Christianity

Last week Tom Holland reflected on the ‘utter strangeness’ of Christianity’s claim that Christ’s death on the cross was a sign of strength. St Paul agreed: ‘We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the gentiles [correcting the SJV ‘Greeks’] foolishness.’ So did pagan philosophers, who argued fiercely about the nature of the gods. One such was Celsus (2nd C ad), who wrote an anti-Christian diatribe, ‘The True Doctrine’. It survives only in the quotations used by Origen in refuting it (248 ad). Though Celsus had a sense of humour (Christians respected the cross as the tree of life: had Jesus been thrown off a cliff, would there be a cliff of life?), he was deadly earnest about Christianity.

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

Religious faith may be declining in America but it is still a cultural force to be reckoned with, looming large in any general election cycle. Courting religious voters remains a factor in the calculus of any prospective presidential candidate, especially as neither party seems a natural home for many of them. Americans are actually losing their religion rather faster than their faith. A recent poll showed that ‘nones’ – those without a religious affiliation –  are now the country’s largest group for the first time: Americans are increasingly defining their own faith, and not asking a church to do it for them. In this landscape, what a ‘Christian’ believes as a core value is suddenly malleable and open to influences from all sides.

Being a street preacher can be a thankless business. Since moving to Britain from Nigeria nine years ago, 64-year-old Oluwole Ilesanmi has toured the country reading aloud from the Bible, spending hours outside train stations, urging people to see the light. Sometimes he makes a convert; most of the time his preaching falls on deaf ears. Last month, it resulted in him being arrested. Saturday 23 February began like a typical day for Ilesanmi. He went to Southgate tube station in north London and preached for a few hours. His spiel included a disobliging reference to Islam, which seemed to rile a passer-by. To Ilesanmi’s surprise he was then accosted by the man.

Sorry to sound sectarian, but the Archbishop of Canterbury should really be able to articulate a preference for Anglicanism over other variants of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism. Interviewed here in this week's Spectator, he was more or less invited to do so; instead he said that he was entirely positive about Anglican priests converting to Rome. Hard to imagine the Pope saying the same thing in reverse. Ecumenical enthusiasm is all very nice, but a Church is in trouble if it can’t say why people should stay within it, or choose it over other options. So what is Anglicanism’s selling point? The answer is unfashionable but unavoidable: its socio-political liberalism. Note that I do not say simply ‘liberalism’.

For over half a century, we’ve been misunderstanding Martin Luther King. Our secular minds are programmed to see him as a civil rights activist, but as another MLK Day comes and goes, it is time to see King as he saw himself: as a priest and a prophet. Today, we tend to understand prophecy as focused on prediction. The nature of biblical prophecy and the word’s classical origins have been forgotten. Pro, the prefix of the Greek word prophetes means ‘fore’, but also ‘forth’. To be a prophet is to ‘fore-tell’ but equally to ‘forth-tell’ – to be a divinely-inspired forecaster or to preach moral, spiritual and political messages. King saw his role as the latter.

What does Tim Farron think about gay sex? Like Ken Livingstone's repeated reluctance to discuss Hitler, the former Lib Dem leader has never really offered his views on the subject. This time a year ago, for instance, he was so busy talking about all the things his party was putting into its general election manifesto that there was just never time for the matter to creep into interviews. He's never avoided questions on gay sex, or changed his views on gay sex, or offered formulations which sound as though he loves gay people (just not in The Way) but actually mean he doesn't think they should be having gay sex. So what a surprise that gay sex has cropped up as a problem for Farron this week. It's not like it's ever been in an issue before.