Phill Sacre

Category: Christian

Anything I write about the Christian faith.

  • No More Page 3 and ‘Rape Culture’

    I haven’t blogged about this before now, so firstly: if you haven’t seen the No More Page 3 campaign, I do encourage you to have a look and sign the petition if you agree. Frankly I think Page 3 is a dinosaur – a relic of a bygone age which should have been gone long ago. (Well, should never have been allowed to start, but let’s not go there.)

    I signed the petition a while back, but what prompted me to blog today was this article about ‘rape culture’. I find it seriously disturbing to know the kind of things which are going on around Universities these days (although, to be fair, it was probably going on when I was at uni almost ten years ago too – but the rise of Facebook and social media seem to have made it more prominent).

    I’m not sure how we got to this point in our society: clearly there are many factors at play, and I’m not clever or well-versed in history enough to understand them. But I do wonder whether this is partly down to our understanding of what it means to be human: if people coming through school are constantly being told “we’re basically fancy bald monkeys” – i.e. we are animals, nothing more and nothing less – then can people really be blamed for indulging in ‘animal instincts’ a bit? If men are designed by evolution to spread their genes as widely as possible – can they really be blamed for trying to indulge that?

    Obviously that is far from the whole picture, but it seems that once a society abandons the idea of a good Creator who values each of his creations equally, this kind of thing is almost to be expected. (Similarly with my previous thoughts on secularism and infanticide). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, can be done about this in our society: I struggle to believe that more ethical education is what is needed for lads who are being educated at university.

    A societal change is needed, and indeed I believe abolishing page 3 is a step in the right direction. The question is, whether it’s enough to stem the tide in a sex-saturated culture, or whether a more deep-rooted and fundamental change needs to happen in the life of society.

  • Positions on Scriptural Authority

    A few days ago, after the news about women bishops had broken, I had a very interesting discussion on Facebook about the decision. One of the interesting things to come out of that was the positions that people had on Biblical Authority. It seems that this is an area where people have major disagreements: do we treat the Bible as a relic of a previous time, which we can safely ignore now (or at least, we can ignore the bits we disagree with); or is it the literal word of God – was it basically dictated by God from heaven, and do we have to obey every last word of it to the last letter?

    There is a huge spectrum of belief within the Church of England – and even within ‘evangelical’ circles. When I say ‘evangelical’, I’m referring to the dictionary definition: ‘belonging to or designating the Christian churches that emphasize the teachings and authority of the Scriptures’.

    For example, the Evangelical Alliance – an organisation which would encompass a broad spectrum of evangelical belief – has as point three on its statement of faith:

    The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which are the written Word of God—fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.

    (Other organisations hold to a similar view – the Baptist Union has a similar statement, for example, as does the FIEC.)

    Notice that phrase ‘the written Word of God’ – essentially evangelicals are saying that the Bible, although written by humans, is the written word of God himself. It’s not just an ‘old book’ which we happen to love because we like the language (which, I do admit, annoyed me with the KJV anniversary celebrations last year: people seemed to love the language, not what it actually meant.) I came across 1 Thessalonians 2:13 yesterday, which I think sums it up quite well: “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” The Word of God – not something which is dead and irrelevant, but something which is at work in believers. As Hebrews 4:12 says:

    For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

    Well, this is all very interesting… but what does this have to do with the debate I was having? The key question we were talking about is: what does the Bible being the word of God actually mean when we come across passages which are seemingly difficult, such as 1 Corinthians 14 or 1 Timothy 2? Are we free to say “Paul was wrong” or “Paul was writing into a cultural context which is no longer relevant?”

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  • Reflections on Women Bishops and the “No” Vote

    Now 24 hours has passed since the synod vote yesterday, and some of the dust is starting to settle, I thought it might be time to wade into the murky waters with my take on the whole matter. I’m honestly hoping not to upset anyone, although given how high the feelings seem to have run that may not be possible – so my apologies in advance!

    Let’s be honest: the vote yesterday was a no-win situation. For the ‘traditionalists’, i.e. those who do not want to see women bishops, the measure was insufficient: the protection built into the measure was not sufficient – it paved the way for problems in the future. I’m not a legal expert, but this is what the ‘no’ voters were saying. For those pro-women bishops, the measure was a last-ditch attempt to try and include traditionalists. Anything other than a ‘yes’ vote would be unnecessarily stalling the process for another few years – and in the process, making the Church of England looking like a misogynist, sexist and out-of-touch organisation. Female rights would be trampled on once again, and the church could never recover. In fact, I saw a few tweets on Twitter yesterday and today which were basically saying “The Church of England is finished”.

    There are a few things about all this that make me uncomfortable.

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  • Secularism and Humanitarian Punishment

    Recently, I came across C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”. If you’ve not read it, I do recommend it: I think Lewis makes some excellent points about punishment. It makes quite a neat follow-up to my previous post on Atheism Plus and ethics. What I was talking about in that post was personal morality: does atheism have the power to change anyone’s life from bad to good? Does atheism have the power to stop people doing things which are ‘unethical’?

    What I’d like to do in this post is look at the idea of punishment itself. What happens when someone DOES do something considered unethical / wrong, at the level of society? Lewis argues that the traditional idea with respect to punishment is that of retribution: someone has done something wrong, therefore they deserve some kind of punishment. There is a connection between punishment and crime.

    However, what some were arguing back in the 1940s with respect to capital punishment, was that retributive punishment is actually immoral. Lewis outlines the two reasons given for punishment: correction – i.e. to make someone change their behaviour – and deterrent, i.e. making sure that other people don’t follow the same pattern of behaviour. I think the same arguments would probably be applicable today. Where it gets interesting is how Lewis then takes it.

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  • Sermon: Gluttony [Galatians 5v16-26]

    Last night I was preaching at Christ Church Cockfosters on the topic of gluttony, as part of their series “The 7 Habits of Highly Destructive People”. I found it a hard sermon to do – it was the first sermon I’ve done on a topic, rather than on a passage, and they’re not easy!

    Still, I think it went reasonably well. Have a listen or a read, and let me know what you think! (If you’re really obsessive you could compare what I *actually* said with what I planned to say… but that might be going a bit far! ;)) The audio recording starts with the reading, by the way.

    I should point out, I had a few slides with the sermon as well. I’m not going to upload those too, so you’ll just have to imagine them 🙂

    (Soundcloud has been removed – sorry!)

    Sermon – Gluttony (Gal 5v16-26)Download

  • Random thoughts on ‘Atheism Plus’

    Edit: 29th October – I have updated the post to make it a bit clearer following some feedback on Twitter and in the comments.

    One of the things that’s been making a few waves on Twitter lately is “Atheism Plus“. In case you haven’t heard of it, this is the official definition according to the FAQ:

    Atheism Plus is a term used to designate spaces, persons, and groups dedicated to promoting social justice and countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, ableism and other such bigotry inside and outside of the atheist community

    In other words, it is seeking to add on to atheism – which only has as a definition the lack of belief in God / gods – some kind of concern for moral or social issues. Kind of like a cross between atheism and humanism (I don’t want to do the definition a disservice though – read the website for the proper info).

    One of the interesting things about this for me is that it seems to have sprung from – at least in part – sexism (or perceived sexism) within the skeptical community. I’ve been vaguely following the story for a while now, but I was prompted to put, um, keyboard to blog (?!) by this article: how a number of prominent female members of the skeptical community had suffered from sexist treatment, followed by abuse once it had been outed. All this is particularly interesting for me, given what I’ve previously written about secularism. Allow me to explain.

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  • House, Marriage, and Grace

    Over the past few months, Mrs Phil and I have been watching through “House, M.D.” If you’ve never watched the series before, I can recommend it – it is pretty compelling! That said, some of the time it is a bit frustrating: the series as a general rule seems to buy into many of the popular misconceptions about relationships. One which particularly irks me is the idea that relationships seem to be totally in the hands of fate – “let’s get together and see how it works out.” Which is perhaps fair enough for a while, but after a few years – and even after getting married? No, that’s not how it works.

    I think all of this has got to me a bit more than usual because last year I read Tim Keller’s excellent book on marriage, and then earlier this year I read John Piper’s book “This Momentary Marriage” (which is also excellent, and currently available as a free PDF from that link). Couple that with the government’s discussions to redefine marriage and it seems that this year I’ve been thinking about marriage quite a lot! What does marriage mean? What does it teach us?

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  • The Untold Story of Islam vs The Resurrection

    A few days ago I watched Islam: The Untold Story, which was based on Tom Holland’s book In the Shadow of the Sword. I read the book recently – following the review in the Oak Hill magazine – and really enjoyed it, so I was happy to see a TV adaptation. If you haven’t seen it – or read the book – I would recommend it: it gives an insight into the earlier years of Islam, some of which are quite striking. One message that seemed to come across is that there’s no real evidence as to who wrote the Quran. There are traditions that developed subsequently, but there are none in actual written form. It’s a similar story with Mecca: no-one knows where Mohammed was from, much of what is known about the Prophet is actually later tradition.

    All this put into sharp relief the Christian story. Recently I’ve been reading Tom Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, which I’ve had for a couple of years but never found the time to actually read it until now (it’s 738 pages of quite dense prose).

    To my mind, the contrasts are stark. Tom Holland hints at this in his book, but in the Bible the history is an integral part of the book: it namechecks contemporary kings, lands, peoples, towns: in short, you can quite easily test it against other forms of history. One thing which struck me about visiting the British Museum earlier this year was how much of the Old Testament is actually confirmed by archaeological evidence.

    But the New Testament is perhaps even more conclusive: what Tom Wright does in The Resurrection is construct a thorough and – to my mind – sound argument for the historical veracity of the resurrection. He examines the context of thought about the resurrection in the ancient Greek world, as well as the spectrum of thought in second-temple Judaism; he examines the epistles, the gospel narratives, the resurrection narratives – in short, it seemed to me he left no stone unturned.

    Essentially he argues that no earthly event could have caused what we have in the New Testament to come about, it could only have been the resurrection as it is described. (That does absolutely no justice at all to his argument; someone has put up a summarised version of the book here which might help).

    I don’t want to dwell too much on the book, but it did make me consider the contrast between Christianity and Islam from a historical perspective: it seems that there are sound historical reasons for believing in the Bible. With Islam, it seems the picture is a bit more murky.

  • Bigoted, Homophobic… and proud?!

    Thought that title would catch your attention! One thing which annoys me about the whole furore surrounding the government’s proposals to redefine marriage (which I’ve blogged about before) is the careless way people use words like ‘bigoted’ and ‘homophobic’. Particularly the first one: these days, if you are opposed to anything which society in general seems to be for, you are ‘bigoted’. For example, Marcus Brigstocke tweeted about a month ago, “Hey The Church – heres a thought – man up and own your bigotry.” Is that fair?

    Let me borrow the definition of ‘bigot’ from the online dictionary:

    a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.

    Many say that because the church don’t want the government to redefine marriage, they are bigots. So they are ‘utterly intolerant of a different belief or opinion.’ The problem is… the idea that marriage should be a lifelong partnership between one man and one woman is an opinion – a belief. But the idea that marriage should be ‘egalitarian’ and allowed between any two consenting adults is also a belief or opinion. Unfortunately, the two opinions cannot co-exist legally – in a country such as the UK, it’s up to the government to pick a position and enforce it. In the past, such opinions have largely been drawn from a Christian view of the world (or at least, quasi-Christian). And many people still have that Christian moral framework in place, even if some of the distinctives have slipped out.

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  • Sermon: 2 Thessalonians 1 – Persecution and God’s righteous judgement

    This morning I preached a sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1. At college this term I’ve been learning about Homiletics, and as part of the assessment for that I had to deliver a sermon – which involved doing lots of diagrams as part of the preparation process (it’s Chris Green’s 12-step process for doing sermons).

    To be honest, I found the 12-step process quite hard: it didn’t really gel naturally with how I would ordinarily like to prepare a sermon. Some of it was useful, but some was a bit of a struggle! – so when I delivered the sermon this morning, I felt like I wasn’t completely sure if it was any good or not. Not because I think I said anything wrong, but just because it had been prepared in a different way and as such it felt a bit … unnatural.

    Anyway, it seemed to go down relatively well, I had a couple of positive comments afterwards! Anyway, if you’d like to have a read of it to tell me what you think, you can download it in PDF form. Feel free to leave comments afterwards, although please be nice!