��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

Good Morning Yesterday’s parliamentary debate on Britain’s response to a request for support from Iraq has produced plenty of headlines in this morning’s papers. There is a familiarity to many of the points put forward yesterday by members of both Houses. We have, for sure, been here before – but this time, the circumstances are different. One of the key questions undergirding many of the yesterday’s speeches was a genuine concern about the future: how does what we do now, affect who we will be in the future? But unfortunately, and this was tangible yesterday, any relationship between the now and not yet is usually susceptible to varying degrees of tension. Professor Dale Salwak, writing in the Times Higher Ed magazine last week observed that we live in a tense society in which various forces threaten to pull us apart: “Our minds are harassed and perplexed. How can we learn to pull ourselves together?” It’s a question which is easily asked but more difficult to answer. The relationship between decisions made now and how they affect the future –including the resulting tension - is at the very heart of New Testament theology in which faith plays an obviously critical role. In his brilliant book Salvation Oscar Cullman observes that the “already” [what’s happening to us right now] always seems to outweigh the “not yet”. This doesn’t mean that we automatically refrain from making decisions because of the complexity of the present time - thereby advocating a kind of sterile inaction. Henri Nouwen vividly describes such a state as a kind of clinging on to ourselves so tightly, betraying a tangible fear to others which means that we are unable to act. Yesterday’s debates certainly did not ignore the future. Throughout the day there was a heartening and sober acknowledgement across all parties that lessons from the past must be learnt, that what we do now must be part of a wider vision. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, in the Lords yesterday contrasted the darkness of the present time to the hope of the future. Whenever Christians say the Lord’s Prayer – there is a petition that God will deliver them from evil. On mornings like this one, after all the words and rhetoric of yesterday, such familiar words have a particular and poignant resonance. For they address that critical tension between where we are now and where we want to be.