Evangelism Part IV: when ideas about hell reveal what we think about God

As a small child eager to learn about the world I picked up a terrifying view of evangelism, heaven, hell, and my duty as a Christian.

Part I of this series introduces the concepts. Part II takes a deeper look at the idea of hell, and how flimsy its Biblical foundations are. Part III takes a look at what Jesus really did say about judgement.

The truth is that Jesus wasn’t terribly interested in providing details on consequences such as hell – that’s why we end up using the name of a Norse goddess (Hel) to describe a realm developed from the Greek/Roman concept of a place of eternal punishment (Tartarus) filtered through Gnostic dualism that raises it and its inhabitants to equal-but-opposite to the heavenly host.

With so little to go on, we have to construct an idea of hell. Within the vague contours of the concept, and between the fictional depictions by people like Dante and Milton, we have a lot of colour and theology to choose from.

Hell is flexible, so every individual vision of hell is personal. That makes it revealing, about the individual – see Dante’s inability to imagine forgiveness for his political rivals – and about the way they see God.

I remember a church event for children, when I was very young, which involved a play put on by the Sunday school teachers.

There was a bridge and a toll gate, at the entrance into heaven. A traveller came over the bridge and stopped at the toll gate, ready to pay for entrance. From a big bag the traveller drew a series of shiny coins, and read out what they represented: “being a good person”, “going to church every week”, “doing what mummy and daddy say”, and so on. But the toll booth rejected all of them.

Finally, from the bottom of the bag, the traveller drew a tiny, dull coin which read “believing in Jesus”. The traveller had almost given up hope, but this time the gate swung open – the coin was right!

From this play I learned that nothing matters for salvation apart from whether you believe in Jesus. And that believing in Jesus is a small thing, the least of things, which is more important than any kind of good behaviour.

I also learned that the gate of heaven is impersonal and forbidding, and that it is easy to get stuck outside. The rules were strict.

In this version of the world, God requires everybody to understand who Jesus is in a certain way, and to respond to that understanding with acceptance and belief. If your journey through life doesn’t take you past the right coin, or you fail to pick it up and keep it, then nothing can save you.

Since getting to “believing in Jesus” only happens if you hear about Jesus in time, and choose to accept the teaching, it is entirely possible to end up outside this version of heaven by simple bad luck.

Inconvenient integrity could also do it. The world we live in does not offer any certain proof of the existence or nature of God. It is entirely possible for an honest person to hear the story and find it unconvincing.

The traveller’s peril was played up to us, as children, as a way of emphasising our duty to spread the word. Think of all those people who might die without hearing about Jesus – and be sent to hell!

Well, think about them. Is that fair? Does it sound like a loving act, to condemn people for ignorance or honesty?

Is it fair to the believers – was it fair to us, as children – to place the burden of salvation on our ability to convince the people around us?

This God would send my classmates to hell if I didn’t manage to save them by getting them to share my belief.

Is that a God worthy of worship?

 

Evangelism III: preparing for judgement

Part I of this series set out the simple idea of evangelism that I learned as a child, and how it was driven by a fear of seeing others go to hell. Part II discussed what the Bible actually says about hell, and touched briefly as part of that on the long passage in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus discusses judgement.

I want to come back to that passage, Matthew 25, 31-46:

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³ and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. ³⁴ Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵ for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸ And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹ And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ ⁴⁰ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,^[g] you did it to me.’ ⁴¹ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴² for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

I talked previously about how strange it is, if eternal conscious torment in hell is what is meant here by the ‘eternal punishment’ that Jesus doesn’t dwell on that a bit more.

You’d think it would be the core of the message: you’re in danger, people!

Instead, the core of the message that Jesus brought is summed up in the two commandments he said were most important: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself.

When talking about God’s judgement, Jesus here emphasises separation. A shepherd might divide a mixed flock into two groups, sheep and goats. Judgement is a kind of division, drawing distinctions between good and bad. The question is, how does God draw that line?

What criteria makes a good person, to God? That’s what Jesus wants to talk about here, the things that divide the righteous from the unrighteous: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me“.

Nowhere does Jesus talk about what these people believed. The judgement of God is entirely based on how they treated one another.

The kind of evangelism that’s all about persuading people to pray the sinner’s prayer – “I know I’m a sinner, I’m sorry, forgive me; come into my heart Lord Jesus” – has nothing to say to this judgement. What you say to Jesus, according to Jesus himself, takes a back seat to the way that you’ve treated the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the strangers and the prisoners.

In fact, Jesus himself said that knowing his name and calling on it is not enough. Here’s a quote from a collection of shorter sayings found in Matthew 7:

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ ²³ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’

To sum up, then:

1. Jesus likes to refer to Gehenna, to eternal fire, and to punishment to give some emphasis to his teaching about how to live right. Those bad things are the consequences of living wrong, but it’s not clear exactly what he means by them.
2. The lack of clarity about hell – and the non-existence of the word ‘hell’ in the Bible – are signs that this concept is not very important to Jesus. That to my mind makes it impossible that hell can be a place of eternal conscious torment that any of us human beings might slip into by accident, or I think we’d see a lot more effort on Jesus’ part to emphasise the warning.
3. That doesn’t mean that there is no warning here. Jesus is deeply concerned about how we behave, and particularly about how we treat the vulnerable and suffering. Any Bad Stuff here is reserved for those who don’t care for “the least of these”.
4. None of this fits into the Billy Graham style evangelical idea of salvation from hell. Praying the sinner’s prayer is irrelevant. It even seems to be irrelevant whether you know Jesus’ name or not.

This means that the fear that I carried as a seven year old – the fear that my actions or inactions could be the difference between whether my classmates lived forever in joy in heaven or in agony in hell – was groundless.

This was the very heaviest of the heavy burdens that fell away when the construct of my childhood faith fell apart. The process was painful, and I will probably never be free of an irrational anxiety about this, even though I no longer believe it.

Evangelism II: no, seriously, what the hell?

Last week I started a series on evangelism by talking about the pervasive fear of hell and the simple “pray this prayer to be saved” Christian message I learned as a child.

The really strange thing about all of this is that the idea of eternally conscious torment mandated by a loving all-powerful God is so widely accepted that all I have to do is type the little word “hell” and you know what I’m talking about.

There are a few references to hell in the New Testament. What’s striking, reading them now, is that none of them really sets out the kind of fire-and-brimstone eternal hell that I encountered in church teaching as a child.

Gehenna

Jesus uses a rhetorical reference to Gehenna a bit, and that gets translated as hell. So for example, in Luke 12 we read, as part of a much longer speech, Jesus advising listeners to fear not the person who can kill the body but the person who has the power (or the authority?) “after he has killed to cast into [Gehenna/hell].” The same teaching appears in Matthew 12 as “fear him who can destroy both the soul and the body in [Gehenna/hell]”.

In fact, out of the 19 examples that came up when I searched on Bible Gateway for the word “hell”, 11 were quotes from Jesus in the Gospels where the word is being used to translate the original ‘Gehenna’. Another one is from the letter of James, who says the tongue causes evil and is set on fire by, again, Gehenna, and two are further uses of ‘Gehenna’ in the apocryphal book Esdras.

So what is Gehenna, and why is it translated ‘hell’?

In the Judaic tradition, Gehinnom is the closest analogue for the Christian concept of hell. However, it has a startlingly different aspect – the maximum period of punishment there is 12 months.

So when Jesus and James refer to the fire of Gehenna, or being cast into Gehenna, they were talking about an experience which (terrible though it might be) was only temporary.

Tartarus

Three of the 19 references for ‘Hell’ I turned up are the word ‘Hellenists’ from Acts of the Apostles, one the same word in the apocryphal book Maccabees. However, there is one alternative to Gehenna that has more relevance for this discussion: the final example comes from the second letter of Peter, in which the author talks about God casting angels who sinned into [Tartarus/hell] and keeping them there until the day of judgement.

What’s interesting here is that there is a distinction between Gehenna and Tartarus. Tartarus is an underworld place of punishment in Greek mythology, a place much closer to our modern understanding of hell than the less-defined ‘Sheol’ or ‘the grave’ that is discussed in the Jewish tradition.

Peter isn’t talking about human fates, but about supernatural beings, and he isn’t talking about specific punishments but just about imprisonment until the day of judgement. The very fact that he had to reach for a Greek word to express the concept shows how alien this was to the very earliest Christian thought.

What about the everlasting fire?

There are other passages in the New Testament, even other things Jesus talked about, which get read as a reference to hell. In particular, in a number of parables involving spiritual judgement, Jesus refers to the everlasting fire.

For example, in Matthew 18:8 Jesus says it is better to cut off your hand (if it tempts you to sin) and enter life maimed, than it is to be thrown into the eternal fire. His very next sentence uses ‘Gehenna’ in a rhetorical parallel, implying that they are the same thing. It’s notable that the fire might be eternal but there is no suggestion that anybody has to stay there eternally – and if it is another way of talking about Gehenna then presumably the stay is still a maximum of 12 months.

In Matthew 25, 31-46, Jesus describes the nature of God’s judgement. I’m planning to discuss this whole passage in full soon, as it has surprising implications for the understanding of salvation that I was taught as a child. For now, though I’d just like to point out that the harshest punishment meted out is: “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. Again, the fire is eternal, and this time the whole passage concludes with “these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life”.

So here, at last, is the concept of eternal punishment linked to eternal fire and contrasted with eternal life. But… is Jesus predicting actual future history here, or is this a parable, a story or metaphor to emphasise a point? Is the language about fire and punishment being used for emphasis, to underscore the importance of the values Jesus wants his followers to hold?

To me the very fact that the passage is a bit ambiguous is good evidence that it is not supposed to be a literal warning. If Jesus was really talking about the stark threat of eternal punishment, it is strangely negligent of him spend so much time on other things. Most of what he talks about is the importance of being good to one another, but surely the best way of doing that, if eternal punishment is a genuine possibility, is to strive ceaselessly to warn people to avoid hell.

Many fire and brimstone preachers do dwell on hell, but Jesus didn’t.

In conclusion

The really striking thing about all of these references to hell is that none of them are about hell at all. The very word ‘hell’ is a Germanic word, which we English-speakers have retro-fitted in to the Biblical text.

Jesus talked about punishment and purification. He and his early followers used this language for emphasis plenty of times, and touched on the issue of judgement. However, if the real heart of the Christian message was about avoiding eternal conscious torment in hell – well, Jesus did a pretty poor job of setting that out. He seems to have been more concerned with teaching people to love God and love one another.

It’s almost as though a loving God saw no particular reason to condemn anybody to stay in the eternal fires eternally.

Evangelism I: what the hell?

Evangelism. Being an evangelist. It’s been an emphasis of the Christian faith from its earliest days. Matthew’s gospel ends with the Great Commission, and Christians have been running with it ever since.

Often in circles.

Matthew 28:19-20 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”^[a]

The church I grew up in identified as evangelical, as well as Anglican and charismatic. Previous posts have examined various aspects of what ‘charismatic’ meant to us, on spiritual warfare, being ‘slain in the spirit‘, and speaking in tongues. Here, I want to start looking at the impulse to evangelism that forms another huge part of that culture.

The Great Commission on the surface looks simple: go and turn other people into Christians, right?

What exactly that means, however, is a subject of ongoing debate, sermonising, recriminations, and guilt. Christians don’t easily agree on what it means to be a Christian, and on whether that is the same thing as being a disciple. They don’t agree on what the message is, or how it should be shared, or what priority evangelism should have.

Why evangelise in the first place? Well, the instruction is right there – make disciples of all the nations. But Matthew doesn’t go out of his way to explain the why.

Is it just about offering all nations the option of becoming part of the church, and including anybody who wants to join in our big tent religion? Or is it a commandment with a much higher-stakes imperative: saving people from hell?

My childhood church were firmly planted in the second camp. I was taught that non-Christians were irrevocably doomed to eternal conscious torment. I was also encouraged to be suspicious of people who called themselves Christians, because salvation only came through Jesus himself and it was easy (apparently) to think that you were okay when you actually didn’t know the real Jesus at all.

The stakes were impossibly high. Before I left infants school – when I was about seven – I was already firmly convinced that converting everybody was the only way to save them.

I read stories about famous Christians of the past, who went to extraordinary lengths to persuade people to convert. I particularly remember a child’s life of John Wesley that emphasised his toughness and the huge crowds he gathered; although it was about one of the founders of modern Methodism, the message was recast for an evangelical audience. Wesley, it said, led a huge revival that God stirred up. The moral and spiritual climate of the nation changed dramatically. Jails emptied, and churches filled up. Everybody became good. Hundreds of thousands of people were saved from hell.

That was what I wanted. I wanted to be important, to be famous, to achieve great things – and to save people from hell.

In order to be saved from hell you had to believe in Jesus. It wasn’t enough just to feel like you believed that Jesus was real, though. You had to pray a special prayer which said:

1. Sorry for all the bad things I’ve done.
2. Thanks for saving me by dying on the cross.
3. Please come into my heart, Jesus, and be with me forever.

Moreover, you had to mean this. Jesus / the Holy Spirit / God (I was down with triune theology) would then dwell inside you. They might well do miracles and things to help you convert other people. You would then be on your honour to be a good person, and you could get help and support from Christian friends and the church.

Picture a seven year old girl, swamped on a regular basis by a tide of grief and apathy which I now know was (and is) depression, driven at all other times by the fear that her classmates would be doomed to eternal suffering if she didn’t manage to persuade them to understand and believe these things.

It is difficult to make friends when there is only one thing that you want to talk about. When I asked people in the church about this, they advised me that making friends was a good way to get people ready for conversion, but neglected to mention that motivated affection is as poor a route to making friends as motivated reasoning is to understanding reality.

That seven year old girl has never really left me. These days I am desperately sorry for her, but I can’t go back in time and tell her that everything is okay. I may not believe now what she believed then, but I carry the echo of her anxieties with me every day. It’s one of the reasons I care so passionately about understanding things: I first learned about learning when the stakes were as high as they could ever imaginably be. I have a compulsive need to know and know and know some more, so that I can outwit any hell out there waiting to catch the unwary.

As an adult, I can recognise that the simple version of Christianity which child-me encountered probably felt different to the grown ups who already understood how social interactions worked, and had support networks and friendships of their own.

I can also understand how this simple, high-stakes message is so successful. It demands relatively little of its adherents, on the surface – just pray the right prayer and go on to be a decent person, which is what most people want anyway, for varying definitions of what a ‘decent person’ looks like.

In practice, of course, accepting the doctrine that most people are going to hell creates a pressure to try to do something about that. Which means spreading the doctrine further, so that more people can be saved as you are.

It’s a highly successful mental meme – as long as you can persuade somebody to believe in hell. But what the hell is hell, anyway?

 

Virtue isn’t who you are, it’s what you do

Bumper sticker slogans, like proverbs, wise old saws, tweets, and other human literary forms with strict length limitations, can sometimes concentrate an idea so neatly that it is hard to take seriously.

One that I’ve seen around a bit is “Love is an active verb”. The wisdom it makes twee is deep and fundamental. We can feel love towards somebody with taking action, but the moment you start actually loving somebody is when you start acting lovingly towards them.

Acting out of a place of love does not guarantee great results, of course. You can mean well and still muck things up, do your best and still do more harm than good.

For example, my husband lovingly falls silent when I’m unhappy to let me vent. When he’s unhappy I lovingly offer words of comfort every time he pauses for more than a second or two. After six years of marriage, we finally had the messy conversation on “I know you care but that just makes me feel worse!”

Expressing your real feelings, even when it’s awkward, is part of love. So is listening. If somebody tells you “that thing you do makes me sad”, and you care about that person, then you will try to find a way to stop it happening again.

I started by noting that this sentiment is so trite you can find it on bumper stickers. What the bumper stickers are unlikely to add, however, is that every other virtue shares this active nature.

You can be brave, or true, or wise, or clever, or any other good thing; but the only way to be those things is to enact them. Courage is, as any literary mentor will tell their teenage charge, all about what you do in spite of your fear. It’s not about how you feel, it’s about what you do with that feeling.

Even qualities like innocence or purity only make themselves known when they persist into a context where they contrast with that which is not innocent, or pure. You find out that somebody has those qualities when they are displayed through actions, not intentions.

To circle back to the main point here, virtue is not an inherent quality, but something revealed through actions. You might feel that you are an above average driver, as surveys have revealed that most people feel that they are above average. Some of those people have to be wrong – and the only way to find out which is to watch them drive.

When a writer creates a character, they may know a great deal about that person. What they’re called, where they come from, what they want. Whether they like marmite. Who they love. However, until that character is put into a scene and is taking part in the action, their inner qualities are unknown. I’d argue that even the author doesn’t quite know what virtues the character will have under pressure until they create pressure and write the character through it; a truly realistic, flawed character reveals themselves in their actions, both strengths and weaknesses.

This is why writers are advised to “show, not tell”. Merely telling us who somebody is does nothing to reveal them to a reader. Tell me a character is brave, and I’ll maybe not even really notice the mention. Show me the character, terrified, keeping a cool head and doing the best they can – not only will I remember that character’s courage, but I’ll believe in it, and they will become that much more real to me.

In life, as in fiction, it pays to look at actions rather then opinions. I once believed that I would cheerfully eat anything, before I noticed how often I ducked out of eating liver. The truth was that I wasn’t omnivorous at all. I just thought I ought to be.

Observing how I choose to spend my time helps me understand what I care about. Noticing what makes me happy tells me more about what I need.

My virtues, such as they are, reveal themselves in my actions. The kind of person I am is not necessarily the same as the kind of person I think I am.

Parenting: R E S P E C T the children

Children come into the world programmed to learn, to learn fast, and particularly to learn by copying what they see around them.

Many a hapless parent has been caught out by a small child’s tendency to brightly repeat in public places words and phrases that were not intended to be overheard.

Imitation learning is so central to child development that it’s relevant to pretty much every aspect of childrearing.

Want your children to eat healthily? Replace cupcakes with apples and pears in your own diet.

What your children to have great body image? Say things to yourself in front of the mirror like “isn’t the human body fantastic? How lucky I am to have this one! Look how incredible it is”

Want to encourage your children to be confident around (say) dogs, or spiders, or when dealing with wasps? Ruthlessly crush any fear you might be feeling and pretend nonchalance in front of them.

Teaching by living your ideal is often great for you, too. I know my diet’s improved dramatically in the three and a half years since my first son was born.

So what does this have to do with respect?

Well, I want my children to learn to respect others, and to respect themselves. I’ve been realising that the most powerful tool in my parenting arsenal in this case is going to be how I show respect to them.

Respecting children looks a bit different from respecting adults. I would not seize an adult I respected, throw them onto a changing mat, and strip off their underwear regardless of their protests.

Babies are not equipped for bodily autonomy. They have needs that can only be met by manhandling them. They also don’t have enough grasp of human communicated to understand explanations.

However, it’s possible to start respecting personal space at a very young age. Here are some things I’ve been trying:

1. Ask “can we have a cuddle?” and accept the answer “no”, even if that’s just delivered as a squawk of protest. The question doesn’t have to be verbal – you can hold out your arms invitingly and watch for the response. With a baby too small to communicate, you can still watch how they react to your cuddles and follow their cues on what they want as far as possible. As they get older they might enjoy chase-and-cuddle games, but it shouldn’t be past the wit of an adult to detect when the game goes from being fun to being frustrating for them.
2. Give warning when I’m going to override a baby’s physical autonomy to do something to or with their body. “I’m going to put you on the mat and change your nappy”, perhaps. Or “you’re going in the buggy”.
3. Always tickle gently, allowing plenty of breaks so that the baby can catch their breath from the laughter and show you their underlying emotion. Tickling can make a child laugh even when they hate it. If they seem unhappy after the laugh, or say “no!” stop at once. You can always start again a minute or so later if it seems like they want that after all.
4. Count to three, out loud, before picking up a child that needs to come with you. This one kind of started by accident as an echo of the “I’m going to count to three and then there will be a consequence if you haven’t done X”. It’s turned out to be extremely useful, though. It’s not an either-you-do-this-or-I-do-that routine, it’s just a way of giving warning before I swoop in to pick them up. Since they’re less startled, and feel less rushed, they are also less likely to cry and protest when they are then picked up.
5. Discuss plans that are going to affect the child, with the child. This is more relevant for older toddlers, but even with a little baby I’ve always tried to run through, in the morning, the things that are going to happen that day. It doesn’t have to be detailed – a classic version is “Daddy’s taking you to nursery and will pick you up, but Mummy will get home from work in time to put you to bed.” Or, “we’re going to play in our house this morning, boys, and then we’ll go to Grandma’s house for lunch.”
6. When you can, let a child make meaningful choices about what they do with their bodies and their time. Hold up three t-shirts and let them pick which one to wear. As if they want to go to the park or to the library. Have two or three cereals on option so they can decide what to eat for breakfast. It’s easiest if you make sure that you offer only options that are ok with you, so that you’ll be happy with whatever they plump for.
7. Give warning when an activity is about to end. The magic words are “it’s time for one last thing” before we go home / have dinner / go to bed. Giving five minutes’ warning makes your control of their lives feel less arbitrary to them, and giving them a choice for the final activity helps them assert a little bit of control within the bigger picture of doing what you’ve decided should be done.

Close observation and restraint is the key, remembering that babies and toddlers are full people even if they’re still developing personalities.

How about times when you have to do things your way?

It’s obviously not always possible to respect a child’s wishes about what they do with their body. A three year old might want to get dressed by themselves, but if you’ve got to rush out of the door to get to nursery and on to work on time for an important meeting, you might have to say no.

When overriding a child’s wishes, I try to ensure two things:

1. Consistency. I want my boys to know what to expect from me. I set general rules where I can: we don’t go near a road without me holding your hand. If I need you and you’re not coming, I’ll count to three before picking you up. Stinky nappies get changed as soon as possible, even if you’d rather keep playing.
2. Explanation. I tell my boys why I am doing something they don’t want. If I don’t change this nappy soon, you might get an ouchy red rash. We need to go now because otherwise we’ll be late for nursery, and Mummy will be late to work. You can’t wear that top today because it’s got avocado on it and it needs to go in the wash.

This approach is one I’ve been feeling my way towards since my oldest son was born late in 2014. Some elements have been in place almost since then, and others have evolved over time. It’s only recently that I’ve started to realise the underlying principle I’ve been working towards.

I want my sons to know at a bone-deep level that they matter and that other people matter. I want them to have an instinct to check that the other person also wants to cuddle.

In short, my goal is to respect my children, so that they learn to respect themselves and to respect others.

Obligatory Aretha Franklin:

What’s wrong with the world

It happened somewhere, somewhen, way back before we had reliable ways of recording history for more than a few generations at a time. It was so far back that even the stories that we have kept telling each other have changed beyond all recognition. These days we can’t say for sure what triggered it. A theft? A murder? A pomegranate, or an apple?

I’m talking about the first time that one of our ancestors turned to another, or perhaps to the tribe, or the village, or the travelling band, or to the trees, and said: “What is WRONG with you?”

We all go through our own mini rediscovery, similarly lost to present recollection in the haze of early memory. The world just is, and then all at once the world is not good enough. It doesn’t hold up to some ideal. We aren’t getting the food, or the comfort, or the experience we have come to expect.

I will always cherish the memory of when my second son, still a newborn, found for the first time that his bowels were working. Over his placid, red-and-wrinkled face came a look of sheer outrage. How dare this uncomfortable thing be happening in my insides! What do you mean, I’m going to have to poo every day for the rest of my life?

Of course, as we grow up, we learn that the world isn’t fair. Then we learn, hopefully gently, that other people and their actions can harm us, just as our actions can harm them.

Bad stuff happens to good people. Worse, good people form part of networks and structures which cause harm to others. Even worse, we ourselves are part of those networks. Our normal, undramatic, uncontroversial way of living and thriving is built on suffering that is (most of the time) invisible to us.

Sin is a loaded term, and I don’t like using it because people are inclined to hear it as a personal reflection. It’s like racism: often people struggle to accept that the society they live in is racist, and that what they do or say is part of that racist environment, because they take that as a personal attack. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a racist.

This discomfort with the language doesn’t change reality: I’m a white woman who lives in London. My success and comfort comes, to an extent that is very difficult to quantify, from living in a society that rewards me regularly just for being who I am.

This effect – benefitting from the way the world around you responds to you not as an individual but because of the categories you fall into – is what is meant in modern parlance by privilege.

The privilege you live with is the hardest thing to see and measure, because it’s water and you’re the fish that swims in it. This is why women see more clearly than men the advantages that accrue to men; non-straight people can help straight people understand what they’re taking for granted; and non-white people are better placed to highlight the invisible privilege of whiteness than white people.

In other words, there are things you can’t learn about yourself without listening to people who are profoundly different from you.

All of which brings me back to sin, and to evil. Racism is a sin and it is evil, but sin and evil are broader categories which between them try to cover all the ways the world goes wrong that are not the effect of blind chance.

Illness, volcanoes erupting, and uncomfortable bowel evacuation are all unpleasant things that cause pain. They’re bad, but as far as they’re facts of life that we can’t influence, they’re not sin.

Sin requires a sinner. Big, sweeping, societal sins often come about because of the actions of hundreds of millions of sinners, sinners like you and me. The evil that comes from those sins often causes more sin, with a kind of ripple effect.

The point of all this is that there are things wrong with the world. They are not all your fault, or all my fault, but we are part of them. We share in this community, we are part of the life of this planet, and in big chaotic systems even tiny actions can lead to huge changes elsewhere.

Is there any way to avoid being part of all this? Two answers: no, and also, please don’t.

No, because no human being can grow and thrive without other humans. We’re a social species. Babies need parents, toddlers need friends, and children need teachers. Adults can choose isolation, but it’s rarely a good idea. That’s why it’s used as a form of torture.

Even if you do go off the grid and manage to reach a perfect harmony with your environment, all you achieve is to remove another pair of eyes that can see, hands that can help, and a mind that can solve problems.

Please don’t opt out. Avoiding evil severely limits your chances of doing good. Stay engaged, and make things better.

A final word to those who might be thinking of sin from a religious perspective: I haven’t said anything here about guilt and forgiveness, and that’s on purpose.

I am talking here about a kind of concept of original sin: the world was messed up before we came into it, and we can’t help being part of the problem.

Yes, we should repent – in the sense that we should walk back from the wrongness wherever we can, and turn to other better ways of doing things. That’s what repent originally meant: a turning around, and going the other way.

Where we have done wrong that goes up above and beyond the background wrongness, the original sin, the ever-present low-grade evil; when we have chosen to inflict harm for whatever reason (even if we only did it for a laugh), then guilt is appropriate. There are times when each of us does something bad, and should feel bad.

The rest of the time, though? We shouldn’t be carrying guilt. I’m not going to reject my responsibility to be part of making things better, but that doesn’t mean I’m always going to need to be asking for forgiveness.

If a sinner is a person who sins, and a racist is a person who’s actions have been racist (whether intentionally or not), then I am both a sinner and a racist. I do nobody any favours – least of all myself – by refusing to acknowledge the harm I’ve cause.

I’ll apologise for anything where I should and could have done better.

I don’t accept guilt for being in a world with wrongness, and I’m not going to ask for forgiveness for original sin.

I won’t apologise for being human, for being caught up in this community of heart-breaking good and stone-shivering evil and everything in between.

Quotes: the outside perspective (Terry Pratchett)

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.

Terry Pratchett as usual hitting more than one nail on the head, in Monstrous Regiment.

The language of men and angels: speaking in tongues, Part III

This is the third part of a three part series on the modern charismatic experience of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia. I’m drawing heavily on a well-researched article by Paul Davidson who blogs at Is That in the Bible?

Part I described what speaking in tongues can look and feel like in a modern-day worship service, and referred to Davidson’s thorough survey of relevant Biblical texts. In Part II I talked about Davidson’s high level survey of the history of glossolalia. I fleshed it out with some personal history in reference to the modern charismatic movement in the UK, which looks different from the US context that appears to be Davidson’s primary reference point.

This post brings together the various themes, mostly to explain that in spite of finding Davidson’s survey helpful and illuminating, I don’t share his conclusion:

The appeal of tongues is rooted in the shared emotional experience it produces, and churchgoers are not encouraged to come to their own conclusions based on the biblical texts. Paul’s warning on the futility of meaningless gibberish is as likely to fall on deaf ears now as it did two thousand years ago.

Davidson shares St Paul’s discomfort with the practice of speaking in tongues. What rings true for me, though, is the phrase ‘shared emotional experience’, which I believe has great value.

Contra St Paul, the Alpha Course makes highly effective use of glossolalia (as the most commonly manifesting initial gift of the Spirit) as an evangelistic tool. The course includes a weekend away during which attendees are encouraged to ask God for the presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, and effectively learn how to worship the way the modern charismatic church worships.

I think part of the success of the Alpha Course comes from the way that it brings prospective Christians in for a taster of what the church believes, drawing them along through the experience of being a charismatic Christian without asking for any kind of commitment up front. The weekly sessions do this by acting as mini church services, with the community aspect of Christian life emphasised by the meal and small group discussion. The weekend away adds in the less conventional aspects, which might perhaps make newcomers feel uncomfortable at first – the connection to the miraculous, the emotional connection to God, and the experience of the Holy Spirit which often manifests in this context as speaking in tongues.

The fact is that all of these things can be deeply compelling. St Paul worried about prospective worshippers being unnerved by glossolalia, but once you’ve been introduced to it gently it is in fact a great feeling.

When you’re praying together with a few people, speaking in tongues can help you get over your nerves at not knowing what to say. Even when you’re alone, it can give you an outlet for emotions that usual words can’t express. This aspect gets emphasised sometimes by modern charismatics, often in connection to Romans Ch. 8 vs. 26:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

In a big group, glossolalia is the natural extension of the direction modern worship music tends towards anyway – a form of communal chanting that emphasises shared emotional experience.

I don’t think that speaking in tongues is the act of speaking other languages, angelic languages, or anything which has meaning in the sense that words carry meaning when we talk to one another.

If you consider the ease with which anyone can artificially create the same effect without any religious intent, and the fact that ‘ecstatic utterances’ is a phrase that can apply to worship practices in other faiths, or to a group of teenagers acting out a scene from Greek mythology, it’s clear that there is a natural human ability to generate language-like sounds.

I therefore don’t think that the act of speaking in tongues is externally exposed on (or even handed to) the person speaking by the Holy Spirit. Or rather, I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that any supernatural action is at work when somebody is speaking in tongues. They may feel as though the strange words that are emerging are not consciously chosen, but the close relationship between the sounds they make and the sounds that form part of the speaker’s normal language strongly suggests otherwise.

None of this makes the experience less worthwhile. When I pray in English, I don’t assume that the Holy Spirit is somehow operating my jaws for me to make the words come out in a different (better?) order.

Similarly, if I sing a worship song (or, more likely, a hymn), I know that I’m the one doing the singing. That doesn’t make the worship less valid, less worshipful somehow. Why should speaking in tongues be held to a different standard?

I do hope and trust that the Holy Spirit is providing inspiration and guidance in all of the ways I relate to God. That’s a subtle thing, however, and it’s part of the bigger picture of how life and faith and the presence of God all fit together.

My experience is that miracles – in the sense of obviously supernatural happenings – just don’t happen to me. There are a few things that masquerade as miracles and there are a lot of word-of-mouth accounts of bigger, more dramatic things happening to other people, but these things do not seem to exist in my personal part of the cosmos.

These things may happen to other people. For me, however, the important part is learning how to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with the Lord my God.

I think glossolalia performs three useful roles:

• it helps a self-conscious person feel that they can engage in prayer without knowing exactly what to say before they start;
• it helps someone communicate a sense of care, attention, and general good wishes when they pray for a stranger; and
• when sung together in a medley it creates and reinforces a sense of community in worship.

It’s a problem when people try to use speaking in tongues as a litmus test for who is or isn’t a Christian. It’s a problem when people use the practice of interpreting tongues – or the practice of making public prophecies in church – as a way to speak on God’s behalf (“thus saith the Lord!”) It’s a problem when the emotional content encourages people to take a more tribal in-group approach, leading to a sense of division between the elect and the rest.

These same pitfalls can be found in many other places in Christianity and no doubt in other religions too. Seeking power and falling into problematic in-group and out-group dynamics are generic human failings.

I therefore differ from Davidson, who sees an inevitable conflict between the scientific study of glossolalia and the charismatic practice. I’m comfortable with the science which only confirms some of the impressions I’ve had of speaking in tongues for many years now.

I’m likely to keep speaking in tongues myself, in full knowledge that the individual words are not some sort of angelic speech but are simply sounds generated somewhere in my unconscious mind.

And, unlike both St Paul and Paul Davidson, I don’t think there’s any reason to regret the presence of glossolalia in the church both now and for the foreseeable.

Quotes: the good side of bad experiences

Genuine trauma is often extremely debilitating, but as far as the brain is concerned, negative experiences are indeed beneficial, for our mental health, wellbeing and, of course, happiness. A greater wealth of experiences for the brain to utilise and refer to over the subsequent course of our lives can significantly boost our ambition and motivation – which, as we’ve seen, are closely tied to happiness. Experiencing a wide range of possible emotions, good and bad, means we also gain greater emotional competence, allowing us to react and response appropriately. This should also lead to greater happiness, for various reasons.

Dean Burnett writing in The Happy Brain: The Science of Where Happiness Comes From.

I like that he acknowledges that genuine trauma is still bad news, but finds an upside in the experience of distress even so. This doesn’t read to me like an argument for inflicting unhappiness in pursuit of happiness so much as an argument that the bad things that happen to us can work to our benefit by helping our brain to develop in useful directions.

Which means that preventing our children experiencing anything bad could be worse for them in the long run than allowing them to struggle occasionally. Food for thought.