The eclipse of the eternal

In so much of contemporary Christianity, there is a painfully diminished sense that something's missing. That something is the personal presence of the eternal God, and the accompanying awe, repentance, and delight in being adopted by him.

He's there in theory, but he's not the thrice-holy, glorious, beloved one who is Lord over and satisfies our souls. He's been reduced to a theory. He's a doctrine, an idea, and a means to an end. That end may be some version of "living our best life now", of glorifying God by lots of shiny achievements, of our neat political plans and dreams (or even something more tragic, like a stick to beat others with in trivial debates) but whatever it is, it's an end which isn't God himself, the glorious and beautiful Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The eternal has been eclipsed. God is there... but as part of a system of thought, not as a personal, living being who both makes us tremble, and makes us desire after him. The spiritual realities of the gospel are spoken; but they're tools to help us get through this life with quiet consciences and enjoy the things, the objects and experiences, that we choose to enjoy.

In the New Testament letters, an awesome thought dominates. Christ, the eternal Son of God, who is before and over all things, was amongst us. He shed his blood for us. He has betrothed his church, all who repent and believe, to himself. He is coming again soon to claim them. Soon we will all stand before the Master, to give an account for what we did in the flesh. The night is nearly over, and the day will soon dawn. He is present now by his Spirit to enable us to know and enjoy him, and to testify to his majesty by our words and deeds, but soon will be present in person, to receive our account of how we lived, and to receive us to himself. The eternal has invaded time, and is now, for Christians, the controlling reality of our daily lives. It is here now, and soon will be here in totality: this changes everything.

The eternal should not be eclipsed. The things we allow to eclipse it are just children's toys. We are called to grow up, and become men. May God help us to do so.

Calvin on the attitude of Christians to the coming of Christ

Commenting on Hebrews 10:25 ("not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching"):

Were any one to ask, how could the Apostle say that those who were as yet afar off from the manifestation of Christ, saw the day near and just at hand? I would answer, that from the beginning of the kingdom of Christ the Church was so constituted that the faithful ought to have considered the Judge as coming soon; nor were they indeed deceived by a false notion, when they were prepared to receive Christ almost every moment; for such was the condition of the Church from the time the Gospel was promulgated, that the whole of that period might truly and properly be called the last. They then who have been dead many ages ago lived in the last days no less than we. 

Laughed at is our simplicity in this respect by the worldly wise and scoffers, who deem as fabulous all that we believe respecting the resurrection of the flesh and the last judgment; but that our faith may not fail through their mockery, the Holy Spirit reminds us that a thousand years are before God as one day, (2 Peter 3:8) so that whenever we think of the eternity of the celestial kingdom no time ought to appear long to us. And further, since Christ, after having completed all things necessary for our salvation, has ascended into heaven, it is but reasonable that we who are continually looking for his second manifestation should regard every day as though it were the last. 

Remembering the poor

I was very gladdened to see this article, by Trevin Wax: "Do we remember the poor?"

Six months ago I commented, in a post on "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel", as follows: 

When outsiders say that evangelicals are far too concerned about laying down the strict confines of orthodoxy and it'd be great if they demonstrated more energy in condescending to help suffering people in their very messy, practical situations, it might well be because, ever since evangelicals made it a priority to clarify that they do not believe "the social gospel", we don't seem to have made it the same priority to so clearly, and conspicuously, make it clear that our lives are handed over to showing love to people in need.  

It seems to me that concern for the poor is much more prominent in the Bible (both Testaments) than it is in contemporary Western evangelicalism; and that conversely, love of endless debate that leads to no action is beloved in Western evangelicalism but is soundly condemned in the Scriptures. So, to see someone with a fairly wide reach talking about this, and making similar points, greatly encouraged me. Trevin Wax doesn't just show us what the New Testament says; he's also not afraid to point out that, in general, we're not doing it as those who went before us either in the Bible or afterwards did, and therefore we must change.

Church leader, are you the sort of person whose Christianity means what the apostle Paul's did? When he met the Jerusalem apostles, he said: "They desired only that we should remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do" (Galatians 2:10). There were, at their meeting, only two things that we were told were discussed by the apostles. They established firstly that they were all preaching the same gospel; and they established secondly that they all understood and were zealous for the inevitable implication of the gospel, of serving the poor. This doesn't just mean writing periodic cheques out of our excess, out of the money that we'd just otherwise leave behind to be dealt with in a will when we've departed from this world and couldn't do anything with it anyway. Rather, it is this. “So you say you love the poor?", Gustavo Gutierrez famously asked, and continued: "Then tell me, what are their names?” May God help us to meet this faithful challenge.

No divine thunderbolts (or not often, anyway)

Many things in the world we look at and say "why does God allow that to go on?" Why no divine thunderbolts?

As we grow as Christians, we look more at the church, as we learn that judgment must begin at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17), and that teachers will receive a stricter judgment (James 3:1). It is the church which is called to be the light of the world (Matthew 5:14) - a light to shine before men, and point the way to them. If the world is in a mess then, well, of course it is. It is in darkness. But when the lamp that should be shining out light also has darkness in it, then this is much more tragic. Why does God allow it? Why no divine thunderbolts?

The letters of Revelation 2-3 tell us that Christ does walk amidst the churches, and does judge them. It is a fearsome judgment. The lampstand may be taken away. One question we are left to wrestle with is: how do we know when that has happened?  If the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2 had had its lampstand removed, what would be the signs of this? It was orthodox, fought against wrong beliefs, and laboured with patience, and could not tolerate evil. When its lampstand was removed, would it still be, on the outside, apparently orthodox and hard-working, but just with no real spiritual fruit and operations of the Holy Spirit? Or does Christ's withdrawal of his presence mean a withholding of the grace that would stop it sliding into error and into apathy about the human need around it, so that error and evil would be seen? Presumably his withdrawal would in some manner become more and more obvious, requiring less and less discernment to see it, over time.

One thing that Scripture does teach us is that God's patience is different, far greater, than ours. It is not infinite, but he is very generous in giving people time to repent (Romans 2:1-4, 2 Peter 3:-9). This creates its own danger for those who aren't listening to him, because they (as suggested by Paul in Romans 2) take the lack of divine thunderbolts as confirmation that they're doing just fine, and have no need to change course.

As an example of this in the Bible: the Jerusalem temple and nation were not destroyed by God's judgment until 40 years after Christ was crucified. That gave a whole generation time to reflect, to consider, to see the clear evidence of God's Spirit and fulfilled prophecy in the Christian church, to recognise that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ raised from the dead, and to receive his offer of forgiveness and life. Or, it gave 40 years to convince oneself that the pesky Nazarene trouble-maker had been happily got rid of, and wasn't going to be seen again - and if only now we could squelch out his mad followers, we can then go back to business as usual.

It seems to me that the time of God's patience gives time to reveal the righteousness and wisdom of his justice. When given a long time to reconsider and repent, people lose the excuse of saying "I didn't have time to reflect; nobody warned me; more years would have allowed me to grow wiser, think, and change; it was a simple mistake, an oversight of the sort any mortal makes, that I'd have happily have rectified". In God's grace, with the passing of time, with prayer, with the Holy Spirit, God's people do reflect and repent. But where people don't want to, they're instead giving a full and complete demonstration that they did nothing except what was in their hearts, what they wanted to do. And when God eventually says "enough", nobody can doubt that it was so. The seasons come, the seasons go; warnings are spoken, warnings are ignored, but there's no change - and why not? Because the problem was not something technical, something complicated, something subtle: the problem all along was sin which continually demanded judgment.

There are, then, comparatively few divine thunderbolts in this life because of God's glorious mercy, and because of God's righteous judgment. When you see sin that continues, the situation will not continue indefinitely; it's heading towards one of those two.

Jesus gave himself for people

Matthew 9: ¹⁸ While He spoke these things to them, behold, a ruler came and worshipped Him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live.” ¹⁹ So Jesus arose and followed him, and so did His disciples.

This sort of thing is, in the gospels, so natural and so frequent, that we easily miss it.

In the modern world we have time for programs and schedules; for projects, for jobs, for careers, for our homes, for entertainment. We have time for ourselves and the things we want to achieve, and our days are divided up even perhaps into 5-minute segments, to make sure we can achieve these things.

Jesus, though, had time for people. He is dealing with the questions of one group (in this case, John's disciples); and then another person comes, and asks for his aid. So, therefore, hence, he arose and followed him. Someone came and interrupted, urgently seeking Jesus; Jesus embraced this new development in the plan of the day, and embraced the new person and new opportunity to serve in front of him.

As modern Westerners we tend to put programmes, action plans and schedules first, and people as individuals often sit a level behind in the structure of our thinking. What would our lives look like if people were first and primary, always, and the rest merely flexible means towards the end of giving ourselves to the image-bearers that God has placed around us? Certainly, Jesus had a programme. But it was all driven by his love for people, and the God who made them. Needy people could never get in the way of his programme, because people were his programme.

Well, that's weird

Having been a missionary, the following experience is familiar to me. You take part in a meeting. You sit, you watch, you observe. You try to understand what's going on. You try to understand what's really going on. What does the way this meeting is organised mean? Why is this being done, and what is the significance of that? Everything seems to flow naturally, as something entirely normal and well-understood by everyone present (except you). You, unfortunately, don't get it. Don't worry: you can try again the next time.

The next time comes, and goes. And the next, and the next; and so on. Unfortunately (for you), though there are some things that you can now explain the inner, local logic of, yet much else passes you by completely and entirely. It's weird. Years pass: it's still weird, really weird. How to relate it to the intended, announced, purported purpose of the meeting? What does it have to do with Christianity? How in any way is it tied to the person, the teachings and the saving work of Jesus Christ, and the Commission that he gave us? Sorry, I don't know. I've tried, but as yet, I'm not sure anyone else really knows either. And yet.... it still makes perfect, effortless sense to the bulk of the people present, such that if you asked them to explain it, well, they couldn't either. Because it just is: this is how things are done, and everybody just knows that. We've always done it this way.

What I am referring to, of course, is that deep, so very deep, thing called culture. Where it all comes from and how it all hangs together is so clear to a cultural native, that not only is it not explained, that some of the time it just can't be explained. If you need it explaining to you, then you'll never get it.

Sometimes, on the other hand (not terribly often!), one of those wonderful moments occurs, when someone says.... "I've been thinking about this, and why do we do it? Is it really in keeping with our purpose and mission, and doesn't it in fact suggest something different to what Jesus taught us, doesn't it clash with it? Shouldn't we change this?" 

When that does happen, it's hard to suppress the urge to jump out of the chair, yell "Yes, yes, yes!", burst into tears, and go and hug the person who said it, and do a few laps of the room in order to work off the adrenaline rush that came from someone saying what you'd been thinking for so long.... but you'd better not do quite this, for it would, in almost any culture, be profoundly weird.

Now, if you live in another culture for enough time, something else begins to happen. Eventually, we hope at least, some of your blinkers begin to come off. It becomes apparent that being weird isn't the exclusive preserve of one or two cultures, much less just the one you happen to be a stranger in. It turns out that in fact your own culture, and your own sub-cultures, are also profoundly weird. There are things that apparently make perfect sense to the people working and acting in them which, if they were gifted with being able to step outside of that for a moment, they'd realise (inside about 10 seconds) are so strange that we can barely begin to describe them. Whether you're British, American, African, Asian; whether you're Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Anglican, etcetera, well, frankly, your culture and sub-culture are very likely quite weird, inexplicably odd, with things more or less prominent that just have no real connection to your advertised and professed identity and purpose.

The moral here isn't "and that's OK, let's all be weird in our own ways and accept it and even delight in it". There is no doubt time and place for a good dose of that. God did create, and does love variety, and it's good for us to broaden our narrow, constricted, darkened little minds not just a bit. And whilst in the church of Jesus Christ this variety should be embraced and celebrated, that doesn't mean that there aren't still parts that are not "good weird", but "bad weird". i.e. They are signs that there is something profoundly wrong. Somewhere, at quite an early stage, far back, someone set their compass wrong, and started wandering off the path, and now we're so far lost we don't even realise it. Things are happening that just should not happen, anywhere, at all, whoever we are. It's not just that we lack understanding (which of course, in any particular case we have to allow for, and must be patient as we labour to understand).

This post isn't about any particular person, people, groups or activities. There is no coded message about some specific situation. I am musing on just how common the cognitive disconnect is, once you have been following Jesus a while. So much of the way of the world around us, and of the way of us disciples who still have so much to learn, just makes no real sense given what we profess to believe, that the experience just comes more and more. It's as if, in this world, we're strangers - we don't really belong here; we're exiles and there's some other place that is home and where we fit in and where it'll all be worked out. It's as if we have to live as if this book, which makes more and more sense to me as I study it more, is the real world, and as if the creation I'm actually living in had some major event that caused things to go off-track, quite early.

Having made that explanation, though, here's one from the world of self-described evangelicalism, apparently on the more conservative end, from the few figures in it that I do recognise. I've not heard of this conference and I don't know much about the writer of this piece, but he's on to something: "The Great Evangelical Schism: Prologue". Look at that poster and read the descriptions. It's not so much that there's something obviously wrong, direct-and-up-front, or that they're trying to be weird. Nowhere does it say they're going to torture babies, or have a fancy dress party in which they all decide to impersonate goats, or to hold an evangelistic rally in which they're only allowed to use the word "Wibbly". It's more subtle than that. Somewhere, the wider movement that this is part of took some wrong turns many stages ago, which actually makes this conference look entirely natural. But if, alternatively, you were to read, say, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, or the Westminster Confession of Faith through a few times, and then read the missionary biographies of Hudson Taylor and John Paton (or their like), and then got transported into this conference, you'd surely realise that some very major changes had happened into the intervening years, that were more than simply questions of style and cultural adiaphora. It's not that I particularly know that any of those people purvey heresy. But it's just.... very weird. How did we get from there to here? What have these two reference points got to do with each-other? It's not a sign of health, whatever it is.

In general, trying to encourage people to be bold for Jesus is a good thing, a good use of our time and efforts. Far better than just consuming content from screens. And my purpose here is, as I say, not particularly to criticise the above conference. The poster/conference are the symptoms of something behind that is widespread, and are not the disease itself. As the article above says, "The “Be Bold for Jesus” conference is a touch-point into this mode of religion, where, among other factors, theology and doctrine take a quantifiable back seat to culture."  Culture is weird. But when evangelical culture/sub-culture has become weird in the wrong ways, we need to work out why that is, and how to retrieve the things that make sense. We're meant to be in a place where people can look in their Bibles, and people can learn about Jesus there, and then look at us, and say "I see what it means, it's talking about being the sort of people that you are, because you're following him". If they instead say "sorry, not interested, you're way too weird", and they're not talking about our life of self-giving for Jesus but about something else that is part of our sub-culture, then, we need to ask God's help to see ourselves more clearly.

Intelligence (artificial and otherwise) and wisdom

"Artificial intelligence" is one of the interesting new technological developments of our time.

What today's "artificial intelligence" actually is 

As ever, it's important to distinguish between what a thing is, and what it is being called. (Or when we're talking about products being sold, between what a thing is, and what it is being marketed as). The name "artificial intelligence" invokes all sorts of ideas out of science fiction: machines that perform actual thinking. Nothing of the kind is actually going on here, though. Today's text-based "AI" (e.g. if you talk to ChatGPT) is based around "Large Language Models", LLMs, which are essentially performing super-charged statistical text-prediction. That is to say, based upon the (enormous) sets of data that they were trained with, at heart, and given your starting text (and given the text from their makers given to prime them, known as their "prompts") as their inputs, they output what would be a reasonable following sequence of text. With the size of their training data, and the massive amount of computation that goes on to work out what could reasonably come next, the results may resemble the output of an intelligent being, but machine itself is doing zero actual thinking. All the intelligence, if we hope that there was some, was in the human-produced training data (and in the programming to access the appropriate parts of that training data to produce an output, and then the human calibration to deal with the consequences of the unhelpful material in the training data). What comes out is based only upon what goes in. This is unlike human intelligence, where people can ultimately output far beyond what was put in, because they are souls, made in the image of God.

So much, then for the marketing. But, leaving aside the current implementation, what about the idea in general?

Intelligence and wisdom

If we think about what the Bible has to say in this area, then we quickly come across an obvious and fundamental fact. The Bible teaches us about the concept of wisdom, which is distinguished from our idea of intelligence. Wisdom is not being very clever, and talking or writing about ideas that are very advanced, in the sense of capacity for technical problem-solving. Wisdom is skill for living rightly, based upon perception and discernment of the underlying realities. And this perception or understanding is based upon understanding the order in which we live. This is in terms of being created beings, recognising our Creator (the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom), understanding that we live in a fallen world, and being able to apply the consequent spiritual principles to the particular situations we find ourselves in, remembering that all our works will be submitted to his judgment and are subject to his providences.

That is to say: as we look at the world around us an analyse some particular situation (the "input data", if you like), then we then learn to evaluate it in terms of the principles of God, our relationship to him, the world he has made and how he intends it to run, and recognise that honouring him and his purposes is the important thing to do. We learn to recognise how, in a particular situation, the principles of wisdom apply. We perceive the workings of sin, of the corrupted desires of the flesh, seeking for worldly gain and immediate advancement contrary to the Creator's principles. We discern the long-term outcomes of different policies and ways of life. We evaluate the different kinds of "gains" at different levels: the differences between trivial but necessary achievements, false achievements and ones of real value; we sort out between such things as the need to eat, drink, look after the state of our "flocks and herds", repair and upkeep, the need to develop character and godly habits, long-term sowing and reaping of what we sowed, how an action will look when we look back perhaps from old age, or on the day of judgment; investing for earth and for heaven, what is of real value and what really impresses men who are walking in the flesh, what is real friendship and what is just empty pretence or froth, and so on, and on, and on. We then decide how to respond and react, whilst remembering that all is still subject to the higher will of our God, to whom we entrust ourselves whether the immediate, flesh-and-blood-level consequences are palatable or not.

Like an LLM's training set in the current text-prediction technology, true wisdom also requires training via considerable experience. It is not something we can have without passing through much, considering much, praying much, being amongst the people of God much, studying the word much, and exercising patience.

So, wisdom has some analogies with "Artificial Intelligence", but it is also fundamentally different, and they are ultimately not the same thing at all. It involves understanding. Wisdom is not simply technical problem-solving, but is discernment. It requires looking at a situation from different perspectives, and remembering which are the important perspectives. It looks beyond immediate appearance, and interprets in the light of God's revealed realities in his Word.

Consequences and conclusions

This being so, "Artificial Intelligence" as the "tech community" is looking at it today is actually of quite limited use. Even supposing that the (considerable) challenges of producing useful products at affordable prices in order to help us to achieve our tasks more efficiently is achieved, these products will still be, like other things, ultimately just tools for human use. Whether the uses that humans put them to will themselves be wise or foolish is another question entirely - one which you will never be able to discern simply by predicting sequential text based upon past training data. "AI" can produce plausible patterns based upon what human beings have written, in the training data. But whether these patterns reflect wisdom that enables us to live rightly in this creation or not: that is a separate question.

The (marketing) talk now from tech circles is of when "AI" will achieve "super-intelligence", surpassing man's abilities. But again, we must remember to go past the marketing: what this really means is just technical problem-solving abilities, resulting in more efficient technological progress. Whether men will be wise or foolish, whether they will be more efficient in doing good or evil, whether they will use their tools to glorify God and serve the poor and needy or whether to build self-centred empires: that is something else. And as ever, the answer is likely to be: some of both. The tares and the wheat will both grow in the field, each revealing more clearly their respective natures, until the harvest.

So, by all means use AI where it can do good, promoting the beautiful and the true. To know where that is, as with every other tool, you'll first need to learn wisdom, and you'll need to regulate your use of the tool at all steps with that wisdom. A chainsaw is a tool for good, if used wisely. If used otherwise... oh dear.