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Why Are the Best Stories About Good and Evil?

     A strong contender for the four most well-known words in the English language must arguably be: “Once upon a time …” Whether we are children or adults, we love stories; indeed our love of stories is something uniquely human. From the earliest recorded cave paintings to the most modern movie, across time, country, and culture, humans are a storytelling species.

     As a child, I loved nothing better than to lose myself in a novel. Now I am a parent, I’ve passed on this love to my children—they don’t care (that) much for television, but their rooms are lined with books. Shortly before writing these words, I was curled up in bed with my six-year old son reading him the first volume of the brilliant Wingfeather Saga; there were mighty protests of “Dad! Just one more chapter!” when I closed the book.

     Some stories are here today and gone tomorrow, but others become classics, retold to generation after generation. When a story is first written, it’s hard to tell whether it will become a classic but I would suggest that one thing most of the great stories, the classic tales, all have in common is they are built around a common theme: the triumph of good over evil.

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“On Living in an Atomic Age” — C. S. Lewis

In 1948, C. S. Lewis wrote this profound little essay, “On Living in An Atomic Age”. Just five pages long, it seems incredibly timely — and as challenging (and encouraging) as it was when it was first written. Here’s the opening …

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

… you can download the entire essay here.

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No Time to Die?

I have a confession to make. I love James Bond films. I love all of them. I even enjoyed Quantum of Solace, which in the eyes of some fans would condemn me to the outer darkness of cinema hell. Thus I was overjoyed when the twenty-fifth Bond movie, No Time To Die, long-delayed due to COVID, premiered last autumn and I rushed to book tickets faster than you could say “shaken, not stirred”.

Bond movie titles are an artform in themselves, ranging from the sublime (The World is Not Enough) to the slightly bonkers (Octopussy). The title of the latest episode, No Time To Die, is—on one level—a reference to the fact this is actor Daniel Craig’s last outing as the eponymous spy, before he is replaced by a fresh face. It’s no time to die: so Bond will live on in a new incarnation.

For the rest of us who are not multi-faced secret agents, however, life is more brutal: there will, for each of us, be a time to die. Death is the great leveller: no matter your race, gender, politics, or bank balance, all of us will eventually meet our end. Although our culture desperately tries to distract us from thinking about this, events like the pandemic bring us face to face with the spectre of our own mortality.

After the release of No Time to Die, movie critics busied themselves writing about how Daniel Craig’s era as James Bond will be remembered. And death raises for us that same question of remembrance. How will we be remembered when we are gone? A few years ago I attended the funeral of a cousin who had died tragically young. It was a secular service and the officiant closed by saying “Jonathan will live on forever in our memories”. But that isn’t true. We will be forgotten.

Last summer we took the kids to visit their grandparents and my mother showed me an old photo she had found in the attic. A grainy black-and-white image from the 1880s, it showed some long-dead relatives. “I know a couple of their names,” she said, “but the others …” Eventually we won’t be remembered.

If we live in a godless universe, that’s the fate awaiting all of us: gone; forgotten; extinct. No wonder that atheist writer Julian Barnes titled his book about death Nothing to Be Afraid of. For nothing is very much something to fear because if oblivion is our final destination, that also entails that nothing we do now makes any ultimate difference.

But what if atheism isn’t true? If Christianity is true, then there is a God who had you in mind before the world began; a God who calls you by name; a God who offers you—in and through Jesus—an eternity with him.

If there is no God, then there is no time to die and death is to be dreaded. But if the God who revealed himself to us through Jesus is real then we need not fear death. For Jesus said: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” For those who trust in Jesus, tomorrow never dies.

(This article originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper).

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The Smuggled Value Judgement

The English village of Hayle is typically picturesque, a small cluster of cottages set around a harbour, looking out to the tranquil waters of St. Ive’s bay. But like so much of England, layers of darker history lie beneath the pretty-as-a-postcard facade. Hidden behind the undergrowth in the garden of what was once the local youth hostel, yawns the mouth of a tunnel. Stoop to step inside its cool darkness and one can walk for hundreds of yards, eventually emerging beneath the cliffs on a nearby cove. Although dank and musty now, local legend identifies this as an ancient “Smuggler’s Tunnel”, once used for bringing illegal contraband ashore under cover of darkness.

The coastal towns and villages of England are full of tales of such tunnels, many dating back centuries to when smuggling was at its height. On moonless nights, sailing ships would pull quietly into bays like that at Hayle, offload their illicit cargo into smaller boats and bring it ashore. There the contraband would be hauled across the sands, carried through tunnels, or even manhandled up sheer cliff faces to a waiting line of locals who would spirit it away. Whole communities benefited from the smuggling trade and the customs men, whose job it was to thwart the black market trade, were often foiled by a stone wall of silence. As Rudyard Kipling, who grew up on the English coast and knew these stories well, wrote in his poem “A Smuggler’s Song”:

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
‘Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by![1]

When you heard the sound of horses, or the whispers of voices late at night, you were supposed to look the other way, ask no questions, ‘watch the wall’, as the contraband was smuggled past.

horseToday, the smuggling business is alive and well, only it is not tobacco or brandy that are secreted past, but value judgements. You see, whenever a writer tells you that something is good and laudable, or that something is bad and condemnable, there is an important question you must ask before you consider whether or not to believe them. What worldview do they subscribe to and does that worldview support the value judgement they are making, or are they having to smuggle it in from outside, hoping that everybody will look the other way?

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One Solitary Life

JesusEyes

Clearing out some old files recently, I came across this famous meditation, written almost a century ago:

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never went to college, never visited a big city. He never travelled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend … All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that have ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together, have not affected the life of mankind on earth, as powerfully as that one solitary life.[1]

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Jesus: Man, Myth, Prophet … or More?

JesusEyes

It has been remarked that if you were to make two lists: on one, write the ten most influential people in history, on the other, write people who have claimed to be God, that only one name would appear on both those lists: Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate Jesus’s influence: much of art, politics, ethics, literature, music, and culture—in the west but also in large swathes of the east—has been influenced by his life.

And, of course, Jesus is the central figure of Christianity—making Christianity, uniquely, a historically grounded religion. Consider this: you could remove the founder of any other religion and that religion could still stand. Somebody else could have taught the system of thought that became Buddhism. The Qur’an could have been brought by somebody other than Muhammad. But Christianity is not a system of teaching taught by Jesus, in a very real sense, Christianity is Jesus Christ. Jesus’s personality, his character, his identity, are the heart of the Christian faith. Christianity stands or falls on Jesus.

For Christianity claims that “God” is not some mere abstract idea, some vague higher power, something “out there” like the Force in Star Wars, or a distant, remote deity, like the God of Islam, but a God who is very, very real. A God who took on human nature and, in Jesus Christ, walked and talked in history.

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Lessons from the Beauty of the Highlands

Every year around this time, the outdoor bug gets hold of my kids and they start dropping hints: “Dad, it’s going to be 5 degrees on Saturday—please can we go camping?” Thus last weekend the shed was prised open and miscellaneous dusty camping paraphernalia stuffed into our elderly Volvo until its springs groaned. Despite my wife’s trepidation, the sun actually shone and we had a fantastic weekend, the highlight of which was bribing the kids to climb their first Munro, the gnarly rock summit of Càrn Aosda that overlooks the Glen Shee pass. 

My six-year-old son’s reaction on arriving at the top was priceless. As the cries of “Wait for me!” and “Parents shouldn’t be allowed to make their kids climb mountains” died away he stood, open-mouthed, gazing at the incredible view down Glen Clunie, with the snow-capped Cairngorms glittering in the distance. “Dad! That’s amazing!” my son cried out. “Look at the view!” And then he flopped to the ground and just stared for a few minutes. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever known him silent.

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The Circle of Rights

Being British, I have a naturally mischievous streak and one of the things I occasionally enjoy is gently poking students with the sharpened end of a question to get a reaction. This can easily be done with the aid of a whiteboard and a marker pen. Draw a large circle on the whiteboard and say to the class something like: “This circle represents the entire set of genomes of every living thing on planet Earth. Everything is here, from whales to whelks, ants to antelopes, bacteria to bats, hippopotami to humans.”

Now I ask the class a further question: “Raise your hand if you do not believe in human rights?” Rarely will a hand go up (peer pressure can be a wonderful thing). “Excellent!” say I, taking my pen and drawing a second, much smaller circle, within the bigger circle. “Now what those of you who believe in human rights are saying is that anybody who lives inside your smaller circle, whose genome is ‘human’, enjoys a special set of rights that inhabitants of the bigger circle do not. Agree?”

Again, rarely will anyone protest.

“Wonderful,” I enthuse, rubbing my hands together in anticipation of what is about to follow. “So here’s the problem. Along comes the white supremacist, armed with a marker pen of his own, and he draws a much tinier circle within your small circle and says, ‘No, only those who are white and European enjoy full rights. Any other races do not.’. See the problem? You have drawn a circle, he has drawn a circle, you have both drawn circles. So tell me: why is your circle acceptable (even laudable, as the we give awards to people who defend human rights) but the circle drawn by the racist is not?”

Usually, there is a stunned silence at this point.

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New Book Launched: “Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?”

My latest book, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? launched with IVP on 18 March 2021 in the UK (it’s coming a few weeks later in Canada and the USA).

If you’re in the UK, you can order it from a number of booksellers including 10ofThose, Eden Books, IVP direct, Aslan Christian Books — or, if you’re desperate, Waterstones or Amazon.

American and Canadian folks can pre-order it from ChristianBook.com — it launches in North America in May.

It is also available in ebook (most formats) as well as an audiobook — the audiobook can be purchased direct from IVP, or from Audible.


Read a Free Sample!

Download chapter 1 (and the table of contents) as a PDF.


Listen to a Free Sample!

Listen to the first chapter of the audio book, brilliantly narrated/read by Neil Gardner. If the media player below doesn’t work, or if you’d prefer to listen to it using a different app, you can download the MP3 here.


Here’s what people are saying about the book:

A nuanced and sensitive examination, from an overtly Christian perspective, of how to negotiate a truth that is no less self-evident for being one that many prefer to draw a veil across: Christianity and Islam are not remotely the same.”
~ Tom Holland ― author of Dominion and In the Shadow of the Sword

“A must-read for the curious whether you have faith already or not. Prepare to be entertained, edified and gripped – I found myself unable to put it down.”
~ Dr Amy Orr-Ewing ― President, OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics

“We need thinkers who have studied both religions extensively. Andy Bannister is just such an expert and he helps us wrestle with this important question with the depth and care it deserves.”
~ Randy Newman ― Senior Fellow at The C. S. Lewis Institute and author of Questioning Evangelism.

“This book is a must-read for all interested in inter-religious issues, both believers and non-believers.”
~ Peter G Riddell ― SOAS University of London and Australian College of Theology

“Persistently challenging, consistently provoking, deeply searching, and endlessly witty!”
~ Anna Robbins ― President and Dean of Theology, Acadia University

“A sharp witted, big hearted, and clear minded romp through one of the most pressing religious questions of our time.”
~ Dr Richard Shumack ― Research Fellow, Centre for Public Christianity and Director, Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam, Melbourne School of Theology

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Brand New Experimental Podcast

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve teamed up with two friends to create an an experimental and occasional podcast. Each episode, I join evangelist Michael Ots and theologian Aaron Edwards to explore a contemporary issue in culture from a Christian perspective. Featuring banter, philosophy, culture, theology, bad jokes, apologetics, and more — the podcast aims to help Christians think wisely about the challenges of living in the 21st century.

You can find it on:

SoundCloud

Spotify

(More platforms to come soon).

Do check it out and let us know what you think! If you like the podcast, you can also support us on Patreon.