An odd parallel between Uniformitarianism and Evangelicalism

Well it’s been an interesting and rather frustrating week. As many of you may be aware we have had an unusually cold winter in the UK and this week it really hit us. The problem was that the weather was rather unpredictable and, in fact, unsporting. So we had snow when we weren’t supposed to have it, and didn’t have it when we were. Because my college has a very large catchment area extending into the foothills of what we call mountains but Americans would probably dismiss as ‘lumps’, we have to be very careful about weather alerts. No one wants several hundred students camped overnight in a freezing college. The upshot was that the teaching week essentially fell into times when the students were either absent (or distracted) because of the expectation of snow, absent because of snow, or disinclined to work because other people were absent because of snow or the fear of it. Out of five working days, I feel I taught only about two properly. As a geography teacher remarked somewhat sourly ‘this would happen the very year they have put global warming on the syllabus’.

Anyway this week I thought I would share with you a curious coming together of something in geology and preaching. In Geology I was discussing the fundamental principle of uniformitarianism; the great rule that we interpret the past according to present-day processes. A key point of uniformitarianism is that it majors on steady and predominantly gentle processes. As an aside I made the point that this idea had really come to prominence in 19th-century Britain and that our society then had welcomed a concept that elevated slow steady change over drastic, traumatic upheaval. The memory of the French Revolution just across the water haunted 19th-century British culture, particularly the aristocracy. (Incidentally to spare some of you writing to me; I have no doubt that most of the time uniformitarianism is the correct view and no doubt whatsoever that the Earth is very old indeed.)

On the Sunday evening following I was preaching on Jesus as Prophet and in passing touching on the extent to which we were to be prophetic within the church. Now my understanding of prophecy is that it is primarily forth-telling more than fore-telling; speaking God’s Word to a particular situation in the present is probably more important than some word about the future. I then made the point that evangelicalism tends to be rather cosy and well mannered, an attitude which often prevents us from being as blunt and open about such matters as social wrongs as perhaps we ought to be. And feeling a vague sense of déjà vu, I realised that the formative years of British evangelicalism were exactly those of geological uniformitarianism. In other words, it was probably not just geologists who had decided to be nice and cuddle up to society but also evangelicals. What we have assumed to be an evangelical standard is probably not that at all, but a two-hundred-year-old cultural one.

It is probably a minor insight but it is possibly a helpful reminder that we need to be very careful to examine what we stand for. Perhaps more often than we realise, our values may be culturally rather than biblically determined.

Have a good week.

On suicide bombers and cultural suicide

Over the last year or so, I have found myself wondering about my hearing. Conversation in crowded places and restaurants has seemed difficult and I have, on odd occasions, misheard students in class. Anyway I got my ears tested this morning and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my hearing was perfectly normal. The sensitivity of the left ear was very slightly down but it was still within normal parameters.

As I thought about the results, two related (trust me) thoughts came together. The first was sitting at my desk, eating lunch in Beirut one Monday in April 1983. In a paroxysm of sound somehow incarnated as brute force, I was picked up off my chair and thrown to the floor. As I staggered to my feet I could see through the door to left of where I had been sitting, shattered windows. Beyond them, a billowing black and grey cloud was angrily boiling rising up from the American Embassy, barely a hundred yards away. It soon transpired that a truck had driven in with what was later determined to be nearly 1,000 kg of high explosive. As stood amid the broken glass, my ears ringing, I heard the surprise in the voices of my Lebanese colleagues as they passed on the rumour that it had been a suicide bomber. Despite nine years of civil war it was an novel concept; it is now generally held that this was first suicide bombing of its kind.

I also remember going up to the American University Hospital shortly afterwards for some reason I cannot now remember. As walked up I saw a young couple – evidently Americans – walking away from the hospital, holding each other for comfort, their once smart clothes, their hair and their grief-stricken faces covered in a fine pale dust that made them look like as if they had returned from the grave. When I saw their kind again on 9/11, I shuddered. So I do wonder whether my slightly weaker left ear is a tiny scar of that blast. In which case I got off lightly: sixty-three people died.

The second thought was this: if it isn’t my hearing, is it my students? Actually I think there is something in this. My students – bless them – as a whole no longer read and they no longer read to people. Many of them have lost the art of clear speaking or any sort of verbal clarity. Their music shouts at them and they mutter at each other and mumble back. With exceptions, they do not express themselves with either clarity or coherence. I’m probably oversimplifying and I’m not blaming them. But I do think we have lost the art of speaking properly and what that portends seems to me far more worrying than any number of suicide bombers.

On a more cheery note; our younger son, Mark has just announced his engagement to a splendid lass, Alice. We heartily approve and the wedding is set for 15 November in the rather tasteful (and more importantly) very evangelical London church of St James Clerkenwell. Hurrah!