Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
The world is a temple, not a machine. This might all sound esoteric, perhaps only helpful when reading the Bible or other works of the past to better understand how they understood the world around them. I contend and continue to that it really matters, and as we start to grasp it everything begins to change.

We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with.
I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s massive and thoughtful, A Secular Age. One of the first distinctives he pulls out when comparing 1500 to the year 2000 is the way we think about time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty.’
Once upon a time… people spoke like that, for a start. Taylor demonstrates that people thought of time as knotty and a bearer of meaning. The word ‘secular’ comes from the Latin saeculum which means an ‘age’ or ‘century.’ It’s a term, originally, about time.
It was used to describe those who weren’t ‘religious.’ Though probably not in the way you think, saeculum was used to describe priests who weren’t monks, because they lived out in the world in ordinary time, rather than having turned away to live nearer eternity. Secular time is roughly what we think all time is. There was also a higher time, such a medieval thinker could think two things that sound whackadoodle to us.
Firstly, that Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac  and the Crucifixion are closer to each other in time than they are centuries apart—in God’s time these two events happen at the same time as they are drawn into eternity.
Secondly, that Good Friday 2022 is closer to the Crucifixion than to the day you’re reading this post. (I’m following Taylor’s argument on 54-61 in these paragraphs.) Neither of these seems obvious to us, we don’t think of the Universe like that at all, and why that’s the case is what Taylor unpacks over the next thousand or so pages.
The medieval conception doesn’t have time as a container, indifferent to what fills it, but instead elevated (and perhaps also demoted) by its content. I don’t necessarily want to argue for the metaphysic that underpinned this different way of viewing the world, but I think we can pin some of the symptoms of our modern malaise on these features.
Two themes in my writing have been the importance of rest and our inability to actually rest. I named the blog after this problem, nuakh is the Hebrew word for rest. One of the reasons that we struggle with rest, thinking it means the same thing as relaxation and that to slouch on a sofa watching TV could have anything at all to do with resting, is that our sense of time has slipped.
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According to the Reformed understanding, all twelve articles are under the heading “gospel.” This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a narrow sense of the gospel (as sketched above), but it does mean that, when we answer the question of what must be believed, we do not stop at the narrow sense of gospel. We include in it the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine of God, a doctrine of creation and providence, of sin, of Christ, of salvation, of the church, sacraments, and last things.
Our doctrine of God is intimately connected to our understanding of man, salvation, church, and worship.
Modern evangelical answers to this question have focused on Christ to the exclusion of these other doctrines, but in Reformed theology they’re all connected. Our doctrine of God is intimately connected to our understanding of man, salvation, church, and worship. The Reformed faith, however, is biblical and catholic, i.e., we believe what the Scriptures teach about God, man, Christ, salvation, etc., as understood by the church in all times and places.
In contrast, for evangelicals, so long as one affirms a personal relationship with the risen Christ, everything else is negotiable. It is not even always certain what an evangelical means by “Christ.” Is she referring to the Christ of Scripture and history, confessed in the Creed, or to the Christ of subjective, mystical experience?
The Reformed answer to the question, “what must a Christian believe?” is not minimalist, but neither is it maximalist. We don’t ask Christians to believe everything possible. We ask them to believe all that is necessary. There are limits to what may be set as a condition of salvation. There is a hierarchy of beliefs. They aren’t all equally ultimate or necessary. There are fundamentalist groups that require adherents to believe that the King James Version of the English Bible is the only acceptable translation, but that’s not a necessary belief. The King James Version is a wonderful piece of work, but it’s just one translation among many.
The Geneva Bible pre-existed the KJV, the Tyndale translation pre-existed the Geneva Bible, and we’ve had many fine translations since 1611. Others would set the length of creation days as a necessary belief. One is certainly entitled to one’s opinion about the meaning of the “day” in Genesis 1 and 2, but historically the emphasis has been on the reality of the creation days and upon the truth that we are created and not the Creator.
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The irony is that Prince Harry was not speaking to the UN as someone who was elected by the people, nor as someone who had made his own way in life. Rather he was there because of the greatest white privilege of all – being brought up in the Royal Family! He can hardly speak as the democratic representative of the people.

When King Saul prophesied at Naioth at Ramah, the people were so surprised that it became a proverbial saying: “Is Saul also among the prophets?”
I thought of this when listening to Prince Harry’s speech to the UN last week. He spoke movingly in his sermon – for sermon it was – of his mother and of Nelson Mandela. But then he moved into specific political and moral issues where he delivered the ‘gospel’ according to progressive doctrine. His three points were climate change, disinformation and abortion.
A prophet declares the word of the Lord, so let’s see how prophetic Harry was. On climate change, as with the other list of disasters he mentioned, he spoke of how he understood and knew people’s pain. He was certainly right to point out that it is the poor who bear the brunt, not only of climate change, but also the measures taken by the wealthy to combat it.
Think for example of the people of Sri Lanka, whose super wealthy president decided to enamour himself to his WEF admirers by banning fertilisers. As a result, crops failed, people went hungry, riots ensued, and he was forced to flee the country.
Prince Harry never has to worry about heating or cooling his Californian mansion, or how much trips home to the the UK to see his family will cost. Or indeed, how many holidays he and Meghan can have. His ability to empathise with those who cannot afford heating bills or expensive food is somewhat limited.
Harry on Abortion
Given he was standing on the same ‘green’ ground as his father, Harry obviously felt safe to weigh in with his considered opinion and calculated empathy. But it was when he turned to the politics of his new home country that he displayed a lack of political awareness and of moral probity.Comparing the war in Ukraine with the ruling of the US Supreme Court on abortion, he pronounced that this was “a global assault on democracy and freedom”, and an erosion of constitutional rights.
This is the same Prince Harry who pronounced that the constitutional right to freedom of speech was “bonkers”. Perhaps he has discovered a newfound respect for the US constitution? If so, he should read it before making pronouncements on the world stage.
The US constitution does not mention abortion and there is no constitutional right within it.
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