Saturday was a very happy occasion – the marriage of Peter Bell and Anna Motee to each other, and I was lucky enough to be invited along to share in celebrating this. I’ve known them for almost two years now – we started coming to Mack at around the same time, and I feel priviledged to count them among my friends. Despite considerable disorganisation, including a lost tie, mislaid wedding march music and dancing that started three hours late, it was still a great occasion!

I’ll post my photos sometime soon, but in the meantime, I’ll just point you in the direction of the Wedding Address delivered by Dave Williamson, which he’s put on his blog, along with pictures of the event: David Peebles Williamson: Wedding Bells.

Mum drew my attention to this when I talked to her on the phone earlier:

‘One Day in History‘ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life.

So I’ve written and submitted an account of my day today, which is as follows:

I woke up later than planned, at 8:30 instead of 7:30, because I’d left my mobile phone, whose alarm I use to wake me up each morning, in the pocket of my coat which I’d left hung up in the hallway downstairs. I try and spend some time each morning with God by reading the Bible, praying and perhaps singing some songs, but because I was running late only said a few quick prayers.

From ten until twelve I had a Chinese class. I’m studying English Literature and History at Cardiff University. In this my third and final year, I’m focusing on Chinese history, “Nationalism and Socialism in the Chinese Revolution, 1921-49”, and took the option of doing “Chinese for Historians” as a quarter of my year’s work. It’s really interesting to learn such a different language from such a different culture, and China seems to be steaming ahead in the world and it’s probably a good language to learn for the future. We’re learning from the classes taught by Professor Greg Benton and a book and tape set that he uses for the course called “Colloquial Chinese”.

I popped home after that to try and have a quick “power nap” because I went to bed late last night, I was watching the BBC sci-fi television series “Doctor Who” being filmed at the National Museum and Gallery just down the road from where I live, and was then discussing what I saw on the Internet. I didn’t actually sleep, though, but it helped refresh me a little.

I then went to the Anglican Chaplaincy, where Lorraine Cavanagh, the chaplain, does a £1 lunch every Tuesday – good food, and good company. There were rolls and sliced meat and pizza and fruit and apple sauce. Around a dozen people were there, a mixture of international students, mature students and ordinary undergraduates.

In the afternoon I was working on designing a poster to publicise an upcoming meeting of the Christian Union student society on “The Meaning of Life”! I did so on my laptop using open source software, which is ideal for me as a student because it’s free and does all that I want that expensive commercial packages like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office do.

I had another hour of Chinese at 5pm, and then came home for dinner, which my housemate Tom cooked – sweet and sour chicken, which was very nice. I share a house near the Students’ Union with Tom, Ian, Steve and Ben, and we each take a turn at cooking and divide the cost between us.

In the evening, I went to the Taf, the Students’ Union bar, for a “Gair Rhydd” social. Most of the editors and sub-editors were there, and we had some drinks, while some people played table football and the electronic quiz machines and the like while chatting (or attempting to over the loud background music). I edit the Debate page of “Quench”, the magazine supplement to “Gair Rhydd”. My housemate Tom edits the “Cult Classics” page, and I know several of the other people from my course.

I’d found out from the university’s intranet notice-board that “Doctor Who” was filming across the road, and so went from the Taf to watch to see if there was anything worth reporting on in the student paper, and saw David Tennant, who plays the Doctor, arrive in a car. I couldn’t get in to see what was going on, though, and after chatting with the fan girls who were there for a glimpse of David Tennant, went back to the Taf briefly before heading home.

I then wrote this blog entry, having heard about “History Matters” from my Mum when I talked to her on the phone after dinner and found the website online!

Well, I finished enrolling this morning, and so I’m now officially a Third Year. Or to put it more scarily, a Final Year student – eeek!

Freshers’ Week is a strange time of year. It brings back many memories of first arriving in Cardiff as a Fresher, which feels such a long, long time ago now. It was particularly strange going to Senghennydd Court last week to show people the way to the internationals events, when that was how I first met people from the Christian Union back when I first arrived. There’s such a strange sense of deja vu at this time of year, a sense of a past that feels at the same time both yesterday and a lifetime ago.

Anyway, here’s what I’ll be doing this year in the English half of my course:

• Creative Writing III – Starting a Novel
• Creative Writing IV – Developing a Novel
• Dissertation – I want to do this on some aspect of Christianity and literary theory, but I haven’t worked out exactly what yet.

And on the history side of things:

• Nationalism and Socialism in the Chinese Revolution
• Chinese for Historians

So that should be quite interesting and challenging! I’m not quite sure what I’m letting myself in for.

I also went to the Societies Fair today. It was chaotic: loads of societies and loads of freshers in a Great Hall that isn’t great enough to contain the sheer volume of people pressing through there. In the middle of the day there was a long queue to get in. I was supposed to be on the Navigators stall at three, and had an embarrasing tussle with over-zealous security guards when I tried to sneak in quickly past the queue. You’d think the Union could be organised enough to arrange for each society to have a couple of passes each to easily allow for those manning stalls to get in and out, but unfortunately not. The whole thing really needs a bigger venue and better organisation – the room gets extremely hot, overcrowded and would be downright dangerous if there ever was an emergency. I hope it won’t quite be so mad in the Sports fair tomorrow when I’ll be on the Gair Rhydd stand in the morning…

This is the tale of my struggles since coming to university; of the struggle between my reason and faith, and how I was rescued from despair and saved from denial; a story of grace and God’s goodness.

This is my story, and that means two things. Firstly, because it’s my story, it’s not a theological treatise or epistemological argument. The place for a detailed academic argument about the ideas I’ve struggled with is elsewhere. And because it’s my story, your story and your struggles will be different – but I hope that my story will be interesting and perhaps helpful to you.

I came to university a committed Christian, ready to set the world (or at least the university) on fire. I relished the challenge of my studies, and the task of engaging with secularism, naturalism, postmodernism, hedonism and a host of other -isms. I was also keen to examine my beliefs for myself, to make sure I was really following Jesus out of my own conviction, not just because I’d been brought up in the Christian faith.

As my first year progressed, this last task pressed down on me more heavily. How could I be a Christian with any intellectual integrity if I hadn’t for myself established beyond reasonable doubt the truth of the Bible’s claims?

I began to try and read up on the historical evidence for Christianity, and on the various arguments for the Christian faith. I think this is a great thing to do, and would recommend it to anyone. There are excellent grounds for trusting the Bible and for the resurrection of Jesus as an actual historical fact.

But even though I knew the evidence was good, I wasn’t satisfied, and the doubts pressed in. I wanted to find some cast-iron irrefutable piece of evidence that would leave me, and anyone I discussed these things with, with absolutely no room for doubt about the truth of Christianity. When God failed to oblige me with some magic bullet piece of evidence to zap people with, I began to get rather upset, to say the least.

My greatest fear was having to make the dreadful choice between believing and thinking. My fear was that either I’d stop believing because of my doubts, or I’d commit intellectual suicide by holding on to my beliefs despite the evidence. Because I was demanding such a high standard of proof and evidence, I found myself in a place of real spiritual darkness (ooh-err!), becoming increasingly unsure whether I could believe anything at all.

Fortunately for me, God had been providing me with good books and people that would help me out of my dilemma. I discovered stuff like the books of Francis Schaeffer, with his insistence on the Lordship of Christ in all of life. I realised in my head that following God isn’t just a matter of the intellect, but of my whole self – but ironically, this fact wasn’t something that had really connected in my heart!

The big moment of change came on Contagious, the Christian youth conference I’ve been going on since I was fourteen. On the first evening, Trevor Pearce talked about the importance of the fact of the Gospel, that it wasn’t just something subjective, but part of time and space and history (talk). When he started talking about this, I remember thinking something like “Great! Perhaps now I’ll get my proof”. But as good as the talk was, I didn’t get that magic absolute evidence to give me the God-like quasi-omniscient certainty I desired.

The theme of the week was Smashing the Idols of the Heart, and as I was challenged to put God first above all else – nothing else, however good, can compare with him. I began to wonder whether my approach was wrong: was I making this absolute certainty an idol? Was I taking the wrong approach in setting my own individual, and supposedly autonomous and objective, perspective as the arbiter of truth?

One night later on I talked it through with a couple of the leaders. All my frustrations, all my doubts, pent up and let loose with tears and anguish. We went back down to absolute basics – did I believe Jesus existed? Did he die on the cross? Did he rise from the dead? As we worked through the reasons for my struggles, I grasped my way to a new understanding. Knowledge doesn’t come through reason alone, but by reason and faith working together.

Making this transition from “knowledge through reason alone” to “faith and reason working together in tandem” was difficult and painful. From my old perspective, taking into account anything that wasn’t strictly Rational – that is, derived by logical, empirical, testable and observable means – such as trusting people or sources outside of myself, or emotion or experience, was anti-intellectual. What I learned was that the Christian faith isn’t anti-reason – there’s no intellectual suicide in believing – it is reasonable, but also goes beyond reason alone and calls us to trust God.

What’s more, the Bible treats us as a whole person, not as a creature cut up into separate bits – Mind, Will, Emotion, and so on. It’s possible to make those distinctions, but they are all interrelated and connected. So Jesus’ call to follow me wasn’t just a matter for my mind, but legitimately makes a call on my whole self. It is perfectly reasonable to take into account my experience of the living God and that the Christian life is one that can be lived out in practice – just not rationalistic.

It was only recently, almost a year on, that I began to realise more fully just how important a transition I made that night. In reading up on postmodernism for my course, I came across the Christian book in the university library Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K A Smith. In it, Smith engages with postmodern thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, drawing out the positive insights that postmodernism has as well as critiquing postmodern thinking. His key insight was that the whole modernist/postmodernist dilemma is essentially about the relationship between reason and faith – the very issue I’ve been struggling with since coming to university.

As he analysed Western thought in light of this, I began to see that my own personal journey had in many ways retrod the recent history of Western thought in a nutshell! It was a real thrill to read something that described and made sense of my experiences.

I’ll give a brief, necessarily generalised and simplified overview: Descartes had responded to the scepticism of his time by attempting to prove the Christian faith by reason alone, by starting from man by himself as an autonomous thinking being. This approach is summed up in that most famous of philosophical slogans: “I think, therefore I am”.

What Descartes did, however, was to remove faith from the equation of how we know things. Modernism assumes that the only true knowledge is absolute, autonomous, objective knowledge, and seeks to find it. As you can see from my story, it’s easy for us as Christians to buy into this way of thinking, but our pretensions to such God-like knowledge is basically idolatrous.

Postmodernism also buys in to the assumption that faith and reason are divided and opposed. It rightly sees through man’s pretensions to God-like knowledge. As a Christian, I agree that man by himself cannot solve life’s questions. Postmodernism sees knowledge as a matter of faith, but since it divides reason and faith, it is a blind faith that cannot have any grounds for deciding what to have faith in. So any choice is as justified as any other, working out on a popular level in attitudes like “That may be true for you, but not for me”.

I started off like Descartes, but was faced with the same difficulties as the thinkers who followed him, and was beginning to spiral off into postmodern despair in the search for true knowledge. But in reconnecting reason and faith that night on Contagious, I became what Smith calls “properly postmodern” – or, as I like to think of it, I moved out of the blind-alley of modernism and postmodernism that comes from disconnecting reason and faith.

The journey isn’t at its end – I’ve just navigated a particularly tricky part of my own intellectual journey. I’ve been looking into the question of reason and faith further. I listened to a series of talks on Epistemology (how we achieve knowledge) by Andrew Fellows from L’Abri on the Bethinking website, which further confirmed my new understanding. Just a few weeks ago, one of the talks on the UCCF Forum helped me to recognise more fully another vital component in the knowledge equation, that of revelation: in particular, God revealing himself and revealing truth to us, though I won’t unpack all that now.

(As an aside, the Pope’s recent controversial talk in which he supposedly attacked Islam was all about the importance of the connection between reason and faith, and is well worth reading).

I’m really thankful to God for helping me work through these difficulties. He has kept me from intellectual despair on the one hand, and intellectual suicide on the other, and I’m the stronger for having worked through this particular question, of having made my faith more my own and not just something inherited from my parents and upbringing.

Doubts and struggles aren’t an evil to be shunned – rather, they’re a part of the process of growing to be mature in my mind and in my service of God through the use of my mind. Often Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, is deemed to be stupid or immature. Well, unfortunately the Church is currently very intellectually weak in many ways, but the Christian faith can stand being intellectually prodded and poked and dissected.

What’s more, the Christian faith is not unreasonable. It is more than rationalism: the Gospel speaks to you as a whole person, intellect, will, emotions and every other aspect of you, and Jesus calls you to follow him with all that you are. Examine the evidence, but do so knowing that ultimately we all have to decide what to believe on the basis of who and what we will trust.

I’ll just end with a quote from Jesus in Matthew 22:37-38, which sums all this up:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.”

Mum’s been pestering me to update my blog and now that I’ve finished doing all the Christian Union publicity for Freshers’ Week, I’ve now found time to do so. I’ve also been busy with settling in to my new house on Miskin Street. Unfortunately the shower has been leaking into the living room, and is directy above the television and electric sockets, though someone has come round and is currently trying to fix it.

The Christian Union’s Internationals welcome events and Freshers’ Week events have also been keeping me busy, with all sorts of events going on. It’s been fun meeting loads of Freshers – Phoebe, a friend from Contagious arrived last week, and over the last couple of days I’ve met hordes of people including Rachel from Worcester, Lucinda from Ireland, Dave who also went on Contagious, Lizzie who emailed me a few months ago to ask what Cardiff was like, Libby who is the sister of a friend from the Nefyn mission, Britain (not sure if it’s spelt like that!) who is from Hawaii, Danni (again, not sure of spelling) who’s studying English Lit and Italian and many, many others!

It’s all been rather manic, and that’s without mentioning my new responsibilities with editing Quench’s Debate page and planning for the Debating Society and so on. Fortunately things are calming down slightly now!

Anyway, here’s a few items of note I’ve come across on the web lately:

• Some good advice for Freshers from Dave Bish
• Rob Wager, who I met at the UCCF Forum, has started a blog, notesfromtheannexe. Rob is studying English Literature – we had some really good chats about various stuff while at forum, and hopefully we can continue some good conversation here on the blogosphere
• An open letter from Paul Hattaway concerning “The Heavenly Man” on some accusations circulating on the Internet and elsewhere about Brother Yun and the book.
• The talks from Contagious 2006: The Cross are available to download. Excellent teaching – well worth listening to!

And if I get time, I hope to blog about:

• The Cross and Relationships seminar I went to on Contagious. What does cross-shaped romance look like?
• Highlights from the UCCF Forum, such as what struck me from the talks, the people I met and so on. And a few thoughts on the one or two things I disagreed with!
• Continuing my series on The Immaturity of the Evangelical Mind and what to do about it.
• Thoughts on Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernier, which I recently finished reading, and on the film Children of Men, which I watched with Philip and Claire Fayers last week.
• Reflections on starting my third and final year of university – scary!

I’ve got an important blog entry almost ready to publish looking back on my intellectual and spiritual journey since coming to university, so stay tuned for that!

The UCCF Forum, that is, and something funny hasn’t happened on the way yet, because I don’t leave for two hours. But I just wanted to use that title! Yes indeed, I’m off to the annual shindig of Christian Union leaders at Quinta, sneaking in since I’m on the Cardiff CU’s publicity team.

It should be interesting – like the Church in general, and CU in particular, I sometimes have my issues with the way things are done when I feel that more could be done, or things could be done better, to serve God wholeheartedly, to spread the revolution of the Kingdom of God, and to share his transforming love with those around us.

But it’s always exciting to come together with people passionate about the same Good News – be it the good people of Bala Evangelical Church when I’m at home, Mackintosh Evangelical Church in Cardiff, the Navigators, Cardiff CU or UCCF – even when there are differences on the way we approach things!

And it’ll be great to catch up with some of the wonderful people I have the privilige of knowing at Cardiff, friends such as Ben, Becca, Sam and lots of others (who I won’t list because, firstly I don’t have time to list anyone; secondly, it’d be worse to try and list everyone and miss someone out, and thirdly, I’m not sure of the complete list of who is and isn’t going from Cardiff CU!)

Another thing that will be “interesting” is that I’ll be camping, and cooking meals on a camping stove! Hopefully I won’t starve or die of food poisoning…

I don’t think I put a link in my previous post to last year’s Contagious talks on the subject of Smashing the Idols of the Heart, so here’s one to the Contagious site downloads page.

However, the files on there are unnecessarily huge (35-50mb each), so I’ve shrunk them down and uploaded them all as a single 26mb compressed file. So if you click here you can download the whole lot in one go! They’re really good talks, very clear and challenging, so if you want a kick up the spiritual backside, why not give them a listen?