Explainer
Creed
Easter
5 min read

Faith, chaos and carnage

Remembered rituals comforted many who mourn. As Easter comes around again, Graham Tomlin examines the underlying hope found when all is carnage and chaos.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A photographer, standing next to a tripod, atop a pile of rubble is a destroyed factory.
Chaos.
Peter Herrmann on Unsplash.

One afternoon in that week after the Queen died back in September, I spent a short while watching the live video footage from Westminster Hall of people filing past the Queen’s coffin as it lay in state. Ordinary members of the public, after their nine hour wait in the queue, stopped for their precious few seconds in front of the coffin before being ushered on to allow others to have their moment. It was clear that many of them were not quite sure what to do. Some just stood silently, but most felt they needed to do something. Some bowed or curtsied, others seemed to utter a quiet prayer, others crossed themselves in a slightly awkward fashion as if it was something they weren't really used to doing.  

It was clear that people needed some kind of gesture of respect, and it was significant how many turned to some kind of religious action to do that, whether bowing a head, signing the cross or muttering a few words of prayer. 

Throughout that week, at every turn, from the ceremony to recognise the new king, to the lying in state, to the funeral itself, everything seemed to happen in a context of Christian prayer. They were all deeply religious ceremonies and came in for surprising little resistance, despite our increasingly secular frame of mind as a nation. It was as if at that moment, in that difficult week, it felt as if the Christian faith held the nation’s grief for a short while. 

Having taken many funerals in my time, I recognise the same dynamic in more ordinary circumstances. Many people who maybe have a dim recollection of Christian faith from their background find the rituals and ceremonies of the church - a hymn vaguely remembered from school, a vicar saying prayers, the rich and hopeful words of resurrection in the presence of death - a valuable handrail to hold onto at a time of deep instability and profound change.  

It might seem that this outbreak of religious observance at the death of the monarch was just a temporary thing before life returned to normal, but perhaps it pointed to something much more significant.  

It always feels a little odd with the beginnings of spring, daffodils and sprouting flowers in the garden, but Good Friday is the bleakest moment of the Christian year. It is the moment when we remember how, for Christians at least, the most complete human being who ever walked the planet, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed in a huge miscarriage of justice. If this really was the day we killed God, it was the darkest moment in human history. 

And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found.

Good Friday is followed by Holy Saturday, the day when Jesus’ body lay still and decaying in a cold grave, and everything seemed to be at an end. Of course, we know that Resurrection and the joy of it was just around the corner, but they didn’t know that on the first Good Friday, and you have to go through Good Friday and even sit with the devastation of it all through Holy Saturday before you get to the joy. And maybe that is part of the genius of Christianity – its ability to hold people in moments of grief and pain, when there aren’t easy answers to be found. 

Nick Cave’s recent book, co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, has as its title, not the traditional trio of Faith, Hope and Love, but Faith, Hope and Carnage. The book explores Cave’s re-discovery of faith in part through the tragic death of his 15-year old son Arthur, and the capacity of faith to hold and sustain him in the middle of carnage, despair and tragedy. As Rowan Williams put it in his recent interview with Nick Cave: “The book reveals the way in which faith, without ever giving a plain, comforting answer, offers resources to look at what is terrible without despair or evasion.” 

The Christian understanding of evil is not that is it good dressed up in dowdy clothing. It does not tell us to believe that somehow premature death, cancer, or childhood leukaemia are somehow good for us. It says that they have no point because that is the nature of evil – that it is pointless. It has no meaning because it is the absence of meaning. It has no purpose because it is the absence of purpose.  

That is why Christians gladly say they have no neat answer to the problem of evil. Because evil is the absence of answers. It is nonsense because it makes no sense. Instead, we believe, not because we have found an answer to the problem of suffering, but despite that fact that we haven’t. We believe because we have heard a more compelling story that does make sense of everything else - the unlikely and sometimes scarcely believable hope of Resurrection, which makes sense of so much else – even the mysterious rebirth of nature that emerges from the seeming death of winter into new life in the Spring. Only unlike pagans, Christians see the natural rhythms of the world as an echo of the central story of the Resurrection of Jesus, rather than the other way round. 

Christians see in the events of the first Easter the turning point of history. That when we tried to kill God on the first Good Friday, he did not stay dead, but rose again, bringing with him the promise that those who face death or tragedy hand in hand with Christ, will somehow come through the carnage and the chaos with a life and a future.  

When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you.

Of course, when you’re in the middle of pain, it’s hard to see that. When you’re in agony you don’t need an explanation, you just need someone to hold you. And that’s exactly what Christianity offers – someone to hold you. Someone who has been through the worst that life and history can throw at him and knows the worst that can happen. It offers the presence of God in the Jesus who is no stranger to pain – as it says over and over again in the Bible “I will never leave you or forsake you.” It is, as Sian Brookes explains in her excellent review of the film Allelujah! on Seen & Unseen, what we will all need at the end of our lives - someone to be with us.  

Christian faith still holds out the hope of Resurrection. Easter Sunday does come around after Good Friday. But even when you’re stuck on Saturday, waiting for a Sunday that never seems to come, when Resurrection is hard to believe in, when all around you is carnage and chaos, you are invited to hold tightly and determinedly to that mysterious presence that stands with you in the darkness, whether you feel it or you don’t, while you wait for the light to dawn. 

Explainer
Aliens
Christmas culture
Creed
5 min read

Star of wonder and beyond

From the Christmas star, humankind has been fascinated by astronomical possibilities.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A star nebula of gas clouds and stars.
Tarantula Nebula, by the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. After hair-raising maneuvers to unfurl its tennis-court-sized mirrors, it has been sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos since July of last year.   

Christmas was a good day for the launch, given its astronomical connections. ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven’, the angels sang to the shepherds, ‘and peace to his people on Earth.’ Meanwhile, the wise men were above all diligent observers of the heavens. ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’, they ask, ‘For we observed his start at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’  

Quite what that ‘star’ might mean there is open to debate. Comets have been popular with artists. Giotto painted one, for instance, in his Adoration of the Magi in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. It is almost certainly Halley’s Comet, which had appeared just a few years before, in October 1301. But why would anything in the heavens be interpreted as a birth in Judea? It would probably involve something in a constellation associated with the nation of the Hebrews. Pisces seems to be favoured, for some reason. A nova of some kind is one possibility: what would look like a temporary new star because, in fact, a previously invisible star was undergoing a spectacular death. Chinese records suggest a nova in 5 BC, which fits the likely date for for Christ’s birth of 7–2 BC. 

The problem with both comets and novae is that they were more likely seen as harbingers of doom than good news. The better candidate for suggesting something joyful is a planetary conjunction, and there would have been a rather spectacular conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars at the right time. None of that, admittedly, explains what it means for the star then to have led the wise men. Coming up against that challenge, we might think that looking into the astronomical detail is the wrong way to approach the story. Nonetheless, Matthew had something in mind when he wrote about a start in his gospel, and it’s worthwhile to ask what that might have been. 

It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours. 

More recently, the Christmas story has intersected with astronomy in questions about how to think about Christian theology now that we are aware quite how big the universe is, especially if it may contain a great deal of other life. We don’t know whether that’s true, of course, but given we now know that planets common around stars, and there are billions of billions of stars in the universe, the probabilities seem to tilt towards other life, at least as I see it. 

Suggestions surfaces from time to time that the world’s religions have arrived late to the party, when it comes to thinking about life beyond Earth. The astronomer and broadcaster Carl Sagan made that claim, for instance, in his best-selling book Pale Blue Dot. In fact, the earliest discussions of life beyond Earth I know about from Christian writers come from the mid-fifteenth century (and they stretch even further back in Judaism and Islam, to give two other examples). Christian writers have written on the subject ever since. If few gave us more than a paragraph here or a page there, that’s usually because the prospect of other life did not worry them enough to warrant more. They noted the prospect cheerfully, and moved on.   

Until the twentieth century, the prospect of parallel Nativities on other planets was rarely in view. In a sense, it didn’t need to be. It’s a consistent Christian position to say that God joined his life to all creation in joining it to one species of rational animal on Earth, just as God joined his life to all humanity in being born in a stable, in a wayside town, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.  

One erudite early exploration of multiple Incarnations comes in a poem from the 1920s by the Roman Catholic poet Alice Meynell, entitled ‘Christ in the Universe’. More recently, Meynell’s topic has become perhaps the central theme in thinking theologically about life beyond Earth. My own book (Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, 2023) looks at the prospect of life beyond Earth from the perspective of all of central topics in Christian doctrine (creation, sin, redemption, revelation, the Trinity, and so on), but the largest section is on Christmas and possible parallels. I am sympathetic to the idea that God would also unite himself to another natures, alongside the human nature he took up in Christ: not because I think that would be necessary, but because it might be fitting. It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours. 

Hiding in plain sight in the Nativity stories is another key to Christian thinking about life beyond, namely the angels. It’s not that I think that angels are aliens, or that alien life is angelic. In fact, being a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas, I’m inclined to view angels as entirely immaterial, and so very much not examples of biological life. But angels are useful for thinking about other biological life beyond Earth nonetheless, because of what they mean for the Christian imagination. The angels show that there’s always been space in that imagination for rational creatures other than human beings. They show that Christianity has never imagined that we’re the sole object of God’s love, or even the most glorious of species.  

The Christmas story has its cosmic elements: the star, glory in the highest heavens, and the angels, reminding us that wonderful though humanity is, it has no monopoly on rational life. My hunch, as much as my hunch matters, is that if there is other life then they too may see God face-to-face in their own Incarnation. Even if we find evidence of life beyond Earth, however, it’s not going give us much detail. The balance of gases in the atmosphere of a planet around another star might indicate life, but not much else about it. The prospects for interplanetary comparative religion are far off indeed. Alice Meynell had the right idea, when she recognised that one of the joys of the life of the world to come will be learning the stories of God’s dealings elsewhere: 

  

But in the eternities, 

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear 

A million alien Gospels, in what guise 

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear. 

  

O, be prepared, my soul! 

To read the inconceivable, to scan 

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll 

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man. 

 Alice Meynell