In this interview, Mal speaks about influence, the future, leadership and some of the people and projects who have inspired him.

In this seminar at Newday 2011, Andrew Wilson gave a whistlestop tour of the history of philosophy, helping us to understand where some of our modern presuppositions come from.

Click here to download Big ideas that have changed the world.

We are called to change culture, but change it to what? Believers need a worldview on all aspects of life. From where do we get this – culture or the Bible?

This talk,  recorded at Together on a Mission 2010, looks at how we can discern unbiblical worldviews, and how to respond to them? Click here to download the talk and here to download notes from the talk

So when the two come together to talk about the place of religion in the secular state, as they did a few weeks ago in an op-ed piece, it makes fascinating reading. The arguments Fish puts forward in the first half of his article are, for my money, about as definitive a statement of the way secularists think about religion as you’re likely to find anywhere. And they are, in places, very problematic.

He begins his piece, Religion and the Liberal State Once Again, uncontroversially:

You are free to believe that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ and to order your behaviour accordingly. You are not free to coerce others, either by physical force or the force of law, to share your faith and behave as you do.

 
Which is nice. Freedom to follow and worship Jesus, freedom from coercion to believe or behave in a certain way: pretty much what Paul was urging Timothy to pray for in 1 Timothy 2:1-4.
 
Then things become, suddenly, much more restrictive:

The key distinction underlying classical liberalism is the distinction between the private and the public. This distinction allows the sphere of political deliberation to be insulated from the intractable oppositions that immediately surface when religious viewpoints are put on the table. Liberalism tells us that religious viewpoints should be confined to the home, the heart, the place of worship and the personal relationship between oneself and one’s God.

 
The leap here is massive. In a flash, we have jumped from ‘you cannot coerce others to believe’, to ‘you cannot bring your religious viewpoints into the public sphere’, without pausing for breath. This is not the place to reflect on how much trouble this assumption has caused, particularly when Western governments have got involved in the Middle East. But it is fascinating that beneath this statement, expressed in the world’s leading newspaper by one of the world’s leading thinkers, is the idea that, for religion not to become coercive, it is necessary that religion not become public. Put the other way round, it is assumed that a non-coercive religion which engages in the public square is impossible.
 
There are so many counterexamples that it is hard to know where to start, but consider the Amish for a moment. It is not clear that the very public nature of many of their faith expressions – dress, housing, technology, trading practices, community formation, schooling, and so on – has ever conflicted with their five hundred year old, Anabaptist tradition of non-coercion. And that makes me wonder: does freedom to worship really require a faith that has no public expression at all, and which is confined to the home, the heart and the church? Or is it perfectly possible to express religious values publicly and peacefully, so long as – and this is crucial – those religious values include non-coercion, non-violence and so on?
 
So let’s say one were to stumble across a group of religious people whose founder, and whose sacred texts, urged love for God, love for one’s neighbour, love for one’s enemies and non-violence, and who consistently, despite the high-profile excesses of a few, adhered to those principles. And let’s say that, at the same time, the heart of those people’s religious beliefs was Iesous Kurios – that Jesus, not Caesar or Obama or Cameron or Merkel, was Lord of the world, and that their announcement of this fact was a very public statement. What then? We would suddenly have what Stanley Fish apparently regards as impossible: a decidedly non-coercive, yet emphatically public, religious belief.
 
Now to be fair to Fish, he may not believe that public religious beliefs are necessarily coercive. He may just be saying that, because they sometimes are, we’re better off without them. But the problem is, virtually any worldview articulated in public could, in the wrong circumstances, lead to coercion. Free market economics has. So has economic redistribution. So has environmentalism. And atheism. And opposition to higher tuition fees. And numerous other beliefs that, for all I know, most New York Times op-ed writers might well share. This doesn’t mean that those beliefs are evil, or (in Fish’s terms) that they should be constrained to the realm of the home, heart and the church. It simply means that coercion and violence are always wrong in a liberal state, and that allowing them under the guise of religion is reprehensible.
 
Now consider one more paragraph:

When the liberal citizen exits the private realm and enters the public square, he or she is supposed to leave religious commitments behind and function as a stripped-down entity, as an abstract-not-full personage, who makes political decisions not as a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim but as what political scientist Michael Sandel calls an “unencumbered self”, a self unencumbered by ethnic, racial, gender, class or religious identities.

 
I find this extraordinary. In the public square, we are not to engage through the self, the real one, with its strong preferences formed by ethnicity, gender, memory, religion, culture, class and so on (how many citizens, let alone politicians, would that disqualify?) Instead, we are to engage through a totally neutral socio-political avatar: unencumbered, genderless, classless, religionless, preferenceless. At one level, I appreciate Fish grouping religion together with ethnicity, gender and class, if only because it shows how ludicrous it is to exclude those things from the public space (unless we are to make people’s gender a “private matter” for “the home, the heart and the church” – and what on earth would that mean?) But at another level, I find myself wondering whether this isn’t simply an attempt to seize any passing sociological argument and dragoon it into service to support an implausible position.
 
In a liberal state, we cannot have people imposing religious laws on an unwilling populace, and we cannot have violence or coercion used to gain religious adherents. But to leap from this to saying that religion (and apparently gender, class and the rest) should always be excluded from any public discourse is … well, somewhat fishy.

What generates a good wave on this patch of coast is an accident of geology and Atlantic weather patterns. When there is a sustained Atlantic depression off the coast of Florida, and an area of high pressure over the UK, a swell is formed which travels the thousands of miles to Dorset. This swell rising and falling over deep water is suddenly compressed into shallow water as it hits the rock ledges off our coast, and big waves kick up as a result.
 
When this happens our local surfers are out in force, even though it generally only happens in winter when the water is properly cold. For a surfer, the chance to ride a good wave just a few minutes drive from home is too much to miss, even if it means near hypothermia.
 
It is rather an odd feeling, standing on a cliff watching the surfers, to think that this very particular activity is only made possible by a weather system on the other side of the planet. For a few seconds a neoprene clad figure stands on a piece of shaped fibreglass and rides the energy of one of the worlds great oceans.
 
Surfing is very elemental – it is all about the buzz of catching that wind and rock generated energy; of being immersed as closely as can be with the power of the water without being destroyed by it, but in a sense transformed by it. It is tantalizing in its fleetingness – something so big and powerful, something that has travelled half-way around the world, but which only exists for moments before it dies and is lost on the shore.
 
And then there is the perennial hope – the hope of another wave to come. A bigger, better wave. The ultimate wave. A perfect combination of swell and wind and reef, and poise and timing and strength, all coming together in that moment of perfect synchronicity and exhilaration and terrified joy. A wave that will be talked about long after the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen have flowed onto another beach.
 
It is that hope which keeps thousands of neoprene clad figures bobbing around on thousands of beaches the world over. The mighty vastness of the oceans, concentrated down upon a small board on the margins of land and sea.
 
Connecting with God is somewhat like surfing, and it is what all seekers after the spiritual attempt to do. The Buddhist at meditation, the Muslim at prayer, the New Ager at the vegan health store – they’re all just trying to catch the wave. All those people living in hope; hoping that the wave will come, and they will bridge the gulf between the visible and invisible worlds.
 
But here’s the thing about all spiritualities not founded in Jesus Christ: They know there is a wave, but they have no idea how it got there. They don’t understand the spiritual equivalents of Atlantic depressions and Dorset rock shelves.
 
The claim of the gospel is that in Christ we get revelation of the true source of all the energy in the universe. That, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Colossians, “by him all things were created…and in him all things hold together.” Weather systems over the worlds oceans, geological formations, water and fibreglass and neoprene, all – ultimately – originate in him and are held together by him.
 
What this means for followers of Christ is that we should be the most deeply spiritual people on earth, as we have greater revelation about the world than anyone else, both the world visible and invisible. In Christ we can interpret all we see in the physical world in the light of his creating and sustaining work; and as people of the Spirit we also exist in the reality of what is unseen. That liminal world, that moment of wave riding ecstasy of existing in two worlds at once, is the living space of Christ followers.
 
The trouble is, surfers tend to get pulled in different directions – it is easy to either get swamped by water or washed up on the shore. When this happens to a Christian it results in either an ungrounded spirituality that is out of touch with all reality or an earthliness that becomes impervious to the invisible work of the Spirit.
 
Where we need to exist is in the place in between, in that place where we see the spiritual in everything and have our feet on the solid rock that is Jesus Christ. This is the place of true spirituality. In this place we are not surprised if God speaks to us through a tree or a rock or a story in the news. And at the same time we are grounded enough to get on with the normal stuff of life – paying our taxes and raising our kids, and washing dishes, and going for walks and riding waves.
 
I recently heard of a Christian who was unwell and in hospital. Throughout this time he would claim, “I am healed!” despite the fact that he was very obviously sick. This seemed to me to be an example of ungrounded spirituality – a spirituality that ignored the things that God may have been trying to speak to him through the experience of his illness. It also ignored the very grounded reality of the work of doctors, nurses, cleaners, and the many other hospital staff involved in the process of making him well.
 
True spirituality is where the gulf between the visible and invisible is closed. We see this most clearly in the person of Christ Jesus. In him we see one who clothed himself in human flesh and lived the very grounded life of a jobbing builder. He healed sickness and cast out demons and stilled the waves, but also sat on the beach barbequing fish with his friends. He holds all things together, but also knows what it is to be tired and hungry and in pain.
 
As truly spiritual people, people who see God at work in everything, let’s inhabit the space where visible and invisible meet. Let’s be those who know how to surf the wave.

If Stephen Hawking is to be believed, apparently not. What’s odd about this – and it goes back further than Hawking and Dawkins, Darwin and Paley, to Lucretius and even beyond – is the assumption that science and God are rival ways of accounting for things, so that the more science explains, the less there is for God to do. The idea that physical and personal explanations might be compatible, so that Hamlet can be both Shakespeare’s character and Gertrude’s son, either hasn’t occurred to Hawking, or has been rejected on grounds that he hasn’t explained.

I find that a little bit strange. If I come into work with a black eye and people ask how I got it, it is perfectly reasonable to give a purely physical explanation, and say, ‘because the blood vessels in my ocular area are working overtime to repair damaged tissue.’ But they might feel a bit short-changed with that reply, because physical explanations don’t remove the need for personal explanations. They will probably find a different type of answer (‘because I stared too long at this guy’s girlfriend in the pub last night’) rather more satisfying.

And they certainly won’t think that the former removes the possibility of the latter.

That doesn’t mean that all physical events must have obvious personal explanations. Many do not. What it does mean, though, is that the existence of a physical explanation does not make a personal explanation impossible. So Stephen Hawking’s deduction – that because of M-theory, God does not exist – is something of a non sequitur, the equivalent of announcing the non-existence of Shakespeare from a study of Hamlet’s DNA.

Scientific and theological explanations of the world are perfectly compatible, as many leading religious scientists are repeatedly (and with remarkable patience, given the circumstances) reminding us. Stephen Hawking may or may not be right about M-theory; time will tell. But to conclude from it that God does not exist, as he appears to have done, is a confusion of categories.

God and science are complementary explanations, not rivals. Maybe, just maybe, something as grandly titled as a ‘theory of everything’ might have room for both.

Originally published at The Times Online (28/09/10). Republished with permission from Andrew Wilson.

As I opened the fridge, my daydream was shattered by the putrid stench of rotten meat. I unwrapped the chicken and the smell immediately made me retch. I ran for the bin, appalled at the foul aroma, and sadly resigned to the prospect of a disappointed family, and a meat-free salad!

This trivial example reminded me of a simple, but important principle. Without proper preservation, meat will quickly rot and decay. Society, of course, is no different.

The United Kingdom has the highest level of drug addiction in Europe. The number of couples getting married has reached its lowest point since 1862. Schools send home 2,200 children a day for disruptive behaviour in the classroom. Violent crime by women has reached an all-time high, with on average, 250 women being arrested each day. 58% of 14-17 year olds have viewed pornography, and 40% are sexually active. Over 41,000 women under 18 fall pregnant each year, and 49% of them have abortions. Since abortion was legalised in the UK just over 40 years ago, seven million children have been aborted. Everywhere you look, there are signs of decay.

This epidemic is not isolated to my own country. Many similar statistics, are echoed in other nations. As a result, we have to ask why the church is not making more of a difference. 

Jesus told us to be salt and to be light. These are evocative pictures of how the church is to be in society. Salt preserves; it holds off decay. If the Church were being as salty as it should, we ought not to see such levels of corruption in society. Light penetrates darkness; it brings revelation and helps people to see the truth. The Church should be a beacon of hope, showing up sin for what it is, and bringing revelation through the preaching of the gospel.

It has always been important to us to build excellent churches but our influence should also go far beyond our buildings and our meetings, and have a tangible effect on the society around us.

This means that as individuals, we need to take responsibility for the environments in which God has placed us; our workplaces, our university campuses, our streets and our schools. We need to be a positive influence through our actions, and our proclamation of the gospel. As local churches we need to impact whole communities, through social action projects and care for the poor, providing for the needs of society and being a positive presence in their midst. One of the benefits of working together across nations is that we can also look to make a difference at a broader national and international level as God leads us.

This is not a new innovation, but a core component of what we were made to do in Genesis 1. On the sixth day, God created man and instructed him to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28).

“Fill the earth”. Clearly this was a command for Adam and Eve to have children. From the beginning it was God’s intention that the whole earth be filled with people who bear His image and represent His handiwork.

Today there are over seven billion people on the planet, so you could be forgiven for thinking we’d filled it enough! But many of those living on the earth today do not know their creator, and God’s image in them has been marred by sin. Jesus has come to restore the image of God in man, so in addition to giving birth to physical children and raising them in a godly manner, we are called to give birth to ‘spiritual children’ through evangelism, conforming people to the likeness of Christ through the gospel.

“Subdue the earth”. The term subdue is a rich and multilayered word which speaks of cultivating, protecting, taking responsibility and bringing order. Adam was placed in a garden and told to cultivate it.

Today our call remains the same. We are to cultivate the environment around us for the glory of God. Even the most beautiful garden, if left untended, will soon become overrun with weeds. God’s creation mandate is this; you are to be gardeners! Pull up the weeds, tend the plants, draw out the beauty of creation. Be salt. Be light.

The implications of this are vast. We have a God-given responsibility that goes beyond simply building churches and winning the lost. We are called to shape the whole of creation. This will require all of us to play a part, using our different backgrounds, talents and passions to bring order to this world.

John Cadbury understood this principle. In the 1820s, alcoholism was rife in England. Water was so polluted that people drank gin in large quantities, and society was plagued by drunkenness, which led to poverty and crime. Cadbury took it upon himself to find a solution, and so established a business, providing cocoa and chocolate as alternatives to alcohol.

For many years the Cadbury family was actively involved in social reform; campaigning against the use of children to clean chimneys, and fighting for the rights of the underprivileged. They set high standards for the care of their workers; paying generous salaries and providing education, healthcare and pension schemes. For half a century they even ran Bible readings and morning prayers.

In the late 1890s John’s sons purchased a large plot of land and built affordable housing with space for gardens and trees, for employees and non-employees alike. By taking responsibility and striving to be salt and light, the Cadbury family had a remarkable and lasting impact upon their society.

We need to live with the same kind of vision. Fill the earth and subdue it. Be salt and light. We dare not focus on one to the exclusion of the other. Instead we must evangelise and transform culture. We must preach the gospel and care for the poor.

As individuals we need to be salt and light in our localities. We need to ask ourselves the question ‘how can I cultivate the area of the world in which God has placed me?’ For some it may be by becoming an outstanding worker for your employer, or as simple as refusing to gossip in the office. For others it may mean visiting an elderly neighbour or being a positive influence amongst other parents and teachers at the local school. One time I started a neighbourhood watch scheme that made the area feel secure to live in and broke down the barriers between the different ethnic communities that lived on the street.

As local churches we need to impact our communities in practical ways so that our neighbourhoods are better places to live. The streets should be safer, neighbours more trusting, children able to play safely in public spaces. Unbelievers should miss your church deeply if it were, for any reason, to close!

We will also need real wisdom to know how to use our resources at a broader regional or national level. We must remember that there are times when the local church should be supporting those championing change rather than leading the way itself. This is not because we have suddenly lost faith in God’s bride, Rather, local church elders may find themselves lacking the complex skill set necessary to campaign for some sorts of structural reform. On other occasions, they will find they need to identify too closely with political parties or have to raise large amounts of money that might swamp the local body. On these occasions we should not be afraid to release the next generation of reformers into their calling, supporting them with prayer and encouragement, as they become the Wilberforces or Shaftsburys of our generation. 

The breadth of the commission to be salt and light is immense. It is all-encompassing, and it requires us all to play our part. The gospel needs to work its way into all areas of society. Salt gets deep down into the cracks, and light can penetrates even the smallest and darkest of places. No part of this world should be beyond the reach of God’s rule. No inch of creation should escape His redeeming touch.

The potential is enormous. I am genuinely excited about all that God will achieve through us as we commit ourselves to being salt and light in the world. It is my hope and dream that as a movement our names will be deemed worthy to be listed alongside the nation changers of ages past, as we strive to bring God’s rule to bear on all of His creation.

“It’s easy being a fundamentalist, too. Mostly you don’t have to think at all … The rational atheist has science at his disposal, and the thing about good science is that it can be proved … For Christian apologists it is essential that Jesus rose again … If a sceptic demands proof, then in the end the faithful have little choice but to hide behind the door marked ‘mystery’”,
John Humphreys, BBC presenter of the Today Programme and Mastermind (agnostic) [1]

“The elephant [religion] is crashing about in the room, trampling people to death, and politely ignoring it is no longer an option.”
A. C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, among other distinguished academic appointments (atheist) [2]

If you’re anything like me, you had two strong reactions to how Ned Flanders responded to Homer Simpson’s accidental proof: laughter and unease. I find Homer Simpson hilarious and I think there’s something of Ned Flanders in most of us. But from where does the unease arise? The second and third quotations above illustrate how the notion of the Christian mind has increasingly been coming under attack.

An inconvenient question lurks in the shadows of these attacks: ‘Doesn’t Christian faith automatically relegate you to an intellectual slum?’ [3] We are all affected: whether you are a sales manager or a teacher, a nurse or a refuse collector, an academic or an administrator, you use your mind regularly. Yet many songs, films and TV shows (sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously) broadcast to all of us the kind of doubts implicit in the above inconvenient question.

This impacts different Christians in different ways. Perhaps you live in two worlds, privatising the use of your mind and keeping distinctively Christian thought processes out of your professional life. Perhaps, if you are a church leader, your equipping of Christians in education, academia and other workplaces is limited just to fostering disciplines of integrity, prayer and witness. Perhaps, for others, before really feeling able to engage with the Bible or praise God, you feel the need to leave your brain at the door. After all, why not do the Ned Flanders thing? If a question that comes up in Scripture, or a potential proof against God raised by a friend, is too difficult to address, just burn it, yes?

No. I am passionate about the Christian mind. It is my deep conviction that, as Christians, we simply must play a significant role in our nation’s intellectual life, be it academia, wider education, politics, business, the arts or elsewhere. As Christians, there are excellent historical, theological, philosophical and other reasons to say that the mind - in all its rational, moral, psychological fullness - is authentically our territory.

In my seminar at the Everything Conference, we will cover:
• The power and reality of the contemporary challenge to the Christian mind, including where the atheists and agnostics have a point.
• How the gospel story provides a rich basis for a mindful Christian worldview.
• How to develop a curious, fully alive, always learning mindset and apply it in practice, in the whole of your life.

I look forward to meeting some of you!

Footnotes
1. In God We Doubt, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, pp, 3 and 14.
2. ‘Where are we in history?’, p. 14, an essay in To Set Prometheus Free, Oberon Books, 2009.
3. Dallas Willard, Personal Religion, Public Reality?, Hodder & Stoughton, 2009, p. 3.

This materialistic reality has shaped not only the goods we produce and own, and the jobs that we do, but also our very way of thinking. Consider your instinctive reaction to the terms – who is superior; the ‘specialist’ or the ‘generalist’? When we are ill we go to the general practitioner at first, but quickly turn to a specialist if we need more than a simple prescription. We want our children to be taught by specialists in their subjects. If we need help with our tax returns we find a specialist to help us.

Specialisation has also shaped our thinking in the way that much of life tends to be compartmentalised. We live in boxes, and travel to work in boxes. At work we sit in a box, looking at a box, and then once home we turn on the box. Inevitably this results in a frame of mind that views work as belonging to one compartment, and leisure to another, and spirituality to another. Increasingly we live atomised lives, where the different things we do are not organically connected, and in which we are isolated from other people. The sense of emotional disconnect that many people feel is hardly surprising in this efficient, specialised, but ultimately dissatisfying world we have created.

While the picture I have painted might seem to be just life as life is, it is certainly not what is expected within a biblical worldview. From the perspective of the Bible’s authors, God is actively involved in everything in creation, and his people are dynamically united with him, and one another. In 1 Chronicles 29:11-12 we read David’s prayer before the people as he made preparations for building a temple:

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all. Both riches and honour come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all.

David’s prayer is a recognition of the connectedness of all human experience. Ultimately it is the Lord who owns and controls all things – he really is the king. And in the end it is the decision of the King, rather than our specialisation that determines what happens in our lives. What this meant for David was that whether he was planning a building project, leading his troops in war, or composing a psalm of praise, the whole thing, everything, was about the Lord.

Turning to the New Testament we see that a favourite apostolic description of believers is that they are in Christ. Joined into Christ, we are also joined into one another. This organic, bodily union must give shape to everything we do. It means that though we may specialise in our place of work, we can never become compartmentalised beings. It means that whether we are travelling to work, cooking a meal, washing the car, sitting at our desk, caring for our children, or anything else, we are doing it in Christ, and in connection with the rest of his people.

My prayer is that the Everything Conference would help us think more about these issues and see their implications for us. Whether your thing is art, or business, or politics, the main thing is that we should be biblically shaped – that our worldview should be conditioned more by the reality of our connection to Jesus than our cultural preconceptions. If the church of Jesus Christ would grasp this it would unleash a revolution far more powerful than the industrial one.

Let’s start a revolution of everything!