Senses, Intellect and Spirit

In response to the charge that Christian theology, indeed the Christian religion, is nothing other than words about words about words, we have seen that our minds and our senses are to be used in a quite natural way in coming to understand our faith. The Christian message is in this sense not at all discontinuous from ‘the natural’, even though our natural powers are fallen. We take this for granted, I suspect, and only notice the fact when it is drawn to our attention. Our senses are fallen but not obliterated. Christianity is not gnosticism, which requires its disciples to be initiated into a special ‘language of heaven’, one that is discontinuous from the natural languages we all speak. At Pentecost those present heard in their own languages the account of the mighty works of God. Nor does it require special non-natural or supernatural access to the basic factual claims of the faith, even though, because of our fallenness, the enlightening and reviving work of he Spirit is needed to enable us to understand the significance of what we learn, and to apply it to our lives.

The senses and the Apostles

The Apostles themselves ‘saw with their eyes; they ‘looked upon and touched with their hands’, concerning the word of life, the life which was ‘made manifest and [which] we have seen and heard’. They saw, they heard, and they touched the Incarnate one of God, and these facts provided John with an argument against Gnosticism. That which their senses told them about ‘we proclaim also to you’ (I John 1. 1-3) What John and the others had seen and heard formed the basis of his declaration of the gospel and of the fellowship which all believers have with the father and his Son. The exercise of senses and intellect provided the Apostle Peter with some reason, a good reason, for thinking that he and the other apostles have not followed cleverly devised myths…….’. Why? Because ‘we were eye witnesses of his majesty, for when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him in the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”, we ourselves heard this very voice, for we were with him on the holy mountain.’ (2 Peter. 1.16) When Paul met with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus he saw a light from heaven, and heard a voice and was then deprived of his sight. The men who were with him also heard the voice. (Acts 9 Cf. John 12.29) ) Similarly, the Saviour said to doubting Thomas: ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands, and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve. But believe’. Seeing, hearing, touching – these were all involved in learning of Christ, confirming the character of God’s revelation, and it seems that the Apostles went out of their way to stress their importance.

What did their senses tell them? First, that their faith was not a case of private or collective hallucination or delusion. They were not following myths, magical events in which the senses are tricked and deceived, but that the Saviour, being God made flesh, himself had that sort of objectivity which our senses convey to us, and the absence of which - ‘cleverly devised myths’ – the senses are also able to detect. We are tricked and puzzled by the cleverness of a magician for some time, but not for all the time. We do not actually believe that the woman has been sawn in half, or that the rabbits were all in the hat. The Saviour did not seem to be magically ‘present’ on the Mount of Transfiguration, but he was present, physically palpably present, for the one transfigured was a physical person, and the glory that surrounded him was visible to the human eye. Even the voice from heaven was not a purely interior voice of the sort we refer to when we talk of the voice of conscience, but ‘we ourselves heard this very voice’, not physically produced by means of human lungs and larynx, but nevertheless a voice objectively identifiable through hearing.

This account of identification by means of the senses is not the whole story, of course, but it is part of the story, and an essential part. Grace builds upon nature. Peter himself goes on to refer to a ‘more sure’ word of prophecy. (2 Pet. 1. 19) He recognises degrees of certainty. Their experience on the holy mountain provided some degree of certainty, God’s word, the product of the inspiring activity of the Holy Spirit, provided a surer ground of belief and hope than what they witnessed, considered as a series of events. Peter speaks of these data as if they were on a sliding scale, with the matters eye witnessed being less sure than the word of prophecy revealed to them, which is, by comparison, like a ‘a lamp shining in a dark place’.

So grace builds upon nature. Not in the sense that grace simply grows out of nature, for that would give us a wholly naturalistic religion; but in the sense that it presupposes nature and is not fundamentally at odds with it, overturning it and negating it. In particular, it presupposes the sort of objectivity that nature routinely conveys to us. The word of prophecy is ‘more sure’ when measured against the sureness and certainty of our sensory experience. It has an objectivity that goes beyond the objectivity conveyed by the reports of two or three witnesses as to what they saw and heard.

Presupposing

Here I pause to say a word or two about ‘presuppositionalism’. There are those who say that the purely biblical way to convey the faith to others is to presuppose, as a kind of axiom, Scripture and all that it tells us. But it seems to me that the biblical data that we have briefly considered (there are other data too, I think) point in the other direction. That we do not, and cannot presuppose Scripture, but that we first trust our senses, and then trust Scripture, as a more sure word of prophecy. We cannot, without vicious circularity, derive our epistemology from presupposing Scripture.

For a moment, consider that phrase ‘presupposing Scripture’. What is Scripture? At its most basic, it is a library of sixty-six books, in various languages, mostly Hebrew and Greek. We have it in English translation, which for the most part serves us very nicely. It is a material object, a book, which we need to distinguish from other books, with individual books, chapters and verses, whose words we need to read and understand (if the words are in our own language) or to translate (if they are in their original languages). In order to even get to the text of Scripture we need to use our senses, what we can see and touch, and to rely on these senses, as we generally rely on them in distinguishing, say, an apple from an avocado, or a peach from a pear. What entitles us to trust our senses at this point? We cannot be warranted in trusting our senses by presupposing Scripture (as the presuppositonalists aver) because we need our senses to identify and understand the words, clauses and sentences of Scripture to begin with. To rely on Scripture to warrant our use of our senses, while at the same time using our senses to understand what the Bible warrants, is viciously circular.

The disciples at the Transfiguration, and Thomas in the Upper Room, did not rely upon Jesus to verify the reliability of their senses, but they trusted their senses implicitly in the way that they trusted them when they counted the loaves and the fishes. It was by such a use of their senses and judgment that they witnessed the transfigured Christ, and the resurrected Christ.

There is no other recourse at this point than to recognise the working of learning processes the function prior to meeting Christ (in the case of the disciples) or to reading Scripture )in our case). There must therefore be an epistemology, however primitive that is distinct from and prior to Scripture, though consistent with what it teaches us about our condition as a fallen race. It is at this point that (for some) the panic seems to set in. But there is no need to panic, any epistemology which, consistent with what Scripture teaches generally about fallen human nature, warrants our uses of our senses and intellect, and the account of which is not at odds with reliance upon the sense and intellect, will do.

It is impossible to set up a ‘Scriptural epistemology’ without vicious circularity, the procedure of appealing to Scripture to justify the use of our senses etc. using our senses in making that appeal. The best we can hope for – and all we need reason to hope for – is epistemology which is not at odds with Scripture. So, for example, an epistemology which delivered to us a general scepticism with regard to the use of our senses would be at odds with Scripture, and there are of course several such epistemologies which have been appealed to in the history of Christian theology. The ‘Reformed’ epistemology of Plantinga and Wolterstorff is the latest of these, and currently prominent, but it is not the only candidate.


The grace that builds on nature

So grace builds on nature, it does not supplant it. We have already identified one way in which this happens. First, the gospel is not a trick of magic, which though the senses are involved, deceives them, but events to which the senses of those who saw and heard bore reliable witness. There are degrees of certainty. There is a more sure word of prophecy than even the Transfiguration and its divinely-prophetic commentary. The testimony of eyes and ears, may sometimes deceive us, as in tricks of magic, but it was not deceived in the case of the Transfiguration. Even here, the testimony of eyes and ears is not to be gainsaid.

So for the Apostles at least, their teaching was not words about words about words, but words which identified and described realities which they learned of with their eyes and ears and fingers. To be sure, there is more to the revelation of God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ than this, but there is not less. Grace builds upon nature, it does not ignore it, or destroy it. This places the Gospel in the realm of objective realities, not purely subjective teaching or a scripturalism which has a kind of Platonic, non-sensory character. (I suspect that in the case of at least some versions of 'presuppositionalism' there is a confusion between the order of being (how things are from the standpoint of the divine decree) and the order of knowing (the processes by which we come to learn of what God has decreed) - but (mercifully!) that's a topic for another occasion).

Next time, in our fourth and final post on this theme, we shall look at the objectivity of the work of the Spirit in his regenerating activities.

Theistic Compatibilism

First, some remarks on the language of ‘theistic compatibilism’. These remarks are not a direct reply to Byrne’s two arguments, but attempt to counter possible misunderstandings that his language indicates.

In Eternal God an attempt was made to separate two claims:

1. That the divine ordination and sustaining of everything down to its last detail, including every human action, is a case of soft determinism, the doctrine that determinism is compatible with human moral responsibility.

and

2. That divine ordaining and sustaining is consistent with soft determinism.

(1) is obviously distinct from (2), in the following way: (1) is the view that the divine ordination of human actions is an instance of a thesis (or set of theses) which is, considered historically, about the implications of the creaturely determinants of creaturely action. (2), by contrast, asserts merely the consistency of the divine ordination of everything with at least one version of soft determinism. The two differ on account of the fact that it is asserted that the connection between the divine ordination and creaturely compatibilistic systems is set up by a Creatorly determinant, not a creaturely determinant: the divine ordination is not a creaturely cause in the way that human beliefs and desires are creaturely causes. My argument in Eternal God was merely that if creaturely compatibilism is consistent with human responsibility then a fortiori such responsibility is consistent with Creatorly compatibilism. As I put it

It will be argued that if we suppose that theism is true, and that therefore God ordains and sustains everything by his creative power, then this fact does not provide an additional difficulty for theism. If non-theistic determinism is compatible with freedom then, it will be argued, theistic creation is as well. (EG146)

The point of comparison is between God’s ordaining and sustaining on the one hand, and philosophical determinism on the other, even if what God creates and sustains is an order best understood as a philosophically deterministic order. Later on in the book I referred to possible additional difficulties that allegedly attach to the idea of theistic creation and responsibility, (EG 147) and distinguished on the one hand between human freedom and determinism and human freedom and theistic creation (EG 149), and between the thesis of general determinism and that of God’s creating and sustaining activity. (EG 153) On one occasion the claim that creation is compatible with responsibility only if determinism is was explicitly denied (EG157), and arguments couched in terms of God ‘setting up’ deterministic processes were discussed. (EG 162) It was not argued that divine ordination is itself a straightforward instance of philosophical determinism, and for the purposes of my ad hominem argument against Flew which we will shortly discuss there was no need for me to develop or subscribe to some version of philosophical determinism. In arguing against Flew I needed only to employ whatever version of determinism that he subscribed to.

So in the language that was used there was a consistent attempt to distinguish between what (in more theological terminology) might be called immanent cause-effect relations, such as those between human desires and beliefs and the actions they prompt, and transcendent cause-effect relations, where God is the ordainer of all human actions, including all their immanent causal antecedents. This distinction was signalled by using different words to refer to God’s causal activity (words such as ‘create’, and ‘ordain’) from those used to refer to immanent cause-effect relations, (words such as ‘cause’ and ‘determine’). In general the phrase ‘theistic determinism’ was avoided, except occasionally when it was used in an ad hominem context (e.g. EG 157), just as claims such as ‘God determines human actions’ or that he is the ‘all-determining cause’ were avoided. Otherwise it becomes difficult to keep the distinction between (1) and (2) in mind.

In the twenty or so years following the publication of Eternal God I have occasionally had the opportunity to develop this point of view, that Creatorly causation (or ordination) has a different sense from creaturely causation. For example,

God is the source of all creaturely power, but the powers of creatures, even when efficaciously empowered by God, are really theirs, and so are distinct from his. If God efficaciously empowers me to type this essay, still the typing of this paper is my action, not God’s. The wicked men who crucified Jesus were the cause of his death, even though he was crucified by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God (Acts.2.23)

One way of expressing this difference might be as follows. While it seems clear that intramundane causation is transitive, that if (where A, B and C are events) A causes B, and B causes C, then A causes C, there is no necessary transitivity in the case of any causal aspects of features of the divine willing permission, if there are any. It is not necessarily the case that if God governs by willingly permitting some event B, and B causes C, then God causes C; rather, God may will by permitting that B causes C and so willingly permit C. God’s willing permission is thus not a straightforward case of causation, and those who seek to assimilate God’s willing permission of evil to the actions of someone manipulating a puppet, or to hypnotism, or to brainwashing or programming, have not recognized the true character of such permission.
Judging by the language that he uses in characterising my view, Byrne misses the distinction between (1) and (2). Thus he says that Helm ‘takes Flew to task for talking about an all-determining God as a manipulator of human beings, someone who reduces human beings to mere puppets and then blames them for what he forces them to do. Such language is dismissed as anthropomorphic and castigated for missing the main point that the divine causation of human acts goes through the normal patterns of desire, belief and intention that are the sources of non-compelled human agency’. (HG196.) But the actual remarks referred to at this place have to do with the character of causal determinism, and not with the character of divine ordination. So it is claimed

General determinism does not claim that the antecedent causal factors manipulate. ‘Manipulate’ is a piece of anthropomorphism. The causal factors are usually non-intentional in character, without plans and aims, but causally sufficient for the bringing about of certain intentional, voluntary actions. The question of having or not having the agent’s consent, or of going or not going against his wishes, does not arise. (EG152)

My point here is not to argue that God does not manipulate his creatures, (though in fact I do deny that) but that if he does (as Flew claims) then, on Flew’s own atheistic determinism, so do our genes manipulate our actions. It is an ad hominem argument, no more and no less. So Byrne has overestimated my willingness to assimilate standard causal determinism to God’s creative and sustaining (and providential) activity, to say that such activity is a case of such determinism. I deliberately allow for elements of disanalogy, and of apophatism, in our understanding of divine activity. After all, the book has to do with divine timelessness. The significance of this fact will be considered further, in the closing section.

Byrne’s First Counter-Argument

I turn now to Peter Byrne’s first counter-argument to my claim that (despite the point just made about apophatism) there is a significant parallel between theistic creation and sustaining on the one hand, and general determinism on the other, and that if general determinism is consistent with human responsibility so may divine sustaining be. Arguing in support of Antony Flew, Byrne claims that there are ‘customs and institutions associated with human responsibility because human beings possess characters and all that pertains thereto – patterns of belief, desire and intention...it would be very odd on this account to praise or blame the non-purposive, non-characterful causes that stretch beyond any instance of human choice and action’. (HG 196) And he goes on to claim that things are different ‘in the case of theistic determinism’.

But this counter-argument clearly rests upon an ambiguity regarding ‘responsibility’, as between ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘causal responsibility’. These phrases are not equivalent, of course. On some versions of atheistic general determinism my beliefs and desires and my character are solely the product of my genes and my environment. It is certainly true that it makes no sense to wag one’s finger at my genes, or to look disapprovingly at my early upbringing, to charge them with moral failure or to punish them because of it. As Byrne says, we do not blame the genes or diet, or the Big Bang. Nevertheless, determinists must assign causal responsibility to them; too many strawberries are responsible for my stomach ache, being high up brings about giddiness, my genetic structure is responsible for my maleness, and so on.

Byrne’s presentation of his counter-argument, with its reference to appropriateness, and customs and institutions, makes it seem as if the attribution of personal responsibility is merely a matter of human convention. But if, according to Flew’s general outlook, it is perfectly in order to hold me responsible for some voluntary action that I perform, but not to hold my genes responsible, and if this is based upon a set of human conventions, or ‘paradigm cases’ of free and voluntary action, as Flew used to argue, then why (by the same token) is there a reason to blame God but not me for my vicious actions? If in the matter of ascribing responsibility to human actions we choose to ignore the causal role that genes play, why may we not, in a similar way, choose to ignore the causal role played by God’s ordaining what I do? Flew’s and Byrne’s answer is: because God himself, unlike our genes, has motives, beliefs and intentions. But they have not shown why this is a telling difference.

'JI' - 2

In the last Taking a Line I tried to set out the case (as I see it) for Packer’s adherence to the Church of England in its present state, drawn as far as possible from his own published writings. JI believes that these arguments, on Puritanism, on mental error, and on the Enlightenment and catholicity, have considerable strength. In addition there is one further argument, a fourth argument, that we shall meet shortly. He deploys these arguments because of a prior position he takes on the permissibility of adherence to a ‘comprehensive’ church. It is only because of this commitment to comprehensiveness, now understood as including the toleration of a very wide spectrum of Christian theological opinion, even (as it seems to be in Packer’s own case) a somewhat reluctant and painful adherence to it, that the other arguments are brought in to support it. They form the centre-piece of his defence of his adherence to Anglicanism, and they are argued with great vigour and conviction.

Two of these arguments, the argument from the Enlightenment and catholicity, and the possibility of mental error, are used to strengthen the legitimacy of adherence to the Church of England as it currently stands. By contrast, the argument about the varieties of Puritan ecclesiology is an attempt to legitimise JI’s own position on Puritanism in the eyes of ‘Puritan’ ministers of a separatistic hue. But even if one accepts these arguments, as Packer does, he nevertheless thinks that the decision whether or not to ‘separate’ could go either way. Remember what he wrote (I reproduce the passage in full)

I do not maintain (I had better say this outright) that choosing to be an Anglican is a virtue, or that choosing not to be one or not to stay one is a vice. Choice, we saw, is necessary, and anyone may conclude that, rather than be Anglican, Methodist, Baptist Union or United Reformed (all which bodies are doctrinally mixed), he should join one of the smaller groups (Brethren, Pentecostals, Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, Reformed Baptists, Free Church of Scotland, etc.) which debar from the ranks of their teachers anyone holding ‘critical’ views of Scripture or rejecting major evangelical tenets. To be sure, some think these smaller bodies purchase doctrinal purity at the price of theological stagnation, and are cultural backwaters out of touch with society around, just as some think Anglican allegiance is an unholy identification with cultural privilege, ecclesiastical worldliness and theological indifferentism. But these matters are arguable both ways, and neither estimate need be accepted. More important is respect for the other man’s deliberate decision, whether or not it coincides with your own. (Ark)

Note: the decision is a forced one; but neither view is virtuous, or vicious; the separation issue is arguable either way: separation and possible stagnation, or Anglican allegiance and the charge of indifferentism. What matters above all is that each respects the other. If the coin comes down in favour of the comprehensive Church of England rather than for the decidedly uncomprehensive Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (say), then let it be so. Don’t bother tossing the coin again hoping for a different, more ‘principled’, outcome. There isn’t one.

There is something a bit odd about this procedure, which makes me wonder if I’ve understood Dr Packer’s position. Packer offers substantive arguments, as we have seen, for his course of action, but at the same time he holds that the opposite course of action may be equally viable, or equally virtuous.

The arguments from the Enlightenment and catholicity, and from mental error are (Packer holds) substantial. Yet according to him they yield a point of view which could easily have gone the other way. It’s as if you recognise the force of these arguments, but nevertheless toss a coin, which lands on its edge. Which way shall I knock it over? Packer’s attitude to this question seems to be one of indifference or near-indifference: you may knock it one way – the way to Anglican comprehensiveness – or you can knock it the other – the way of evangelical separatism. As if to prove this, two of JI’s heroes, Calvin and Owen, were certainly ‘catholic’ in their outlook, (though of course pre-Enlightenment), in the sense that they saw themselves standing in the line of, and inheriting the theological outlook of the ‘catholic church’, but nonetheless they were hardly the friends of comprehensiveness.

I suspect that at the root of the toleration of others implied by comprehensiveness is the contrast in outlook between a church and a sect which JI touches on in the quotation above, but does not develop. Packer’s conviction is that the Christian faith not only serves the special interests of Christians who agree together, but that it ought to serve the wider concerns of society and the state, and of other, discordant Christians. A church is concerned not only with those who loyally and conscientiously attend it, the inner circle, but also with those who are on the periphery, and with the society and culture that the church is situated in. There is need to address society and the culture, to be sure, but also to listen and learn from it. Addressing and listening keeps one on one’s toes, as well as enlivening and refreshing the mind. For such reasons the Christian Church must remain on speaking terms with the culture and with those who influence it, and as a consequence be willing to suffer and to be snubbed and misunderstood as the price of this.

Nevertheless, this procedure seems weird: to offer arguments which you regard as strong but allow them to yield only a permissive conclusion.

But maybe JI wishes to be heard as saying: ‘For my part it does not matter which way the penny falls as far as the bonds of fellowship between true Reformed evangelicals are concerned’. But that does not sound right, either. It hardly seems cricket to treat
arguments as weaker than you believe them to be in order to extend a hand to those who do not rate these arguments at all, or as highly. Does JI rate these arguments, or does he not?

Let’s have another go. Perhaps JI believes that the arguments are strong, but that their strength should not be trumpeted. He regards the position as weighty, but does not wish to present it as being as weighty as it is. That’s perhaps why he cannot say outright ‘the catholicity and Enlightenment, mental error and Puritan arguments are strong. They ground my conviction that the Church of England is the place to be, the boat to fish from. But this does not mean that I cannot do things together with my separatist friends.’ For as he mulls over this position the following thought may occur to him: 'but they might not want to do things with me'. So it is possible that for the sake of holding hands across the separatist-comprehensiveness divide JI has deliberately (or un-selfconsciously) allowed these arguments to be understated so as not unnecessarily to irritate or offend those from whom he differs on such matters. (If this is his deliberate policy, then he might by now be inclined to believe that such an exercise of forbearance has hardly been reciprocated).

This interpretation may be reinforced by observing that JI could harden or strengthen his position by another argument which he certainly finds appealing, but which in the literature that I have read he certainly does not push.

This, which earlier I referred to as the fourth argument, is a rebuttal of an argument for separation that one might called the ‘compromise by involuntary contagion’ view, held by his separatist friends, or some of them. Some separatists argue that comprehensiveness is per se corrupting because in a comprehensive church one is immediately contaminated by error and heresy. To which Packer replies ‘the “guilt by association” argument touches no one who explicitly dissociates himself from the errors concerned’.(Ark) To live in a church that tolerates a variety of views is no more a recipe for catching their contagion than to live in a society which practices toleration is necessarily to be infected by the views tolerated. One might tolerate other views under protest.


It is important to highlight a fallacy that is sometimes committed in discussions about compromise. It may be hinted at or suggested that the advocacy of compromise is itself an act of compromise. It may be. But of course it is not necessarily the case, as JI recognises. A person may advocate toleration – a classic case of compromise – from a position of principle, as say John Milton or John Stuart Mill did. So comprehensiveness may be defended as a principled position even though it might make life more difficult than otherwise. And JI certainly underlines that fact by continually opposing false teaching in the Anglican Communion, as in ‘Keep Yourselves From Idols’ and in his more recent arguments on gender and ministry. Yet though he is committed to each of these positions, the ‘under protest’ argument and the ‘not involuntarily contaminated’ argument, nevertheless they do not figure very prominently in the statement of his anti-separatist position.

So, summing up, it seems to me that JI has a number of serious arguments for adhering to the present Anglican church, but that he deliberately understates them, as well as understating his opposition to an argument for separatism. He does this (I surmise) in an effort to keep open the channels of fellowship and cooperation between himself (and those who think like him), and their separatist evangelical friends.


The view from the pew

Now I wish to consider the following question: for whom is the decision between separation and comprehensiveness a forced one? In the last post we looked particularly at what Packer has written about comprehensiveness in his pamphlet A Kind of Noah’s Ark, quoting it at length. It is noteworthy that that pamphlet is addressed to an imaginary young man, Joe, seeking advice on ordination to the Christian ministry. What Packer then offers, the substance of the argument of the pamphlet, is professional advice for such a student. For an evangelical who is called to the ministry cannot dodge the comprehensiveness question, even though which way he goes may (in Packer’s view) be a matter of judgment which might equally well go the other way.

The whole issue of separation, including the business over the Puritan Conference, was and is essentially conducted from the point of view of ministers of the gospel. And it is routinely analysed exclusively from that point of view. It is largely conducted as a clerical dispute over matters which are, understandably enough, of crucial importance to ministers and their families, but (I shall suggest) of importance to them alone. The question that must be answered by any intending minister is, in what sort of Christian church can I communicate the gospel? If questions of churchmanship and ecclesiastical allegiance matter, then answering that question has enormous consequences for the personal and family life of the minister, for his sphere of influence, and for how his understanding of the Christian gospel will develop.

But what of the ‘ordinary Christian’ who sits (with his family) in the pew or on the chairs, and who seeks to have his faith built up through the means of grace, and to serve Christ and his church locally? It is easy to see that for such people ‘separation’, as a matter of personal decision, is nothing like as important as it is for his minister. For them it is rarely if ever a forced decision. Why is this?

There is first the fact of the waning of denominational strength and distinctives. I reckon that the call to ‘Come out of your mixed denominations’, to form a new association of separatist local congregations cuts little or no ice with most ordinary Christians nowadays. For better or for worse such people are consumers of evangelical religion and retailers of it on a local scale. Primarily they look for Bible teaching and the propounding of evangelical doctrine with a contemporary application, and to receiving pastoral care from ministers who are approachable. If they read at all, they read books from a variety of authors and download pods and browse sites and listen to music from all over. The bishops of the Church of England may meet together to discuss world poverty or the ethical problems raised by trans-sexuality, or ministers meet in conclave in the Westminster Conference, furrowing their brows over the varieties of Arminianism or the evils of Finneyism. But these are of vanishingly small importance to the rank and file of evangelical Christians compared to a minister’s own character and general theological outlook and how he fulfils his ministry in their own congregation. Perhaps it ought not to be so, but it is.

There is also the fact that in a society in which Islam is increasingly prominent Christians of various hues have a tendency to become more conscious of what they have in common rather than what divides them.

If for one reason or another such people become dissatisfied with their local church, they typically move along the road, to another church that will give them what they need, or provide an outlet for their own gifts. (I once heard of a couple who had attended the ministry of Dr Lloyd-Jones. When he left Westminster Chapel they gave up going to any church and worshipped at home, no doubt listening to the Doctor’s sermons on tape. But I suspect that that was a rather extreme case then, and decades later it would be even rarer.) People who are willing to move from congregation to congregation in this way quickly get used to the fact that they may have to recite a creed, or to sing an unaccompanied metrical psalm, and that the minister may wear funny clothes. Or – moving the other way - that the pews have given way to chairs, the prayers are spoken extempore, and the communion cup is in fact numerous little cups on a portable rack. (In fact such cultural markers are also getting eroded, at least in England, as evangelical Anglican adherence to a fixed liturgy and the funny clothes becomes slacker, and as it seems that the bulk of evangelical congregations tend towards a common mean.) An informal census of current church attenders would quickly confirm this impression, I believe.

When, venturing from the confines of their own congregation, Christians go to a rally or family conference to hear Don Carson or Sinclair Ferguson, Donald Macleod or Rico Tice, the question is not whether or not these chaps practice first degree or some other degree of separation, but whether they can open up the Scriptures in a way that informs and exhilarates and changes lives. Further, the Church of England is no longer the Tory Party at prayer, nor Dissent the Whig Party. (‘Dissent’? Dissent from what? The very word has gone out of use.) Once again, the issue here is not whether these trends are desirable or inevitable, but the need to recognise them as matters of fact.

Such church or chapel goers may, in addition, realise that when they or their church supports Tear Fund or the Christian Institute or the Wycliffe Bible Translators, for example, such organisations are similarly formed on a non-denominational or interdenominational basis. In addition to the ‘compromise’ that commitment to such a basis involves, they have also to ‘compromise’ to do their work. Tear Fund has to negotiate with government agencies, local suppliers, and the like. The Christian Institute has to ‘compromise’ in forming alliances with non-Christians In order to head off a piece of proposed legislation, say legislation that would make it a crime to make fun of someone’s religion. In order to train native workers, the Wycliffe Bible Translators has on occasion to become the Summer Institute of Linguistics. And so on.

Public and professional life, indeed all aspects of life, has to involve cooperation, a willingness to accept the second best, to becoming used to not getting one’s way all of the time. In such a world, the world of compromise, the idea of the forced exclusion of someone who has a different though overlapping view from others as to what ‘Puritanism’ means seems distinctly unappealing.