Chris Brown

Let me add my happy Christmas to everyone else’s. I will be in church celebrating the true meaning of Christmas – yes it really is about a baby in a manger and nothing else.

If you listened to my talk at the carol service at TMC I mentioned that Christians had been at the forefront of science and it is just not true to say that Christians held science back. I recommend watching this video from the Cold Case Christianity people – in fact watch more than this if you need evidence as to why you need to believe but here is the answer to the science misinformation you have been fed over the years. If you are a science person then you should believe in Jesus – makes sense to me.

I’ve been wrestling lately with the idea of art and what it does. I mean the emotional response that one has to a work of art. It seems to me that this is the purpose of art to speak to us through our heart and imagination. The artist with a message can use the medium of art to get their message across.

However, in more recent times the emotion seems to have become an end in itself. Art is not about a message so much as an experience. It seems to me there is danger in this – not least within worship.

If we do things in worship that are only designed to elicit a response without regard to the message then we would be guilty of false worship. If what we do is to assume that somehow the Spirit will sort out the message as long as we can just raise an emotion then we are failing.

Don’t get me wrong I think emotion plays an important role in worship. And if boredom is an emotion then most churches are doing very well at raising it. But emotion is just a factor and should not be seen as a means of manipulation or as an end in itself. The message is as important, if not more so.

I think those churches that believe raising any emotion in their congregation is wrong are mistaken in what God, or His people, want. Or rather what God’s people need. We are emotional beings and made that way by God but like all things emotions can be a source of great evil as well as a source of great good.

So, I do believe art has a place in worship but not if we separate the message of art from the means of getting a message across. Truth is important in worship and that truth comes from the message of Jesus Christ. Emotion without the message is false worship.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here but I thought I’d write about something very sad for me. I think the hymn is dead.

Now don’t misunderstand this because I’m sure that we will still sometimes sing hymns and it is still possible that a great hymn writer might emerge again but I think the days when worship was dominated by hymn singing is finally over. It has had a good innings to be fair. The great revival of hymn singing came with the Wesley’s and we Methodists have enjoyed singing them, and some of us still do, but let me explain why I think that age has now passed. These are my own opinions, of course.

No one can produce a good hymn book anymore

Have you noticed that hymn books are a shadow of what they once were? Hymns were once collected for their spiritual value into a collection which worshippers could then use to express what they needed to both at home and in the service. Now they are a collection of popular songs and a compromise for those who want different styles of song. All the old great hymns are re-written to express modern language hangups which often seem to remove some of the greater thoughts and poetry that they once expressed. Every new hymn book that comes out seems to have less of the old good stuff in it.

No one is writing good hymns today.

There is the occasional exception to this but even the ones that are good don’t seem to have the longevity that hymns used to have. Now, not all of the hymns we used to sing were/are good so maybe things are not that different than they used to be but I can’t help but express my own feeling that somewhere things did change and hymns written today are just not what they once were. You could learn theology from some old hymns but today you seldom can. Don’t misunderstand me here I am talking about hymns not worship songs – proper hymns with several verses and occasionally a chorus. It is hard to define what a hymn is but I hope you see the point.

Some of the older hymns are now pretty much unsingable

There are hymns I find I can’t pick because the tunes are so complex that unless you sing them regularly they are just not singable by a modern congregation.

Congregations are different than they were

When I came into the church as a young man churches still had good sized congregations and some people would still sing the hymn in parts. This all went to making the experience of hymn singing something very different than it is today. Whilst I admit this might be pure nostalgia on my part, in my humble opinion it does make a different when you are trying to worship.

Generations of people have voted with their feet

So many people have left the established churches and have joined alternative churches where the music is very different. I’ve had conversations with some of them who have expressed a complete boredom with the old styles of worship (that is the hymn sandwich). We might tut and say they are wrong (and let’s face it that is pretty much what churches have done in the past) but the reality is that the church is dying out and in part because of an insistence on a particular style of music.

I think, honestly, if I was a young man today and came to a Methodist church and sang what most Methodist churches offer today I would not have stayed long. Even as a mature Christian I have found much of the Methodist worship to be dull and often tedious to attend. Gone is the great hymn singing to be replaced by soft sentiment hymns with little gospel but lots of social justice.

Music is such an important part of worship that it can make a world of difference.

But there is hope for church music

There is a style of music that seems to appeal to the lost generations. It is a more popular style and whilst at times we might wonder if we have lost some of the reverence and depth the old hymns gave, some of the new songs are able to provide a rich worship experience suitable to the contemporary worshipper.

Perhaps it is time to admit that the old hymn style is dead and move on to the new worship song style at least for the sake of future generations.

There is a fairly common statement made by agnostics and atheists alike that: there is no proof that God exists.

Many times I have heard Christians argue that we should not engage with such statements because then we will argue and it will only lead to confusion. However, it seems to me that our non-engagement has led to far more confusion than anyone getting confused by the arguments. We have done such a disservice to people when we have stepped back and refused to engage with the challenges. Ultimately people do come to faith through an encounter with Christ and not through the intellect but if people believe that the intellect is against God then why would they ever seek to encounter Jesus? People are captured by atheism because it, at least, attempts to offer reasoned answers.

I am not embarrassed about Jesus or God and so I’ve learned a way to answer the question.

If I’m challenged that there is no proof for the existence of God my response is: well, actually I think there are at least five good proofs. They are:

1. Why does the Universe exist? What made it exist?
2. The fine-tuning and complexity of the Universe
3. Objective moral values
4. The historical facts surrounding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
5. Personal experience of the existence of God.

These may need expanding on – maybe I will do that in a subsequent post – but even having a response will take most people by surprise.

Every Christian should be prepared to answer when they are challenged about their faith.

Is anyone ever so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good?

I think the answer is no. At least in the sense that if someone genuinely has their thoughts concentrated on God and as Jesus put it, is loving God heart soul and mind (heavenly minded) then there is no reason why they would be no earthly good. In fact they should be more earthly good than anyone else.

I think this is born out throughout history where many of the great advances in health care, science and social reform have been driven by those who are very heavenly minded.

But this must be one of those sayings where a literal interpretation is not intended.

What is meant, I think, is that some people devote themselves to a selfish view of heaven (often involving a desire for study of various religious small details) where they substitute thinking for action. Where thoughts of God should motivate to good things they are instead in love with thinking and philosophizing rather than God.

So, the root of the problem would be pride and selfishness. The prime sins of the fall (that is the first sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden). Or, as God often describes it, adultery. If we don’t devote our heart and soul to God alone then we sin.

So, I would suggest any form of religion that makes the practice of that faith into one of selfishness is failing. If you don’t have your mind on heaven then you are failing. If your thoughts of heaven are exclusively about how you can be good enough, in the practice of your faith, to get past the gates then you are failing.

It is a complicated thing. We should think about our own soul and its journey and be especially concerned about our journey into the afterlife. Yet, if that fills our mind with a preoccupation with self then we have failed. As Jesus puts it seek first the kingdom (Matt 6:33).

Watching the TV the other day one of the stars (I’m avoiding saying who it was because I’m not singling them out, I think this is a general attitude among many) started talking about how they were going to have a humanist funeral (as my late brother also wanted) – nothing religious at all and then followed up his monologue saying you have to have hope, life is nothing without hope.

It seems to me this sums up the typical assumption that somehow you can reject belief in God and put yourself in the centre of the universe and then still have hope and even some kind of afterlife.

Yet, where does that hope come from? Is it hope in some unseen force of the Universe that will make things better in the end? According to most atheists, who think about it, the Universe is heading for destruction and there is no such force. Anyone relying on humanity improving into a Utopia and that somehow their small life will have contributed to it is very deluded. According to science one-day humanity will cease to exist and the Universe expand so far that there will be only cold and death. Shouldn’t this make our efforts at improvement pointless and end in deep depression for us all. The way many atheists seem to think they can avoid this depression concerning future destruction and endless death is to avoid thinking about it. What kind of answer is that! No wonder as more people like the appeal of atheism the world becomes more depressed. It is making me depressed just thinking about it.

Here is what Bertrand Russel once said about this wonderful atheist future (his approach was not think about it):
“All the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).

Why are you not in deep despair? Or is it because you are deluding yourself about the atheistic faith you profess? Everything you have ever done, all the art produced and progress and ending problems is in the end pointless.

No atheist should have a humanist funeral. At best it is a bunch of deluded people thinking that somehow a person’s life had meaning and that maybe as your atoms blend into the Universe (perhaps as pond scum or worse) you go on forever. Well, my friend your atoms may survive (all very poetic and all) but you and your achievements do not. Even the memory of those who knew you will disappear with a little time. When you die your body should just be disposed of and no humanist funeral – to have such a funeral is something of a joke.

Am I upsetting you by talking about the truth as an atheist should see it?

I’m also told that more young people are praying these days. Praying to whom? If more of them think they are atheists then why do they pray? And who do they think is listening?

I agree that you need hope but hope is not an end in itself it needs to be hope in something. The same can be said about faith – also wrongly used as a noun these days. Faith and hope need to be in something.

Hope is what then? Humanity? Politicians? Science? All of these have failed utterly in the past. Humanity will one day disappear (according to science); politicians hardly need describing as a bad source of hope; science took us into two world wars and the possible complete destruction of everything if another world war ever comes. Where is the hope coming from?

I think there are plenty of reasons to believe that God exists.

• That the Universe exists in the first place.
• That the Universe is so finely balanced.
• The existence of objective moral values.
• Historical facts surrounding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
• The personal testimony of those who have encountered God.
• etc.

So if God does exist (I believe God does) and if Jesus has revealed the nature of a loving God to us (I believe this is true) then we have a God who we CAN put our hope in (and pray to).

If such a God does exist you had better find out what that God wants and stop putting yourself in the position of God in your life.

So I am not depressed, as any atheist should be, but instead I’m following God who gives me reason to hope.

I will have a religious, Christian, funeral because only this makes sense and offers any kind of hope when someone dies.

I’m talking about lessons from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles of course. Is there a Christian lesson to learn?

I’ve been re-reading this wonderful book by a master story teller. Hardy has a wonderful way of describing the world and in particular, the now lost, rural world of Dorset. Sometimes he gets carried away and goes too far with it but generally his abilities enable us (me) to share in his love for this time and its people.

However, Hardy is wrong in his pessimism, which he personally described as realism. This may be the world as he saw it but I feel very sorry for a man who saw the world in such bleak ways. He seems determined to believe that the worst will always happen and that people are essentially evil, although the reverse seems to be true of Tess.

Yet this is a story and in a story it is possible to go too far to make a point. I think his critics sometimes miss this important point. So I’ve been trying to work out what point he is making in this book. I think there are probably many, good writers seem able to do that, but there is one point in particular that stands out to me. It revolves around the failures of the various characters to protect the purity of Tess.

I wondered. at first, if the point was that Angel should not have looked for purity in his new wife. I suppose this is part of the problem, in that everyone is a sinner and so we should think hard and understand our fallen condition before being the one to cast stones. Angel was also guilty – in my opinion more so – and yet he seems to think his simple confession takes away his guilt whereas Tess has to carry her guilt, according to Angel, despite her confession. This is complex and I think addresses the problem of male expectations of women and what men were allowed (if not expected) to do in Victorian England, etc. However, Angel then compounds his own guilt by failing to protect Tess through what follows. I can’t help but want Angel to return and save Tess, I think because I feel so much for the character of Tess herself. Hardy always maintained that Tess had kept her purity throughout all her trials, and I agree with him.

Tess is failed by her parents. Her father gets drunk and forces Tess to take the hives to market and her inexperience at driving (the problem compounded by her brother who is a better driver falling asleep – another let down for Tess) and so their horse is killed. Her father also fails to protect her innocence by passing his own responsibilities on to her mother. Her mother then fails to check the credentials of the man she entrusts Tess to, as well as failing to warn her of any of the dangers. Tess’ innocence then leads to her loss of physical purity.

Alec, her rapacious cousin, fails to protect her and instead takes advantage of her innocence. His later conversion to Christianity also soon fails Tess when he insists she is responsible for tempting him back into desiring her – though in truth she has done everything she can to spurn him.

The church fails her when she turns to it for help and comfort. We are told that she has an unsophisticated faith that contains elements of paganism. The church failed to educate her – despite in Hardy’s time having lots of opportunities (Hardy taught Sunday School himself in his youth, I understand). When she reached out for support she was let down. I think Hardy also believed that God has let Tess down by his absence throughout the story. You can write God out of a story but it does not mean you can write God out of life – by the way.

Angel arguably lets Tess down the worst. He should have forgiven her, it is obvious that he loves her and yet persuades himself that he can’t live with her past. Telling Tess that he cannot be her husband whilst the man she had sex with first still lives will ultimately lead to Tess killing Alec and her own death. Angel in failing to look after his wife also pushes Tess back into the abusive Alec’s arms, her motivation being her pure love for her family and sacrificing her own happiness for them. It would be easy to hate Angel but he does at least return and Tess’ true love for him seems to win me over.

Tess is ultimately let down by the law which saw no room for a woman to kill her abuser. Presumably, this becomes part of Hardy’s own thinking when as a 16 year old he witnessed the hanging of a woman convicted of murdering her abusive husband, and even when that abuse was known she was refused a pardon, or commuting of sentence, because she insisted her husband had been killed by a horse rather than at her own hand with an axe, right up to the last days before her execution. This moment left Hardy a changed man and it seems pretty clear had an influence on the telling of Tess’ story.

Tess’ purity is challenged by various events, which in many ways would make her impure in the eyes of people. I find it interesting that Hardy believed that her purity was maintained and presumably he believed there was something about purity that stands outside the physical. This is interesting in itself because Hardy seems to have become an atheist and someone who only believes in the physical. It is clear in Tess, though, that there is something that is immaterial (her purity) and if the immaterial does exist it surely opens the door to a belief in God. She was physically impure (pre-marital sex, illegitimate child and murder) and yet her true purity (love, intentions, etc) for Hardy remained pure. I agree with him.

I disagree with some commentators I’ve read who seem to believe Hardy is attacking social convention and religious taboos around sex. I actually think the opposite might be true. Hardy values purity above everything in this story. Yes, Tess’ inner purity is enough to make her physical impurity forgivable, if not excusable, because her physical purity is taken from her rather than her giving it away, but he is not trying to say that physical purity does not matter at all. If that was his message why does he go to such lengths to heap blame on those who failed to protect Tess’ physical purity? I also wonder if those of us who read the story do not in turn weep over Tess’ lost purity and innocence because we know the value of such things?

So there is a Christian message in this book. Innocence and purity are things we should protect and value and those who neglect to protect such things are as guilty of causing the loss of purity and innocence as anyone else. I just wish Hardy had found a way to finish the story with Tess’ purity winning through so I could have saved my own heartbreak at the end.

I think one of the failings of our contemporary world is the adoption of the enlightenment principle that change is progress and all change is therefore good. I think this comes from the enlightenment (enlightenment is a name put into use by its promoters and I can’t help but reflect that this name is often misleading – the dark ages, another name brought in by promoters of the enlightenment, are not all dark and the enlightenment is not all light). Anyway, is all change really good?

I think if any of us reflect for a moment we would soon conclude that all change is not always for the good. As I grow older my eyesight is changing for the worse. for instance. When people close to me die it leaves a great gap in my heart that I cannot bring myself to declare is a good gap. A pandemic brings a great deal of change and whilst some of it might seem to be good I can’t help but feel an awful lot of people would be better off it it had never happened. No, not all change is good.

I think then we can very quickly conclude that not all change is progress. This may seem obvious to you but bear with me. There are those who will criticise those of us who want to hold on to some things, because they are in our estimation good, and accuse us of being against progress and change. They will tell us that we are ‘old stick in the muds’ who don’t want any kind of progress. Now maybe at times that is true of me (I don’t like it when they put things in a different place in the supermarket or when my favourite TV show is moved to a different time – for instance) but in most cases, this is certainly not true.

In technology terms, for instance, where finances have allowed I have been an early adopter. I was an early adopter of the personal computer and the world wide web. I even played a part in moving the world wide web on with some of the programming projects I was involved in. I accept that as I get older the shine has gone from some of the early technology projects I see today but I am very much in favour of progress (that is change for the better). However, I am also very opposed to change for the worse.

How do we decide what is change for the worse? It is difficult. Some things don’t really reveal their worse nature till they have become the established way. So it requires two things in particular.

1. A good understanding and appreciation of history. Quoting Winston Churchill (yes I know others said the same thing before him but this is the one from Churchill): “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
2. A good dose of wisdom (wisdom is, of course, the ability to think through a subject in depth and then come to a reasoned conclusion based on an unprejudiced understanding – or, in short, agreeing with me).
3. I’m going to add a third thing – for me the most important. A strong belief in God in Christ. God has given us scripture to help us in making these choices. I don’t apologise for this belief but I understand you may not share it.

So we should be in favour of progress but not all change is progress and some change is bad.

I’ve been on a search for truth all my adult life. I believe that the truth will set you free. This search has taken me down a lot of dead-end roads but I have travelled them because sometimes to get to where you need to go you have to be able to eliminate the roads that are not right.

For a while, I was an atheist (a couple of years as a teenager). I explored the arguments, and whilst I enjoyed the perceived freedom of not being responsible to anyone else, I felt that there was something missing. I discovered that, for myself, the arguments were intellectually hollow, I was hiding in definitions and false assumptions about religion. For me, it lacked honesty and truth. Like many atheists I encounter today it is more to do with personal anger than with truth.

I returned to my parents faith and went back to church. In truth I was tempted back by the prospect of girls and strangely thought that being an atheist would not be a problem for joining a church group. They put up with me and led me to the person who said the truth will set you free.

As I explored this faith I felt called to full-time ministry and was accepted. I left College and decided to explore a more liberal view of the bible and theology. I read widely and found that there were good reasons to be a liberal in my views. However, liberal theology took me back to where I had been as an atheist. Indeed, at its most sceptical there is not much distance between liberal theology and atheism. I perhaps ought to note here that there is no relationship between political liberal views and liberal theology – they are different things. Liberal theology is dominated by scepticism. After a few years of this, I decided as a Christian Minister I perhaps ought to read the bible. So I started to read it and also read widely about the bible.

My search for truth has always included the need for intellectual rigour. I need there to be good scholarship behind a view and I desire logic and a coherant view. This is when I discovered that I did not have to be a liberal sceptic. I discovered that scepticism is not more intellectually vigorous – in fact, I discovered quite the opposite. It turned out that there are plenty of reasons to have faith in scripture and I could choose to believe as opposed to doubt. It turned out that doubt was just a state of mind and not a road to the truth at all.

I appreciate others will have a very different story about their own search for truth and whilst I accept that it doesn’t make my journey any less valid.

So, I discovered that for me the truth I was seeking was found in trusting Jesus Christ. I found it in believing that God has spoken through the bible and that with a little effort the truth can be found there.

I am still a seeker after truth and I can say with confidence that the truth has indeed set me free.