Why God Probably Had To Be Male

The Church of Sweden has urged its clergy to use more gender-neutral language when referring to God, and to avoid referring to the deity as “Lord” or “he”. Their reason, as expressed by Archbishop Antje Jackelen, is to promote the use of more gender-inclusive language - “Theologically, for instance, we know that God is beyond our gender determinations, God is not human,” she said.

This is no doubt on the back of a socio-cultural trend towards “accepting difference of all varieties", where people can more easily "be supported to accept their own gender identity or sexual orientation and that of others". Even accepting this as a good basis for humans, that does not necessarily mean that it naturally translates into a good basis for engaging with Deity - after all, we know from Jesus that things that apply to humans do not necessarily extend to applying to God ('My kingdom is not of this world').

The church is claimed to be something over and above human construction (although it is full of human construction too) – it is thought to be a body that represents the bride to Christ’s bridegroom. Hence, in those terms, even at a metaphorical level, sex is important; particularly as Jesus instructs us to pray to Our Father.

Obviously there is no doubting Jesus' maleness - in becoming a man He took on all the properties of manhood (even sin right at the end on the cross), and there is no difficulty whatsoever in referring to Jesus in the masculine third person pronoun 'Him'.   

But why did God the Father refer to Himself in terms of maleness? Is it perhaps the case that being (I presume) something spiritually beyond our comprehension, He may have indentified Himself in terms of maleness in recognition of our difficulty in conceiving a neuter singular indefinite personal pronoun that departs from the ‘He’ or ‘She’ concepts (I don’t think we would wish to refer to God as ‘it’ - and both male and female being made in His image indicates Divine transcending of sex). 

But that doesn't satisfy much, and I'll try to explain why. If God is transcendent of sex, and we can call God 'Him' or 'The Father', can we equally well call God 'Her' or 'The Mother'? I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a feminist Christian who would say this is not a problem.

Similarly, to say that sex has zero importance must be to admit that God could have equally well chosen the incarnation to be in the form of a woman instead of the male Jesus.  Instead of Jesus on the cross as the Son of God, imagine a women on the cross as the Daughter of God - I don’t think many Christians would think that is the same religion.  It would probably more closely resemble the worshipping of Aphrodite or Iris or Athena, which may have qualities that Christianity does not, but it wouldn’t be Christianity at all as we know it. 

I am not making any comment on whether the religions centred around goddesses or ideas centred around ‘mother’ nature are better or worse than the more patriarchal religions, but if the majority of Christianity's leading figures are seeking to retain the status of God as Father and Christ as Son as central tenets of the faith, I think we would be hard pressed to deny that this is entirely consistent with scripture.

And I can equally see why if Christianity departs from God as Father and Christ as Son it could easily lose other core elements that make up its very essence. Perhaps those wishing to retain maleness in Deity are doing so more as a humble fault than out of allegiance to patriarchy - after all, they might be fearful that if the church cedes more and more of its uniqueness and fades into the background of an increasingly watered down, individualistic modern culture it may not have many pearls left to share. 

With Christ at the head (bridegroom) of the church we are dealing with ‘male’ and ‘female’ not merely as facts of nature but as shadows of deeper dimensional realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Given the foregoing, it is not that we have chosen that God should be Him not Her, it is more likely that it was chosen for us by God – and that to consider the church only as an analogue to, or as having qualitative importance with, the other socio-political institutions in the world is to diminish some of its power and gravitas. 

And just as in his epistles St Paul often seems to be giving exhortations regarding the severity of the message of grace being impeded or disfigured by cult practices (the example of the instruction against women speaking in church in the letter to the Corinthians is not a universal edict to be taken doctrinally, but specifically as a portent against the Aphrodite cult, which was rife with prostitution, and priestesses immersed in the Christian church who were indulging in their own brand of heterodoxy and heresy), I suspect that the notion of God as Father and Christ as Son is central to the creation story in ways that none of us yet understands except perhaps in terms of creation as a shy adjunct of God's relationship with His creation.

I may be over-interpreting things here, but when scripture refers to Christ as our bridegroom, and Jehovah as our father and husband, perhaps this is to set a template for our understanding some of the characteristics of God in terms of characteristics of maleness. Perhaps it is redolent of the male archetype as maker, protector, provider, leader - the kind of qualities that women seek in men, and children seek in parents - also being the kind of qualities that created creatures seek in their Creator.

You may object that these roles of men and women in nature are mere human constructs, and because of which we have imputed those properties onto the Divine - but I think that may be getting the causality backwards. Because if you are alert to reading between scripture's lines, you'll find that God uses pretty much all His most profound methods of communication through the conduit of human constructs.

Animal sacrifices were part of tradition long before Go instituted it into Hebrew culture as part of a covenant. The same is true of war, prophecy, governments, kingdoms, priesthoods and, most importantly here, the practice of crucifixion. The cross on which humanity had its sin forgiven was a barbaric human practice that God used to demonstrate His love for humankind and to draw us closer to Himself.

And I have a feeling that that is also the case regarding God's maleness in terms of our salvation and a relationship with us - He has co-opted human elements as conduits through which He can reveal Himself as our maker, protector, provider, leader and saviour of the world. No doubt our understanding of this is but a shadow of the full profundity of the reality, but that's my best guess as to the relevance of God being a He and not a She.

Perhaps a final illustration will help if you're still on the fence with this one. Imagine you're at Golgotha about to witness Jesus die slowly on the cross. Your strongest instinct would be to help him down, but I can conceive of a situation where, however difficult, you could be talked into letting him suffer and die because what he's doing is a noble act of sacrificial love that will save the world.

If the situation was the same except for the fact that the person on the cross was a woman, I can't think that leaving her up there to die slowly would be something we could ever feel was instinctively right - I cannot imagine that any onlooking man or woman would be absent of the overwhelming feeling that if someone is going to go through this barbarous, lengthy period of intense suffering and death, that it ought to be a man volunteering Himself up there in her place - not by coercion, but by the strongest compunction imaginable - like a husband doing so to save his wife, or a father doing so to save his son, or a Creator doing so to save His creation.

The Genius Of Christianity: Pascal's Wager - Placing A Bet On Whether God Exists

Pascal's Wager is one of the most famous philosophical propositions in history, but it is also one of the most widely misunderstood. Pascal’s Wager is quite simply this:

‘If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing - but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will have lost everything. Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist’.

At face value there is so much wrong with this argument - namely, that it makes no mention of which particular God this applies to; that one cannot choose what one believes; and that even if one could choose one's beliefs, a person that tried to strike up a belief in God through this artificial method would not impress God much at all.

But Pascal meant something better and more profound than that; and in his Pensees - sections of which are, in my view, among the best Christian writings of the last 2000 years - Pascal lays out his wager not as a trivial each way bet, but as an encouragement to pursue Christ, and think intelligently when doing so.

Pascal never intended his wager to be about God as an undefined concept, He meant it to be about Christ, and he understood better than most that Christ wants every part of us; He wants to live inside of us and help us fulfil our potential, and He wants to make us more like Him. He did not die on the cross for us to make a half-hearted appeal - He died and rose again so that we could experience the spirit of Christ within us, so that we could fully imbibe all that the divine has to give us

In Pensees, Pascal had the following to say about belief in God if it turns out God doesn't exist: "But what harm will come to you from taking this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, doing good, a sincere and true friend”. This can be taken as a comment about those who profess belief as much as it can those who don’t, because Christianity has virtually nothing to say to the man who is happy to acknowledge it as part of his daily background but makes no attempt to grow in Christ.

Thus it is probably better not to believe at all than to adopt an indifferent sycophancy which merely hopes in the end for a divine hand-out (this is suggested with Christ’s words in Revelation 3 about the dangers of being 'lukewarm'). After all, those who live their lives by this principle are no closer to the genuine rewards of Christianity than those who passionately repudiate it.

Given that we humans believe only what seems sensible to us (we cannot force ourselves to believe something if it doesn’t seem right), and that we infer from experience, from perception, from feelings and (hopefully) from rational enquiry, I am inclined to believe that Pascal’s wager was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - which reads: behave as though you believe in Christ and you will gradually start to become more Christ-like – and when you do He will start to reveal more of Himself to you. 

In other words, Christianity is the one offer we have from all the holy books to test the strategy of God by having the guts to try to emulate Him. Further, its genius shows it to be the very life force that will best give you fullness of life – and it is presented as self-affirming by having two complementary forces; one part shows the divine presence through our choosing to have a relationship with God, and the other shows the divine presence by our having to courage to try to live up to the standards and fail. To that end, Pascal's wager is like an invitation to the start of a journey of which you can only see the first few steps.  

Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

Matthew 16:25-26

A few years after I became a Christian in my early twenties, a realisation occurred to me about the genius of Christianity: the Christian qualities are such that even if the supernatural claims of the faith turn out to be false, we should still choose the Christian way anyway, because it is the best thing in the world.

The genius is in the presentation and in the seduction of the power of what faith does - it involves the understanding that Christianity presents us with the best and most blessed way of living your life - therefore if you live that way you are made better off because of it anyway, and will begin to understand why it is true. To that end, a development of Pascal's wager is betting on the best way to live your life, and in doing so dovetailing the pursuit of the truth with the truth itself thereby being assimilated into your life in the process.

Now instinctively this might sound anathema to an unbeliever, but only until you begin to see that actually Christianity is a remarkable thing it itself. One of the many reasons I believe in Christ is because all the good and great things in the world - even things that have no direct connection with Christianity - can be had as a Christian, and all of the bad and undesirable things in the world - by which I mean things that human beings generally all agree are bad - are things from which Christianity says it's best to distance oneself.

Consequently, then, one of the ingenious qualities of the Christian faith is that even as an unbeliever one can connect oneself to any of its positive qualities and at the same time constantly enjoy things that are of benefit to oneself and humankind anyway. That is a sense in which one can wager that Christianity is the truth - live as though it is and you'll soon start to realise that it is.

Perhaps an analogy will help

I was just trying to think of an analogy for my above comment about the rewards of mirroring Christianity. Here's one. Suppose you meet a young man, unapprised of matters of the heart, and you want to tell him what being deeply in love with a beloved is like. Up until now, he only knows what casual dating is like, so you set about explaining to him what the joys of love feel like. Then a few months later he starts dating a girl he really likes, and he gets all the warm tingly pleasures, feelings of fondness, but hasn't quite mastered how to take his nascent love to an even deeper, more profound level, and is not even sure if all the effort is worth it.

Now here's where you can tell him how to take the path that will edify and enrich him. In order to find out what a deeper love is like, he is going to need to practice things that are at first quite alien to fledgling minds, but once practiced, soon reveal themselves to be the epitome of human delights. For a deeper love with his beloved, he will need to learn how to forgive wrongdoings, master contrition, perfect the art of putting the beloved before himself, and exercising patience, kindness and understanding at a level he hadn't previously comprehended.

And although the path won't be entirely smooth - we are all flawed humans, after all - what he'll find is the more he tries to imitate love, the more he will feel like he is love, and the better the self will be in becoming. In wearing love's shoes, which seem tight at first, he will begin to find himself fitting into them more comfortably, until he hardly even notices he has shoes on. The most comfortable shoes are, after all, shoes you hardly notice you are wearing. In imitating love, he will begin to co-opt its fundamental qualities, and that is analogous to what imitating Christ is like. 

As some of you may know, there is a very famous book series that captures this sentiment. Picture the scene; it’s C.S Lewis’s Narnia tale The Silver Chair – the protagonists are under the thrall of the Green Witch – stuck in her underground domain they are getting desperate, and they begin to doubt the power of the more heavenly world above.  At this point Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle gives the following speech:

'One word, Ma’am.  All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. .Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia. So we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland’.

The upper world is Aslan's world, which of course represents what Christ drives us towards in a relationship with Him. Just like Pascal’s wager, Lewis in stating what we could call ‘Puddleglum's Wager’ - which is saying that even if Jesus isn’t God it is still a better life pursuing the world envisaged by Christ. It is a probabilistic venture based on the wisdom of Christ even aside from the supernatural – and it calls for a courage that many find difficult, because it asks us to ‘be perfect’ even without the entrusting support of the supernatural. 

The quintessence of its magic is in another altogether unexpected form; roughly this; ‘Don’t worry if you cannot believe that there’s a God’ just believe you have the courage to act as though there is one, and by your failing to live up to the standards you’ll increase your probability of belief’. That really is the genius of Christ – and shows precisely His coming to earth just once was more than enough for humankind to fall at their feet and believe. With this, you can see why Christ assured everyone that for anyone who asks it will given to them -

"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."

Puddleglum's speech also touches on the ontological argument posited by Anselm and Descartes, and develops it along the lines of this: if Narnia does not exist, then fiction is more stupendous than reality - and as fiction cannot be more stupendous than reality, Narnia must be real. To translate that into Christian thinking, if Christ's claims are not based on Him being the truth, then Christ's fiction appears to me to be more stupendous than any truth out there.

I personally know of no better way to live, or no greater standards to which I’d want to adhere. I’m on Jesus’ side even if there isn’t any Jesus to lead the Christian world. If I’m guilty of making a play-world, then all I’ll say is this – I fancy that the play-world into which I’m immersed and to which I’m committed licks the other ‘real’ world hollow. 

There may be some who object on Paulian grounds – citing his epistle to the Corinthians as evidence against this wager – “And, if in this life we have hoped in Christ only, we are more to be pitied than all men” (1 Corinthians 15:19).  But there is no reason to suppose that this contradicts the wager. What St Paul means by our being ‘pitied’ is in relation to the costs of being a Christian, not in acting out the Christ-like template in our own lives. Don’t forget Jesus says that faith will divide families and cause us much discomfort. 

We are even told of a dying of the self, which in prospect sounds unsettling. If it turned out that there was never a resurrection, then the trials, tribulations and ridicule to which believers were subjected by others would have been a history of experiences with no ultimate reward. That is why the talk from St Paul of ‘pity’ comes into it. To deny the power of the wager would be to deny that what Christ taught was not a template that is good in itself, when most clearly it is. 

In recognising the Christ-like template as the best we can achieve, the wager is twofold; if Christianity is true then our acting as though it is true by reflecting Christ will provide the best chance of our seeing its truth. If Christianity is false then Jesus still represents the pinnacle of ethical thinking, and remains the model on which we should base our worldview.

When We Do Bold & Unusual Things

Sometimes, out of the blue, I do bold and unusual things – things that I use to escape my own sin for a moment to make a point of how powerful Christianity is. Here's an example of what I mean.

I remember being in the Forum in Norwich with friends; and one friend, a sceptic of Christianity, was talking about what a troubled world God has created. I said something along the lines of: “Hey, the world is broken, but it’s human sin that has broken it, and each of us knows how we can make the world a better place”.

I then proceeded to show my friend what I meant. “Look how easy it is to make people smile and brighten up their day” I said, as I took him for a quick tour of making people happy. For the next 20 minutes, we went on a happiness escapade, during which time I showed how much strangers smile when you stop them and compliment them.

I showed him the happiness of a couple when you go into a restaurant and pay for their meal and tell them you just wanted to do something nice for them; I showed him how much better people feel about themselves when you go into their shop and say how lovely you think their art is or how much you admire their window display; and I showed him the joy of an elderly couple sitting in Hay Hill for whom I’d just bought an ice cream and told them I wanted them to accept it as a gift because they look like a lovely couple.

Naturally, we can't do this sort of thing every hour of the day because we’d soon run out of money. But things like compliments, kind words and thoughtful words don’t cost anything, and they are available to us at all times, whenever we like.

Next time you’re feeling down on the world, go and do some bold and unusually lovely things for complete strangers, and you’ll see how easy it is to make people happy and brighten up their day. And, of course, it will bring joy to your own day too, because you can’t pour out happiness on others without spilling a few drops on yourself too.

I think this sort of thing is a little of what Christ means when He encourages us to pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Not that we could ever reconstitute an earthly world of heavenly bliss where there is no sin or suffering, but that in our honest and heartfelt prayers we don’t find it very difficult to get a sense of what we must do to make the world better than it is.

Heaven, I suppose, won’t just be the blissful reconciliation with God - it will be a full understanding of the vast gulf between divine grace and human sin, and a more lucid understanding of how much we depend on grace in the here and now. And it's the sense of love and grace that can motivate us to do bold and unusual acts of kindness, and make earth a little bit more Heavenly in the here and now.

Where The Genius Of God Is At Its Most Brilliant

One of things I'm often trying to convey about Christianity is what a story of genius it is. That is to say, the Incarnation - God becoming man and suffering and dying for us - is such a profound work of genius that it speaks of a God who pulled off a creative masterstroke. Once one gets past a superficial consideration and gets right to the heart of what is going on here, the Incarnation is the only claim about God that makes any kind of rational sense to me, and without which I would probably remain fairly theologically ambivalent.

You'd need to have something of the Divine about you to make up such an account like the Incarnation - and therefore believing it to be a real piece of history one gets to tap into a little bit of understanding of the genius of God. Think for a minute about how astounding this really is; God, who is awesome enough to create the entire universe and everything in it, demonstrated an act of such grace-filled humility that He allowed Himself to be governed by, abused by, humiliated by, tortured by, and ultimately put to death by people whose only power over Him comes by the very power He gives them in the first place.

We find this account in John's gospel, where, when Pilate thinks the captured Jesus is refusing to speak to him declares "Don’t you realise I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” To which Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” What He's effectively saying is, "Hey, I have the power to put you in your place, but because I love you I'm going to grant you the freedom to mess up, and then use your bad deeds to offer you and everyone else the free gift of salvation."

There are countless things about reality to marvel at, to be astounded by, and to be challenged by - but for me that one little passage of time in history compresses the whole genius of God into a succinct reality more than anything else I know (along with the nature of mathematics, although that evokes a quite different feeling). You probably can recall when President Nelson Mandela had the political power to condemn the people that maltreated him but chose to forgive them. God does this on a universal scale.

The creator of the universe hung up on a cross being tortured by people whose only power comes from the grace of the God they are torturing, and begging the Father for their forgiveness because Divine love understands fully that "they know not what they do" is the moment in history, for me, when the corporeal and the Divine interlock, and when the Christian faith does its most illuminating work in shining light on the truth of God.

The genius of it is that it is the only reality that could properly satisfy the narrative of an all-powerful, all-loving God retaining complete sovereignty over creation, yet simultaneously lowering Himself to be sufficiently involved in the story that He can provide a salvation offering that fully conjoins His omnipotence with His Divine love and grace in a way that we can understand.

The genius of Christ is that He provided His creation with the emotional route to Divinity by way of giving us the above to respond to. And if that wasn't enough, He also gave us another glimpse of His genius by exhibiting perfect evidence that He is the cosmic mind behind the mathematical patterns in the universe.

 

A Chapter That Changed My Life.

Lots of writing has had a huge impact on my life - particularly in the fields of philosophy, economics, politics, literature, science and, most pertinent here, theology. Here I want to talk about a particular chapter in C.S Lewis's Mere Christianity called Let's Pretend, that I recall at the time (nearly 20 years ago) made a significant impression on my journey of exploration into Christianity, and was perhaps the piece of writing that shined the most light on the bridge between the Christian faith in theory and the Christian relationship in practice.

The Christian faith in theory is about what we believe to be true and factual. The Christian relationship in practice is about how we live our life and whether we put God at the heart of it. C.S Lewis's chapter Let's Pretend does a wonderful job of helping to take what one might practically believe (or start to believe) is true and turn it into a life-changing first step on the road to faith.

Lewis starts the chapter with a fairytale about someone who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for a year. And when he took it off he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as disguise had become a reality. C.S Lewis invites us to attept to wear the mask of Christ in order to start to become more like Him, and in doing so start to see the powerful truth of Christianity. He begins with quite a direct invite:

"If you are interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord's Prayer. Its very first words are Out Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending.

Because, of course, the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it."

Lewis then goes on with a lovely passage about the practical benefits of pretending to be better than you are:

"What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already."

What I started to learn when considering this in relation to Christ is not just how when pretending to be like Him it becomes less of a pretence. It's also the case, or it was for me, that the more I pretended to be like Christ the more I started to realise the vast distance between God's goodness and ordinary human morality. It was then that I came to see that Jesus was no mere man - that the standards He set for us are so unattainable that they very much feel like they are from God. Lewis puts it like this:

"The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience is telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one.

There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself."

This is what the New Testament means by "being born again"; and "putting on Christ"; and about Christ "being formed in us"; and about our coming to "have the mind of Christ." - what starts as a pretence to be like Him, a bit like how a student tries to be like a teacher to master a particular subject, turns into something supernatural where the real Person of Christ is actually changing you from the inside. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead and created the whole universe lives in us.

And in becoming little Christs we start to learn not just our true state of being forgiven sinners, but also the fallenness from which we needed saving in the first place. In understanding our perfect God's goodness we begin to be astounded at how sinful we really are, and how much our outward appearances mask our real nature. Lewis puts it in a way we can all relate to:

"When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected: I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated.

On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man: it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light."

I suppose, although He was not like us in that He was without sin, there is a sense in which by becoming a human, Christ pretended a little bit to be like us to live in conditions that would enable Him to suffer and die like us. And that act, underpinned by God's goodness, is what it means to live under grace, with Christ turning us gradually into sons of God through His power. I daresay this seems quite a peculiar thing to get your head around - but is it really that surprising - after all, the greater thing is what brings the less great thing up to its level; teachers do it to students, parents to their children, and likewise, Christ to His creation.

On Morality & C.S Lewis's Fleet of Ships Analogy

The other day I was reminded of one of C.S Lewis's chapters in Mere Christianity - a chapter called “The Three Parts of Morality”. Some readers may be familiar with it. In this chapter Lewis lays out what he thinks is a good Christian analogy for how “the human machine” goes wrong, by which he means at an individual personal level (failing at becoming as moral an individual as possible), at a level between humans in interactions (failing at treating each other as well as we can), and overall in terms of a broad human teleological purpose (the Christian narrative for human beings as created creatures in the eyes of God).

The analogy Lewis presents is of human beings resembling a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The fleet may be unsuccessful because of internal failures within the ships, or it may fail because the formation of the fleet is upset:

"The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions, they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order, they will not be able to avoid collisions."

 

We all know this is true about both individuals and groups alike - be they religious congregations, political parties, office teams at work, and so forth. If a group is not in a decent state of harmony, with the individuals in order with each other, then it will be an unsuccessful coalition. And if the individual's inward machinery is not in a good state then personal failures upset the cooperation of the group. But here is where things get even more interesting, because while both Christians and non-Christians alike pretty much agree on the wisdom of the above, there is a third element to the analogy upon which they may disagree - the question of whether the fleet of ships is heading where they ought to be heading.

 

This is where C.S Lewis tries to draw out the distinction between the Christian narrative and ordinary human progression. Ordinary human progression may result in our ships working fine internally, and many may even sail in proper fleet formation, but alas they still may not arrive in the right place at the end of their journey.

 

Now all analogies come with limitations, and sometimes Lewis's are overly simplistic, but this one has some interesting connotations, because purely in considerations of human morality (which I think is a human invention in its entirety) the direction of the fleet is more of an unplanned one with no observable end destiny. That is to say, if you'll forgive the introduction of another analogy, human progression is more like the formation of a grand, sumptuous ensemble musical piece over time - it evolves gradually with plenty of bum notes and discordant chords, but along the way the more pleasing sounds survive and are added to the mix as we retain the good and throw out the bad over a long evolutionary percentage game.

 

The Christian narrative, then - being a grace-centred narrative - must, as far as I can see, be equivalent to God using the internal machines of our ships and the evolved formation of the fleet to steer us all in the direction of the destiny of grace-inspired salvation for all (Eventually! There will doubtless be some huge struggles of resistance at the end, rather like stubborn patients who won't take the medicine that will make them better).

 

Observing the rough waters from above, it certainly will look as though among the fleets of harmony there are all kinds of groups heading off from the main trajectory: and if we zoomed in further we would see all kinds of bad machinery in the internal workings of the individual ships. But to me, Christianity speaks the truth about God's amazing love and grace in promising us all the free gift of salvation in the shape of a secured and assured destiny for our ships to travel towards - a destination guaranteed 2000 years ago on the cross.

 

That, for me, is how we disentangle the knotty issue of Christian goodness and what for many people seems to be a human set of moral and ethical ideas that appear to serve God His redundancy notice. Looked at properly, human morality is analogous to the individual interworkings or our ships and the fleet trying to sail harmoniously together. And the destination to which we are all headed is the universal free gift of salvation awaiting us at the end of the journey. And if that seems like a strange mixing of two distinct narratives, remember that the Bible is full of examples of God using human ideas to convey His love for us - most prominently the crucifixion, which is a human invention but one which God uses to show humankind that we are all included in His love and grace.