How Then Shall We Live?

Christian Engagement with Contemporary Issues

Samuel Wells

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780898692549
• eBook ISBN: 9780898690019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

• Reflections deal with issues that matter
• Author is a renowned preacher, broadcaster, and internationally known ethicist

Essays by a preeminent Anglican figure on the salient issues of our time, "issues on which I believe the Church should have a view, " says Wells. The issues run the gamut from social, political, personal, life-cycle to theological. Some of the issues treated include Islam, migration, the rise of religious extremism, dementia, Israel, marriage, LGBTQ identity, domestic violence, death, shame, old age, retirement, assisted dying, ecology, obesity, inequality, Brexit, and the Trump presidential election. "Sam Wells arguably has the liveliest, most agile, best informed, critically disciplined mind in the entire Christian community; and he has a baptized heart of honesty, compassion, and passion to match his baptized mind. In this book he ranges over a cluster of complex issues, all the way from hard public questions of economics and politics to the most pathos-filed personal issues of retirement, dementia, and death. Concerning every issue, Sam's sound judgment instructs us as he moves easily from life to Scripture and back through church tradition. This book will serve many of us well who live with daily perplexities that admit no resolution." —Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

PART 1

Engaging the World

• 1 •

The Resurrection of Politics

The Brexit and Trump votes in June and November of 2016 had many things in common—their unexpected nature, the scorn poured upon the winners by educated elites, the populism of the victorious protagonists, the visceral hatred unleashed, the rather far-fetched promises of the successful campaigns, and the losers’ nightmarish anticipations of what will now come to pass. But one particular feature represented in both movements was a rejection of politics. For Brexit, conventional politics was either a sell-out of sovereignty from Westminster to Brussels, or a stitch-up by the privileged London classes at the expense of the downtrodden provincial masses. For the trumpeters of Trump, Washington was a broken, wasteful, self-indulgent culture of fiddling while the economy of middle America burns, and what was required was a bonfire of the vanities of expertise, experience, and dynastic presidency.

The losers of the two votes share a twin dilemma. The first half of the dilemma is how to participate in the new politics: whether to dwell in the denial or despair of what seems a set of catastrophic decisions, or whether to be upbeat and say much remains to be seen, the known deficits are outnumbered by the unknown possibilities, and the game is very much still to be won. The second half of the dilemma is how to come to terms with the half of the population that voted for something that seemed at once unimaginable and horrifying: whether to hide in the bubble of like-minded dismay, or instead humbly to seek out, meet, and learn from people who apparently think so differently, feel so alienated, and harbour such deep anger.

The one thing no one seems prepared to do is to find any fault with democracy, which while having delivered two crushing blows to a whole swathe of those accustomed to being in the majority, has remarkably emerged unscathed. Indeed some have seen 2016 as a year of triumph for the much vaunted “little guy.” In late 2016 a letter from a certain Keith Craig was published in the Financial Times, calling for a little humility from what might be termed “complacent political majoritarians.” This is what it said.

Your pages overflow with predictions of disaster brought on by the Brexit/Trump axis. Leaving aside the depressing and repetitive pointlessness of this mass guesswork, its underlying assumption—that things were better when People Like Us were in charge is at best dubious, at worst delusional. Under PLU rule, we have two failed wars and the Middle East in flames, China expansion-ist, Europe enfeebled, America ineffective and Russia resurgent. At home, we have banking crises, stagnant median incomes, uncontrolled borders, record indebtedness, profiteering by the ‘professional’ classes, and general social polarisation. This is the Eden from which the rude and licentious electorates have expelled us?

Face it. We FT readers had our decades in charge and we blew it for everyone but us. Time for us to do what we’ve been telling the rest of them to do for years, and suck it up. Or go forth and earn the respect that regains power.

In other words, not only have many people in the UK and the US undergone a profound breakdown in their sense of their place in their culture, society and politics—but it’s their fault.

For those who feel like strangers in their own country, and wonder if the qualities they most value in their culture are becoming a minority cause, the prophet Isaiah may be a source of insight, enlightenment and encouragement. Isaiah 11 begins with an uncompromising, blunt, almost brutal word: stump. It’s a horrifying word, conjuring images of amputation, loss, ugliness, finality. You look at what’s left after a tree’s been chopped down and you see an empty space where once there was life; a future sawn off. But if you think about a freshly-felled tree, it’s still got a vast network of roots underground. Those don’t immediately cease to work just because there’s not a lot left above the soil. And so there’s always the possibility that a shoot will surface from out of the severed stump.

And that’s what Isaiah describes. He’s writing in troubled times. More than half of Israel has been invaded, dismantled, and destroyed by the Assyrians. What’s left is under intense threat. Yet in the midst of despair he offers a vision of a new politics. A shoot will arise from the same family that produced David, Solomon, and the great kings of Israel.

And this will be the new kind of politics that rises from the ashes of the old. Solomon once asked God for a wise and understanding heart. This is talking about two kinds of wisdom. One’s the kind that can step away, formulate ideas, and work out the theory. The other’s the kind that can roll up sleeves, get in the thick of things, build alliances and make compromises. Wisdom and understanding. Then there’s another pair of virtues, counsel and might. Again, it’s about recognising politics needs a balance of two things, in this case, careful planning and preparation, matched with vigorous execution and follow-through. Counsel and might. Like theoretical and practical wisdom, the one is useless without the other. And then there’s a third pair of virtues, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. On the one hand a sense of what’s possible, what works, where your limitations are, where your strengths lie; on the other hand a sense of who God is, how small we are before God, how limitless is the grace and possibility and generosity and mercy of God. A rational recognition of human potential, and a faithful apprehension of divine wonder: knowledge and the fear of the Lord. If the first pair echo Solomon, this last pair echo David, who in his last words speaks of just rule as that which stands in fear of God.

So out of the desperation of Israel grows a new shoot from the house of David and Solomon, and this time the lessons of those two flawed leaders have been learned. Politics is now to be characterized by theoretical and practical wisdom, by careful planning and vigorous execution, by human endeavor and divine grace. But Isaiah hasn’t finished his description of what makes true politics. We now get an account of what it means to be righteous. It’s interesting our culture has become skeptical about any hope of being righteous. Today we only use the word in two senses: either entirely negatively, as in the highly critical term “self-righteous”—or rather condescendingly, as in the phrase “righteous indignation,” with which we describe someone who’s correct, but has lost their temper, or at least their sense of proportion. But Isaiah has twin understandings of the word righteous, which we could call uprightness and faithfulness. Uprightness simply means being fair, upholding the rule of law, not making arbitrary judgements, not showing bias on account of personal favor or gain, showing dependability and consistency and keeping one’s promises. But faithfulness means recognising that life is not fair, that when the rules are enforced there are those that don’t fit them and lose out through no fault of their own, that people deserve a second chance, that it’s possible to be unlucky, disadvantaged, oppressed, and that a good politics doesn’t just reward those who benefit from uprightness but remains faithful to those who lose out.

You could be forgiven for thinking the new politics could stop right there. Leaders who exhibit these virtues are worthy of public support; leaders who don’t are not. Isaiah promises that God will raise up a new leader who will indeed embody such qualities like no one has before. That’s the politics that thinks. But Isaiah has a whole other dimension to tell us about. Isaiah wants to offer us also the politics that dreams. In Woody Allen’s words, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid. . . but the lamb and the kid won’t get a whole lot of sleep.” Isaiah changes the focus from the politics of the city to the flourishing of the animal creation. Just imagine, he says, a life that has no danger, no insecurity, no evil. Picture being a shepherd who has no anxiety that a predator will decimate your flock. Visualize trusting your baby to linger around a snake pit, or beholding your young child train wolves, leopards and lions. Isaiah is self-consciously revisiting the Fall narrated in Genesis 3, where a serpent took up enmity against God and humankind. This scene is a vivid depiction of what it might be like to reverse the effects of the Fall, and suppose creation where life isn’t defined by scarcity, envy or antagonism, by hurt or destruction.

And then in a single sentence Isaiah stunningly brings the political and the pastoral together in a harmony of grace: the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Everything he’s said in the first part of his description can be summed up in that simple phrase, “the knowledge of the Lord”: it’s the best of human wisdom, knowledge, but it’s the infusion of divine wisdom, the knowledge of the Lord. And it’s as comprehensive as the waters that cover the sea. Just close your eyes and lie right back prostrate and feel the warm cleansing water run over your body right up over you giving you strength and peace and healing and calm. The world will be full of the knowledge of God just like that, just like the warm cleansing water rises up over your weary, spent body. Feel the joy of that.

Here’s Isaiah, in the midst of chaos, destruction, and despair, describing the resurrection of politics: a politics that thinks the way God thinks, with ideas and practicalities, planning and implementation, human effort and divine grace, upright trust and faithful compassion; but a politics that also dreams the way God dreams, with the innocence and simplicity of a child, with the withering away of animosity and hostility, with a gentle immersion in mercy and truth.

What a beautiful idea. What a vision. What a dream.

But wait. We read this today not as an idle poem or a pious fantasy. It’s not simply an idea, a vision, or a dream. We read it because these words became flesh. There was one who was the beautiful idea of God and the tangible reality of God, who was God’s plan but saw that plan through to the very end, who knew what it meant to be human and knew what it meant to be God. There was one who was so upright he did not fight on his own behalf when he was arrested, who spent his life among the rejected and outcast of the world. There was one who sprung up from the root of Jesse and came from the line of David, who emerged from the stump of Israel, who was born in the midst of the lamb, the calf, and the kid. And there was one who came as a little child to reverse the effects of the Fall, to invade our despair and inspire us to dream again.

And so we believe in the resurrection of politics because Jesus is the resurrection of politics. Jesus is the idea of God made flesh, the word of wisdom and the flesh of creation, the best that humanity can do and the grace of God that meets us in our weakness. Should we ever despair about our country, our choices, or our politics, we may always go back and read Isaiah 11. Because there we will discover how to walk in God’s ways, there we will recall how God has already walked those ways and will walk them with us all our days, and there we will realize that when our spirit is spent, the Spirit of the Lord will come with the wonder of a new shoot and the simplicity of a little child and summon us into the dream of God.

• 2 •

Islam and Islamist Extremism

When talking about Islam and Christianity, we have to start by recognizing the backdrop to our conversation. There’s a historical backdrop: a longstanding fear that Islam was on the brink of overrunning Europe, having swept through North Africa and the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries, and had global ambitions, having expanded into sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia much later; on the other side a problematic legacy of the Crusades, of Spanish reconquest of European colonial expansion and the West’s complex role in the Middle East today. There’s a mixture of caricature, prejudice and ignorance: a tendency to regard Western modernity and Christianity as interchangeable, an inclination to line up intolerance, backwardness, legalism and militancy on the Islamic side and assign peace, progress, freedom and enlightenment to the Christian side, and a habit of seeing Christianity as complex and nuanced while regarding Islam as monolithic and fanatical. And then, like a long-running domestic dispute, there’s a large list of grievances: on the one side colonialism, corrosive Western values, and the State of Israel, culminating in the duplicitous invasion of Iraq; on the other side intolerance, regressive social policy, the nightmarish phenomenon of Islamist extremists, ISIS and, most of all, 9/11.

That’s quite a family argument to walk into. So why do so? First, because Christians want to deepen and grow in their faith and learn from anyone who has a lot to teach them. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been relaxing as a tourist or at a social event and I’ve more or less tripped over a Muslim in a quiet space kneeling to pray. Every time it’s made me wonder if my faith had the unwavering faithfulness I see in Islam. It humbles me. Second, because Christians are called to repent of our many historic and current failures in relation to people of other faiths and to grow in understanding so as not to repeat them. Third, because intercultural and interfaith conflict is one of the greatest threats to the world right now and we are duty-bound to seek a better way.

Islam is a thrilling religion. It’s thrilling because of its straightforwardness. Islam sees the problem with most cultures and religions that there’s so much clutter. It sees Hinduism as festooned with different gods, tribal societies as subsuming the individual entirely within the group or clan, and Christianity as obsessed with mediators—sacraments, in the case of Catholicism, priests and pastors for most denominations, endless adornments of clothing and buildings, and most obviously for all believers, Jesus. By contrast Islam is unmediated: we have a direct relationship with God and everything depends on that. This simplicity is the heart of Islam. But Islam is also deeply appealing because it’s so practical. Despite many assumptions, only about 1 or 2% of the Qur’an is about law; but it’s certainly concerned with ethics—particularly how wives, children, dependents, slaves and orphans are treated, and three troublesome subjects—violent clashes, business relations and intoxicating substances. It’s hard to get more practical than that. Humility, gratitude and comradeship characterize a religious outlook on life. The key notion is submission: in letting God direct your will, you find a freedom the world cannot give. And Islam is easily summarized: the five pillars refer to believing in God and God’s messenger, daily prayer, concern for the poor, fasting, and pilgrimage. Once you grasp the simplicity, practicality and comprehensiveness of Islam you can see why it spread so quickly in the early centuries and has so many adherents today. You could say Islam combines the direct intensity of Protestantism with the tangible humanity of Catholicism. For 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, it’s a winning combination.

In its statement Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council grasped the significance of Islam and the potential for dialogue. It said that Muslims

adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to [humans]; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgement when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.¹

So much for understanding the appeal of Islam. Let’s turn to points of tension. The obvious and irreconcilable difference is about Jesus and the Trinity. For Islam God is wholly other and the notion that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine is blasphemous. Christianity jeopardizes monotheism, because it sounds dangerously like Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three gods. This Muslim criticism is a perfectly consistent position, and its concerns are essentially the same as those of Judaism. For Christians God is indeed wholly other, and there is no way human beings can communicate with God on account of that difference, let alone stand before God on account of sin, but God’s plan from before the foundation of the world was to be with us in Christ, so God’s whole existence is shaped to that end—hence the Trinity. In the Trinity we see how Jesus is integral to God, but so is the Holy Spirit, which makes Christ and his benefits present to us after Jesus’ earthly ministry is over. For Christians, that means relationship, in the traditional language of Father and Son, is integral to God and thus at the heart of all reality: they would ask Muslims how that can be the case in Islam. Thus Islam is gloriously simple, but in Christian eyes lacks the dimension that constitutes the gospel—that God’s whole existence is shaped to be with us in Christ. The way Christians describe that shaping of God is, to Muslims, so complicated that it’s either incomprehensible or absurd.

There’s a line in the Qur’an that suggests Jesus didn’t die on the cross. A lot of dialogue has circled around this controversy. But what gets missed is the point that Jesus’ death is a fundamental statement of the centrality of nonviolence. Jesus could have responded to his arrest with force; but instead he’s led like a lamb to the slaughter. Thus peace and nonviolence are, for Christianity, part of the character of God, rather than simply a desirable state of affairs. Islam has nothing like this. Peace can, for Islam, be an aspiration, but can’t be a basic stance, as I believe it must be for Christians.

Moving from the nature of the faith to its practice, there’s another significant difference between the two faiths in the way the respective traditions came about. The emphasis of Islam is not so much on Muhammad himself but on the revelation given to him. That means Jesus and Muhammad aren’t equivalents. The correspondence is more between Jesus and the Qur’an: they’re both forms of incarnation. Just as for Christians the Bible points to Jesus, so for Muslims, the prophet Muhammad points to the Qur’an. The prophet Muhammad was active as a religious leader for around 23 years. He was therefore present and involved, not only in the recording of the Qur’an, but in the early stages of its interpretation. He was a legislator, a commander, and a judge. Christianity has a major interpretative problem to overcome, namely that much of the gospels seems to anticipate an imminent end of the world and return of Christ in glory. That means there’s always a question of whether Jesus’ (and even Paul’s) more strident and dem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Engaging the World
• Part 2 Being Human
• Part 3 Facing Mortality