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In Scotland right now, a promising candidate for the leadership of the Scottish National Party (SNP) reminds one strongly of the Calvinist hinterland of theology at Potchefstroom.
The contender for this high office is Gaelic-speaking Kate Forbes, 32 years old, former finance secretary in the SNP: a very clever graduate of Cambridge university, married with three children, and a devout member of the smallest of the Presbyterian Protestant churches, the Free Church of Scotland, a close cousin to our own Doppers in South Africa.
Forbes is the new Joan of Arc of Scotland, a true believer, unafraid to wear the Christian faith emblazoned on her sleeve. She has also incited instant controversy, inasmuch as she has refused to disavow the teachings of her church on marriage, abortion and sex – a stance which is anathema to the strongly secular population of the United Kingdom.
In particular, she made it clear that she does not support gay marriage. Uproar ensued. As The Spectator noted, it’s just like the old Test Act, where Scots in public life had to swear they held no Catholic beliefs; now, a new Test Act is emerging for would-be party leaders:
This isn’t about what they would do but what they think. Those from traditional Christian, Muslim or Jewish backgrounds risk effectively being barred from leadership if they follow their family’s faith. This means exclusion in the name of diversity – a new glass ceiling.1
The “Wee Frees”, as they are known colloquially, are a historical Scottish Presbyterian church with roots in the Scottish Reformation. It is neither the Church of Scotland nor the Free Presbyterian Church, though they share the same roots. It has a significant number of new young members attending 100 churches, and it runs the Edinburgh Theological Seminary, which trains and educates ministers, teachers and missionaries.
The church asserts that while it does not take party political positions, it does proclaim God’s word on a number of moral issues, including inter alia injustice, poverty, racism, euthanasia, abortion (against), family, sexuality (not before marriage) – and it believes all human beings are equally created as male and female in the image of God, and that it is irrational and unscientific to claim that people can change biological sex.
John Kennedy, late president of the USA, faced the same problem as Kate Forbes: he had to convince voters that his Catholicism wouldn’t get in the way of his performance in high office. Likewise, Forbes has already made clear that she will always respect majority democratic opinion if she is elected leader. The latest polls suggest that sceptical SNP members are listening – she is now ahead and stands a good chance of being elected as SNP leader later in March.
Hers will, however, be a rare victory of religion in the face of a ferocious reaction, similar to the “secular inquisition” that sank Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, who eventually resigned, saying he had found it impossible to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching while practising politics.
But perhaps in Kate Forbes we are seeing a return of old-fashioned religious values to fill a spiritual vacuum. Donna Leon, celebrated for her Commissario Brunetti books, has Brunetti himself speculating that Italy’s problems are the ineluctable consequence of centuries of firm, unconsidered and unquestioned religious faith that prevailed well into the last century. Until it didn’t anymore. People who used to believe in God, realised they didn’t really believe any of it anymore, but had nothing else to believe in. God has proven very difficult to replace. “Wellness”, Pilates, yoga, wealth, a sprinkling of new cults, meditation – and drugs, above all – have given little in return for the time and money invested in them. God, it seems, had filled so much space with so little effort.2
Scotland has the greatest number of drug deaths in Europe, greater even than Italy, and there may be something in what Donna Leon says. But who knows? This is one of those unquantifiable questions.
What is true, however, is that Forbes is not the only politician controversially asserting her faith in public today. In the USA, civil rights groups have condemned the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, after he said he believed God had made him mayor. He supports compulsory prayer in public schools, adding, “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state .... When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.” He added: “State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies. I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.”
The big question, though, is whether Kate Forbes’s Dopper religion will incline her towards pursuing Old Testament “nation-centred” solutions for Scotland based on notions of “the people” or “die volk” – and therefore commit her to seeking independence from the United Kingdom, rather like her predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon.
Late president FW de Klerk, a Dopper of note, who freed Nelson Mandela and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the process, has inadvertently provided us with a bit of a road map in this regard. All the better to understand Kate Forbes with.
Perhaps. This is all very thin ice for cynical reporters, given the ontological nature of these matters, but suffice it to say that a couple of years ago, De Klerk gave an important speech at the university at Potchefstroom, his old alma mater. It may be the last speech he made before his death, in fact.3
In this presentation, he explored in some detail the history of religious Protestant differences that had emerged in South Africa in the 19th century, to wit: Martin Luther’s doctrines were the fountainhead of Calvinism and the theology of the traditional Dutch Reformed Church. The Luther doctrines were subsequently refined at the Synod of Dort, which was the guiding influence in the formation of the separate Gereformeerde Kerk in South Africa in 1859.
How did this come about, so that South Africa ended up with two Afrikaans churches? According to De Klerk, many Afrikaners had become deeply disturbed by growing Methodist tendencies in their church. During the Batavian Republic’s brief tenure at the Cape between 1803 and 1806, the “New Church Order” introduced by Commissioner De Mist did not even mention God’s name, and instead referred only to a “higher Being”. Furthermore, De Mist had introduced strongly humanist elements into the liturgy, corresponding with the traditions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
When the British took over the Cape, these tendencies were reinforced by Scottish clergymen under the leadership of the local reformed church and, in particular, the Reverend Andrew Murray. Conservative Afrikaners in the Cape then made common cause with religious conservatives in Holland who rejected these humanist and liberal tendencies, with the emphasis on the individual, introduced by William I in the wake of the French Revolution.
Patience wore thin, and eventually in 1857, the Afrikaans conservatives requested the “Reformed Church of the Netherlands” to send them a minister supporting the pure principles originally enunciated at the Synod of Dort in 1619 (pre-French Revolution). Responding to this request, the Christelike Gereformeerde Kerk in the Netherlands sent the Reverend Dirk Postma to South Africa, and two years later the Gereformeerde Kerk of South Africa – also known as the Dopper church – was established, with a theological seminary rooting itself eventually in Potchefstroom, where it became the embryo of Potchefstroom’s university.
This adherence to the Synod of Dort’s principles laid the foundations for democratic institutions in England, Scotland and the United States of America. John Locke, that great philosopher, began his career as a Calvinist Trinitarian, while the Pilgrim Fathers, an English sect of dissenting Calvinists, adopted democratic processes after their 1620 arrival in America. The Synod of Dort doctrines have had a lasting effect on the constitutional evolution of the United States.
De Klerk went on to say that while these early Dort beginnings planted the seeds of individual political freedom, there is another freedom tradition in the Scriptures that has also had a profound impact on the world. It relates to the freedom of peoples rather than individuals. The Israelites had their genesis in their liberation from Egyptian subjugation, their flight from Egypt and the establishment of their own state in the land of Canaan.
It was also the inspiration for many Boers, who left the Cape to escape the subjugation of the British Empire and to establish their own Zions. And so, perhaps, there we finally have it, the key to Kate Forbes. Her church, the Wee Frees, is wedded to an ideal of political and religious self-determination not unlike the Doppers and for the same biblical reasons. There seems to me to be little difference. Scotland, she believes, wants to escape from the embrace of the United Kingdom and become an independent country. This is the one area where her religious beliefs and those of her party, the SNP, are entirely compatible, utterly ad idem. This is where we should not be too surprised her focus will lie.
Modern Britain, like so many nations elsewhere in the world, is a secular country. Lovely old churches that were full of parishioners 40 years ago are being sold off to be turned into apartments. There are consolations for the ordinary family, other than religion. Sundays are given over to outings and the garden centre and the supermarket. It’s a massive shopping day. Of course, there are churchgoers and there are growing evangelical movements, but they are fringe in terms of numbers. The established Church of England and Wales, of which King Charles is the head, is shrinking.
What sustains churchgoers then, other than blind faith? What empirical evidence is there for the existence of God? Perhaps if there was something more tangible for this woke and plugged-in generation concretely to put their hands on, then they may come to believe, as Kate Forbes does. I decided to put the question to ChatGPT. And the answer was most surprising and very thought-provoking. Not a single word of what follows has been changed.
As an AI language model, I do not hold personal beliefs or take a position on the existence of God or any deity. However, I can provide information on various arguments and empirical evidence that has been put forth in favour of the existence of God.
The question of whether God exists has been debated by philosophers and theologians for centuries, and there are numerous arguments that have been presented on both sides. One such argument is the teleological argument, which suggests that the universe and its natural laws exhibit a design that implies a purposeful creator. This argument is often referred to as the argument from design.
One of the most famous proponents of the argument from design was William Paley, an 18th-century theologian who wrote the book "Natural Theology." In this book, Paley argued that if we were to find a watch lying on the ground, we would immediately assume that it had a maker, even if we had never seen a watch before. The intricate workings of the watch would suggest that it was designed with a specific purpose in mind. Paley then applied this reasoning to the natural world, arguing that the complexity and orderliness of the universe suggested that it had a purposeful creator.
While the argument from design has been criticized by some philosophers, it has also been supported by empirical evidence in the form of scientific discoveries. For example, the fine-tuning of the universe is a concept that has been studied extensively by physicists. This refers to the idea that the physical constants and laws of the universe are finely tuned in such a way that life as we know it can exist. Even slight variations in these constants would result in a vastly different universe, one that may not support the emergence of life. Some scientists have argued that this fine-tuning suggests the existence of a purposeful creator.
Another argument that has been put forth in support of the existence of God is the moral argument. This argument suggests that the existence of objective moral values and duties is evidence of a moral lawgiver. In other words, if there is such a thing as right and wrong, and if we have a sense of moral obligation to follow the right, then this implies the existence of a higher moral authority.
While the existence of objective moral values is still a matter of debate among philosophers, there is empirical evidence that suggests that humans have an innate sense of morality. Studies have shown that even very young children have an intuitive understanding of fairness and justice. For example, in a classic study by psychologist Jean Piaget, children were shown two rows of blocks, one with more blocks than the other. When asked which row was fairer, even three-year-olds were able to point to the row with an equal number of blocks. Similarly, studies have shown that infants as young as six months old prefer to watch puppets that behave in a moral and helpful manner over those that behave in a mean or unhelpful manner.
Another argument for the existence of God is the cosmological argument. This argument suggests that the existence of the universe itself implies the existence of a cause or creator that brought it into existence. The argument goes that everything that exists must have a cause, and since the universe exists, it must have had a cause.
While the cosmological argument has been criticized by some philosophers, there is empirical evidence that supports the idea of causality. In the field of physics, for example, the law of causality is a fundamental principle that underlies our understanding of the natural world. Every event is thought to have a cause, and scientists work to uncover the causes behind natural phenomena.
One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence in support of the existence of God is the near-death experience (NDE). These experiences are reported by people who have been clinically dead or near death, and they often involve vivid and life-changing experiences.
Endnotes
1 The Spectator, 25 Feb 2023.
2 Give unto others by Donna Leon. Penguin.
3 28 November 2019. Potchefstroom speech.
Also read:
To Google or to Chat? Getting information is likely to change
Getting the lights to work by teaching anti-corruption values
Kommentaar
One-sided questions will get one-sided answers from AI. A very strange article. Is it only me who struggles to connect the dots, or bots? Maybe because when we start quoting bots it does not really add value; these arguments are well-known, ditto for their counter-arguments.