By Lionel Windsor

In this fifth and final instalment of his five-part series, Lionel Windsor reveals what the solution to Psalm 8 has done about the problem of death. (Read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.)

We've been looking at Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2, and have discovered that Jesus provides the solution to the puzzle of Psalm 8.

Where do we see Jesus? We see him in the Gospels, those records and witnesses to Jesus' life, death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. The Gospels form the first four books of our New Testaments. And as we look at this man Jesus Christ in those Gospels, we see something very significant: we actually see (if we look at this testimony closely) that God himself became human: Jesus, the Son of God.

This is the reason that we are important to God. It's because God actually became one of us. God, the creator and designer—the one who is far above and beyond even the 70 sextillion stars—the one whose hands hold the universe—the one for whom and by whom this same universe exists—became human. He became one of us—one of the specks of dust—one of the small, pitiful creatures. He became a baby and grew. And he did it “because of the suffering of death” (Heb 2:9b).

Just as our very existence and value in this universe is a real problem, so too is the fact that suffering and death is also a problem. The Bible doesn't give us final and neat reasons for suffering and death—especially when it comes to individual cases. But it does tell us that suffering and death are all finally bound up with our rejection of God himself. The fact that we have abandoned our responsibility and ceased to live as God desires means that we are subject to death.

Death is not the way the world should be. It's wrong. You will know this if you have ever experienced the death of a loved one, relative or friend, as well as thought about your own impending death. But the Bible says that death is all bound up with this terrible reality—the reality that we, as individuals and as a race, have taken our importance for granted and have used it to pretend that we are God, choosing to define our own lives. Death is, in the end, God's judgement against our rejection of him—our abandonment of who we are, our ignoring of him and our playing God ourselves. Death now; death forever.

But what has Jesus done about death? Again, take a look at the same verse: “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9c). God's Son became one of us because of God's grace—his lavish, undeserved love for us. The reason you matter to the God who made the countless stars and supernovas is not because you're big or good or important to the running of the universe; it's simply because he decided to love you. And he showed his love in an incredible way: Jesus, in becoming one of us, tasted death for us. Although he was God himself, the perfect human being, he also suffered. He died. He died, in fact, an agonizing death on a Roman cross. And he did it for us, in our place.

What does that mean for us? “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). Jesus died to bring us back to God. Because Jesus has suffered the consequences of God's judgement, we don't need to face God's final judgement against us. Because Jesus died, he has made us ‘sons’, which means heirs—children of God. Those who trust Jesus—those who belong to Jesus—will have ‘salvation’, which means escape from God's judgement—escape, in the end, from death itself.

Jesus died to bring us to glory—to finally ‘crown us with glory and honour’, as the song goes (Ps 8:5). This means everlasting life in a new creation that God will make—a place where there is no suffering or death, where there is no judgement from him, where we live rightly as God's children and where we will know him finally and perfectly.

Jesus, who has suffered and been made perfect, has risen from the dead and is now alive. He himself is crowned with glory and honour. One day those who trust in him and know him will see him as he is.

What is your response to this? Do you know Jesus? Do you trust Jesus? Do you believe that the riddle of our existence is actually found, not in yourself, but in him?

If you've just joined us, in these Saturday posts we've been looking at classics from The Briefing archive on the Holy Spirit. First we learned about the signs and wonders ministry of John Wimber. Last week, we looked at the issue of Christian experience and what the Holy Spirit has to do with it. This week, John Woodhouse lays the foundations for how we should think about Christian experience:

In the first of these articles, we looked at the current confusion surrounding the topic of Christian experience. We noted that there is confusion about what counts as Christian experience; about what authority experience should possess; and about the place of the Holy Spirit in Christian experience (and vice versa). We concluded that there is even confusion about how the very subject of theology and experience should relate. So if you finished the first of these articles feeling somewhat confused, then I can only claim to have been successful thus far.

In this article, I will attempt to get beyond the confusion to some clarity. But where to begin?

The wrong starting point

As I’ve already suggested, much of the muddle regarding Christian experience begins at the starting point—the wrong starting point, that is. Much of what we hear and read about this subject starts with, and is preoccupied by, the reported experiences of Christians. If we want to understand the nature of Christian experience, it is argued, then let us begin by analyzing what Christians have actually experienced.

This approach has its highbrow exponents in theologians such as Schleiermacher, who began his inquiry by studying Christian piety. Indeed, the substance of his theological work was to describe and explain the nature of Christian piety, even though this eventually led him to a theology that was basically pantheistic.

At a more popular level, this is also the problem with much of John White’s recent writing and teaching. He has become fascinated with the phenomenon of revival, and has used his skills as a clinical psychiatrist to analyze the experiences of Christians in the great revivals. He has tried to determine whether the experiences of various contemporary Christian movements qualify them to be seen as revivals. Notice that he focuses on the experiences of the Christians concerned, and argues out from there. At various points (such as in his book, When the Spirit Comes with Power), he argues that certain experiences are simply inexplicable in psychological or other terms, and therefore must be attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. John White acknowledges that this approach is liable to lead to a Holy-Spirit-of-the-gaps problem, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from falling into precisely this error.

Ultimately, nothing is to be gained by this sort of analysis (cf. 2 Cor 12:1). It fails because you cannot deduce the cause of an effect by looking only at the effect. You cannot understand a relationship by looking only at one side of it. Introspection (looking inwardly at our own experience) is therefore not an adequate or reliable means of understanding Christian experience.

There are numerous examples of this tendency in Christian circles today—most notably people’s penchant for labelling activities as ‘in the Spirit’. We have laughing in the Spirit, the silence of the Spirit, the weeping of the Spirit, slaying in the Spirit—perhaps speculating in the Spirit might be added to the list. The experience has been interpreted by looking primarily at the experience and not to the supposed author of the experience. I suggest that this will not lead to any useful or reliable conclusion.

Read the rest of the article online (3,703 words).

By Lionel Windsor

In the fourth instalment of a five-part series, Lionel Windsor uncovers the answer to the riddle. (Read parts 1, 2 and 3.)

We've been looking at Psalm 8, and we've seen the puzzle it presents us with. On the one hand, we are nothing compared to the majestic God who created the universe. On the other hand, God tells us that we are important—that we are created for a purpose in this world.

You know that you and your actions matter, don't you? You know that what you do or say, how you treat the world and how you treat other people actually matters, don't you? You know that some things are right and that some things are wrong, don't you? You know that you will face death one day, like everyone else, and that there's something scary and horrible about that. What are you going to do about it?

One possibility is that you could just ignore the whole issue. You could just decide that it's enough to eat, drink and enjoy life as much as you can, minimizing pain as much as possible and maybe along the way, doing great things, loving, laughing and crying, and then dying. You could buy, read and act on Dave Freeman's book 100 Things to Do Before You Die—carve out your own meaning, define your existence.

But is that really enough? History is littered with the corpses of individuals who have died and suffered under dictators who decided they wanted to define the meaning of their own existence. Maybe you will never be an evil dictator—maybe you will never try to live in a way that hurt anyone. And yet, if you're honest—if I'm honest, I know I have hurt people. Deeply. Despite the fact that I want to pretend that I can run my life the way I want without any consequences, I also know the guilt of my failures, the pain I've cause by my selfish actions and the evil in my heart. And I know that my existence, no matter how full of food and drink and life and love, is not, in the end, going to matter when I die and dissolve into the dust from which I came. I also know that this matters too, somehow.

Back to the song and the riddle of the song. God is great. His creation is enormous. In all of this, what is man? Who am I? Who are you? Why am I so important?

Fast forward hundreds of years.

The claim of the Bible is that this riddle—this puzzle—does have an answer—a profound and great answer. It's there in the words of the New Testament—where a Christian (that is, someone who knows Jesus Christ) can read the words of the song that we ourselves have just read and not only sees the problem, but also the answer:

It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
    or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
    you have crowned him with glory and honor,
    putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

(Heb 2:6-8a)

Here's that song—that problem—that age-old issue of our importance: “What is man?” And then, just to make sure we're all on the same page, our Christian author highlights the particular problem he sees: “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8b)

We might believe that we have a God-given purpose and responsibility to our lives in this world. But we don't actually see it. When we look up, we still see those majestic and distant heavens. The original Hebrew song speaks of the greatness of stars—the heavenly lights. Here in this letter to the Hebrews, it's expressed in terms of angels, heavenly superpowers. But in either case, the point is the same: God is above it all, and we don't and can't see with our eyes why and how God should care for us.

And then, when we look around, we don't see human beings living responsibly, caring for God's world or for each other, or acting rightly as agents of God's loving rule, do we. We just see ourselves, trying to define our own existence, hurting and being hurt, loving and hating and dying.

But there is something else—somebody else—who we do see, in verse 9: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9a). Whom do we actually see? What is the piece of evidence that should make us turn around and take notice? We see Jesus. This is the Bible's claim; this is the difference and the answer.

To be continued …

We at Matthias Media have recently made available a free and downloadable discussion guide for Col Marshall and Tony Payne's The Trellis and the Vine. Download it from our Australian or North American store.

Released in only December last year, The Trellis and the Vine is currently undergoing its fourth printing, which will bring the total number of copies printed to over 55,000. This makes it the most successful book we've published in our 22-year history.

But it's not just the quantity of sales that's exciting; what really excites us is what people are saying to us about the content. The Trellis and the Vine calls for a radical re-think of the priorities of church ministry. So far, most of those buying the book are pastors, and the reaction has been extremely good. They see the biblical truth of what's being said, and they are being challenged to rethink what they're doing. In particular, Col Marshall and Tony Payne call upon them to focus on people more than on programs and structures. Providing that kind of help and challenge to so many people—well, that's why we do what we do here at Matthias Media.

We hope that the release of this discussion guide will facilitate church members talking together about the issues the book raises and the changes they might need to make in their fellowship and in their own lives.

By Lionel Windsor

In the third instalment of a five-part series, Lionel Windsor discovers we humans are significant in the universe after all. (Read parts 1 and 2.)

We've been looking at Psalm 8 and have discovered that stargazing should make us wonder why God the creator should have anything to do with us.

At this point, if you were sceptical about the existence of the creator himself, I could point you to proofs of a designer in the universe. For example, I could use the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for the existence of God—the fact that there are over 20 fundamental physical constants in the universe that all work together to make the universe work as it does, and that can't be explained as a coincidence—at least, not yet. If any one of these constants had been a tiny bit different, life couldn't appear. For example, if the force of gravity was even slightly different by a colossally tiny factor (1 part in 10⁴⁰), no life-supporting stars could exist. Or I could talk about the statistical improbability of life itself emerging—the fact that even a small protein has 10⁹⁵ possible folding combinations, and the chances of a protein folding by accident into a functional life-conducive shape during the lifetime of the universe is something like 1 in 10⁶⁵.

But then you might come back with an answer—the multiverse. Do you know about the multiverse? The multiverse is a philosophical theory, born out of reflection on cosmology and quantum theory. It's the idea that we are just one out of a gigantic number of different possible universes. The multiverse is a way to solve the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe. Since there's such a huge or infinite number of possible universes, it's no problem that our universe just happens to exist by chance—a universe with impossibly fine-tuned life-supporting physical constants, where proteins folded in just the right way. The multiverse is an act of faith; it's not a scientific hypothesis in the strict sense. There is no scientific evidence for the multiverse; in fact, there's no experimental test that anyone has conceived that could possibly prove it or disprove it. It's a philosophy that tries to solve the apparent design of the universe without resorting to a designer. The multiverse theory is complex, physically and philosophically, and it seems to me to be the last resort of the desperate. But if you're philosophically committed to atheism, that's what you've got at your disposal at the moment.

But actually there's a bigger problem with my proofs for a designer. You see, even if my arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer were true and irrefutable, and even if you believed them, what does that actually prove? That there is a great designer—a purpose—to the universe doesn't say anything about you and me.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that there is a great grand design to the existence of the 70 sextillion-plus stars out there. Say there is some grand 13-billion-year-old design to it all, and that God the creator is behind it all. So what? What on earth would that have to do with you, your life, your relationships, your joys, your sorrows, your acts of kindness, your feelings of guilt at those evil things you've said and thought and done, your goals, your children, your ethics, your conviction that it's wrong to hurt and right to love, and your death as you dissolve back into the dust you came from? What is that to God? Why does that matter at all in this gigantic universe?

Yet this is the question of our poet, as the song continues:

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
    and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
    you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
    and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
    whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

(Ps 8:5-8)

This is actually a real puzzle—a problem—the crisis of the song—that this God, the one who made the heavens for some reason, deliberately and personally sees you and me as important. You and I are a key part of his creation. We (as the song says) are “crowned … with glory and honor”. We are rulers. We have dominion.

These words ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ recall the words of Genesis 1-2. They are used to describe the reality that humans are put on the earth by God himself to care for it, not to exploit it for our own ends. It's a statement of our glory and our responsibility, not a statement of our God-given right to use the world any way we want. Our poet in this biblical song recalls these words to express wonder at the fact that we specks of dust are somehow glorious in God's eyes. The evidence of the stars suggests that we are nothing, but God himself, the creator of the stars, says we are something. We have been made by God for a purpose in this world: we have responsibility. We have responsibility to God to do what is right—to rule the works of God's hands. And, as the rest of the Bible points out, we have a responsibility to live rightly in our relationships with each other—to honour God, to care for his world, to care for each other, to live under his loving rule.

But that's the problem. That's the puzzle. How is it that such a great creator—such a great and super-powerful supreme being—has given us specks of dust this responsibility?

Verse 9 gives us no answer:

O Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The song ends where it began. It hasn't solved the puzzle; it has just expressed it. God is great in the earth, and somehow, for some reason, we are important to him.

To be continued …

By Jean Williams

I teach Sunday School for children regularly, but I don't always have the time and energy to write my own lessons. So last year I found myself in the market for Sunday School material.

Thanks to a friend trawling through the shelves at a Christian bookshop, what I discovered was kids@church, put out by Youthworks in conjunction with CEP. (In Britain, it's published as Click by The Good Book Company). I suspect that lots of churches in Sydney are familiar with this material, but many other churches aren't.

kids@church is a complete nine-year Sunday School syllabus for preschool and primary school children. It consists of Serious Play (which is for children aged 3 to 5), Adventure (which is for children aged 5 to 7) and Over the Top (which is for for children aged 8 to 11. This is the one I tested). For each age group, there's 12 sets of 10 lessons—one set for each school term—which cover the big story of Scripture in three years. Each term's lessons can be purchased separately, with no pesky subscriptions. In a single term, you'll need one reasonably priced teacher's manual (which includes 10 lesson plans, visual aids and a child's component) and enough child's components (take-home booklets) for your group.

During term 4 last year, I taught Ephesians and Revelation to our Sunday School using Preparing for Jesus' Coming, an Over the Top booklet for children aged 8 to 11. Here's what I liked about kids@church:

• It's thoroughly biblical. The exegesis is excellent. (There was only one lesson out of 10 that I had quibbles with.) It's been written and edited by a panel that includes respected names like Kirsten Birkett.
• It teaches the Bible in a clear and interesting way. I occasionally added to a Bible teaching time that I thought could be a little more interesting (for example, I ‘drew’ the story of Saul on the road to Damascus), but mostly this was unnecessary.
• It covers the full story of the Bible. If you were to run this material from year to year, the children would get a good overview of the Bible story and how it all hangs together, and then you would review this as they moved from age group to age group.
• It deals with parts of the Bible that Sunday School material often avoids. I chose the lessons on Ephesians and Revelation for this very reason! Most Sunday School material focuses on Bible narrative, but avoids the theologically dense parts of Scripture. I want to teach children how to handle all of the Bible. I want to teach them sound doctrine, not just Bible stories.
• It tackles challenging theological issues, while staying sensitive to children's level of understanding. For example, the lesson on Ephesians 1:3-14 talks clearly about what it means to be ‘chosen’ (predestined) by God to be part of his family.
• It teaches memory verses well. I was very impressed with the variety of methods used to teach memory verses, and I'll be using these methods in future!
• It's engaging. Games, treasure hunts, posters, dramas, crafts, murals, maps—I was very impressed by the range of activities at the start of each lesson, which are designed to grab the children's attention and introduce the lessons' themes. It was good to have several activities to choose from. In each lesson, there's also an excellent list of suggested songs from well-known kids' CDs related to the lesson's theme.
• It's age-appropriate. I found the material for eight to 11-year-olds to be well pitched to this age group. This is typical; I'm currently using some other CEP material for a range of ages (Kids Plus) and it's carefully and cleverly adapted to different stages of understanding.
• It's well-organized and easy to use. It took me a week or so to get used to the layout (as with all new material!), but I soon found it clear, easy to follow, and suitable for teaching from and referring to during the class. The list of ‘gear’ to take each week was helpful, and the ‘photocopiables’ were well-designed and easy to reproduce.

There wasn't much about kids@church that I didn't like. But here are a few small complaints:

• The visual aids (mainly posters) are small and not particularly impressive. (I found the picture of the risen Christ off-putting!) We often chose to create our own posters together instead.
• The take-home booklets: the children found these small black and white booklets a little boring. However, it was good to have something for them to work on at the end of each lesson that they could take home at the end of term.
• A lack of craft ideas: only one lesson included traditional Sunday School crafts. Even if we didn't use them each week, it would have been good to have some more ideas for crafts at the end of each lesson.
• The Bible translation used is the CEV (Contemporary English Version). While this is a matter of preference, I find the International Children's Bible/New Century Version to be more reliable, if a little less readable.

I'll be using kids@church again! While I wouldn't want to use one Sunday School syllabus all the time (I think the children and teachers would get a little bored!), kids@church would be at the top of my list if I was looking for a single syllabus. With it, I'd be confident that our children were learning the complete story of the Bible in a doctrinally sound and interesting way. Because each set of 10 lessons stands on its own, you can also teach kids@church for a single term, as I did.

If you're looking for Sunday School material that is biblical, theologically sound, clear, usable, engaging and fun for kids, kids@church is well worth a look!

I mentioned in my last Saturday post that for the next little while, we would be looking at articles from The Briefing archive on the Holy Spirit as a precursor to our April issue on the topic.

Today we delve into the area of experience and the Holy Spirit. John Woodhouse in Briefing #85 attempts to cut through the confusion:

There is something of a crisis among many Christians today over the question of ‘experience’. If not a crisis, there is at least much confusion and uncertainty—a fascination and a longing—perhaps even a vacuum. This goes back some time.

Do you remember the remarkable welcome afforded to JI Packer's Knowing God back in the 70s? It seemed to have an impact quite unlike any other recent Christian book. And I am sure that this is partly because of its experiential emphasis. The title of the book is not God, but refers to an experience: Knowing God.

This article will be what theologians call a ‘prolegomena’ and what ordinary people call an ‘introduction’. I want to make sure that you are itching in the places that I plan to scratch in the second article (appearing in the next Briefing issue). In this article, I first plan to map some of the confused territory we face today—not at this stage offering a path through the bewildering jungles, but first pointing out where they lie, what shape they take and some of the wildlife that inhabit them. I will also discuss why ‘experience’ matters for Christianity and why it is important to chart a path through the confusion.

1. Mapping the confusion

What is an ‘experience of God’?

The confusion starts with the very word ‘experience’. What are the characteristics of a Christian ‘experience’? What is an ‘experience’ of God?

Some people use the word very narrowly and specifically. A Christian friend said to me recently, “I have never had a spiritual experience in my life”. This person was being very honest, but since I know him well, I know that he was using the word ‘experience’ in a very restricted sense. In much the same sense, some Christians accuse other Christians these days of being ‘against experience’ or ‘anti-experiential’.

Others of us, however, find this rather confusing. How can you be ‘anti-experience’? It's like being accused of being ‘anti-existence’. The problem is that ‘experience’ is such a general word—such a broad category. It can include virtually all events of human consciousness. We could dispel some of the confusion if we could be more specific, and I will attempt to do so in due course. For now, let us simply note that there is confusion about the extent or nature of the whole subject of ‘experience’.

Christianity in an experiential age

Even if there is confusion about the meaning of ‘experience’, there is undoubtedly much emphasis and interest in ‘experience’ in contemporary Christianity. Some plausibly relate this to cultural factors:

In comparison with recent centuries, the latter half of the twentieth century has emphasised the desire and right of man to experience for himself, that is to receive knowledge through direct sensory perception, through feeling … It is on this basis, rather than on the basis of received traditions and wisdom, or reason or of objective facts, that perceptions are formed and interpretations of life are founded. ‘I know’ or ‘I think’ has been replaced by ‘I feel’. The objective has had to make way for the subjective and man has become preoccupied with the inward quest for self-fulfilment. (Derek Tidball in Christian Experience in Theology and Life, Rutherford House, p. 1.)

In light of this, it is not surprising to find Christians themselves reflecting on their Christian experience. Christian dialogue with non-Christians frequently focuses on Christian experience, because the non-Christian is interested in experience. The non-Christian may want to know, for example, why the Christian thinks that his experience is superior or more authentic. If the appeal of the New Age Movement is largely experiential—if our age craves authentic ‘experiences’—then there is certainly strong motivation to express the gospel in experiential terms. Most of us would say that the gospel can speak to a guilt-ridden age, or to an age seeking the meaning of life. But what has the gospel to say to an age that craves experience?

Read the rest of the article online (3,653 words).

By Lionel Windsor

In the second instalment of a five-part series, Lionel Windsor contemplates the extent of our significance in the universe. (Read Part 1.)

We've been looking at Psalm 8, and we've discovered that stargazing helps us to see how insignificant we really are.

Just think about the size of space for a moment. Imagine you could get into the fastest jet on earth (last time I checked, this was the SR-71 Blackbird). Its official speed record is almost 2,500 miles per hour. Now imagine you could speed it up 100 times to 250,000 miles per hour. Then imagine that you could take it on a trip to space. It would take you an hour to get to the moon—that's pretty reasonable! It would take you eight days to get to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. It would take you four months to get to the planet Saturn (remember, we're travelling 100 times faster than the fastest jet ever built). It would take you a year and a half to get to the planet Pluto at the edge of our solar system. To get to the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, it would take you 12,000 years. To get to the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take you 80 million years. To the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, it would take you seven billion years. To get to the edge of the visible universe, it would take you 40 million million years. And they think that the size of the non-visible universe is vastly huger than this: that would take you a million million million million, etc. years.

I'll quote another modern ‘poet’—this time, the late Douglas Adams, writing The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.¹

The ancient biblical poet was ignorant about billions of parsecs or millisecond pulsars. He just knew that space was big, wonderful, majestic and beyond us. That's the universe we live in.

So the Bible has a question for you: who are you?

what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

(Ps 8:4)

What is man? Who am I in comparison to this world? Who are you? You are one of seven billion tiny organisms, living on an infinitesimally small pinprick of a dust ball, who are giving birth, breathing, eating, maybe reproducing and dying.

But that's the Bible's question: what is it to be human? What is your existence—your family, your career, your study, your relationships, your life—compared to this immense universe with its big bang, its nebulas and its millisecond pulsars?

But did you notice something? That's not quite the way the song puts it, isn't it. It's not just the universe that's big; this biblical song makes an even more profound point. It's a point about God himself: God is big. See verse 1:

O Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.

We're not just talking here about how small we are compared to the universe; this is a song about our relationship to the majesty of the Lord—the God who created that universe.

Now it's important to realize that this ‘God’ spoken about in the Bible has nothing to do with superstition and magical religion. The Bible's view of God is the opposite of superstition. In fact, it's the biblical view of God that enabled the early Christians to throw astrology away and promote astronomy instead. Astrology is the belief that the stars have something to do with our lives. Astrology happens when people look out at the stars, see how distant and high they are, and decide that somehow, in some magical way, these stars have a direct influence on their own personal lives.

But just listen for a moment to Augustine, a Christian theologian who was writing in about 425 AD—a man whose influence over western thought has been profound and continues to this day. This is what Augustine says about astronomy and astrology, and their relative value:

Astronomy … makes possible systematic predictions about the future, which are not speculative and conjectural but firm and certain; but we should not try to extract something of relevance to our own actions and experiences, like the maniacs who cast horoscopes, but confine our interest to the stars themselves.²

Augustine rejected astrology because he believed in the God of the Bible—the God we meet here in this very song—a God whose glory is above the heavens. See verse 3: this is the God who made the heavens, and set the moon and stars in place. This is the God who is majestic and great, and above and beyond those stars themselves. He is a God of order who set those heavenly bodies where they should be. But he's done it for his glory, not for magical speculation about how your week is going to pan out.

So the question of verse 4 is a question about our place before this God:

what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

Why on earth would this God, who created the stars, be interested in you and me? There are more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand in all the beaches on the earth. According to an Australian estimate in 2003, there are 70 sextillion stars. This is 7 x 10²². Who are we in all of this? I can't resist quoting Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.³

Even then, he's talking about one galaxy amongst quadrillions. And that's just the visible universe.

There is a God who made it all. So what on earth would he have to do with us? Who are you? What is man?

To be continued …

¹ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Del Ray, 2005 (1979), p. 65.

² Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.113.

³ Adams, p. 3.

By Peter Bolt

Revisionist history is probably as common as it is unethical. There are lessons to learn from the past, but if the past is distorted for the sake of present-day lessons, then it is no longer serving honest inquiry, but has become propaganda.

The destruction of the World Trade Centre by Muslim terrorists has spawned in the West a new fear of Islam, as well as a new desire to understand Islam. At the same time (and rather strangely and illogically), it has spawned new attacks upon Christianity. For example, the event in New York motivated Christopher Hitchens, one of the ‘new atheists’, to speak against religion as a damaging force in the world. So what began with some Muslim extremists was generalized to all religion, and then (it seems) particularized by a renewed and increased attack upon Christianity. Go figure.

Rodney Stark notes that in this post-9/11 environment, “frequent mention was made of the Crusades as a basis for Islamic fury” (God's Battalions, HarperCollins, New York, 2009, p. 4). This is propaganda based upon recently generated myths.

With the first Crusade being called for in 1095 and their last city (Acre) falling in May 1291, the Crusader kingdoms survived for almost as long as the USA has been a nation, and certainly longer than Australia has been. However, it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the Muslims showed much interest in the Crusades. Instead, they looked back on them with indifference. Even as they were happening, Muslim chroniclers regarding them with little interest, for they were simply the invasions of primitive and unlearned people. Most Arabs dismissed them as attacks upon the hated Turks, and so were of little interest. In fact, to some, the European occupation of Jerusalem was considered advantageous as it blocked Turkish influence on Egypt.

According to Stark, it was the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulhamid II (who reigned 1876–1909) who first began to speak of the Crusades of yesteryear, and he did so to serve his criticism of the European attacks on his own Empire. His remarks prompted the first Muslim history of the Crusades (1899). The theme was quickly picked up by Muslim nationalists, and the anger was fuelled further by post WWI British and French imperialism and by the post WWII creation of the state of Israel. “Eventually, the image of the brutal, colonizing crusader proved to have such polemical power that it drowned out nearly everything else in the ideological lexicon of Muslim antagonism toward the West” (ibid., p. 247-8).

And (to extend Stark) of course, for those not exactly in favour of Christianity, here was a windfall: the Muslim memory and anger about the Crusades, which Stark claims to be a 20th-century creation, provided a new weapon for 20th-century opponents of Christianity. Here was yet another opportunity to blow some smoke in the air to try to choke the good news of Jesus Christ. The memory of the Christian Crusades has (supposedly) brought the world to the brink of a clash of civilizations: ‘Christian’ versus ‘Islamic’. When Muslim terrorists attack the West, it then became time for the West to attack Christianity.

By Lionel Windsor

In the first instalment of a five-part series, Lionel Windsor ponders what astronomy has to teach us.

I'm a fan of space. I don't actually know much about the details of astronomy or cosmology or astrophysics; I just think that the space is really cool.

If there are any real scientists reading this, I want to say thanks. I know that most of your work involves boring and tedious searching, collating and number crunching. Thanks for doing all that stuff so that I can see those fantastic pictures of nebulas on the internet and wonder at it all.

For example, I'm a fan of millisecond pulsars. A gigantic star, millions of light years away, explodes in a huge supernova. It creates a fireball ten million billion billion times bigger than Hiroshima. In its ashes, it leaves behind a neutron star made of dense atomic nuclei, squashed together at a density 10 trillion times greater than steel. A teaspoon full of neutron star weighs about the same as Sydney Harbour. Sometimes this neutron star will steal stuff from a nearby star and start spinning. Some neutron stars spin hundreds of times a second—a whole star rotating as fast as an idling car engine. Many of these super-dense, revving stars send out pulses of electromagnetic radiation, milliseconds apart. And we might be able to use these millisecond pulsars as standard cosmological clocks to help us detect gravitational waves, explore space-time bending, and understand more about the tiniest particles in the universe.

But apart from the wow factor, what's the point of learning about space?

Some people might say that, in the end, astronomy is a complete waste of time. Sherlock Holmes, that fictional epitome of scientific rationalism, cared nothing for astronomy. When his friend Dr Watson scolded him for being ignorant even of the basic facts of the solar system, he interrupted and said, “What the deuce is it to me? … you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”¹

Is Mr Holmes correct? Is stargazing a completely useless exercise?

Well, you could point out that weather and tide and climate predictions need detailed solar, lunar and planetary modelling. You could also point out that car engines need modern mechanics, which is all based on the laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton, who used the orbits of planets to calculate and build his theories. Or you could point to the humble GPS satellite navigator, which relies on Einstein's theory of relativity and orbiting satellites. Of course, astronomy is useful; after all, it helps us to work out whether it's raining, and how to drive quickly to the cricket and back without taking a wrong turn!

But I want to suggest that stargazing is far more important than all this. In fact, the Bible itself gives us a very good reason for considering the stars. There is a song in the Bible about the stars—a song composed thousands of years ago in ancient Israel. This is how the song begins:

O Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
    Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
    to still the enemy and the avenger.

(Ps 8:1-2)

You'll notice that this poet believes in God (just like many of the astronomers down through the ages). In fact, this whole song is a prayer to the creator of the universe. We'll come back to this shortly. But for the moment, let's look at his exercise in stargazing. Do you see what he says in the third verse of the song?

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place …

When you think about it, stargazing is something that would have been easier and more natural for an ancient Israelite than for us. Yes, we can use our light, radio and gamma ray telescopes to penetrate vast distances, and we can use our complex mathematical and cosmological theories to make determinations and predictions. Of course, the ancients couldn't do that. But on the other hand, they had a very big advantage over us: they had a clear, unpolluted sky in their backyards. We have so many lights on earth—especially in our cities—that the lights of the stars and the moons are drowned out. When I go into my backyard on a clear night, all I can see are a few pinpricks. But this biblical songwriter could step into his own backyard and see far more than you or I. He could see the glory of it all—the heavens, the Milky Way, the wandering planets.

We don't tend to look up very much at all, do we. We don't use the night time to look at the heavens; we use the night time to look down—to watch TV, to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds online. We know cyberspace very well, but this ancient poet sees real space with his naked eyes. We know the intimate details of the lives of rock stars and football stars, but this song is about the real stars. At this point, this biblical poet is far more in touch with the reality of the universe than we are. And knowing these stars—seeing them there before him—what does this do for the poet? How does it make him feel? Look at verse 4:

what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

What does astronomy do for this poet? What is the use of astronomy for all of us? Astronomy is very useful. It does something very negative for us, but it's still very worthwhile: it reminds us how very very very small and insignificant we really are. In case you're wondering, the words translated ‘man’ here mean ‘all humanity’. The question “What is man?” is an expression of amazement that human beings have any importance at all in the face of the evidence of the stars.

To be continued …

¹ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Long Stories, John Murray, London, 1929, p. 17.