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.

Making the gospel optional

It was good to see this link (found at Tim Challies' blog) this morning: https://www.proclaimanddefend.org/2025/10/23/a-dangerous-new-ecumenism/

Recently there's been a spate of Internet noise from people - who self-describe as evangelical Protestants - giving their opinion that the golden age of Christianity in the world was the medieval period. One supposedly Reformed evangelical publisher emailed out advertisements for a book on Christopher Columbus, breathlessly explaining that "we had been lied to" because we didn't know that Columbus' ultimate motive was to finance a new Crusade to free the "Holy Land" from "the Moslem hordes"..... and this was being presented, without any hint of irony or embarrassment, as a good thing. Many voices declare that the time has come to put aside our differences, and not merely co-operate with sufficiently like-minded people to achieve limited societal aims (such as combating abortion or the promotion of sexual depravity), but to together build a "Christian society" together with those who preach what our confessions of faith say are false gospels which corrupt the fundamentals of Christian faith.

All this is to say: there are a lot of siren voices telling us that, in effect, the gospel is optional. It can be your own private belief: good for you. But outside the privacy of your own thoughts, the Christian faith must be reduced to only the profession that there is one God in three persons, and that salvation has something to do with your preferred version of Jesus. The minimal "Christianity" in this new ecumenism will include the being of God and the fact that the gospel saves, but as to what the gospel is, that is something you can choose for yourself. In the public sphere, Christianity is to be a large tent which includes both saving biblical truth and its denial.

It is never explained why this should be. If we can edit the gospel, then why not the Trinity too? If it does not matter whether salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, or whether it is progressively mediated through the sacerdotal ministry of a official priesthood of the church, then why does it matter if someone is a Binitarian instead of a Trinitarian? That is to say: if the boundaries of what is "Christian" are being extended to include this heresy, then why not that heresy? Why does the meaning of Christianity change when moving in between the church sanctuary and the public square?

In effect, the idea seems to be that as long as we have official, outward Christianity, then it doesn't actually matter if we have genuine spiritual life or not. Which is again to say: the gospel is optional.

But the gospel is not optional: it is everything. We may well co-operate with people who are not Christians on various projects in this world, because we are members of this present age as well as the age to come. But to re-define what is meant by "Christian" in order to accomplish this, is not something the Master has given us freedom to do, and nor should we want to. The gospel is not negotiable, for whatever purpose. Our duty is to pass it on faithfully. If some political purpose requires us to soft-pedal essentials of the gospel or to treat them as optional, then we must sacrifice that political purpose. This is not a choice: this is what being a genuine follower of Jesus who told us to take up the cross implies.

Do you have any tears?

The speech of Paul to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20: 

"18 And when they had come to him, he said to them: “You know, from the first day that I came to Asia, in what manner I always lived among you, 19 serving the Lord with all humility, with many tears and trials which happened to me by the plotting of the Jews; 20 how I kept back nothing that was helpful, but proclaimed it to you, and taught you publicly and from house to house, 21 testifying to Jews, and also to Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ."

Note:

• Paul served amongst the people. His life was an open book to them. He could appeal to them to testify as to how he had lived, because they all knew. Like the Lord Jesus Christ, he came to where those he was serving were, and walked as one of them.
• Moreover, his life of service amongst them was consistent. He was not a part-time servant: he had "always" lived amongst them in the same way. Service was not something that he turned on and off, with limits and boundaries: his identity was that of a servant of the Lord. He served with all humility, as his Master did.
• This service brought him "many tears and trials". Paul's life and soul were in his service. He was not a "fixed hours contract" man. Before he gave anything else (time, money, particular labours), he gave himself. And consequently, he brought upon himself many sorrows.

Servant of Jesus, do you have any tears? Or is your ministry carefully constructed to make sure you avoid them? All is clean, professional, well-ordered, to keep all the messiness and pain of sharing your life with other human beings who you are giving yourself in order to bless in Jesus' name at a comfortable arms-length distance?

"I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears", Paul said to the Corinthians. "many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ", he wrote to the Philippians. "I remember your tears", the aged Paul wrote to his son in the faith, Timothy.

Again I ask, servant of Christ, do you have any tears? Is your heart and life sufficiently joined to those that you are serving that, when inevitably the trials and sorrows of human reality intervene, you can only weep? If yes, then the promise of Scripture is that they are stored up before God and precious to him - and one day Jesus will wipe them all away. If no, then, why is this?

Jesus, the divine bridegroom

"For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is His name; and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel; he is called the God of the whole earth." - Isaiah 54:5.

"You shall no longer be termed Forsaken, nor shall your land any more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you." - Isaiah 62:4-5.

“When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love; so I spread My wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you and entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine,” says the Lord God. ...  You are an adulterous wife, who takes strangers instead of her husband." - Ezekiel 16:8 and 32.

"“I will betroth you to Me forever; yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy; I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. " - Hosea 2:19-20. 

These are just a few of the Old Testament verses which represent a consistent thread of Old Testament teaching, depicting God as the bridegroom of his covenanted people. The later prophets, such as Hosea, lament the unfaithfulness of the bride, but promise that God will renew the covenant, and take his people, his wife, to himself again.

The New Testament, and Jesus personally, explicitly states that this is fulfilled in Jesus himself, and in the union of Jesus with his church, e.g.:

"And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast." - Matthew 9:15

"You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ,’ but, ‘I have been sent before Him.’ He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease." - John 3:28-30

"Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might [g]sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish." - Ephesians 5:25b-27 

"Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife" - Revelation 21:9 

Were these the only related verses and the only related theme in the Bible (whereas in fact there are very many others on both counts), it would still be quite sufficient to show that Jesus is explicitly presented as God manifest in the flesh, the covenant God of Israel now come personally to fulfil the Old Testament promises. He is not a man, or the most exalted created being, through whom God acts: he, himself, does the things that the Old Testament tells us that God personally does. The concept of God taking a bride through an intermediary who does the actual taking of the bride in the New Testament, as a fulfilment of the Old Testament promise, would be absurd. Jesus, and his apostles, explicitly taught that Jesus himself is God. He does the things that the Old Testament tells us God himself is going to come and do.

On the Calormenes

From time to time, you hear or read someone arguing that C S Lewis was a racist, and that this is proved by his depiction of the Calormenes in the Narnia books.

In recent years I've read enough history to now understand that the Calormenes are essentially - and very clearly - based upon the rulers of the Ottoman Empire during the medieval period and their excesses. i.e. Not upon all "brown-coloured" people in general.

Ironically, then, the people arguing that C S Lewis' depiction was racist seem to be indulging in some sort of racism themselves, because they think that the negative traits of the medieval Ottoman sultans and elite which are poked fun at are something generalisable to all "brown people" in general. Why would they think that? It does sound quite like racism, but perhaps they have some other reason for making that leap.

Or to put this another way: it's like concluding that all the things which Lewis and Tolkien clearly adapted from Norse mythology and its heroes when they formed their heroes form a reliable guide to their view of people of white European descent in general. This makes no sense.

Of course, neither the Calormenes nor the medieval Ottomans are separable from their religion, which is clearly some brand of Islam, filtered through their culture(s). To some modern minds, critiquing a religion in any form is also some sort of racism. I don't recall coming across a serious attempt to explain why this is. Both Islam and Christianity claim to be global faiths, which are not the possession of any specific people-group or race. C S Lewis was a Christian apologist. He can hardly be expected to portray the religious culture and practices of a group based upon the Ottomans positively - just how many of his critics would do so? If the claim is that he deliberately picked upon the medieval Ottomans in order to ridicule Islam in general, then this claim needs to be accompanied by some actual proof. A bare assertion is not an argument.

On deceiving the simple with plausible-sounding words

Seen today on the feed of a prominent Reformed Baptist ministry: 

Premise 1- Government must promote the public good
Premise 2- Christianity, as the only true religion, is part of the public good 
Conclusion- Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion

This conclusion does not at all follow, since (amongst other reasons, but we'll just go with this one for now) there is a disguised/missing premise which is also required:

Hidden Premise: It is the explicit duty of Government to promote any and all public goods (and actively suppress alternatives)

i.e. This argument collapses, or at least severely reduces, all concept of "sphere sovereignty". Must the government force children to do enough exercise, and actively interfere if they fail to? And why just children?

Once such a premise is admitted, both logic and actual human history tell us that there's no logical stopping place to hold back where it'll be taken to. Why just "promote Christianity as the only true religion", and why not "promote the correct specific form(s) of Christianity, and hinder others"? Is it only some vague, under-specified Christianity itself which is a public good, and not any doctrines or practices in particular?

And who will be deciding which ones are correct, by the way? I mean, as long as it's me, then things will turn out just fine, so, no worries there. But if it's you then I'm already quite worried, since I've observed that you sometimes fail to even manage yourself and your family correctly, so being the one true arbiter of all religion for the nation is certainly beyond you. Alright then, that observation applies to me too. Who's it going to be, then?

Oh, it'll be "the Bible", of course! But again - who will be adjudicating what is correct interpretation of the Bible? Is that me, or will it be you? For a start, since the apostles never teach us anything at all resembling the above syllogism, I think we're already off to a very bad start.

But, I suppose, you're going to propose some new version of a "mere Christianity", a minimal creed which the state will decree as acceptable, and it will promote that, and suppress the rest? The Trinity's in then, presumably. I hope, though, that this won't include Eternal Functional Subordination, or attributing three wills to God, and everyone who's dabbled with those will be suppressed? Good stuff. And as Christianity is defined by the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone, independently of needing the benefit of any ritual performance to be justified, and not merely by Trinitarianism (which even the demons believe, and tremble), then certainly Roman Catholics are out. The state has a duty to suppress the works of G K Chesterton and J R R Tolkien. Oh, you like those two? They're different? Well, we'd better have some kind of star chamber of the approved theologians to work all this out for us. Who's going to be on that, by the way? And... what will the state be doing to those unfortunate people who feel conscience-bound before God to promote the errors they believe? I mean, the mental vision of all recalcitrant promoters of incorrect eschatology being marched off to the gulags has a certain Je ne sais quoi to it (good job I'm not one and that only people I disagree with will be caught by these proposals!), but I'm wondering if that's exactly what you had in mind?

And so on and on and on we could go. In practice, in 2025, even generally healthy evangelical denominations have difficulty policing their boundaries. And yet, apparently some Reformed Baptists now think that not only should we allow the state to arbitrate doctrinal questions and what is and isn't inherent to the promotion or denial of true Christianity, but that it's actually required of it.

On the contrary, we should hold to the historical Baptist understanding that the state has been delegated limited authority from the triune God (which it would be better if it recognised, but whether it does or not) to deal with outward breaches of and promote obedience to the second table of the law, as well as to regulate all other necessary accompaniments of government itself, but that the promotion of Christianity is a task which the Great Commission handed explicitly, and only, to the church.

Ah well. It's clear, then, that the given syllogism is about as valid as this one is: 

Premise 1- Government must promote the public good
Premise 2- The historic Baptist position, as the revealed will of our Saviour in Scripture, is part of the public good 
Conclusion- Government must suppress all its competitors, including the invalid syllogism with which this post began