Scientists Create Life

Scientists in American have created life! Well, if you believe the headlines they have, a closer examination with a little scientific advice shows that they have successfully rearranged some of the components of life to make a synthetic microbe capable of reproduction. This is a remarkable achievement and whatever reservations we may have the imagination, ingenuity, skill and sheer persistence of the research team deserves our admiration and applause.

Two comments – firstly, as ever in these breakthroughs scientists are accused of “playing God”, as though this were a knock down argument against human arrogance. Allow me to let you into a little secret – according to the Christian faith human beings were actually made and designed to “play God”. In the Bible humanity is said to be made “in the image of God” – with the capacity to imitate God and to be intimate with God. Created not to be God, or replace God but to imitate God. It is our very purpose for being here that we should honour God by becoming a people who are shaped by the same qualities that God has shown towards us – love, patience, grace, justice, compassion and yes creativity! So “playing God” is precisely what we are to. To suppose God made a mistake when we were made with minds capable of synthesising DNA is what I find arrogant – not that scientists should venture to do this.

But secondly: This discovery clearly has both dangers and opportunities attached to it. Part of “playing God” is learning about restraint. A God who can do anything doesn’t chose to do everything. Some things are not to be done not because they are impossible but simply because they are harmful and demeaning. We are told that there are big moneyed interests behind this development, and that worries me more than the success of the scientists. Market forces are notoriously difficult to control when they conflict with ethics.

So let us pause. Let there be plaudits (and Nobel Prizes?) for the scientists, but we need to do some more ethical thinking before we start to use this new technology. If we want to play God that is the way to do it – creativity and wisdom hand in hand. If there is any arrogance in science I find it not in these discoveries but the false notion that we can imitate the creativity of God without seeking to imitate his wisdom.

Hymn Books are Sooooooo Last Century

The Methodist Church is about to publish the proposed list of Hymns/Songs for inclusion in its new official hymn book. There will follow a positive mêlée of counter lists complaining about what has been included or omitted. I await the discussion with scarcely restrained disinterest. It matters not one jot or tittle what is excluded from the list as we can all sing it anyway if we want to. Being the creature of habit that it is, the Church still seems to think that publishing an authoritative list and printing an expensive book will somehow define our worship. This is modernist thinking in a post modern world resulting in an industrial product being offered in a digital market. It just can’t work anymore. Worship material is now drawn from digital and online sources, words are printed or projected in selections and forms which meet local needs: the sun has set on the normative hymn book.

What goes in the list is not a big issue, but there are really two major concerns for the Church here – the first is east to see and grasp: blindness to new technologies and contemporary cultures. Martin Luther described the printing press as “the best of God’s inventions” and the reformers (Protestant and Catholic) seized hold of this new technology to renew the spiritual life of the church, so why have we lost this enthusiasm for new communication technologies which could serve us so well?

The second issue is more profound and ought to disturb us more. If I am right in my description of what is happening then the purpose of the new “hymn book” really isn’t to introduce “new songs” – which we can already access. So what is its purpose? I can only conclude that this is about control – a rearguard action to try to hold together our increasingly diverse theologies and liturgies by creating a normative list of Methodist hymnody. The list serves not to modernise our music, but rather to restrict our choice, it is there to define an elusive Methodist identity. Like so much human activity it is about control, and I’d just like us to be honest and recognise what it is that we are doing, rather than go on pretending that this is a major renewal of our worship.

Playing with God

It’s Monday lunchtime at work and I am still tired from Sunday evening’s service! Along with some really gifted and enthusiastic friends I was leading an experimental service in a Café Church. I don’t want to parade the details of what we did here – for that is not my point in this blog – only to say that to prepare and run this service needed about ten people to rehearse all afternoon, three or four others to meet to do some technical work and at least one to create a complex and scripted narrative which held the thing together. That’s a lot of work - a lot more than your typical liturgy or even family service takes.

My question is this – whose needs does alternative worship meet? It is often billed as the new culturally relevant spirituality which will re-engage a new generation with the church – but it is not. The people who plan it run it and attend it are mostly highly committed Christians who are just looking for something different, for a few spices and pickles to enliven palates dulled to insensitivity by the routine of church life and all too often uninspiring worship.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am generally a fan and certainly a practitioner of alternative forms of worship, guilty of inflicting all kinds of imaginings on congregations at different times. BUT this is mainly because in common with many other Christians I need times to be playful with God in my worship. Play is that activity in which we imagine what it would be like to do, try or be something, in which we make and follow all kinds of rules and procedures together just because it is good to be together and do these things.

So let’s have worship godly play for adults too.

It’s Time – But not as we Know it

As a university chaplain I spend a lot of time I expend a lot of effort explaining to the secular institution in the run up to exams why so many of their students cause so much trouble by wanting to go and pray at such odd times. University timetabling has a clockwork mentality – Muslim and Jewish prayer, however, is governed by the movement of the sun and moon. This causes a degree of holy havoc, and in many ways I’m glad that it does.

Time as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century to solve a railway timetabling problem. In those innocent early days everyone assumed that the trains would run on time, but the time in London was different to the time in Bristol. Everyone set their clocks by the sun but the sun takes a longer to get to Bristol than it does to London. Having struggled with publishing timetables with each stop adjusted for local time, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide eventually gave up and unilaterally declared train time to be London time.

Machines run like clockwork; nature does not. Natural time is messy and surprisingly variable, so the time we use now is “mean time” - watered down wishy-washy stuff averaged out over the year by timetablers, engineers and administrators. It’s a time of our own making which ties us to the regular motion of the machines we make to serve us and the needs of the industrial production which supplies us.

Time wasn’t always like that and for many people today it still is not, and here is the rub. Originally the “hours” of the day were the “hours” of prayer in the monasteries. It was prayer not production which defined time. After all who is to say that our days must be governed by that nasty, pinched “mean” time driven by productivity rather than God’s messy, awkward, wasteful and wonderfully generous gift of time?

I’ve learnt a lot from students who are being “awkward” because of their faith; I’m sorry to say few of them have been Christians.