Tag: Catholic

I’ve Become a Catholic

Earlier this year, after a lifetime in charismatic Evangelical churches, including 13 years helping to lead a Baptist church, I became a Roman Catholic. 

Earlier this year, after a lifetime in charismatic Evangelical churches, including 13 years helping to lead a Baptist church, I became a Roman Catholic. 

For the last 6 months I have not written or talked about this change publicly both because I wanted to give a chance for my family to adjust to our new lives and because I do not consider myself qualified to be an internet apologist for Catholicism. However, I have just begun a new academic year as a Catholic University Chaplain (you can follow me here and here) and, since posts have begun to appear that look conspicuously Catholic, I thought I had better say something for those who are confused or bewildered.

Catholicism is Great

First, I really like being a Catholic. I don’t want to come across as a triumphalist convert. I am acutely aware of all the foibles, failures and frustrations of the reality as well as the theory of the Catholic Church. But notwithstanding all of that; I love her. Catholic Christianity is saturated with grace, makes coherent sense of Scripture, invites me to participate in the single greatest intellectual and spiritual tradition in the history of humanity, provides me with beauty and wonder, enfolds me in the most diverse organisation in the world, and, most significantly, offers me the substantial body and blood of my Saviour. I go to Mass often; I would go every day if I could.

My wonderful, intuitive and succinct wife pointed out to me a while ago that we used to speak often of being hungry and thirsty for Christ. Now I feed on him each week in the sacrament. When my priest hears my confession and speaks the words of forgiveness and cleansing over me it does not merely communicate a spiritual reality, it brings that reality into existence in my soul. The liturgy in my local parish is not as much fun as a really well constructed and executed worship set. But it brings me the voice of Scripture and prays in return everything that needs to be said in a way that is both concise and beautiful.

Moreover, to become Catholic is to join oneself to the whole communion of the Saints throughout the ages in a way that is real and powerful. My experience of the history of the church and her great heroes as a Protestant was similar to the way I might think of great Spurs players of the past; I can look at them and learn from them but not play with them. Indeed, I am being generous here; as a Protestant I could only really publicly learn from or acknowledge a few – principally Augustine and the Reformers. Aquinas, Bonaventure, Therese of Liseaux and so on were, to say the least, suspect. Were they great heroes for us or suspect? Now I not only learn from the saints, I pray with them and they with and for me. My whole understanding and appreciation of the truth of the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints has been transformed by the knowledge that those who go before us still stand with us, pray for us and do so powerfully.

Being a Catholic is great.

I Still Love Protestants

I still love Protestants.

Becoming Catholic is obviously a huge decision. It has meant changing job, moving house and has put strain on relationships I had previously thought strong. There are obviously some profound theological differences between the evangelical and Catholic understandings of Christianity. I don’t want to diminish those differences. Some are relatively trivial. Others are more profound. But for all this I do believe that my brothers and sisters in Protestantism are just that: brothers and sisters and I have nothing but love for them. 

My own reception into Catholicism is not, from my perspective at least, a repudiation of the evangelical charismatic world or a denial of God’s work within it. I remain grateful for all God did in me and my family through the work of bodies like New Frontiers and the brothers and sisters we worshipped with and pastored at HBC. I believe the Spirit is really at work in and through them, changing lives, saving souls and healing bodies. The work those churches do is extraordinary and profound as is their love for Scripture and the Spirit. I would not be who I am without them; I love them and continue to pray for them.

This is, no doubt, hard for some to hear. Inevitably there is a sense of loss when someone becomes Catholic, especially if, like me, they have worked and pastored in a Protestant context. For those who hear of my conversion and feel some sense of pain at it, I hope it will be reassuring to know that I became Catholic because I positively believe the Catholic understanding of Christianity to be a true and good fulfilment of everything I experienced in my Protestant faith. It is not, in this sense, a rejection of anyone but rather a continuation of the same pursuit of Christ that characterises evangelical piety. Indeed, a crucial part of my own emotional journey towards Catholicism was reading the works of Joseph Ratzinger and deeply desiring the knowledge of Christ and the joy in his beauty that I discovered there.

So, how did it happen?

Conversion is Both a Process and a Punctuation Point

Coming to the Catholic Church was very like getting engaged. I can tell you the time and place I became engaged to Heather. It was a Sunday evening in late August in my parents’ living room. I know what we ate just before it (lasagne) and how it happened (I wrapped a ring in a series of boxes like Russian dolls before going down on one knee). I asked her to marry me, she promised to do so and we were engaged. In the same way I can tell you the day and the time I became a Catholic. On 20 March 2025 at about 1845 I stood before Fr Con Foley at Christ the Prince of Peace in Weybridge, promised to receive all that the Catholic Church teaches as revealed by God. He laid his hand on my head and prayed for the Spirit to fill me and use me. I was filled with joy and then received my first Eucharist. It was, like our engagement, one of the most important days of my life.

It is important that both our engagement and my reception into the Church were definite moments. Before I asked Heather to marry me, she had made no promise to do so. We were not pledged to one another. Something changed in that moment as we went from one state to another. In the words we exchanged and the physical pledges we offered, our status was altered. Before that service on 20 March I was not a Catholic. I had not promised to obey the Church’s teaching, had not acknowledged it as revealed by God, and could not receive the Eucharist. When people ask me when I became a Catholic, therefore, I tell them that I can name the day and time just as I know the moment I became a fiancée (and later, even more so, a husband).

At the same time, conversion, like engagement, is the culmination of a process that takes time, sometimes years, proceeding on occasions dramatically and at others imperceptibly. My engagement to Heather was the fruit of a year of friendship and love between us. Going back further, it flowed from the work of God in both of our lives shaping our desires for a partner and a life lived for God. Over time it became increasingly clear where that process would likely be leading until Heather was sat at a dining table with a ring on her finger and a crying man at her feet. We were not engaged until that moment, but that moment came because of everything that had gone before.

My coming to the Church was similarly a process that, viewed in retrospect began many years ago. It proceeded through a thousand questions, prayers and experiences that led to it. It came through my wrestling with Scripture, with prayer, with pastoral work and with history. It came through moments of grace and joy, tears and frustrations, through pain and through the providence of God.

I mention this to reassure those who find themselves on a spiritual journey of whose destination they are as yet unsure. I did not believe my journey would lead to the Church until it was nearly over. Christ led me through all my preaching, friendships, prayer and pain to a place I did not anticipate. It was a hard journey. And yet, from this side I can see his grace and love in it.

For me my conversion is a process and a punctuation point. Prior to 20 March I never preached or taught anything that was distinctively Catholic. My theological arguments proceeded using Protestant sources and logic. Nor did I receive communion in a Catholic Church. I was not a Catholic until that time.  And yet from the perspective of my being a Catholic I can see how that evangelical work, the love of Scripture, of the Church, of God’s people and work, led me to find my home in Rome. I hope it will lead me deeper and deeper into God’s love and his Church.

Where To from Here?

If you are still reading this post, I imagine you may be interested in what I am going to do next and what has come of my wonderful wife and her ministry. I am at present working on finishing my PhD examining Baptist doctrines of the Church in conversation with Joseph Ratzinger. While I am doing that, I am the Catholic chaplain at Royal Holloway University and about to begin teaching RS at a local secondary school. I have no idea what God’s plan is for me in the future save that I would love for it to involve bringing as many people to know Jesus, to find love in his Church and to receive his grace as I can.

Heather’s story is her own to tell. For the moment I can say that she, too, has experienced a great joy in becoming Catholic and has found particular peace and fulfilment in the Eucharist and in a deepening relationship with the Saints of the Church. She is currently working in a prison as a chaplain. I have never seen anyone more obviously used by God to bring light into darkness.

If you would like to know more about how this all happened, please feel free to reach out to me privately. We value and covet your prayers above all.

Hope, Life and Death

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.
Deep and profound reflections from Heather Fellows.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

Here’s a brilliant guest post from Heather Fellows.

Life is hard.  Some days and for some people it may be so hard that they question if it can be endured much longer.  And yet, by and large, our desire to live wins through.  What is it that makes us want to live, even when life is hard?  What keeps us going?  Hope.

Christianity is all about hope.    Our faith is tied to hope.  We are a people of hope.

The letter to the Hebrews explains faith in this way:

‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’1

To have faith – to trust in God and in Jesus – is to be a man or woman of hope.

As St Paul wrote, ‘in hope we were saved.’2

And it is by trusting in that hope – in Jesus, in his life and the life he has won for us – that we can face our present. 

Even though that present may be hard, it leads towards a goal that we can be sure of and which is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. 

But that leaves us with the questions: what kind of hope is this that saves us?

What kind of hope transforms lives, families, and societies?

What kind of hope can make our present pain and struggle worthwhile?

What kind of hope leads beyond the valleys of this life into the light of eternity?

These are the questions we are thinking about this morning.

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge my debt to Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to the church, Spe Salvi, Saved in Hope. It is a brilliant and rich document that I can barely scratch the surface of but has something very important to say to us.

Living Without Hope

To begin to understand the hope we have in Jesus, we need to start with where we were before he came.

When St Paul wrote to one of the earliest Christian churches in Ephesus, he reminded them that before they came to know Jesus, they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12).  They had had other ‘gods’ that emerged from the different and conflicting myths they talked about. But those ‘gods’ provided little or no hope for their future or light for their present.  They found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. 

A dark present, facing a dark future. Does this sound familiar? 

Why don’t we pause for a moment and consider who the ‘gods’ of our age are.  Let’s start with money.  How often are we tempted to say: ‘If I could just have more money, then I would be happy.  I need to earn more money to buy more stuff.  I need stuff to give meaning to my life.’

Jim Carey, the famous actor & comedian once said,

‘I wish that everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so that they would know that’s not the answer.’3

Or what about the gods of power and success?  “If I could reach that position or get that promotion, then my life would be good.” 

Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the rock band Queen put it this way,

‘You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man.  And that’s the most bitter type of loneliness.  Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need.  A loving, ongoing relationship.’4

Hope, Love and Purpose

There are lots of ‘gods’ in the world, but only one God. 

The thing that sets Christianity apart from the ‘gods’ of Ephesus, or of our time, is that Jesus promises a future. Wealth is lost or dies with us. Power and success are fleeting. But we have the hope of a life which will not end in emptiness.  Paul said in his letter to the Thessalonians, ‘do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.’ 5

As Christians we don’t know all the details of what our future holds whether in this life or beyond. But do know for sure that we have a future and this makes it possible to live in the present well. 

This is because the Christian message doesn’t only tell us something about the world; it does  something in us.  When we receive Jesus’ hope, we live differently.  We are given new life and it begins as soon as we accept Jesus. 

Benedict tells the story of an African slave girl, Josephine Bakhita, who was born around 1869 in Sudan. 

She was kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 9, beaten till she bled and sold in slave markets.  She worked as a slave for the wife of a general who flogged her daily.  She bore 144 scars on her body.  Finally in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul who took her back to Italy. 

After her master had taken her back to Italy, he made the mistake of leaving Josephine at a convent while he went back to Sudan to conduct more business. As she listened to the Nuns, she came to know a new kind of master, Jesus Christ.   She heard there was a master above all masters, the Lord of Lords and that he is goodness in person.  She came to know that she was known, created and loved by this supreme master.  What’s more this master had himself been flogged and now he was waiting for her at the Father’s right hand.  Now she had hope.  No longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope that she was definitively loved and whatever happens to her, she is awaited by this Love.  She said, ‘my life is so good.’ 

Through the knowledge of this hope she was redeemed, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.  She was baptised, and confirmed in Venice, fought for and won her freedom in an Italian court and spent the rest of her life telling others about this great master in whom she has found hope.

Christianity brought for Josephine Bakhita an encounter with the living God and therefore an encounter with a hope stronger that the sufferings of slavery, a hope which transformed her life from within and thus world around her.  Through baptism she was joined to the Church as a sister, not a slave.  She was filled with the same Spirit and received from the same body of Christ together with those who were her ‘masters’ in her working life.  Even though the circumstances around us may remain unchanged when we come to know Jesus, we are changed from within and, through us, others are changed too.

Many early Christians were from the lower social classes and so were very open to the experience of a new hope.  But so too were those from higher social classes.  They were all living without hope and without God.  The shallow state religion of Rome offered them lots of ceremonies, but Christianity offered them God to whom they could pray and enjoy a relationship with. 

A friend who grew up in a Muslim culture once said to me that it was the most precious thing to discover that she could pray to God for herself; that she could tell Him what was on her heart; that she could ask Him for what she needed and that to do so was not selfish or unholy, but rather that God desired this intimate relationship with her.  Sometimes if we have been Christians for a long time, we can forget the preciousness of this gift.  Jesus invites us into a personal relationship with God the Father.  That’s awesome. 

Knowing the God who made all things and whose Son loves us and is redeeming all things sets us free. We are not at the mercy of life, of its trials, of chance or the world around us. The future is not written in our stars but in the loving will of our Father.

Benedict puts it this way in Spe Salvi,

‘It is not the laws of matter which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the universe.  It is not the laws of matter or evolution which have the final say, but a person.  And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly we are no longer slaves of the universe and its laws, we are free.  Heaven is not empty.  Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus revealed himself as Love.’

So our hope in Jesus sets us free. But it also changes how we face life and death.

Hope, Life and Death

When archaeologists dig up ancient Christian graves they find Jesus portrayed in two different ways on them.

The first shows Jesus as a philosopher; the second as a shepherd.

In the ancient world, the philosopher was someone who knew how to live and how to die.  They would teach this art to anyone who could pay them for it. Many so-called philosophers were found to just be charlatans making money through their words who had nothing to say about real life. 

I don’t know about you, but this rings true for a lot of ‘philosophies’ about life that are circling around today. 

How often are we told to ‘Be true to yourself’ and anything less is a fake life?  Or that we need to break free of the traditions that enslave us, follow our own path and think your own thoughts.  This philosophy is everywhere from social media to Disney movies.  But does it help us to live authentically as a human?  Can I really have my ‘own’ truth rather than there being something external which is objectively true?   I don’t know about you, but I find it terrifying to think I am supposed to find ‘the truth’ within myself.  I am fairly sure there is a lot of rubbish deep inside of me and it is a huge comfort to know that I am not the source of truth, but that that is to be found in another, far greater than me.

But when we come to Jesus we find the true philosopher. He is one who can tell us who we are and what we must do to be truly human.  He shows us, in his own words, the way, the truth and the life.  He also shows us the path beyond death.  And only someone who is able to do this can be a true teacher of life. 

The second image was that of a shepherd.

This is most beautifully described in Psalm 23.  The true shepherd is the one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death, the one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude where no one else can follow.  He has already walked this path, descended to death, conquered it and has returned to accompany us on that same journey and give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.

The realisation that there is one who even in death accompanies me was the new hope which arose over the life of the early church. It is what the world still desperately needs to hear today. 

Life is hard, suffering happens, death is real and we all need hope to sustain us. 

Hope and Eternity

Hebrews 10:34 the writer notes the counter-intuitive freedom of a group of persecuted early Christians,

‘You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’

As Christians, we can give up material possessions, gladly, because we have found a better basis for our existence, one that does not depend on money or power or status.  We have a real hope.

This enables Christians to live for eternity, not for the here and now.

Because we hope for eternal life, we can give generously, even recklessly, for the sake of the gospel and in order to bring others to faith. 

If I told my non-Christians friends how much money I have given away, they would thing I was absolutely bonkers.  At the time we gave up our flourishing careers as barristers to come and work for the church they thought we were mad enough.  I don’t have a lot of money, but I feel compelled to give it away whenever I can anyway.  And do you know what?  That is incredibly freeing.  When you stop believing that earning money and getting a promotion is the goal of life and that serving Jesus is instead, it turns out he takes care of you anyway. 

Lots of you know our story.  God has provided houses, school places, ballet classes, music lessons, holidays, pushchairs and much for us when we could not afford them.  Some through miraculous gifts in the post and some through the generosity of others as God has moved their hearts.  The future has broken into the present.

But what does that future look like?  Do we really want to live for eternity?  If eternity looked like this life carrying on forever, many of us would say, no thanks, 70 odd years is enough for me!

So if on the one hand we don’t want to die, and those who love us don’t want us to die, and on the other hand neither do we want to live like this indefinitely, what do we really want? 

St Paul says that ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for’ we just know that it is not this life.6 

This eternity is not an unending number of days on a calendar, but rather it is like plunging into the ocean of love, a moment in which time no longer exists.  Jesus says it like this, ‘I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.’ 7

Or again,

‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’ 8

And again, ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’9 

On and on and on and on it goes: Eternal life, our only ultimate hope, is centred on a relationship with One who does not die, who is life and love itself.  We are in him. 

Whenever we are moved by his love, we experience true life.

Every day we experience many greater or lesser hopes.  Sometimes they can appear totally satisfying – the hope of a great love, a new job or other success.  But when they are fulfilled it becomes clear that they were not the whole.  We need a hope which goes further. 

Only God can give us this hope.  And the very fact that it comes as a gift is part of the hope.  God is the foundation of hope.  Not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.  His kingdom is not some imaginary hereafter that will never arrive, but it is present wherever he is loved and whenever his love reaches us.  His love alone gives us the possibility of persevering day by day, spurred on by hope in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

This is hope and we all need it.

What Does It Mean?

So are these just pious thoughts or do they have a practical consequence for the way we live now? How can we know this hope in a way that is personally and socially transformative? 

Firstly, if you are currently living without hope, come and know Jesus.  Put your trust in him and get baptised.

He is our hope.  He shows us the path through life and beyond it to eternity with God in heaven.  He enables us to bear the present and to taste life now.

For those who are already walking this path, thought, I think we can grow in hope in three ways.

  1. Prayer – when no-one listens to me anymore, God still listens to me.  When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God.  When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me.  Benedict puts it beautifully: when I have been plunged into complete solitude, if I pray I am never totally alone.

In his sermon on First John, Saint Augustine describes beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope.  He defines prayer as an exercise of desire.  Human beings were created for greatness – for God himself; we were created to be filled by God.  But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined.  It must be stretched.  By delaying his gift, God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases our capacity for receiving him.10 

If you are barely hanging on to hope, pray.  Pray anyway, but especially in the darkness of life, pray.  Through prayer we draw near to God and he to us and he strengthens our grasp on his great hope.

  • Action – We cannot earn heaven through by what we do, it is a gift. But at the same time, our behaviour is not indifferent before God and the infolding of history.  What we do does matter.  We can open ourselves to truth, to love and to what is good. We are called to be ‘God’s co-workers,’ contributing to the world’s salvation.11 

We must do all we can to reduce human suffering when we see it in our everyday lives. 
It is not within our power to banish pain and suffering from the world altogether. But through Jesus, hope for the world’s healing has entered the world.  We are healed by accepting suffering, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ who suffered with infinite love. 
Each of us can live out this when we see those in pain in our families, in our schools, or our work places. 

Where is God calling you to partner with him in reaching out to a suffering world?  Who needs to know the hope which you have found in Jesus?  How can you demonstrate his love to others today?

  • Words – As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking, how can I be saved? We are given hope in order to share it with others. When we see those in pain or suffering, we should pray for them, we should comfort them. But then we need to share our hope with them. When all else has passed, that is what they ultimately need. That can be as simple as offering to pray with them, sharing our stories of hope with them or inviting them to Church with us.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

  1. Hebrews 11:1 ↩︎
  2. Rom 8:24 ↩︎
  3. 2005 December 16, The Ottawa Citizen, Carrey’s been busted, Continuation title: Carrey—Being rich not the answer by Jay Stone, Start Page F1, Quote Page F2, Column 2, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
  4. https://queenarchives.com/qa/ ↩︎
  5. 1 Thes 4:13 ↩︎
  6. Rom 8:26 ↩︎
  7. John 16:22 ↩︎
  8. John 17:3 ↩︎
  9. John 13:1 ↩︎
  10. In 1 Ioannis 4, 6: PL 35, 2008f ↩︎
  11. 1 Cor 3:9 ↩︎

The Dignity of Life

All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

This week I want to think about one of the most pressing, important and sensitive issues we can: the dignity, value and sanctity of human life.

Before I write another word, I want to acknowledge that this topic may bring up painful memories, experiences or ideas. In a blog I cannot possibly do justice to the pastoral or emotional issues that arise when we consider abortion, euthanasia, war, or any related issue. For that reason I want to ask for your patience and forgiveness for when I misstep or write clumsily. Above all, however, we must always remember that while it is vital that we speak and think with clarity and courage on these issues, Jesus came not to condemn but to restore and that there is always grace and forgiveness available to us in him.

[If you’re interested in some Bible passages that relate to these ideas, you can find them here]

  1. The Central Importance of Life

There is no more important issue in all human ethics – all moral questions – than the dignity and value of human life. It shapes and affects everything. Your view of this question changes your answer to every other question.

Christians make several startling claims about the value of human life that change the nature of every other discussion profoundly.

We believe that human beings, both male and female, are created in the image of God. Pause there. That is the ethical point being made in the story of Eve being created from Adam; not that she is inferior to him or an afterthought. Rather that she is inseparable from him. Men and women together equally share in God’s image and his dignity.

We believe that every human being is, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘unique and unrepeatable’. You matter as an individual. You are not a lego brick, interchangeable with a million others, whose only purpose is to make a bigger model. You are unique. God saw you in your mother’s womb, before you were born. He chose you. 

As Benedict XVI beautifully put it, while evolutionary theory may picture how God took the stuff of this world and shaped it into people, nevertheless ‘we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.’

We believe, therefore, that every human being has an inherent dignity and worth that does not depend upon others. Every life matters whether other people love it and cherish it or not. It is inherently worthy because every individual is known to God and loved by him. Every person is, to quote the Psalmist, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’.

This means that a person’s value, dignity or worth does not increase or decrease as they age. It does not depend upon race or social class, upon intellectual ability or usefulness to a society. It does not diminish upon injury or disability.

This is one of the major problems Christianity has with ideologies or belief systems that make the individual’s worth and dignity contingent on their value to the rest of society. Communism, Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism are offences against the idea of the dignity and worth of the individual created in the image of God and of infinite value to him.

It is also one of the major problems with seeing people as a bundle of characteristics, each of which increase or decrease their significance. You are not worth more, you do not have greater dignity, if you are black or white, male or female, attracted to men or women. That kind of thinking leads inevitably and inexorably to the oppression of groups and divisions between people. 

All human lives are possessed of God-given value and rights from the moment they are conceived – when God knits them together in their mother’s womb and begins to plan the adventures he has for them – until the moment they die.

We do not, we dare not, violate that dignity in others or in ourselves. To do so is a crime against the person and, most profoundly, against the Creator whose image they bear.

All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

  1. Ethical Implications

What then does this mean for our moral lives?

It means that to be a Christian is always to be pro-life. 

I am going to explain what I mean by that in a moment. Of course it is nuanced. But it is not negotiable.

The witness of the Christian church from its beginning today, in almost all places and at all times, is that to follow Christ means to be for life. 

That is why Jesus came for us. He came in order that we might have life, and life to the full, life that extends to the ends of the earth, to the depths of hell, and beyond the limits of time.

To be a Christian is to be pro-life because Jesus is radically pro-life.

This has implications that are uncomfortable to talk about in polite British society.

Because Christians believe in the dignity and value of every life, irrespective of age or gender or race or class, we should work to reduce and then eliminate abortion and oppose euthanasia.

Human dignity and worth do not start at a low level, increase until a point of maximal productivity in mid-life and then decline as we get older. Putting it as baldly as this might sound odd. But that is functionally how much contemporary ethical dialogue proceeds. It is common to come across the sentiment that the very young are inconvenient, unnecessary and it would be better all around if they weren’t born at all and there were fewer people. Or that the views of the old should be given less weight and less priority because they in some sense count for less than those of the young.

The creeds begin their narrative of Jesus’ life by recording that he was ‘conceived of the Holy Spirit’. The gospels speak of how John the Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb in celebration of the presence of Christ. That is a reflection of one of the great joys of expecting a baby – to feel him or her move while still within the womb.

Abortion is a direct attack on the weakest human lives. Intentionally ending the life of an unborn human being represents a rejection of the dignity and value of those seen only by God, loved by him, and yet treated as disposable by others.

Now I will concede immediately that these are profoundly painful issues and if anyone is struggling with this, I am happy to listen, to pray and, if needed, to extend God’s forgiveness. 

But we have to confront this painful reality. 

More than seventy million abortions occur throughout the world each year, significantly more than the whole population of the UK.

Every. Year.

This is almost as far from God’s desire and plan for us as it is possible to get.

We will think about the broader questions in a moment. But being pro-life does not mean only that we work for the elimination of abortion.

It means opposing the intentional taking of life in other situations.

Euthanasia is not compatible with Christianity. We do not have the right to take another’s life from them. Nor do we have the right to take our own lives.

Suicide, whether assisted by others or not, is a subject of extraordinary pain. Who truly knows the anguish and illness that afflicts someone who would take their own life, except God himself. 

We address these issues not to condemn those on whom we pray God has mercy and compassion but to protect and care for those who are in pain now.

I can offer many pragmatic arguments against assisted suicide from my time as a lawyer, times when I have seen people take major decisions because of perceived pressure or depression about their worth to others. We protect them against the effects of those decisions because we recognise that they are not thinking clearly. 

Or the fact that the vast majority of those who attempt suicide and survive (between 90 and 95%) do not end up killing themselves. To quote the New England Journal of Medicine, this suggests that ‘many suicidal crises… including attempts that were expected to be lethal’ are actually of a ‘temporary nature and fleeting’. In other words, the evidence we have suggests that the majority of people who try to kill themselves regret it and, if they survive the attempt, do not try again.1

The idea of a settled suicidal wish, for the vast majority of cases, is just not true. And it is a profound and awful tragedy when, instead of working to make that person’s life better, society colludes in ending it.

Yet these are not the most basic arguments. Most fundamentally, euthanasia is wrong because this is a person made in God’s image and neither we nor they have the right to end their life.

All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

We could go on to talk of other examples of affronts to human dignity such as war, capital punishment, poverty, discrimination and so on. We will return to these ideas later in this series.

  1. Putting It Into Practice

What should we do about this? How should it affect the way we behave?

As Voters

As voters, there is realistically no mainstream option among political parties for those who want to work to eliminate abortion.

However, we can campaign on and ask candidates for their plans to reduce the conditions that make abortions attractive.

In the UK, this takes the form of policies such as removing the limit on child benefit, to build more homes, to increase access to adoption services. Each of these might have a measurable effect on the demand for abortion.

We can write to MPs and campaign on the issue of Euthanasia when it comes up. The same applies if the nation is being taken into an unjust war.

As a Church

As a church we should continue to promote a culture that embraces life. That means being clear that caring for the elderly is a priority for us, within our church community and beyond.

It means welcoming children and supporting families with babies. This means going beyond Sundays to the work that we do with midwives, health-care visitors, toddler groups and so on. 

As Individuals

As individuals, the most important thing we can do is to pray.

Beyond that, however, let us challenge ourselves: do we see all people as created in the image and likeness of God? Do my actions and interactions with others reflect this belief?

What about the people who bother us at work, at home, or at school? Do we care for them as made in God’s image? 

All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

  1. Matthew Miller and David Hemenway, ‘Guns and Suicide in the United States’, N Engl J Med 359.10 (2008) < https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923#:~:text=The%20temporary%20nature%20and%20fleeting,on%20to%20die%20by%20suicide. > ↩︎

How Can We Lead Prayer Better?

What are the problems involved in evangelical and charismatic approaches to public prayer? And how can it be done better?

In my (charismatic free) wing of the Church our services don’t feature much written or traditional prayers or liturgies. We prefer to change the exact words we speak to reflect the type of community we are waking in or what we think the Holy Spirit wants us to do at any particular moment.

There are big advantages to this approach. 

It allows us to be flexible, fresh and to respond to the needs and characteristics of the people in Church. It also allows us to be alert to what the Holy Spirit might want to do at the time we are ministering. Finally it allows us to model for the people we are pastoring that they can pray in any language and in a way that is real for their personality and background.

With that said, emphasising contemporaneous prayer also has drawbacks. 

Andrew Wilson has written about the need,  in the midst of spontaneity,  to maintain the essential elements of Christian worship (like praying, reading Scripture, taking communion etc). Otherwise our worship becomes progressively less and less full of the riches of worship the spirit has given to his Church in Scripture and Tradition. We want to be “Eucharismatic” in our worship.

My concern here is a slightly different one. When the charismatic or evangelical worship leader, venue pastor or preacher leads the Church in spontaneous or unplanned prayer, he (or she) is writing liturgy and language that needs to sum up, express and model the concerns of the Church, the needs of the world and the right way to address God. All at the same time as teaching the people how to do that for themselves. 

This is a much harder task to do well than one might imagine. It involves formulating Scripturally sound, theologically rich, pastorally sensitive and reverent words, expressing them contemporaneously and clearly, and then fitting them into the rhythm and setting of an informal worship service. 

If we are not careful the spontaneous prayer we bring becomes all the things we want to avoid as people of the Spirit and Scripture. 

I think there are three particular areas we need to be careful about (drawn from my own failings leading prayer and worship over many years):

  1. Not including much, if any prayer, in public services.
    Here we end up having extended singing followed by a sermon (and maybe communion). There might be a short prayer between songs or at the end. But, if we’re honest, it’s not a particular feature of the service, certainly compared to, for example, sung worship or a talk. 
  2. Having my own personal prayer time in front of the congregation rather than leading them in prayer.
    Here I end up praying in a slight mumble with my eyes closed and talking quickly and informally, as if I am having an internal monologue. The problem is I am not leading the congregation at this point; instead, they are just watching me pray.
  3. Praying prayers that, instead of expressing the immediate, urgent, prophetic intercession of the Spirit praying through me, become predictable, banal, cliched, and dominated by non-words that litter speech such as “just…”, “yeah…” and so on.
    The ‘just’, and ‘yeah’ prayers are actually the least problematic form of this. It gets much worse when public prayer becomes dominated by the concerns or vocabulary of the leader’s own politics or concerns, narrate their own thoughts about life, politics, social issues or Jesus (often with the phrase ‘God, you know that… followed by explaining it to him anyway). At times they can become offensively bad. The most egregious one I’ve heard used the phrase ‘blaze, Spirit, blaze’ from Shine Jesus Shine (an excellent song people are wrongly snobbish about) to segue into intercession about a major fire in which people had lost their lives. It was, to say the least, not optimal.

What can we do to remedy these difficulties if they begin to arise in our context or ministry?
One approach would be to begin using formal, written liturgies. That approach might be one we should consider (I’ll leave that to Andrew to argue for). I think, however, that there is another approach that would allow us to keep the good that we find in spontaneous prayer while also remedying its difficulties.

Resolving these issues requires us to think a bit more about what is happening when we pray publicly, particularly if we do so spontaneously.

Filling Our Stores: The Christian Tradition of Prayer

When we speak publicly, whether in prayer, preaching or some other way, we are essentially bringing words, ideas and idioms out of our minds and memories. No speech is, in that sense, truly spontaneous. We are a bit like jazz musicians Who seem to be producing spontaneous, improvised music but are doing so using scales, techniques and phrases they have internalised over time practising. Or footballers,  who produce moments and movements of inspiration in the immediate context of a match but draw on hours of drills and practised skilIs. 

If we want to lead prayer well,  therefore, we need to practise. 

That means filling our minds and memories with great prayer, Scripture and discipline so that we have something to draw from when we pray in public. In some ways, this is more important for those of us in traditions that don’t use a formal liturgy in our public services than it is for those who do. It is precisely because we want to be able to lead the congregation in spontaneous prayer in response to the Spirit’s leading in the moment of worship that we particularly need to fill our minds and mouths with the language, cadence and concerns of great prayers. We might repeat these exact prayers as we lead people to pray. More likely, though, is that we will begin to pray with a greater fluency and depth when we create our own prayers. We will also find the content of our prayers becomes more timeless and aligned with the eternal and historic concerns of the Church and the saints she contains and less dominated by the phrases and personal preoccupations we unconsciously find ourselves repeating.

Similarly, disciplining ourselves to include in our daily devotional life a set time in the Psalms or the Divine Office imprints on our minds and hearts the central importance of prayer as a discipline for both public and private worship. We will find, then, that the impulse to overlook intentional times of public prayer on the basis that there is no time in the service or that it interrupts the “flow” or mood of sung worship is easier to overcome. 

Moreover, the discipline of reading (out loud) the prayers of the historic Church and of Israel is an antidote to the habit of mumbling to oneself when leading in prayer. These are prayers written and published with the intent of being read publicly. They have that feel about them.  As we begin to make them a part of the unconscious reservoir from which we draw our public prayers, we will begin to find that we construct and project our prayers with a similar tone.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

So what does this mean for those Who regularly lead prayer in charismatic or evangelical  services? 

There are, I think, three specific things that will transform the way we pray, and particularly how we pray in public.

  1. When praying, remember we are leading the congregation and not just praying on our own in front of them.
    That means:
    1. Begin your prayer with clarity. Don’t just let the prayer ’emerge’ from under your breath.
    2. Go at a pace where the congregation can follow what you are saying and agree with it. God can understand you at your fastest speed but we can’t.
    3. Think about what you want to say and then say it. Don’t feel the need to keep on speaking when you don’t have anything to say at that moment.
  2. Plan to pray as part of your service leading.
    If you are not able to say when you are going to lead the congregation in prayer during a service, there is a problem. Choose a time in the service and allocate who is leading prayer and what you want for it. A good test is to think how you would treat the preparation of sung worship in terms of planning etc and then make sure prayer in the service is at least as good and focussed as that.
  3. Twice a day, as part of your daily devotional times, include praying the Psalms and/ or a traditional Daily Office.
    There are lots of modern versions of a liturgy of the hours or something similar. However, to be honest, I think you are better off with one of the older ones from a historic denomination. For me, the best you can do is get the free “Daily Office” app. It is a Catholic app, devoted to systematically praying through the Psalms and uses many of the ancient prayers of the Church. If you don’t want to use a prayer book then read three Psalms (give or take, depending on the Psalm length)twice a day as part of morning and evening prayer.

Throughout this article I have focused on the pragmatic reasons for immersing yourself in the Church’s historic prayers. There is, however, another even more powerful reason to do so. These prayers have been collected, edited, arranged and prayed over millennia. Praying them each day as part of a disciplined prayer life won’t just make you better at praying; it will bring you joy. Ultimately every worship leader themselves needs to draw close to Christ. Disciplined prayer with the church will help you to do that.

Further Reading and Resources

If you want to explore these ideas further or get into praying with the Church, here are some resources to get you started.

Books about this type of prayer for evangelicals:

Prayer Books or Apps

What Is the Future of the Church?

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous…the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous. Therefore it will collapse of its own accord. From today’s crisis this time too a church of tomorrow will rise, which will have lost much. It will become small, and to a large extent it will have to start again from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of its buildings that were built in times of prosperity. Because of the number of its adherents it will lose many of its privileges in society. Unlike in the past, it will present itself much more strongly as an optional community, which can only be joined through a decision to do so. It will surely find new forms of office and ordain reliable Christians as priests, who also have other jobs. But, as before, full-time priests will be essential too.

The future of the church will not come from those who just follow recipes. It will not come from those who just want to choose the easy way. Those who avoid the passion of the faith and call anything demanding false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalistic. To put it positively: the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

But despite all these changes which we can imagine, the church will again decisively find its essential being in what has always been its heart: faith in the triune God and in Jesus Christ. It will be an inward church, which does not bang on about its political mandate and flirts as little with the left as with the right. It will rediscover its own core in faith and prayer and experience the sacraments again as divine service, not a problem of liturgical design. The church will find it hard-going. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much labour. It will become poor, a church of the little people.

The process will be long and difficult. But after the test of this letting go, great power will stream from a church that has been taken to heart and become simplified. For the people of a wholly planned world will become unutterably lonely. When God has disappeared from them, they will feel all their terrible destitution. And then they will discover the little community of believers as something completely new. As a hope that takes root in them, as an answer, which they have always secretly been seeking – as a home which gives them life and hope beyond death.

Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube und Zukunft (Munich, 1970) (quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life (Volume 2), p.70)

How Can We Understand the Bible?

For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. This is a quick guide to how we can understand it’s deep meaning and know God better.

For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. There are bits that seem easy to follow (like when Jesus teaches people), that seem irrelevant (tell me again about eating shellfish in the desert), that are obviously picture language or poetry (the trees in the fields don’t literally clap their hands), and that just seem weird (all of Revelation). 

Then there is the way Biblical authors use other bits of the Bible. For example, John the Baptist looks at Jesus and describes him as “the lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), St Paul writes about the stories of Israel finding water in a rock only to say “the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). It is perfectly reasonable to ask: what on earth is going on?

The church has always believed that the Bible is a book that operates on a number of levels. I recently came across this summary of how this works in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 109-118). It really helped me to categorise the different ways we engage with Scripture. I’ve reproduced it below (with some of my explanation at the end of each section) in case it helps you too.

First, read what the authors meant:

109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

110 In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”

This means that we can’t always simply read the text literalistically. Instead we need to work out what the original author meant and how his readers would have understood his words.

We do this all the time in English. If I said “it’s raining cats-and-dogs outside”, you get an umbrella. You don’t call the RSPCA. You know that in English that is an idiom or metaphor, not literal. And it would be completely inappropriate to treat it like it was.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to read the Bible like a history book (for example when dealing with the Gospels or biographies). Sometimes it’s obviously not (for example when dealing with the poetry in the Psalms). Sometimes it’s complicated because the Bible uses types of books that we aren’t familiar with (like collections of Proverbs or Paleo-History).

Things that can help with this are Pastors and good Bible commentaries.

Second, read Scripture as a whole, assuming that it is coherent and bearing in mind that Jesus is the point of it all:

112 Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”. Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.

The phrase “heart of Christ” can refer to Sacred Scripture, which makes known his heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be interpreted.

This means that as Christians we believe that the Bible has lots of human authors (all writing in their own personalities and using their own styles) but one divine mind behind it. To put it another way, Scripture is loads of books but together they tell one story. And that story is ultimately about Jesus.

This means when you take two texts that seem hard to reconcile or contradict one another, they can almost certainly be read as complementing each other or as talking about different things. If you find something that troubles you in this way talk to a Pastor (or read a good commentary).

Third, read with the Church:

113 2. Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church”. According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (“. . . according to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church”).

114 3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith. By “analogy of faith” we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.

The Bible is a book that is meant to be read in community. Jesus promises that as we live together as the Church, we are guided by his Spirit and learn how to read the Bible correctly (eg John 15:26). This goes for the Church in the world now but also throughout time. We want to hear how the Spirit has directed us to read Scripture, and that means reading it in the community of the Church. It also means that sometimes we have to have the humility to accept that we may have misunderstood something from Scripture and to be corrected.

Four, pay attention to the different senses of Scripture:

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”83

117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
1. the allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.
2. the moral sense. the events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.
3. the anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:

The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.

This is the hardest bit for us to grasp but it makes sense of how the apostles and other Biblical writers used Scripture and unlocks a lot of what God is wanting to tell us through it.

Put simply, there are four ways that we can interpret different bits of the Bible. They aren’t contradictory – they are like levels of meaning (kind of like a Russian doll). They are:

  1. The “Letter” or “Literal” sense.
    This doesn’t mean taking everything literally. It means asking what a passage would have meant to the original readers. This is what we talked about above. It means reading bits of the Bible according to the type of book they are (poetry, history etc). It is the basic question: what is the writer trying to say here. For a lot of modern Bible scholars, this is as far as they go (which is a shame and means we miss a lot of meaning that the ancient church understood).
  2. The “allegorical” sense.
    This means way that the bits of the Bible we are reading teach us lessons about Jesus even when he doesn’t explicitly appear. This is what John the Baptist is doing when he describes Jesus as the “Lamb of God” or what St Paul is doing when he describes a Rock from the Old Testament as being about Jesus. It realises that when God inspired the Bible he was always pointing us to Jesus, even when the original authors didn’t realise it. So, for example, the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is designed to teach us about Jesus and the church (see Ephesians 5:31-32). Another word for this is Typology.
  3. The Moral sense.
    This is obvious. Bits of the Bible are designed to teach us how to behave. When it says “don’t steal”, you don’t need to reach for a commentary (particularly if the commentary isn’t yours). Other narratives can also teach moral lessons. So, for example, the story of Cain and Abel can teach valuable moral lessons about the danger of anger, jealousy and the destructive consequences of violence.
  4. The “anagogical” or “mystical” sense.
    Stories we find in Scripture can ultimately teach us something important about our eternal destiny in Jesus. So, for example, the story of God bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt, through a time of trials and testing in the desert, over a river (literally through something that kills people) and into a promised land is a picture of the way God rescues souls, leads them through life and brings them through death to heaven.

You don’t need to be an expert at spotting all these levels of meaning in Scripture right away. One of the good things about being part of a Church is that many men and women have spent their lives meditating on Scripture and explaining to us what they saw so that we can see it too. It’s also part of why God gives the church teachers – so that we can grow in understanding him and his word to us.

Free-will, Grace and Election: A Pastoral Guide

One of the theological questions that has the potential to cause the most concern for some Christians is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and our freedom.
It is a topic that I have wrestled with a good deal myself as well as being asked about it by concerned members of my church. I want to explain my conclusions in case they are helpful to anyone else who is wrestling with this issue.

One of the theological questions that has the potential to cause the most concern for some Christians is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and our freedom.

It is an issue that I have wrestled with a good deal myself as well as being asked about it by concerned members of my church. I remember being at University studying law (but interested in theology) and worshipping at a moderately Calvinistic Baptist Church. The prevailing view in that congregation was that Calvinist understandings of predestination were correct. The most popular articulation of that how was the high evangelical Calvinism of John Piper and the movement around him in the US. This caused me a tailspin- what if I was not really ever choosing anything? Was I really free? Did I even exist as a mind or soul in any meaningful way? I was profoundly unhappy for and while before resolving some of these questions in prayer and reading. 

Years later I flirted with the Open Theism of Greg Boyd and others but soon found a similar level of anxiety and dissatisfaction with the exegesis I was being urged to accept. I ended up realising that I did not fully accept the exegesis or synthesis of either the rigorous Calvinists or the Open Theists. I went away and did some more reading (and praying) particularly in the Church Fathers, Reformers and Eastern Orthodox writers. In the rest of this article I want to explain my conclusions in case they are helpful to anyone else who is wrestling with this issue. In keeping with the ether of this blog, I have tried to be as un polemical and consensual as I can while also saying what I think is true.

The first part of this article outlines a classical Christian understanding of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom, ultimately arguing that John Wesley’s synthesis of these ideas is the most helpful,  but not necessarily the only correct,  way of seeing this question at least within the limits of actual lived human experience.  The second part  will focus on how we can read the Bible well when these issues come up.

Thinking About Free-will and Predestination

The question of free-will and predestination is a massive one and I’m not sure I will be able to answer it satisfactorily. In some ways, that is part of the key to coming to peace with it. We have minds designed to operate within time and to perceive it as acting in a linear way. Then when we try to work out how God (who exists above and beyond time) acts in relation to us we become confused. That confusion is inevitable – it flows from the natural limitations of our present existence; we can’t expect to understand it because it is a question that is by its nature not one that can be grasped by us. I don’t think that this is a cop-out but rather recognises that there is a fundamental difference between ourselves and God that prevents us from even imagining the answers to certain questions (another, related, example is what was there before the beginning / big bang etc? We can’t even properly conceive of an answer because in our experience everything has a prior cause and everything exists within creation – beyond that we can’t speak).

With that said, there are certain propositions that orthodox Christians have generally held to be true whatever background they come from (ie Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant etc). 

  1. God is free to do whatever he wants. 
  2. God knows the future. 
  3. As we perceive it, we are free to act in the present. 
  4. Without God’s prior grace that freedom does not extend to choosing him (ie he has to act first).
  5. There is (at least as we perceive it) the possibility of anyone coming to Christ. 
  6. Our grace-enabled freedom (as we perceive it) continues after we come to Christ into the choices we make to become like him. 
  7. While we have faith in Jesus God will keep us to the end.

Different groups have explained how we can hold all of these ideas together in different ways. On a fundamental level, as long as one is able to affirm all of them the explanatory net underneath doesn’t matter as much as we sometimes imply.

My own preference is for Wesley’s framework which fuses (in my view) the best of Eastern and Western Christianity. In this model, all humanity is fallen and therefore tends by nature to do wrong, all are experiencing the grace of God in some way and this grace is intended to enable them to respond to Christ in a way that is appropriate for them (commonly called prevenient grace), we come to Christ when God’s Spirit opens our hearts to enable us to respond (providing us freedom) and we then choose to respond. At that point God freely and totally forgives us in a way we could never contribute to or merit (justifying grace). Thereafter we have freedom to become like Christ insofar as we remain in relationship with God’s Spirit (sanctifying grace) and God then leads us to glory (glorifying grace).

Throughout all of this I want to affirm that God is sovereignly in control of the future but makes space within his plans for us to have true, grace empowered freedom. In the past I have used the (limited) analogy of a sat-nav in which the destination is programmed but the driver has freedom to keep turning off the route, although I wouldn’t want to push this too far.

Reading the Bible

Having thought about the overall framework Christians might use when discussing these questions, we can now address how we can read Scripture when the topic or language of predestination or election comes up. 

We have to be aware when we read Scripture that we often unconsciously read it with a particular set of prior ideas in mind. In my experience this is nowhere better illustrated than in relation to predestination. 

‘Predestination’

Throughout the Scriptures the writers are trying to balance these truths: 

  1. God is free; 
  2. God knows all things; 
  3. God loves humanity; and 
  4. human beings are (as we perceive it) free; 

In any given chapter one or other of these themes may be more prominent than the others but this will nearly always be balanced out somewhere else. This is why it is important to (as you very commendably have) get familiar with the whole of Scripture.

With that caveat, in the New Testament references to predestination are nearly always to the end state of believers ie what is the final fate of those who are in Christ? The answer is their final salvation and transformation. Thus in Romans 8:29-30, God foreknew those who would respond to Christ and the destination he chose for them was justification and glorification. Predestination refers to where believers are going (ie if we hold to Christ God has chosen a wonderful destination for us, he isn’t leading us nowhere).

‘Election‘

When we’re reading references in Scripture to ‘election’ or something similar, it is important to remember two distinctions that are very easy to forget:

  • There is a difference between corporate and individual election.
    In corporate election a group can be chosen because they all fulfil some other criteria. An example would be choosing to cheer for a particular football team. My (undoubtedly wise) choice to cheer for Spurs means that I will also cheer for each of their players, whoever those players happen to be at the moment.
    In individual election a particular person is chosen without reference to their membership of a group or their relationship to an individual.
    The distinction is complicated in Scripture when one person can be chosen (like Jesus or Abraham), which is individual election, and then others are chosen because of how they relate to that individual (like Israel or the church).
    We always need to ask what type of election is being referred to and in reference to whom.
  • People can be chosen for a particular purpose or task without that referring to their eternal salvation. For this reason we always need to ask what the person or people are chosen for.

In the New Testament, references to election are nearly always corporate. They refer to God’s plans for a particular group (Israel, the church, or those in Jesus Christ). Reading them as referring (at least in the first instance) to individuals is misreading them. The question of who is a part of that group is a separate one which is nearly always answered in respect of the church by pointing to those who have faith in Christ. 

For example, Romans 9 is part of the overall argument from 8-11 about the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles in the church. Paul wants to answer the questions, are the Gentiles part of the elect group? If so, how? What about the Jews? His answers are ‘yes’, ‘by faith’, and ‘also by faith.’ The argument proceeds through chapter 9 by pointing out that God determined the criteria by which the Jews were elect (they were children of the promise given to Abraham). Note this refers to Israel as a group rather than the salvation of any particular Jew. God’s choice was sovereign – it wasn’t because Abraham was good or his descendants were good but because God gets to set the entry criterion: 9:14. They then complain that they haven’t done anything wrong; they kept the law so why should the Gentiles be included by faith? Paul’s answer is that membership of the elect group has always been by faith and now it includes the Gentiles: 9:30-33. 

The overall point of the argument is that God determines the group that he justifies. Individual membership of that group is by faith (implying freedom and response, v.32) and not by works. Far from teaching that God predetermines and elects certain individuals prior to any faith of theirs, the chapter teaches that God determines that all who have faith will be part of the elect group whether they are Jew or Greek. The question is then what about Israelites who don’t believe in Jesus and this is what Paul deals with in chapters 10 and 11, a flow that only makes sense if 9 is about the group rather than the individuals.

I point this out because we get so used to reading chapters out of the stream of the overall  argument of the letter that we assume they are talking about us (as individuals) rather than us, the church, (as a group). God has chosen the church – we (together) are elect. On a deeper level this is because he has chosen Jesus and we are in him (this is the point of Ephesians 1). None of this necessitates that human beings are not (as far as we perceive it) free. In fact it implies exactly the opposite – that by God’s grace we are free to enter the elect group through Christ.

One solution to this is wherever you come across a passage that seems odd in its predestinarian thinking, try reading the chapters either side as one block and see if that changes how it comes across.

Further Reading

I would start by checking out Thomas C. Oden’s The Transforming Power of Grace which manages to be steeped in consensual, ecumenical exegesis of Scripture and yet also readable and enjoyable (and thin!).  

For commentaries on this issue, particularly in the context of Romans, there is a deeper and balanced discussion in Ben Witherington III with Darlene Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p.236-259 which I found very helpful. Slightly different perspectives can also be found in Douglas M. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (part of the more Reformed NICNT series) and Scott W. Hahn, Romans (part of the Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture).