The essential story

Doctor Who is back and is back on form. I had a theory about why Doctor Who became rubbish and disappeared. It was because we no longer really believed in good or evil. We stopped believing in evil, or that there was anything really worth hiding behind the sofa for. Everything was relative, evil was just something that happened when people did not live in good enough conditions. Better housing, a better environment and suddenly everyone would be good. Nothing really mattered, and in a world where nothing really matters it is difficult to have a good yarn, and therefore Doctor Who went down hill. We never really believed in good either that was relative, so try having a story about the battle between good and evil when you don't believe in either, and it is not going to work. Doctor Who never relied on special affects or big fight scenes and therefore it just slowly died, and it was the lack of the story that was the enemy that finally killed off the Doctor.

However, whether or not September 11th changed the world, it and other such events changed our view of the world. Doctor Who disappeared before Kosovo, before the bodies started floating down through Burundi. When we were not really aware of what was happening in the Congo. While we still thought Zimbabwe would sort itself out. While here in the UK violence has increased, so that it is not just over there it is over here again. Till again we believe in evil, till again we believe that there is something worth hiding behind the settee about. J K Rowling has made an incredible success about the battle of good against evil in Harry Potter, and it is a battle where the goodies don't just get away scot free either, but are marked.

To have a good good versus evil story you have to believe in good. It is here again where changing in culture and outlook appear interesting. Both Doctor Who and Harry Potter show a leaning towards ideas of good and heroism that I once thought had disappeared for good in a cynical age. Of course both are family entertainment and have children in mind, there is still much that is unremittingly bleak and dark, where "heroes" just shoot and kill, and it would be very much premature to announce the death of the anti-hero. However there is a resurgence of the idea of goodness and that it might be so to speak a good thing. There is at least a small call to what we might even call traditional morality.

We have lived through the me generation and in one sense looking after yourself is such a part of human nature that it is never going to disappear, but the harshness of some of the self-centredness has been based on the idea that I can get on on my own. I don't need you, you don't need me. I can fight my battles on my own. However when life gets really difficult we turn to others not just because it is the warm and cosy thing to do, but because we have to. We might be a national of individualists but when it comes to fighting something as big of Nazism, you have to work together. When evil is out there and armed and dangerous, you have to alter your behaviour.

One of the interesting questions that is being posed and that I heard on the radio today was the discussion about how much you sacrifice individual freedoms for the interest of collective security. The fact that we live in a world with dangers, with an enemy does have an impact on how we may behave - though we need to ensure that we do not manage to imprison ourselves because of the threats of others.

The world of course has not changed, we have lived in a world of sin since the days of Adam and Eve - there is nothing new under the sun. However the fact that our thinking is in flux matters, really matters. Much of the way that we live is based on the idea that in the end everything will all turn out okay, whatever we do, that life does not really have consequences - that it will be all right on the night.

Car bombs and drunken louts remind us that the reality is very different, that in truth our actions do have consequences and as Iraq demonstrates it is far easier to cause problems than it is to solve them, far easier to set things in motion than to stop them once they are in motion. Our actions do have consequences, the war that we hatch in someone else's country can come home to roost, and of course our actions in terms of pollution and how we treat the planet do have consequences and if we are not careful they can have dire consequences, melting icecaps and rising sea levels and climate chaos.

In the end the battle of good and evil matters because it is the human story and it has consequences. I think sometimes the church has something to blame, we can treat religion as the ultimate panacea - bring it to Jesus and it will all be okay; just believe; just pray - but our actions have consequences. The choices we make matter. There may not be angels and demons on our shoulders shouting or gently reasoning with us to choose a certain direction, but what we do matters - it matters to us and it matters to other people.

Christianity and the church have been seen as irrelevant because the story that we told about good and evil did not matter any more. We lived in a world that not only did not believe in God and the devil, but did not believe in good or evil either, anything went between consenting adults and if you did not like it you could switch over. However we have reaped what we have sowed and perhaps whether or not it makes a difference to people's attitude towards God and Christianity or not, people's attitudes are changing - and as much because of fear as anything else.

History has lessons for us and one of those lessons is that sometimes terrible things can happen, and that once they begin to happen it can be too late to stop them. Events like the French Revolution remind us that nothing is eternal and that sometimes reaping the injustices that we have sown can be a very bitter pill. Mario Antoinette had an idealised peasant village built where she could hide from the world and enjoy the simple peasant life, but it was fantasy, in reality the peasants lived in poverty and many of the city dweller lived in squalor and her rural retreat could not save her from the reality.

Good and evil matter, and therefore Christianity deals with the essential story of humanity, that of the battle between good and evil. This is played out in every aspect of our lives, and that is why morality matters. Easy sex has become part of the British way of life, and sex has become disconnected from marriage, so that the majority of children are born outside of wedlock. The problem is that while easy sex has a certain appeal, the reality that giving in to our passions and desires opens the door to much that is not good. In the end bringing up children and building families and communities is about hard work and self-sacrifice and dedication. The reason why marriage makes sense is that if you cannot commit yourself to someone for life then really you should not be bringing a child into the world, and though your child will be influenced by you and by your genetics, you do not get to choose your child. In the end as the last Harry Potter film finished, the time is coming when we will all have to choose between what is right and what is easy. The time of that choice is now, and indeed is always now.

The reasons why God sets good laws is that we may be blessed by living good lives, but God's laws make sense and can be summed up very simply love God and love one another. In a sense therefore God's rules for our relationships with each other are love. The reason for rules surrounding sexual restraint are because that is the loving thing to do, rather than exploiting and demeaning others.

As Christians we can often become uncomfortable with ideas of goodness. We do not like to teach it in case it makes us out to be boring, or to be the people who like to say no. However if we fail to share what it means to be good, then people will make mistakes and will hurt themselves - and others. People are into experience but the problem is that if we wait to learn from experience we may cause incredible damage both to ourselves and others in the meantime.

The other problem is that when we rely on experience we are limited by our experiences, i.e. we may not know any better, we may lack the empirical data that shows us the other choices that we missed. It is like deciding to go somewhere and not asking for directions but hoping that we will eventually stumble upon where we need to be. We need to take a look at the directions, we need to understand where we are going. The problem is that there are dangerous places, cliffs that we can drop off, bogs that we can sink into, objects that will block our paths - just setting off in hope is not enough. One of the images that I struggle with is the idea that the Bible is a map book, but the image that often we have is that we need to consult it at all times, like something that we carry in a case around our necks. However we know that is not the case, we know the way to go to the shops without needing a map, but there is a reason for that we have been shown, we have learned the way. It is like that with the Bible on much of it we just need to hear and obey, and once we have learned it and obey it we do not need to keep on looking up what to do in a certain circumstance we know because the Bible tells us.

There is a story of goodness and love, we need to learn it by heart, we need it to ring in our ears and to become our story. Not that we have to look at it nervously every day, but that we need to learn to live it out every day. Of course it is not a simple story and therefore we will still learn new things about it and we need to come back to it when fresh experiences challenge or where we find ourselves in uncharted territory. I'm not saying that we do not need to keep learning, of course we do, but we need to learn new things, not just to repeat by rote what we learned in Sunday School. It is about learning new things, and struggling with new terrain.

We live in a world of a battle, where there are real casualties, where what we do matters and has real consequences. In this world Christianity is 100% relevant and it is this message that the church needs to be unafraid to proclaim, it matters, it is the essential story.