Nathan Hobby’s blog

I’ve revamped my other blog, http://perthanabaptists.wordpress.com . It’s now called ‘An Anabaptist in Perth’. I’ve made a few posts in the last week, given it a new template, pruned the categories and updated the blogroll.

For the forseeable future, I think I’m going to be posting to it more than to this one. I’ve been living in this dreamworld where I read too many novels (not even writing that much) and not thinking enough about all the questions of faith which I need to explore. So I’m going to be reading less fiction in 2008, hopefully writing more, and spending more time on theology and faith. Working in my new job as librarian at the Baptist Theological College will help with this shift.

The Perth Anabaptists site started out as the blog for Perth Anabaptist Fellowship, the house church which was such a big part of my life but disbanded in April 2006. I imagined originally that lots of people would contribute to it, that it’d be a multi-voiced blog reflecting our theological ideas about everyone having a say. That didn’t work out. Rather than start again, I kept on contributing to it occasionally. Now it’s time has come properly.

Letters reveal Mother Teresa’s despair - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.

“Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,” she wrote to the Reverend Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

…”I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God - tender, personal love,” she wrote to one adviser. “If you were (there), you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy’.”

Reading this makes me feel both encouraged and discourged. Encouraged that she was just like me. And discouraged that she was just like me. (I should qualify ‘just like me’. I am not devoting my life to poor people in Calcutta. But ‘like me’ in suffering periods of doubt.)

Do we want our saints, our heroes, to be so sure of their faith that it makes us think they - and, by extension, we - must be right? Or do we want them to be vulnerable like us? Struggling along?

I doubted a lot when I was seventeen, eighteen. I thought it would never end. It did. For seven years after that, I experienced God in a way that made me feel strong in my faith. I had found something amazing, and I had no problem believing it. And then, in the last year, the doubts have come back. And sometimes I think they will never end. But then - in small ways - over the last week I’ve been experiencing God in fresh ways.

The story of William Wilberforce’s parlimentary fight against slavery in Britain and his marriage to Emily.  

I was inspired by the film. I didn’t care how much director Michael Apted was manipulating me, I was barracking for William Wilberforce, I was angry at the capitalist forces which made slavery happen in the first place. I was proud that this man was a Christian.

 I wanted to make a difference like he made a difference. Looking back from where we are, slavery seemed clear as such an abhorrence, the greatest evil that needed fighting. But that moral clarity wouldn’t have existed in the 1790s, not for most people. And we can’t have that ‘moral clarity’ about our own times. It takes someone with prophetic imagination, a man or woman who can see the evils that have been naturalised.

And so what is the equivalent today that we should be fighting for? I’m not sure; I don’t have enough of a prophetic imagination. There’s too much grey in any issue I can think of. It’s clearer for my wife, and I can see where she’s coming from - the virtual slavery of the two-thirds world, making stuff for the first world for a pittance.

Add to this all the related evils of the System: global warming, war, greed.

I read the Last Battle - C.S. Lewis’s final Narnia book – twice, but I never noticed the strong suggestion that the humans who have come to Narnia have been killed in a train crash. I found out this was the case after reading it as a casual aside in a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 

It seems that all the Narnia ‘children’ – barring Susan, who’s rejected Aslan’s ways – are on the same train, having met up. Conveniently, this means that they all die at the same time and appear in Narnia simultaneously, where they are in high demand for the last battle. 

If Narnia is the afterlife, then the idea is this: we die because we’re needed in the afterlife.  This is a very comforting idea. My Granny died soon after Ron Pop because he was lonely in the afterlife and wanted her there as well. Perhaps some heavenly band needed Ian Pop to play drums, and that’s why he died of lung cancer in his early seventies. But I don’t know what God wanted with Mark Sandman, lead singer of Morphine, so young nor my favourite theologian, John Howard Yoder, who should have been given another twenty years to amaze the world. And then why such high demand for people in the afterlife during wars and epidemics? 

 Well, I might respond, these people were dying anyway, and it just so happens that God manages to make good the tragedy of their death by creating a reason for it – invisibly to us who are left behind.  

Okay, I could almost live with that, but I’ve got a more serious and sustained objection. I don’t believe afterlife is lived in an invisible realm running parallel to this one like Narnia. I believe that the afterlife is resurrection, that it takes place on an Earth made right. Whatever existence we might have immediately after death, it is but a shadow, a waiting for the time of our resurrection with incorruptible bodies on a new Earth.  

C.S. Lewis, I’m sure, never meant me to read his eschatology too literally. But I do think that a lot of Christians see ‘heaven’ as a Narnia-like realm in its basic disconnection from Earth.

People talk so much about life being a journey that it’s a standard way to talk and think about our lives.

But is life like a journey?

Journeys have a destination. Journeys are about getting from one place to another. Sure, they’re more than that; we should enjoy the scenery as we go. But in the end, if there isn’t somewhere we are headed, then we don’t set out on a journey.

Life doesn’t have a simple destination like that - unless it’s death. And death isn’t a culmination, a completion of life so far.

Unless you’re Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

Or maybe even in the Christian story - if death in Christian thought is not a destination as such, then it is at least the transition point to the Christian destination. Maybe it is the expectation of eternal reward or punishment at the end of life that has pushed this metaphor of life as a journey.

And that’s a very individualistic Christianity - it doesn’t factor in Christian hope for the renewal of the Earth, for the establishment of God’s reign on Earth.