David's Pen

We know that God is just, we know too that in God’s Kingdom, mercy triumphs over judgment, that His grace means that we don’t receive what justice alone might demand. Yet there seems to be something ingrained that leads us to presume that punishment is part of God’s plan. When someone is caught in criminal activity, they receive a punishment that society has deemed appropriate. Once the culprit has served their time or paid the fine, we often speak of the ‘slate being wiped clean’ – after all, they have paid their debt to society. It becomes a transaction: I did x, society inflicted y, we are all square. Of course, nothing has changed as a result of the transaction. The punishment might well make the perpetrator more reluctant to be caught, but that might as easily result in more circumspect crime than in reformed behaviour. In truth, there is very little evidence that even the most disproportionate of punishments has much impact on the level of crime. (Perhaps as a perceptio...

In this blog, I'm responding to the recent thesis that young people, who might otherwise want to engage with church, are put off because they don’t know which bits of the Bible to interpret literally and which metaphorically. In particular, they are taught to dismiss a 6 day creation by the science that they are taught and then wonder which bits of the Bible might also be untrustworthy. The argument then goes that we need to insist on a literal interpretation of all scripture to guard against this reason why young people are leaving the Church.  A simple observation that most children continue to trust their parents after the devastating revelation that Santa isn’t real might be sufficient rebuttal for many, but for those who want a more detailed response, read on: In my experience, the perceived irrelevance of the Church isn’t to do with a lack of literal Biblical interpretation, but to the implacable unwillingness to engage with anything that even hints at something oth...