“Where does it say in the Bible that the pubs should be closed on Good Friday” was the question troubling a heckler at an Open Air meeting? The question came around again this week when those who enjoy pub-time after full-time realised that the Magners League rugby match was scheduled to take place on Good Friday in Limerick. The vintners did their sums and reckoned that the loss to the community would amount to a cool €5,000,000. Presumably they were factoring in a home win over Leinster! A local priest kicked for touch with the suggestion of a public debate. He claimed to know of a couple of players who said their prayers before matches but it is hard to see how he could arrive at a majority without the accusation of tampering with the results! An appeal was made to keep sacred the two most important days in the church calendar – Christmas and Good Friday. Regarding the latter he said, “There was something emotive about it and it had a sombreness to it that allows you to tap into and reflect on personal suffering, and psychiatrists would argue that it’s important to do that.” What has the Bible to say on the matter? When Jesus remarked that Abraham “rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day” (St John Ch.8 V56) it wasn’t so much Good Friday that was in view but the fulfilment of the promise that Messiah would bring blessing to all nations. For Jesus Good Friday was the day when he finished the work of atonement. The day when he became a sin-offering to his Father for the sins of his people. The Lamb of God substituted for the sinner who looks to Him in faith and finds pardon, forgiveness and a new life in the household of the living God. As to the day itself the Bible is not dogmatic. St Paul writing to the church at Rome says, “ One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind”. (Romans Ch.14V5). As to what happened on that day however St Paul has absolutely no doubt of its significance, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians Ch.15V3) and that truth should be remembered 365 days of the year.
Making the Grade
When “grade inflation” was highlighted in the press this week it was a term new to most of us. It sounded sophisticated. Rather status enhancing. The truth was quite deflating when we learned that exam results in many schools and colleges were being massaged upwards to enhance their reputation. The students who received these higher grades were not going to complain neither were the educational institutes who wanted to look better in the competitive world of academia. There was, what one columnist termed, an “evaluation deficit”. In other words no one was testing the teachers work. The irresistible temptation to step up the grades because others were doing it produced a similar situation to that of the banks but without the international money market to blow the whistle. That was until the consumers of the products from our colleges got together, Google, Hewlett Packard and Intel – all high users of our graduates – and spelled it out. Our educational standards were only average and average was no longer good enough. Cooking the answer to look good was what one young man did when confronted by Jesus’ question about keeping half of the 10 commandments. “All these I have kept from my youth” he replied thinking that life here was some kind of probation period for life hereafter. (Luke chapter 18 verses 18 – 22). The problem with that kind of thinking is you never know if you are making the grade. You might be guilty of grade inflation on yourself! The man St Luke mentioned thought he had scored 100%. Others of us may be more modest markers but if left to ourselves we would be prone to massaging the figures to look good. However we can relax the Bible has already given us our grade. It says that we are all in the same boat. St Paul, quoting from the Psalms in his letter to the church in Rome writes “No one seeks for God, all have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one”. He was referring to us as created beings not the creator, Jesus Christ, who alone has kept the law 100% and lays it to the account of the repentant sinner who turns to him in faith. Jesus advised the man to get rid of all the things that held him back and “come, follow me”. Making the grade in God’s school is more a matter of divesting yourself of “stuff” and following the only one who can present you faultless on that great day. “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen” . (Jude 24/25)
Science versus the Bible: A Response
In a 1989 New York Times article Richard Dawkins declared, with characteristic directness, that anyone who denied Darwin’s theory of evolution was either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. Rarely a model of diplomacy, the Oxford zoologist reserves his most biting rhetoric for those who question the secular explanation of life’s origins.
Which is not surprising. There’s a lot at stake in the creation-evolution debate, and negative stereotyping has long been a weapon of choice for both sides.
To the disinterested outsider the conflict is a tired slugging match between hardcore atheists and swivel-eyed fundamentalists, and anyone seeking a compromise can expect haymakers from both sides.
That’s why I’m loathe to criticise events such as Grosvenor Road’s recent panel discussion on Science vs. the Bible. By all accounts it was very well run and important issues were considered without the rancour that’s often generated when those two topics collide.
Nevertheless, I must criticise. Not the event, but the philosophy behind it, a philosophy that seems to be taking many Christian minds captive (particularly educated Christian minds). The philosophy is naturalism – the assumption that the existence of all life can, and indeed must, be explained without reference to any supernatural agency, i.e. God.
The three participants on the panel – a chemist, microbiologist and geologist – were of course Christians, and none of them would deny God’s existence. But as scientists they are also naturalists (or, as the microbiologist helpfully refined it, methodological naturalists). They are committed to the method of explaining the world with the naturalistic assumptions that underpin contemporary science. In Geology, this presents itself as uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell’s idea that the processes we observe in the present, such as erosion, are the main causes of all geological formations; and its equivalent in Biology is the creeping, stepwise, unconscious and undirected Neo-Darwinian process.
The panellists would doubtlessly contend that it’s perfectly reasonable to be methodological naturalists – to adopt the assumptions of naturalism when doing science – while rejecting metaphysical Naturalism. They see no conflict in being theistic evolutionists, for they believe in two books with different purposes: the book of Nature tells us how the world works; the book of Scripture tells us why the world exists.
I believe this division is unnecessary, philosophically and theologically incoherent, and leads to a diminished view of Scripture.
I’ll begin with my second objection. The panel’s chemist, when challenged to explain Christ’s transformation of water into wine at Cana replied simply that it was a miraculous act which ‘was not part of the regular, normal behaviour’. I quite agree. God interrupted the normal course of events to produce results immediately that would naturally have required many months.
But allow me now to run a quick thought experiment. If one of the panellists was transported back in time to that wedding feast, presented with a pitcher of the miraculous wine and challenged to explain its creation, what would be his reply? As a committed methodological naturalist, he would be bound to explain that grapes ripened on a hillside, were picked, crushed, fermented and finally brought to the wedding feast in wineskins. His explanation would be quite reasonable, naturalistic, and wrong.
You might reply that the scientist’s Christianity would trump his methodological naturalism, that he’d simply believe apostolic testimony on this issue. I’m sure he would, but that’s not the point. Our little experiment shows that methodological naturalism would have been clearly incapable of explaining at least one historical fact in the natural world; it simply couldn’t have answered the how question of the wine’s provenance correctly. (Remember, once introduced, the wine was chemically no different to its non-miraculous counterpart – although it did taste much better!)
So if God can compress the natural processes of many months into one instant in first-century Cana, why do many Christian scientists object on principle to His intrusion at other times, such as at the creation of Adam and Eve and the flood? I believe it’s because they’ve chosen to be bound by the naturalistic assumptions that currently govern science. This naturalism is assumed a priori and is not a necessary conclusion of scientific observation – instead, it determines how scientists view the evidence in the first place. If the history of all material phenomena must be explained through a naturalistic lens, then there’s no place for a literal, historical interpretation of, for example, the early chapters of Genesis.
And, logically, there’s no place for Christ’s New Testament miracles. However, the panellists believe in those miracles as strongly as I do, but only by arbitrarily suspending their naturalism. Their faith comes at the very heavy cost of logical inconsistency.
I think it’s very important to recognise the commitment of so many Christian scientists to naturalism because it is this commitment that determines their response to any attempts to challenge Darwinism. And their allegiance is very strong, maybe even stronger than that of their non-believing colleagues. The microbiologist claimed, for example, that he was uncomfortable with Intelligent Design (ID) because he was a methodological naturalist and therefore suspicious of invoking any non-natural agent to explain natural phenomena; he was scared of anything that seemed like a God-of-the-gaps argument.
But the argument offered by ID advocates is the opposite of the God-of-the-gaps approach: they claim that our increasingly sophisticated knowledge of life’s complexity – not our ignorance of biology – points to the existence of a Creator.
An interdisciplinary approach, such as the application of information theory to the interpretation of DNA, has yielded some very strong arguments for ID. For example, William Dembski has proposed specific criteria for detecting intelligent causation in his book The Design Inference, an academic monograph published by Cambridge University Press in 1998.
Designed systems demonstrate what he terms ‘specified complexity’: objects and messages produced by an intelligent agent consist of seemingly random yet specifically ordered components or symbols. For example, the repeating string abcabcabcabcabcabc is specific but not complex or random enough to contain much information, and the string xjmfernidheosnbyt is a complex collection of random information but its lack of specification means it communicates nothing we would identify as a coherent message. In contrast, the string methinksitislikeaweasel is both random and specific, indicating an intelligence behind its composition. (In this case, the intelligence of a famous 16th century playwright).
ID theorists maintain that it’s reasonable to apply the criteria of specificity and complexity to biological systems, and in particular to the messages encoded in DNA, and draw the same conclusion of design by intelligence. This is simply the logic of Romans 1:20 applied to microbiology.
Given these criteria, they argue, standard evolutionary thought, with its emphasis on the classic combination of chance and necessity, is inadequate in explaining life’s complexity at the information-rich microbiological level. Chance produces meaningless disorder (the xjmfernidheosnbyt of the above example) and necessity can merely account for the mindless repetition of that disorder.
Nevertheless, theistic evolutionists prefer to cling to Darwinian orthodoxy because they simply believe that it’s taboo to speak of an outside Designer inferred from the apparent design of a closed natural system – they would call it ‘bad science’. But remember that the closed natural system is an assumption (and one that they themselves often feel compelled to suspend).
I used to have some respect for this philosophical nicety until I realised the following irony: theistic evolutionists – the party within the Darwinist movement that should be the most open to detecting God’s handiwork in nature – are arguably the most committed opponents to detecting design in God’s creation. The following example should be enough to demonstrate this claim.
In an interview with Ben Stein for the film Expelled, Richard Dawkins conceded that ‘a signature of some kind of designer’ might be found if scientists looked hard enough in the details of biochemistry. Dawkins’ putative designer could, he claimed, be no more than an earlier alien life form that may have seeded life on earth in the distant past. But he at least recognised that it was not philosophically illicit to infer a higher designer from complex biological systems. Incredibly, Christian Darwinists, who believe that God created the universe and everything in it, are even less open-minded than Richard Dawkins in this respect.
So theistic evolutionists are in a very difficult position, theologically and philosophically. They share the methodological naturalism of their secular colleagues but are forced to ignore it when its inadequacy becomes clear in the context of Christ’s miracles. Nevertheless, it guides their understanding of other miraculous accounts, particularly in the book of Genesis. What is the reason for this inconsistency? And why do these scientific believers deny the possibility of inferring design in nature while the world’s most notorious atheist is happy to allow it?
Those questions should be enough to keep your minds busy this week. Next Sunday we’ll examine why theistic evolution is unnecessary and leads to a diminished view of scripture.
Wood’s Words 20th February 2010
In a country awash with sexual perversions it is almost a relief to read of the serial adultery of Tiger Woods. So skewed has our moral compass gone that the philandering of this superb athlete does not seem so remarkable. What makes his fall from grace intriguing is the fact that he had all his liaisons while he was in the limelight as the world’s top golfer. His wife did not know and the journalists, who make careers out of delving into the secrets of the rich and famous, were taken by surprise. His ability to control the media was in evidence on Friday when he delivered a prepared confession before a hand-picked audience of friends and sympathisers with only three journalists in attendance. They were there simply to take notes – no questions were permitted. After 45 days of therapy Woods was in control. Addictions are hard to handle and Woods struggled to rationalise his behaviour. “I convinced myself normal rules did not apply…I thought only about myself…I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to …I felt I was entitled.” He returns to therapy and to the Buddhism of his youth. In it he would have been taught the “4 Noble Truths”; Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. The cessation of desire eliminates suffering. This comes by following the path between the extremes of sensuousness and asceticism. In Woods own words, “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves, causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.” Like many of the world’s religions Buddhism seeks the remedy within the person. Jesus contradicts this, “For from within, out of the heart of man come evil thoughts… theft, murder, adultery… all these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” St Mark ch.7 V21. All sin is against God because he made the rules which we all transgress. When we sin we create a debt. Even the most elastic conscience knows that. Therapy cannot remove it. Going within is looking for a remedy in the wrong place. We need to look away from ourselves to Jesus atoning work on the cross and believe that he was there in the sinners place. When we recognise that he died for me we experience the freedom of forgiveness which now evokes in the heart a new desire to live in conformity to his word. The addict will always have his Achilles heel. He will be tested. But for the Christian who has personally experienced the love of Jesus there is the power to live above the ordinary and the assurance that he is not alone in his struggles. Jesus has promised that he will never leave or forsake him in this life or the next. Our “tiger” natures need to be tamed by faith in Jesus.
Global Warnings
At this time of the year we have cows calving in the farmyard so it was with some curiosity that I learned of the Mertz glacier in Antarctica calving earlier this month. Apparently the gesticulation period is not as predictable as cows occurring every 50 or 100 years but when the calf is an iceberg the size of Luxembourg it must make quite a splash! The birth was assisted by another iceberg called B-9B, itself a mere 60 miles long, bumping into it like a gigantic dodgem car. Scientists reckon the pair may have some effect on global ocean circulation. As I write news is breaking of a massive earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live. President Michele Bachelet declared a “state of catastrophe.” Buildings collapsed and phone and electricity lines are down, making the extent of the damage difficult to determine. A tsunami is travelling across the Pacific and the inhabitants of Islands in its path are taking to the boats. Its effects may reach New Zealand and Australia. It may be my imagination but there seems to be a stepping up of these natural phenomena. The Lord Jesus did say that prior to his return there would be various signs in the heavens and “on earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves” – St Luke chapter 21 verse 25. If you are of a scientific bent you will find explanations for these occurrences in the movement of plaetonic plates and ridicule the notion of fulfilling Biblical prediction. If you are in that category the words written by St Peter in a letter to the churches are especially relevant: – “you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Saviour through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” 2 Peter chapter 3 verses2-9. Please take note of these events, take St Peter’s advice and turn to Jesus.
Resigning Times
We have had a famine of resignations in Ireland but recently this has turned into, what for us, is something of a flood. Some have been voluntary like the two politicians who resigned this week. Others like the handful of Bishops whose resignations were involuntary came reluctantly. The reasons given by the politicians are somewhat obscure. In their explanations the temptation to wash someone else’s dirty linen in public proved too hard to resist. The Bishop’s suffered from the general blindness of society towards child abuse but since they knew about it they were faced with no alternative but to go. What exactly was the deciding factor that brought them to their decision may never be revealed. What was the straw that broke the camels back, the bridge too far, the action or word that triggered the letter of resignation? We may never know. What is certain is that none of them ever expected to end up this way. There are no resignations in the New Testament. The Apostles would have had plenty of grounds for taking that route. Their mandate was to be “fishers of men” and to experience the abundant life that Jesus offered. Indeed in the commissioning service did He not forecast that they would do greater things than he had done? A great future beckoned. Perhaps if they had not been arguing about who would get the top job in the new Kingdom they would have heard that suffering and service go together. The amount of hardship they suffered for simply doing their work would have had people today running to the Labour Court or the Rights Commissioner for redress! On the other hand if they had listened better they would have heard the bit about cross-bearing which Jesus modelled so graphically and realised that there is a close relationship between discipleship and martyrdom. Their message to “come and die” is not one to pull in the crowds. But this was the way they were to go – Jesus said it clearly. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Of course it was the love of Jesus, experienced by the presence of the Holy Spirit within them that gave them the confidence that indeed he would “never leave them nor forsake them”. In all their trials there was only young Mark who found the going a bit too tough and even he repented and joined Barnabas on a mission trip to Cyprus. None of them resigned or retired. Their Gospel told of a saviour who died so that sinners like you and me might be forgiven and rose from the dead to guarantee our future with Him in heaven. May we be granted a like faith to follow in their footsteps.
Gender Matters
Word on the Week. 6th February 2010. We are not told in the Bible why God made Adam and Eve instead of Adam and Steve but it makes sense when a short time later he commands them to “be fruitful and multiply”. We are not told why the one man and one woman in lifelong monogamous relationship was the best arrangement to rear a family but we can see throughout Scripture the blessings it brought when it was not transgressed. We are not told why St Paul in his first letter to Timothy rules that, in the church, a woman should not teach or have authority over a man relating this back to the creation order, but at the very minimum it implies that gender matters. There are God-given roles which we breach at our peril. Once you say that gender doesn’t matter, it may seem to be a small thing, but you “sow to the wind and reap the whirlwind”. The consequences of our actions may not be apparent at the time but they will appear and there is no means of redress. We are told why there is an order in opposite sex marriage (the only marriage the Bible recognises). The husband is head of the house. He is to love his wife enough to die for her. The wife is to submit to her husband. She is to love him enough to live for him. Because we are sinners the roles are to be worked out in a setting of mutual forgiveness. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” But the underlying reason for marriage is simply that it provides us with a picture of Christ’s relationship to his church. He is the head of the church. The church is his bride. He loved the church and died for her. She is to submit to him and obey his word. “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” So where does this leave Adam and Steve? The proposed Civil Bill would recognise their relationship and make allowance for it. The Bible also recognises their relationship and tells us that the love of God is so strong that Christ died for them. The out-working of his death was to enable those who trust Jesus to turn from their homosexual practices as instanced in the Corinthian church: “And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God”. The love of God for the homosexual is no less strong today. Trust in Jesus. Further recommended reading – Ephesians Chapter 5.
Avatar 23rd January 2010
This film, from the director who gave us “Titanic” is the hottest thing to hit the science fiction world. Aided with 3D glasses audiences can see where the $280 million went in making the film and the Director’s bankers can see the $1 billion it netted in the first 17 days! It is impossible not to be fascinated and enthralled by this action-filled vision of adventure and battles in an iridescent jungle on an alien planet, where hideous, dragon-like creatures appear to leap off the screen, flora and fauna wave in the air and a heroic avatar does battle with a pterodactyl-like beast before subduing it and soaring off on its back. This is Pandora, an Earthlike-planet with a lush rainforest environment, trees a thousand feet tall, floating mountains and an abundance of life forms, some beautiful and some terrifying. Into this new world our hero, Jake, is sent on a spying mission. Here the natives, the tall blue-skinned “Na’vi”, (navy blue perhaps!) have long resisted the miners from earth trying to plunder their land for the valuable mineral Unobtainium. Borrowing from Hinduism where Avatars are incarnations sent to earth by Hindu deities and in his artificially-grown alien body, our ‘Avatar’ Jake must go among the Na’vi, learn their ways, and win their trust. The idea that he might do them wrong is upset when he falls in love with a 10 foot beauty. As he becomes increasingly involved with her and her clan he finds himself caught between the military and industrial forces of Earth and the Na’vi, who are increasingly threatened by human expansion on Pandora. Jake wants a cause. Can this extraterrestrial girl teach him something? “All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for” he says. Well he gets plenty of fighting when he chooses to side with the Na’vi! Then there is the big white tree. It represents Mother Nature and is the life force of all the animals and plants on the planet. It also bonds the Na’vi with nature and must be protected. If it dies Pandora is doomed. The Bible teaches that salvation did not originate in nature but in revelation. The grand narrative of our salvation is not found in worshipping nature, but in God’s interventions in redemptive history. They do, however, culminate with a tree, or rather with the One who was hung on it. It is through faith in the atoning death of Jesus that we have life. Life that is not dependant on nature but on the forgiveness of our sins and our adoption into God’s family for ever. As St Peter put it in his letter to the churches: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we, might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned unto the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
A Stove Wins
There is something satisfactory when, in a National scientific competition for schoolchildren the winner out of the 1,000 plus entries was the designer of a home-made stove. It heightens the satisfaction to learn that he did not make it for the cash prize nor for its marketing potential but to have it taken up by Charities working in developing countries. Richard O’Shea, an 18 year old sixth year student from Blarney, Co Cork, designed his biomass (wood dung and plant material) fired cooking stove out of tin cans. It can be made with a screwdriver, a small knife and a nail! The stove uses small quantities of fuel and produces little or no smoke. It is reckoned that over 2 billion people in the world depend on fires for cooking. These use a lot of fuel and produce smoke. The beauty of Richard’s simple design is that it can be made from materials readily available. The life-span of the stove was not examined but, given the ease with which it could be made; replacements could form a sustainable cottage industry! The welfare of the poor has always gone hand in hand with the proclamation of the Gospel in Scripture. In fact when St Paul was commissioned to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles the church leaders asked him to remember the poor back in Jerusalem. It was not as if St Paul was wealthy at the time, quite the reverse, but it was an accepted fact that when the lord saves a person from their sins he puts a desire into their hearts to give to those in need. Their attitude to money changes when Christ is Lord of all. Those who were converted to Christ during St Paul’s ministry contributed to the needs of the saints in the Jerusalem Church. Seldom is giving purely altruistic as the donor, be it an individual or the State, usually looks for some reciprocal benefit. What makes Richard’s gesture different is its generosity, a Christ-like commodity in a greedy world.
Sin makes a Comeback
Word on the Week. 9th January 2010. We thought postmodernity had put it out of the house but in it comes through the back door. The “A” word was heard in the media just when it seemed adultery had been dropped from the vocabulary. After all the current descriptions of “having an affair” blunts the impact and to be “in a relationship” sounds almost healthy. A possible reason is that we are dealing with Biblically literate Northern Ireland where the evangelicals call a spade a spade and not an agricultural implement. Another reason could be that the one guilty of adultery is the wife of the First Minister who herself was a formidable political figure. The fact that she recently condemned “same sex unions” in Biblical terms provided ready ammunition for her detractors. Her husband, the First Minister, mentioned his wife’s repentance and granted his forgiveness in a moving broadcast marred, perhaps a little, by his desire to remain in Office declaring, “I have done nothing wrong”. It’s not every week that we see two professing Christians in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. It is fairly common in the USA and each revelation is met with some agonising by the evangelical community and the issue of more books on “How to” pray more, practice forgiveness better, be more holy etc. etc. Another temptation is to look for better role models only to find that they too have feet of clay. Now it is understandable for people who have put their faith in Christ to look for some transformation, some conquering of sin, a victorious life. In 2Corinthians ch.5 verse 17 it says “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come”. So it is commendable that we want to see a bit more of it in ourselves. The problem is that what Christ offers and what we want are two different things! Instead of some form of sinlessness we are told to take our sin-stained broken lives into the world and proclaim that we are sinners saved, not by our efforts, but by God’s grace alone. What we are to do is offer, not ourselves but “Jesus Christ and him crucified”. We are to point to the way of faith in the work of Jesus. We are to show that fulfilled the law on our behalf so that we are now free to live a life of love – love to God and our neighbour. Whatever the fate of the First Minister’s job, perhaps he should revisit his confession of blamelessness, even if it was made in the restricted sense of his wife’s adultery. Like all of us we bow to the Bible’s verdict of universal sinfulness and get on with making known Christ as the remedy.