Y Safle

Have you ever wondered where we get the term “freelancer”?

In the fifteenth century, warfare was changing. The arrival of gunpowder, and especially of cannon, had changed everything. The fall of the great city of Constantinople in 1453 – the final destruction of the Roman empire – served as a demonstration of how cannon could achieve what no army had ever managed – to breach Constantine’s massive fortifications.

Before this final siege, defenders had always held the advantage in a siege situation. Attacking armies were in the field, exposed to counter attack and at the end of long supply trains. But now with cannon the tables were turning. It was now possible to breach the mightiest of defensive walls.

European warfare had also, over the centuries, concentrated on cavalry. Knights, who could ride and fight atop horses, were drawn from the aristocracy, and were a warrior elite that had held sway in a time when there was no money for standing armies. Peasants could be archers, and these were important, but with the return of sufficient currency in europe to pay for them, another important force arose – infantry.

Swiss infantry quickly became some of the most sought after – mercenary armies of infantry who would fight for anyone with sufficient silver to pay their wages, and throughout Europe wars were now won or lost by infantry, and not cavalry.

The reason for this was easy to see. These infantrymen, with their long pikes and spears, if they stood their ground, were nearly impregnable. No cavalry could force their horses to throw themselves on those pikes, and so the cavalry charge was blunted. The independent infantry – the free lancers – were what every army needed.

But there was an important proviso here. The infantry had to stand together. If they lost their nerve – even just a few of them – and broke ranks, then the formation would collapse, the defense would be lost, and the infantrymen could be picked off one by one on the field of battle.

Every free lancer knew what it was to entrust his life to his comrades. The same was true in the defeat of the highlander charge at the battle of Culloden. The charge was defeated because each rifle man was tought to put his bayonet not in the man running at him, but the man immediately next to him. Thus the bayonet could bypass the highlander’s shield. But every infantry man on the field had to entrust his life to his neighbour. This took courage, but also an exemplary level of trust.

So how much do we trust *our* peers? More to the point, how much can they trust us? Could we be faithful in such situations?

Peter said he would stand by Jesus, but when the soldiers came, he departed and denied his Lord. But never again. Peter later stood firm in his testimony and he died for his trust in the Lord who would save him. Indeed, nearly all the disciples of Christ were eventually martyred for their faith in him. That was trust.

John Wesley was approached by the customs and revenue officer, raising taxes. He was asked what silver he had that he might be assessed for taxation. As a clergyman, it was expected he had reasonable wealth. Wesley replied that he had a teaspoon.

Like so many other Christians, Wesley trusted in God to provide for his needs, and saw no profit in hoarding wealth. He knew where true wealth lay, and did not need the crutch of materialism. That too was trust.

History is replete with examples of people who trusted God to meet their needs, because they understood what trust was.

When we speak of fighting the good fight, do we have any vision of what it would be like to be a free lancer, having the tide of battle wash over us, trusting in those around us to stand firm with us?

An enjoyable childhood in which children are encouraged to play is not necessarily a bad thing. Children are designed to learn through play, and imaginitive play is a very important part of this. Of course, if we just buy all the latest toys, where does the imagination go? Hannah loves being pushed around in the laundry basket, and both girls like to climb onto a blanket and “fly away” to exotic places. We don’t need a filght simulator to make that work!

Video games are also an issue because of the time they waste, and the sedentry lifestyle they encourage. But I don’t think we need to ban video games – we just need to keep the balance right. The same for television and just about everything else.

But where I think our society is going wrong is in the whole notion of “youth culture” as something different from our current culture. The reason these young people are not growing up, and are learning to behave like debauched idiots is because they are associating only with other young people. They disdain contact with more mature adults, and nothing in our society really forces them to associate with adults any more.

Now it is basic human nature that we conform to our societal norms, because (in the absence of Christ at least) we derive our sense of significance from our standing in whatever group or society we inhabit. So if you get groups of young people, they derive significance and a sense of self worth from one another by behaving in a manner that idolises what sets their group apart (their youth). And so they act more like immature people – because they need the sense of self worth that this brings them.

So how do we change it?

In our churches we have “youth work”, which is important. But youth work that separates the youth from the Church and never attempts to integrate them into the larger body is counter productive. It becomes increasingly secular and often embarrassing. It dishonours God.

So bring the youth work back into the life of the Church. Involve the pastor and everyone else. Have joint events, and fund raising by young people working with or for the older people.

Any other ideas? Please add them in the comments.

We know that scripture does not contain all prophecy. Scripture tells us of
people who prophesied but whose prophecy is not recorded.

It seems to me (and I derive my view from, I think primarily, Wayne Grudem [see:
Systematic Theology, Grudem, IVP] ) That New Testament prophecy differed from
Old Testament prophecy. The Old Testament prophets had a specific role in
bringing us the special revelation of God. They tell us of his character,
his workings in the life of man, and particularly they point to the
incarnation as the focal point of history. The time when our saviour would
come and usher in the kingdom of God. They knew that Jesus would be our
salvation, and they pointed to him over and over until John the Baptist, the
last “Old Testament” prophet came to prepare the way of the LORD.

Jesus has now come, and we live in his kindom already. The Kingdom of God is
both hear, and yet it is to come. We are already living in the kingdom and
yet it is not here (the so-called eschatological hope).

What this means for prophecy is that it is no longer required (at least,
there was a requirement in the 1st century for prophecy specifically
relating to the work of Christ, but that prophecy is given – the task of it
was given to the apostles). The view is usually stated: “we have the
scriptures, we do not need further infallible revelation”.

This is quite true, but I would suggest that New Testamant prophets were not
the same as OT prophets. Note the Apostles gave us the NT scriptures, not
the people who prophesied.

So what did they prophesy?

Literally prophecy is the telling forth of God’s word. It is a forthtelling,
not a foretelling. There may be occasional prohecies that appear to be
foretellings. Charismatics would usually call these “words of knowledge”.
Whether the label is correct is not too important, as it is possible to
preach the word of God straight from the Bible “prophetically”. The prophecy
comes in the action of the Holy Spirit in applying the infallible scriptures
to a situation and a specific people. It is a telling forth of God’s word
that will indeed not return void.

Again, prophecy is not infallible revelation at all. It is a forth telling
of the very words of God into a situation.

It is a widely held belief amongst pentecostals and charismatics that one can receive the gift of tongues and a prophetic interpretation of those tongues.

Tongues are a contentious issue in the modern Church. Indeed they always
have been. Our largest problem with modern day tongues speaking is that we
cannot be absolutely certain how people spoke in tongues in the days of the
apsotles. Thus we must be careful that we do not claim passages to support
our practises that actually mean something slightly different.

I am of the view that tongues probably did sound much like the tongues we
hear today, but we ascertain from scripture that the use of tongues was
primarily as a prayer language (1 Cor 14:14). When someone speaks in a
tongue they speak to God. They are praying. It is not God speaking to them
but them speaking to Him.

We should not be surprised that prayer formed a part of corporate worship,
but notice what was happening in Corinth. People were puffed up with pride
in their spirituality. They came together and spoke in tongues together so
that no one could say the “amen” to their prayers. They were showing off.
This sinful and
proud use of this gift was of no benefit to anyone. There was no one who
understood the prayer and could say “amen” to it.

What does Paul say? That he would pray with his spirit and his mind also. He
tells the congregation that any tongue must be interpreted before the
congregation can move on. There is no point meeting together and all
speaking in tongues so that no one can understand, because no one is
edified. They might as well all sit in their own prayer closets and pray in
private. Why did they meet together in this way at all? Won’t an unbeliever
on seeing it say “they are all mad!”?

So tongues are prayers from the spirit of the man to God, enabled through
the Holy Spirit. The interpretation is just a making known of the prayer, so
that we can say “amen” to it.

The question is asked, why did Paul call this prophecy? The answer being
that he did not. 1 Cor 14:5 simply says that prophecy is greater than
tongues unless there is an interpretation. Paul never says that the
interpretation makes the tongue prophecy. He merely says that the value of
tongues is increased enormously by the interpretation, putting it on a par
with prophecy.

I see no reason why heartfelt and Spirit inspired prayer to God should be
thought to be less important than prophecy, and Paul seems to agree.

‘We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.’

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 3 (quoting St. Augustine)

Augustine’s Just War theory still is at the heart of ethical justification of many of our wars, but is the teory sufficient? Augustine argued that Christians should rather suffer loss than go to war, but did not make the same case for the head of a Christian state. Rather, the head of state may declare war in the interests of maintaining peace. If our peace is threatened, or if we have suffered grave loss, then our head of state may declare war.

I am not particularly happy with the just war theory, and part of my objection lies in this statement, made by a friend:

> A pretty standard observation is that non-combatants get
> killed in wars of any “stripe”. That is often said as if it
> were a surprise. The important question, it seems to me, is
> whether fewer civilians get killed in a Just War than would be
> killed if there were no war.

There is an issue of responsibility here, and we should note that humans
are not like beans that can be counted and weighed one against another.
If there is a room full of unconcious people who are about to die in a
fire, and I throw them from a window so that half of them survive,
whereas half of them die from the fall, then I have indeed saved half of
them, and my actions – it seems to me – are ethical (assuming there was
no better means to save them available to me!).

But now consider this same room, and I decide I will save these people
by releasing a flood from some water tanks that will quench the fire. I
do so knowing I will drown several other people in another room. Is it
now ethical for me to spend the lives of other people to save these?

If one volunteers for action then one says that their life is available
to be laid down for the cause for which the action is prosecuted. But
what of those who do not volunteer for this action and do not want it?
What right have we to lay *their* lives down for the sake of others?

This is the kind of messy ethical situation one finds oneself in when
attempts at a peaceful resolution to a festering problem are abandonded
for the economic, logistical and political expediency for war.

I think it is a mistake to try and shoehorn our actions into Augustine’s
Just War theory – we may manage to do so, or we may not, but the danger
is that in uncritically accepting a theory from another age, whose
underlying ethics we have not investigated, we may attempt to abdicate
our responisbilities as Christians to consider the issues carefully for
ourselves in the light of a fundamental biblically derived Christian
ethic. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, such a Christian ethic would need to examine everything from our
current lifestyle, our culture and its assumptions as well as the
morality of both the Iraqi and western regimes.

Saddam Hussain wore his immorality on his sleave, and a reading of
Amnesty International reports is terrifying, but let us not fall into
the trap of imputing some overarching morality on our own nations – many
of Saddam’s atrocities were perpetrated with western backing, and using
western weaponry. The massacre he was executed for was perpetrated under the noses of the US army, and with their permission given to Saddam to breach the no fly zones to perpetrate the massacre.

Regarding the government’s new morality:

This completely fails to take into account the views and beliefs of all those involved. The idea that new Labour — which has got every second thing wrong and is back-tracking on extended drinking hours, is in a mess over this cash-for-peerages business, cannot keep all its prisons under control — the idea that new Labour can come up with a new morality which it forces on the Catholic Church after 2,000 years; I am sorry, this is amazing arrogance on the part of the Government.

Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.

Tony Blair’s Labour Party today has refused to allow exemptions to Catholic adoption agencies regarding placing of children with homosexual couples. Instead they have given the agencies 21 months to comply with the law (which at least makes it no longer Tony Blair’s problem).

On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said:

“There is legislation and legislation and some legislation, however well intended, in fact does create a new kind of morality, a new kind of norm – as this does.”

“The legislation about the adoption by homosexual people of children, it does seem to me we are having a new norm for what marriage is, because I think normally children should be brought up by a father and a mother and I think that we hold that that is extremely important.

“The government has a right to legislate and homosexual couples are also able to adopt in other agencies but we want to hold onto this principle.”

It seems that we are heading down the French secular model – where religious expression and morality is to be outlawed for the sake of inclusiveness – without realising that the inclusivity is sacrificed in the process.

Notice what the Catholic adoption agencies are *not* saying. They are not saying that adoption to gay couples should be outlawed. They are not saying that it should be illegal for gay people to adopt children. If they were, then we could say that they are not being inclusive. But rather, the government is saying that a Christian body may not act to improve the common good in the British state, unless they are forced to act against their own moral values – in a way that they honestly believe to be to the detyriment of the state.

That is a new morality which outlaws the old. (and Labour knows all about outlawing things. They have outalwed more things and destroyed more civil liberties than any peace time administration).

The sooner this bunch of crooks (Tony cash-for-honours Bliar), liars, warmongers and career politicians (voted in by a mere 36% of voters – the lowest share of the vote ever received by a governing party) gets out of office, the better.

In the continued illegal US detentions at Guantanamo bay, we see an administration that
continues to flout international law, human rights and its alleged
commitment to truth and justice for the sake of some fuzzy expedient
predicated on the spurious grounds that an administration can declare
war on a concept. This is clearly a serious departure from any moral
underpinnings one might perceive.

When I make statements like these, someone often replies:
> I’m relieved that those who are
> sworn to kill us and other innocent people are being held somewhere.
> But their desire and efforts to kill us probably has something to
> do with it.

The fallacy of this argument is in the assumption
that these people are guilty.

It is uncontentious that evil people be locked away, where they can
do no harm. Few people would have much difficulty with such an opinion
(and indeed, I do not).

But the false belief here that brings the argument for continued
detention crashing down is that someone can be validly considered evil
and a menace to one and all, simply because some politician dictates
that it is so.

No one in Guantanamo bay can now ever be successfully and fairly
prosecuted for a crime – the illegal detention has seen to that, so
legal doctrine tells us they are all innocent.

But more than that, the vast majority really *are* innocent. If there
were evidence of a crime then they would surely have been prosecuted by
now. Some are simply victims of mistaken identity, and others were in
the wrong place at the wrong time. But one way or another, they are
innocent, and so the case for locking them up comes tumbling down.

Another argument:

> In WWII both sides took prisoners, with America and
> it’s allies keeping most of theirs alive.

As, indeed, did the Germans.

> The intention
> being that removing combatants from the battlefield
> would hasten the end of the conflict.

But the “war on terrorism” is not *war*. I believe in the war on want.
Shall I kidnap everyone who runs a business, has a share portfolio,
owns a house or runs a car with an engine larger that 1 litre, and lock
them all away in…ooh, shall we say… Merthyr Tydfil, until such a
time as we have won the war?

Terrorists are criminals. If we capture a terrorist we should prosecute
them according to our established legal systems and doctrines. If we
cannot prosecute them, because we have no actual evidence that they
really *are* terrorists, then they are free to go.

That is what it means to live in a free(ish) society.

Christians like to ask, what would Jesus do? Would he lock people away in Guantanamo
bay, leave them to rot, with no legal representation, nor contact with
their families, allowing them to be tortured and abused?

Is that what Christ said we should do with our enemies?

Utilitarianism is the philosophy that says the moral worth of an action is determined by its utility only, and the utility is defined in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number.

For instance, if we see people in poverty, and they cannot afford to eat, then we are morally obliged to give them money or help them out of poverty, because it is in their best interests that we do so. So far so good.

But an objection to utilitarianism is that if a single man with no immediate family walks into a hospital where there is a man needing a heart transplant, another needing a liver transplant, another needing a kidney transplant, then we should kill the single man and harvest his organs. The greatest utility comes from the sacrifice of the one man to cure the three.

A utilitarian might reply that in the real world such could not happen, because a hospital that acted in such a way would quickly fall into disuse as no sensible person would darken its doors. But this, to me, is little more than a kind of special pleading. The problem with utilitarianism as a philosophy lies entirely within the assumption that our innate sense of morality must be ignored.

You see, a utilitarian will point to emotional and instinctive responses to moral questions and argue that these are evolutionary vestiges that may not be appropriate in the modern context. They will say we must ignore the emotional response that cries out that it is simply wrong to kill a man to harvest his organs. Moral choices are reduced to a simple economy of utility.

So should we invade a country to remove a despotic dictator? The utilitarian must say yes – if the end result will be in the interests of more people than the number of whom it is against their interests.

There is no place for the belief that we have some innate worth beyond being beans to be counted in the weighing up of utility.

But if we, each of us, matter to God. If we bear his image then we are more than carriers of organs (or self interests or whatever). As bearers of his image we have worth that cannot be measured in this simplistic manner.

Should Christians listen to secular rock music? Someone said to me:

> The Bible says ‘to prove all things and hold fast to that which is
> good’ Have you proved secular Rock Music and do you think it is
> good?

Some of it is very good.

But the serious answer is “yes”. I apply the same criterion to rock
music as to books. There is a great deal of rock music I would never
purchase, nor willingly listen to. There is also a great deal that I
*do* listen to. In some cases, I find the *message* in the music is a
powerful one. Occasionally I will use a song in order to make a
spiritual point to teenagers.

Non Christians have things to say too!

The answer this comment drew was:

> No kidding! I notice they have a lot to say on just about everything.
> Some of them are under the delusion that they are the answer to the
> world’s problems (their ability to make money that is); but I fail to
> see any image of God in them,

I think this is a core problem. If you do not see God’s image in our
fellow humans then it is all to easy to lack compassion for them
Every one of us bears God’s image. The image may be diminished and
marred, especially so in the lives of an evil and adulterous generation,
but it is still true that every one of us *is* an image bearer of the
living God.

We need to be less judgemental of our fellow image bearers, and scratch
beneath the surface. A singer is just another flawed human being, loved
by God, just like every one of us.

The cult of fame and fortune in our society blinds us sometimes to the
humanity of those we idolise or envy, but when all is said and done,
these people are still worth listening to (if *anyone* is worth
listening to).