The more things change…

A post by Dr John Quinn

Image from Wikipedia Commons

Shortly after being elected Anglican Archbishop of Sydney in 2001, Dr Peter Jensen found himself embroiled in a stoush with the then Prime Minister John Howard over the issues of aboriginal reconciliation and the treatment of asylum seekers.  Twelve years later and the newly elected Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, has also called for more humane treatment of asylum seekers.  Has nothing really changed in the last 12 years?

Image courtesy of google images

The 24 hour news cycle, with its insatiable hunger for new stories, creates the impression of a fast paced world where issues move rapidly and circumstances change constantly. You can tune into news around the clock, through ABC News 24, the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera or any number of other media outlets.  News websites are constantly being updated with new material.  Live blogs cover the day’s goings on in Parliament or on the campaign trail.  Political parties and businesses engage communication consultants and PR executives to monitor the perception of their image. The treatment of any issue is necessarily superficial to keep up with the frenetic pace of the news cycle, and the image projected or the “spin” is where the real game seems to lie.  Any in-depth research on a policy question is practically “out of date” before it enters the public domain.  One has to wonder whether this is serving us at all well. 

Even though we have greater and faster access to information than ever before, the pace of genuine progress on any given issue does not seem to have increased. Aboriginal reconciliation and asylum seeker policy are two great examples, but there are plenty of others.  Whether the issue pertains to cost of living, housing affordability, work/life balance, mental health services, aged care facilities or environmental sustainability, it feels like we have had the conversation a thousand times over. And we usually have. 

Many Christians have embraced the digital revolution, blogging constantly and tweeting incessantly. Christian organisations invest an increasing amount of time and effort into online and social media resources (the irony of posting this on a blog is not lost!). Certainly we need to meet the world where it is at, having a presence in the digital realm is the being “all things to all men” of our generation (1 Cor 9:19-23).  At the same time, the writer of Ecclesiastes ought to give us pause for thought:

What has been will be again,

    what has been done will be done again;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there anything of which one can say,

    “Look! This is something new”?

It was here already, long ago;

    it was here before our time.

11 No one remembers the former generations,

    and even those yet to come

will not be remembered

    by those who follow them.

The tools of digital and social media bring the constant temptation to be saying something new. In many cases the same thing was said a metaphorical five minutes ago, and the repetition changes little. Yet in the word of God we find what the world truly needs to hear. And it is the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow.

Pushing Through The Election Blues?

A post by Rev Ben Gooley

Australians have an upcoming Federal Election. In many conversations I have had, disillusionment seems to be high with many struggling to find a party or leader to support with genuine enthusiasm.

For all its faults, the democratic system we enjoy in Australia works best when the wider populace is properly engaged with the electoral process, understands the key issues and asks their candidates intelligent questions.

For Australian Christians there are a number of tools to help move beyond the sound bites of the nightly news and understand a little more about the stated positions of the various parties.

The ABC has launched their Vote Compass which tries to plot your answers to a short set of questions against the policies of the major parties (they evaluate the ALP, Coalition and Greens). Its plotting is necessarily fairly basic, but it is also quite straightforward to use and may be helpful to some in understanding the differences of the major parties on a variety of issues. There are also links that give more detailed summaries on various issues.

The Bible Society Australia has also tried to gather relevant information on a variety of issues for Christians in their Federal Election Guide 2013. It considers more than just the major parties, and unashamedly takes a Christian perspective. With the enormous breadth of opinion among Christians on every issue this is non-trivial. Their methodology is to provide quotes and articles by key leaders and commentators, as well as a summary of the party positions, and allow the reader to reach their own (better) informed opinion. It takes a little work, but is a useful summary on understanding the issues more deeply.

While it’s often easiest to slide into a cynical disillusionment about Australian politics, remaining uninformed will only encourage more sound-bite policies. Perhaps these resources will help in pushing through the election blues.

Rethinking the place of work, rest and play in the 'self-consistent' life

I wrote a post on 'Children's loss of play' a couple of years ago and I continue to reflect upon my central thesis. That is, could the failure of adults to understand the nature of play and its importance, be depriving their children of play, and at the same time offering them life models that might just shape their own use of time in negative ways when they grow up?

In my last post on this topic I cited Kenneth R. Ginsburg's work that suggests play is critical for children and fulfils many needs:

• Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength.
• Play is important to healthy brain development.
• Through play children at a very early age engage and interact in the world around them.
• Play allows children to create and explore a world where they can achieve a sense of mastery.
• Play can also help them to conquer their fears while practising adult roles, sometimes in conjunction with other children or adult caregivers.
• As they master their world, play helps children develop new competencies that lead to enhanced confidence.
• Undirected play allows children to learn how to work and create with others, to share, to negotiate, and to resolve conflicts.
• When play is allowed to be child driven, children practice decision-making skills, move at their own pace and discover their own areas of interest.
• Play is essential for the building of active healthy bodies.

But as well as being important for children, play is important for adults. In 'The Christian at Play' Robert Johnston argues that play is part of life and hence should be part of our consideration of what it means (quoting Thomas Oden) "to live self-consistent and intelligible [lives] of faith in Christian community".

Johnston has many interesting things to say.  As someone who has a spent a lot of time as a researcher observing children at play, I have become conscious that I know less about play as an adult. Here's how Johnston describes play:

I would understand play as that activity which is freely and spontaneously entered into, but which, once begun, has its own design, its own rules or order, which must be followed so that the play activity may continue. The player is called into play by a potential co-player and/or play object, and while at play, treats other players and/or "playthings" as personal, creating with them a community that can be characterized by "I-Thou" rather than "I-It" relationships. This play has a new time (a playtime) and a new space (a playground) which function as "parentheses" in the life and world of the player. The concerns of everyday life come to a temporary standstill in the mind of the player, and the boundaries of his or her world are redefined... But though play is an end in itself, it can nevertheless have several consequences. Chief among these are the joy and release, the personal fulfillment, the remembering of our common humanity, and the presentiment of the sacred, which the player sometimes experiences in and through the activity. One's participation in the adventure of playing, even given the risk of injury or defeat, finds resolution at the end of the experience, and one re-enters ongoing life in a new spirit of thanksgiving and celebration. The player is a changed individual because of the playtime, his or her life having been enlarged beyond the workaday world (p. 34).

His comments are interesting and lead me to ask, might play have a different human value to rest and leisure? Is it a distinctive part of the life of the adult as well as the child, and can my engagement in play bring glory to God and help me to live a life of faith well?
 

We Protestants have always been suspicious of play and idleness, trusting instead in the worth of work and diligence in all that we do. But in the process we have often failed to understand the biblical sense of 'rest' and have been just as confused about 'work and its purposes. We know that God ordained rest at creation when He rested from the work that he had done (Genesis 2:2-3). As well, we know that physical rest has a relationship to spiritual rest and God's ultimate plan and design for us, that we are to seek him in our lives. Our lives are to demonstrate that we understand and seek the only true rest that is to be found in Christ (Matthew 11:28-29). Play is an added complexity because it isn't the same as rest, but it may be pursued as part of rest, as we seek in the midst of life, rest for our souls not just our bodies. Understanding work, rest and play is made even more difficult because in the modern era the place of play and rest, relative to work, has become confused.  Johnston cites some of the following trends:

• As the amount of leisure time increases for some, the meaningfulness of work has decreased.
• While opportunities for leisure and play have increased for some, there has been a reverse trend for many women with paid work adding to many of their previous responsibilities at home.
• For many, work has become simply a means to an end; primarily, a way to increase purchasing power for life, with leisure increasing dramatically as an area of expenditure.
• Free time does not necessarily mean rest, leisure or play for those who Staffan Lindner labelled "the harried leisure class"; those for whom consumption dominates non-working time.
• What people do when they have time away from their jobs can often be simply idleness.

There is much that could be added to Johnston's list some 30 years later. For example, today I suspect that Christians, like people in general, have a tendency to binge on rest and play, and I'm also not too sure that anyone has much more leisure time. For many, there is an inconvenient truth about the dominant place of work, as they seek to earn money to allow insatiable consumption in all parts of life.

In an age where most people feel time poor, and we spend too much time working and too little time entering into rest, a consideration of the role of play in life might just be helpful for many of us. As well, we may need to give careful consideration to the way we model what rest and even play mean in our lives as others observe us.

If you're interested in this topic, you might have a look at issue #24 of Case Magazine on 'Work in Progress'. You might find this helpful.

On Intelligence and Omniscience

A post by Dr John Quinn

Edward Snowden (Courtesy of Wikicommons)

As I write, former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden is en route to Ecuador, passing through Moscow and Havana. Mr Snowden is wanted by US authorities for disclosing information regarding the extent of US surveillance of its citizens’ internet and telephone activities. The disclosures, which were first reported in “The Guardian”, have rocked the US Government to the core, and have met with praise and contempt in almost equal measure.  Those in the government and security establishment argue that Mr Snowden’s disclosures are treasonous, endangering the lives of innocents by compromising effective security programs and intelligence mechanisms.  At the same time his actions are hailed as heroic by civil libertarians and journalists for pushing back against the increasing intrusion of the state into personal affairs.  As thinking Christians what are we to make of this?

The New Testament is not silent on the role of government. In Chapter 13 of his letter to the Romans, Paul exhorts his readers to “submit [themselves] to the governing authorities.”  Paul’s reasoning is not pragmatic, but is tied up in God’s sovereignty over earthly affairs: he writes “for there is no authority except that which God has established.” As result, “he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves”. Moreover, “if you do wrong, be afraid, for he [the ruler] does not bear the sword for nothing”.  In short, the ruling authorities are to be treated with respect and a measure of fear, as they are instituted by God to administer justice.

Image courtesy of Google images 

I have to admit that these verses bring me some discomfort in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations. What if, God forbid, it became illegal to be a Christian?  What if checking an online bible, calling your local church or even reading www.case.edu.au could land you in prison? These are activities we do every day: should we just stop them in submission to a tyrannical state? While a cursory reading of Romans 13 might invite that conclusion, I don’t think the picture is quite that straightforward. In Verse 3 of chapter 13, Paul writes:

“For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.” 

So it is really wrongdoers that ought to fear the government, not those who do right.  Of course, we now have a problem of definition: who are “those who do right” and “those who do wrong”?  I don’t think there is anything too controversial in suggesting that for Christian people “those who do right” must ultimately be those who trust and obey the Lord Jesus.  If this is the case then any government acting against Christians has moved from being an administrator of God’s justice to a persecutor of God’s people. The Bible is clear on both the reality and certainty of persecution for Christians.  Moreover, while persecution brings suffering in the here and now, it ultimately points to the certainty of hope in Jesus.  Hence there is nothing to fear from a government that persecutes, for the Christian holds to certain hope of ultimate deliverance through Jesus.

So, do Christians have anything to fear from a government that monitors our every movement? At one level the answer is no, because God would ultimately deliver us from a persecuting government. That said, it does not seem adequate to say that since God gave the authorities the power to monitor all our activities, we should just accept it. The potential for misuse of surveillance is substantial, and it is not only Christians who might face injustice as a result of government intrusion. As people who put others before ourselves we should be attentive not only to our own vulnerability, but also of others who might face persecution from an intrusive tyrannical state.  The scale of government monitoring now evident, we need to think about how we work toward change, not through illegal means, but by advocating through legitimate channels.

Did Edward Snowden do the right thing? I have no idea. His actions have certainly upset the US government who are making all sorts of claims about the legality of what has occurred. Moreover, he has almost certainly violated those confidentiality clauses that were part of his work arrangements. Deliverance for Edward Snowden appears to be coming from somewhat unexpected quarters, via the Russian, Cuban and Ecuadorian governments. Leaving aside the morality or legality of Mr Snowden’s actions, and his now precarious situation, through his disclosures he has flagged a significant issue with which we need to grapple. We can thank him for that.