Gentle Wisdom

Usually mainstream scientists and journalists treat predictions that the world will end on any particular day with utter contempt, as coming from religious nutcases. And indeed they are generally right to do so, for the Bible clearly states that Jesus will come again on a day when he is not expected (Matthew 24:44). Indeed I remember the day in 1975 when Jehovah’s Witnesses were predicting the end of the world (actually I can’t find any mentions now of a specific day, only a year, but there were certainly days being predicted at the time), and reasoning as a young Christian, but not very seriously, that Jesus could not possibly come on that day as there were people expecting him, and so it was OK for me to get drunk that night!

So it comes as quite a shock to find posted on the BBC blog a post entitled The end of the world is not nigh, in which science correspondent Tom Feilden reports that “Some scientists have voiced fears” that something which will happen tomorrow, Wednesday 10th September, “could trigger a black hole that would swallow the planet (and the rest of the solar system for good measure) in a matter of minutes.” Tom has to reassure his readers with:

So what is happening tomorrow which has worried not just religious extremists but some serious scientists, and prompted even the BBC to issue this kind of reassurance?

It is an event which is being covered by BBC radio as The Big Bang. They seem to have taken that title from the worst fears of some scientists, that what happens tomorrow will be something like a replay of the original Big Bang. We can hope that whoever thought up this title doesn’t have the gift of prophecy!

The event is of course the one I already reported in advance in June, the official switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator which has been built at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The huge cost of this has been justified because, it is hoped, it will be able to smash sub-atomic particles into one another with so much energy that completely new particles are formed, providing profound insights into the fundamental nature of the universe. It seems perverse, even a big boys’ toys method as a friend of mine suggested, to investigate such things by smashing things up as hard as we can, but this does seem to be the only experimental approach.

The potential problems have been summarised in this report from CERN, with links to more comprehensive discussions. There seem to be two possible dangers. One is that the new types of matter or energy produced (”strangelets”, “vacuum bubbles” or “magnetic monopoles”) just might react with ordinary matter in some kind of chain reaction, which could immediately turn the whole world into something far more explosive than an H-bomb. The other is that the LHC may be able to produce microscopic black holes which could grow and swallow up the earth.

The basic safety argument here is that the earth has always been bombarded with cosmic ray particles, some of which are far more energetic than anything the LHC can produce, and has survived for billions of years. The CERN scientists note that

Well, maybe we have just been lucky so far, or protected by God. Would we know if other planets had disappeared into black holes? Probably not if they were outside our Solar System. So is it responsible for us to launch thousands if not millions of LHC experiments to increase the risk? Anyway, cosmic ray collisions are not directly comparable because any dangerous particles resulting from such collisions of fast moving particles with stationary matter would be shot out of our earth at very nearly the speed of light, so perhaps before they could be dangerous, whereas ones produced by the LHC from head on collisions may be much less energetic and so remain within the earth for long enough to be dangerous.

As I reported in June, if by any chance the earth is swallowed up in this way tomorrow, or later, the way it happens will be well in line with biblical prophecy, especially in 2 Peter.

Will the world end tomorrow? I don’t think so. But, following the apostle Peter’s advice, I won’t take the opportunity to get drunk!

Yesterday I received the following from God TV, which is also at this web page:

So Todd Bentley is taking a well deserved break. Perhaps his critics will also take a break. Perhaps some of them will conclude that their campaigns against his ministry have been successful, and rejoice. But this would be premature. I suppose that all the criticism has added to the stress which Todd has necessarily been under after keeping up such a heavy schedule for three months. But I’m sure he will be back. Indeed the announcement from God TV suggests that his break will not be a long one, as well as confirming that nightly meetings will continue at Lakeland, although without Todd and without TV coverage:

Meanwhile there has been an interesting report about Todd in USA Today. This is generally reasonably sympathetic, considering that this is in the secular mainstream press, but it is unfortunate that Todd’s staff cannot come up with even one convincing authenticated healing for the press to report. Here is an extract:

At this point I interrupt the quote to note that, despite how Eddie Arthur interprets this, Todd is not saying that miracles and healings are the only signs of the Kingdom. They are clearly the signs which Todd is concentrating on, but he says nothing to invalidate the other kinds of signs which Eddie mention, which are also helpful in getting interested people beyond “a bunch of theology” to an understanding that God is real and at work. I could add that Todd’s eschatology may be over-realised (we should expect victory now), whereas Eddie’s may be under-realised (we should expect suffering now), but that issue needs another long post to do it justice.

Meanwhile Richard Steel posts an interesting defence of Todd’s strategy, which he presents as essentially one of evangelism:

Amen!

The earth is not at risk from a new particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, according to scientists as reported by the BBC. There had been suggestions, even by theoretical physicists, that the Large Hadron Collider could generate new “strangelet” particles which might destroy ordinary matter, or miniature black holes which could grow and swallow up the earth. But the scientists have now reported that there is “no conceivable danger”. This is not because the accelerator cannot generate black holes - it can. But it is because the earth throughout its history has been bombarded, if only rather occasionally, by cosmic ray particles which are just as energetic as those produced by the collider, but even over billions of years these have failed to produce killer particles or black holes of mass destruction.

So are we safe? The scientists seem to think so. But they also seem to accept that there is a small but not completely vanishing chance of a collision between particles, whether cosmic ray particles or ones generated in an accelerator, having effects which spread out to destroy or damage the whole earth. The assurance that they can offer is simply that it hasn’t happened yet, for billions of years, and so isn’t likely to happen any time soon. And the new collider increases the danger by apparently producing as many high energy collisions in one experiment as occur naturally on the earth in thousands of years.

What is God’s perspective on this? This is what the apostle Peter had to say:

The scoffers claim that the earth is safe, it will continue as it is for ever, or at least for billions of years more, and God will never bring judgment or destruction. However, now even scientists are saying that there is a possibility, however remote, of the earth suddenly being destroyed. One possible scenario,

sounds remarkably like what Peter prophesied nearly 2000 years ago. I don’t claim that this is how the prophecy will be fulfilled, but even scientists are not ruling out the possibility.

As Peter writes, the consequence of this for us Christians is simple: “You ought to live holy and godly lives … make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

Brian of the blog sunestauromai - living the crucified life has the good fortune to pastor a church at a place which in some ways must be heaven on earth: the rim of the Grand Canyon. But is it in fact the nearest he will get to heaven? I don’t mean the altitude, although from there it must be unusually easy to imagine what it would be like to fall into hell.

Brian has been reading what Bishop NT Wright has had to say about heaven, in a new Christianity Today article (from where I have taken my post title) and a slightly older interview in Time Magazine. To these Brian has written a response, with a follow-up. I am sure he is not the only Christian, not even the only pastor, to be a little confused by the way in which Wright seems to be undermining the traditional understanding of the Christian hope, that we go to heaven when we die and that is the end of it.

So I will take a break from explaining the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to explain the Right(!) Reverend NT Wright, as I understand him.

In fact I am completely with NT Wright on this issue. The understanding which he is undermining, even if according to Nick Norelli it is not in fact widespread, is not biblical teaching but a distortion of it. Bodily resurrection - of every Christian in future, as well as of Jesus on the first Easter Sunday - is central to the Christian hope as explained by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: (Read on …)

It is always strange to me when Christian speakers and authors refer to the Antichrist in the singular, often with a capital letter. Even Pope Benedict seems to have done this, in the passage from him I quoted in a recent post, so I can hardly blame those who commented on that post for following his lead.

Of course it is fun to speculate about which political, religious or media figures might be the Antichrist - perhaps Tony Blair as I suggested tongue in cheek last year, or one of the various suggestions made in the more recent comment thread here.

But in fact there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that there will ever be an individual identifiable as the Antichrist. This is teaching from outside the Bible. It is so ancient that John, the author of the letters of John traditionally identified with the Apostle John, knew it, but he did not teach it. His teaching, which is the only biblical teaching on this subject, is that there are many antichrists, and that some of them had already come in his time.

(Read on …)

Welcome to thousands of new readers of this blog!

Perhaps I should have anticipated your arrival. Linking “Pope Benedict” and “Antichrist” in the title of a blog post has brought you here, it seems. Yesterday this post attracted 2143 views, and today already at 6 pm that total has been surpassed with 2267 views. The well over 3000 total visits to the blog on each of these two days dwarfs my regular 200-300 visits per day.

And all this without me making any suggestion that Pope Benedict is the Antichrist, indeed I wrote the opposite! I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have a lot of respect for His Holiness.

Of course one problem with this is that it has attracted a few people commenting with their own theories of which individual the Antichrist might be. That was not the point of my post at all. Rather, I was suggesting that there is not and will not be any single figure called the Antichrist, as suggested by 1 John 2:18.

In fact the great majority of you new visitors reached me from just one site, Spirit Daily, apparently a Roman Catholic news site which linked to my post.

No, I am not going to break my rule on this blog that I don’t speculate about the end times. But I was struck by the extract from Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, about the temptation of Jesus, quoted by Michael Barber. Here is part of it (typos corrected):

Well said, Your Holiness. These days I try (not always successfully) not to get involved in disputes with Bible scholars of this Antichrist kind.

With the apostle John in 1 John 2:18, I refuse to identify any single Antichrist but think in terms of multiple antichrists. These may include the liberal Bible scholars Pope Benedict has in mind. But ironically it is not just theological liberals who want to limit what God has to say by “supposedly purely scientific” exegesis. I often come across an essentially similar approach from those who call themselves evangelical Bible believers, but in practice hold that “God says nothing and has nothing to say” beyond the interpretations of the Bible by certain typically 16th and 17th century teachers. So I also wonder if among the antichrists are some evangelical scholars who are so sure of their traditional interpretations that they refuse to read the Bible “in order to listen to what God has to say”.

This is a follow-up to my recent post on the doctrine of eternal subordination within the Trinity and the related discussion at the Complegalitarian blog. This doctrine has recently become popular among complementarians, many of whom also call themselves Calvinists and so presumably value the teaching of John Calvin. Recently at the CBMW Gender “Blog” (in fact not a real blog because there is no opportunity for discussion) Calvin was listed among ten theologians who, it was claimed, held to this doctrine. Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology (as quoted by Molly), takes this further, claiming that

But can this claim be substantiated? I will not attempt to discuss all the ten theologians’ views. But in a comment on Complegalitarian Suzanne (apparently not Suzanne McCarthy) found a quote from Calvin which clearly shows that he did NOT believe in the eternal subordination of the Son. I have verified the quote from my own copy of Calvin’s Institutes, 2.14.3 (vol. 1 p. 486 in my copy, in the translation by Battles), and here I quote part of what Suzanne quoted with some additional text to introduce it, with my own emphasis:

In other words (and this is confirmed by reading the context), it is clear that to Calvin the distinction in honour between Christ and God the Father is only a temporary one which will cease when Christ has “discharged the office of Mediator”, that is, completed his saving work by bring his people to glory. Thus Calvin clearly shows that he believes in the temporary rather than eternal subordination of the Son.

If, as Calvin teaches, God shall cease to be the Head of Christ, that means that 1 Corinthians 11:3 is only a temporary teaching. So, if this verse is given the weight that many complementarians put on it, the “headship” of a husband over his wife (whatever that might mean) is also only temporary and will no longer be applicable in the eternal kingdom of God.

Ruth Gledhill reports an amazing statement by Bishop Graham Dow of Carlisle, at a meeting in connection with the Church of England’s General Synod. The bishop reportedly said:

When asked for clarification by Riazat Butt, the Muslim woman who is the new religious affairs correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, Bishop Dow expressed his surprise that press correspondents were present. But they had been invited. It seems that Rowan Williams is not the only bishop who needs some elementary lessons on handling the media.

But what of the bishop’s suggestion? We mustn’t forget that when Paul wrote Romans 13 the Roman empire was already much more repressive than any modern western democracy and strongly imposed its morality and religious practices on the whole empire. Our British government is in some ways moving in a bad direction, but it has a long way to go before it matches Romans 13, let alone Revelation 13. It is surely not helpful in a situation like this to throw around words like “demonic”, even in meetings which are thought to be private.

I just found this quiz entitled What is the Kingdom of God? As this subject interests me, I will put myself in a theological box, as they put it in the post where I found the link to this quiz, even though it is not Friday. So here are my results:

Interesting to see that I came out with the Anabaptist position of a Christian counter-system, although I wasn’t consciously thinking on those lines. But, and this is one of the points which I had trouble explaining to John Hobbins in our discussions on pacifism, I don’t take this to the extreme of withdrawing from the world, and so some of my answers reflected my position that I should be seeking to bring the values of this counter-system into the wider society.