When Ignorance Is Sometimes Best

In a week of mourning over the tragic deaths of the Christian members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, we have also seen the most powerful earthly example of Christian love there is - showing love, grace and forgiveness to someone who deserve condemnation - just as Christ did for each and every one of us.

I think it is in these wonderful acts of Christian faith that we'll find the answers to some of those difficult Bible verses, like the one where St Paul says we are to be like infants when it comes to evil (1 Corinthians 14:20). I think we must place this alongside Jesus saying that we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3), as there are clear parallels between the two. Children have many excellent qualities, and it is those child-like qualities that we should emulate in our faith. We should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and we should always be enquiring just as children are always enquiring about the world they live in.

But being told to be like children in our love towards God is in no way to be taken that Christians are to be innocent and unapprised of worldly things. For we all know that Christ also says to be as 'shrewd as snakes' as well as being innocent as doves" (Matthew 10:16). We should search and rely on God as a child searches and relies on a parent, but we should also be shrewd and wise on our Christian journey too.

Perhaps the grace-filled response of forgiveness we are seeing by those who lost loved ones in Charleston is a perfect example of how, and why, it is better for us to be like infants in being innocent and unapprised of evil. This has parallels with St Paul's instruction in Romans 16:19, to be "wise in doing right" and to "stay innocent of any wrong". In remaining innocent of the motivations of the evil mindset, the victims' families are steering well clear of any motivations of their own to respond quid pro quo. In other words, they are allowing the power of Christ's love to subsume their motivations to the extent that evil is always giving way to love and grace.

And it's in those microcosmic demonstrations of Christ's love and grace on earth that we get the hint of what the world would be like if we all behaved that way and had the same motivations - the template for which was laid down by Christ himself on earth, with His teachings, miracles, death and resurrection.

The Trouble With Humanism Is Humans

We often hear talk in the UK of injecting more humanism into our society in an attempt to rescue us from the archaic social cancer that is religious belief. Humanism is a non-religious ethical life stance that commits to development and human wellbeing on the basis of reason and naturalism.

The upshot is, humanists are a group of people that want to cut the supernatural out of ethics and decision-making. The problem with being a humanist is that it involves the tricky business of trusting human beings - which is ultimately going to leave us in trouble.

There are two ways we can trust humans: one is in what we can achieve, and two is in how we behave. It's quite easy to trust humans in the first sense. Our achievements are phenomenal: we've built big cities, travelled into space, mastered global travel and communication, learned how to treat the sick, lifted millions out of poverty - and with the Internet we have all the world's knowledge at our fingertips.

Alas, it's in the second sense, in our behaviour, that humans are so very hard to trust. However much we advance our scientific achievements and improve our material living standards we are always going to have to face up to the reality that at our worst we humans are pretty selfish, ignoble, inconsiderate and unkind creatures.

That's why even if I wasn't a Christian I could never be a humanist - I think humans are as much of the problem as they are the solution. We are so incorrigibly wretched inside that we can never be the solution to the problems of being human, just as gravity can never be the solution to a skydiver having difficulty opening his parachute. Gravity of course is the reason he needs his parachute just as our human brokenness is the reason we need so much more than humanism. We need Christ, in fact.