The sound of the trump

I must say I enjoy politics on television.  One of the most enjoyable aspects being (of course) that you can always turn it off.  But who would want to turn it off when none other than Donald Trump is having a little spat with the Roman Pontiff?  Not me.  And I'm afraid I have gone and taken sides. God bless the Holy Father!

However, we should feel a certain sympathy for The Donald.  (As an aside, I think that Lord Macdonald, High Chief of the Clan, should perhaps threaten The Donald with legal action under the Trades Descriptions Act.  Who does Mr Trump think he is - the equivalent of The Chisholm, or even of his fellow American The McBain of McBain?  Clan Donald is equipped with no less than three fully fledged chiefs already, not counting the High Chief himself who surely is The Donald.  Any more chiefs would be mere ostentation.)

But to return.  We can have a certain sympathy for Donald Trump if only because so many others have thought like him, both in the past and in the present, and I imagine that original thought has never been his strong suit. However, Mr Trump has certainly been living up to his name. He has provided a terrific fanfare for the religious instincts of his tribe, and tribal religion is all too often the only kind of religion that many people can understand.  And strangely enough, this is just what Christianity is most definitely not about.

Take the experience of Christ himself.  Did he or his views appeal to the Tribes of Israel speaking at his trial through the High Priest and his Council?  Not to mention previous conflicts with the Pharisees and the Sadducees?  From the biblical record it doesn't look much like it.  Kierkegaard said that Christ died for one man, and that every man is that one man.  There is a certain contrast here with the declaration  of the High Priest that it was expedient that one man (Christ) should die for the people  - and for the people, read the tribe.

Christianity is often taken for a sort of magic.  It has had its uses from winning wars to curing warts, and I would guess that very many, perhaps most, people have thought of it in such terms.  For them, Christianity is about making life (both here and hereafter) safe for God's people - but not perhaps for anyone else.  It's an understanding of the matter which has a very good pedigree - one which can even be found in the pages of the Old Testament itself.

But divine revelation - indeed divine self-revelation - did not come to an end before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had picked up their pens.  Indeed, it can be seen to have reached its climax in the pages of their Gospels in the person of Jesus Christ.  And he most certainly did not just rubber-stamp all that had gone before.  From now on you would have to make do with just one wife.  But at least ham sandwiches could be enjoyed by all - except for their recently deceased ingredients, of course.

But religion became completely impractical from the point of view of someone like Mr Trump's friend and supporter, Sarah Palin. Even sparrows are of concern to their Creator - so no assassinating helpless moose from a helicopter, even if you can see Russia from your kitchen window.  Now you have to love your enemies and do them good. Violence is out - especially from helicopters whether in Alaska or Vietnam.   National greatness is of little significance in eternity,  and Christianity is not particularly useful either in curing toothache or in making America great (yet) again.

Christ himself refused to be made an earthly king, despite being the King of Heaven, and he refused, despite all those legions of angels, to defend himself against the mob which came to the Garden of Gethsemane with Judas to take him prisoner. Riches are no longer to be seen as an indication of God's favour but as a means of doing good.  They are to be given away - preferably to the despised poor, and especially to those in need of a decent system of healthcare.

And the Great Wall of America is not even to be thought of, let alone paid for in pesos.

On the fence

I realise that renaming this blog Gallican Anglican Orthodox probably doesn't help to make it look any more sensible (let alone intelligible) than it did before, but I have not done so without reason. The three adjectives are in an ascending order of significance (as you might well expect) and to my mind the most significant does not obliterate those which are less so.  But then, neither are they are all equally significant.

It seems to me that holding together two or more separate things without making them equal to one another can be a very difficult thing to do.

The temptation to ignore differences altogether and to give First Prize to everyone is as great as the temptation to throw something (or even someone) overboard.  In my opinion neither of these options is satisfactory.  At the present time in the West it seems that Prizes for All are obligatory among the bien pensant, and no more so than in matters to do with the distinction between male and female and its attendant consequences.

Do we have to pretend that nothing has changed even when Bruce becomes Caitlin (if only more or less)?  Are designer babies and wombs-for-hire as ho-hum as all that?  And must we refer to David Furnish and Elton John as husband and husband?  I am not in any way aligning myself with those who are still a little teary over the cruel abduction of gay - that lovely, happy word straight out of Swallows and Amazons, but then neither do I intend to go to prison in Kentucky with any county clerks.

Perhaps we would do well to reaffirm the difference between the sexes and then recognise that this difference can and does include ambiguities - without either rejecting them or canonising them.

So let's just sit on the fence for a bit and have a think, shall we?

How big is God?

I have just read for the second time God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by Dr John C Lennox and I am more impressed by it than I was the first time, probably because greater familiarity led to greater understanding.  He writes very clearly about semiotics and the human genome (among other things) and what I manage to grasp of it I find most impressive.

Like the formerly enthusiastic atheist Professor Antony Flew in There is a God, he establishes very convincingly  from scientific evidence the  overwhelming likelihood - indeed necessity - of what two scientists Guilliermo Gonzalez and Jay W Richards in their book The Privileged Planet call 'an extra-terrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we have been willing to expect or imagine.'

So far so good.  Encouraged by his book  I looked Dr Lennox up on Youtube and found him debating these matters with Professor Richard Dawkins before an audience in the American Bible Belt. Naturally I cheered for Dr Lennox, or at least I did until we came to his closing statement.  Until then he had more or less stuck to the science with excellent effect.  But then he became an enthusiastic spokesman for evangelical Christianity, and in my opinion he did the cause no favours.

That's because preaching the Gospel these days requires an approach in two stages, not one.

Firstly, it should be recognised that theism is not the given that it was two thousand years ago - and for a long time afterwards as well.  Now you have to show that there could indeed be a vast, ancient and magnificent extra-terrestrial intelligence behind reality as we presently experience and understand it.   The title of J B Phillip's book Your God is too Small should be borne in mind here.

The second stage consists of building on the first.  Any suggestion that the Creator is a small-minded chooser of favourites - to give but one example - makes God little better than Woden or Zeus, and to my mind at least, makes atheism seem almost like a moral duty.