Category Archives: History

Did the Church suppress Jesus' message of forgiveness?

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Tommy Wasserman of Evangelical Textual Criticism reports on a New Dissertation in TC on the Pericope of the Adulteress, i.e. on the passage John 7:53-8:11 which is omitted or relegated to a footnote in some Bibles (including TNIV), because most scholars do not consider it to be an original part of John’s Gospel.

In this new dissertation (I have not read it) John David Punch looks in detail into the text critical issues relating to this passage. According to the author’s summary and Wasserman’s post, Punch examines five theories which could explain the textual evidence. Wasserman writes:

Although the author said in the summary that “[n]o particular theory is advocated for” it is nevertheless clear that in the end he favors #5 Ecclesiastical Suppression …

That is to say, Punch’s favoured theory is, in his own words,

Ecclesiastical Suppression, suggesting that the Church omitted the pericope out of fears that it could be misinterpreted and/or misapplied.

Now Punch also writes that “the theory is likely unproveable”. But if it is true, it raises some interesting questions. Why might the Church have chosen to suppress this particular passage of Scripture? Could it be because this is the clearest teaching in the Bible that sinners should not be condemned, but forgiven and told to “Go and sin no more”?

That message of forgiveness is implicit in the whole of New Testament teaching, but it is not one that the Church has always upheld. At some times in the early Church, perhaps including the period when this passage could have been suppressed, the false teaching was in circulation that sins committed after baptism could not be forgiven. At other times the Church has treated sexual sins as far more serious than most others, and adulterous women and prostitutes as quite beyond hope of salvation – quite against Jesus’ teaching here and elsewhere. To Christian leaders with that attitude this passage, included in most mediaeval and modern Bibles, must always have been an embarrassment.

In our broken world the Church needs to emphasise again Jesus’ teaching of unconditional forgiveness, while not forgetting the “sin no more” conclusion. If this passage can be rehabilitated as a genuine part of the Bible, which this dissertation might help to do, that would be a great help in breaking down the barriers of guilt and unforgiveness which keep so many people apart from one another and from God.

An "Atheist" Perspective on Haiti

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While I have been arguing that atheist arguments prompted by the Haiti earthquake are toothless, my friend and fellow blogger John Richardson, the Ugley Vicar, has been questioning whether they are really rational. John looks from the perspective of an atheist (although he is in fact a Christian minister) mainly at what Richard Dawkins has written about Haiti. He finds in Dawkins’ article anthropomorphic language and an anthropocentric perspective. He finishes by condemning Dawkins for irrationally calling for aid to be sent to Haiti, when the rational response from an evolutionary perspective is to let even more Haitians die, to reduce the world’s overpopulation which threatens the survival of our species. Read it all here.

Of course John’s tongue is firmly in his cheek here. And he is perhaps attacking a straw man version of atheism in response to the way atheists often attack straw man versions of Christianity. But he shows how the thinking of people like Dawkins is in fact firmly based in the Judeo-Christian morality whose roots they want to pull out. Do Dawkins et al really want human society to go where their rationalism seems to lead it? They may be playing with fire. Is it really rational for our society to pay a pension to Dawkins, who is no longer productive or (I presume) reproductive? Wouldn’t it be better in evolutionary terms to have him put to sleep?

It is interesting to see how atheists like Dawkins and John Loftus seems to have as a basic presupposition that human death is the ultimate evil. They use it as an argument that God cannot exist because otherwise he would not have allowed multiple human deaths. But what is their ethical basis for that judgment? It is not originally a Christian one, as Christians have always held, at least in theory, that it is better for them to die and be with God than to suffer in life. It is not an evolutionary one, for as the Nazis infamously argued the survival of the species is enhanced by the death of the less fit and of those past the age of childbearing. It is not even the ethics of a popular culture which is increasingly coming to the view that the terminally ill should be allowed to die. So why are today’s atheists still presupposing that human death is the ultimate evil?

In the Toothless Lions' Den

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Their intentions were the best, but between them Joel Watts and Glenn Peoples have managed to throw me and my blog into a lions’ den, atheist John W. Loftus’ blog Debunking Christianity. I already reported on John’s first response to my post on Haiti. Since then he has responded twice more, here and here, with increasing length in each of his three posts.

In a comment on the second post John writes:

Peter, nice to see your comment but prepare to get fried. If the regular visitors here at DC don’t do this, I will later.

So he can hardly complain at me changing the imagery from a frying pan to a lions’ den. Or perhaps I should have gone for an earlier chapter of Daniel and the burning fiery furnace.

Now as a Christian I trust as Daniel did that God will protect me in the lions’ den. But I feel safe in this particular lions’ den not just because I trust in God but also because, as far as I can tell so far, there is only one lion in it, and perhaps a few cubs, and the lion and its cubs seem to have no teeth or claws. John Loftus is hitting me with childish arguments. He tries to pretend that they have some force, but they have none at all. I have already demolished most of them in my various comments on his posts.

As far as I can see, John’s main argument centres on a rather obscure point. He insists that God could have forced King Charles X of France to change his mind, about imposing reparations on Haiti, without violating that king’s free will. His evidence for this proposition is that some people in the Bible sometimes did what God asked them to do. He completely ignores my point that a lot of other people persistently refused to do what God wanted, and God did not force them to do it. So, John’s argument seems to run, since God did not force the king to repent, God cannot exist, QED. Or have I missed some step in the argument? Can he really not see how weak and full of holes this is? He doesn’t seem even to allow consideration of the possibility that God chooses to let people disobey him, that he has chosen to give us free will.

John claims on his profile page that

I have three master’s degrees in the area of the Philosophy of Religion along with some Ph.D. work. I majored under William Lane Craig and earned a Th.M. degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1985.

My first reaction to this is to despair of the quality of American education, including at TEDS, if they give master’s degrees to someone who has apparently failed to master even the basics of the philosophy of religion, who does not demonstrate any understanding of metaphysical libertarianism or compatibilism – I link to Wikipedia articles which could help to introduce John to these subjects. Or perhaps he is not really ignorant of these things, only feigning ignorance as a debating tactic. Either way, that means it is a waste of time to debate with John, so I won’t do so any more.

magnumdb, commenting on John’s blog, linked to an interesting piece Why It’s So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers, which describes

a pattern. Believers put atheists in no-win situations, so that no matter what atheists do, we’ll be seen as either acting like jerks or conceding defeat. … these “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” tactics aren’t really valid criticisms of atheism.

It seems to me that John Loftus has found a way to respond to these tactics: if you can’t beat them, join them by copying them. I already noted that by him I would be “damned whatever I write”. It seems he wants me to “be seen as either acting like [a] jerk[] or conceding defeat.” Well, I am not going to play his little game. I am getting out of the lions’ den unharmed by his childish arguments and without conceding any measure of defeat.

Haiti: damned whatever I write

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I am happy that atheist propagandist (and #2 biblioblogger) John W. Loftus has linked to my post about Haiti, and has in fact quoted a large chunk of it. I am pleased that, in his own comment, he endorses the Avaaz.org appeal which I also endorsed, for the relief of Haiti’s debts.

But I get the impression from what John writes that I would be damned by him just because I am a Christian, whatever I might choose to say about Haiti. In my post I explicitly denied any intention of explaining why God allowed the earthquake to happen:

That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.

That is the only place in the post where I even mention God. John quoted these words, but then immediately wrote:

Yet, Christians still try to open any window to show their God is not to be blamed for anything.

Well, some Christians may do this, but I quite explicitly denied making any attempt in this post to show anything of the sort. I can’t help thinking that John would have taken anything I wrote about Haiti as an attempt “to show [my] God is not to be blamed for anything”?

But perhaps I should blame not John but Christian blogger (and #5 biblioblogger) Glenn Peoples for this misunderstanding. In a comment which John quotes Glenn describes my post as

a better representation of a Christian response to Pat Robertson’s unChristian comments.

Well, thanks, Glenn, but it was not really intended to be a Christian response. Apart from that one sentence mentioning God, I wrote nothing in the post which couldn’t have been written by an atheist. Indeed I challenged John to find anything in the post that he actually disagreed with.

In fact, here is my entire comment on John’s post, to which I have now been awaiting any reply for nine hours:

Thanks for the link to my post at Gentle Wisdom. But I can’t help thinking that I would be damned for anything I wrote about Haiti (and you happened to read), just because I am a Christian. After all, I didn’t mention God in this post except to say “That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster.” Is there actually anything in this post that you disagree with?

But in answer to some of your questions, yes, God could have for example spoken to King Charles X (or for that matter to today’s bankers) and asked him to forgive Haiti’s debts. Very likely he did speak to him. But the king, as a selfish and sinful man (like all of us), didn’t do what God asked him, or would have asked him. God could have forced him to do it, but only by turning people into robots.

And he did show the Haitians that their country was an earthquake zone, through devastating earthquakes in the 18th century. But they went ahead and built unstable buildings there anyway.

How about this argument: Suppose you have a teenage child who goes out, with your permission, and commits some minor offence. Are you to blame? Well, you could have locked the young person up at home 24 hours a day, so yes, by the standards you apply to God, that anything you could have stopped is your fault, you are to blame. But is that responsible parenting? No, it is child abuse. Similarly God could lock us up 24 hours a day so we are unable to sin, but that would be to abuse us, not to be a responsible and loving Father.

If atheists like John Loftus and Richard Dawkins want their arguments to be taken seriously, they need to make an effort to understand and interact with what thoughtful Christians write, rather than offering only ad hominem responses to them and directing their only attempts at proper argumentation at extremists and straw men.

Haiti's debts and the USA's benefit

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This morning I received an e-mail from Avaaz.org about a new campaign to drop Haiti’s debt, which has already attracted nearly 300,000 signatures, including mine. I was horrified to read (in the e-mail, the same text is in the “Tell Your Friends” box at the web page) that

even as aid flows in to Haiti’s desperate communities, money is flowing out to pay off the country’s crushing debt — over $1 billion in unfair debt racked up years ago by unscrupulous lenders and governments.

There  was also interesting background which I had not been aware of:

After Haitian slaves rose up and won their independence in 1804, France demanded billions in reparations — launching a spiral of poverty and unjust debt that has lasted two centuries.

I decided to look into this in more depth.

In 1791, following the French Revolution, the slaves of France’s Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled against their white masters and seized control of a large part of the territory. Partly in response, in 1794 the French National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies (it was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833), and eventually an uneasy peace was restored to Saint-Domingue. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruler or France, reimposed slavery in some colonies, but not in Saint-Domingue. However, this move prompted a new rebellion there which the French government was unable to put down. So when in 1804 the colony gained its independence and took the name Haiti, despite what is often claimed this was not technically the result of a slave rebellion.

Saint-Domingue, with an area of 27,750 square kilometres, had been only a tiny part, much less than 1%, of the French possessions in the Americas. Within living memory France had claimed almost half of North America, known as New France. The southern half of this area was called Louisiana. But in 1763 the French were forced to cede all of New France. The northern part, Canada, became British. Louisiana east of the Mississippi also came under British control before passing to the United States in 1783. Spain took the part west of the Mississippi, as well as New Orleans.

Bonaparte (who crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon in 1804) dreamed of a new French empire in the Americas. So in 1800 he imposed a treaty on Spain by which the part of Louisiana which had been under Spanish control since 1763 was returned to France. However, Bonaparte never took effective control of this territory. And by 1803, facing the loss of Saint-Domingue and a renewed war with Great Britain, he gave up his plans for a French empire in the Americas.

So, when in that year the young United States sent negotiators to Paris seeking to buy the city of New Orleans, Napoleon offered to sell not just the city but the whole of his newly regained territory, Louisiana west of the Mississippi, which consisted of more than 2 million km² of mostly good agricultural land. The Americans quickly agreed to this purchase, for a price of 78 million francs or $15 million, that is, “less than three cents per acre ($7.40 per km²)”. According to Wikipedia,

The purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, comprises around 23% of current U.S. territory. …

Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement, stated, “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States …”

Indeed it did, if not “forever” at least up to 2010. This area, sold to the USA at a bargain price for political reasons, has become the breadbasket of the world and a major driving force of US economic strength over the last 200 years.

(Of course all this land, Haiti as well, had earlier been seized with little or no compensation from its Native American inhabitants. But that’s another story.)

Contrast the French response to Haiti. This tiny former colony gained its independence in 1804, but France did not at first recognise this independence. Again according to Wikipedia,

In July 1825, King Charles X of France sent a fleet of fourteen vessels and thousands of troops to reconquer the island. Under pressure, President Boyer [of Haiti] agreed to a treaty by which France formally recognized the independence of the nation in exchange for a payment of 150 million francs (the sum was reduced in 1838 to 90 million francs) – an indemnity for profits lost from the slave trade.

In other words, the Haitians were asked to pay twice as much for the freedom of their tiny mountainous republic than the USA was asked to pay for the Louisiana Purchase, of an area 77 times larger than Haiti. The people of Haiti did manage to pay the 90 million francs, estimated to be worth billions of dollars at today’s prices. But, according to this 2009 article from the Sunday Times (linked to by Avaaz.org), it took them over a century to do so:

In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

It is no wonder that in recent years, as I discovered in this article, at least some

Haitians Demand Reparations
for the Ransom Paid for its Independence.

I can’t bear to summarise the picture of Haiti last year given in the Sunday Times article, of extreme poverty exacerbated by overpopulation and a series of rulers who have enriched themselves at the expense of their country.

Then into this ongoing disaster zone came this month’s devastating earthquake. Was this a natural disaster? Well, yes and no. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake was of course a natural event. But that was not the main cause of the loss of life. I have lived through a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in a major city, in Baku in 2000. (Well, they said at the time it was magnitude 7.0, but the latest data gives a figure of 6.8.) In that earthquake “26 people died as a primary result, but only three people in collapsing buildings”. The latest (28th January) confirmed death toll in Haiti is 170,000.

Why the huge difference? Yes, there were probably geological factors which caused the ground acceleration in Haiti to be higher than in Baku. But surely there is far more here. It must be the poverty and overcrowding in Port-au-Prince, and the poor standard of building work in a known earthquake zone, which have greatly exacerbated the damage and casualty rate. In addition poverty and poor infrastructure have hampered relief efforts.

That is not an attempt to answer the question of why God allowed this natural disaster. But it is intended to put the disaster in perspective.

So we can contrast here the continuing poverty of Haiti with the wealth of France which enriched itself from reparations from Haiti, with the wealth of my own UK which continued to enrich itself from slavery in the Caribbean for decades after the French liberated their slaves, and with the wealth of the USA which benefited so much from France letting them buy Louisiana at such a bargain price. These are some of the roots of continuing injustice in the 21st century world.

So I urge all of you to support the Avaaz.org campaign:

Petition to Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, IADB, and bilateral creditors:

As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.

This should be done not just as an emotional response to the earthquake but as a way of putting right the injustices of the past. And it should be a step on the way to cancelling all the debts owed by poor countries to the rich ones who have exploited them in the past and continue to do so.

Experiencing God and believing the Bible

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James Spinti makes an interesting point, in his musings at the end of his review of  The Bible Among the Myths by John Oswalt. James writes about how he approaches the historicity of the biblical text, probably thinking mostly of the Old Testament:

I would be classified as a “maximalist” by most. The reason I would be a “maximalist” is that I have seen and experienced God breaking in on my life and the lives of others. Once you have experienced that, the stories in the Bible are not so hard to believe. If you read the archaeological reports and the biblical text with a “hermeneutic of sympathy” rather than a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” you can see that it is possible for the text to be correct.

Don’t misunderstand what I just wrote! I am not saying that archaeology “proves” the Bible! I don’t think that archaeology can “prove” anything. Archaeology can be used to interpret what we see, and what we see depends on our theological paradigm. If you have a paradigm of non-divine intervention, you will come to a radically different conclusion than one that allows divine intervention.

One view is not more scholarly than the other! To believe in a God who can—and does—intervene in human affairs is not naïve and unlearned; it is taking the given data and analyzing them just as carefully as possible. As Sherlock Holmes used to say, if you look at the data and you have dismissed every other possibility, the remaining one must be true—however illogical it seems!

I would echo all of this. I too “have seen and experienced God breaking in on my life and the lives of others”. So I too have no trouble believing the stories in the Bible, at least from Genesis 12 onwards. That doesn’t mean that archaeology proves the Bible. It does mean that I trust the biblical text unless archaeology disproves it – and I don’t think it ever has done, although it has prompted some reinterpretation.

Very often when “minimalists” claim that archaeology disproves the Bible they are arguing from silence. For example, they hadn’t found the ruins of Jerusalem from the time of David and Solomon, so they argued that it never existed. But the real reason those ruins hadn’t been found was that no one had looked for them in the expected place, because this place was under an Arab village. In recent years, controversially, Israeli archaeologists have been looking there, and guess what they have found: ruins of a significant city provisionally dated to the time of David and Solomon! But have those “minimalists” eaten their words?

Of course there are also those whose argument that the Bible is inaccurate is basically that miracles and predictive prophecy cannot happen, and so stories with these elements cannot be true. I can understand that argument as it follows logically from that world view. But from what I have seen and experienced I know that that world view is inadequate, that God can do what appear to us as miracles and can reveal what will happen in the future. So I have no trouble believing these stories.

Yes, indeed the genuinely Christian approach to the biblical text is not the scholarly “hermeneutic of suspicion”, meaning an assumption (usually applied to the Bible far more than to other ancient literature) that the text is unreliable unless it can be proved right, but a “hermeneutic of sympathy”, an expectation that the text is right unless proved wrong.

Calvin spoke in tongues

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The great Reformer John Calvin “may have spoken in tongues”, according to Ben Witherington, in an article in Christianity Today to which TC Robinson links. (Actually more or less the same article was published online in July this year, and noted by Brian among others.) The evidence seems to be that “one morning he woke up and found himself speaking in lingua barbaria.” Witherington refers only to a half remembered article, which, he writes,

went on to speculate that Calvin may have spoken in tongues!

Perhaps it is safer to use the word “speculate”, but what else could this lingua barbaria have been? But I wish someone could find the original article “in Gordon-Conwell’s newspaper”, or the letter from Calvin from which these words are taken.

Meanwhile in another article in the same issue of CT Roger Olson writes:

Calvin was no charismatic, but he was closer to it than some Reformed people readily admit. At least one does not read much about the crucial role of the Holy Spirit in their own interpretations of Calvin’s theology. This Arminian, raised Pentecostal, deeply admires and enthusiastically applauds the attention Calvin himself gave to the Spirit by basing even the authority of the written Word on the Spirit and his work.

At the same time, of course, Calvin also warned against basing any truth claims about God on ecstatic revelations claimed to be from the Holy Spirit. This is a relevant warning against modern-day prophets who say things like, “The apostle Paul would be surprised if he knew the things the Spirit is teaching today.” According to Calvin—and I agree with him—the Spirit does not reveal new truths; the Spirit and the written Word are interdependent and inseparable.

I agree too. But this sounds a bit like a straw man argument: how many people are really saying things like “The apostle Paul would be surprised if he knew the things the Spirit is teaching today”? If this is Olson’s definition of “charismatic”, then neither Calvin nor I are charismatics, but then nor are most of the well known charismatic leaders, who are very careful to teach that “the Spirit does not reveal new truths”, especially not “truth claims about God”, but only applies the old biblical truths to new situations and individuals’ lives.

Yes, we charismatics may agree with the words of John Robinson, surely no charismatic, in his farewell sermon to the Pilgrims leaving for America on the Mayflower:

I Charge you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.

It is the task of the Holy Spirit to bring out this “more truth and light”, but only what is already in the word of God. And, even though Robinson went on to criticise the Calvinists of his day who “stick fast where they were left by that great man of God” (rather like some Reformed Calvinists today!), Calvin would surely have agreed with his sentiments.

Meeting Suzanne, and viewing the treasures of London

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Last Sunday my fiancée Lorenza and I were very pleased to meet Suzanne McCarthy, who blogs at Suzanne’s Bookshelf. She writes about meeting me here. She and a friend were visiting London from Canada. We had arranged to meet up at the British Library, to look at the gallery of manuscripts and printed treasures.

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Gospel of St Matthew the Evangelist, initial page

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Gospel of St Matthew the Evangelist, initial page

I had been there before, but still found the collection amazing. Suzanne’s primary interest was the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels, which  include the oldest surviving translation of any of the Bible into (Old) English. I was more excited to find sitting together in the same museum case two of the three most important Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus (Vaticanus remains in the Vatican). In the next case was part of the Old Testament of Sinaiticus, now separately bound, which is one of the main sources for the Septuagint text.

St Lukes Gospel, Codex Sinaiticus, c.350

St Luke's Gospel, 'Codex Sinaiticus', c.350

[Sinaiticus] was made up of over 1,460 pages, each of which measured approximately 41cm tall and 36cm wide. … At the British Library the largest surviving portion – 347 leaves, or 694 pages – includes the whole of the New Testament.

We also paid a visit to the nearby British Museum. This was far too brief to take in all its treasures, but we got to see the Rosetta Stone, the Assyrian reliefs, and the not yet returned Parthenon friezes, or Elgin Marbles.

The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone

Then we visited the National Portrait Gallery, my first visit, where we found the originals of some familiar images, including this one of John Wesley which has featured on many blogs:

John Wesley, by Nathaniel Hone, oil on canvas, circa 1766

John Wesley, by Nathaniel Hone, oil on canvas, circa 1766

It is a privilege to live only 1½ hours away from such world class treasures, of which these are just a sample. I really should make more of an effort to explore them in detail.

Darwin, Wedgwood, Alpha and the anti-slavery movement

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A chance to blog today on an unexpected day off because of snow …

The Wedgwood family is in the news. The famous pottery firm founded in the 18th century by Josiah Wedgwood is currently in administration, i.e. just short of bankruptcy. Now two eighth generation descendants of Josiah, both called Tom Wedgwood, are bidding to take back family control of the firm.

Meanwhile an article links Josiah’s anti-slavery views with those of his third generation descendant, Charles Darwin. Darwin’s wife was also a grandchild of Josiah. The Wedgwood family’s campaign against slavery was based on the Bible verse which they used as a slogan, “God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Men” (based on Acts 17:26 KJV; “blood” here comes from a textual variant which is probably not original, but “of one” is certainly original and probably refers to Adam). This same concept of the common descent of humanity is evident in the caption of the anti-slavery medallion designed by Josiah, a kneeling slave asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

So Darwin took this biblical concept of the common descent of humanity from the Wedgwoods and used it as the basis of his own anti-slavery campaigning. But also, when he observed differences between animal and bird species analogous to those between human races, he extended this concept to the animal kingdom:

Since species were only extended races, they too must share an ancestry. He moved from talking of the common “father” of mankind to an “opossum”-like fossil as the father of all mammals.

Darwin was one of the first to suggest this common descent of different species of animals. And indeed this lies at the heart of his theory of evolution. Since this theory is seen so widely by Christians as opposed to biblical truth (I don’t agree, by the way), it is ironic that it was inspired in part by a Bible verse.

Meanwhile I have just received a new copy of  Alpha News, reports about the Alpha course and testimonies from those who have done it (November 2008-February 2009 issue; there is no online edition but some of the articles, not the ones I mention in this post, are online at this site). There are two things in it which relate to this post.

An extended testimony in this newspaper (which I haven’t read yet) is entitled “I was a slave trader”. No, this isn’t about 18th century converted slave ship captain John Newton. Amazingly, it is the story of a man of our own times, Dave Blakeney from Manchester, who was involved in slave trading in Angola in the 1970s. This is a reminder that Wedgwood’s campaign is by no means over.

Also in the paper is a news article about the new office building for the 150 staff of Alpha and of the church that set it up, Holy Trinity Brompton. The article is also on the HTB website, but sadly without the pictures. The interesting thing about this building, in Cromwell Road, London, is that it is immediately opposite the Natural History Museum.

Unlike some people I don’t see a fundamental opposition between science and Christian faith. Indeed I commend Doug Chaplin and Henry Neufeld for pointing out the fallacies in this approach. But I can’t help seeing something of the bravery of David facing Goliath in Alpha setting up their offices right opposite one of the world’s great temples of Darwinism.

The oldest living fossils

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Roll over, Coelacanth! You are no longer the world’s oldest living fossil, but a mere youngster, believed extinct 80 million years ago until discovered alive in 1938. Actually you weren’t the oldest such Lazarus taxon: that honour used to go to the Monoplacophora class of molluscs, thought to be extinct for 380 million years until discovered alive in 1952. But now an animal has been discovered which makes both of these seem young.

As the BBC reports, scientists have found an explanation for strange tracks made in rocks dated up to 1.8 billion years old. The old theory was that these tracks were made by primitive worms, but there was a problem in that this was more than a billion years before the first worms, or multi-celled creatures of any kind, appeared. The solution has now come to light on the sea bed near the Bahamas; I guess someone was enjoying the idyllic diving conditions when they spotted tracks just like the ancient ones. And they then discovered what was making them: “A single-celled ball about the size of a grape” which crawls slowly through the sea bed mud. Similar “globular or bulbous collapsible bodies” were found fossilised in the ancient rocks.

So here we have a creature which seems to have been crawling about the sea bed unnoticed, covered in mud, and little changed for billions of years, while above them continents have risen and fallen and the seas and the land have been ruled by a succession of different kinds of creatures which haven’t even noticed them. These little balls of jelly seem to be the ultimate survivors.

But even this unnamed creature is young compared to the blue-green algae which form stromatolites. The age given for the oldest stromatolites known to have been formed by living creatures is 2.7 billion years, and they are still being formed in the same way. In that ancient period stromatolites were common, but now they are very rare, and indeed one of the few places where they survive today is the sea bed near the Bahamas.