perhaps he shouldn't

Things you have to laugh about. Election leaflets in John Prescott's constituency have included one with a picture of him and his wife in 'domestic harmony,' according to this report - more than slightly unfortunate given the recent publicity over his affair with a secretary.

The local council leader defended Mr Prescott by saying that public opinion remained fairly positive. "People have said he shouldn't have done it and perhaps he shouldn't but it's done now isn't it."

Yeah, perhaps, on reflection, he shouldn't have cheated on his wife with a woman who was going to marry another man. Maybe that was a bit, you know, iffy. Perhaps he did slip up a wee bit there.

But it is done now, isn't it. So now we see the deputy prime minister in a different light - as someone who can't be trusted to behave honourably towards his own wife or treat his office staff with decency. It's no excuse to say that these things only happen in people's personal lives - it's the personal lives of public people who expect us to trust them to run the country. If it was scandalous in the Tories, it's every bit as scandalous in New Labour. Time for a change, methinks.

it's not just the guardian

In the Guardian recently, one Jenni Russell nicely described the creepiness of this government's attitude to civil freedoms. Nothing unusual there I suppose, but the encouraging thing is that it's not just the usual suspects who are getting progressively worried about the way that things are being put in place which will make it easier for democracy to be stifled in this country.

As just one example, the Russell article articulates the same concerns as are held by the Lawyers Christian Fellowship about the powers which the government is wanting to take, which will allow government ministers to change laws "by order, rather than going through parliamentary procedures." [I can't lay my hands on it right now, but a couple of issues ago the LCF had a statement in the English Churchman about this.]

But as has been gleefully pointed out on one of the Guardian's comment pages, it's none other than the crusty old Telegraph itself that's laying into the Home Secretary and the government at large, for introducing "illiberal measures," "undermining our democracy," and in general having a "disregard for our liberties." Strong words from such a source, as a Guardian reader might see it.

Along the same lines, there was an interesting article in my paper copy of today's Scotsman, about Asbos. It was by columnist Peter Jones, and although the piece itself devoted much more space to the supposed plus points of the asbo scheme than to its disadvantages, it was still encouragingly tentatively negative overall. The scenario which he conjured up about the ineffectiveness and counterproductiveness of the orders doesn't seem too implausible - and if it comes about, he says, it would show that "civil libertarians will have been correct that liberties have been needlessly eroded." Apparently it's only 5% of the population who have any concerns at all about civil liberties being compromised by asbos, but you never know - plant a seed of doubt, and hope that the general lack of concern comes more from lack of awareness than real disregard for democratic freedoms.

And on that uncharacteristically optimistic note ...

bookish successes

Trust it to be books that cheered me up today.

In the morning a parcel arrived containing Matthew Henry's Communicant's Companion, newly republished by Solid Ground Christian Books. I'd nearly given up hope of getting it, since I ordered it a whopping two months ago - but I needn't have worried. I've already quoted it here actually (this bit from the first chapter) and it was so good all the way through that I just had to stock up on another couple of copies. I got it from here: it's got a nice new cover, although inside it's a facsimile of a nineteenth century edition, but as it says in the introduction (by Rev John Brown of Edinburgh, 1825), its contents are "very plain, very pious, and very practical." Definitely worth the wait.

Anyway, then this afternoon I had to pass a Barnardo's shop near my office and they had a box of 'Religion and Theology bargains' outside. And there I picked up Redemption: Accomplished and Applied by Prof John Murray and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J Sider - for the eminently reasonable price of 50p each.

And in between all that, I even discovered that a whole issue of the journal Reading and Writing was devoted to reading/writing in non-alphabetic scripts (like Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, etc), which hopefully doesn't sound too obscure, as it's exactly what I'm going to be spending the next wee whiley thinking about.

best year ever

I'm the 11,405th vote in the BBC poll: Is the Health Service having its best year ever? Eighty eight percent of respondents have voted no, which is hardly surprising: obviously nobody's taking Patricia Hewitt seriously.

You've got to wonder what's the point of extravagant claims like these. If the government were just arguing that things aren't as bad as we think, that would be more convincing than announcements like "the best year ever" which are blatantly counterfactual.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to convince you that I do do work sometimes, I'm trying to decide what to make of this thing that an interviewer said on the radio yesterday evening. Speaking to her interviewee about the Health Secretary she said, "(Health service workers) don't feel as optimistic as you sound and as she does." I feel there's something unexpected in that use of "does" right at the end - even though, being but a humble phonologist, I can't quite put my finger on the syntactic reason why. It could be because the first comparison is between "don't feel as optimistic as you [do] sound," and both the verbs are lexical verbs, then the second is between "don't feel as optimistic as she does [feel]," where the first verb is lexical and the other is an auxiliary (or dummy?) verb. Never mind - it makes perfect sense, and in my linguistic world, meaning gets priority over syntax, so, please, don't let it worry you too much.

we had more freedom

The BBC is reporting on violence and murder being committed against homosexuals in Iraq. Under the local interpretation of Islam, homosexuals deserve to be killed "in the harshest way," and people are accordingly being murdered. The most frustrating thing of all is the quote right at the end of the article:

"Saddam was a tyrant, but at least we had more freedom then," said Hussein. "Nowadays, gay men are just killed for no reason."

But this isn't the only group which has been experiencing greater intolerance from Islamists now that Saddam has gone. Christians in Iraq were scapegoated right from the start of the campaign for regime change, and it's not getting any better as time goes by. In another article from the BBC, it's reported that "in Iraq, the Christian middle class is emigrating in droves, fearful of the daily violence and the hostility it now encounters from Islamists," and throughout the Middle East, "says the Lebanese journalist Hazem Saghieh, 'being anti-Christian is a way of showing what a good Muslim you are'."

Whether or not there was any justification for invading Iraq in the first place (you probably know what side I come down on there), the outcome has only been to initiate the replacement of a one-man secular dictatorship with an equally repressive tyranny differing only in its religiousness, and, arguably, its thin veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's not a good thing.

holier than us

I'm still pondering a discussion which I listened to the other week, where people were talking about believers in the past, and how they were overall more holy than believers are today, as evidenced for example in their greater diligence in praying, fasting, self-examination, etc.

The comment which stuck with me was when someone said that if we were as holy as them, then we would pray more and fast etc as well. In the past, people would fast much more often, and pray for hours on end, and hang on a preacher's every word throughout hours-long sermons. So the reason why we don't fast so much (etc) today is because we aren't so holy.

But I've been wondering whether that might actually be putting things back to front. Prayer, fasting, church-attendance, etc, are all means of grace, and maybe, if believers today were more diligent in making use of these means, that itself would lead to increased holiness in the lives of contemporary Christians.

I know that two essential things are gifts, namely diligence and sincerity. But doesn't it come back to what Thomas Boston said to dissuade people from making inability an excuse: we have to make use of the means which are available, and maybe God will have regard to the means which he himself has appointed. Merely using the means won't lead to an automatic increase of holiness, but surely on the other hand, neglecting the means will lead to an automatic decline in holiness.

"[People] do not act rationally unless they exert the powers they have, and do what they can. ... Therefore pray, meditate, desire help of God, be much at the throne of grace supplicating for grace, and do not faint. Though God regard you not, who in your present state are but one mass of sin, universally depraved, and vitiated in all the powers of your soul, yet he may regard prayer, meditation, and the like means of his own appointment, and he may bless them to you. Wherefore, if you will not do what you can, you are not only dead, but you declare yourselves unworthy of eternal life." Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, from the end of chapter 2, 'Man's Utter Inability to Recover Himself.'

the discovery of forgiveness

This is from John Owen's 'Practical Exposition on Psalm 130,' the part where he reaches verse 4, and starts to talk about the way that forgiveness is "discovered to" people who are burdened by the guilt of sin. (I wonder if the word must mean having it revealed, or dis-covered or un-covered to you, not so much finding it out?)

... this discovery of forgiveness whereof we speak, is indeed no common thing, but a great discovery. Let men come, with a sense of the guilt of sin, to have deep and serious thoughts of God, they will find it no such easy and light matter to have their hearts truly and thoroughly apprehensive of [able to grasp] this loving and gracious nature of God, in reference to pardon. It is an easy matter to say so in common, but the soul will not find it so easy to believe for itself. ...

Though men profess that God is gracious, yet that aversion which they have to him, and to communion with him, abundantly manifests that they do not believe what they say and profess. If they did, they could not but delight and trust in him, which they do not; for "they that know his name will put their trust in him." So the slothful man in the gospel said, "I knew that thou wast austere," and not for me to deal with; it may be he professed otherwise before, but that lay in his heart when it came to the trial.

But this, I say, is necessary to those to whom this discovery is to be made: even a spiritual apprehension of the gracious, loving heart and nature of God. ... And he that really considers forgiveness, and looks on it with a spiritual eye, must conclude that it comes from infinite goodness and grace.

And this is that which the hearts of siners are exercised about, when they come to deal for pardon. "Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive." Psalm 86:5. "Thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." Nehemiah 9:17. And, "Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity? - because he delighteth in mercy." Micah 7:18. And God encourageth them hereunto, wherever he says that he forgives sins and blots out iniquities for his own sake, or his name's sake: that is, he will deal with sinners according to the goodness of his own gracious nature.

... To have all the clouds and darkness that are raised by sin, between us and the throne of God, dispelled; to have the fire and storms and tempests that are kindled and stirred up about him by the law, removed; to have his glorious face unveiled, and his holy heart laid open, and a view given of those infinite treasures and stores of goodness, mercy, love, and kindness, which have had an unchangeable habitation therein from all eternity; to have a discovery of these eternal springs of forbearance and forgiveness - is that which none but Christ can accomplish and bring about.

That comes from p136-138 of my secondhand 1836 edition - I chopped out a fair bit (and they're only small pages!), so I hope it isn't too long.

uncomfortable in the modern world

On Saturday morning there was an interview on the radio with a Roman Catholic archbishop, and the interviewer put it to the archbishop that the Pope's Easter message had revealed a man who was "uncomfortable in the modern world," and didn't think it was a very happy place to be.

Well, the Pope's comfort or discomfort in the modern world is really his own problem, but one thing that his spokesman didn't challenge, was the assumption that the modern world is indeed a happy place to be. I might have been slightly depressed when I wrote the post before last, but even in the cheerfulness induced by the first real days of spring and sunshine, you've got to admit that people could well be forgiven for not finding the modern world such a happy place after all.

Having said that, I thought the archbishop did quite a good job of presenting the case against rampant abortion, genetic engineering and similar issues; which is not to be sniffed at, in the contemporary situation.

the problem that languages solve

Believe it or not, the question of what language really is can be quite contentious within linguistics. Here's one statement:

"Languages represent a class of solutions to a problem that is undeniably unique in its scope and nature: the problem of mapping a hyperdimensional meaning space onto a low-dimensional channel."
(Bates et al (1998) in Bechtel & Graham (eds), A Companion to Cognitive Science, p595)

I have a lot of respect for Bates et al, but on this occasion I think I have to disagree. I don't think that providing a mapping between meaning and sounds is really the core problem that languages solve. Rather, I would suggest, the problem is communication, and the links between sound and meaning are only the means of solving that problem. To me anyway, it makes more sense to think of things that way round.

treacherous friends

In a post back in December I was having a wee think about the weak and exploited state of the church, and now I've just rediscovered the draft of a post following up on that. Here it is polished up and up-dated a bit - a train of thought sparked off by Jeremiah saying about the church, "all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies." (Lamentations 1:2.)

There are several one-time friends which might be identified, which have turned traitor on the church since they used to be friends.

One friend which the church used to have is the state. You used to be able to expect the state to support the work of the church in things like general morality and law and order, say. But not any more, not when the government doesn't care about morality, and is in fact at the forefront of introducing things like super casinos and twenty-four hour licencing for pubs, and neglecting to support the traditional two-parent family, and lying to us about going to war. Not when law and order becomes a matter of unchallengable control orders, and attempts to restrict freedom of speech through legislation like the "glorification" of terrorism law, and implicit intentions to hold us all accountable to the state (forgetting that it's the state who should be accountable to the people, not the other way round).

Another friend to the church could have been technology. In a time of instant mass communication, for example, it should be easy to transmit the gospel message far and wide - reaching far more people more easily than they did when the printing press was invented, and publishing was a laborious, lengthy procedure. Instead, this technology gets put to use for things like entertainment - for surrounding you wherever you go with music and images and print which are hardly supportive of a wholesome environment - hardly productive of thoughts on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report.

The third friend would be science and learning. Whatever you learn, in a world that God created, if it's not something about God himself, then it's something about what he has made. So in the hard sciences, you're only finding out about how the created world works; in history you're only looking to see how providence has unfolded; and in psychology you're only coming to understand about how fearfully and wonderfully made we are ourselves as human beings. But, treacherously, scholars in every field prefer to use their scholarship as a reason not to believe in God, and not to go to church, and in general, they tend to use these advances in science and learning to disparage even the idea of a designer.

If these friends were still with us, like they were in the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth, maybe we wouldn't be in such a solitary and desolate situation now.

But you also have to wonder - maybe part of the reason why the friendship of these sources has drained away is because the church for her part didn't treat them right either - when they started to promote their tendencies to forget the ultimate authority and ultimate wisdom, she should have stuck to her guns and held on to the absolutes, instead of watering down her critiques to suit their tastes and letting their mistakes seep into her own doctrine and practice, muting her proclamation of the gospel. It's not an excuse, but in a way it's no wonder really if they were disappointed and turned away.

guess what?

Before you skip down to look at the answer, read this quote and see if you can guess which outstanding advance in human history took place under the following conditions:

X was invented "within the framework of a rapidly expanding urban environment, social stratification, technological specialisation, the emergence of a politically powerful nobility, large-scale community labour projects and commodity distribution, and intercity and international exchange networks."

The question is: Has anything that's ever been invented, not been invented in a context like this?

Just for the record and so I'm not guilty of plagiarism, this is the scholar Margaret W Green talking about the invention of cuneiform - the earliest ever writing script, developed by an ancient people called the Sumerians over five thousand years ago. Rapid urban expansion, social stratification, technological specialisation ... it seems so contemporary, but it seems like you can use the same terms to describe virtually any period of human history there's ever been. Unless you can think of something I can't?

MW Green (1989), 'Early cuneiform.' In WM Senner (ed), The Origins of Writing. University of Nebraska Press, p43.

consciousness of need

Linguists might not be in the news, but old Scottish Free Presbyterian ministers are:
"Genuine Revivals are Always Accompanied by Conviction of Sin."

linguists really not in the news

Upon reflection, there really couldn't be anything more misleading in the title "Linguists 'have different brains'," which I mentioned already. It's definitely not linguists that the study was looking at, and now I'm not even sure that it was even about "language learners". Until I actually read the journal article itself I can't be sure, but it sounds more like a sound discrimination task, where people are asked to say whether Sound 1 is the same as Sound 2 - the only novel aspect being that the people in question got their brains scanned at the same time. If anything else exciting comes out of this, I'll make sure and let you know.

and no role play either thanks

This follows on from the "no graven images" issue and goes into one futher aspect of it which is maybe more relevant in the contemporary situation than the drawings-or-sculptures type of image. It's to do with the trend for producing films where an actor plays Jesus, and then for these films to be tolerated by Christians and sometimes even welcomed within the Church as evangelistic tools.


There are different kinds of ways of attempting to make an "image" of God - portraits on paper, stained glass, crucifixes, statues of madonna and child, etc, but they're all just ways of making the attempt to represent God in some physical way. In getting an actor to attempt to play Jesus, it's only one step further - it involves a living human being rather than a statue, but it still falls into the category of making an "image", because it's an attempt to represent him physically, visually - somehow other than spiritually. Whether it's a 2D picture-image, a 3D statue-image, or a living moving human-image, these are all ways of in effect bringing God down into the realm of things which we can get a hold of, changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man.

Films are favoured as teaching tools because of the way they can convey their message much more powerfully than conventional media. But when you present someone with an actor attempting to play the role of Jesus, the message that that conveys is wrong from start to finish.

It's wrong ultimately because it contravenes the second commandment, but it's wrong too in the sense that it gives the viewer a fatally distorted idea of what this person Jesus Christ is really like. Here's a short, three-pronged explanation of how.

(a) For one thing, although Christ Jesus was of course a real human being just like all the rest of us, yet he was also God, and that's really the vital fact that we need to know about his person. He was, and is, a divine person, even though he has a human nature united to his divine person. The implication of this is that anything that's merely human must inevitably fail to convey the most important thing about him. In fact, I think it's safe to say that any actor who tries to do this, is really behaving blasphemously.

(b) For another thing, I might even say that in one way it's much worse to act as Jesus than to make an image of him from wood or gold or other physical material, because it much more forcibly makes him seem "altogether such a one as ourselves," Psalm 50 - altogether as merely-human and sinful as any one of the rest of us. In itself it is just staggering that any mortal fallen human being would take it upon themselves to impersonate the eternal Son of God in our nature, considering he is absolutely holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens - but quite apart from that, when it is done, it taints our understanding of him with human frailties and sinful imperfections much more subtly and insidiously than mere objects do. You can grant that "ordinary" graven images come from the best intentions of misguided religious people using their natural skills to create a thing of beauty - their creations are still blasphemous and conducive to idolatry, but in themselves they're only pieces of wood and metal or stone, without any moral properties of their own, in contrast to whatever human being you pick in the whole world, whose person must be sinful.

(c) One more reason is that no piece of acting can convey what he was doing in the world at all. Unlike every other human who was ever born, he came deliberately according to his own will, and on purpose to do a work. The details of what he did, and the success of it all, is something that no one can ever convey by attempting to act out any part of his life. It has to be said too that the attempt to do so casts obscurity onto his uniqueness and the fact that he is a real Saviour, and again, it can really only be described as blasphemous.

Finally I'll just refer you to a helpful article on this general issue dating from the release of the "Passion" movie - available here - which I found useful at the time, as something of a lone voice on the huge problems associated with treating that film in particular with approval.

no pictures please

God is infinite, absolute, and eternal, and beyond the reach of human beings to comprehend. For these and similar reasons, it is not possible for us to make any sort of visual or pictorial representation of him. Attempting it inevitably and necessarily comes short of who he is, and by reducing him to the kind of thing that can be adequately modelled by human beings, it has the effect of denying these essential aspects of the glorious being that he is. This holds true for God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

In addition to this, he actually forbids us to make images of him. So that, even if it was possible for finite and sinful human beings to capture the qualities of divinity in the productions of our finite and sinful creativity, it would still be wrong to do so.

The wrongness of it can be seen (a) from the second of the ten commandments, which explicitly forbids any attempt at worshipping him in any way that he has not appointed, including "the making [of] any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever" (as the Westminster theologians agreed in 1647).

(b) It can also be seen from the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah (eg chapters 40 and 10 respectively), where the people are condemned for their idolatry. Compared to the reality, and the omnipotence, eternity, and uniqueness of God the Lord, the absurdity of constructing images from wood or gold for worshipping, should be self-evident. And although the call might be primarily to abandon the false gods in favour of the one true and living God, it noticeably doesn't advocate building images of God to replace the images of false gods - it's a call to abandon all false worship of all kinds, and return to the spiritual worship of the living God, free from props and material aids of any sort.

(c) It can also be seen from the New Testament. We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and human imagination (Acts 17) - it's not even legitimate to conceptualise him like that, far less to implement that wrong idea concretely in pictures or sculptures or anything else. In Romans 10 it was one of the grossest symptoms of the "ungodliness and unrighteousness of man," that they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man.

Noticeably, the prohibition on representations of God includes pictures of the Son of God. Even though he became man, a real man, that doesn't detract from the fact that he was never a mere man - he was still a divine person, the Second Person of the Godhead, and all these arguments apply to him just as much as any of the other persons. In fact, after his resurrection, he specifically taught his people that they would no longer have him physically present with them. As he told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed," John 21, and Peter says the same thing - "Jesus Christ, whom having not seen, ye love - in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." 1 Peter 1.

"For what nation is there so great, that hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for? ... Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves: for ye saw no manner of similitude in the day that the Lord spoke unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female ... Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the Lord thy God hath forbidden thee. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God." Deuteronomy 4.

tourism strikes again

It was disappointing today to hear that the High Court has decided Dan Brown didn't plagiarise the Leigh et al book after all. Not that the fantasies aired in either book are worth defending, but, if they'd ruled that there had been plagiarism, it would have at least postponed the release of the film.

But here's an article on marketing Scotland as part of some sort of Da Vinci experience, because of how bits of it were shot in Rosslyn Chapel, outside Edinburgh. If only we could entice more wealthy Americans to come and visit, imagine how much income we could generate.

Pandering to tourists is something we're unfortunately getting good at, with tourism currently being made an excuse for controversial seven-day ferry sailings in the islands, for example. It's just a bit depressing that we're now hoping to make money out of something as untrue and scandalously pointless as the Da Vinci Code. (Maybe that should be pointlessly scandalous?)

Dan Brown is very readable and popular: it's just a shame that he wrote all this rubbish about people and things which there's no real doubt or confusion about whatsoever. Even when people read it knowing that it's not all true, bits of the misrepresentation always stick in your mind, and can't help colouring your perceptions about the persons involved. That's not something you can really afford, given who these persons actually are. And no, we don't want hordes of tourists turning up to celebrate their dubious ideas about bloodlines and whatnot. But come August, I'll probably have plenty more to say about the tourists at the Festival, so I'll leave it there for the time being.

a research finding

A finding, at last! At the start of this week I finally got enough numbers together to qualify for doing some statistics, and can now exclusively reveal that (a) people speak at different rates of speech and have different ranges of pitch, and (b) notwithstanding the individual differences between speakers, they all show the same trend of producing one linguistic pattern with one combination of pitch & duration, and the other pattern with a different combination. Good news!

linguists not in the news

The BBC is reporting an interesting study under the title "Linguists 'have different brains'." It's actually about language learners, not linguists, I feel I should point out though. I doubt my Heschl's gyrus would be very different from yours, all my, ahem, years of linguistics notwithstanding.

Never mind - there was one piece of linguistics there - they talk about the difference between the "d"-sound that you get in French by your tongue making contact with the ridge behind your teeth, versus one of the "d"-sounds in Hindi, where the tongue is curled back on itself and makes contact further back in your mouth. The study was looking at how quickly native speakers of French could pick up on this difference, and looked at the structure of their brains at a place called Heschl's gyrus, which is known to be important for processing sounds. They found that the size and shape of Heschl's gyrus in the fast learners differed from its size and shape in the slower learners. Now isn't that interesting.

forgive me, natasha

A friend lent me this book, Forgive Me, Natasha - the autobiography of a young Russian man called Sergei Kourdakov, born in 1951 and brought up in children's homes from the age of six. He was athletic and intelligent, highly ambitious, and worked hard for himself. He really believed in communist ideals and made it his goal to excel in the Communist Party, and they singled him out from an early age as "just the kind the state needs." In 1969, when he was in his late teens, he was promoted to head of a police squad consisting of over a dozen other young men, hand picked by himself from among his cronies for their physical prowess, specifically their boxing and martial arts skills. They were initially responsible for jobs like breaking up brawls in pubs, jobs where brutality was encouraged and the people they targeted often ended up beaten to a pulp.

However, it turned out that much more menacing enemies to the state came in the form of Believers - and interestingly, not religious people per se, since religion and the church could be managed well enough, but people who believed in God. "Comrade Lenin said that we can close the churches and put the leaders in jail, but it's very hard to drive faith and belief from the heart of a man once he is contaminated by them. ... This is why we don't call them Christians or church-goers. We call them Believers. They believe inside, and to root this belief from their hearts is a very difficult task."

Sergei and his squad were sent on missions to break up meetings of Believers, groups of ten to fifteen who gathered to pray and sing. They were savagely beaten by these young men, who often got partly drunk before they set off. Their literature was taken away and most of it burnt - Bibles which had been smuggled in, or copied out by hand.

Sergei was struck by the beauty of one girl, Natasha Zhdanova, who they found at a meeting and battered severely. But they kept discovering her at other meetings too, and in fact he beat her himself one time, repeatedly until he was exhausted. The brutality of those big drunk young men didn't stop her gathering to worship - and overall in fact, it was impossible to stem the numbers of people all over the country who were becoming Believers (or refusing to abandon their faith maybe).

The perseverance of Natasha and the other believers (and also it has to be said, their submissiveness under these physical attacks) started to make him think, and one day he took a look at one of the bibles before throwing it in the fire (a handwritten copy, with some verses missing). He tore a couple of pages out of Luke's gospel, around chapter 11, and took them back to his room to read. "I opened up those pieces of paper and began to read them again. Jesus was talking and teaching someone how to pray. I became more curious and read on. This certainly was no anti-state material. It was how to be a better person and how to forgive those who do you wrong. Suddenly the words leaped out of those pages and into my heart. I read on, engrossed in the kind words of Jesus. This was exactly the opposite of what I expected. My lack of understanding which had been like blinkers on my eyes left me then, and the words bit deeply into my being. It was as if someone was in the room with me, teaching me those words and what they said. ... I read them again and again, then sat thinking, my mind lost in the wonder of it all."

It was because the words from the scriptures took hold of him that he gave up the police work (which had been work on the side for them anyway) and concentrated on getting ahead in the Navy instead. This was in late1970, so after doing this work for the police for about eighteen months, and at a rate of one raid every 5-6 days. On his first assignment at sea he was transferred from vessel to vessel, and eventually ended up on a ship off the American coast, where he made up his mind and jumped off the ship somewhere off the coast of Canada. Amazingly he made it to the shore, and set about building a new free life, finding help in spiritual matters from the pastor of a Ukrainian church. However, the book ends with a publisher's note to the effect that in January 1973, shortly after the draft was completed and some 15 months after reaching Canada, Sergei died by being shot - accidentally, according to the inquest at the time, but it's reported in the book with the implication that it was really a revenge attack by the Soviet police.

The biggest part of the book deals with his harsh and violent experiences and activities within the communist system, and the savagery of the treatment which was dealt out to believers comes across clearly. But so does their courage and tenacity and the way they didn't fight back, and the way they even tried to talk to their persecutors about the reality of God, and the fact that they met for prayer around their bibles. And what moved Sergei in the end was not just the witness of the believers, but scripture itself, which came with power even to the heart of a man who was as godless and brutal as this. "I must show people, especially young people, that there is a God, and he can change even the worst life, as he has mine."

Rabbi Duncan's gospel vice

I cannot, but I must. But I cannot. But I must. This is how I've heard someone describe the dilemma that people find themselves in once they realise they have to obey the gospel. As a sinner, I can't believe. It's something beyond achieving for someone who is dead in trespasses and sins. And yet, as a sinner, I must believe. It's a command from God, and it's the only way of salvation - believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.

It's slightly similar to what the man in The Pilgrim's Progress said when he stood in perplexity crying, What shall I do to be saved? - I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgment; and I find that I am not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second.

The Evangelist's direction to the man was to make for the wicket gate, keeping the shining light in his sights, and in the margin Mr Bunyan explains his allegory - you have to use the Word as a guide, and what you're making for is Christ.

That was the same way out of the cannot-but-I-must dilemma. Rabbi Duncan called it "the gospel vice," pressing in on either side. In the context where he used the term, it was to discourage people from attacking one or the other "limb" of the vice, as though the solution was to deny either that you are really unable believe or that you really are under the obligation of believing. But the person I first heard it from used the metaphor in this way - to say, When you're hemmed in on every side and there's no way of escape on either hand, then you have to look up instead, that is, look to Christ. I cannot, and yet I must: it's too hard for me: but Christ himself is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. The gospel provides the very things it demands: by grace you are saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.

"Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else."