The New Testament seems to contain a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism. On the optimistic side there is a heaven and so everything must work out all right in the end. But on the pessimistic side is some of the teaching of Jesus: ‘Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another. There will be terrible earthquakes, famines and plagues everywhere; there will be strange and terrifying things coming from the sky.’ So what are Christians - optimists or pessimists? Read more
‘God created mankind in his own image: male and female he created them,’ says the writer of Genesis. In Greek legend Zeus first created a sexless being. Later, in a fit of divine anger, he split this into man and woman. The division of humankind into two sexes is thus understood to be an imperfect state, a weakening of mankind’s power, because the two sexes pull in different directions. Read more
In some ways we are no different from any other species on earth. We are creatures subject to the usual conditions of space and time. But we know that human beings ’stand out’ from other beings in several ways. Some of these are plain enough; they partly explain humankind’s superiority over other creatures: our creativity, our intellectual, linguistic and cultural achievements.
But the Bible adds a further and remarkable point. People stand out not by what they do but by what they are. This is expressed right at the beginning, in the creation story of Genesis 1. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness.’ It is a theme taken up and developed in other parts of the Bible: we are not like the other creatures; we share God’s nature in a special way. Read more
Modern science developed in one place only, and over a restricted period of time. The place was Western Europe; the time, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It is not immediately obvious why conditions were then particularly favourable. Much of the intellectual background of Western Europe at that time
“I have shown man the glory of your works, as much of their unending wealth as my feeble intellect was able to grasp.”
Johannes Kepler was not original — it was derived from classical antiquity. In technical invention, the Chinese had reached a higher level of sophistication than the Europeans, and at a much earlier stage. Why then was the decisive step to modern science not taken centuries before in Greece or China? Read more
The implications then of the opening words of the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, are immense, greater than anything we can conceive. The first words of John’s Gospel re-echo the words in the beginning‘. The beginning of what? The author of Genesis doubtless meant the beginning of the world, or better the beginning of God’s creative activity. It is a theme unimaginable to Greek philosophers or contemporary secular science.
Greek understandings of the beginning
Thoughtful Greeks, in the five or six centuries before Christ, had great interest in the question, in what sense did the world have a beginning? Read more
There have been many attempts to define religion, none of them entirely satisfactory. Perhaps it is easier to say what religion is not than what it is. A useful definition is this: religion is the refusal to believe that the universe can be adequately explained in purely three- dimensional terms. The three dimensions may be taken as the three conditions of our life — space, time and matter; or as the field of the physical sciences which deal with those things that can be counted, measured and weighed. A purely material view of things would naturally exclude the possibility of religion. Read more
It is not always easy to handle problems in the Bible which are posed by modern knowledge. This is particularly so since difficulties usually reflect the larger problem of how to hold together differing attitudes to authority and knowledge. In modern thought we generally work ‘from below’ Read more
For many centuries ‘theism’ as we have described it was a relatively stable element in the Christian heritage. But today many different conceptions of God are voiced, and many people are unsure what they should believe about their Maker. What has thrown Christian belief in God into such a state of confusion and uncertainty?
In the churches, Christians have neglected the study of God. Other beliefs have been carefully taught, but belief in God is seldom spelt out. So it is no wonder that eccentricities emerge. Failure to cultivate healthy ideas makes it easy for unhealthy ones to grow. Read more
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became Man.
It is impossible to read in the Gospels the account of Jesus‘ ministry without being struck by the many stories about Jesus doing things such as healing people and stilling the storm which people normally cannot do. There are over thirty such incidents recorded, apart from some general accounts which refer to large numbers of people being healed. Read more
