Wittgensteinian Fideism?

The question mark seems to be apposite. Neither term in the title here is in common circulation, so before discussing the content of this book:

Nielsen, K., & Phillips, D. Z. (2005). Wittgensteinian Fideism? London: SCM.

I think unpacking the title might be an idea.

To start from the end, ‘fideism’. According to Penelhum, fideists argue that faith does not need the support of argument, and therefore reject the approach of philosophical defenders of faith who try to show that faith is compatible with reason, scientific knowledge, and so on. Faith, on this view, need not be rational. There are some venerable names in this tradition: Tertullian and Kierkegaard, for example, although their positions still can be defended on philosophical grounds.

In fideism, the key is a state of trust and commitment to God, not to some doctrine or argument about God. We reject, as sinful beings, signs of God’s presence revealed to us, and think that only human powers are the cure for human ills. Reason and science require detachment; faith requires a passionate involvement. Faith requires rebirth and submission; without these God remains hidden from us.

The’ Wittgensteinian’ bit of the title refers, of course, to the Twentieth Century philosopher Wittgenstein, and, more specifically here, to his idea of language games. Wittgenstein’s own relationship to faith, religion, and, more specifically in his context, Christianity, is ambiguous, but it is certainly true that some of his ideas have been incorporated into philosophy of religion and theology.

Wittgensteinian Fideisim, therefore, is the accusation that some philosophers of religion claim that faith (particularly Christian faith, but the claim is usually advanced against Judaism and Islam as well) is a particular language game and that the language game can only be understood from within the faith, that is, by someone who is a believer already. Therefore, the argument goes, these philosophers argue that religion cannot be criticised from outside the faith. Hence, if we agree that, say, Christianity is a language game, or at least that that language and meanings, actions and activities that constitute Christianity constitute a language game then was can claim that the faith is immune to criticism from without, although not from within, the language game.

These claims about some philosophers of religion were first put forward by Kai Nielson in the mid-1960s. The philosophers in his sights were Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, and D. Z. Phillips. Eventually, Phillips replied, denying that there is or was such a thing as Wittgensteinian Fideism and that, even if it did exist, he was not such a fideist, and the argument, slowly, developed from there, culminating in the book referred to above, which has Nielson’s original 1967 paper, some of Phillips’ responses, Nielson’s responses to those, and some papers from a 2003 conference on the subject.

It is, admittedly, the sort of book that gets philosophy, and particularly, in this case, philosophy of religion, a bad name. Mostly Phillips and Nielson seem to spend their time talking past each other and accusing each other of not having read what they have written carefully enough. In short, the book can be characterised as two rather grumpy elderly men arguing about who said what about them when. External interventions in the debate do not really seem to help, either. On the whole, I did not feel that the discussion was advanced, let alone resolved, by the papers in the book.

I think the principal problem with the whole debate is that Christianity (and, I suspect, Judaism and Islam, although I do not know) is not a philosophical discussion. Of course, right back to the Patristic Fathers philosophy has been a part of the debates within and about Christianity, but that does not mean that either philosophy or the philosophical categories imported into Christian theology by engagement with philosophy, represent anything other than human ways of exploring, describing and discussing the faith.

Therefore, we can say that while Christian faith has some of the aspects of a language game in Wittgenstein’s terms, the same can be said for, say, chemistry. That does not mean that either Christianity or chemistry is immune from discussion outside those subjects, however. A physicist may comment on either, as may an ethicist or politician. What the comments amount to is not the point; with a fair amount of care and engagement with an alien subject, the external commentator can make pertinent points that require a response.

The other thing about Christianity specifically (asides about how Judaism and Islam are included are only, I fear, there for political correctness rather than the result of any engagement with those faiths) is that it completely ignores, on both sides, any encounter with God. The debate is about the existence of God, the coherence of belief in God, and so on. There is no discussion about how God might be encountered.

In Christianity, of course, the clue is in the name. Christianity is, first and foremost, about the encounter with God in the shape of His incarnate, crucified, and risen Son, Jesus. That is, Christianity is not a series of more or less coherent doctrines, debates, creeds, and activities, but ultimately about the encounter with Jesus. The encounters came first, after all. The accounts of Jesus’ life came afterward and then, as the message was carried out into the world, came the doctrines, creeds, and liturgies that have developed over the last two thousand years or so.

It is, of course, open to us as humans to accept or reject the encounter with God and Jesus. That is a slightly different debate about human freedom and will rather than fideism as such. The language game (or games) which that encounter might produce are perhaps, human constructs and are open to criticism, much like any other human construct or the idea of human constructs itself. If an individual never has the encounter then they are left with a language game to engage with or to reject. If the encounter develops a deeper faith than that in a person who never has it, then that is a matter or human experience and lack of it, not, surely, a philosophical position.

Levelling Up

There are a few political rallying cries which stir most liberal Westerners: freedom and slavery, for example. This has been an issue in certain right-wing arenas during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs and other restrictions on freedom of movement. The freedom from having irresponsible people infect me with a possible lethal and (at the time) hard to treat illness does not seem to be quite so much on the agenda, but no one is perfect.

Equality before the law is another thing upon which liberal democracy is founded, as is the universal franchise, that is that all people should have a vote in deciding who is going to represent them. These things were not always part of our national structures, of course. The obtaining of them was a struggle, and took, in fact, centuries.

One of the early groups to argue and agitate for those things we now consider to be rights under our national constitution were the Levellers. These are to be distinguished from the Diggers (discussed a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, the Diggers seem to have regarded the Levellers as insufficiently radical, describing themselves as the ‘True Levellers’.

The Levellers had their beginnings in the First English Civil War (1642-6). They were never a united political party; more a few well-known leaders and their followers, and a large number of pamphlets and tracts describing a program of reforms. Their main claims and arguments were for a reform of Parliament and religious tolerations. Everyone was born equal in their political philosophy, and no one had a natural right to govern or rule over another free-born person. Government had, therefore to be by consent.

Fair enough, but that begs the question of ‘consent by whom?’ to which the answer was ‘the people’. That raises another question, of whom ‘the people’ are. The complaint was that Parliament was, in two ways, undemocratic. Firstly, the undemocratic elements, the House of Lords and the Monarch had to be stripped of their power. Secondly, while Parliament was officially democratic, in fact, the franchise was so small in many constituencies and many seats were in the pockets of the local gentry as rotten boroughs, the democracy as the voice of the people, in general, was stifled.

The Leveller suggestions were to elect Parliament more frequently – every year or two (depending on which pamphlet we read), giving MPs a modest salary to prevent them being dependent on rich patron and their programs and for the electorate to be all men over 21 except servants (who were expected to vote as their employers directed), the recipients of alms (ditto) and royalists (who would have to wait a decade). If voting was a birthright, it was only to be removed from those who had squandered it – criminals, supporters of the king, the wage earners and so on. Thus the Levellers actually limited the franchise significantly and never seem to have considered the right of women to vote.

The Leveller position was founded on Scripture, a fact which those who regard them as the foundation of the British political left might like to ponder a little. Limitations on the power of government were necessary because the human heart was corrupt and magistrates were likely to err. Certain freedoms were to be respected no matter what Parliament decreed, be it never so democratically elected. Freedom of conscience was likewise to be protected. Conscription was to be outlawed and everyone was to be treated equally under the law.

There were to be limits, of course. True freedom of conscience was liable to land up with trouble. Freedoms should not land up troubling other people or endangering the state. Natural law, of comeliness and civility, should trump religious freedom when required. For the Levellers, perhaps, political liberty was the route to religious liberty. The two could not, at the time, be separated.

For the Levellers God did not choose the university-educated men to be ministers of the Gospel, but the ill-educated, the fishermen and tent-makers of the New Testament. Anyone could, therefore, preach; clergy who spoke of obedience and submission to the government were serving other gods than Jesus. This is a consequence of the Reformation and the printing press – the Bible was available for all the read and discuss, and people did, drawing their own conclusions.

However, people also needed to be instructed in the Gospel, and hence there was a case for having ministers, but these should be elected by the people of gathered churches, rather than imposed by the government and a national church. The Levellers therefore would have separated church and state, something which was not to the liking of many in the country at the time. Politics and religion were not that easily separated.

Of course, theological positions among the Leveller pamphleteers varied, and there is dispute as to how much of their program (such as it was) was theological. Lilburne of course was a well known religious radical, in trouble as a young man before the outbreak of the civil war over distributing banned pamphlets. Many Levellers seem to have taken the core of Christianity as the Golden Rule and it was the basis of their arguments for equality. Old Testament forms of government were overturned by the incarnation. The Old Testament was not, according to the Levellers, a prefiguring of later practices. If the church was a voluntary assembly, then Old Testament ideas of church and government could not apply.

After the 1647 Putney debates, the Levellers were suppressed. They had been too influential, particularly in the army, for the comfort of the government and an ill-timed and ill-planned mutiny led to their decline. They may well have felt betrayed by Cromwell (who spent some time defending Lilburne) and Parliament. The impact of the Levellers was rather small; they existed as a group, albeit loosely, for around six years. None of their proposals were established, and they were forgotten about for two to three centuries, until the Chartists revived some of their demands and, slowly, some of the demanded freedoms were established.

Their program was radical – equality under the law, inalienable natural rights, freedom of conscience, limitations on government, concepts of natural justice and voting rights for the poor. These had never existed, except in their imagined Anglo-Saxon past (before the Norman yoke was imposed). It is little wonder that their demands were too rich for the grandees of the time and, in many places, are still too much for governing classes to swallow.

The Emergent Multiverse Part I

I have been, slowly and painfully, reading

Wallace, D. (2012). The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford: OUP.

Slowly, because it is a complex subject, and painfully because while I am a fully paid up quantum mechanic, or at least I was, my skills are a bit rusty.

Still, Wallace’s claims so far (I have read Part One of the book) are reasonably clear, even to a rusty quantum physicist. The main claim is that the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is the only one that does not require additional bits to be added to the formalism of quantum mechanics. Hence, the argument goes, it is the best interpretation of quantum mechanics that we have.

Now, as an argument, this is valid, but it is a bit weak, in my view. Firstly, the interpretation produces nothing measurable, it seems (perhaps it will in due course). Secondly, just because we cannot think of a better interpretation of quantum mechanics than the emergent multiverse view does not mean it is right, it simply means that we cannot think of anything better. So much the worse for us.

A post or two ago I produced a couple of questions about the emergent multiverse view. So far, the book has addressed one of the. I wondered about the multiverse view and Occam’s razor. That is, we are strongly encouraged by Occam’s razor not to multiply entities unnecessarily. Wallace’s reply is that Occam’s razor is valid, but the key word is unnecessarily. That is, his view is that as the formalism of quantum mechanics requires it, creating additional universes does not break Occam’s razor. We multiply entities but not unnecessarily.

This may or may not be true, of course. Within the assumptions that Wallace makes it is reasonable, but I think that worries do remain and are not answered by this assertion. This relates to the over concern I raised, which is where the energy comes from to create another universe, exactly the same as this one, every time something happens to require that to happen in the quantum mechanical formalism. Creating anything, including universes, takes energy, and quantum mechanics, while it can, temporarily, play fast and loose with conservation laws, has to obey them in the final analysis. Quantum mechanics may be weird, but it does not break the conservation of energy.

Without getting too technical, Wallace seems to be arguing, so far as I have followed him, that each quantum transition does not cause a new universe to emerge. Hence, if I have an atom in its ground state and it collides with another atom, and it has a probability of gaining energy to promote its electron to one of two other states, two new universes are not created for the two possible outcomes. It is only when we have (to use the standard example) a cat in a box which may be in one of two states that there are two universes, one with a dead and one with an alive cat. So the number of universes that are created is not so big as it might be, but it is still uncountable.

I still think that there are further worries. Firstly, as an extension of the above, there is still the underlying question of what the quantum formalism means. The normal interpretation of the wave function is that it gives the probability of finding a particle in a given state. While Wallace raises concerns as to what probability means in this case (and, indeed, in wider cases) the wave function is not the particle. That is, the quantum formalism is not a full description of what is going on at the micro-scale. The quantum scale has little to do with our intuitions and understandings, which is based on our macro-scale experience. What we get out of the equations is not reality, or a description of it, but something we can work with.

It seems to me that there is a danger here of taking the relatively clean quantum mechanical description of the world available through the mathematics of Hilbert space and it associated entities, and thinking that this is the description of the world and all that is in it. That seems unlikely. Quantum mechanics is not, despite its success in the twentieth century, the be-all and end-all of physics, let alone science as a whole, or human experience. The status of scientific theories, especially in physics is disputed. Wallace seems to think that because we do not dispute our theories of dinosaurs and take their description of the world to be pretty well true, we should do the same with quantum mechanics, otherwise something is wrong with our conception of science.

However, we need not take the quantum mechanical description of sub-atomic particles to be true in the same sense that we take dinosaurs to be true. Both theories (no doubt; I am not an expert on dinosaurs) have problems in interpretation, but we are not constrained to take both theories as having the same sense of truth about them. Dinosaur theories are true because we can find bones and reconstruct what the creatures may have looked like. Quantum theories are true because we can make predictions about what will happen under certain circumstances which turn out to be valid within experimental error. These are not scientific theories on the same level as each other, it seems to me.

Theories in physics, therefore, are somewhat odder than those in other subjects in science. Mostly, this is because they rely on two aspects that Wallace seems to rather (so far at least) ignore. Firstly, of course, they are based on mathematics. This is not, of course, a problem (except for people who have to learn how to do the mathematics in the first place) but there are questions about what the mathematical entities thus created mean. Secondly, most physics, including quantum mechanics, is the outcome of a process of modeling some aspects of reality. Again, there arises, perhaps more pressingly, questions about what the models mean as representations of reality. We certainly do not have to take them literally. If we do, then perhaps we do land up with an emergent multiverse from quantum mechanics, but the move is not forced.

Common Treasury?

Politics and economics are inevitably intertwined. If people feel worse off, they will more often than not blame the government and vote (if voting is permitted and fair) to remove it. If, therefore, you change the political landscape, there is surely scope, if not desire, to change the economic one.

The execution of King Charles I in 1649 is a case in point. The monarchy, as it was conceived in, say, 1639, had been dismantled, not only literally but legally. Despite the efforts, some of which were honest, on both sides, the distrust and intransigence engendered by years of plotting and warfare led to the demolition of the political and social hierarchy as it had been known. The question was: what happens next?

Perhaps the most radical reform propositions put forward were those of the ‘Diggers’, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the ‘True Levellers’. The Levellers themselves were a more radical organisation, proposing to extend the franchise but maintain property rights. The Diggers objected that the poorest people would not benefit from this. The rich parcelled off land for themselves, while the poor had to beg or scratch a living from land rented at a high price or beg for bread for their families.

The Digger solution was to restructure landholding. The people should be restored to their land, each with sufficient land to grow their own food. The workers on the land of others for ‘small wages’ barely enough to keep themselves and their children should be able to work for themselves. All people, rich and poor alike, will act more righteously towards each other when Christ comes again and that event was expected soon.

The Diggers, of course, acted as they wrote. In 1649 twenty or so Diggers set themselves up on St George's Hill in Surrey and proceeded to build shacks and plant the land. The land was, they informed the authorities, crown land, but as the king was no more, and the crown claimed the land by right of the Norman Conquest, the had been returned to the original owners, the common people of England.

The local landowners, of course, regarded the Diggers as a threat. Eventually, so did the authorities. The Diggers were harassed, their plantings and home destroyed and many were arrested. Their threat to landowners was perceived as considerable, although their writings denounced the use of violence. Persuasion was the key: landowners would voluntarily give up their land to the poor when they saw the rightness of the cause of the poor. This is based, of course, on a particular reading of Scripture, particularly the texts relating to the Garden of Eden and also relating to the second coming of Christ.

The Church, of course, was intimately related to the landowning class, the clergy being mainly drawn from the strata of society and churches being major landowners themselves. In common with a lot of the other sects, the Diggers had no time for the established church or its clergy. Indeed, some of the early resistance to their commune was organised by a Parson. They accused the clergy of making God and Christ distant from the ordinary people, and so reliant for salvation on the clergy themselves. With the addition of heaven for obedience or Hell for the opposite, the power of the clergy over the minds of the ordinary people was, in the Digger view, established, and alienated people from God.

Winstanley, the key author for the Diggers, stressed the immanence of God, God could be known by all. Here, of course, we see the influence of the translated Bible. If all can read Scripture, then all can interpret Scripture. All can, themselves, know God without the intervention of clergy (or, indeed, anyone else). Here Digger arguments perhaps start to shade into Quaker theology: all carry the light of Christ in themselves, and none should oppress that.

While the Diggers were ejected, suppressed, and fined, the ideas they put forward did not totally expire. In 1999 some land rights activists reenacted the first Digger encampment and were similarly ejected. The Diggers are often described as England’s first communists, which is sort of true, but that description is often given by the more Marxist historians of the English Civil Wars and their aftermath, which ignores the very strong theological strands in Winstanley’s thinking.

There are resonances between the Diggers’ views and those of some contemporary theologians. This is not so true in the liberal Western tradition, where, after all, the welfare state, at least in theory, prevents people from being really, really, poor, but in other parts of the developing world, the liberation theology has inspired social action and political views aimed at overcoming oppression and promoting social justice. The reading of Scripture by the people themselves, the oppressed, can lead to a liberation of their views, including on the church and its collusion with the authorities, and then action to remedy the injustice.

Partly, then, the questions of the Diggers and the latter-day liberationists turn on the right and authority to interpret Scripture. If it is from the established authorities, the church in collusion with oppressive regimes, then ‘pie in the sky when you die’ is the religion that is promulgated and accepted by many. But the Bible is full of scenes of liberation and salvation. A key theme, I believe, in liberation theology is the Exodus, with the refrain ‘set my people free’. Similarly, the movement for cancelling debt draws its inspiration from the Biblical principle of ‘jubilee’. The Bible can be a potent political weapon.

The weapon of the Bible can cut both ways. The problem with the powerful is that they prefer to keep hold of their power and privileged. The Digger encampments were scattered and destroyed. Third World land rights activists are assaulted and murdered. We should not overstate the Diggers and their influence, of course – there was a period of at least two centuries when no one had heard of them – but the issues they raised are still live ones today.

The Multiple Universe

 Quantum mechanics is weird, counter-intuitive. The ‘true meaning’ of quantum mechanics is the subject of many late-night undergraduate discussions, preferably fuelled by a few beers, but, so far as I know, most physicists and practitioners of allied subjects such as mathematics and chemistry simply and pragmatically decide not to worry about the meaning, get on, and calculate stuff that is useful. What it means more widely than the result to apply to the case in hand is not really a problem.

Despite the pragmatic approach of most physicists, there are a few, theoretical physicists and philosophers of science, who continue to worry about what quantum mechanics means for our view of the universe. The problem which most concerns them is that quantum mechanical weirdness seems to potentially have macroscopic effects.

The principal example of these macroscopic effects is the widely known ‘Schrödinger's cat’ paradox. Suppose we have a cat in a box (no cats were harmed in the writing of this post). Also in the box is a radioactive source. These sources decay randomly, and, it being in the box, we do not know when it is going to decay, but when it does, the cat will die. From outside the box, we have no idea as to whether the cat is alive or dead. In quantum mechanics terms the wavefunction of the radioactive source and the cat is in a superposition of states:

|cat> = a|cat alive> + b|cat dead>

The odd-looking brackets are standard quantum mechanics notation denoting the quantum wave functions. The letters ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the probabilities of the cat being either alive or dead. In standard quantum mechanics, these are complex numbers; the modulus squared of the complex number giving the probability of that state.

The only way to establish the health of the cat is to open the box and look. At this point the wave function |cat> collapses, or at least the superposition collapses, and the observer sees either |cat alive> or |cat dead>. The superposition of states is not observed. The question arises of how, exactly, this works. What is going on to collapse the superposition of the wavefunction?

This leads us to at least one conceptual problem. We can view the collapse as a purely instrumental affair, and ignore the human questions of what is going on. The important thing is the answer and, to boot, that it is the right answer. While this works for quantum mechanical problems, it leaves the understanding of the universe behind. Quantum mechanics does not describe the universe as it is, but is a tool to describe the results of experiments.

Conceptually, instrumentalism means that all we are interested in is the observational output of the theory of quantum mechanics. How such results are achieved is unimportant. But quantum mechanics is very successful at predicting and explaining the unexpected, such as superconductivity. The idea that results such as this are simply the consequences of some sort of formalism unconnected with reality is uncomfortable, to say the least.

There are, of course, other options. Another approach suggests that there are hidden variables that represent the state of the system but are unknown until we choose to measure it. However, from a physics point of view, the hidden variables simply add complexity to the theory of quantum mechanics without adding any physics. Making, possibly, the theory intelligible is not sufficient pay-off to make these theories popular.

Another approach is the quantum many-worlds theory. Here, the idea is that that there are two parallel, but non-interacting worlds created at the point of a quantum fluctuation. The argument is something like this:

The cat is either alive or dead, but we do not know which. When I make an observation, I go from being ignorant of the fate of the cat to knowing it. I do not see an indefinite cat, but a cat in a given state. But then if you ask me ‘Is the cat alive or dead?’ you are in a state of ignorance until I tell you. And so on. The point here is that the wavefunction of the cat, the observer, and observers of the observer are not separable. Macroscopic forces act of the cat, me, you, and everything else. Before I look the whole universe is in two states, one with a live cat, one with a dead one.

Upon looking the wavefunction collapses into one or the other case. But the argument of the many-worlds approach is that collapse does not happen. The universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead cat. There is no collapse but simply we find ourselves in a world with one outcome or another. We might have found ourselves in a world with another outcome.

Given that quantum interactions occur many times a second in the universe, that universe is splitting into incredible numbers of universes all the time. This is a very strange idea (much exploited by science fiction writers) but it can be claimed, with some justification, that it is a natural result of the quantum mechanics theory.

I do have my doubts, however. Quantum mechanics is well known for breaking the conservation of energy over short time periods, but the energy required to create many universes, each a copy of the current one seems to be prohibitive. I have never seen an argument to suggest that this can be achieved within our understanding of physics as it is. Admittedly I have not yet looked very far, so it might exist.

My second objection is a bit more philosophical. The creation of many, many, universes which do not interact ever again seems to me to be multiplying objects to no avail. This seems to be a clear break of Occam’s razor. If we can never tell if the universe has just bifurcated, why bother having it so. This also suggests that the many-worlds interpretation is heading away from being science – we can never test the idea because, by definition, ‘our’ universe and its parallel never interact past creation.

That is not to say that such ideas are in principle untestable or pointless. I may simply be expressing my ignorance and I certainly need to read a bit more about them. But quantum mechanics and its implications are unsettling enough for most people. Multiplying universes at such speed seems to be a bit beyond the pale.

Transgender Disciple

Bernard Lonergan was clear that we learn things when we set out to learn things, in a particular process. This starts with having an experience and then reflecting upon it. Next, we may have an insight into it, into what the experience was (or was about). Thirdly, we might broaden that insight into a concept, such that we suspect that all such insights will be of a certain form.

Notice that at this point we have not yet decided upon anything. Lonergan says that insights are ‘a dime a dozen’, and most of them get discarded either at the concept forming stage or in the next one, where we form a judgment. Judgment has both a good and a bad name, of course. No one blames their faulty judgment for something going wrong. Often we blame our poor memory or lack of attention, but not our judgment. On the other hand, to judge someone else is generally frowned upon. Each to their own, the cry is.

Fortunately, Lonergan means neither of these sorts of judgment. The question which we pose to ourselves by our tentative notion of a concept derived from an insight is ‘is it so?’ To answer this we use the resources we already have to hand. The other insights we have collected and formed into a manifold of concepts we have accepted play a large part. Our memory is part of this and adds a bit more, of similar or comparable things that we already know about. Logic, expectation, experience of how the world works all play a part. And we form a judgement: it is so, or it is not so, or we do not have sufficient information to decide.

Once the judgment has been formed we have an ethical question to answer: what do we do about it? In many cases, the answer is ‘not much’, because most of the insight – concept – judgment complexes we form do not require a great deal of action. If I form the idea of a biscuit in the cupboard, and go and experience the fact that no biscuit is there, I may judge the fact of my biscuit-less-ness to be the case, but it does not take a great deal of ethical thought to decide whether to go and buy another packet or not. Similarly, discovering that 42 is the square root of 1764 hardly needs an ethical decision.

I have been reading Heaven Come Down by Chrissis Chevasutt (2021, DLT), which is subtitled The Story of a Transgender Disciple. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I suspect that part of Chrissie’s problems were rooted in a lack of language to express the feelings of gender dissonance which he felt as a boy and young man. Various difficult circumstances might have compounded the feels and led to a track of self-destructive behaviour, which led him to being down, out and nearly dead in Delhi.

Returning to England he became a follower of Jesus but struggled with church. Partly, this seems to have been to do with the general fractionating tendencies of the conservative Evangelical side of the broader church. On several occasions, Chrissie / Paul and his family (for he married and had two daughters) were casualties of churches splitting, rather than anything to do with his gender identity.

However, there were some occasions when admitting his issues with gender identity led to trouble. In particular, church leaders and other Christians could not cope. One friend listened, said all the right things, and then vanished forever. Another recommended a counselling service which turned out to be conversion therapy. On a couple of occasions, having had to courage to admit gender identity issues, he had Deuteronomy 22:5 quoted at him:

If any man wears a woman’s clothes, or any woman wears a man’s clothes, they are detestable to God.

This is, of course, an open and shut case to the proof-texters in the church. He wants to wear women’s clothes, therefore he is detestable to the Lord. You cannot be a disciple and do that; you cannot follow Jesus and be transgender.

There are a number of issues at stake here, of course, and not all of them can be explored in the space left. But let us return to Lonergan. Firstly, there is the problem of getting the order right. Someone has just disclosed that they struggle with gender identity. You have just had an experience. Is your or my first move to reach for a Bible and club them over the head with a verse from the Old Testament? That seems to be reaching for judgment before really having listened to their experience and forming an insight into the predicament, let alone forming a concept of the notion and subjecting it to reason.

Somewhere I remember reading a quote, which went along the lines of if you declare something to be impossible, the next day you are most likely to run across some damn fool doing it, who did not know it was impossible. If we think that it is impossible to be both transgender and a follower of Jesus, then we have to tackle the fact that there are people in the world who are both. We cannot just dismiss them as being either not one or not the other.

The initial response from responsible Christians must surely be to listen. We need to hear the experience of people who are transgender. Before we rush into judgment, make decisions about whether they can be disciples or not, we need to hear the experiences, not dismiss them or cosh them with the Old Testament. Not asking is not an option either. Chrissie / Paul kept quiet for years and it nearly destroyed him/her. If we take the view that all are made in the image of God, then we have to accept that there are people who are not like us, but who are just as much followers of Jesus. If we cannot or will not, then we perhaps are failing in our discipleship.

It is much more Important than that..

The title refers to a football manager, who is quoted as saying about the game that ‘it is not just a matter of life or death, it is…’ Well, perhaps football is not quite that important, and certainly, it does seem that the sport is less important these days than the money, which is a pity. But that is not what I want to talk about.

In today’s liberal, secularised democratic western world, religion is is viewed pretty well as a bolt-on option. I can be ‘religious’ so long as I do not disturb anyone else. I can ‘do good’ – run food banks, feed the poor, offer debt counseling, and so on, as long as I do not really proclaim that I do it for any particular reason. Feeding the poor is one thing; asking why they are poor is entirely another and not permitted by the niceties of society.

In previous eras, the distinction between politics and religion was not anywhere near as clear-cut. In the age of the English Civil Wars, of course, religion was politics and vice versa. There is a school of thought that the wars were, in part, caused by Charles I’s religious policies, and this theory hold at least some water. The precise form of religion the country opted for was contested and thought worth fighting and dying for. I read a comment somewhere that the English parts, at least, of the English Civil War were a civil war between different visions of Protestantism. Again, this holds some water; perhaps the visions could be broadly characterised as ‘Arminian’ and ‘Calvinist’. I doubt, however, if those categories really capture either the issues at stake or the outcomes.

What is not in doubt however is the seriousness with which the issues were debated and, literally, fought over. A godly society was the aim, whether that was the Laudian reverence and formality in approaching God and worship, or in the more Puritan preaching of the word. Of course, there were plenty of other currents around. Firstly, and perhaps equally contested, was the presence of Roman Catholics in England, along with threats from the Irish Catholics (which were perceived as threats to England, Protestantism, and the godly cause, even though they were not really so). Secondly, within the more extreme end of Protestantism, there were currents that were more radical, leading to the Quakers, the re-emergence of the Baptists, and the whole gamut of other sects and ideas, such as Diggers, Levellers and Ranters.

Part of the basis behind these emerging camps was the availability of the Bible in English. This, along perhaps with Foxes Book of Martyrs, formed much of the background to a lot of the ferment. Anyone could, and many did, read the Bible and, in the intellectual and social ferment of the times, they come to their own conclusions. Much of the reading was of the Old Testament, of course, and hence there were assorted prophetic acts, such as riding on a donkey in Bristol or pronouncing a curse on the city of Litchfield (why Litchfield was singled out I have no idea).

The point is that in these disputes knowledge of the Biblical text was assumed. In our debates today, religious illiteracy has to be assumed. Even among churchgoers, the distinction between the Old and New Testaments can be vague, and the idea that the Bible contains different sorts of literature is even less present. Even among those who do know their Bibles, there can be as little sensitivity to the historical context of the texts as some of the more radical (and indeed, less radical) Seventeenth-Century theologians and pamphleteers showed. Historical criticism did not start until at least the Eighteenth Century, so it would be a little unfair to expect George Fox of John Lilburne to be able to discuss the nuances of the representation of the Roman Empire in Acts.

It is then impossible to understand the English Civil Wars without some understanding of the role religion played in them. Of course, it was not the only factor. Various causes of the wars have been pointed to: the rise of the gentry, the fall of the gentry, the financial problems of the crown, the spread of warfare (of a partially confessional form) on the Continent, the character of the king and so on. But religion, the arguments within Reformed Christianity, was a key factor.

What is true of the currents of Seventeenth-Century Britain is also true of much of history, of course. An awful lot of history makes little sense to a fully secular, atheistic mind. The way people behaved, their map of the world, and how to operate in it, was heavily influenced by religion, specifically Christianity, until the Twentieth Century. It is thus more or less impossible to understand anything more than just the outlines of history, a bunch of facts, a succession of events. The way people thought about things, such as the Divine Right of Kings or which sports were permissible to play on a Sunday is bound up in the Christian worldview of the society and the individuals which constitute it.

A failure to understand the religious point of view, therefore, points to an impoverished picture of the past. Of course, not everyone in the past was a religious fanatic of the nature of Lilburne (and even Freeborn John eventually became a Quaker), but most people had an idea of their faith (there were few other options, after all) and, if they could read, read the Bible and if they could not (I am not sure of literacy levels) would certainly have heard it read. Further, in a less literate society, what was read to them (or spoken in sermons) would have probably stuck more than it does today.

Is this a cry of despair as to the religious illiteracy of our day? I hope not, but it is an argument that knowledge of the Bible and of the broader spectrum of theological debate and the issues at stake are an important part of our understanding of the past. If we do not have that, then we will never grasp why cathedrals were built, for example, of why British people fought and killed each other three hundred and fifty years ago.