“You can’t really move forward unless you first look back”

In May this year (2021) after several delays due to Covid restrictions we were able to launch two very important books at Ridley College by Dr Stuart Piggin the Sydney historian. I was given the privilege of being the speaker on this occasion. What follows is the address that I gave. The occasion was also combined with a celebration of the centenary of the late John Stotts birth and the annual Charles Perry lecture also given by Dr Stuart Piggin.

The book launch address by Peter Corney.

It is a great pleasure and privilege to have a role on this occasion today. Because three people whom I admire and greatly respect are featured here today. First, John Stott who had such a profound, inspired, and wide influence on contemporary Evangelicalism and indeed on my own life and ministry.  Second, Stuart Piggin, a friend, and whose work as a historian of the Christian influence on our nation is so important. Third, Harry Goodhew a person and an Australian Church leader I greatly admire.

We are gathered to launch two books “Attending to the National Soul” and the biography of Harry Goodhew. The first is the second volume of Stuart Piggin and the late Robert Linder’s history of the significant influence of Evangelical Christians on our nation’s history since European settlement. The first volume covered the period from 1740 – 1914 and this volume from 1914 – 2014.

The record in these two volumes is so important and needs to be made more widely known especially in our current cultural context. One where the Christian foundations of our culture are now largely forgotten or distorted by an aggressive secularism and various ideological reconstructions.

There is a rather quirky novel by a French writer Michel Tournier whose central character is a fourth Wise Man in the life of Jesus. His unique role is that he always arrives too late for the great events in the life of Jesus. He misses the nativity, he’s just too late for the Sermon on the Mount and arrives too late for the Last Supper in the upper room. But he does find a bit of left- over bread and picks it up and eats it!

The story is a bit like a metaphor for the present state of Western culture. So preoccupied with the present, so distracted by our prosperity, our popular media and entertainment, so controlled by a hyper individualism, that we have missed or lost the knowledge and meaning of the past key events and beliefs that have shaped our culture and its best values.

But like Tournier’s fourth wise man we still manage to scrounge some meagre sustenance for our weakening inherited values from what we have missed or abandoned from the scraps that are left behind. But the scraps are disappearing, and historical amnesia is a dangerous affliction for a culture’s future.

It is said that ‘‘you can’t really move forward till you first look back.” I first heard that statement from an indigenous female elder in North Queensland as she was discussing the way forward in relationships between indigenous and other Australians.

Stuart’s historical work helps us to do that with the history of the Church in Australia as we try to move forward in tackling the challenges we have today in our contemporary culture. For example, in chapters eleven and twelve there is a good account of the challenges presented to our culture and the Church by the 1960’s and 70’s period of radical and rapid social change. It records how parts of the Church responded poorly, and so declined rapidly by the 1980’s but many evangelicals did better and were more creative and adaptive in that period especially in the youth culture of the Baby Boomers.

We are now in a new and even more challenging period of change and the Churches cultural profile is smaller and more contested. To meet these challenges, we need to first look back if we are to move forward creatively and faithfully. This book helps us do that.

There are different ways of looking back, some are helpful, and some are not. For example:

• Nostalgia is not usually very productive.
• Grief and anger at our losses are not very productive either.
• But examining past responses to social and cultural changes and challenges can be. You can see the mistakes more clearly and identify the creative and positive responses that were influential and productive, and which contain key principles.

This major work helps us do that. So, thank you Stuart and to the late Bob Linder for these two volumes of the history of the Church in Australia and the key contribution of Evangelicals. May they have the influence they deserve.

My second task is to launch Stuarts fine biography of Harry Goodhew. Harry is a person and a leader whom I greatly admire. He has that rare combination of Godliness and strength of conviction with inclusiveness and collaboration. Not a common combination! The book is a very comprehensive study of his life and the influences on him.

There are many interesting insights to be gained from Harry’s life and into the Diocese of Sydney. One of the fascinating things to me was Stuarts inside account of Harrys election as the Archbishop of Sydney in 1993. It’s an eyewitness and insiders account of the politics of such elections by Stuart who actually ran Harry’s campaign. An unusual role for a historian!

The other thing that caught my attention was that Harrys ministry in the parish of St Stephens Coorparoo in Brisbane coincided roughly with mine at St Hilary’s Kew in Melbourne in the early 1970’s, a very turbulent time culturally. What I discovered in Stuart’s biography was that St Stephens and St Hilary’s both approached that period of change in similar ways, and both grew to become large congregations in a time when others were declining. For example, they both pursued the following methods: (a) Strong youth ministry with contemporary worship and culturally relevant music. (b) An effective evangelistic ministry, Harry developed E.E (Evangelism Explosion) and Kew used Christianity Explained. (Today one would probably use “Alpha.”) (c) Both adapted and applied Church Growth principles that were drawn from cultural analysis of the social changes taking place. They included developing lay ministry gifts, small groups in homes, and connecting with the local community and its needs. This is an example of my earlier observation about learning from the past especially in periods of dramatic social change. Find the principles of adaption that are effective and consistent with our theological convictions! To move forward we have to first look back!

So, it is my great pleasure to launch both these excellent books that have so much to teach us about how we can respond to the challenges we face today.

Peter Corney (Vicar Emeritus St Hilary’s Kew.)

 NEW ZEALANDS TRAGEDY AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL – Peter Corney

On the 27^th August 2020 the New Zealand’s High court brought down the judgement of imprisonment for life without release on Brenton Tarrant the Australian terrorist who attacked two Mosques in New Zealand on March 15^th, 2019. He shot and killed 51 people and seriously injured 40 others with semi-automatic weapons. This terrible tragedy struck at the heart of the way New Zealanders think of themselves, as tolerant and inclusive people. Many of the victims were relatively recent immigrants to N.Z.

This event raises many questions for us: Is the perpetrator, a self-confessed member of the extreme ‘alt -right’ and a ‘white supremacist’, part of a growing movement that will further stress our democratic liberal societies and how do we counter that? Given what appears to have motivated this act how can we survive the pressures being created by the massive people movements around the world, the clash of cultures and the xenophobia they produce? Can we reign in the spread of these toxic ideological viruses on the ‘Web’ that seem to be the way many like Brenton Tarrant are radicalised?

There are deep tensions in Europe as they have coped with several large waves of people fleeing the violence in North Africa and the Middle East. Some countries have reintroduced border controls in spite of the EU’s policy on free movement. The Pandemic has added to existing tensions, and the financial and unemployment pressures it brings will increase these.  It also raises the question of the disturbing link between ultra-right-wing and extreme nationalist politics and religion. This includes for example; Hindu nationalism in India, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Islam and extremist violence in Pakistan to non-Islamic groups. All public figures on the political left or right, and particularly religious leaders, need to take great care with their rhetoric in these dangerous days. Christians need to remember “that they will know we are Christians by our love.”

But in addition to these socio-political questions another ancient question raises its head once more. It is a question we prefer to keep at bay till another atrocity hits our screens. It is the reptile we keep locked away in the cellar of our minds – the reality of evil.

Our writers have turned to metaphor to name it and the paradox of its presence alongside human goodness and beauty. It has been called “the worm in the rose” and “the maggot in the breast”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made the point most elegantly when he wrote, “the line dividing good and evil goes right through the heart of every human being.” In its larger mystical sense St. Paul described it as “the mystery of iniquity” and Conrad as “the heart of darkness.”

But however we name it we must face it if we are to defeat it, both in our societies, our nations and ourselves. Optimistic Humanism wants to deny it. Scientific Naturalism wants to explain it away as the blind indifferent and brutish survival process of evolution. Secular sociology and psychology want to explain it sociologically or chemically.

But we all know this will not do. These explanations are inadequate and reductionist. When confronted with the beast we instinctively feel its malevolent spiritual reality. It may be that the reason that our first response is either to deny or rationalize it is because we do not want to face its presence in ourselves and the challenge it presents. But face the challenge we must, or the darkness will overpower us. When Bonheoffer faced the darkness in the form of the German Nazi party in the 1940’s he wrote: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Of the many horrors of the 20^th and 21^st C that one could recount I chose two reflections by people who were actually present when the beast got off the chain. I chose them because they reveal in a very personal way that when intelligent and sophisticated people are confronted with rampant evil, they can only describe it in terms that reveal their intuitive sense of its malevolent spiritual reality.

In 1993/4 General Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian army officer was appointed the Commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda. Due to an inadequate force size and the negligent unwillingness of the UN to make decisions, in spite of his repeated appeals, he was unable to prevent the deaths of 800,000 people in the intertribal mayhem and murder that erupted over a period of 100 days. In his heart-rending book “Shake hands with the Devil” he writes: “This book is the account of humans who were entrusted with the role of helping others taste the fruits of peace. Instead we watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.” Later haunted by the experience he was driven close to suicide.

The second reflection comes from the experience of a young German lawyer, Sebastian Heffner who fled to England in1938 to escape the Nazi regime. There he wrote a description of Germany’s seduction and corruption by Hitler entitled “Defying Hitler.” In an icy passage he describes the evil he sensed in Hitler well before it took expression in ‘the final solution’. “For a moment I physically sensed the man’s odour of blood and filth, the nauseating approach of a man-eating animal – its foul, sharp claws in my face.”

So, is the New Zealand terrorist a deeply psychologically disturbed person or a mad man, or is he madness in the service of evil? Is he a racist, a religious and political fanatic, fanaticism in the service of evil? When and where was the point he stepped beyond reason, morality and reality, surrendered to the darkness and was overpowered?

When we ponder the reality of evil other questions leap forward. Can it ever finally be overcome, not just personally, but universally? Who calls evil to the final accounting? Will there be an ultimate universal Hague, a final court of justice for the unnamed victims of history? Will there be a final judgment for the monsters of ancient as well as modern genocides? Is there another kingdom, a kingdom of light that can and will overcome the kingdom of darkness?

The responses posed range from Nihilistic despair that says that life is absurd and without meaning and so there is no reason why anything cannot happen in a meaningless random world. To the Optimistic Humanists who, in spite of all the evidence, believe more education and social engineering will solve the problem. They seem unaware of the naiveté of their position in the light of the fact that it was the most sophisticated, highly educated and aesthetically aware nation in Europe that designed and permitted the Holocaust.

Then there is the Existentialist response of heroic decision in the absence of no ultimate meaning, purpose or values. Like the hero in Camus’ novel “The Plague”, Dr Rieux, who works courageously on fighting the plague knowing all the time he cannot finally win but who finds his meaning in his actions. Of course this is ultimately no different from the disillusioned young men in David Fincher’s film “Fight Club” who find meaning in the visceral violence of bare knuckle fighting, or Hemmingway’s meaning in action, “Nobody ever lived their life all the way up except Bullfighters.”

The above are modernist responses, what would a Post Modernist say? With its rejection of all grand narratives of meaning and the embracing of moral relativism they are driven inward to individual subjectivity – what feels good or right to the individual. This leaves them at the mercy of their own thin personal resources distorted by their internal disfunctions and limitations. Ironically within their rudderless world there may be a seed of hope as their subjectivism may lead them to rediscover the core of their humanness – “made in the Image of God.” But the journey will be fraught because they will also meet the darkness and dysfunction within themselves as well.

Then there is the current Western flirtation with Eastern Mysticism and its concept of peace through disengagement from that which it claims produces evil and suffering – attachment, desire, individuality and difference. Leave desire, individuality and the self behind and merge oneself into the cosmic sea of universal oneness. Transcend the illusory world of difference. To critics of EM this is just the ultimate escape, the destruction of the self, a kind of mystical suicide. In the end these mystical and mental gymnastics will, I think, prove uncongenial to Western individualisms preoccupation with personal autonomy and self-interest. In fact it is mostly ‘EM light’ that’s flirted with in the West. Historically it  has a bad track record of indifference to social and structural evil. Despite their Constitution the iniquitous cast system is still alive and well in modern India. [i]

But there is someone who offers another way, the way of redemptive suffering, someone who suffers with and for us. Who neither denies, nor withdraws from evil but engages with it to defeat it. His actions take him into the heart of suffering caused by evil and to a final, terrible but triumphant confrontation. This one is ‘The Christ’, crucified and risen, “the lamb of God offered for the sin of the world”, God who becomes one with us in our humanness in his incarnation in Jesus.

Johns Gospel describes him in this way: “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Although to his friends on that dark night when they came for him it seemed that it had. When the police and the betrayer arrived to arrest Jesus at night, he said to them “This is your hour, when darkness reigns.” Yes! Like every oppressive regime before and since this is when the secret police always arrive, at night in the darkness. There is a deliberate play on words here by Jesus. As he said on an earlier occasion “men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil”

But evil overplayed its hand; in attempting to destroy him it destroyed itself. Its cunning, its overweening pride and will to power overreached itself. It precipitated a final showdown with God and his sovereign will and his absolute power, justice, and mercy. There is only one outcome in such a contest. And so, on the cross Jesus bears all that evil can do, not only in its destructive violence and blood lust, but also through its primary goal, the separation of humanity from God and then people’s alienation from each other. So, he identifies with us in our suffering, but also suffers for us by bearing justices’ penalty for our willing participation in evil. He suffers death and then defeats it in his resurrection. The cross reveals how implacably opposed God is to evil and how unrelentingly for us is his love.

How are we to live now in the light of all this? As Christians we understand that we live now in the tension between the two kingdoms. The kingdom of light has broken in with the coming of Jesus, the decisive battle has been won but the final surrender and the consummation of the Kingdom of God is yet to come. It is like the situation in Europe as WW2 drew to its close. The decisive battle with Hitler’s army had been fought and won late in 1945, the Axis forces were routed and in retreat. It was now only a matter of time before the final surrender and the enemy laid down its arms. But of course, if you were in an allied infantry group on the front line there were a dozen more small but deadly battles and skirmishes to survive before you reached Berlin and the formal surrender. That is the Christians position now in the world. God has won the decisive battle on the cross; the end is now decided but we are still exposed to the crossfire of evil and each day we must act both personally and socially to confront and defeat it. [ii]

As a Christian I also need to remind myself that Christians have sometimes betrayed Jesus by also descending into religious fanaticism that has led to division, discrimination, and violence. This is a tendency that lurks in our fallen natures and we must guard against it constantly. Only by submitting to Jesus’ commands to love our neighbour and take up our cross daily and follow him can we defeat evils seduction to partisan and sectarian destructiveness.

[Peter Corney August 30^th 2020]

[i] For a fuller description of these responses see Chp’s 4-9 in “The Universe Next Door” by James Sire IVP 2004

[ii] Some elements in this article first appeared in a different form as a response to a similar tragic event in Norway in July 2011in which a lone terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, with a similar profile, killed 77 people.

Reflections on our troubled world – A message for Christians.  By Peter Corney May 6th

As I nightly watch the news of our troubled world – at present the Pandemic, but of course the violence of places like the Middle East continues and the persecution of particular people groups like the Myanmar Rohingya or the Uyghurs in China continues as if there were no pandemic – questions flood my mind: “God where are you in all this chaos and pain? Why don’t you act to judge and save and protect the innocent? And Lord, if you are acting, why is it hidden from us?”

Yes! I am aware of God working through individuals through His ‘common grace’ and the many often unseen acts of care by individuals and neighbours and the heroic work of medical staff and volunteer agencies. Reading the moving writing of Trent Dalton in the weekly Australian Magazine as he records the acts of simple kindness by ordinary Aussie neighbours as they reach out to one another in this ‘lock down’ phase of the pandemic is heart-warming.

Nevertheless in the midst of the bigger picture the questions persist. But I have found some helpful perspective in returning to the writing and theology of a thoughtful Christian who found himself in a chaotic and violent time in the crisis of the 1940’s and the war in Europe.

Recently I have been re-reading some of the war time sermons of Helmut Thielicke, the German pastor and scholar who continued to preach and pastor his people through the nightly bombing and chaos of WW2 Germany in which his own home and Church were destroyed. A contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he was part of the German resistance to Hitler and the Nazi ideology, and in 1941 he was forbidden to speak or travel. He was also dismissed from his university teaching position and forbidden to publish books or articles. He was finally given permission to deliver one evening lecture per week in the Stuttgart Cathedral Church. He decided to speak on Luther’s Smaller Catechism, and through that vehicle he sought to prepare people for what he believed were the terrible things they would experience. He drew crowds of 3,000 people weekly as the air raids intensified, eventually the Cathedral was destroyed and they moved to other churches and halls, as one by one they were destroyed by the allied bombing. But the people kept coming. It is an inspiring story of faith and courage. He says “What we were doing was teaching theology in the face of death. There the only thing that was of any hope at all was the Gospel itself. Everything else simply dissolved into thin air. We were living only upon the substance of our faith. And these desperate hours also helped us to find that substance.”[i]

As he struggled with the same questions I mentioned above, in the midst of the crisis of those times, he preached that God’s role in world history can only be understood from the end, not from within the midst of it. “Not until the world’s last hour strikes, that hour of the Second Advent, when faith will see what it has believed, and unbelief will be compelled to see what it has not believed – only that last hour of the world will make known the meaning of history.” He went on to emphasise that till then life must be lived by faith not sight; faith in three things: (1) faith in God’s goodness, (2) faith in God’s presence with us, (3) faith in the knowledge that God has acted in Christ and his death and resurrection to save and reconcile us to himself, and one day to restore and renew the whole world. [ii]

Between our now and the future renewal of all things, we live as God’s people with the tension of being members of two kingdoms – the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. There will be times when great numbers of people will embrace the Gospel and even particular nations will embrace the values of God’s Kingdom in their societies. And there will be times like ours when they are rejected. But, whatever our times, our primary task remains the same – to go on proclaiming the Gospel of the Cross, and to live out its values in our individual lives and Christian communities. For whenever anyone embraces the Gospel of the cross, they are secure within, safe in the grace of God, whether in prosperity or poverty, peace or chaos, moral decay or an existential crisis of meaning and purpose in their society.

Thielicke also makes the very insightful point that the Christian faith is always twofold: (1) Faith in what God has done in Christ and (2) Faith that is contrary to appearances, especially when particular historical and cultural appearances oppose the Gospel and appear to overpower it.

Our challenge in these times is not to live in despair, negativity or denial, but hope – hope of the future God is bringing in, and a confidence in the message we have to share, the Gospel and its power to change and renew people’s lives now.

Peter Corney

Footnotes

[i] From the forward by H. Thielicke to a selection of the lectures. Page10, “Man in God’s World.” First published in 1958 in German and then in 1968 in English by James Clarke.

[ii] Helmut Thielicke Page 15 “Christ the meaning of life” Pub.  James Clarke 1965. See also “The Prayer that Spans the World,” Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer from the WW2 period of nightly bombing in Germany. First published In German in 1958 and then in English in 1967 by James Clarke

*These thoughts can also be found in the conclusion of Peter Corneys recent study discussion guide “The Gospel and The centrality of the Cross”. Available by order from Peter at <aphantom@ihug.com.au>

“STEPPING INTO THE VOID”
(With comments on the recent BBC production “Years and Years”)
By Peter Corney (Dec. 2019)

Once you step outside the idea of objective truth and natural law and say there is no ultimate or absolute moral standard or universal good you have “stepped into the void”
You join Nietzsche and his tribe who believe that humans are just the “Will to power” and have no inherent or created sensibility to ‘the good.’ If you also reduce the explanation of all statements of value about the natural world to just the expressions of personal feelings you step into the murky world of subjectivism, which is also a step into the void. Lewis’s essay “The Abolition of Man” from which the quotation is taken is a brilliant explanation of this process.
The current popular reporting of the Royal Commission into the behaviour of the Banks and financial institutions in Australia is a fascinating insight into how confused our present society is about the matter of ultimate moral standards and the chasm developing between ordinary people and what prevails in some parts of our tertiary education system.
The words “corrupt”, “corruption” and “attitudes of venal self- interest” appear regularly in describing the behaviour of these institutions and the people who run them. This is very discouraging for ordinary Australians who have trusted these bodies. But at another level it is very encouraging for it reveals that there is still a residual belief in our culture of a doctrine of absolute moral values and in the classical virtues – the practice in ordinary everyday life of pursuing the truth, honesty and the common good.

It is also encouraging for it is evidence that the Judeo/Christian heritage and values that lie behind Western culture has not been entirely lost or abandoned. This is remarkable given the influence of a coterie of tenured academics in the Arts faculties of some of our universities who have been working assiduously now for years on reconstructing the world view of a generation of tertiary students. Their goal is to create a radical scepticism about universal values and virtues and to promote moral and cultural relativism and a shallow doctrine of “social constructivism”. This puts forward the idea that all social norms and values are relative and merely social constructs created by the prevailing holders of power to control others and are open to change as we see fit. This is a reminted version of the old extreme left “ideology of oppression” with a dash of Post Modern deconstruction and hyper individualism, flavoured with identity politics. It makes a bad ethical cocktail!

The irony is that when these same people are duded by financial institutions, corporations and rogue government officials who steal from us, they are quick to call out such behaviour as corrupt, immoral and requiring just punishment! We might well ask – ‘But on what absolute moral basis, what universal values is this judgement made?’ To quote C S Lewis again, requiring from people integrity and absolute moral values when you have called them all into question and spent years promoting self-interest is “like castrating the gelding and then bidding it be fruitful!”

Nietzsche was at least consistent in describing human natures essence as “the will to power” His prophecy of the end result of our rejection of transcendent reality and values is a chilling vision of Western culture’s future, and remember this was written at the beginning of Modernity’s reign in the late 19th C. The “death of God” in the Western mind will, he predicted, be like leaving the stability of the land and launching out on an uncertain and restless sea. He wrote “We have left the land and embarked …… we have burned our bridges behind us – indeed we have gone further and we have destroyed the land behind us …. Woe then when you feel homesick for the land……there is no longer any land.” The storms on this restless sea are now beginning to engulf us.

Watching the recent dystopian and satirical BBC television production “Years and Years”, written and produced by Russell T Davies, that predicts the future of Western culture and our politics was both an amusing but depressing experience. But as the elderly grandmother of the family says; “Well we are responsible for all this!”
The recent election results in the UK, Australia, Europe and North America show that perhaps the majority of the electorate are beginning to wake up and react to this cultural confusion and destruction.

[Footnotes:
* C S Lewis “The Abolition of Man” page 45 Pub. Geoffrey Bless 1965
* Nietzche – See “Beyond Good and Evil” S36, also his essay “The Antichrist” for a succinct summery of his radical idea of the good as the will to power found in “Twilight of the idols” page 95-96 Pub. Woodsworth Classics 2007, and “The Gay Science” Vintage Books 1974 page 124.]

The following essay “Eden – No Entry” is taken from my recent study book “The Gospel and the Centrality of the Cross,” which will be available on the website soon for free download. The aim of the essay is to show how the Gospel and the Cross is the key to finding our way back to a true understanding of the knowledge of reality. C S Lewis wrote “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (From “The weight of glory.”)

                           “Eden – No Entry!” 

 “Jesus took the tree of death so you could have the tree of life” (Tim Keller)

“I am a passionate believer in the unity of knowledge – there is one world of reality.” (Professor John Polkinghorne theoretical physicist and theologian.)

In the study book “The Gospel and the centrality of the Cross – the preaching of the Cross as the power and wisdom of God – with observations on the exercise of power and knowledge in contemporary culture,”  I explore the meaning of God’s power and wisdom in 1Cor chapters 1-3. In these chapters we see that they are essentially relational in their action and purpose, exemplified in the incarnation – “God with us” in Christ’s birth, death and resurrection to reconcile us to God.

We also see that they are in dramatic contrast to the way the world generally understands and exercises power and wisdom.

But this leads us to some critical questions:

• Does this emphasis mean that we can therefore ignore or dismiss all human wisdom and learning?
• Does this lead us to an anti-intellectual fundamentalism?
• Does this justify a retreat from engagement with the ideas and ideological fashions of our times?
• Does this emphasis on God’s power in contrast to worldly power mean we can retreat from any involvement in political action or worldly power structures?

The answer to these questions must be an emphatic No! But they are a temptation for us. Christians in the past have at times retreated in these ways. That retreat is a strategic error for it leaves the field of ideas, intellectual and cultural influence, and political power to those who ignore or reject God’s wisdom. We must engage but not be seduced into playing only by the prevailing or dominant philosophical or ideological rules!  We must insist on respect for our presuppositions that reality includes the transcendent and God as creator and upholder of all that is. (Colossians 1:15-17)

All this raises the further question of what is the role of reason in our engagement.

If we look at Paul’s example in the NT, we see not retreat but vigorous engagement. Paul did not live in a modern democracy and so his political options were limited but he could and did work on the power of ideas shaped by the Gospel and urged the Church to live out a new set of values in their communities. In Acts 17: 16-34 we have a clear example of Paul’s evangelism engaging the culture and ideas of the Greco /Roman culture of Athens. He goes to the common place for the discussion of ideas, the Areopagus on Mars Hill, and debates with the philosophers and rhetoricians quoting their own poets to them as he argues from their acknowledgement of the “Unknown God” to whom they have erected a statue in the Agora.

The result of this example of engagement is described in vv 32 -34: “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”

Another example of such engagement occurs when Paul was in Ephesus. He hired a lecture hall belonging to a man called Tyrannus and lectured there daily for two years. Rhetoricians’ putting forward their ideas was a common practice in cities influenced by the Greek culture of the first century. Acts 19:10 says it was such an effective strategy that “…all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia (part of modern Turkey) heard the word of the Lord.”

Also when Paul arrived in a new city the first place he attended was the Synagogue where he entered into discussions with the Jews of the Dispersion. The phrase that is used in Acts to describe these encounters is “ He reasoned with the Jews”, the Greek word used in the text is that from which we get the word ‘dialogue’, or it can also be translated as ‘reasoned with’ or ‘to debate’.

Paul is a wise and gifted apologist who connects with the culture in which he finds himself, whether it be Jews of the diaspora or Greek intellectuals. He is not afraid to use reason and debate, and his strategies involved cultural adaption. He says in 1Cor 9: 22 “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

Having observed that Paul is unafraid to use reason and dialogue in his encounter with ideas opposed to or different to the Gospel he also knows the limits of human reason. In Romans 11: 33-36 he quotes a hymn of praise composed of a number of Biblical phrases to emphasise this:

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!

Who has known the mind of the Lord?”

Reason alone will not bring us all the way to God we also need divine revelation because, like all our human faculties, our reason is limited and imperfect.

By “Divine Revelation” Christians mean two things:

1. God’s specific revelation of Himself in Christ and God’s Word. We receive this by hearing or reading God’s Word and reading or hearing the Gospel. (See John 1: 1-18)
2. God’s general revelation of himself and aspects of his nature in creation. We describe it as “general” because it is nonspecific. In our fallen state, we can easily distort or misread it or, worse, make nature the object of our worship as in Paganism and Pantheism. (See Romans 1:18-32) (In the case of a person’s commitment to “Scientific Materialism” or “Naturalism” they generally exclude any notion of the transcendent from their investigations of nature and trust in the self-sufficiency of human reason. This leads to an inevitable reductionism in their understanding of reality.)

Christians also believe that it is the work of the Holy Spirit in our minds and hearts that brings true understanding and awareness of God to us as we observe and experience creation. The Holy Spirit brings understanding and conviction as we ‘hear’ the Gospel. (2 Cor. 4:6. John 1:6-9)

In relation to knowledge and our purpose, the limits of our reason mean that our capacity to develop a comprehensive knowledge from nature and reason alone is limited and often leads us to a narrow and reductionist view of reality that rejects the transcendent. This approach to epistemology and ontology locks us out of the answers to the vital questions of meaning, morality, values and our ultimate purpose.

The Judeo/Christian foundation story in Genesis and in particular chapters 1-3 remind us of why the wisdom and power of God in the Cross is necessary to regaining access to a true, and eventually comprehensive, knowledge and wisdom.

The story in Genesis 2:9 tells us that in the centre of the Garden of Eden was “the tree of life” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The man and the woman are placed by God in the garden to tend it and enjoy it in fellowship with God. In 3:1-13 they are told they could eat the fruit of any of the trees in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the story, the essence of the temptation and the great lie presented to humanity was that by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would become “like God”, even though God had told them their act of disobedience and independence would cause their death!  But “when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it and gave some to her husband.” Here is the Judeo/Christian theological explanation of our constant quest for autonomy, to live without God through our own quest for knowledge, wisdom and power. This is the explanation of secular modernity’s story of slowly unhooking the quest for knowledge and meaning from the transcendent. The Genesis story continues but doesn’t end well. Adam and Eve are ejected from the garden and all it represents in terms of intimacy and fellowship with God. Their ejection is described in a dramatic way in Genesis 3:23-24. God banishes them from the Garden of Eden and “…..placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

The way back to the Garden is now blocked by a “flashing sword”, a graphic symbol of the denial of access! In other words the way back to fellowship and intimacy with God, the way back to life as it was meant to be, must now be by another way. The way back to true wisdom, to a comprehensive knowledge and understanding, to a comprehensive or “unified field of knowledge”, [i] one that includes not only our physical world but the larger reality of the meaning and purpose of our lives and the source of values, right and wrong, good and evil must be by another way, another gate! The way through autonomous reason, nature and the material and physical world alone will not take us there.

Now it is important not to misunderstand this point. The discoveries and mastery of a great deal of our physical world that modern science has delivered has to be celebrated, enjoyed and encouraged. Every time when we hear of another new medical breakthrough to overcome disease or enhance physical life we should rejoice at the creative ability God has given us. He has given us the freedom and capacity to discover true knowledge about our world, especially in the physical and material world. But we cannot find a “comprehensive knowledge” by human reason alone. We must come to the tree of knowledge now by another way. We need Revelation. This may sound strange to those raised in the mental framework of secular modernity, a framework that has forgotten or rejected the Christian heritage and learning of Western culture.

The new way, the gate of entry that God has provided back to ‘the Garden’ and the trees of Knowledge and Life is through the Wisdom and Power of the Cross. This is how we must find our way back to God, to true freedom and life, to the fullness of wisdom and knowledge.  This “way” back to the trees of Life and Knowledge is by another “tree”, the Cross, the tree on which Christ died. The NT. says that “He bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sins and live for righteousness, by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24. See also Acts 5:30, 10:39, 13:29, Gal 3:13)

Picking up the symbolism and imagery of Genesis 1-3 was natural for the NT Christians with their Jewish background. And so the Cross, as the “Cursed tree” in Jewish law (Deut 21:23 Gal 3:13), becomes a graphic biblical image to explain what must be embraced if we are to find the way back to the “tree of life”, to fellowship with God and the answer to our disobedience and rejection of God’s authority that shut us out of “the Garden” and all it represents. Our act of trust in Christ and his death on the Cross is the act of obedience that opens, as it were, the gate back into the garden. As C S Lewis expresses it in a memorable phrase: “…in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adams dance backward, and returns.” (From “The Problem of Pain”)

This brings our reconciliation with God and the way back to true wisdom and knowledge, the proper use of knowledge, and the power of creativity God gave us at creation to “tend the garden”, to care for it and to unfold its amazing complexity, beauty and potential.

The NT closes with the book of Revelation and in the last Chapter 22:1-5 there is a rich symbolic picture of the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God. In the centre of the picture is the tree of life, whose leaves it is said “are for the healing of the nations”, a time when division, violence and war will be redeemed and all our human folly and will to oppressive power shall be healed. It will be a time when we again will “see God’s face”, our intimacy with Him fully restored. This is the goal of God’s Wisdom and Power, but it is only achieved for us fallen people by hearing, understanding and receiving the Revelation of the preaching of the Cross. That is why it is the Church’s primary task.

Peter Corney

End Notes

[i] “A unified field of knowledge” (or ‘Unified field theory’) is a term that is used in physics to explain the attempt to describe all the relationships between the fundamental forces and elementary particles in terms of a theoretical framework. ( Michio Kaku the theoretical physicist more humorously described it as a “An attempt to seek an equation an inch long that would allow us to read the mind of God!”)

PRINCIPLED TOLERANCE BY PETER CORNEY
Tolerance, as it is being understood and practiced in Western culture today, is in danger of becoming oppressive and undermining its own good intentions.
As Western culture becomes less uniform in its cultural influences and drifts from its historical roots in its Judeo – Christian heritage, the way we understand and practice tolerance of difference in belief, values and life style is crucial to our common good.
My proposition is that true tolerance is only possible if one also holds to other convictions such as truth, goodness and freedom of speech as well as respect for others. What we might call a ‘principled tolerance ‘.
Tolerance can be elevated to the place of supreme virtue so that it obscures or overpowers all other virtues. Without a ‘principled tolerance’ it can easily slip over into any or all of the following negative outcomes:
1. An oppressive political correctness that gradually, through overzealous legislation, creates a raft of social restrictions that diminish our freedoms and stifles the public discussion that is crucial to a healthy democracy and, inadvertently, creates an underlying resentment that is counterproductive to the very aims of the spirit of the legislation. The frequent outbreaks of irreverent and politically incorrect humour are signs of, and blessed reliefs from, this oppressiveness. We so easily forget that laws do not make people good or kind; at best they may only restrain the worst among us. Goodness and kindness come from deeper convictions.
2. The development of a cultural blandness that can lead to indifference about deeper issues of value and questions about the meaning and purpose of human existence and the goal of human flourishing. This is a particular danger in in our prosperous Western societies. Economic hardships have a tendency to inspire deeper questions both politically and spiritually.
3. An intolerant secularism that rejects or seeks to dismiss and marginalises from the public square all religious convictions. Ironically secularism is of course a strongly held conviction in itself and a very narrow and often intolerant one. It is experienced today by people of faith as a kind of ‘hostility creep’ in many areas of life. The most recent being the change to Religious Instruction in Schools in Victoria. Another example is the strange way much current media commentary in Australia works in relation to ‘conviction politics.’ Commentators criticize the blandness and lack of convictions in our politicians and their ‘spin speak’ but as soon as one expresses their religious convictions or personal values strongly in public they are painted as bigoted, and ridiculed as out of step with the ‘assumed majority!’ Only those ‘convictions’ that are listed in the currently acceptable moral lexicon are protected from their derision.
4. A sceptical tolerance: this is when tolerance is driven by a sceptical relativism and anti-foundationalism. “We must tolerate everything because no one knows what the truth is, in fact there is no ultimate truth or objective set of values any way!” This leads our culture to become an empty shell without any deeper purpose than the utilitarian one of keeping social harmony at all cost.
5. Cultural relativism: this is where tolerance is driven by the idea that all cultural practices and beliefs are of equal value and legitimacy and are therefore immune from critique by any other objective standard or set of values. Three examples are sufficient to illustrate the shallowness and inconsistency of this widely held view: The treatment of woman and the abuse of their rights and equality in a number of cultures. The practice of cast inferiority systems endemic in some parts of the Indian sub-continent and other places. Endemic corruption in Asian business and political cultures where business is regularly smoothed by bribery. While corruption in business and politics exists in Australia it is generally seen as unacceptable and destructive of the common good. It is also illegal and you go to jail if you’re caught. We currently have a series of Royal Commissions vigorously investigating corruption. Very few if any Australians would support these three practices indeed most would condemn them. This simply illustrates that most cultural relativists are deeply inconsistent and have their own set of standards by which they judge other cultures. All societies have intolerances to certain practices and ideas like our intolerance of paedophilia, child abuse and violence against woman. Certain “intolerances” are in fact considered virtues. Of course any form of valid critique assumes some objective set of values, some moral convictions. It is at this point that much contemporary thought is hollow, inconsistent and evasive.
The only way to avoid these negative outcomes of a very thin view of tolerance is to hold a “Principled Tolerance”.
(Two excellent books for further reading are “The Intolerance of tolerance” by D A Carson Eerdmans 2012. “The Cube and the Cathedral” by George Weigel Basic Books 2005. This book explains and describes the crisis in the European Union of a spiritually and morally hollowed out culture.)
Peter Corney

ISLAMIC TERRORISM CHALLENGES THE WEST TO RENEW ITS MORAL AND SPIRITUAL VISION
by Peter Corney.

Frank Ferudi the English sociologist has made the very insightful point that the efforts of Western countries to stem the flow of young men from Western Islamic communities to fight under the ISIS flag will not be successful until the West renews its own moral and spiritual vision. He writes “Until Western society articulates its own moral vision of a good society, it will struggle to contain the influence that Jihadist political theology exercises over its target audience.” He points out that political arguments about the superiority and virtues of liberal democracy rarely succeed in overcoming the recruiter’s claims that in fact the effect of the Western way of life is actually morally corrosive on young people of Islamic faith. That’s an argument that it’s very easy to find evidence for in the present state of our culture, not only among Islamic young people, but among Western young people in general! As Ferudi puts it “The language of good and evil appears more convincing than arguments based on secular logic and reasoning.” (The Australian July 25/26 2015)

Long before the rise of Islamic terrorism and ISSIS there have been a number of voices in the West calling for a renewal of our moral and spiritual vision. George Weigel’s book “The Cube and the Cathedral” (2005) is an articulate example among many. The social fabric of our culture is under enormous strain as the stability of the family and our experience of community has eroded and substance abuse has escalated. While we have never been so prosperous, never had more people in tertiary education and never had better health care, we now have more dependent children in state care than ever before, a third of our marriages end in divorce and we are experiencing escalating family violence. One woman per week is killed by her partner in Australia today! Our state institutions that are tasked with providing child and family welfare, and the justice system that attempts to administer intervention orders, are all in a constant state of crisis. In 2013 Mark Latham wrote a very insightful essay in the Quarterly (QE 49 2013). He spoke about the rise of an ‘entrenched underclass’ in Australian society who are trapped in a repeating cycle of generational family dysfunction and unemployment, they have lost the skills and habits of healthy family life, without the motivation to take advantage of the many schemes that are available for personal development, rehabilitation, job retraining and education. Fortunately, due to our generous welfare system, they do not live in the physical poverty and hunger of ‘The Great Depression’ years, but they live in a social, psychological and spiritual poverty. He describes them in this way: “….this group has gone feral, leading lives of welfare dependency, substance abuse and street crime.” Political parties of both left and right seem unable to solve this.

The problem with using the virtues of democracy in our arguments is that we have drifted away from many of the values that contributed to shaping it and the idea of a “common good”. These were largely Christian ideas and values; remember Western culture is the product of 2,000 years of Christianity.
For example: out of the Christian belief in our creation in God’s image and the incarnation of Christ we derived the idea of the value of the infinite value of each person and their human rights and individual freedoms. The political expression and evolution of these was a great step forward in our social and political life. (The origins of this process go right back to the struggle in England by the Christian Protestant Dissenters to be free to decide their own religious affiliations and places of assembly. That struggle resulted in “The Act of Toleration“ in 1689, a milestone in the development of human rights. Interestingly those struggles were about both the individual’s right to freedom of belief and the group’s right, in their case the small Christian communities dissenting from the State Church.)
One of our difficulties now is that the right of individual freedom has developed into a hyper individualism where the individual feels there should be no restraints on their right to choose or decide on any particular life style, and no restraint on saying what they think or feel regardless of others feelings. The old Christian idea of personal freedom was that we were made both free and responsible by God, free to overcome our weaknesses and self-interest so we might responsibly accept our duties and serve others – free for service. This is long gone and replaced by the idea that we are free from any restraint on our choices. This idea is daily reinforced by the market and consumerism. When freedom or equality or tolerance is elevated to the place of supreme virtue they tend to overpower all other virtues that could moderate their excesses. Unfortunately our fallen human nature makes excesses inevitable.
If we take the three classic political virtues of “freedom, equality and fraternity (or community)”, which as Charles Taylor has pointed out in his writing on ‘Secularism’, currently seem to be the only ‘moral virtues’ of modern liberal democracy, then clearly this new idea of freedom has overpowered one of its own virtues – ‘fraternity’ or the ‘common good’ of the community. A commitment to the ‘common good’ requires Hobbes’ ‘social contract’ – that citizens must be willing to sacrifice to the community and its governance some freedoms in exchange for the community’s protection of their other freedoms .If our hyper individualism continues on its current trajectory and the erosion of the commitment to ‘the common good’ continues then liberal democracy will become difficult to govern and may in the end founder. It cannot survive without this commitment, nor can it survive without a common moral and spiritual vision, indeed the two are intimately connected. As many of the framers of the American Constitution believed – “Freedom requires virtue and virtue requires faith.”

A common moral and spiritual vision that is informed by ideas and values that transcend our human self-interest is necessary precisely because of human frailty and selfishness. These values have almost always been informed by religious faith. When the discussion is moved into categories of moral corruption, good and evil, as Islamic extremists will do, the possession of a vital moral and spiritual vision for our society is critical. While the strength of secularism is that it can protect us from the excesses and oppression of religious fundamentalists its great weakness is its rejection of any transcendent values. At its best, liberal democracy in the West has enabled us to value and include the contribution of religious faith in the democratic process while at the same time maintaining a separation or healthy distance between Church and State. This is largely due to the historical evolution from established Churches and the influence of Christian values on Western democracy. With the knowledge of this history now a distant memory, or completely unknown for many, we are in danger of losing the valid place for faith in the public square under the pressure of a new secularism suffering from historical amnesia.

As Ferudi explains this state of mind renders us very vulnerable to the sense of moral and spiritual superiority that underlies and is expressed in Islamic fundamentalism and Jihadist terrorism.

More people attend an AFL round over a weekend in Melbourne than the combined membership of all Australian political parties. In the 90’s ALP membership was around 50,000, it is now about 30,000 and still falling, and in the last national party elections only 12,000 voted. A similar pattern affects the Liberal party. The late Don Chip’s Democrats, that began as a high member participation party is now a tiny shadow of its former self.

Some people say that the greatest threat to democracy today is voter indifference and voter cynicism with politics and politicians.

This year a Lowey Institute survey polled Australian’s attitudes to democracy. They found that – 60% preferred democracy to any other form of government. But most disturbing was that of 18-35 year olds only 39% answered yes to that question and 15% said “It doesn’t matter what kind of government we have.” [i] Currently it is estimated that about 1.4 million young Australians eligible to vote have not registered.

Our English word democracy comes from a Greek word meaning “the rule of the people”, from demos = people and kratos = power – “the power of the people”. Well, if that is how we are to define it then we might be in trouble because the people are switched off, or in the case of party members, ‘ticked off’ by being shut out of the political process by an increasingly professionalised and remote party machine.

Commentators point to other issues like:

–         The over influence of the Media and the relentless reporting cycle that politicians seem to allow to control them, and the media focus on the internal political conflict rather than policy – politics as entertainment rather than real debate over ideas and vision.

–         The obsession with minority issues and special interest groups that affect only a tiny proportion of the electorate.

–         The tendency of governments to attempt to intrude further and further into areas like freedom of speech.

–         The creeping surveillance and data collection culture that threatens our privacy and freedom.

–         Etc.

These are all important issues but I have chosen to focus in this lecture on what I believe to be three critical threats to modern liberal democracy today.

(1) The diminishing influence of Christianity in the West and the rise of an aggressive secularism.

(2) The growth of hyper individualism and the new understanding of freedom.

(3) The threat to democracy from religious extremism.

The first threat comes from the diminishing influence of Christianity in the West and the growth of an aggressive secularism that believes that it alone has the right to occupy the public square.

Almost everyone knows Lincolns description of democracy that was part of his famous Gettysburg speech on Nov. 19^th 1863. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

But where did that phrase come from? Did it originate in Lincolns mind? Well, No! Thirteen years before Gettysburg it was used in a speech by the Rev Theodore Parker at an anti-slavery convention in Boston. In his speech urging Americans to abolish slavery Parker described democracy and freedom in these words: “ A democracy, that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people…..a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God…..I will call it the idea of freedom.”  [ii]

But where did Parker get it from? Well it turns out that the first occurrence of this phrase is found in, of all places, the preface to the first translation of the Bible into English by John Wycliffe in 1384. Where it says: “The Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”[iii]

Now I mention this obscure bit of history to illustrate how powerful the influence of Christianity and the Bible has been on the development of Western liberal democracy.

The quote from the preface to Wycliffe’s Bible also illustrates the inextricable link between democracy and freedom and the part that the Reformation and Protestant ideas played. Wycliffe is known as “the morning star of the reformation” and, like Martin Luther who translated the Bible into common German, they were concerned to make the Bible accessible to ordinary people so that they would be free to make their own judgements unfiltered by authoritarian Popes or controlled by priestly mystification. This thread of influence weaves its way through the development of democracy.

In the long struggle for democracy and its evolution in England from Magna Carter on, Christians and biblical ideas played a key role. For example: the key idea that God has established the state as a delegated authority, not as an autonomous power above God’s law. Laws made by the State should not contradict God’s law. English jurists from Bracton (1210-1268), to Edward Coke (1552-1634) and William Blackstone (1723- 1870) repeated and upheld this idea. [iv] This concept lies behind the trial of King Charles I. for “crimes against the people of England” by the English Parliament in1649. He was the first European monarch to be tried and sentenced in such a way. Even the King is not above the law. This is the principle on which the International court of justice in The Hague now operates in judging crimes like genocide by leaders of states.  [v]

In the 16^th and 17^th C’s  and the formation of the English Parliament and the Commonwealth, the Puritans were a driving force. They sought to model their ideas about community and government on the Bible. James Harrington a Puritan scholar developed a concept of republican government with popular ownership of land based on Israel’s God given agrarian land laws. [vi] They were greatly influenced by the NT ideas that all Christians are one in Christ and all people are equal before the Cross and God’s grace. Radical elements like the “Levellers” challenged the whole aristocratic arrangement of inherited land and privilege. They were heavily persecuted for their ideas. All the Protestant Dissenter’s Confessions of faith in the 17th C. contain strong statements about freedom of conscience and the moral limits of the state to compel people in matters of faith and belief.

These ideas were then transported to America with the Pilgrim Fathers and the first English settlers who were seeking religious and political freedom and were foundational in the new political experiment in the ‘new world.’

Tom Paine who wrote “The Rights of Man” and greatly influenced American democracy and human rights thinking began his public life as a Methodist lay preacher in England in the 1760’s. [vii]

When we come to the late 18^th and early 19^th C, the beginnings  of organised labour, the early union movement and workers’ rights were dominated by Methodism and people affected by the Evangelical revival in England. [viii]

Human rights are intimately connected with democratic values and Christians have been closely involved in their development and codification from the very beginning. Key figures in this process like the anti – slavery campaigners: Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and the French Huguenot and Quaker Anthony Benezet, were all motivated by their Christian faith.[ix]

The first country to give woman the vote was New Zealand, closely followed by South Australia, in both cases Christian woman’s organisations like “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union” were a driving force.

So from these few brief highlights we can see  the profound influence of Christian and Biblical ideas on freedom and democracy. The key point here is to recognise that modern democracy has  a cultural foundation developed in the Christian West.

I said earlier that freedom and democracy are intimately connected but as the framers of the American Constitution stressed “freedom requires virtue and virtue requires faith”. [x] It is striking in their writings and speeches to see how clearly they understood this. While many were Christians, others were Deists and free thinkers, but they all understood the essential connection between freedom, virtue and faith. Let me give you just three quotations from the many I could have quoted:

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom” (Benjamin Franklin)

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a fantasy.” (James Maddison)

“It is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.” (John Adams)

The social and cultural critic Os Guinness has recently published a new book provocatively titled “A Free Peoples Suicide – Sustainable Freedom and the American Future”. [xi] He makes the point that while freedom can be a long and tough struggle to achieve; sustaining freedom is an even greater challenge because freedom is its own worst enemy. When freedom becomes unmoored from virtue and faith it tends to become license and undermines liberty. We begin to believe that whatever life style we desire we can choose without any cost. Inevitably we begin to impinge on the freedom of others as we lose our sense of obligation to the common good. He writes “only those who can govern themselves as individuals can govern themselves as a people. As for an athlete or dancer, freedom for a citizen is the gift of self- control training and discipline not self- indulgence. The laws of the land may provide external restraints on behaviour, but the secret of freedom is what Lord Moulton called ‘obedience to the unenforceable’, which is a matter of virtue, which in turn is a matter of faith. Faith and virtue are therefore indispensable to freedom” [xii] This is a most perceptive insight.

The Classical virtues are: Temperance, Prudence (Wisdom), Courage and Justice; the Christian virtues are: Faith, Hope and Love.

But these virtues can only be sustained by belief in and a commitment to a source of transcendent values. Hence the formula “Freedom requires virtue and virtue requires faith..”

It is no accident therefore that the two outstanding English speaking examples of modern liberal democracy are Great Britain and the United States, both profoundly influenced, as I have shown, by the Christian faith and world view that also incorporates the classical virtues. In the case of the British example it has now been successfully adopted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a large number of countries in the British Commonwealth of Nations, including the largest democracy in the world, India. (Japanese and Korean democracy were the gifts of America.)

To dismiss this influence on world democracy on the grounds of personal or ideological prejudice towards the Christian faith, as many aggressive secularists do, is to say the least, curious. But to ignore it as a result of historical amnesia is just irresponsible. To fail to ensure that this history is taught in our educational institutions is to fail to nurture and sustain the foundations of our culture and identity and to sustain our democracy. The question people in the West need to ask is, how long can the flower of democracy last once it is cut from its roots?

The second threat is from the growth of hyper individualism and the redefining of freedom.

Democracy like community requires the commitment of its individual members to the common good if it is to flourish. Indeed democracy is a form of community. It can only remain healthy if its members have a sense of obligation and duty to the good of others. Rights must be accompanied by responsibilities.

In Pre- Modern traditional societies the good and the authority of the community is placed above that of the individual and their rights, conformity is required, often in ways that are oppressive of individual freedom.

In Modern societies the rights of the individual are more strongly asserted and a balance or accommodation is sought with the authority and good of the community. This is ‘the social contract’ struck between the state and the individual.[xiii] Many of our current public debates arise from this tension, like the issue of freedom of speech.

In contemporary Post – Modern society the emphasis on the individual’s freedom and rights has now overbalanced so far towards personal autonomy that obligation, duty, commitment to the family, the community and the greater common good is falling away. This is ‘hyper individualism.’

In a recent essay in The Quarterly, Mark Latham has produced a very insightful essay into not only the future of the A L P but Australian politics in general. He makes the point that liberal democracy with its emphasis on individual rights worked much better in the early 20^th C. when citizens were tied together morally much more strongly, by tradition, common culture, religion, family and locality. But such a society has now passed. He writes “This is the price of modernity: instead of being heavily inculcated in traditional social norms, our obligations have become optional. The challenge for progressive government is to maintain the benefits of pluralism and personal freedom while encouraging solidarity among its citizens…… Rights alone are not sufficient to create a good society. Having the right to do something does not always make it the right thing to do. More is needed: a collective recognition of right and wrong.” [xiv]

This is not an entirely surprising view from the left for those who know its history. The ‘ethical left’ in English and Australian politics was heavily influenced by the early English Christian socialists. [xv]

In this process of social change another critical shift has taken place: the idea of freedom has been unconsciously redefined.

The new Post Modern view of freedom is located in the idea of the right of the individual to the unhindered power of spontaneous choice. On this view an act is free when it is in defiance of any restrictions, even of any objective values or duties. The only absolute is “the triumph of the will”. [xvi] Once freedom in this sense becomes an absolute we arrive at the tyranny of the individual – this is ‘hyper individualism’.

This expresses itself trivially in the social media by unpleasant people who feel it is their right to say whatever they like and express however they feel without concern for others feelings.

At the most serious and destructive end of the spectrum it reveals itself in the desertion of family and community. As one writer expressed it: “This kind of freedom is really just abandonement. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and way of life, and when later on, you leave your partner and your child too, it seems like a natural progression”  [xvii]

I argued earlier that freedom requires virtue or it descends into selfish individualism or moral license. But virtue cannot stand alone in its task of guiding freedom. Virtue requires faith if it is to be strong enough to resist our selfishness. It requires a foundation in a transcendent moral source beyond ourselves.

Until recent times the Western idea of freedom was greatly influenced by Christianity. In Christian thought freedom is about becoming free from the negative and selfish aspects of my nature so I might become what I was created for – to love and serve God and others. The model was the self-giving of Jesus in the sacrificial act of servant hood; “I have not come to be served but to serve and to give myself as a ransom for many” [xviii]

This idea also drove Christians to work for the social and political freedom of oppressed people so that they also could become and be what God had made them to be. This is why Christians have so often been at the fore- front of human rights movements.

But once this core idea is lost freedoms end becomes fixed on the self, on the individual, on my rights, my choice and my freedom from any restrictions on those choices, including any transcendent or objective values, there is now no limits to my freedom.

So duty to others, to the community, to family, to service, to kindness and respect for others falls away. People are then trapped in a destructive narcissism, imprisoned in the service of the self. As the NT expresses it:

“They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them” [xix]

Also the positive side of Enlightenment liberal thinking about human rights and freedoms is corrupted into a culture of entitlement, ugly selfism and hyper individualism.

These attitudes weaken democracy at a fundamental level. The positive “power of the people” rests on a virtuous vision and that rests on faith. I believe this can only be renewed in Western culture by a return to its Christian roots.

The third threat comes from religious extremism:

National and cultural identity and forms of government have historically been inextricably bound up with religion. Europe, North America and Australia have been shaped by Protestant and Catholic Christianity. After the collapse of the Christian Byzantine Empire the countries of the Middle East were reshaped by Islam. India has been shaped by Hinduism and Buddhism, and so on.

For centuries these cultures were separated by distance, geography and limited communications but we now live in a very different world. Our world has shrunk through globalisation, large people movements and modern communications. As a result the old cultural boundaries have become porous or weakened and in some cases broken down altogether. Very different cultures, religions and world views now find themselves living together. Almost all the great cities of the world are now multicultural. One of the results of this is a growing sense of confusion and anxiety about our identity. Assumptions about values, beliefs, rights and forms of governance are challenged.

Xenophobia, (the fear of difference), and racism, (the sense of racial superiority) have been with us ever since the fall and the tower of Babel. But these human weaknesses are exaggerated by the current changes we are experiencing.

One of the most dangerous developments of our current situation is the growth of religious extremism and ultra-Nationalism. Some examples: [1] The first and most obvious is Islamic fundamentalism and its deep hostility to the West and Christianity. Inherent in its core beliefs are (a) the goal of a world wide universal rule of the Islamic faith and law, (b) the union of the state and the Islamic faith and Sharia law, (c) the submission of all other faiths and beliefs to this rule, (d) the principle of ‘Jihad’ or holy war understood as both an internal spiritual war against evil within the individual and also the legitimate use of war against any external opposition to Islam. When these core beliefs are held without compromise or liberalisation they become an ideological foundation and justification for the use of violence, armed conflict and terrorism to advance the cause.
The resort to violence to advance their cause is inflamed by certain social and historical factors such as the Wests colonial past and the present high levels of unemployment and poverty among young adults in many Muslim countries and their marginalisation in immigrant and refugee communities in the West. Also the threat of modernity to conservative, authoritarian regimes in some Islamic states and their perception that the West has an insidiously permissive and moraly corrupt lifestyle are contributing factors. [2] The second example is the unease that is felt by many Europeans to the large influx of Islamic immigrants and refugees to Europe and the EU. This has created an anxiety that has fed a revival of the old ultra nationalism that the EU was designed to counter. With Europe’s present economic difficulties and high unemployment levels this is a dangerous mix. [3] Third, is the growth of Hindu nationalism in India represented by the BJP party that threatens to distort democratic politics and religious tolerance in India. There are now regular serious attacks on religious minorities in parts of India. [4] Fourth, is the growth of a militant and politicised Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar which has partcipated in numerous violent attacks on racial and religious minorities in those nations.

There is a long and depressing history of Nationalism in its extreme form seducing religion to its cause. This is a great danger to modern liberal democracy. In the tragic story of ethnic cleansing in the recent conflict in The Balkans in the 1990’s, the ambitions of Serbian nationalism was supported by elements of The Serbian Orthodox Church. This conflict is built on historical tensions between Islam and Christianity going back to the Islamic invasions of the 17^th C. The emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1930’s that led to the rise of the extreme nationalism of Hitler and the Nazis, Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy was supported by parts of the Christian Church. In Hitler’s case he managed to recruit the official German Lutheran Church to bless what was really his Pagan cause. Only the courageous opposition of the minority Confessing Church formed by Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonheoffer stood against Hitler.

Many wars have been fought under the false flag of religion. A tragic example is The 30years War that devastated Europe from 1618 – 1648. It is often explained as a Protestant verses Catholic conflict but in fact the underlying force was the emergence in Europe of the ambitions for independence and power of the sovereign Nation state. Catholic France with its messianic pretensions actually made alliances with Protestant armies to defeat and ruin Austria and defeat Spain, both Catholic countries. [xx] The Treaty of Westphalia that ended the conflict in1648 created the idea of independent national sovereignty and what is now the basis of modern Europe. Some historians believe that it also paved the way for the national ambitions and power conflicts of the 19^th and 20^th C’s, it certainly didn’t solve them. [xxi] Whatever the weaknesses of the current EU it is at least a genuine attempt to create a unity that will diminish these old temptations to national pride and megalomania.

Underlying extreme nationalism is the ancient pagan and tribal marriage of “blood and soil” – the linking of race and land in a kind of exclusive covenant of difference and superiority. Christianity challenged this with its doctrine of all nations and tribes being one in Christ. The great prophetic visions of the Bible speak of a day when every tribe and nation would be united and living in peace, where, in the words of Isaiah “they will beat their swords into ploughshares”.[xxii] If you visit the United Nations headquarters in New York and go to the courtyard garden you will find a powerful bronze sculpture of a man beating a sword into a ploughshare and on it are inscribed Isaiah’s words. The Biblical dream is of the Tower of Babels confusion being transformed into unity and peace on the Mountain of the Lord.[xxiii]

The thirty years War broke the influence of that unfulfilled Christian dream in Europe, although it did not entirely snuff it out. In a sense the EU and the UN for all their weaknesses are reflections of that dream.

We cannot turn the clock back on globalisation and multiculturalism. To support liberal democracy and to make it work in this context we need to do the following five things:

(i)                We need the commitment and cooperation of faith communities who support liberal democratic values and who understand that it is not necessary to have a state sponsored religion or church to preserve these values. And of course we need religious freedom.  (eg: Muslim intellectuals who support a ‘middle way’- a pluralism that rejects both ‘assertive secularism’ and ‘radical Islam’ – and accept the idea of a ‘secular Muslim democracy’ or what is sometimes called ‘proceedural democracy’ are to be encouraged. Although it should be understood that these ideas are not accepted among traditional Muslims. See the recent book by Sydney University academic Lily Z Rahim “Muslim Secular Democracy – Voices from within”  pub. Palgrave Macmillan 2013.)

(ii)              We need a consensus and acknowledgement from the general community about the importance of religious faith in the sustaining of democratic values and the virtues that make them work. Aggressive secularists need to understand and accept that the overwhelming majority of people in the world have strong religious attachments and commitments and have a rightful place in the public square. Globally secularists are in fact the minority.

(iii)            In my personal experience of working with refugees it has become very clear that democratic governments need to take far more seriously and intentionally the process of integration and the education of new settlers. People from very different cultures and value systems who have almost no experience of democratic values and governance need special assistance. As I mentioned earlier education in democratic values and the history of their development should also be a compulsory part of the general school curriculum.

(iv)            We also need to begin an open public conversation about our current problems in this area.

When new settlers fail to adapt to or embrace democratic values and become isolated cultural islands, or their young people are marginalised by poor education, discrimination and unemployment serious social problems emerge. For example: If the new settlers come from a pre modern culture, as they engage with modernity in the new culture the gap between young people and their parents’ traditional values grows to a chasm and the parents lose control. The young person’s identity becomes confused; they then become vulnerable to the extreme religious voices as well as petty crime, drugs and street violence. The internet provides all the radical resources they need to forge a new identity that seems empowering. This can also be exacerbated by the xenophobia, fear and right wing extremism they may find in the host culture.

In March this year the UK scholar and member of the UN’s special committee on intercultural engagement Dr Aftab Malik spent a month in Sydney’s Lakemba community which has the highest concentration of Islamic people in Australia. He reported that the identity crisis for young Muslims in Australia is a “growing disease”. He urged us to begin a public discussion of these issues.

He said: “Unfortunately for British Muslims it took a terrorist attack for us to have that discussion…. You need to pre-empt this. Don’t wait till something tragic happens.” [xxiv]

(v)              We need to understand that multiculturalism is an important part of modern democracy but that its definition and limits have sometimes been subject to naïve views and overly influenced by the philosophy of ‘cultural relativism.’[xxv] A view that ignores the reality that every culture has some features that are destructive and morally wrong. Our naiveté in Australia is partly due to the success we have had with our post WW2 immigration and the cultural enrichment it has brought. But we forget that the majority of those immigrants were from Europe, including a large group of Jewish refugees; all had a similar Judeo / Christian world view and culture to Australia. The second wave after the Vietnam War was also a success as the Vietnamese immigrants were fleeing communism and enthusiastically embraced our democratic values. Within the current wave are many people from traditional, authoritarian and Islamic cultures whose experience, values and world view are very different to that of a liberal democratic society like ours.

As Christianity continues to make, the sometimes painful journey from the pre – modern to the modern world, it continues to negotiate and adapt its relationship with the state. From its beginning as a persecuted minority, to controlling Europe’s Holy Roman Empire, to a separation of Church and state in some western nations,[xxvi] to conflict with totalitarian states like the former Soviet Union, to embracing representative democracy today, the relationship continues to change. Christianity has at times, in disobedience to the clear teaching of Jesus and the New Testament, descended into the use of force to forward its mission and discipline its members. It has at times persecuted minorities. It has at times confused the Kingdom of God with the Church or the Kingdoms of this world. It has had to adapt to scientific and Biblical criticism, to secularism, to philosophical materialism and now to consumerism and aggressive atheism. Therefore Christians, as a result of their sins mistakes and successes, have much to bring to the conversation that other religions and cultures need to have with the Enlightenment, modernity and liberal democratic values. Indeed there are some sections of the Christian community who are still to make that journey. Some sections of the Christian community are still hoping for a return of Christendom!

Of course for us all it is a continuing journey as our society continues to change. Maintaining an intelligent and relevant orthodoxy and holding on to the essential core beliefs and values of the Christian faith in a rapidly changing culture is a challenge but we must not shrink from it otherwise we concede the ground to secularism, extremism or authoritarianism.

CONCLUSION

Christianity has many unique and rich things to bring to the process of sustaining democracy:

(a)  As I have mentioned, our past and present experience in responding to the challenges of The Enlightenment and modernity. This should equip us in our conversations with some other faiths who have yet to constructively respond to these challenges.

(b) Our long history of involvement in the struggle for freedom and human rights.

(c)  Our theological commitment to the following core ideas that are a great underpinning for democracy:

–         The primacy of love.  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart… and your neighbour as yourself”, “Love your enemies”, “Whoever loves God has fulfilled the law.”

“God is love. Those who live in love live in God and God in them” [xxvii]

–         The key doctrines of grace and forgiveness commit us to reconciliation in all our relationships.

–         The infinite value of every person because they are made in Gods image, and because God in Christ took on human flesh. This value propels us to champion human rights and protect the sacredness of every individual.

–         The community of equality. In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” [xxviii]

–         An international community that embraces all races – we are saved by grace not race. We have no sacred language, everyone prays in their own heart language and we are committed to the provision of the Bible in every person’s language.

–         Servant hood and following the example of Jesus is our goal.

–         The three great Christian virtues of ‘faith hope and love.’ [xxix]

These ideas and commitments fit us most aptly to be in the vanguard of actions to forward and sustain democracy’s cause.

All of us need to ask ourselves the following questions: (i) Is my current engagement with the democratic process sufficient to claim my rights as a citizen? (ii) How can I be more engaged at a level appropriate to my abilities and stage of life? (iii) As a Christian how can I apply the core Christian values listed above to the various activities and involvements of my daily life, especially where I might be involved in decisions that affect professional or business standards, public policy and social structures? (iv) Given that the foundation of my life is my relationship with God in Christ how can I bring prayer to bear on this task?

Peter Corney 17/6/13 St Hilary’s Annual Lecture series.

[i] The Lowy Institute poll 2013 on Australian attitudes to democracy.

[ii] From a speech delivered in Boston 29^th May 1850 “The American idea”

[iii] From the Prologue to the first edition of the Bible to be translated into English by John Wycliffe in 1384. The prologue is thought to have been written by John Purvey.

[iv] Augusto Zimmerman “Christian foundations of the rule of law”  News Weekly June 4, 2005 (www.newsweekly.com.au)

[v] See “The Tyrannicide Brief” by Geoffrey Robertson, Chato and Windus 2005.

[vi] James Harrington (1611-1677), who wrote “The Commonwealth of Oceana” in 1656. It was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. See Gai Ferdons article in ‘Engage’ p.6 Spring 2006 from The Jubilee Centre UK.

[vii] Tom Paine (1737-1809) “The Rights of Man and the Age of Reason”. From “Tom Paine – A Political Life” by John Keane p. 46-48 1995 Bloomsbury Press.

[viii] See “Christian Social Reformers of the Nineteenth Century” Ed. by Hugh Martin, Torch 1933. “Saints in Politics – the Clapham Sect and the growth of freedom” by E. M. Howse, Allen and Unwin 1976.

[ix] A. C Grayling “Towards the Light” Bloomsbury. See chp 5.

[x] Os Guinness “A Free Peoples Suicide” IVP 2013 p. 108

[xi] OS Guiness ibid

[xii] OS Guiness ibid p.106

[xiii] The idea of ‘the social contract’ originates with Thomas Hobbes (1588- 1679) who wrote “Leviathan’. His theory is the basis of much western political philosophy – the idea that individual citizens surrender some of their freedoms and rights to the state in exchange for protection of their remaining rights.

[xiv] The Quarterly Essay issue 49. 2013 “Not Dead Yet – Labor’s post left future” By Mark Latham p.61-62

[xv] See “Christian Socialism – Scott Holland to Tony Blair” Alan Wilkinson, SCM press 1998.

[xvi] F. Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”

[xvii] Larissa Mac Farquhar in The Age Good Weekend 11/8/13.

[xviii] Jesus, Mark 10 :45

[xix] 2Peter 2:19

[xx] David  P Goldman “How Civilisations Die” Regnery 2011 Chap.11.

[xxi] Ibid Goldman chap 11

[xxii] Isaiah 2:4,

[xxiii] Micha 4:1-4

[xxiv] The Weekend Australian 13-14  April  2013 p 6. See also the article “Between Two Worlds” by Trent Dalton on Lakemba NSW in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

[xxv] See the article “Christianity’s Radical Challenge to Cultural Relativism” at <petercorney.com>

xxv The separation of Church and State is still in a process of evolution in liberal democratic countries like The UK where the Bishops sit in the Upper House, although the powers of the Upper house are limited and subject to those of the Lower elected house “The Commons”. The Church of England is an established Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury has considerable moral authority and influence in national affairs. The balance of ‘powers’ in this case is as much custom and culture as it is law and its effectiveness is only as significant as the general citizenship accept its place and level of influence. This idea hangs over in a more vague way in Australian political life although it is being challenged by aggressive secularism.

[xxvii] Mathew 5: 44., Romans 13:8-10., I John4:7-12.

[xxviii] Galatians 3:26-28.