To be a Christian is to be attentive to signs of God’s action in the world, and this is especially true in Holy Week and at Easter, when – the faithful believe – Jesus by his death and resurrection revealed the nature of God’s relationship with humanity. For some Christians, the most important part of the lesson is that Jesus accepted death and offered his innocence as a gift; for others, or at other times, the point is that the gift was accepted and he was in the end resurrected. Either way, the symbolism has been unavoidable in reactions to the dreadful blaze in Notre Dame Cathedral. It is a rare catastrophe that persuades anyone they were wrong: the usual effect, especially when the disaster strikes others, is to illuminate just how right one has been all along.
This tendency to learn from disaster that God approves of your opinions is fully on display in some reactions to the Notre Dame fire, just as it was three decades ago, when York Minster was set on fire by lightning a week after the consecration there of David Jenkins as bishop of Durham, a man whom evangelicals regarded as a heretic. Some conservatives have already recruited this disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure at the liberals in the church and the secularists outside it. There is a further, racialised version of this madness, which is already spreading: that this is connected with Muslim immigration. The speed with which this has been promulgated is a worrying sign of the erosion of civilised values.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2V0WVo1
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