Macavity: the mystery cat

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw—
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime—Macavity's not there!

(TS Eliot)

Of course, it's somewhat unfair when an epithet like this sticks to someone with the power, authority and dignity (*snigger*) of the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, because it means that even if he genuinely wasn't involved, it's impossible for him credibly to deny it. However, it's stuck, as Martin Kettle wrote even in May last year, and stuck because, as with all good clichés,

it's essentially true. No one in the Blair cabinet has had greater power and authority for the last ten years than the Chancellor. But when something goes wrong, just like Old Possum's monster of depravity, Brown is never there to take the rap.

So when he denies all knowledge of the arrest of Damian Green, the question isn't, Is he telling the truth, but rather, Will anyone believe him?

"That rock was Christ!"

Pam Tolliver asks, quoting my reply to her comment, 'Where does it indicate in Exodus 17 that God would have to "bear His own wrath"?'. I'll quote the passage from the Watchtower's own translation; I've edited only the formatting (and a couple of Americanizms). I'm doing this to demonstrate that even the New World Translation, though I would have serious objections to its translation at significant points, obscures the truth of Scripture but has not completely hidden it.

And the entire assembly of the sons of Israel proceeded to depart from the wilderness of Sin by stages, which they took according to the order of Jehovah, and went camping at Rephidim. But there was no water for the people to drink.

And the people fell to quarrelling with Moses and saying: “Give us water that we may drink.”

But Moses said to them: “Why are you quarrelling with me? Why do you keep putting Jehovah to the test?”

And the people went on thirsting there for water, and the people kept murmuring against Moses and saying: “Why is it that you have brought us up out of Egypt to put us and our sons and our livestock to death by thirst?”

Finally Moses cried out to Jehovah, saying: “What shall I do with this people? A little longer and they will stone me!”

Then Jehovah said to Moses: “Pass in front of the people and take with you some of the older men of Israel and your rod with which you struck the Nile River. Take it in your hand and you must walk on. Look! I am standing before you there on the rock in Horeb. And you must strike on the rock, and water must come out of it, and the people must drink it.”

Subsequently Moses did so under the eyes of the older men of Israel. So he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the sons of Israel and because of their putting Jehovah to the test, saying: “Is Jehovah in our midst or not?” (Ex. 17:1–7, NWT)

Pam asks a very good question, and the reason I mentioned that passage in particular was that it was the subject of a children's talk I delivered at church this morning. So let me summarise the main points.

Firstly, the people grumble against Moses. They accuse him of bringing them out of Egypt to die by thirst. Now, by grumbling against Moses, they grumble against God—after all, it was he who brought them out of Egypt, he who protected them, guided them and fed them. So the people are grumbling against God and accusing him of attempted murder. They're doing a wicked, wicked thing, and they're ready to revolt against Moses, God's appointed leader, even against God himself.

Secondly, when Moses cries out for help, God tells Moses to go to court. This is an important point, and to understand it, we must understand the words massah (H4532) and meribah (4809). The words derive from nasah (H5254) and riyb (H7378); the intersection of these words is a judging, a testing, a court case. It's very much a judicial idea, although of course, "judicial" in the Old Testament Israelite sense, rather than our modern Western sense.

Still on the idea of judging, note that Moses is to take the staff with which [he] struck the Nile River. This is the rod used when the Nile was turned to blood in judgment against Egypt. This is the rod of God's punishment of his enemies. And this rod is to go to the court-room and be used in the decision. This is serious stuff; God is basically saying that whoever is in the wrong here has behaved at least as reprehensibly as the Egyptians did in enslaving Israel.

Thirdly, notice that God and the people are both repesented here. God himself appears on the rock; the people are represented by their elders. They're the plaintiffs, and Moses the Law-giver is to decide between them.

Fourthly, the judgment falls. Thus far, we saw that the people grumbled against God, sinned against him, behaved as his enemies, and thus deserve his judgment and punishment. So it's an open-and-shut case, right? Not even Kavanagh Q.C. could get them off this charge, right? But where does God tell Moses to cast judgment? Against the people? No! He tells Moses to strike on the rock, where he is standing, and water flows out and the people drink and live.

You see, judgment is passed and that, against God himself. Not against a mere man. Not against the people, who goodness knows deserved it. It fell against God. He bears what we never could bear, to give us what we could never obtain and to make us what we never could be.

Exodus 17 teaches us, really very plainly although it's not something which is well remarked-upon, that God himself will come to bear the punishment that his people deserved. It is that that we remember and celebrate, even as we enter a period of waiting, to wait 'along with' Israel for the promised Messiah. And praise the Lord, it's not man-made, but God-wrought.

I feel another "Yes, PM" quote coming on

Sir Humphrey: "If you walked into a nuclear missile showroom you would buy Trident—it's lovely, it's elegant, it's beautiful. It is quite simply the best. And Britain should have the best. In the world of the nuclear missile it is the Saville Row suit, the Rolls Royce Corniche, the Château Lafitte 1945. It is the nuclear missile Harrods would sell you. What more can I say?"
Jim Hacker: "Only that it costs £15 billion and we don't need it."
Sir Humphrey: "Well, you can say that about anything at Harrods."

£70bn (that's inflation for you), we still don't need it, and people who used to shop in Harrods aren't any more—and what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the government gander. So argues Marina Hyde in today's Guardian.

Humans aren't hard-wired to believe in God

So said AC Grayling on the Today programme earlier this week, and so he says again today in the Gurandia. I heard the discussion, and there was one point where I thought Grayling had quite shot himself in the foot. He was so strident in his assertion that he told us "there is nothing in the human brain which would make it come up with the idea of God." So where did it come from?

Psalm 89:19–52

Read the whole thing.

Of old you spoke in a vision to your godly one, and said:

"I have granted help to one who is mighty;
I have exalted one chosen from the people.

I have found David, my servant;

with my holy oil I have anointed him,

so that my hand shall be established with him;

my arm also shall strengthen him.

Who's this about? Any simplistic (*cough* dispensational *cough*) reading of the passage would assert that this is about David. After all, 'swhat the passage sez, innit?

Let's think a little more carefully. The basic structure of the passage is quite simple:

19–29 God: I will establish and uphold his king.
30–33 God: I will punish wrongdoing
34–37 God: I will be faithful to his promise
38–45 Psalmist: the people have rejected the king of God's choosing
46–51 Psalmist: won't God rescue the king of his choosing?
52 Psalmist: benediction

Of course the immediate referent is David. God says as much, and we'd be fools to deny it. But look at verse 27: "I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth." The language is stretching almost beyond what it can bear if it applies to David alone. Great David requires a far greater Son if this passage is really to make sense. The king, greatest in all the earth yet rejected, who knew the greatest rescue of God in the Resurrection, is none other, of course, than the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Government's on its last legs

It's not just their mantra, "desperate extraordinary times need desperate extraordinary measures," used justify whatever economic folly they've come up with this week; it's not just watching the arrest of an Opposition MP and refusing to do anything about it; it's this: watch or listen to any minister on a political discussion, like Question Time or Any Questions? They get consistently out-gunned with every member of the panel ganging up on them, and have completely lost almost every audience they face. Was this how it felt in 1996?

Can a man be the ransom for another?

I was pleased to see I had attracted the attention of some Jehovah's Witnesses following my previous post concerning the impossibility of a mere man carrying out atonement for sin. I wonder if they can explain the following passage.

Truly no man can ransom another,

or give to God the price of his life,

for the ransom of their life is costly

and can never suffice,

that he should live on forever

and never see the pit.

Psalm 49:7–9

Can someone who is only a man ransom another?

Incompetence or malevolence?

The former is about the best explanation for the shock political story of the day, which is the arrest of a prominent member of Her Majesty's Opposition, simply for doing his job. The most charitable explanation we can adduce is that the Home Secretary is not in charge of her department. After all, if she was informed, then why did she not immediately countermand the police order?

The police need to have operational independence, of course; but there are certain classes of occupations where extreme caution must be exercise. The police cannot simply raid the offices of a practising lawyer, they cannot simply impound the files of a general practitioner, and they should not simply swoop on Members of Parliament with a counter-terrorism unit.

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I just ran a Google search on "police arrest politician" (without the quotes) and the top pages which came up were news stories from Kenya and Brazil, and this story. A search for "police arrest mp" gets this story and Zimbabwe. These are not what you'd call good company for the United Kingdom.

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Don't expect the story to go away. Parliament has been prorogued (I thought they were all rogues?) and the State Opening for the coming year is on Wednesday, so while we can assume that questions will be asked in the House, it will not be for almost a week at the least.

Men in glass houses…

…shouldn't throw stones; thus goeth the proverb.

Not that that stops the Gudarina's Media Monkey from mocking the associate editor of the Telegraph for holding his editors to a standard of literacy. That is to say, any standard of literacy; it is a standing joke here that one of our student publications, noted for its spelling errors (a recent edition carried the word enammered without intended irony), was awarded by the esteemed left-of-centre daily the prize of "Student Newspaper of the Year"—or was it "Stewdunt Noospayper of the Yeer"?

Dashed right!

Some nincompoop at the Grauniad is reporting on the BBC cleaning up what is a blinking poor show in some areas. I've had up to here with all that flipping swearing on the gogglebox and wireless; makes the unmissable blasted unwatchable, and although most people couldn't give a fig, I jolly well do.

Hm… It's not bl**dy working, is it?

Thou shalt not bear false witness

Over the weekend, I was "fortunate" enough to be visited by both Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses (honestly, you wait for a cult, and then two come along at once), and I've been left homework by both of them, lucky lucky me. The Jehovah's Witnesses left me a book, cunningly titled What does the Bible really teach? (I'm reminded of the famous question, "Did God really say…?") and it's like a Watchtower mini-systematics, I guess. If you get visited by JWs, it's not an unhelpful book in terms of knowing what they believe, and if you ask for it, you'll probably earn a few Brownie points, at least until you proceeed systematically to rip it to shreds.

Well, all that is to lead into explaining where I'm getting this post from. It is known that Watchtower Christology is warmed-over Arianism; it is probably roughly settled that they are essentially Pelagian on certain key matters; but what had not really hit me until today was that their Origenism on the atonement really does tie into their Arianism.

According to the Watchtower, in Adam we sold ourselves into bondage to Satan. The solution that is required, therefore, is for a ransom to be paid of the same value as that which was lost: a perfect human life was lost, and therefore a perfect human life must be sacrificed. Presumably this is all to Satan, which sound suspect when you put it like that; and I would contend that this is a mis-representation of the situation, as even on the Watchtower's account, it isn't one soul which is lost, but millions. However, the problem is worse than that.

The Bible, you see, teaches us that it isn't simply that we incurred death in the Garden, but that we offended against the law of the eternal, immortal, infinitely wise and just Creator of the universe. We incurred wrath in the Garden, and how can a single soul be sufficient payment to satisfy the wrath of the Infinite One?

No indeed, if all that was needed was payment to the devil, then perhaps a single human life might have sufficed; but we needed so much more than that. We needed, as my current computer wallpaper reminds me from the Heidelberg Catechism, "one who is very man, and perfectly righteous; and yet more powerful than all creatures; that is, one who is also very God," because only one who is very God "might by the power of his Godhead sustain in his human nature the burden of God's wrath; and might obtain for, and restore to, us righteousness and life."

If the atonement was merely a ransom, then Jesus need have been merely a man. But if the atonement is a penal substitution, then the substitute must be none other than God himself. The Watchtower is wrong about Jesus because they're wrong about the atonement, and wrong about the atonement because they're wrong about Jesus.

Eyebrows is back!

As John rightly reminded me, he's been in purdah. But no longer; and the pre-Pre-Budget Report reports have turned out to be remarkably well-informed. Surely not leaks from Number Ten? I hear you cry.

Well, whatever. John Battle (Leeds West, Lab) was on the news just now defending the temporary VAT cut from 17.5% to 15% as good news for poor people in his constituency. In the words of the good soldier Svejk, "Humbly report it's not, sire." Let me explain, because this point, I confidently predict, will take a long time to filter through to the twits who call themselves The Medja [1].

Not everything is Vattable, and not all things are Vattable at the same rate. Many things accrue VAT at the top rate, but notably domestic fuel, doesn't, while basic foodstuffs, children's clothes, rent and mortgage interest aren't Vatted at all. Now, perhaps if the poorest spent their money on plasma screen tellies and new cars, we'd be smokin'. But they don't; they spend their money principally on things which are not taxed at 17.5% already. So the effect on the poorest will be minimal.

This is a serious point, and I wait to see quite how long it's going to take to filter through. But in the meantime, let me ask a simple question. Call yourself a Labour Chancellor, Darling?

[1] This just in: I was unfair. Today's leader in the Independent made exactly the same point when it said, "True, the main beneficiaries will be the wealthy rather than the poor."

Yesterday's Mail on Sunday (I know, I know; I heard it on the radio, okay?) had as its lead story the couple—if I'm judging this right, they're not Christian themselves but have been brought up by Christian parents—who are having twins. The news story is that she is 18 and set to be the youngest mother of conjoined twins, and because of their upbringing, they refused to have the children aborted.

The thing which really caught me about the story, and which first suggested to me that some sort of Christian influence must be a part of it? That they've already named their two girls: Faith and Hope.

New version of e-Sword

For any e-Sword users out there (recommended! free Bible software!), version 8.0.5 is now available. You can get it from here.

Have Anglicans lost their memory?

Thus argues Christopher Howse, following Prof. Jonathan Clark's analysis, in today's Telegraph:

Professor Clark, once the enfant terrible of Peterhouse and All Souls, now wields his scalpel from remote Kansas, but it cuts as sharply. The Church of England, he argues, is "losing command of its history", thus losing its identity (as if a man had lost his memory, one might say).

In the 20th century, he notes, "Anglicanism was powered by German theology rather than by Anglican historiography". One result is a loss of authority, which "is ultimately historically grounded". That's why, he says, "feminism and gay rights should today occupy so much of the attention of Anglicans".

Ignoring the liberals for the moment, one of my complaints about modern evangelicalism is that we're so concerned for a generalised evangelicalism that our Anglicans are forgetting how to be Anglican, our Baptists are forgetting how to be Baptist, and in England at least, our Presbyterians have forgotten how to be. We appreciate so little of our history, and our best and strongest direct link to the past, our classic confessions and hymnody, are all around denigrated and rejected in favour of the eternal cult of vacuous contemporaneity.

Will evangelicals learn from the lesson of liberalism and re-discover our heritage, or will we suffer much the same fate, as the gospel becomes assumed and then denied?

Identity crisis

I was at a performance of Bach's Johannes-Passion last night, and it struck me that there's a stark contrast drawn, certainly in the piece and probably in the Gospels as well, between Jesus and Peter. When approached by the mob looking for Jesum von Nazareth, the Lord answered, Ich bin's (I am he). Later, Peter is questioned by crowd around the fire, asking Bist du nicht seiner Jünger einer? (Are you not one of his disciples?), and he answers, Ich bin's nicht (I am not he), the exact opposite of Christ's earlier reply. Later, of course, Jesus goes to the cross, and there he who is the sinless one takes identity with sinners, so that those sinners might be treated as being as sinless as Christ himself.

Christ accepts who he is, and is even willing to be treated as he is not; Peter denies who he is, and thus denies who Christ is. Of course, the Passion is a Good Friday piece, and so doesn't reach even the Resurrection, but we know that beyond the Resurrection, there are freedom, forgiveness and restoration offered for those who deny what they are and deny who the Lord Jesus is.

God moves in a mysterious way

God moves in a mysterious way
his wonders to perform;
he plants his footsteps in the sea,
and rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
of never-failing skill,
he treasures up his bright designs,
and works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
the clouds ye so much dread,
are big with mercy, and shall break
in blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
but trust him for his grace;
behind a frowning providence,
he hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
unfolding every hour;
the bud may have a bitter taste,
but sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
and scan his work in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
and he will make it plain.

I love this hymn, and I think one of the reasons I love it is because it's so wonderfully cross-centred. Surprising of me to say that, given the cross isn't mentioned once?

But just look at it. We aren't to judge God purely by what we see of him—"his eternal power and divine nature"—but rather, we are to see that behind that frowning providence is hid a smiling face. And where is God's frowning providence most clearly shown?

On the cross; where else! The cross shows us, in the starkest terms possible, what God must do to sinful human beings; and those who judge the cross by sight alone will conclude, as did many of his contemporaries, that Christ must have been peculiarly sinful to have been punished in that way.

And yet, the Spirit testifies that on the cross the Father reveals his just punishment precisely in the death, not of a mere sinful human being, but his own beloved and perfect Son. A frowning providence…

And the Spirit testifies, too, that this Son was crucified "for us men and our salvation". He died to bear the shameful punishment which we deserved, and he died so that we might live. Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face!

So I suggest that the whole hymn can be read as a two-level poem, with the deeper level expounding the less deep. The deep level is this view of God's frowning providence as being most darkly expressed on the cross, and his smiling face as being most clearly shown there; a view which sees our fear at the cross—"We have crucified the Lord of glory! Brothers, whatever shall we do?"—and which tells us that the judgment of the cross, the death and the pain, are borne for us, in our place, that we need fear them no more.

The less deep level is the view which we all want to know about, and which is to comfort us that "our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." However, unless we go through the cross, we can always be in danger of making this verse into a theology of glory—"I'll go through this now, and God will reward me with glory later"—rather than understanding that the only true glory is the path of the cross. So when we sing "God moves in a mysterious way", I think we should remember that highest of mysteries, the cross, in order that we may know the far lesser mystery of our suffering.

Is Alistair Darling still alive?

The question rather asks itself: I haven't seen hide nor tail of Ol' Eyebrows recently.

Ministers of hatred?

Ekklesia has run with today's news that five people on the leaked BNP list (mailing and membership) claim the title "Rev" or "Revd". Actually, I looked into them, and of the five: one was retired when he joined, and is no longer a member after the entreaties of family and friends; another, currently practising, says he was only ever "on the mailing list" and has left even that; another two appear to be phony; and the last is the infamous Robert West, whose own credentials are also suspect.

However, Ekklesia does also report that there are people who list under "interests" as being a practising Roman Catholic, a non-conformist lay preacher, a Pentecostalist and a "born again" Christian. There are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, "British-Israelists" on the list [1].

So this raises an interesting (and, as far as I'm aware, entirely hypothetical from my point-of-view) question: is BNP membership a matter for church discipline?

[1] One of the saddest things about a church that I can tell is that Orange Street, the church where Augustus Montague Toplady, author of hymns like Rock of Ages, ministered, is now a hot-bed of British-Israelism.

Someone's got the wrong end of a stick, I swear

Bob Myers at the BHT linked to the following article. Am I the only one to see something of an inherent contradiction here?

[Bush's] proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their "religious beliefs or moral convictions." …

But three officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including its legal counsel, whom President George W. Bush appointed, said the proposal would overturn 40 years of civil rights law prohibiting job discrimination based on religion.

(IHT, emphasis mine)

Just me?

PMQ, 19-Nov

Mr. Speaker, when I catch a cold it may be fair for me to blame the person who carried it. But if I fail to have enough medicine in the cabinet, then it is my own fault and no-one else's. Now, it is rightly said that America sneezes and the rest of the world catches a cold. Does the Prime Minister accept responsibility for his own poorly-stocked cabinet?

Not that "velocity of money"!

I don't much care for the redesigned coins of the realm, but we're going to have to live with them for the next little while—the last design lasted forty years, heaven preserve us from such a fate. Yet they make for a nice little experiment. They've been in circulation since summer '08, and I was passed new-style coppers in change at Aldi quite a while back, so the coppers evidently make it up north fairly quickly. However, it's only today that I saw my first silver coin, a twenty pence piece; that was change in a campus catering outlet. So, I wonder how long it will be before I see my first new-style pound coin.

A human-centred universe?

One of the beliefs which we have slowly learnt to jettison over the millennia has been the idea that we are at the centre of the universe. For a long time, the Earth was at the centre of the universe, and the Sun, Moon and stars orbited our planet, fixed to spheres within spheres. Then came Copernicus, and we refined our theory, learning that it is far more plausible to suppose that in fact, the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way round. Eventually, we discovered that this Solar System is just a part of a larger collection of solar systems which we call the Milky Way, and that this Milky Way is part of a larger group of local galaxies we called, imaginatively, the Local Group; and so on, further up and further out. At each stage, the universe became orders of magnitude larger, and at each stage, our place in the universe became orders of magnitude smaller.

And Christians have sometimes resisted this trend, although eventually we've made our peace with it. However, I think even here, we can see that resisting this trend essentially places us on the side of theologians of glory, those who see a bright history and a brighter future for mankind. It panders to our pride to think that the universe revolves around us, and it makes us feel that humans are great. Of course, it also, we think, means that God gets to be involved in this central story of the universe, and that's a good thing, right?

But I'd suggest that a theologian of the cross is very open to the prospect that we aren't the centre of the universe, in a carefully expressed sense. God didn't find a wonderful story, one which already existed and into which he could insinuate himself; rather, he's the story-teller extraordinaire, and this is his story. But he isn't telling it on centre stage, and when he takes a role in the story he is telling, he does it in a very strange way. He is the lead actor, and yet he only appears fleetingly. His big break comes when he appears for three and thirty years, and then he dies a cruel, shameful death. He is rejected by those to whom he came, and continues to be rejected by so many in the world he created.

The story God tells is a "small" story in the "big" universe he created. Why? Why did he create such an enormous canvas for such a small painting? Is it, perhaps, because the cross is the centre of the divine drama? It would start to fit into place, wouldn't it, because the most important event in all of history looked like the death of a common criminal. It would start to fit in had God decided that to involve himself personally in his creation, he would choose just one tiny corner. It would start to fit in if the pinnacle of his creation—yes, we certainly are, and yet look at what we did with it!—were less than a pin-prick in the universe.

We're not the centre of the universe: the cross is. Who would have thought it?

Inflation down from 5.2% to 4.5%

(BBC)

Merv'll still have to write a letter. But why, oh why, on the Today programme, did both Sarah Montague and Bronwyn Curtis of HSBC insist on saying that "consumer prices have come down"? Rot, rot, rot! Prices haven't come down, they're just increasing more slowly. Even when Curtis uttered the inane statement "prices might go negative" no-one appeared to bat an eyelid. So will shops be paying us for goods soon?

Yet another one to add to the list of "BBC journalists demonstrating a complete lack of a general education", I guess.

Penal substitution and the theology of the cross

Luther's theology of the cross, dealt with so delicately by Gerhard Forde in On being a theologian of the cross, is perhaps not as well-understood as it ought to be. In Luther's view, and rightly for it is also the view presented in Scripture, "the cross alone is our theology." This means, as Luther developed in his Heidelberg Disputation (evidently, all good things come from Heidelberg) that on the cross we see God at work definitively.

In the weakness of the cross, God's strength is exhibited; in the foolishness of cross, his wisdom is made apparent; in the wrath of the cross, his mercy. The cross shows us that we can never attain to good works on our own account, and that God does the good work for us. The cross re-orients even our idea of what a good work is; the cross re-orients our conception of God's Lordship and sovereignty. The cross, in short, changes everything.

And yet, Forde's presentation of the theology of the cross also carried with it a flaw. He belonged to a liberal Lutheran denomination, and while certainly among the most orthodox in that body, I suspect that he was not immune to some of its prevailing winds, as he appeared to criticise those who hold to doctrines like original sin and, implicitly, penal and substitutionary models of the atonement, as holding to a form of a theology of glory, the very antithesis of a theology of the cross. I believe that he was truly wrong, and I believe so because I would like to put it to you that penal substitution is truly a theologia crucis.

We must start, however, not at the cross, but, as does the apostle Paul in Romans, with the light of nature. For by it, we know God as the just Judge, the divine Lawgiver, the immutable and implacable foe of all that is disordered, rebellious and sinful. This God, the God of nature, is a fearsome and terrible God. And, to show forth the full force of this, we crucified him. What a sober, terrifying thought.

Ah, but! we do not stop there, and this is why penal substitution stems from and safeguards the theology of the cross. On the cross, that just Judge bowed his head to his own condemnation; the divine Lawgiver was punished as a transgressor of the divine Law; and the immutable, implacable enmity was directed against himself, and so directed, exhausted. The God of the cross is the God who submits himself to shame so that his people may be raised up; who exhausts his wrath against himself so that his people may be beloved; and who bears the penalty in himself so that his people may be declared righteous at the last.

The penal-substitutionary story is no theology of glory, for it declares to us in the most ringing tones the God who descends to the depths for his people. In the midst of condemnation, genuine wrath and complete abandonment, we find reconciliation, propitiation and justification.

Consumerism and consumptionism

It's often said that our modern economy is founded on the principle of "consumerism", and sometimes it's decried as a corrosive influence. However, I'd like to suggest that we do not live in a "consumeristic" society so much as a "consumptionistic" society.

Economic consumerism is the belief that the economy exists for the benefit of consumers. This is unremarkable; as I have previously commented, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers only have jobs because there exists demand for their goods. If no-one wanted bread—and what they intend doing with it doesn't really matter—then bakeries would shut, bakers would be out of jobs and bottom would fall out of the bread-maker market. So the way to understand the economy is very definitely with the consumer at the centre.

Lest anyone think this is unfair, let it be observed that the one thing that everyone is is a consumer. There's no-one who lives on nothing, and so preserving the rights and interests of consumers favours everyone.

Now, we cannot say from this that a consumeristic society allows consumers to screw over producers. After all, it's not in the interests of consumers for them to force their baker out of business, is it? But equally, people producing goods for which there is no demand aren't owed a living by anyone, and so subsidies and tariffs do not help anyone.

So economic consumerism, the setting of the consumer as the centrepiece of the economic system, has to be the right way to view the economy; and it has public policy implications. But I would contend that we do not really live in an economically consumerist society, but rather a consumptionist one. What do I mean by this?

I can illustrate by appeal to the recent discussions around tax cuts. Tax cuts for the poorest have been advocated, and while I agree with the policy, I profoundly disagree with the reasoning. The stated reasoning is that the poorest have the lowest marginal propensity to save, and that consequently, we should cut their taxes because most of the money so liberated will be spent. Politically, I think this stinks: politicians who claim to have the interests of the poorest at heart are implicitly endorsing the spendthrift attitude which forms an integral part of the complex of poverty. But economically, this isn't consumerism! This is the elevation not of the spender, but the spending; not of the consumer, but the consumption. This is consumptionism.

Consumptionism is the root of our problems: spend, spend, spend! But consumerism is quite different, asserting that we are not sheep to be herded into spending; we are people who should be allowed to make our own decisions as adults in a free society. So when politicians talk about taxes and spending and economics, ask yourself: are they really talking like a consumerist, or are they a closet consumptionist?

The Lord's museum piece?

Yesterday our minister preached on the Lord's Supper, and before I detail my main disagreement, I'd just like to register positively that it was a Good Thing he tackled the subject. Systematic theological teaching isn't one of our 'gifts' at my church, so to have a sermon where an important theological topic is treated more-or-less systematically is a good thing to do [1].

That said, I did find myself working out quite what it is that I find so dispiriting about the Zwinglian approach to the Lord's Supper. To quote our minister, "The eye of faith sees the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus in the elements of bread and wine." The eye of faith sees—but the mouth of faith doesn't taste. The Zwinglian conception of the Lord's Supper tells us that we can look, but we can't touch. We can look, but we can't taste. We can look, but we can't participate. By their lights, the Lord of all is exhibited as a museum piece!

Ultimately, it holds out the prospect of a symbol without fulfilment; that in emblem, we eat and drink the body and blood of the Lord, and yet the Father does not give us the fullness of that image by graciously feeding us on the body and blood of his Son. But the truth, surely, is that what he promises in emblem he gives in reality, and that since the Supper only does anything because it is Christ himself, given for us, given to us, who assures us, strengthens our faith and keeps us on the straight and narrow. The Supper is a supper, not a museum piece; so let us know and be assured that when we meet around his table, we do truly feed on him by faith.

[1] I'd be concerned if we had systematics every week; on the other hand, we're a bit stuck for times when systematic teaching can be done, so maybe mornings are the best of a bad bunch.

A few bits

If maths doesn't work out, there's always economics. The Telegraph called, on Monday, for the same thing I suggested on Sunday, and for much the same reasons, although my proposal was only meant as a temporary measure. Nonetheless, it's good to know I have a national newspaper on my side in the quest to: Eliminate taxes on savings!

On tonight's Any Questions? Rosie Winterton (my question: is she really that garrulous normally, or was she just tanked up?) was explaining how an unfunded tax cut can be repaid without raising taxes later. Apparently, it's all to do with how, if it's done right, the economy will grow, tax revenues will float upwards, and the boost in government revenue can be used to pay off the debt accrued in the unfunded tax cut. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds suspiciously like "sharing the proceeds of growth," a policy for which Labour ministers were queueing up to criticise David Cameron.

Of course, they weren't entirely wrong to criticise Cameron, as he was being typically vacuous, because no government taxes away the entire increase in GDP, which is the implicit opposite of his mantra; however, he'd have been somewhat less vacuous if he'd argued that the effective marginal rate of taxation on increases in GDP should be consistently decreasing, so that the government's growth is always slower than that of the economy's. He'd have been more correct, less vacuous, and also less comprehensible to the general public, I don't doubt.

The problem with an unsuccessful unfunded tax cut is that effectively, it's a loan from the government to the public, as it will have to be repaid one way or another later. And given that it's unfunded, it's not even the government's money that they're lending; it's the buyers of gilts who are funding this liar loan. So basically, in order to solve an economic problem caused by mountains of debt, we put ourselves even further in debt, most probably to the Rothschild clan and the rest of them. Great plan, Gordon! Nice one!

Oh, this is classic

HSBC may be forced to repossess its own home (Independent)

The banking group sold and leased back its office, normally a sensible plan for a business to slim down its unproductive assets and convert them into productive capital, while also removing from oneself the risk of property ownership, since taking property risks isn't really the job of a bank.

However, they also lent the purchaser the money to buy the block, which is, after all, the job of a bank. The purchaser, Metrovacesa, is now in serious difficulties, and one of the options open to the bank is to repossess the property and write off the loan.

So in other words, all they did was to move the asset and the risk from the property management office to the debt management office. If HSBC manages to make a profit on this, which seems unlikely, it'll be on a par with Volkswagen's earlier coup.

A blast from the past

As people talk [e.g., e.g.] about the dangers of a "Labour sterling crisis" (wasn't the last sterling crisis a Tory one, though?), I discovered this lovely poster from the 2001 election. Of course, this is "political statistics", so we don't know whether this is a maximum, or an average, or what, and the more important figure is the repossession rate, expressed as a percentage of the total number of mortgages.

Fortunately, there's a very helpful webpage which details the figures, and shows us that 0.77% is the figure to beat—or not, as the case may be. Last year, it was 0.22%, and if we assume that mortgages outstanding is about the same, then this year's figure is likely to exceed 0.33%, as the Council of Mortgage Lenders is forecasting a 50% increase in repossessions [src].

The interest rates point, of course, is moot, since this isn't a monetary crisis calling for higher interest rates, but rather a pretty standard recession, caused by a mis-match between investment and requirements as seen in the housing bubble, and therefore lower interest rates are the usual approach.

It is this point about interest rates which will probably save Labour from suffering the ignominy of having exceeded the Tories' feat in '91; yet for all that, I do wonder whether this poster will come back to, um, 'haunt' them.

Faith to face?

I was in a discussion about the role of faith last night, and it was suggested that if we all knew that the Resurrection had happened, we would not need faith. I answered briefly to this point, but here's a fuller explanation.

Firstly, I failed to appeal to the conclusive answer, which is that the demons know that Christ died and rose, and yet they don't have faith. That shows us that factual knowledge does not remove the need for faith.

Faith is not a "leap in the dark". Think about it! If faith were some property which knowledge made less certain, then the person with the most faith would in fact be the one with the most doubts and the least knowledge. Yet we all know that this conclusion is absurd. Therefore, knowledge cannot make faith less certain.

However, there is another angle to go down. In 1 Corinthian 13, we are told that in the context of the eschaton, three things will remain: faith, hope and love. We shall see face-to-face, the gift of miraculous knowledge shall have passed away as we all shall have perfect knowledge, and yet faith shall remain. For why?

For this: faith is aptly described as the threefold mental state of knowledge, assent and trust. Seeing faith this way, it must be the case that perfect knowledge, so far from rendering us incapable of trusting God, shall in fact see us able to trust him perfectly. Faith will remain, since it is founded in the knowledge of God in Christ for us.

One down, how many to go?

The EU is set to scrap one of its pottiest regulations: the requirement that retailed fruit and vegetables meet specified standards for colour, shape and size, notorious for determining the bendiness of bananas. Given this causes farmers to throw away perfectly edible food; forces consumers to buy more expensive food and removes the choice of buying cheaper, less attractive food; and imposes on food merchants silly burdens and, presumably, unnecessary paperwork. Next stop, the Common Agricultural Policy?

EDIT: Ironically, as the Times reports, bendy bananas aren't a part of the reprieve, nor, due to political lobbying by agricultural nations, are ten other sorts of produce which remain subject to this loopy EU protectionism.

Many pounds, but not an ounce of sense

Today's Independent carries as its lead story a journalist's journey to see the people affected by the credit crunch. It sounds like some of them need to learn about the barbershop puzzle:

There is a lot about Duncan Glassey which is not what you might expect. … His firm Wealthflow LLP now specialises in clients with between £1m and £5m to invest.

For all that, he is modest in his own lifestyle. So much so that in the past he has been told that he lost business from new clients after turning up for the initial interview in a car which they decided was insufficiently grand.

So the puzzle is this: you're new in town and need a barber. There are two: one has beautifully-cut hair, and the other's hair is a complete mess. Which do you choose?

Well, you choose the one with bad hair, because he cut the hair of the barber with good hair, of course. But who are these nutcases who think that an ostentatiously rich investment manager is the right man choose?

PMQ, 12-Nov

Mr. Speaker, can the Prime Minister confirm that free trade is a good policy for every country, and that he will be taking this message to both Brussels, where the iniquitous Common Agricultural Policy has not yet been expunged, and to Washington, where the President-elect has made protectionist noises of a sort the Prime Minister himself was warning against only the other day?

As simple as possible, but no simpler

On the arxiv today, a paper by a physicist, Don Page of the University of Alberta, on the subject of simplicity in science and religion. It's an intriguing read, and I don't know much about Page's personal position on the questions he tackles, but that's the point, isn't it: he writes very well from whichever position he's taking. His thesis is that human history has always been to take explanations of the world around us, and make them simpler, and that theologising is a part of that procedure. He observes that even for those of us who take seriously the accounts of divine intervention in the history of Israel, the existence of God is the simplest explanation for a set of facts.

He also implicitly squashes an idea about the history of physics which I think is quite pernicious: the Kuhnian "revolution of the paradigms" idea. The theory goes that we basically lurch from paradigm to paradigm, and with very little way to assess which paradigm is the better. I take the old-fashioned view, which is that we've always operated, as Page suggests, in one paradigm: "as simple as possible, but no simpler", to quote Einstein.

The classic example used to defend the revolutions idea is the "jump" from Ptolemaic geocentricity to Copernican heliocentricity but this is less a radical departure, and more a simple re-orientation towards simplicity. In fact, this simplicty wasn't even that heliocentricity was easier to work with, mathematically; it just made the assumptions simpler. So it's very definitely a part of the story of science, which is a general ebbing and flowing towards a greater simplicity of assumption.

His chief conclusion is, as theologians have been pointing out for decades, that simplicity for the scientist remains a "faith position", one which is unproved and unprovable, and there is a sense in which is forms some common ground for both the religious believer and the sceptical scientist.

Well, the whole thing is well worth a read, especially if you can stomach a little Bayesian statistics at one point. His grasp on the issues is good, and he's clearly been speaking with the right people. He mentions William Lane Craig by name, and the section of acknowledgements is a veritable Who's Who in the science-religion nexus, ranging from Dawkins and Carroll through to Dembski and McGrath.

Oh, come on!

After AQA caved in, removing from an English GCSE sourcebook a poem which tackled the issue of knife crime, they've now succumbed a second time to the Sun-reading mob, who are up in arms that Gary Glitter should be on the Music GCSE curriculum. At least with the poem, the concern, misguided though it was, was focussed on the content itself. But here, it's pure guilt-by-association. AQA: get a spine!

However, they probably won't. So if the invertebrates at AQA are going to stick around, then I'd like to make sure that we press the principle through. For starters, we should never introduce anything from Madame Butterfly to the curriculum, as Puccini once applied to join the Italian Fascists. We must also, of course, never advise that they listen to anything to do with Wagner, that notoriously raging anti-Semite. The vaunted "Mozart effect" must be traded in since the eponymous composer was a gambling addict. By modern standards, Bach, Haydn and Handel must all have been religious nutcases of the first order, and goodness knows there's nothing worse than the kind of fervent Christian faith which produced the St. Matthew Passion, Creation and Messiah. And as for Tchaikovsky and Britten, well! readers of the Sun and Mail should look away now…

Music, eh? What's it ever done for us?

Murphy's Law, applied to Google Books

Google Books is in my head, I swear it. It seems like every time I go to find something in a book there, the exact page I'm looking for is "not a part of this book preview." The latest was looking for a setting of Psalm 72, and finding half of it missing in the book I was looking at. Grrr.

To get credit flowing again…

…it's going to take more than leaning on a few banks to pass on the Bank's base rate cut, especially as Libor is now disconnected from the base rate. If they have to cut rates, then they'll simply need to tighten their lending criteria to compensate.

I wonder whether, as a part of the reported raft of measures being contemplated in the Treasury, an income tax exemption for savings interest is on the table? Couple that with a modest cut in general income tax to put money back in people's pockets, and they may just decide to save some of that extra money. That should push rates down.

Questions, questions

What better way to mark Remembrance Sunday?

While I'm asking rhetorical questions, what happens when a JW and a Mormon strike up in conversation? Submissions via YouTube are acceptable.

One of those difficult bits of 1 John, made slightly less difficult?

He says, "One of those difficult bits," as though there are easy bits.

We've got a Bible study tomorrow, and we're going through 1 John. We're up to 1 John 2:28–3:10, which is not the easiest of passages to work through. Next week's is even harder—"We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death."—so I'm glad I'm only doing this week's study. Anyhoo, as I was reading the passage, I came to the following conclusion.

Verse 9, to take the starkest example, is both good news and bad news. "No-one who is born of God will continue to sin" is Bad News, because we know we all continue to sin. We must despair of ourselves. Ah, but in verse 8b (and elsewhere), John directs us to Christ's finished work. And when we consider what Christ did for us, verse 9 becomes Good News, which is that Christ's finished work is promised to us not only for salvation in sin, but salvation from sin, a salvation which begins today.

Therefore, in that context, it becomes less incredible that works—gifts of God, lest we forget—should be a way for our faith to be confirmed; yet, we cannot consider our works apart from the cross and be assured, since the law will always find fault with even our 'best' works. Thus the cross must be the first and primary source of our assurance, and any confirmation that works give will be simply a facet of the assurance of the cross. To say otherwise risks either contradicting the Apostle (who explicitly grounds a positive aspect of assurance in something we do, love), or else throwing us on our own efforts as the only proof of God's love for us.

Obama: the world-wide view

The BBC has a page of brief reports from correspondents around the world, including the UK, on how the election of the President-elect will be viewed. Apart from the sheer symbolism of having a black man in the White House, other positive points include a more nuanced diplomatic approach toward places like Iran, qualified support for Israel and better help on cross-border issue in Mexico.

Kenyans, illustrative of the patronage politics common in Africa, have apparently been expecting their nation to do well out of the man whose father was born in their nation. As the BBC's lady in Nairobi points out, Obama's main concern will be to serve the people of the USA, and not Kenya.

On the negative side, the reports from South Africa, Canada and Brazil all mention the issue of Barack Obama's undoubtedly protectionist rhetoric, which has not played well. I would suggest that when the British correspondent says that, "the relationship with Britain in some areas will be … fiery," trade is one such. I think his first protectionism test will probably come on cars; I hope it will be early on in his Presidency, that he burns his fingers as did George Bush on steel, and that, like Bush, he realises very quickly that free trade is the only sensible policy. Furthermore, his diplomatic nuance appears not to extend to Pakistan, where he espoused an incredibly hawkish stance towards terrorism from within her borders.

An ignoble Berean?

Mike Horton recently did a Q&A on the Washington Post's site as a part of the promotional tour for his new book. He did very well, and handled questions from all over the world, not just the US.

One question in particular struck me as being rather ironic.

Berea, Ohio: Since there is no solid history upon which to base a factual Jesus, since Jesus is only the faith creation of believers after the fact of a presumed historical character, in short, mythology, why do we persist in spending so much time on all these variants about Jesus?

Mike's answer was great, and set off in a different direction. I think, had I been answering that question, I'd have started with, "It's interesting that you should come from a town called Berea. There's a place of that name in the Bible, and the people who heard the Gospel there were said to be of 'noble character' as they investigated what they were told thoroughly. I'd like to encourage you to 'be a Berean', and to look seriously into this issue. Here are a few facts…"

PMQ, 05-Nov-08

Should the Democratic Party's candidate win the US Presidency, will the Prime Minister be willing to extend to him the welcome he has given to the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, "This is no time for a novice"?

With thanks to Rachel Sylvester of the Times for the idea for this week's PMQ, which is a day early, I know. If I watch tomorrow's PMQs and think them worth summarising, I may still do that.

How many things are wrong here?

Two muddled tax policies

A couple of quickies.

First one. I listened to a short excerpt from an interview Barack Obama did (BHT; the audio's not great), and if I caught him aright, he want to encourage the building of coal-fired power plants, and then tax them (through carbon credits) for the privilege of emitting greenhouse gasses. This, he claims, will generate "billions of dollars" to invest in renewables. Sounds to me like he wants to smash windows and proclaim himself a public benefactor because he generated business for the glazier.

Second one. The Liberal Democrats want to cut taxes for low and middle income families, and say they will fund this through closing "tax loopholes". One of these so-called "loopholes" is the tax relief for pension contributions for higher-rate earners. Quite apart from the sheer injustice of disallowing higher-rate earners from sacrificing salary for their pensions, there is a philosophical flaw here, which is the principle of taxing investment and rewarding spending (this is one of my main problem with LD tax policy). One of the great gaps in British household finances is the low rate of investment and the poor capital stock we hold. Obviously the consumer must be king in the economy (the baker is in work only because there is demand for his bread), but the consumer can only consume those goods which are produced; it is therefore a good idea to ensure that policy does not hurt productive investment. While the specific policy, of "soaking the rich", doesn't fall directly foul of this principle, it is unseemly for Liberal Democrat policy to be encouraging spending at the expense of saving.

This is why we don't want a database state

Ironically, I'd been having a conversation with a colleague over coffee about the database state, and he pointed out that it's not only the government which is incompetent with our data. I readily agreed, but perhaps hadn't quite expected to be the subject of a bungling attempt at identity fraud this evening.

Just before eight o'clock, I received two e-mails from an Internet retailer, informing me that half a dozen memory sticks had been ordered to be delivered to an address I didn't recognise, and a name I don't expect to exist. Evidently, some spotty twerp of a teenager had managed to get his greasy paws on my log-in details, and thought he'd have a bit of fun. I'm reluctant to point out the havoc he could have wrought had he been possibly just a little brighter: I was still able to log in, cancel the orders and change my password.

However, I cannot remove from their database my debit card details. Given that it could be their database which is compromised, this is a serious failing. I shall be telephoning their customer services people tomorrow, and among other things, be berating them for precisely this problem.

And now, to Spooks, where information never falls into the wrong hands…

Promises made, promises broken?

I was reading the 1997 Labour Party manifesto, and it's an amusing document. Labour's defenders, of course, will insist that this was meant to be for one Parliament only, and they'd be technically correct; but one could justifiably understand the manifesto promises as providing a kind of "direction of travel". On that basis, there are a fair few promises they simply haven't kept. Let's have a look at the list.

Education will be our number one priority, and we will increase the share of national income spent on education as we decrease it on the bills of economic and social failure
Well, this one's debatable, but we probably ought to let them have it. Education has been generally better, although there are complaints to which we shall come shortly. Pass.

There will be no increase in the basic or top rates of income tax
A starting rate was introduced, at 10p, in the Parliament covered by this manifesto, and then abolished, pushing the marginal tax rate back up to 20p, in an attempt to buy Gordon some cheap political capital. The tax burden rose over Labour's term. Fail.

We will provide stable economic growth with low inflation, and promote dynamic and competitive business and industry at home and abroad
"No more boom and bust." 'Nuff said? If a policy doesn't work in the long-term, it was no good in the short-term. Fail.

We will get 250,000 young unemployed off benefit and into work
Fair play to them, they did manage to do some good on this score. Pass.

We will rebuild the NHS, reducing spending on administration and increasing spending on patient care
Another one, like schools, where this is debatable. The cancer of bureaucracy needs to be tackled with tough treatments, and I suspect that Labour hasn't ever really quite got its head round how to stop it. They got the benefit of the doubt once, so I can't really give it again. Fail, for lack of effort.

We will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, and halve the time it takes persistent juvenile offenders to come to court
Ah, the old "tough on crime, tough on the victims causes of crime" promise. The promise which gave us increased surveillance, ID cards and the database state. If this were a paper exam, they'd get a pass. But it's not; it's a lab subject. Fail.

We will help build strong families and strong communities, and lay the foundations of a modern welfare state in pensions and community care
I'm not convinced families have been strengthened. Communities certainly aren't. And pensions policy is a complete shambles. Fail.

We will safeguard our environment, and develop an integrated transport policy to fight congestion and pollution
Any fan of Yes, Minister will recall the dread words "integrated transport policy". No-one will ever do this. Ever. Fail, for sheer hubris.

We will clean up politics, decentralise political power throughout the United Kingdom and put the funding of political parties on a proper and accountable basis
[Cue maniacal laughing.] Funding is as shady as ever, and decentralisation has gone into reverse in England. The kingdom, principality and province did somewhat better, but still aren't really decentralised. Fail.

We will give Britain the leadership in Europe which Britain and Europe need
Well, Britain's always going to be important in Europe, especially now the memory of de Gaulle is fading fast. The question was always, What will we do with our position? Solve all the things which Euro-sceptics rightly dislike about the EU: the CAP, the un-democratic institutions, the refusal of subsidiarity? Fail.

The election a little closer to home

There's a fighting chance that the next MP for Glenrothes will be a practising "Christian" (being extremely generous and allowing Quakers and Mormons). According to the BBC profiles, the religious affiliations of four of the eight candidates are sufficiently important to be worth mentioning: the Scottish Socialist is a Quaker (that figures); the Labour candidate is an elder in the Church of Scotland; the UKIP candidate is a Mormon (again, that figures); and the Liberal Democrat is also an elder in the Church of Scotland (something of a shame; I'd been holding out for a Wee Free somewhere in the list).

This, of course, after the acceptance in the House of the new Glasgow East MP, John Mason (SNP), who is an evangelical, a member of Easterhouse Baptist (which also figures).

Of scarecrows and iron men

I worked out, while watching Nick Clegg's performance at his own personal Question Time on Thursday, how I feel about the British commentariat: I think I'd like to give Polly Toynbee a brain, and Simon Heffer a heart.

Incidentally, Toynbee's column today tells us all that we shouldn't think the banks know best. Duh. Her solution, unsurprisingly, to express confidence that instead, the government knows best. D'oh!

Yesterday on the radio news—The World Tonight, I think it was—a reporter was explaining how not even bankers, who got us into this fine mess, know how it happened. In fact, he surmised, and I agree, that no-one really understands the whole problem, it's just too big for anyone. But I would take that a step further. You see, if it's true that no-one can understand this problem, then the worst that can happen is for anyone to try and take upon themselves the responsibility for fixing it.

The government can help people at the margins, which is probably one of the economic functions it serves more efficiently, but no matter how much Toynbee eggs on the government about it, meddling, and the government's already done quite enough damage on that score, will not solve our problems. Only time, de-leveraging and the slow, painful process of re-adjustment can do that.