The World's Most Unlikely Radical, or Those Pesky Nicolaitans 27 ½

“But don't you find

it interesting how, most of the time,

your self-interpreting seems to coincide

with what's deep inside

your heart's desires?

Seems rather convenient, doesn't it?”

Beautiful Eulogy feat. Propaganda, ‘Symbols and Signs’, Instruments of Mercy (2013)

Unlikely, is the idea here, because this probably isn't somewhere you'd expect to find a kids' playpark. But I do love kids' playparks in unexpected locations.

Those of you who've been following my blog for some time (hi, loyal readers! Love you lots) may recall that about six months ago, I trotted out a little series in which I espoused some fairly left-field thinking on the matter of church governance. I made some remark at the time to the effect that it would have been entirely feasible to continue publishing posts dealing with various aspects of the same subject for at least the rest of the calendar year, but, for the sake of my sanity and yours, I determined to drag myself away from the topic after a mere five instalments, and spent the following few months’ worth of posts rambling about other matters. As you may already have guessed, however, I thought the present moment an appropriate one to briefly revisit the question of Those Pesky Nicolaitans.

Here's the TL:DR as to my view: I think that Jesus hates ecclesiastical hierarchies. I think that the bestowal of a special leadership status on any individual within a Christian community violates the principle that the body of Christ only has one Head, and the rest of us are all brothers and equals. I think that no exercise of any spiritual gifting entails any assumption of spiritual authority over other believers, and to suppose that it does represents a misuse of the gifting. I think that all this is plainly laid out in scripture, as is the warning that the Church at large is going to get it wrong an awful lot. I think that it’s the responsibility of every one of us as believers to be increasing one another in holiness through the exercise of our giftings - and I think that that's humungously exciting.

This represents, as I say, some fairly left-field thinking, at least in most of my usual social circles, and so the past six months of bloggerly silence on the issue have not in any way corresponded to six months of inertia regarding it in the non-online portions of my life. I have tried to explain why I've not been showing up on Sundays for the past little while to a good number of siblings in Christ, and there's been pushback. I was expecting there would be, and indeed I'm glad there has been. Had none of my Christian friends who subscribe to more conventional views on the matter questioned my decisions or tried to persuade me back round to something approaching their own way of thinking, I'd have feared that they didn't actually care for me and my walk with Jesus as much as I'd supposed they did. Even as I beg people not to worry about me, I have to admit that in their shoes, I'd probably be worried about me too. And they've made some good arguments as to why they should be. I've debated, I've considered, I've gone back to the scriptures and thoroughly frustrated myself over them, I've prayed from my heart and remained just as frustrated, I've reasoned, I've wrestled, and I've teetered on the edge of taking a softer approach on several occasions. Still, as things stand, I'm still where I was; if anything, I've dug my heels in harder.

And the point I really want to make today pertains to something I suspect has played a major role in my granting myself permission to do that digging in of heels, namely a question that more than one person - some Christian, some not - has posed upon my explaining my Strange and Unusual Opinions as sketched out above. Well, they say, isn't this really just a matter of preferred worship style? Why delegitimise what works for somebody else just because it doesn't work so well for you? Maybe for you, with your personality, this more flat, unstructured, fluid format you describe is a really helpful way to engage with God, but might other people with different personalities not benefit more from a format that includes, to a greater or lesser degree, some form of leadership structures?

Now, this actually constitutes a far graver accusation against me than I think the people who have made it have realised. Sometimes, granted, differences in how people do church really are down to nothing more sinister or significant than personal or social or cultural preferences: music style is perhaps the most obvious example. On trivial matters like that, though, we're not to dig our heels in; rather, we're to be as flexible and accommodating as possible for the sake of our brothers and sisters. The statement I'm making about church leadership is that it's a contravention of God's commands, that he literally hates it, that to uphold it is a serious offence against him; if my making such claims were to be attributed merely to my indulging my own preferences about the style of collective worship, what a deplorable, self-seeking false teacher that would cast me as! What a wolf among the sheep, beckoning them astray from the safety of God's path for the sake merely of facilitating my own enjoyment! What a Jezebel, taking the desires of my flesh and declaring God's approval over them, along with his displeasure over anything contrary to them!

The variety of butterfly known as a Jezebel. Still not very fair on the poor butterfly.

It is, it must be admitted, completely true that sometimes the biases contained in my personality, though fairly neutral in and of themselves, can have unfortunate effects on what my practice of my faith looks like. For instance, because I'm naturally a very academic person, I'm prone to turning following Jesus into an intellectual exercise instead of something I pursue with my whole being. This, I recognise, is categorically Bad. It demands the rebukes of others, my own determination to strive against sin, and a whole lot of help from the Holy Spirit, without whom sanctification is entirely impossible, to correct it. And I do try to be really honest and self-critical about where particular facets of my personality might lead me into particular errors. I have previously encouraged you my lovely readers to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism towards any theological argument I make that chimes suspiciously well with my own personal preferences, and I continue to encourage you thus.

But to suggest that my views on Those Pesky Nicolaitans chime suspiciously well with my own personal preferences is basically just hilarious, and I'll tell you for why: if anybody out there has a personality with an inbuilt proclivity towards structure, hierarchy, tradition, and all these things I'm arguing we should throw unceremoniously out of the figurative window, well, it's I. I'm an ISTJ. I love order and neatness and clear organisation, everything having a set place and staying in it. I love arbitrary and pointless tradition, the doing of things in a particular way for no reason other than that that's how they've always been done (within reason, of course). I love having explicitly defined responsibilities that don't overlap with other people's, and designated superiors to go to with problems or queries. I even sort of love being told what to do. Following someone else's lead is naturally my most comfortable posture; typically, I only take initiatives on behalf of a group if I don't trust that the task at hand is going to get done if I don't. Chaos and anarchy and spontaneity and blurredness of lines are all things I naturally recoil from. And so, if the issue at hand were merely the proclivities of my own peculiar personality (and peculiar it certainly is, in both senses), then, crikey, I would surely be the very last person in the world to want to tear down church leadership structures.

I hasten to add that this in itself doesn't constitute a reason to suppose that I'm right. Each of our personalities is naturally going to find some of God's commands easier to hear than others; the mere fact that something goes against one of our personal preferences doesn't automatically single it out as a just and obedient choice. After all, our preferences are different, but God's commands to the Church apply equally to all its members. All the same, though, the clash between my natural inclinations and my theological stance as regards church governance does reassure me that, on this matter at least, I'm probably not just indulging the desires of my own flesh and calling it holiness. I'm the world's most unlikely radical here, and yet a radical I am. Naturally, I love structure and hierarchy and tradition; in other contexts - my old secondary school, for example, or the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead - I have consistently enjoyed and valued and defended them; but when I see them in the Church, I'm seized by this impassioned desire to raze them to the ground and scatter the ashes to the four winds. That's a bit weird. Evidently enough, something has interfered here that has the power to overcome my natural inclinations. And I don't think it's too far fetched to identify said something as the conviction of the Holy Spirit, achieved through the scriptures.

So that's a whole lot of rambling about me and where I'm at; let me leave you with a bit of a broader exhortation on the same theme. My Bible-in-5-years reading plan had me in Numbers 15 this Tuesday just gone, which ends with a command to make tassels on garment corners, “for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.” It's normal enough for little chunks of instruction to be capped off with “I am the LORD your God” in the Law, but the final verse of this chapter is more emphatic than that: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the LORD your God.” This in the context, by the way, that God just decreed a man be stoned to death for gathering sticks on Shabbat. The point is, it really, really matters that we be constantly striving and choosing to do what God has commanded we do rather than what our own heart and eyes desire to do. That’s not easy, because naturally, our own heart and eyes will happily encourage us to prostitute ourselves after virtually anything that promises pleasure. So we need to stick constant reminders of God's commands in front of them, tassels or otherwise, because indulging our personal preferences at the expense of obeying him is a sure-fire route to death. The stakes are that high. There are no trivial matters when it comes to what God has commanded. We need to be robustly cynical of our own motivations and ready to challenge fellow-believers about theirs as well. This question of whether my holding of a particular theological view amounts to merely an indulgence of my own fleshly desires is a really important one, a really grave accusation. So thank God that when Jesus died for us, the fleshly self with all its disobedient lusts died too. Thank God that we are born again as spiritual people able to learn to conduct ourselves according to spirit instead of flesh. And thank God that, because through faith in Jesus we have died with him to self and sin and in him been resurrected righteous, that status of righteousness can never be revoked or diminished, any more than our Lord's own status of righteousness ever can.

I am the world's most unlikely radical here. But then, chief of sinners that I am, I'm kind of the world's most unlikely righteous person too, and yet that happened. Turns out all things are possible with God. Now where have I heard that before?

Another Side to Genesis 2

Miranda:        How is your mum?

Gary:               Still frantically trying to find me a wife.

Miranda:        My mum is the same.

Gary:               What, trying to find you a wife?

Miranda:        Finding me a wife … but just to be clear, she wants me to find a husband, because I am a woman.

Gary:               Right.

Miranda S1 E1, ‘Date’ (2009)

A vintage poster depicting Adam naming the animals. Huzzah for expired copyright!

So this week I’m back to my old habit of getting cross about English Bible translations – specifically, English translations of Genesis 2. Honestly, with so many English renderings out there, you’d think there’d be a bit more diversity in how this chapter is dealt with, but in actual fact, there are a couple of translation decisions that I think are really poorly judged that seem to uniformly plague the entire spectrum of versions, all the way from the super-literal NASB to that pile of alphabet soup known as the Message. As a result, I’ve had this post on my to-do list for quite a while.

Because obviously my little old self, with my basic training in the Biblical languages and my less than a decade of having actually been taking the scriptures seriously, is so, so much cleverer and more spiritually insightful than all those translation committees: gather at my feet, children, and I shall enlighten you. By which I in fact mean, please look at what I say (which isn’t original, by the way) with a critical eye and test it to as ruthless a degree as you can. Get second opinions on my second opinion. This is one of those occasions where I’m struck by such disbelief at the fact that virtually everybody seems to be doing the same thing with the text, despite there being no apparent sound logic behind those choices, that I can’t help but be just a smidgen paranoid that I’m missing something.

I’ve translated verses 4-8 and 15-25. The clunkiness of my rendering is deliberate: I’m trying to reflect the structure of the Hebrew as accurately as I possibly can, at the expense of English fluency, because I figure you’re really not short of more idiomatic versions to help you out with grasping the sense of the passage. The things I really want to make a point about, I’ll explain in more detail below, but I’ll mention one of my translation choices now: I’ve rendered the divine name – usually given as ‘the LORD’ in English Bibles – as a transliteration of its Hebrew consonants, YHWH. I think this all-caps-all-consonants form is the best English way of making clear what the word actually is, without encouraging anyone to pronounce it.

So yes, grab your favourite Bible translation, flip it open to the relevant chapter, and enjoy an entertaining game of spot the difference as you hold it against the below:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth in their being created, in the day of YHWH God’s making earth and heavens.

And every bush of the field is not yet in the earth, and every herb of the field is not yet springing up, for YHWH God did not cause it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human to work the ground,

and a mist is going up from the earth, and it watered all the face of the ground.

And YHWH God formed the human, dust from the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living soul.

And YHWH God planted a garden in ʿēden, in the east, and he put there the human whom he had formed.

…

And YHWH God took the human and he set him in the garden of ʿēden to work it and to keep it.

And YHWH God commanded the human, saying: From every tree of the garden you shall certainly eat,

and from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat from it, for in the day of your eating from it, you shall certainly die.

And YHWH God said: It is not good, the human being on his own; I will make for him a helper as corresponds to him.

And YHWH God formed from the ground every animal of the field and every bird of the heavens and he brought (it) to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human being called a living soul, that (was) its name.

And the human called names for every beast and for the bird of the heavens and for every animal of the field, and for a human he did not find a helper as corresponded to him.

And YHWH God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, and he slept, and he took one of his sides, and he closed up flesh in place of it.

And YHWH God built the side which he took from the human into a woman, and he brought her to the human.

And the human said: This one, this time, is bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh; this one shall be called woman, for from man this one was taken.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and adhere to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And they were both naked, the human and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

Spot any major differences?

See, the way every English Bible translation I’ve checked tells this story, you get the impression that God initially made a male human, from whose form he then nabbed a solitary rib in order to make a female one. But I really, really don’t think that’s what the text actually suggests. First off, note that, while there’s only one human about, the word used to refer to that human is, well, ‘human’ – Hebrew אָדָם (ʾādām), which refers to a human being of either sex. I’ve said this before, but the fact is that, leaving aside the creation accounts and instances of the word being used as the proper name Adam, the first time it shows up in reference to people of one sex specifically, namely in Numbers 31:35, it denotes a group of women.¹

Now, granted, אָדָם is grammatically masculine, which means that it takes masculine pronouns and so forth, but that doesn’t ascribe any quality of actual maleness to the being it denotes, any more than a modern French-speaker would construe, say, a hat as being actually male just because chapeau happens to be grammatically masculine. The way English simply doesn’t bother to gender its nouns actually makes it pretty weird as languages go. When we choose to refer to something or someone using ‘he’ or ‘she’, we’re not merely following a grammatical rule, but (usually) making a statement about the actual maleness or femaleness of said something or someone. For this reason, it’s kind of misleading that I’ve referred to the human using ‘he’, ‘him’, etc. in my translation above, but the only real alternative was ‘they’, which presents its own problems, so, you know, what can one do.

Back to the point, then, only after woman has been made does the actual Hebrew word for an adult male,אִישׁ  (ʾīsh), show up; only after woman has been made, in other words, does man become a thing. And while we’re on the making of woman, I’d like to stress that the word given as ‘rib’ in this chapter by so many translators,צֵלָע  (tsēlāʿ), does not carry that meaning in any of its thirty-odd other instances in the Hebrew Bible. On the contrary, it means ‘side’. It’s used of the sides of the ark, the sides of the tabernacle, the side of a mountain, the sides of a door, the side chambers of the temple, but never does it have anything remotely to do with such a thing as a rib.² And yes, granted, words sometimes have different meanings in different contexts, but why on earth would one postulate some dubious alternative possibility in an instance where the word’s common, standard meaning already makes perfect sense?

And it does make perfect sense. God decided to take one of the sides of the initially unsexed human and make a helper as would correspond to him (or them, or whatever) – as would correspond to him perfectly, because the two are halves of one whole. Marital sex then represents the reunification of that whole: one flesh. Remember also how, last chapter, God split light from darkness, heaven from earth, sea from dry land; this, therefore, is just one more split in that creative sequence.³

See, doesn’t that just sit better than the normative interpretation? Doesn’t it trace a more coherent story arc through the creation narratives? Doesn’t it reassure you more fully of the equality of the sexes – that woman was never merely some deviation from the norm, but a corresponding half of the human whole? Doesn’t it shed more light on the purpose of sex and marriage? And I haven’t done anything clever to achieve that; it’s all just there in the text, if only the sense isn’t obscured by dubious translation decisions. I hasten to add, as well, that you don’t have to translate even half as clunkily as I have in order to renderאָדָם  andצֵלָע  in a fashion consistent with their other appearances in the Bible; that would be perfectly achievable in a nice, smooth, idiomatic translation.

I stand by what I’ve said before, that if two or three English versions are saying the same thing, you can be pretty confident that that’s what the underlying text actually means⁴ – but unfortunately, there do remain these occasional instances where I’m totally at a loss as to why the translators have done what they’ve done. I remain, therefore, extremely thankful that I live in a society where I’m able to read and study and interpret the Bible for myself; where I’m permitted to question and challenge normative interpretations; where I’m even free to fling articulations of my atypical opinions into the digital ether for the perusal of charming humans like yourself, O Darling Reader, who, incidentally, have all the same rights I’ve just described. That we, common-or-garden believers that we are (that we all are, indeed), have God’s holy scriptures in our own hands, is a blessing never to be taken for granted.

Footnotes

¹ I mentioned as much in ‘On Being a Woman in the Church’, under August of this year in the box on the right. If you want to examine how the word is used throughout the scriptures for yourself, here’s a good place to start: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/Lexicon/Lexicon.cfm?strongs=H120&t=KJV.

² Check it out: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?strongs=H6763. It seems to me that the only time there’s a decent case for translating it as something other than ‘side’ or ‘side chamber’ is in Jeremiah 20:10, but it still definitely doesn’t mean ‘rib’. So where on earth did the rib thing come from? The best answer to that is the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), which translates צֵלָע in these and most of its other instances as πλευρά (pleurá), a word which can mean either ‘rib’ or ‘side’. According to the legendary Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pleura&la=greek#Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=pleura/-contents, it tends to occur in the plural when referring to the side of a person or animal, so I suppose you can sort of see why a translator might have mistaken its occurrence in the singular in Genesis 2 as meaning ‘rib’, but that said, it does sometimes mean ‘side’ in the singular too, and the failure to compare to other instances that its being rendered ‘rib’ here betrays hardly seems indicative of careful or thorough translation technique.

³ You remember, but here’s the chapter in question just in case: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ That’s a case I made in ‘Dear Fellow-Believers Who Don’t Read the Biblical Languages’, under September 2017 in the box on the right.

Salvation and Schrödinger’s Cat

Sheldon:               In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger, in an attempt to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, he proposed an experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a sealed vial of poison that will break open at a random time. Now, since no one knows when or if the poison has been released, until the box is opened, the cat can be thought of as both alive and dead.

Penny:                   I’m sorry; I don’t get the point.

Sheldon:               Well, of course you don’t get it: I haven’t made it yet.

The Big Bang Theory S1 E17, ‘The Tangerine Factor’ (2008)

So you know Schrödinger’s cat?

 

Thanks to the talented Tomsan at newgrounds.com for this absolutely charming poster.

At the risk of employing an analogy so abstruse that it obscures rather than illuminates the point I’m trying to make, here’s a rough description of Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment from my non-scientifically-minded self, that’s nevertheless a bit more comprehensive than the extremely pared-down version given by Sheldon in my opening quotation. As I understand it, when one does experiments to figure out what tiny little elementary particles like protons and photons and electrons and other sorts of –ons are doing, they prove themselves extraordinarily unpredictable. There’s just no way of knowing how they’re going to behave in any given instance. One way of explaining this erraticness is known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which posits that an object exists in a state of superposition – that is, in multiple different states at once – until it’s actually observed, or interacts with the outside world in some other way, at which point the superposition is forced to collapse into one particular state. Which state it plumps for varies, of course, hence the unpredictability of the behaviour of quantum objects. Schrödinger thought this was a stupid idea, and to illustrate as much, he imagined a scenario in which a cat is put in a box, along with a vessel containing a tiny amount of a radioactive substance – said amount being carefully chosen so that there is a fifty-fifty chance within the next hour of an atom radioactively decaying and emitting a radioactive particle. Also in the box is a Geiger counter (which measures the presence of radioactive stuff), rigged up to a hammer next to a vial of poison. If the Geiger counter detects radioactivity, the hammer with smash the vial of poison, thereby killing the cat. The box is then sealed – cut off from being observed by or interacting with the outside world. Consequently, there’s no way of predicting or measuring the behaviour of those tricksy little particles during the next hour, and according to the Copenhagen interpretation, that must mean the situation is in a state of superposition as to whether the radioactive decay has taken place or not. Until the box is opened, the situation is observed, and the superposition is forced to collapse into one possibility or the other, the radioactive particle is simultaneously present and not present; the Geiger counter has simultaneously triggered the hammer and not triggered it; the vial of poison has simultaneously been smashed and not been smashed; and as a result, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Except it obviously isn’t, because cats don’t do that. And this, then, was Schrödinger’s point: if a cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time, then the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t work.¹

Now, as unbelievable as this may seem after that last paragraph, I’m not actually here to discuss physics today, and I’m not at all commenting on whether Schrödinger’s disdain for the Copenhagen interpretation was justified, to what extent it remains a plausible theory, or whether alternatives are more compelling.² That would be neither interesting for you nor, given that I haven’t studied any Physics since a slightly botched AS-level, particularly educational. Rather, take the key fact on which Schrödinger’s conclusion rested: the hypothesised cat is actually alive or actually dead. It can’t exist in some weird in-betweeny both-at-once state where it could theoretically turn out to be either of the two – because it’s a cat, and cats don’t do that, whatever weird little quantum particles may or may not do. The fact that you don’t know whether the cat’s alive or dead until you open the box doesn’t mean that it wasn’t already either one or the other before then. Equally, though, because the matter of whether it’s alive or dead rests on something you have no way of observing until you open the box, there’s no way of knowing which it is until you do so.

The first week of December has historically been one in which I’ve tended to make use of my blog to stick my humble oar into the whole predestination debate, and since my views on the matter haven’t shifted much from where they were two years ago, I thought I’d resume the theme this year by addressing a consequence of the issue rather than the issue itself.³ Scripture spills over with affirmations that predestination is a thing, that every human being has already been specifically designated as either a vessel of wrath or a vessel of mercy.⁴ It’s one or the other: there’s no in-betweeny state where a person could theoretically turn out to be either of the two. Before God spoke the present order into existence, he had already selected the individuals yet unborn who will be made righteous by the blood of Christ and inherit a place in the world to come. Ultimately, each of us is, like Schrödinger’s cat, either dead or alive. But – and it’s a big but – we can’t see inside anybody else’s metaphorical box.

There’s a physical reality that we can observe, and there’s a spiritual reality that, under normal circumstances, we can’t. Physically, we who trust in Jesus are on earth, in the flesh; spiritually, we are seated with him in the heavenly places. Physically, we sin every day; spiritually, we are as sinless as he is. Physically, we are all going to die; spiritually, we are alive forever and ever.⁵ But when you look at a human being, you can’t see his or her spirit. You can’t see inside the box. You can’t tell whether the cat is dead or alive. You can’t tell, not until the box is opened, namely until the spiritual reality becomes observable – either at death or at the end of the age.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that there’s absolutely no evidence to be gathered as to whether a person is born again or not; that’s where this analogy comes apart slightly. If someone confesses Jesus as Lord and strives to follow his commandments, that’s a pretty strong indication that he or she is spiritually alive; if not, that’s a pretty strong indication otherwise. But then again, there are people who absolutely seem to have grasped the gospel and given themselves to the pursuit of God’s glory, and then end up denying that he even exists; and there are people who live their whole lives in utter rejection of Jesus as Lord, only to turn and repent at the very last minute. The cat is either dead or alive – each of us is either a vessel of wrath or a vessel of mercy – but until the box is opened, there’s no knowing for sure which one it is.

I actually think there are two massive encouragements contained in this state of affairs. First off, if you’re alive, you’re alive, end of story: there’s no unpredictability as to which state you’ll ultimately be found in, no possibility that things might swing the other way at the moment of collapse. If God chose you before the foundation of the world, if Jesus has already borne his Father’s wrath in your place, if the Spirit has already been given you as a deposit of your inheritance, then you can be as sure as you like that you’re going to get that inheritance. The assurance we have is phenomenal; nothing could ever be more certain than that God will have his way, and that both frees us from the need to try to exercise any influence over these things ourselves, and empowers us to live in a way that demonstrates total trust in him. Second, there is always, always hope that someone who seems dead at the moment might yet turn out to be alive when the box is opened. Affirming predestination doesn’t amount to assuming a defeatist attitude about the spread of the gospel. It takes the pressure off us, because we can’t actually do anything to change a person’s eternal destiny – the work is the Lord’s – but it’s no reason at all to give up hope on anybody, or suppose that our attempts to preach the gospel are in vain. At the moment, we can’t observe the spiritual reality; when, one day, we can, an awful lot about it is probably going to surprise us.

Schrödinger’s cat is either dead or alive, but there’s no way of knowing which until the box is opened. One day, the spiritual reality will be made observable to us, but until then, we live by faith – faith by which we can walk in total assurance of our own salvation, while actively hoping and striving for the salvation of others. Let’s aim to do exactly that.

Footnotes

¹ Gratitude is due to IFL Science and Sixty Symbols for helping me get my head round this jazz: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/schr%C3%B6dinger%E2%80%99s-cat-explained/. Any misrepresentation of the matter here is entirely my own fault.

² Apparently a lot of quantum physicists prefer the Many-Worlds interpretation these days: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/quantum-suicide.htm.

³ My previous posts on this topic are ‘Freedestination’, under December 2015, and ‘Freedestination Revisited’, under December 2016. My views progressed a lot during that year. Oh, and I also put forward some thoughts on election in ‘Fair Choice’, under July of this year. Just in case you really haven’t got anything better to do with your time right now, though if so, my deepest condolences.

⁴ For that particular bit of phrasing, you’re looking at Romans 9, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+9&version=ESVUK, but you really can’t read the New Testament for very long before you hit some mention or other of the whole predestination business.

⁵ Excuse to read Ephesians: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+1&version=ESVUK.