My Valentine's Disappointment

By Ben Molyneux

I waited all Valentine’s Day in a state of anticipation. I knew exactly what I wanted, and I could feel the goosebumps rising on my skin every time I thought about it. Having waited all year for this one opportunity, I could barely contain my excitement to finally get what I was waiting for. And yet, as the day ticked slowly closer to ending, it was clear that I was once again going to be disappointed on the celebration of St Valentine.

You see, all I wanted to see was one Christian article questioning Valentine’s Day. I’ve seen Christians argue and question all sort of cultural happenings: hand-wringing over tattoos, aggressive denouncements of watching Game of Thrones and more words written about Halloween than there are drops in the ocean. I guarantee you someone is currently writing a tortured article about what Shrove Tuesday being known as Pancake Day says about our God-less culture. But I haven’t seen any hot trending articles about Valentine’s Day.

Pictured: A tool of Satan. A delicious, beautiful tool.

We know that, as Christians, we’re meant to be counter-cultural, but I think we’ve lost our way. So many of our attempts are surface-level, confronting the superficial issues without ever really challenging much of the basis of our culture. We feel like we’ve done our part but, in reality, we’re just as much a part of the culture as everyone else.

Take everyone’s favourite hot-button topic, gay marriage. So often opposition to gay marriage is presented as this counter-cultural act of rebellion against the zeitgeist, but the reality is that it is nothing of the sort. There's the global perspective: Russia is one of many countries currently cracking down on homosexuality. It wasn’t very long ago that Uganda was trying to introduce the death penalty for being gay. Or the historical perspective: there are an estimated 15000 men alive today that were chemically castrated by the UK government, simply for being gay. Or there's even the present day in this country: rates of suicide and self-harm are much higher in LGBT community, and it seems likely this is linked to the higher rate of bullying they face.

Now, none of this says anything about the legitimacy or otherwise of gay marriage. The point is, there’s nothing counter-cultural about opposing gay marriage when the culture we are in is one that is still oppressive, albeit less so, towards the LGBT community. Oppose gay marriage all you want, but don’t pretend it’s counter-cultural.

“But Ben,” I hear you cry, “what was this got to do with Valentine’s Day?” Good question. Valentine’s Day is an accepted part of our culture, and largely goes unchallenged by the Church. But if we want to be genuinely counter-cultural, Valentine’s is an excellent place to start. On the surface it’s a very innocent celebration of love, but dig just a little deeper and it’s clear that its roots are less savoury.

After all, Valentine’s Day’s main point is this: buy things to demonstrate love. I can’t imagine a more capitalistic holiday, and it’s thoroughly un-Christian. Love is about self-sacrifice, about giving of yourself to the other. Splashing cash around is, in reality, a cheap way to love. Valentine’s day, as it’s represented in our culture, takes love and makes it about money.

It’s also often deeply sexist. I have yet to see a single Valentine’s advert that isn’t sexist on some level. They often reinforce sexist myths that are prevalent in our culture: women use sex to get love, men use love to get sex; all women like flowers, chocolate, princesses and the colour pink; men only show their affection under duress. It’s nonsense, but it’s deeply ingrained into our cultural horizons. And Valentine’s Day serves to deepen their grip on our cultural consciousness further.

I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with celebrating Valentine’s Day. But if we’re as desperate as we claim we are to be counter-cultural Christians, critiquing Valentine’s and its roots are a good way to start. Let’s stop getting caught up in the superficial when dangerous un-Christian ideas are endemic in our culture. We need to stop salving our desire to be subversive by protesting cheap, hot-button issues without dealing with the big issues in our culture. Being counter-cultural is our calling; in a capitalistic, misogynistic culture, maybe the Christian thing to do is to criticise Valentine’s Day. Who knows: what starts on Valentine’s may end up lasting for life.

Shane Claiborne's Valentine's post on Facebook is worth a look for the real meaning of Valentine's. Apparently in some European countries, it's common to spend time with friends and family, often eating dinner, on Valentine's as a display of love for each other, which is pretty cool and worth looking into it as well.

Food Banks and Jesus the Badass

By Ben Molyneux

Food banks are in the news in a big way. A recent report, conducted by a cross-party group of MPs with the support of the Church of England, confirmed that there is a startlingly large number of people in Britain who simply cannot afford to eat. Trussell Trust, the major food bank charity in the UK, has grown in the last 14 years from nothing into having 400 food banks across the UK.  In the last year, 913,138 people ended up using Trussel Trust food banks to get emergency food supplies, a figure that is 78,441 higher than it was the year before.

 There have been dissenting voices: Tory Baroness Anne Jenkin claimed recently that this was due to the loss of cookery skills, assumedly through some kind of group amnesia that led 78,441 people to forget how to cook in a year; Lord Freud, in charge of pushing Tory welfare reforms through, suggested that it could be due to people just wanting free food, ignoring that 45% of people went to food banks due to the benefit system he is in charge of overhauling; and Ian Duncan Smith, the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, accused the Trussell Trust of scaremongering assumedly broadening the definition of scaremongering to include “publishing factual reports in one’s area of expertise.”

Leaving aside ideologically-motivated voices, most people agree that this many ordinary Britons being left unable to afford to eat is a disgrace. Food banks are providing a hugely needed service, but the fact that such a service is so hugely needed is unconscionable in 21^st century Britain. How can we live in a country that is capable of incredible feats of engineering like the Shard in London, but is apparently incapable of feeding its own people?

Churches have been instrumental in helping food banks meet this need, and have been doing brilliant and possibly life-saving work in this area. Churches that host and support food banks deserve recognition and applause. In doing this, they are clearly following Jesus’ teaching, particularly in Matthew 25: “I was hungry and you gave me food… just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” [NRSV] But this worthy work is only a reflection of one aspect of Jesus’ ministry.

The story of Jesus wreaking havoc in the temple is one of the most famous Biblical stories, probably because in it Jesus is undeniably a badass – flipping tables, whipping animals and generally just being awesome. Mark’s gospel specifies who he was targeting: “he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.” [Mark 11:15b, NRSV] The doves were particularly important, as doves were what poor people sacrificed. But the temple system controlled not only the sale of doves (and only doves bought in the temple courts were considered acceptable for sacrifice) but also the money changing which would allow people to purchase the doves. Essentially, the entire system was set up to allow the temple elite to rip off the poor.

Jesus Christ: Badass

Now, Jesus could have magic’d up some doves if he wanted to, getting them to fly out of his sleeves like failed magician Gob Bluth in Arrested Development. He could have gone round distributing the doves to anybody who needed them (provided they had a reference from the Job Centre of course). But instead he decides to take on the system that oppresses the poor and engages in a prophetic critique of it. His wrecking of the temple is a clear and unequivocal challenge to the system and those who perpetuate it.

If the church is to truly follow Jesus, it needs to follow his example in this area as much as his teaching on feeding the poor. Justin Welby has started to do that, asking the government to do more to deal with the food crisis many in Britain face, but there is so much more to be done. The church should be standing up and saying that a situation where families are being left unable to eat due to government-sanctioned changes is totally unacceptable. The Church should be standing up and defending the welfare state as one of the greatest things in Britain. And the Church should be standing up for those that the powerful like to attack – the poor, the immigrant and the working class, to name a few. It’s time for the church to make a bold prophetic stand against systems that oppress, just as Jesus did, and declare that the food crisis in this country is a modern day disgrace.

For more information on how to support Food Banks, either as a volunteer or by giving, visit the Trussel Trust website here or find out about your own local area’s food bank.

This article draws heavily on Richard Baukham’s book The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically, both in its general approach and in the section on Jesus in the temple.

What's in a Miracle?

Thoughts inspired by Peter Whittle's original post on Modern Day Miracles

Are miracles that important?

I remember thinking – in the early stages of my humdrum Christian years – that if I could witness a miracle first-hand, then I could cast aside all my doubts and just focus on loving God.

With that in mind, I made it my mission to scrape the barrel of my everyday routine for fragments of what might be conceived as a “God-moment”, which ultimately led to me over-thinking every minor incident as a potential miracle:

I found a parking space today! Praise God!

My favourite Tim Hughes song just started playing on shuffle on my ipod! Praise God!

I had a headache earlier, but now it's not so bad! Praise God!

At the time, it was clear that I wasn't the only one wanting to experience the miraculous. Every Sunday at my old church, the pastor would set aside a time for people with niggling headaches, sore limbs, and various other grave afflictions to step forward and experience the healing power of Christ.

I remember once seeing a senior member of the church hop around in a euphoric state after having suffered from long-term leg pain. I thought to myself, “Wow! God is definitely real! This is it!!”.

But it wasn't it. Or at least the feeling didn't last, and in a few short weeks I was back on the hunt for the next miraculous moment.

Thinking back, it makes sense that I would have wanted to experience God in such a tangible way so that I could boldly move forward with my faith. But in reality all I really did was waste time and energy chasing an empty miracle.

By “empty miracle”, I mean a miracle without reason or purpose. In the Bible, when the supernatural occurs it is usually there to supplement a theological point raised by the author. For example, Whittle, in his post on Modern Day Miracles, mentions Jesus walking on water, which is probably one of the best biblical examples where the miracle itself is secondary to the theological message intended by the author.

If we take Mark's version as a starting point (which seems logical given that it is likely the earliest account within the Gospels), Jesus walking on water functions together with Jesus calming the storm, and as a result Mark was able to demonstrate Jesus' dominion over the creation. However, despite this significant nod to Jesus' divinity, Mark notes that the disciple's hearts were hardened.

When we look at Matthew's account, it starts by following the same pattern as Mark's. However, instead of having Jesus get on the boat and calm the storm, Matthew adds a whole new segment to the story where Peter requests that Jesus command him to come out onto the water with him.

In doing so, Peter is able to briefly walk on water until the moment he starts to falter in his faith. Jesus then picks Peter up out of the water and gently scolds him for his doubt. When they eventually get back on the boat, the disciples openly worship Jesus as the Son of God (very different to Mark!).

And then there's John... John takes a different approach altogether. Like Matthew, he follows Mark's original pattern to a certain point. Nothing is really made of the storm (although it is briefly mentioned) and Peter's side-story added by Matthew is ignored.

In John's account; Jesus walks on water, gets on the boat, and then they are all magically transported to their destination.

There is enough in this simple little outline of each account to cause one to question the validity of the miracle of Jesus walking on water – probably the most troubling issue being that Luke, who out of all the Gospels takes the agenda of portraying an accurate summary of Jesus' doings, chooses not to include this story in his account despite sharing the same source material as Matthew (that is, Mark's Gospel and the elusive Q document).

However, in each account the miracle doesn't stand alone. Every story has something bigger to say than just talking about a man who walked on water. In Mark, we gain a greater understanding of Jesus' authority over creation. In Matthew, we gain a greater understanding of faith and doubt. And in John... well, John just wants us to know that Jesus was amazing.

I don't know whether miracles happen or not. The fact is the vast majority of people have not and will not experience a life-changing supernatural event in their lifetimes. However, what I do know is that there are things in Scripture that are considered more important than a miracle.

These are the things that I am more interested in now.

How Science Helps Me Believe in Miracles

By Ben Molyneux

This is a response to another recent post on miracles, Modern Day Miracles, written by Peter Whittle.

I’m quite a cynical person. When I’m trying to kid myself, I might conclude that I’m a realist, but the reality is that cynicism is hard-wired into the way I view the world. So when it comes to the subject of miracles, my gut response is fairly unsurprising:

Miracles really just don’t happen.

The whole thing seems at least a little bit silly. We no longer live in an uneducated pre-modern world, where everything is governed by fairies and capricious gods. We don’t need miracle accounts to prove which religion is right, particularly as every religion seems to claim some sort of miraculous proof. Miracles just aren’t necessary to us any more, so we should just drop them and move our faith into the 21^st century.

So when I read Pete’s blog on miracles, I found myself instinctively nodding along. Let’s just forget about demanding the supernatural and be prepared to find the miraculous in living out the command to love one’s neighbor.

And yet… I can’t quite give up on it all. I still can’t work out how God interacts in the world, but something in me can’t quite buy the idea that he doesn’t. A world without a God who steps in to do something from time to time just seems so hopeless. Even Pete, in his blog, acknowledges, “there are many things that happen that science can not adequately explain.”

This should leave me in a very a convoluted position. I’m naturally suspicious of any reports of supernatural events and I’m likely to reject them, whilst at the same time believing that they could be possible and desperately wanting at least some of them to be true. It gets even more complicated on a practical level; what do you do if someone asks you to pray for them? It’s a problem I used to struggle a lot with. Responding, “I can if you want, but I don’t really know if anything will happen or not, so it might be better to ask someone with a stronger faith” only leads to some very British awkwardness, but when I agreed I always felt like a fraud and a hypocrite.

Pete’s comment, in response to my question about this, is perhaps more extreme than I am, but gets at the same idea: “I struggle a lot with the concept of 'supernatural miracles', I don't want to deny them, but I find it impossible to affirm them either.” The practical, every-day implications of this were, for a long time, very confusing and very difficult. Then something strange happened.

Science saved my belief in miracles.

It’s a bit of an odd one, I admit. Traditionally, the opposite has tended to be true. As we discover more about the power of the human brain, particularly placebo effect and psychosomatics, there seems to be more and more basis to discredit supernatural origins for miraculous healings. But I wonder if we aren’t looking at this the wrong way round. After all, these explanations prove one thing: Science says praying for people actually works. It might not always work the way we expect, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. How many people cured of life-threatening illnesses will be demanding their illness back if they suddenly prove it was a placebo effect that healed them?

This means that I can have a confident, rational basis for maintaining that miraculous healings can happen. My doubts about the mechanics of supernatural intervention don’t get to stop me acting, but at the same time I don’t have to reject all claims of the supernatural. There’s a helpful unknowability about it all; I can’t separate the supernatural healings from the naturalistic ones, meaning that I can maintain that both can and do occur. So I can absolutely believe that God intervenes miraculously, even if I have no idea how that works, whilst maintaining that not all the miracles have supernatural origins and acknowledging that Science can explain at least some miracles and will probably go on to explain many more. It doesn't stop me feeling deeply awkward and self-conscious about the whole thing, of course, but I don't think any theology in the world would.

At the end of the day, I guess I agree with Pete’s original post – miracles are to be found when the people of God get up and do something. But that “doing something” should include praying for the miraculous and expect it to come about – regardless of how exactly it does come about.

Modern day miracles

By Peter Whittle

Edit: After reading check out this response by Ben Molyneux, and this one by Charlie Comerford.

The bible is full of miracles, from the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, to Jesus walking on water, to the many and varied healings. Jesus alone recorded 37 'miracles', and John 21 says there were “many other [miracles]” that went unrecorded.

But do miracles still happen today? A quick google search reveals hundreds upon thousands of people who claim to have had some form of miraculous experience, especially common are miraculous healings, including many from incurable conditions. 

Science does give us some explanations for so-called miracles, for instance placebo effect, or even the power of positive thinking in dealing with illness, however there are many things that happen that science can not adequately explain.

I think that looking at these more traditional miracles throws up more questions than answers, but I also think that if we simply focus on if the happen or not, we miss the point. The question is not so much did God do these things, but what is the purpose behind them? For instance, does Jesus walk on water is far less important a question than why are we told that Jesus walked on water? In other words the purpose behind the miracle is the thing of importance, not the miracle itself.

Jesus Walking on water

The catholic Church describes miracles as “works of God, either directly, or through the prayers and intercessions of a specific saint or saints” which is a fairly broad definition, so with that In mind I've thought about what a modern day miracle would look like.

We like to think of miracles as supernatural acts of God, in which something incredible happens (preferably involving dramatic effects, like explosions, or at the very least a bit of smoke), and we tend to minimise 'works of God' which can be passed off more easily as works of man, but if we look at the above definition, it specifically mention the intercessions of saints. If we as saints are not physically doing something, I believe there are no miracles. Through the whole bible God works through his people, and it is no different now.

In churches, we are obsessed with seeing the outworking of God's power, we long for miracles, and yet how often do we neglect going and being miraculous? Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourself, and to me there would be no more obvious example of a miracle in history than if our churches started to live by this. Honestly whether or not miracles happen should not even be a question, because our churches should be full of them, just maybe not in the way we expect. 

The Story of Adam and Eve: A Fresh Old Perspective

By Charlie Comerford

I love the story of Adam and Eve.

These days it has a pretty bad rep across the board, from the atheist who believes it to be nothing more than a silly story to the devoted Christian who struggles with some of the “big theologies” that have been forged from its contents; it is perhaps regarded as one of the most controversial narratives of our time.

However, once you peel back all the hardened layers of prejudice and preconception that have smothered its message over the centuries, what you're left with is a beautifully simple yet profoundly sophisticated piece of literature that manages to convey the complexities of the collective human experience, in a way that would have been totally and utterly relatable to the ordinary working man and his family some 3000-4000 years ago.

With that in mind, let us try and imagine how they might have understood it.

Working the fields - Bible Fun for Kids: Genesis Series. Page by Debbie Jackson

The story sets the scene by introducing a land that is in need of cultivating.

This is a fairly fitting environment for the time. Back in ancient days the most common means of making a stable living would have been through agriculture. So we can tell from the very beginning that the story was likely conceived with the most common type of person in mind: the working man and his family.

We see in the story that in order to get the land working properly, man (Adam) is birthed from the ground (Adamah) to care for and maintain it.

The meaning behind the birthing metaphor (used twice in the narrative) is simple: it indicates that man was made for the purpose of working the ground. For the man, the ground represents his livelihood, his source of food, and ultimately his purpose for living.

This starts out as a good, healthy and mutually-beneficial engagement. The man can tend to the ground at his leisure, and in return the ground is generously cooperative; providing the man with an abundance of food.

Now we should pause for a moment and try to imagine what this might have sounded like to an ordinary working man listening to the story in those times, for surely such an accommodating garden would have seemed like paradise!

Why? Well if you think about it, your average working man in those days would have spent the majority of his waking hours toiling in his fields, desperately hoping that his efforts might reap enough harvest to feed his family.

In his routine he would have likely wondered – probably more than once – why work had to be so hard.

The story of Adam and Eve gives us a unique perspective on work. For the lowest common denominator, work would have been one of those universally harrowing experiences. However, in the story, we see that work is set out to be an enjoyable and fulfilling part of life. For the Yahweh-loving Israelite, it would have been important for him to know that his God had originally intended for work to be a pleasant experience.

Although when we return to the story, we find that, despite the fact that the man is enjoying his work, he is not completely fulfilled. He craves companionship – and a horde of fuzzy animals just aren't giving him the kind of satisfaction that he's looking for.

For this purpose, woman (Ishah) is birthed from man (Ish), and in knowing each other both are fulfilled.

Strangely enough, there are two different words for man in this story and both share a likeness to another word (Adam-Adamah, Ish-Ishah).

This is of course no accident. The similarities in sound would have pricked the ears of the ancient listeners and given them cause to contemplate the significance of the relationship between Ish and Ishah – which is initially set out to be an intimate and loving relationship.

For a woman in those times, the experience of social segregation and misogyny would have been her daily burden, and she might well have wondered – probably more than once – why it was so hard to be a woman.

Again, the story comes as a source of comfort and consolation, this time to the woman in her suffering; for in the beginning woman was made to be man's companion, and in turn the man was made to love and cherish her as though she were his very bones and his very flesh.

#Swoon.

At this point in the narrative, the picture is a pretty one: Man is happy with his woman and his work, and woman is happy basking in man's adoration.

And yet, despite the fact that they both had it so good, they still fell prey to one of humanity's most fundamental vices: the desire for more.

In a peculiar turn of events, this error in judgement is triggered by the words of a crafty snake.

Why a snake, some might wonder?

Well, if we again consider the context, what other creature could be considered a bigger troublemaker for an agricultural family than a venomous snake? To the average working man and his family, the snake would have been their natural enemy, and so it becomes an obvious choice for the role of “villain” in the narrative.

The story concludes by relaying the tragic consequences of humanity's greed: the ground is cursed, and so man is forced into backbreaking labour every day until he eventually returns to the ground in death; woman is cursed to submit to the will of man and endure horrendous agony in childbirth; and the snake and the humans are cursed to be locked in a never-ending battle of heel-biting and head-stamping.

The battle rages on...

This remarkable narrative provides us with a fresh perspective on how ancient believers would have dealt with big life concepts, such as birth; work; companionship; temptation; greed; consequence; suffering and death.

To my knowledge, there is no tale that better sums up the human experience in a more concise and comprehensible way.