jayber crow

Thanks to crookedshore for pointing me in the direction of this.

It does me good to lay down the cynicism and embrace the hope.

If you hang around with Christian parents for long enough, you’ll start to hear the same comment coming up in conversation repeatedly. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly you can see that they’re wee sinners?”

Now, I have no desire to downplay the depths of human sinfulness. I tend to agree with G.K. Chesterton that original sin is the only part of Christian belief that can actually be proved. We don’t even need to open a newspaper to find the evidence, since we don’t need to look any further than our own little bundle of selfish desires and habits.

But there’s something about how quickly and how often this comment is made that makes me a little uneasy.

More accurately, what disturbs me is our failure to say something else first.

The Christian story doesn’t begin with original sin. It begins with something like original goodness and original beauty. It begins with a garden, a good creation, and human beings who have been made in the image of their good creator. This is the breathtaking dignity and glory which the Christian story gives to all human beings. “He made us little less than gods,” the psalmist says.

Of course that original goodness and beauty has been fractured by the fall. But it hasn’t been completely destroyed. It still comes through in whispers and glimpses. The image of God has been smudged, but not erased. We are this strange, paradoxical mixture of dignity and depravity, glory and grime.

There’s something badly wrong if all we can see in our children is the grime – if we fixate on their failures and their sin, while the happy pagans down the road marvel at their child’s capacity for playfulness and unfettered joy, their moments of spontaneous kindness and generosity, the unique personality and gifts and quirks which they bring to the world.

It’s one of the great strengths of the Christian story that it faces with honesty the ugly side of human nature, and refuses to hide it or excuse it or rationalise it away. But when we start there, something gets horribly distorted. A story which is meant to be good news becomes harsh and abusive.

And too often, that’s exactly where we start. It’s where many of our evangelical statements of faith begin. It’s where we often begin with our children, and in relating to people who don’t share our faith. More and more I’m wondering if this is the thing which most often goes rotten at the heart of evangelical Christianity – the failure to recognise this original goodness, the image of God in all people.

There’s a cliche which rightly insists that the good news of redemption only makes sense against the backdrop of the bad news of sin. But we also need to insist that this bad news in turn only makes sense against the backdrop of the good news of our creation in God’s good image. The bad news comes sandwiched between a good beginning and a good end.

The full tragedy of our sin is that we fall short of the high calling we were created for. The tragedy is that we are rarely as good as we are in our best moments, that we don’t live out in reality what we aspire to in our best dreams. We fall short of the glory.

But the glory is what we need to notice first, in each other, and especially in our children. We need to look for the glimpses of goodness, of beauty, of God’s image, which point to what we once were, and what we can be again.

Of all the parents in our street, we should be the ones who are quickest to notice and celebrate these glimpses of glory in our children.

And then we can turn to face the grime, with joy and hope as well as honesty. And the story we tell may actually start to feel like good news to our children, and smell like good news to our neighbours.

New Year is a strange time. Some like to take time to reflect on the year gone by – mistakes made, lessons learned, wisdom gained – and shape some intentions for the year ahead.

Others prefer to trivialise the complexities of the past year by parcelling it up into simplistic and banal lists of the best and the worst of whatever.

In that spirit, I’m delighted to present you with my own, entirely subjective and highly opinionated opinion on the top five records and books of the year. They weren’t all released or published this year, but they were all new to me. First the music:

1. The Trumpet Child (Over the Rhine). One of the few bands that Espero and I are equally taken with. We caught them live here in Vancouver last year, and were totally floored. This album was a surprise – jazzier and more playful and, well, sexy, than anything else in their back catalogue, or in my music collection. But by far the most enjoyable album of the year. And plenty of thoughtful hooks under the playfulness – “His final goal, to fill with joy/ the earth that man all but destroyed.”

2. Sky Blue Sky (Wilco). I’ve loved this band for a long time, but at first didn’t know what to make of this. It’s simpler and happier than anything they’ve ever recorded – the first song has the cheesiest guitar solo and I still have no idea if they’re taking the piss or not. But if you go with the album it’s just lovely. Musical sunshine.

3. The Shepherd’s Dog (Iron and Wine). This guy has gone in the opposite direction to Wilco. His last record was a thing of gentle, quiet beauty – this one is noisier and more complex and ambitious, a more difficult listen. But he hasn’t lost his gift for haunting melodies and strange, evocative lyrics. It gets better with every listen, and if you ask me in a few weeks I’ll probably regret not making it my number 1. I’ll just have to carry that regret through 2008.

4. Boxer (The National). Dark, textured, weary, articulate, beautiful.

5. The Broken String (Bishop Allen). Maybe I should be growing out of it, but I still have a soft spot for a good bit of tuneful indie pop. Belle and Sebastian still light up my life. This New York band’s album was a highlight this year – it collects together the best songs from a project they took on in 2006 to record an EP every month of the year.

Narrowly missing the cut were The Innocence Mission (We Walked in Song), Calexico (The Black Light), Whiskeytown (Faithless Street), Brian Houston (Sugar Queen) and Stars (Set Yourself on Fire). Biggest disappointments of the year after being hailed as returns to former glories were Ryan Adams (Easy Tiger) and Radiohead (In Rainbows).

And now the books. This will inevitably be extremely random since I’m refusing to separate fiction from non-fiction, sacred from profane, and academic from bed-time-reading. It’s more fun this way.

1. The Violent Bear it Away (Flannery O’Connor). This is the least celebrated of her writings (she only wrote two novels and about 30 short stories) and has been out of print for a while. But it blew me away. I never understand everything that’s going on in her stories, but her strange characters on their bizarre spiritual journeys just draw me in, stir me deeply, and live in the memory long after I finish. Absolutely unique.

2. Reflections on the Psalms (C.S. Lewis). Most of you know that in my list of favourite writers this Belfast boy is out in front on his own. I read pretty much his complete works in uni, but it’s about time to revisit them. Every page is provocative and refreshing and surprising. Reading this reminded me that I don’t love Lewis primarily as an “apologist” or defender of the faith, as he’s usually depicted. For me he’s above all a spiritual guide – what he does for me is call me to a lifelong pursuit of the beautiful and the good and the true.

3. The Sacred Journey (Frederick Buechner). Buechner writes better than nearly anyone else alive today and he writes about life in general and the spiritual life in particular with disarming honesty and deep insight. His short memoirs are my favourites among his writings.

4. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (Jean Leclerq). OK so this one was a textbook for a class I took. And it’s exploring the culture of medieval monasticism. But it is really, really good. Seriously.

5. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson). This is a really fun and engaging read. Bryson does a great job of condensing the history of science into a readable and entertaining paperback, without trivialising the subject matter. He clearly loves science, and it’s infectious. But he also does a great job of showing the humanness of science – that it often advances through colossal egos and petty rivalries, creative leaps, blind alleys and lucky accidents, as much as by the clear-headed and methodical pursuit of knowledge. And that, although we know a lot of amazing things, there’s still a whole heap we don’t know.

Now it would be appropriate and traditional for you to tell me I’m out of my mind and wouldn’t know a masterpiece if it bit me on the bum, and offer your top fives as a corrective to my ignorance.

Happy new year.

Ambiguity can be good.

Ambiguity in a story can make it richer, funnier, more provocative, more profound. And it nearly always gets lost in translation.

Take Jonah, for example. God told Jonah to go and speak against the city of Ninevah because he had become aware of its wickedness.

Or maybe God wanted Jonah to go and speak to the city because he had become aware of its misery. The Hebrew words are a little ambiguous. Was this a mission of judgment or of compassion? Of anger or of love?

I wonder if Jonah had been sure it was a judgment mission, would he have gone without argument? It’s pretty clear that he hated the Ninevites. And with good reason – they had a reputation for violence and cruelty and general nastiness. Surely Jonah would have been delighted to announce their impending doom?

But the ambiguity is enough to plant a seed of doubt. In the back of Jonah’s mind is a chorus, a refrain, a song that keeps rising in the stories of Israel.

Yahweh is gracious and compassionate

slow to anger, abounding in love

Jonah didn’t like even the vaguest hint of a whisper of a possibility that he might be asked to be the messenger of compassion to his enemies. So he ran away.

Whatever we make of the idea of God’s anger, it seems that we can’t separate it from his love. It’s not an opposite impulse, the flip side of his schizophrenic character, something in tension with his love. It’s an expression of his love. As CS Lewis says, anger is what love bleeds when we cut it.

God was angry with the Ninevites because of their stupidity and selfishness and violent cruelty. God had compassion on the Ninevites because of their self-inflicted misery and suffering. Maybe we don’t have to choose. Maybe the ambiguity is wiser than the clarity of our English translations.

So after a short interlude involving a ship to the edge of the world, some pagan sailors, a storm and a sea-monster, Jonah goes to Ninevah and preaches. “Forty days and the city will be destroyed.” At least, that’s probably what his words meant. Its just that there’s a little ambiguity again, and his words could be taken in a very different way. “Forty days and the city will be transformed.” Is this about destruction or renewal? Is it a threat or a promise?

There’s no doubt what Jonah meant it to mean. He was all about unambiguous destruction. But in the most ironic twist of the whole story, this is the moment at which Jonah speaks more prophetically than he realizes. The people have a change of heart. They change their lives. The city is transformed and renewed.

And we’re left with Jonah, grumpy and bitter and pathetic, wishing he was dead. Maybe that’s where too much clarity and definition always leaves you. Certainly that’s where we end up if we take delight in a message of anger and judgment and destruction which is not somehow part of a larger story of love and compassion and renewal.

At least in this case, clarity kills. And ambiguity brings life.

(A small contribution to the revolutionary movement begun by smallcorner and lilytodd and espero, continued by zoomtard, and immortalised in film by vox. With apologies to vox for extended use of the first person plural)

Paul had a dream

It was a good dream. A long time before Martin Luther King, Paul dreamed that one day all of God’s children, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women, could join hands and sing in the words of the not-yet-written negro spiritual, “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last.”

“In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.” That was how he put it, and it was probably the most socially revolutionary idea expressed by anyone for several hundred years on either side.

Of course, Paul was a practical man as well as a dreamer. He wanted to actually make a difference in the real lives of real people in his culture. He knew that if he stood on the roof-tops and shouted “abolish slavery” and “full equality for women” people would find him very entertaining but society would remain unchanged. The economic world of his time was built on the practice of slavery, and the social world was built on the extended patriarchal household. These things weren’t going to change any time soon.

So Paul wrote letters to people living in the realities of that culture. He gave instructions for how people should relate to each other within households. He assumed that for now,the slaves were stuck in the slave system, and the women were stuck in the patriarchal system. So he focused on the masters and the men. He told them to treat the slaves and the women with dignity and respect, as real human beings made in God’s image. He told the men to love their wives in such a way that they would be willing to lay down their lives for them. All over the Greco-Roman world people heard Paul’s ideas and fell off their chairs. This was subversive and radical and dangerous thinking.

And for a while, people really got it. They caught the dream. For a while, the Christian community was good news for slaves, for the poor, and especially for women. Women were drawn in large numbers to the Christian faith because it gave them full dignity as children of God, and the Christian communities were places where they could be honoured and respected, and given real responsibilities and a real voice. One of the reasons the Christian church grew so rapidly was because the Christians refused to follow their culture’s habit of leaving baby girls to die on the rubbish dumps of their cities. They believed that baby girls were as valuable as baby boys.

But then time passed. The cultural gap between Paul and his readers grew. We forgot that Paul was not a philosopher like Plato, expounding universal statements of universal truth for all people at all times. We forgot he was a pastor who cared about real people, immersed in the detail of his time and place, writing real letters to particular people in a specific cultural context. We assumed that when he told certain women in certain churches to stop stirring up trouble and be quiet for a while, that was his final, absolute statement on women in the church (and ignored all the times he referred in passing to women who were leading and preaching and prophesying in the churches he had planted).

We forgot to listen carefully for the song, the dream, behind and beneath the letters on the page. We started to treat his writings as theological bricks in space, without context, without any human clothing or language or colour. We heard Paul saying that women were to be eternally subordinated to men in the church and in the home. We ripped the commands out of their place in the story and made them into ugly sticks to keep women in their place.

And so we stopped hearing the dream. The song was silenced, and so were the women.

And now some of the women are frustrated and hurt and angry. And rightly so. And they want to know what some of us men are going to do about it. And they won’t be satisfied with clever blog-posts.

I have no doubt that lilytodd will bring up her girls to be amazing and confident women, with bucket-loads of grace and gift and beauty to offer to the world. Our challenge is to raise our boys in such a way that they will be men who listen to these women with respect and give them a voice in family and church and world.

But of course it’s a cop-out to postpone the revolution until the next generation. As espero says, some of us need to get our asses off the sofa and start acting a bit more like Jesus, stop tolerating that which enslaves and wounds, and start empowering our sisters to live freely. And that should be the final word.

(Except go and watch this).

Some of you may be aware of some major debates/fights in recent times among British evangelicals over the doctrine of the atonement. I’m not even going to link you to the arguments, because it all made me a little sick, a little sad, a little angry.

I always thought the cross of Jesus was about bringing people together (with each other, with God). Making peace. Making all things new. And here we are arguing about how exactly this peace-making works, and making one particular theory a line in the sand which allows us to exclude people… OK I’m feeling queasy again.

Anyway, I just stumbled on the existence of this book, and the very fact that it exists has given me some renewed hope. I may even read it sometime soon.

I feel much better now, thank you for asking.

It goes without saying that my one year of physics at university gives me the authority to write a definitive post about the nature of science. I’ll wait for WhyNotSmile to come round here with her science PhD and give me a beating.

When people suggest that the scientific method of “evidence based enquiry” should govern all questions of truth, I have two issues with the suggestion. One is that I’m not convinced that the approaches which are appropriate within science are appropriate to many other areas of life, including not only religion, but also art, ethics, friendship, romance etc.

But my other issue is that I’m not convinced that science itself is as purely objective or evidence-based as we are often led to believe. I’ll make three small points and then await your abuse.

1. The whole scientific enterprise is based on assumptions which can never be proved by empirical methods. In fact, modern science would never have got started it if it wasn’t for assumptions drawn from the Judeo-Christian world-view (such as the reliability of human reason/logic, the possibility of understanding the material world, and the non-divinity of nature). Once science was up and running, we discovered that it worked and produced reliable results – so it was possible to discard the underlying world-view and keep doing the science. But it remains true that the empirical method itself is based on beliefs and assumptions which are embarrassingly non-empirical.

2. Science doesn’t proceed by a simple process of observing the evidence, then following a process of logical deduction which leads us inevitably to our conclusion. The evidence is often complex and contradictory, and the best scientists have to make imaginative leaps to come up with a hypothesis, which is then tested by looking at the evidence through its lens. So Charles Darwin was not simply a rigorous empiricist who followed the evidence where it clearly and inevitably led. He was also a creative genius who took a brave and imaginative leap well beyond what was obvious from the evidence.

Successive generations of scientists have found that when they look at the evidence through the lens of this theory, there is a kind of resonance – it makes remarkable sense of a lot of the data. They often find evidence which doesn’t fit the theory neatly, and while some Christians triumphantly take this as proof that evolution is discredited, the scientists quite rightly don’t abandon what remains the best available theory. If enough evidence accumulates which sits awkwardly with the theory, adjustments are made, leading to various revised forms of neo-Darwinism. But the whole process involves creativity and imagination as well as empirical observation and logical deduction.

3. Scientists are human beings. So they are not capable of achieving total, dispassionate, detached objectivity. They come to the evidence with their own pre-commitments, as people who are part of various relationships and communities (family, friends, culture, scientific community, etc). The same is true of those of us who read the results of science as lay-people. All knowledge is personal knowledge and happens in the context of relationship and community. Total objectivity is neither possible nor desirable.

None of these observations is intended as a criticism of science. In fact, I think they restore the dignity of science as one of the highest and most glorious of human pursuits, rather than something engaged in by robots or machines.

The other thing is that these are not points being made primarily by Christian apologists with an axe to grind. They are a well-established part of mainstream discussion in the philosophy of science (see Michael Polanyi as one prominent example). It puzzles me that someone like Richard Dawkins, entrusted with a high profile role in improving the “public understanding of science,” often seems to be willfully ignorant of the past century of intellectual history.

Of course he would probably say that this is all arty-farty philosophy, and he is a scientist. But then he should stick to what he does well and not write books that are 90% philosophy (or rather anti-theology). Just like I should stick to writing posts about beer and CS Lewis and depressing novels where nothing happens.

Tread gently, for you tread on my ignorance.

So Zoomtard and the QMonkey had an intellectual thumb-wrestling match, and the only winner was the spirit of passionate dialogue and mutual respect. I was invited, but then I went on holiday to the wilds of Oregon and missed it all. This is not so much a continuation of their debate as a belated tribute to it. I’ll probably repeat some of Zoomie’s points, but to be honest it was a long debate and I got bored and skipped to the end. Feel free to do the same with this post.

The heart of QMonkey’s challenge seemed to be that all our decisions about what to believe should be based on “evidence based enquiry” – so thinking people should be skeptical about the claims of religion until it can provide some damn compelling evidence.

Let’s jump straight to the biggest, boldest claim Christians make, namely the resurrection of Jesus. What evidence should we consider when weighing up that outrageous claim? The historical evidence is actually pretty strong by most standards – a good case can be made for the gospel accounts being rooted in eyewitness traditions, and the manuscripts are far earlier and far more numerous than for any other significant event of that period.

But as QMonkey points out, normal standards of evidence won’t do for something as unusual as a resurrection. Most people come to the evidence with a pretty strong presupposition that dead men don’t rise, so the evidence would have to be super-extra-mega-compelling to overcome our skepticism. But already we’re realising that we don’t come to the evidence as neutral, impartial observers. We bring all kinds of pre-commitments and prejudices and assumptions with us which will colour the way we see the evidence. On its own, this kind of historical argument just leads us round in circles.

But there are other kinds of evidence. The early Christian community was extraordinary, not only in the way it grew so quickly to become the dominant religious movement in the empire, but also in its positive social impact on the Greco-Roman world. The Christian message was great news for slaves, for the poor, and (yes) even for women. One of the reasons the church grew so fast was that the Christians refused to join in their culture’s habit of leaving baby girls to die on the city rubbish dumps. In the Christian community you could find rich and poor, former slaves and former slave owners, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, all sitting down to eat together in peace.

We know that there were plenty of Greek philosophers whose ethical teachings were (almost) as admirable as those of Jesus. So why was it the followers of the Jewish carpenter who had this revolutionary impact on society? If we could ask them, they would undoubtedly attribute this power for moral and social transformation to… the presence of the risen Jesus in their community by his Spirit. Transformed lives and relationships and communities are a different kind of evidence for the resurrection. But of course it’s still possible to come up with some other hypothesis to explain these phenomena.

But there’s another whole world of evidence to consider. If we could ask a first century North African Christian why they believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, what would they say? I’m guessing they would point to the strength of the eyewitness traditions, and to the evidence of transformed lives and communities. But I think they would also talk about a more experiential kind of evidence – they had seen, felt, sensed, experienced a power at work in the Christian community, bringing to birth things like, say, joy. And freedom. And peace. And love. Things which the early Christians talk about a lot. Things which are hard to define and harder to analyse, and which can’t be studied under a microscope or statistically measured. But things which are no less real and no less essential to meaningful human life. And things which these Christians attributed, again, to the presence of the risen Jesus in their community by his Spirit.

This last kind of evidence is often disregarded because it’s unapologetically subjective and personal and even emotional. Just like many of the most important dimensions of human life. The idea of detached and dispassionate analysis of objective facts is a peculiar myth, and I don’t think it is either possible or desirable for us as human beings. I’m brewing up another post in the next few days on why perfect objectivity is a myth even in the world of science. I bet you can’t wait.

Anyway, even with my expansion of the admissible evidence, we still fall way short of anything that could be described as irrefutable proof. But then the gospel stories wrestle with that very issue, and tell us that at the very beginning of his public ministry Jesus refused the temptation to provide the kind of undeniable evidence which would force people to follow him. He wasn’t interested in bullying people into that kind of faith. Which is why we shouldn’t try to intellectually bully anyone into faith, even if we could.

And also why the last word goes to the musicians and poets:

the rule has been disproved

the stone it has been moved

the grave is now a groove

all debts are removed

can’t you see what love has done?

(what it’s doing to me?)

I’ve just finished reading Steve Turner’s biography of Johnny Cash, and it’s got me wondering. How on earth did a man who was so blunt and direct about his faith remain so respected by, well, pretty much everybody?

I mean, Cash didn’t approach being a Christian in the music world like Sufjan Stevens, throwing in songs about Abraham and the transfiguration among all kinds of other stuff, and then refusing to talk about his faith in interview. He didn’t even approach it like Bono, with shovelfuls of irony and subtlety and poetic indirectness. He was just a big-Bible gospel-preaching, hell-fearing believer and he didn’t care who knew it. This was a guy who stood on stage with Billy Graham and called the masses to repent. The last album he released before his death began with an apocalyptic song about the day of judgment, warning that “everyone won’t be treated all the same, when The Man comes around.”

And yet this is a man loved and revered and spoken of as a legend by everyone from Bob Dylan to Jonny Depp to Bruce Springsteen to Tim Robbins to Nick Cave. How can people who are full of contempt for most figures of America’s religious establishment be so ready to shower Johnny Cash with praise?

My guess is that there are two connected reasons. One is that Johnny Cash was not afraid to talk and sing about the darker side of life. As Steve Turner observes in another book, Christians have often preferred to produce and consume art with a kind of “Pollyanna quality,” pictures of kittens and sunsets, positive and upbuilding songs – art that seems to take place in an almost unfallen world, where any problems that arise are trivial and easily overcome.

Johnny Cash was willing to wrestle with the shadow side of life, and he sang songs about poverty and hardship, murder and infidelity, addiction and violence, loss and loneliness. He explained his now iconic habit of dressing all in black like this:

Oh, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,

And tell the world that everything’s OK,

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,

Till things are brighter, I’m the Man in Black.

The second reason is that Cash identified himself, in the present, with the darkness that he saw in the world. He had personally lived a pretty wild life that included plenty of addiction, infidelity, violence and loss. But his posture as he engaged with people was never one that implied, “I used to be like you. You are a mess. You need Jesus.” He was always aware of the darkness in his own heart, his present capacity for selfishness and stupidity and sin. Even at the end of his life he sang with deep conviction about “The Beast in Me,” borrowing words from Nick Lowe but making them sound like only he could have written them.

So what he conveyed to everyone he met was, “We are broken and stupid and selfish and weak. We need Jesus.” He met the world with open hands and not a pointing finger. He somehow managed to sing gospel songs to prisoners without coming across as self-righteous and judgmental. They loved him and saw him as one of them.

Maybe the rest of us need to learn to face the darkness in the world with a bit of honesty, and especially the darkness in our own hearts. Then the world might want to listen to our songs and stories too.

This post indulges in the nerdiest of all nerdy theology student activities. It discusses the difference between our English bible translations and the original languages. And not even in relation to the big themes like loving God and our neighbour, but in relation to some pretty small details. Go and do something less nerdy while you still can. Like playing chess against yourself while watching Star Trek.

There’s a weird and wonderful story in Daniel 5 in which King Belshazzar of Persia throws a party, but is interrupted in his drunken revelry by a disembodied hand writing on the wall. According to most of our English translations, he was so scared that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way, which sounds reasonable enough. But in the Hebrew the phrase is a little more colourful. It says that “the knots of his loins were loosed.” Which almost certainly implies that he momentarily lost control of certain bodily functions. Nice. There’s even a cheeky little pun when Daniel is introduced later in the chapter as someone who “is able to loosen knots” (the NIV has “solve difficult problems”). The message seems to be, “if the writing scared the crap out of you, wait til you hear the interpretation!”

So the translators of our English bibles have decided it is in our best interests to remove the toilet humour from this story, and in the process they’ve made it less earthy and less funny. Now maybe this just grabs my attention at the minute because we have a three-year-old in the house and have an endless supply of poo-related stories with which to entertain our dinner guests. But I’m also taking it as a metaphor for what we repeatedly do to the bible. We find this collection of ancient writings too messy, too wild, too strange. And so we tidy it up. Clean up the poo. Tie up the loose ends. Explain away the mysteries. And end up with a meek, tamed book which has lost its power to provoke and offend and surprise and transform us.

Here’s another (small) example. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a parable about a mustard seed, which he describes as “the smallest of all the seeds.” Now the mustard seed is pretty darn small, but it isn’t actually, technically, the smallest seed in the world. And some people think this is a problem, what with Jesus being God and all. So the ever-helpful translators of the NIV have fixed it. What Jesus meant to say, of course, was “the smallest of your seeds.” It’s not a big change, but it papers over a little bit of the wonder of the incarnation. There are two possible ways to take the original words of Jesus. Maybe in taking on a human nature, Jesus chose to limit his own knowledge in such a way that, during his earthly life, he didn’t know that there was a smaller seed than the mustard seed. Or maybe he knew, but chose to communicate to his hearers within their own view of the world, within which the mustard seed was the smallest seed they knew. Either way it’s a small but powerful expression of the way God humbled himself to come near and speak to us in the person of Jesus. By tidying up the mess, we have lost a little bit of the glory.

Back to Daniel for one last example. Remember those three flannel-graph heroes, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? Threatened with death by fire for refusing to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, they come out with one of the most quoted and preached on soundbites in Scripture: “the God we serve is able to save us, and he will rescue us – but even if he does not, we won’t bow down to your gods.” It’s great stuff – total confidence in God’s power to rescue them, combined with humility in the face of God’s sovereign plan.

Except, of course, that’s not what they said. Apparently this is a bit of a nightmare to translate, but a much more likely version goes something like this: “If our God is able to save us, he will. But even if he can’t, we won’t bow down…” You see the problem. Total confidence in God’s goodness – not 100% sure about his power. Their theology is a little suspect, so the translators have crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s. It kind of shows you where our priorities lie. These guys loved God enough to go to almost certain death rather than betray that love. But if their doctrine is a little untidy, they get censored. Maybe we should wait until our faith-in-action is close to theirs before we presume to sort out their theology.

So here’s a small plea. Let’s leave in the puzzles, the problems, the paradoxes and the poo. When we tidy them up, we lose some of the humour, and a lot of the power and the beauty. This is not a tame book.