Q.1
Someone with no religious faith or interest might look around our present world and claim 'there is no evidence for the existence of a 'worthwhile' God (who would be powerful, caring and 'hands-on' to dampen down the woes of war, pollution, suffering etc.)'. How might a Christian best address this attitude?
  • 'It is possible to know God personally in one's life, and to begin to make a difference'
  • 'At the front of the Bible, Genesis tells us God created the world'
  • 'Perhaps it's because we ignore and deny God, that we have taken false paths and made such a mess of things'
  • 'You suggest our world may once have been better; so who's spoiled it? We're the ones that are here, and we need to get back into harmony with God and His plan'
Q.2
Even people with no religious faith or background can take comfort in 'everyday miracles' ~ though they would probably question that description. Many songs list several such experiences, but only one of these titles continues with words explicitly acknowledging God as creator: which ONE?
  • 'My Favourite Things' from The Sound of Music ('Raindrops on roses ... ')
  • 'All things bright and beautiful' by Mrs C F Alexander
  • 'What a wonderful world' as sung by Louis Armstrong in 1967
  • 'Every time I hear a newborn baby cry' (as sung by Elvis Presley and many others)
Q.3
People of faith have wrestled mentally with the concept of miracles over many centuries, not least the 13th-century Catholic divine St Thomas Aquinas. Into how many categories did he seek to divide them?
  • Two (as with Jesus): miracles over the forces of nature (e.g. stilling the storm) and over disease (e.g. healing the blind and deaf)
  • Three (as with Jesus): miracles over the forces of nature (e.g. stilling the storm); over inanimate objects and substances (e.g. turning water into wine); and over human disease / disability (e.g. healing the blind and deaf)
  • Three: doing what nature never could; reversing normally one-way natural processes (e.g. paralysis / loss of faculties); bringing on natural processes at 'unnatural' times (e.g. prompting or withholding wind or rainfall)
  • Four levels
Q.4
Fervent Christians may not be the only ones to pray for God's miraculous intervention in a seemingly impossible situation; but Brother Andrew, more widely known as 'God's Smuggler' (in his autobiographical book of that title), felt called to a particularly difficult ministry ~ transporting Bibles and other sacred literature into the communist-controlled lands of Eastern Europe, where these were legally forbidden. As he approached the barriers of the old 'Iron Curtain' in the 1950s and 60s, in a Volkswagen 'beetle' crammed with religious printed matter, in what terms would he pray?
  • 'Lord, save me, and save the souls of the border guards who meet me'
  • 'Lord, give me the strength to withstand their questioning, and any detention they put me to'
  • 'Lord who made blind eyes to see, now make seeing eyes blind'
  • 'Lord, forgive me today if I tell any lies ('bear false witness') for the sake of Your kingdom'
Q.5
'How can anyone hope to glimpse God through the smog and warfare of the 21st century?' How might a Christian best begin to answer this challenge?
  • 'Our view may be masked for the worse by these regrettable things, but God can see beyond and through them'
  • 'God is there, even in the smog and warfare: there cannot be anywhere He cannot be'
  • 'God loves His creation, even when we disfigure it'
  • 'The smog and warfare are wilful products of humankind, but that's not to say God isn't there still, beyond and behind them'
Q.6
'How can anyone these days believe in God creating the world, in the first place?' Again, which answer offers the most appropriate Christian response?
  • 'The chances of our planet developing as it has are infinitesimal ~ even over geological time, and within a universe whose edges (if any) we smartest earthlings have yet to discover. Surely there must have been Someone, or Something, to see us on our way?'
  • 'The Bible opens by suggesting a sequence of stages, in which the world as we know it took shape. In broad terms that isn't so bad, as a seemingly primitive but well-intentioned attempt to rationalise what we now understand as the evolutionary process. There may be a lot more common ground than you reckoned'
  • 'The more scientists discover through microscopes, telescopes and other research, the more evidence they find of remarkable and elegant patterns undergirding our existence. We're way behind on catching up with them all.'
  • 'The Bible tells us He did'
Q.7
In an instantly visual age, people are (perhaps surprisingly) quick to spot 'images of Christ' in apparently unlikely contexts, where random natural or man-made processes generate a shape that echoes ~ usually ~ a classic traditional image of Him. All of the following, apart from ONE, are contexts in which such images have genuinely been claimed to be spotted within real natural life. Which category is clearly the most dubious?
  • In the patterns of scorch-marks on various cooked items such as toast, pancakes and pizza
  • In the growth of ivy up a telegraph pole, resulting in a 'natural crucifix'
  • In newly-exposed rocks after a landslide
  • Cloud patterns
Q.8
For some particularly sensitive people, a 'theophany' may trigger acts of creativity which others can enjoy after them, and which these later people may come to regard as a blessing. In 1936 a French composer, orphaned in his teens some 20 years before, lost a dear friend in a particularly unpleasant car accident, and during a planned holiday shortly afterwards sought solace in the sanctuary at Rocamadour. This spiritual experience reawakened and refocused his previous religious sense ~ and he went on to write many sublime religious musical works that have rightly become cornerstones of the 20th-century sacred repertoire (cherished by countless performers and listeners, not least in times of their own trouble). Who was he?
  • Maurice Ravel
  • Francis Poulenc
  • Camille Saint-Saens
  • Georges Auric
Q.9
Numerous Bible characters, and others subsequently in history, reported that they had been sent messages from God through their dreams. In the case of Joseph (the Old Testament one), he was released from jail thanks to his God-given ability to interpret the dreams of others (having had many ups and downs in his life already, not least due to dreams of his own). Perhaps it is understandable that the false-reality of dreams, playing in our own minds while we are alive yet not awake, should fascinate and even occasionally scare us. Along came a very famous psychoanalyst around 100 years ago, proposing that all human dreams are self-generated and largely self-ISH with their emphasis on ill-disguised desires, regrets and ambitions. This psychoanalyst happened also, famously, to be of Jewish descent ~ 'one of God's chosen'. Who was he?
  • Sigmund Freud
  • Karl Marx
  • Moritz Moszkowski
  • Alfred Ernst
Q.10
A final 'minor miracle' story, again of a church-musical nature ~ but for which your author can vouch, as having been present on the occasion. During the late 1970s Britain suffered a period of industrial unrest which included frequent power cuts. One such evening the congregation for Evensong in the chapel of New College, Oxford had been expecting a service with organ-accompanied choral music, but a power-cut meant the organ could not be blown, and the singing went on unaccompanied, by candle-light, as it had done traditionally all through the pre-electric centuries since the College's foundation by the Bishop of Winchester inStaff outside (and out of earshot) were meanwhile labouring to coax a petrol-driven generator into action to provide some current. By one means or another, the power supply did indeed come back on during the service: the lamps sprang back into action, and those present blinked, rubbed their eyes and smiled at one another. Within the regular service, what words had been sung immediately before that moment?
  • ' ... To be a light to lighten the Gentiles' (in the Nunc Dimittis canticle)
  • 'The Lord is my light and my salvation' (Psalm 27 v.1; also, in Latin, the motto of Oxford University)
  • 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, o Lord' (from the 3rd Collect, a nightly prayer for protection during the hours of darkness)
  • 'Let your light so shine before men ... that they may glorify the Father'
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