Theology – Page 9 – All Things Considered

16 May

The Religion of Peace and Love

A pregnant woman in Sudan has been sentenced to be hanged for converting to Christianity. Mariam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, who is being held in detention with her 20-month-old son, had been ordered to abandon her Christian faith and return to Islam. She has also been charged with adultery for marrying a Christian man. The death sentence was given despite appeals by Western embassies for compassion and respect for religious freedom. At a court in Khartoum, Judge Abbas al Khalifa said: “We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged.”

(Courage, Mariam: remember what Jesus managed to achieve in three days)

The judge also sentenced her to a hundred lashes for “adultery.”

I am puzzled by this and I should like to know whether this barbarism is being perpetrated in the name of Islam, or is it only “Islamist”? Actually, I can answer that question myself: the Koran prescribes the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their religion. That is quite definite: the Muslim scriptures are the basis for all Islamic doctrine and legality. Thus this is not a question of “extremism.” It’s in the book, as they say. So any Muslim who does not believe that the death penalty should be prescribed for those who convert from that ideology to the Christian religion is simply not a faithful Muslim. But I do have a further question: If I criticise the judgment of the Sudanese court, am I guilty of “Islamophobia”? But the word “phobia” means an irrational and neurotic fear. And there is nothing irrational or neurotic about fearing a religion which institutes barbarism.

Also today we learn that state schools in Birmingham which are alleged to have established Islamic teaching and Islamic social practices are to be re-secularised by parachuting in “super-heads” from high-achieving schools in the area. Certainly – for the time being at least – Birmingham’s troubles are little ones compared with the fate decreed for Mariam in Sudan. But the authorities will not be able to arrest the Islamic incursions into our national life. The process is entrenched and the speed and intensity of it is increasing. Only be patient, give it time…

I have been looking at the figures produced in the 2011 census and others from the Office for National Statistics. There were one-and-a-half million Muslims in this country in 2001. By 2011 there were 2.7 million. The census further reported that our Muslim population is increasing at ten times the rate of non-Muslims. And there are 100,000 converts to Islam every year.

A friend told me that he has a colleague who describes himself as “a moderate Muslim” – an oxymoron, for there can be no such thing. You are either a faithful Muslim – one who accepts the Islamic scriptures including Sharia – or you are faithless. Anyhow, this man means by calling himself a moderate Muslim that he occasionally eats pork and likes a drink. My friend then asked him, “D’you think Islam will be the religion of this country within fifty years?”

“Of course,” he replied.

Fifty years is a long time to wait. We’re just going to have to be patient.

13 May

Christianist Terrorism?

Yesterday I wrote about the media’s use of two words – “Islamic” and “Islamist” – and asked if they were in any way related. I apologise to coming back to the same subject so soon but it is, I believe, important and there is another aspect to it which I had not thought of yesterday.

Terrible things are happening in the Central African Republic. For instance, a Christian woman had her hands chopped off by a gang of Muslims. This provoked horrific reprisals. It was not an isolated confrontation: such atrocities, and worse, are happening in the CAR every day. The way these events are usually described gives pause for thought. In every report I have read, the Christians’ bloody acts of savagery are described as having been perpetrated by Christians. I think this is fair enough, for Christian is what they are. I decided to broaden my enquiry further and so considered other areas of conflict in which Christians have resorted to violence: in Sudan, for example, and in Somalia – and even in Kenya. In every case the reporting is distinguished by its accuracy and respect for the plain truth. The atrocities were committed by Christians and the reports said exactly that, neither more nor less.

There was no mealy-mouthed attempt at camouflage by euphemism. No use of a spurious and dishonest neologism such as “Christianist.” So when acts of terror are perpetrated by Muslims – something which is not unknown – may we be allowed to say so, and so abolish this lying evasion “Islamist”?

Regrettably, this will not happen. For while, as we know, all religions are equal, some religions are more equal than others.

29 Apr

The New Laodiceans

Archbishop Justin Welby has contributed to the discussion about whether Britain is a Christian country. He says, “The influence of a moderate and careful and generous Christian faith has enabled us to be welcoming to other faiths.”

“Careful” and “generous” I can understand and wholeheartedly support. But what does he mean by “moderate”?

I recall the old joke by Jonathan Miller when he said: “I’m not really a Jew – just jew-ish. Not the whole hog.” Is the Archbishop suggesting that Christians should not be fully-fledged but, as it were, just Christian-ish? What about all those exhortations in the New Testament which tell Christ’s followers to be fervent, to be prepared to suffer and even to give one’s life for the faith? St Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

“Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.”

Did St Paul really suffer the thirty-nine lashes five times – and all those other privations – for being “moderate”?

Also with characteristic moderation Jesus said, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

I suppose the prophets were stoned for their being so “moderate”? And the martyrs – crucified, thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, strangled, drowned? No doubt on account of the fact that they were all:

Civilised men of moderate religion; Of flexible principle and estimable pragmatism; Unrestricted by the petty syllogism; And as easy in agreement as our Justin himself.

Oh how nice it is to be “moderate”! Admittedly, it wasn’t very nice when men such as Bishop Polycarp, Thomas More, Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley and countless other immoderate men were put to the death for their beliefs. But at least these things happened in an age when Christianity had not yet been emptied of serious content.

“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, ‘These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth’.”

Spew thee out of my mouth. Oh dear, I do wish the Holy Spirit would learn not to use such immoderate language!

23 Mar

The Real Church of England

I have at last discovered where the real Church of England has been hiding out. This has taken some time. I moved to Eastbourne last May and for the last ten months I have been trying to find a place to worship where prayer remains valid. In the process I have come across a great variety of tomfoolery, religion so trendy it sets your teeth on edge, sackless thespian parsons who put the stress on all the wrong words: one said, every week, “He took bread and gave IT to them.” Liturgies at once so tedious and infantilised they might have been written by a partnership between the circumlocution office and Enid Blyton’s Noddy. One church so fastidiously committed to interior design it could have had its own stall at the Daily Mail’s ideal homes exhibition: instead of Epistle and Gospel candles, one on each side of the altar, rather a candelabra all at one end. And then the politically-correct prayers about “rights” and right-on causes, the intercessions elaborated into something resembling the grand tour. They forget, these clerical politicos, Evelyn Waugh’s saying, “Praying for Nicaragua when you live in Tunbridge Wells is the first sign of madness.” There are many other such signs following: the Peace, which is invariably the noisiest part of the service with all its froth and phoney friendliness; the aisle-dancing; the bloody guitars; the inane and unmusical choruses which repeat half a dozen time words that were not worth singing once.

Well good bye to all that.

I have found the real Church of England alive and well in the parish of St Thomas A Becket, Lewes. And it only takes me three-quarters of an hour to get there, door to door. I take the train. But honestly, I’d go if I had to walk it. The Service is Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion and nothing else – except the welcome addition of four traditional hymns. No burbling on with imbecile mentions of parishioners whose birthdays fall that week. No more of that sickening new version of the Prayer for the Church in which the bishops have accorded themselves precedence over the Queen. English in all its lapidary simplicity and easy-goingness.

The priest is a priest. He has presided there for thirty years and he is well past retirement age. There is no vicarage. Fr George lives in his own house in the parish. He is not paid. I said Fr George but he is known to all his parishioners as Brother George – because he was once a monk who left the monastery to come to Lewes to look after his mother when she became frail, and he has been there ever since. Sage and the nearest thing to a saint I’ve ever met. He preaches with disarming plainness and invariably about fathomless truths. So easy and all unaffected. One of the reasons he comes across so well – quite apart from the learned holiness of the man – is that his words echo those found in the real Bible and the real Prayer Book. There is no jargon, no pretence, no thespian frolics, no thrashing around to force a link between St Paul’s Epistle and what they were banging on about on the BBC news bulletin; and no affected sincerity. He is the complete natural, a man as at home inside his own skin as i have ever come across. There is a tangible bond of love between Brother George and his people: the real thing, all calm and unstated, not the hyper-inflated emotionality and sickening touchy-feelyness which is the aroma filling the air in so many parish churches.

The proper words. Scholarliness. Honesty. Brotherly love. I am healed of my ten months’ distemper by the mere touch of the hem of his garment.

11 Mar

Hurrah for Thought for the Day!

Three cheers for Thought for the Day! You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? Naturally, I’m not extending to the programme a universal enconium, but today’s talk, given by the former Chief Rabbit Jonathan Sachs was a model of what such things should be and a flash of light in the encircling gloom. Dr Sachs reported new findings to the effect that male birds do not, as Darwin preached, sing only as part of a show of sexual advertisement – in the attempt to find a lady bird and get their genes passed on – but to announce their presence and tell anyone listening they’re glad to be alive. And the lady birds do the singing too.

This is so refreshing for it pulls the rug from under the satanic hypothesis of genetic determinism, that reductionist notion that our whole sense of beauty, truth, value and love is nothing but the accidental and meaningless spin-off from ineluctable evolutionary theory.

While we’re at it, we should apply Dr Sachs’ antidote to those other two deterministic, reductionist monsters Freud and Marx. For Freud, we are little more than our unconscious motivation which we are powerless to influence – short of turning up on his couch for seven years’ worth of narcissistic blather and, of course, paying the psychoanalyst’s fees. For Marx, the motivations for all our human and political relationships are mere economics. The fact that Darwin, Marx and Freud have been for so long worshipped as our true – and perhaps only – teachers and prophets is the supreme intellectual tragedy of our time.

Satanic indeed. There is no better word to describe the dirt that these deterministic ideologists have done on human beings. For we are not entirely in the grip of unconscious motives, economic laws or selfish genes. There are first-order experiences of which we are all acutely and continuously conscious, and which are real: self-sacrifice, wit, humour, self-mockery, the power of music, poetry, fine painting. Beauty, Truth and Love – these three. And the greatest of these is love

Darwin, Freud, Marx? Aw shucks, they’re just for the birds…

10 Mar

More Gorm, Please, Professor Wilkinson

God help those being taught theology at St John’s College, Durham where the principal is Rev’d Professor David Wilkinson. He came on Radio Four’s Thoughtless Today at a quarter to eight this morning to tell us that we’ve learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all previous history. A pity we haven’t at the same time learned to use the brain a bit better than Wilkinson did. I suppose it was rather early in the day. First he caricatured Greek philosophy to a degree that would have Plato and Aristotle suing for misrepresentation, for neither of those gentlemen believed what was attributed to them by Wilkinson: “Body evil, mind good.”

We were then treated to Wilkinson’s own view on the subject. He reckons that the body, the mind and the soul are three different parts of the human person which interact. Now forgive me if I comment on this opinion with the use of some technical jargon. Wilkinson’s view is what we philosophers call gormless. For body, mind and soul are not three things; they are three aspects of one and the same thing. The mind and the soul do not inhabit the body like ghosts in a machine. For the body is material, and the only things that can exist inside a material thing are other material things. Thus the body is the material aspect of the person, the mind is the mental aspect of the same person, and the soul (if there is such a thing) is the person’s spiritual aspect.

Wittgenstein warned us against first forming a picture of something and then becoming enslaved by that picture. For the picture may be a false picture – just like the one drawn by Wilkinson, in fact.

07 Mar

Thoughtless Every Day

I never imagined I would one day disagree with Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, the best (the only?) bishop we have. But he has just said that Dawn French – the Vicar of Dibley – should not be allowed to present Thought for the Day on 29^th March, Red Nose Day, because “this would detract from the programme’s seriousness.” At times like this, I’m tempted to echo John McEnroe’s admonishing of the referee: “You cain’t be serious, Michael!” TFTD serious? Don’t make me laugh.

The genial Today presenter Evan Davis says he would like to hear “serious and spiritually-minded secularists” on Thought for the Day. But, with one or two distinguished exceptions, these are the only sort of speakers we ever hear in that slot. There is nothing authentically religious about TFTD. It is an anodyne, multi-faith political pep-talk from the soft Left and so bum-clenchingly politically-correct as to be beyond satire. It is the social gospel – only without the gospel.

The presenters always trendily try to link their “thought” to an item in the day’s news:

“Jesus didn’t go in for binge-drinking but, after a long day chastising the money-changers and the greedy City bankers, there was nothing he liked better than to chill out over a few beers with his disciples – though he was careful not to exceed the recommended daily alcohol units…”

“Guru Nanak did not stigmatise obese people but showed his love for them by distributing low calorie curry dinners…”

“In one of his many speeches about global warming, the Buddha…”

The array of TFTD presenters is like Grand Guignol. There is Anne Atkins, formerly the terrifically scary bible-basher, now mutated into a terrifically scary agony aunt and post-modern novelist. And the faux-proletarian Dr Giles Fraser, fully paid-up member of the Church Militant Tendency.

Lord Harries, the retired Bishop of Oxford, comes on every few weeks to support embryo research and always justifies the killing of embryos by saying that many of them die anyway – a vivid demonstration of TFTD’s non-sequiturial style: like arguing that because some people fall under buses, it’s OK to push them.

There is a tremendously progressive Muslim with a name and an intonation that sounds like Moaner Cyd Eekie. They still nostalgically wheel out Rabbi Lionel Blue now and again to tell us that he’s not very well, Gay and trying his best to exorcise his Woody Allenish obsession with the Grim Reaper. I haven’t heard Bishop “Tom” Butler for a while. It was always nice to hear him reminisce about how, returning soberly from a reception at the Irish Embassy, he was discovered lying down in the back seat of someone else’s car, throwing toys out of the window: “I’m a bishop. It’s what I do!”

Hardly any of the contributors to TFTD are what you might call religious. Rather they translate traditional biblical stories into secular metaphors. For example, the feeding of the 5000 was no miracle but only a lesson in “sharing.” No more than a socialist picnic. Jesus did not rise physically from the tomb: it was just a case of the disciples’ subjective experience of “new life” – though how they gained this experience if Jesus remained dead they don’t explain.

There is no need for a religious slot these days. The BBC relentlessly preaches its own syncretistic secular religion, ecumenically combining anti-Americanism, hatred of Israel, addiction to pop-music, multiculturalism, the adulation of tawdry celebs and left wing playwrights and an obsession with climate change. Amen.

Good morning, John, good morning Sarah and good morning Jim… On the other hand what really would be a turn up is if a traditional, full-believing Christian were ever allowed on the programme. No chance. He wouldn’t get closer than a Sabbath day’s journey.

07 Mar

Not Architect but Maker

Nihil ex nihilo fit – nothing comes out of nothing. This is the starting point for the “debate” or slanging-match between the creationists and the new atheists. It is a very old argument and it is not very enlightening, despite its venerable credentials. It is in essence the same argument as that between the 18th century deists such as William Paley and their positivistic opponents such as David Hume. It goes even further back, to Aquinas and the scholastics and eventually to Aristotle. David Bentley Hart comments acerbically that the two sides in this dispute are so fatuous that they deserve each other.

For God is not the Great Architect, as the freemasons vainly believe. God is not the supreme technologist and fabricator, the one who made all the bits: he is the Creator. God was regarded by Augustine and Aquinas as the First Cause, but they didn’t mean that God set some mechanical sequence in motion and then, as it were, retired. By “First Cause” they were not talking about some aspect of thermodynamics: they meant that God is the One who gives reality to what otherwise would remain forever only potential.

This is what the Creed means when, quoting the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, it says by whom all things were made.

God does not therefore fabricate the world: rather he bestows upon the natural order its being. Something of this can be seen in the very first verses of Genesis where in the beginning there was not nothingness, but the earth was without form and void. It is God who gives form – being – to the formless void.

Those, like Richard Dawkins and indeed all materialists, who argue that the material order requires no Creator and that it is self-generating and self-sufficient – that there is nothing but the material order – fail to understand that, if that were the case, there is no way we could ever know that it is the case. Because knowledge implies thoughts, and thoughts are not material.

Perhaps there is an analogy between God’s creativity and ours – which we should in any case expect since we are made in God’s image. So the novelist when he creates his novel does not make the pen and paper with which he writes it though, of course, without the pen and paper, the novelist would not be able to present to us the characters he invents for us. These characters are not the ink marks on the page: they are the production of the mind of the novelist.

Similarly, we are creatures created by the mind of God. Specifically, as Augustine says, by the love of God. And God’s act of creation is not like the big bang. It is continuous and everlasting. Augustine says that if God were to stop loving us even for a moment, we should immediately cease to exist. Fortunately for us, God cannot do this. For God is love and he is bound to act in accordance with his nature. Augustine goes further and says, God is love and nothing else. Thus if God were to cease loving, he would cease to be God. (To express this anthropomorphically, God would cease to exist)

Incidentally, that old chestnut objection to the existence of God expressed by the question, Who made God? can be applied more pertinently to the big bang: if the big bang were really the first cause, what caused the big bang? In other words, how could a purely natural order naturally generate itself?

Dante underscores this truth at the end of The Divine Comedy when he speaks of the love that moves the sun and the other stars

Thus our existence is not our material features, but it is our being, our reality, bestowed upon us by the gift of God.

Once we understand this, the familiar difficulties with the idea of life after death entirely disappear.

06 Mar

Dumber Still and Dumber the Church’s Bounds are Set

Love Life: Live Lent.

The Archbishop of York is taking seriously his responsibility for the spiritual life of the nation. He has written the Foreword to three booklets to guide us through Lent: one for “The Family”; one for “Adults and Youth” and the other for “Kids.” Or is that last one for nanny goats?

These glossy booklets feature Mr Men style cartoon pictures whom we must suppose are meant to represent the general public. Achingly politically-correct with all races represented – but no fat people or smokers. Dumbing-down beyond the farthest reaches of infantilisation, the booklets urge us to “Do fun things together. Create a space in your home…a corner of a room…an understairs cupboard… a shelf…make a prayer den using furniture and blankets…gather some objects that are fun to touch, feel and smell: a piece of velvet, feathers, a tray of sand, lavender bags or pine cones.” These should be enough to satisfy at least some of the more mentionable fetishists among us.

And what are we supposed to do in the prayer space? “Take in some pebbles, shells or feathers” – presumably to demonstrate impeccable ecumenical relations with primitive animists and tree-huggers. And prayers are supplied: “Dear God, make wrong things right…” But this is not God; only the sentimental wish-fulfilment of Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy We are even educated into the correct manual acts to perform while praying this desolate prayer: “Shake your finger from side to side for ‘wrong’ and then do thumbs up for ‘right’.”

You feel there should be a caution not to do this near a window in case the neighbours see you and phone for the men in white coats.

Lent involves us in acts of practical devotion too. So, “Give a lollipop to your lollipop person.”

Of course, as always in the Church of England these days, the sheer blithering inanities only faintly disguise the right-on political hard sell:

“Email or write to your MP about a global poverty issue… Buy a fair Trade Easter egg” But what, if you follow the advice of many leading economists who claim so called Fair Trade does nothing to help the poor, and recommend free trade instead?

The only orthodoxy we find in these booklets is environmentalist demagoguery and the pagan superstition of global warming: “Help lighten our load on the planet… defrost your fridge and find out how climate change affects poorer people…help stop global climate change: recycle your rubbish save trees, use both sides of the paper…”

(When doing what, by the way?)

Lent is supposed to be a time when we repent of our sins. But the only sins found here are those of not subscribing to the Christian socialist manifesto and global warming denial.

No wonder the pews are emptying faster than ever, when these booklets represent the mind of the Church of England. Lent is for deepening our understanding of the faith and for growing nearer to God. These booklets contain no nourishment for those tasks.

What might the Archbishop have offered, if he had been in his right mind? That we should all begin and end the day by saying the Lord’s Prayer. Read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel written in the matchless English of The Book of Common Prayer for each of the six weeks of Lent. Perhaps say the Psalms set for every day. Try to attend an early morning or lunchtime weekday service of Holy Communion. Competent shepherds of their sheep would also have recommended some spiritual reading.

These patronising booklets are worse than a joke, worse than useless. They ape the trite and gaudy language and images of a debased advertising culture, babyfied and debauched, and apply it to the Christian Gospel. But faith cannot be taught in this way. It cannot be communicated by the thing it is not, the thing that is actually anathema to it. People have to be taught. These booklets only insult the intelligence of the public. There is no Christianity in “Live Life: Love Lent” – only a blasphemous parody of the faith.

24 Feb

God and Evil

This is widely agreed as the Big Problem in Christian theology and the reason why so many do not believe. Ever since Voltaire in Candide mocked Leibnitz’ view that our world is “the best of all possible worlds”; ever since David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Enlightenment attitudes to the issue of God and evil have prevailed. Hume wrote what has become the standard version, stock-in-trade among modern theologians: If God would like to prevent evil but cannot, then he is not omnipotent; if he could but won’t, then he is malevolent. In either case he is not God.

The first thing to be said about this standard objection is that it is a rationalistic, anthropocentric perspective: the “enlightened” mind of man presuming to evaluate God. As such, it is a non-starter because, if God is God (and he should not be worshipped if he isn’t) then he is transcendent and his nature is beyond the scope of man’s natural, limited mind.

The true theological answer to this so called “problem of evil” is not anthropocentric but theocentric. In other words, only God can answer it. And in The Book of Job – out of the whirlwind – God does answer it: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel without knowledge? Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook?” Job is put firmly in his place for his presumption.

So where does this leave the problem of evil? Does God’s answer to Job amount to his saying, “Keep your nose out! I’ll do as I damn well like because I’m the boss”? No, because in another place in the Bible Genesis God says, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eastest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” This means that the mystery of the origin of evil is inextricably tied up with the mystery of the being of God: depths which we cannot plumb.

This is unsatisfactory. Happily, God provides more information and this information takes the form of the whole of subsequent Judeao-Christian history and development. It is like this…

Evil is not merely something nasty which afflicts us – an offence as it were to the self-esteem of Enlightenment Man. Evil is something which we perpetrate – by proving ourselves incapable of keeping God’s commandments. The next bit of information provided by God is God’s coming to do something about this problem in Jesus Christ who dies in order to redeem us. This is even more astonishing as a cosmic event than it appears, for it entails the truth that – God, being God and therefore omniscient, knew that his original act of creation would result in the crucifixion of the Second Person of the Trinity. Thus in the original act of creation, God willed his own suffering and death. That is he too became the victim of evil.

It is at this point in the story that Enlightenment Man pops up again and says, “Then in that case, it would have been better not to create anything at all than to do so in the sure and certain knowledge that it would entail all this misery.”

But that is the one thing precisely which we cannot know, which we are forbidden to ask about in the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This however is not unsatisfactory; it is no cop-out on God’s part, God throwing his weight around. For the subsequent revelation of God in Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Ghost explains and vindicates the original act of creation. That is why our sin, Original Sin, has been called felix culpa – the happy fault without which God would not have become incarnate in Jesus Christ.

Evil remains a mystery, the mystery. But now we can see that it was necessary in order that God could manifest his love for us. That is why evil is necessary. If there had been some other way, God would have chosen that instead. But there you have it – the paradox of the cross: in order for the redemptive act of God to become real for us, evil is necessary. This redemptive act of love is real for us – because Christians for 2000 years have known it as a fact of their direct experience.

So the question is not, “How can a God of love allow evil?” Rather the answer is that it is evil which reveals that God is a God of love. It is not only a mystery, but a miracle. C.H. Sisson puts it beautifully, heartbreakingly, “The wonder is that he came here at all, where no one ever came voluntarily before.”

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: Theology