Speaker: Dr Tan Gee Paw

Venue: St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Prayer Hall A-C

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Time: 8pm – 9.30pm

“This used to be the most dangerous place in Nairobi,” says our guide. We are standing on the edge of the Karuna Forest. We’re here to plant trees, but just six years ago, being here would have meant we’d been kidnapped and murdered and our bodies dumped here.  

This was the collective grave for anyone who’d been set upon in Nairobi’s streets. As well as this, there was illegal logging and land grabs.   

Then, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai, decided that this wouldn’t do. The 2,400-acre site had to be restored to its natural state.  

With the local people’s support she staged a land grab of her own, getting in to claim it for what it is a place of incredible beauty. Six years on, Skyes’ monkeys are back in force and Colobus monkeys have just been re-introduced. Other reintroductions are planned.  

But for now, the key aim is to slowly get rid of the eucalyptus trees, which are not local, and restore the forest to indigenous species. 

This is how five representatives of the British & Foreign Bible Society find themselves down on their knees planting trees, on the eve of the African Biblical Leadership Initiative conference. Think tree-planting and you envisage the Queen at a state occasion. We’d thought something a bit similar, if albeit somewhat lower key.  

Not a bit of it. The Karuna Forest staff have, to their complete glee, given us 30 trees to plant. We get a demonstration: water the pot; massage the water through the soil; turn the tree upside down and gently remove it from the pot.

Here’s a key thing: the pot is just a plastic bag, but on no account are we to tear it, as it can be reused. “We don’t want any litter,” says our guide. Then, it’s down on our knees to scrape the red soil back into the hole; firm it round and water it.  

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“Prophesy over your tree,” says our guide. So each, in our own way, we pray for our little trees and wish them well. Soon, we hope, they’ll have monkeys swinging from their branches.  

Washing his hands free of red mud, CEO Paul Williams says, “It’s a very inspiring project. It’s restoring what’s been damaged and in doing so it’s bringing life to a lot of different communities who didn’t know each other or were even afraid of each other, but now are working together.”

Speaker: Dr Tan Loe Joo
Venue: Saint Andrew’s Cathedral Prayer Hall A-B
Time: 8pm – 9.30pm

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The most unique and radical claim of the Christian Faith is not that God has revealed himself, but that he has done so by becoming a human being.

The incarnation is the most central truth of the Christian Faith. The eternal Son of God took up human flesh and became ‘like his brothers in every respect’ not only to ‘make propitiation for the sins of his people’ (Hebrews 2:17) but also to reveal the very being of the triune God to humankind.

The Bible everywhere speaks of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son now incarnate, as the supreme revelation of God. Thus, the author of Hebrews could write: ‘Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, who he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world’ (Hebrews 1:1-2).

Hebrews continues to proclaim the Son as the ‘radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature’ (Hebrews 1:3). Paul, writing to the Christians at Colossae, could declare that the incarnate Son is ‘the image (Greek: ikon) of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15). And in John 14:9, Jesus claimed that ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’.

In the person of Jesus Christ, the event of God’s self-disclosure occurs fully and supremely. In the life, speech and acts of Jesus are revealed the very character and purposes of God. As Millard Erickson has clearly put it: ‘The pinnacle of God’s acts is to be found in the life of Jesus. His miracles, death and resurrection are redemptive history in its most condensed and concentrated form’.

Only the second person of the triune Godhead, who is with God and is God from all eternity, can reveal God to us. Thus, the consensus of the Patristic theologians that can be traced to Irenaeus of Lyons (AD 125-202): that God can only be known through God.

To be sure, God’s revelation of himself in Christ comes in a mediated form, through the humanity of the incarnate Son. It is important to note that God has not revealed himself in humanity per se, but through the humanity united to Christ, the divine Son (Latin: humanitas Christi). In the incarnation, God has revealed himself through a medium that is not alien to us.

The Reformers recognise that in order for God to reveal himself to human beings he must in some ways accommodate or condescend himself to the ways of human knowing. According to a number of Reformed theologians like David Wright, Timothy George and Edward Dowey, the incarnation is God’s accommodating act par excellence.

But it was the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner who articulated this with great insight and eloquence. In a 1966 essay titled The Theology of the Symbol Rahner writes: ‘The Logos, the Son of the Father, is truly, in his humanity as such, the revelatory symbol in which the Father enunciates himself, in this Son, to the world – revelatory, because the symbol renders present what is revealed’.

Using different terminology, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth makes the same point when he maintains that the incarnate Christ is the ‘sacramental reality of [God’s] revelation’, the ‘first sacrament, the foundation of everything that God instituted and used in his revelation as a secondary objectivity before and after the epiphany of Jesus Christ’.

To say that God’s self-disclosure is found supremely in Christ is not to deny his universal revelation in creation. Paul is unequivocal that God has revealed himself in the created order when he writes that the ‘invisible nature’ of the Creator is clearly perceived ‘in the things that have been made’ (Romans 1:20).

Neither does it diminish the way in which God revealed himself in his dealings with Israel as recorded in the Old Testament.

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In fact, if Christ is indeed the supreme revelation of God, then in him all the other moments of God’s self-disclosure becomes clearer and more comprehensible. In him all the manifestations of God – past, present and future – are clarified. And in him God’s dealings with Israel becomes more understandable and meaningful.

Christ is the summit of God’s revelation.

It is precisely because in him is to be found ‘all the riches of full assurance of understanding and knowledge of God’s mystery’ (Colossians2: 2-3) that Christ can be said to be the ‘exegesis of God’ (Hans Urs von Balthasar).

In the incarnation of the Son, we also see the profound relationship between revelation and salvation. Insofar as the second person of the Godhead is Word, his incarnation is the revelation of God. But even as he comes as Word to reveal the love of God, he also comes as Son to reconcile us to the Father.

In Jesus Christ we not only come to know God, but we are also brought into communion with him by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8).

The great Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance explains:

‘In this act of condescension God comes as God the Son and God the Word. He comes as God the Son to enter our rebellious estate in order to effect reconciliation by living out his life of filial obedience where we are disobedient, and he comes as God the Word to enter into our darkness and blindness in order to effect revelation by manifesting the love of God and by achieving from within humanity faithful appropriation of divine revelation’.

Insofar as these are the works of the incarnate Son of God, they must be seen not as two acts but as one act: revelation is part of reconciliation, and reconciliation is part of revelation.

In Jesus Christ is revealed the loving God who saves human beings from sin and death. Thus, we could indeed say (together with Paul) that in the face of Jesus Christ we see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:6).

While a community grieved the HIV-related deaths across a generation, many elderly people were accused of being witches who had brought on the curse of HIV. Enifa was one of them, rejected by her own family, until a Bible Society project and the Parable of the Good Samaritan changed perceptions – and Enifa’s life.

69-year-old Enifa Ngulama has sold some honey. She runs to the back of her mud-brick house in the village of Kasarika in southern Malawi to get a jar for a passerby.

A neighbour sits on Enifa’s porch and laughs at the elderly lady breaking into trot. They share a joke. The sale is made. And the two old women sit down for a chat.

But it wasn’t always like this. Until recently, Kasarika had one of the highest rates of HIV in the country, more than double the national average of 12%. Some one in four people were HIV+ in Kasarika. But the majority didn’t know their status, so the real figure was undoubtedly much higher.

Every day the local vicar held at least four funerals, sometimes more. The village was dying on its feet. And with no understanding of how the virus was transmitted, the villagers looked for someone to blame. And they blamed the elderly, including Enifa.

The community – like so many others across Malawi – believed that Aids deaths were caused by a curse from God. That curse was cast by witches. And a witch was anyone who lived to be ‘very, very old’ or in local parlance, over 60.

The accused

Malawi has a shocking life expectancy of just 48.3 years, making it the 180th worst place to live if you hope to have anything approaching an old age. There are only 14 countries with worse life expectancy and they include Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

So, the idea went, if you’re not dead, you’re a witch and you’re the cause of the village’s Aids-related deaths.

“Instead of rejoicing that God had kept us this far, when people died, other people pointed their fingers and me and said I was bewitching them,” says Enifa. “It went on for years.”

“In the end the whole village was accusing me. They used to say, ‘You are a witch. You are killing people.’ It was very painful. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Betrayed by family

Worse was to come when Enifa’s own family turned on her. They ransacked her house shouting, “Why aren’t you dead yet? We want you to die.”

“If your own children and grandchildren rise against you, what will happen to everyone else?” she says. The answer was that they joined in. Enifa was repeatedly attacked and on one occasion a lynch mob carrying sticks set on her to beat her to death. But she was rescued.

81-year-old Billy Thomas and his 73-year-old wife Ulalia know what this feels like. The three of them were among more than 40 elderly people in the village long held to be witches.

When one of Billy’s grandchildren died of Aids, his family froze him out accusing him and Ulalia of causing the death by placing a curse on the child.

“It was a double calamity,” he says. “We were grieving for our grandchild at the same time and grieving at the rejection. It was very painful.”

“When someone accuses you of something that you haven’t done, it is very degrading,” he adds.

“It was like being in prison. We stayed indoors as we were too afraid to go out.”

As the couple are, like all the village, self-sustaining farmers, this meant that they were slowly starving to death. But they say that worse than the hunger was the ‘psychological attack’. No-one spoke to them at all for three years.

Time for change

Two-thirds of people living with HIV are in Africa. The effect on those of working age, leaving orphans to be brought up by their grandparents, is well-known.

But, this is a hidden side to the Aids pandemic in Africa. A generation of people accused of something that they haven’t done, and too scared to leave their homes as a consequence.

One woman decided that this had to change. Hilda Ntiya ,46, had attended an Aids-awareness training called the Good Samaritan programme that is run by the Bible Society of Malawi. She returned to Kasarika fired up to help her neighbours like Enifa, Billy and Ulalia.

“I couldn’t keep quiet,” she says. “Without this training the village would have been wiped out.”

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“People thought that they were bewitching each other. When they saw someone who was sick, they believed that it was from witchcraft.”

“The prevalence rate was going up and up. People accused of being witches were beaten. It was a bad place to live. But not now. Now people understand that it isn’t the case that people are witches. HIV is an illness. People know that now.”

The Good Samaritan

What’s made the difference has been a church-based scheme run by Bible Society. It uses the story of the Good Samaritan as its foundation, teaching compassion for the suffering.

It explains what HIV is, how it is transmitted and encourages sexual gratification within marriage as a means of faithfulness, a reduction in the number of sexual partners, the use of condoms and the importance of getting tested. Over 365,000 people have heard this message over the last three years.

Hilda was one of them. As a consequence, two years ago, she set up a one-room orphanage-cum-community centre in Kasarika, despite living on the poverty line herself.

Every day she feeds 45 elderly people who were accused of witchcraft including Billy, Ulalia and Enifa. It gets them out. And they are reintegrated into the village.

All three are now back on good terms with their former accusers and their families. The prevalence rate in the village has also dropped, to 15%.

“Now people are beginning to believe that deaths are not because of bewitching,” says Enifa. “It’s from HIV sickness.”

“Things have started to change. In some cases people came to apologise to me. They said, ‘We’re very sorry. We know that you have nothing to do with the deaths that have happened.'”

“I’ve been reunited with my family and all this is a thing of the past. But without the Good Samaritan project I would have been killed.”

The Christian faith is premised on the belief that since God has revealed himself, the Church as the recipient of this divine self-disclosure is able to say something true about him. Put differently, Christians believe that their speech about God – in their prayers, worship and sermons – is both objective and true.

This assertion concerning the veracity and truthfulness of the Church’s speech about God has been subjected to attack and ridicule since the Enlightenment, especially in the writings of its more radical spokesmen like the French philosopher and encyclopaedist Baron d’Holbach. In our time, writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – the so-called ‘new atheists’ – have continued this campaign of rubbishing all forms of theological or religious language.

Even the more sympathetic among the modern philosophers have questioned the epistemic significance of much of theological language.

For example, R. M. Hare, writing in the 1960s argues that religious language says nothing objective about reality but only expresses the outlook of the person or community who uses it. While Hare is willing to concede that some theological speech – or bliks as he calls them – may be meaningful, the claims that they make cannot be empirically verified.

Similarly, R. B. Braithwaite argues that religious language does not contain any information about the world, but merely expresses the speaker’s intent. The meaning of a religious claim or assertion, he insists, ‘is given in its use in expressing the asserter’s intention to follow a specified policy of behaviour’.

The Christian understanding of the veracity and truthfulness of the Church’s speech about God is based on the doctrines of creation and revelation.

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Christians believe that because God has created the world, the latter can and does reveal or reflect its Creator in some measure and in some significant ways. This means that the world that God has brought into being tells us something about him, just like a work of art or music disclose something about the artist or composer.

This is the general revelation of God in creation.

In addition, as the great Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth has pointed out, in his special revelation in Scripture, God commandeers human words that describe the things of this world in such a way that they are now truly able to speak of him. To put this in another way, in his special revelation God teaches us how we may speak about him by using our words – i.e., human words – to describe his own being and character.

We may therefore say that the Church’s speech about God is authorised by God himself in Scripture.

Both general and special revelation, however, presuppose that human words can be used to speak about God. And this brings us back to fact that God has created the world in such a way that there is a real correspondence between the creation and the Creator.

This of course does not mean that the world is exactly like God, for the Creator is qualitatively different from the creation. However, although creatures can never be said to be exactly like their Creature they do resemble their Creator in some sense.

Thus, the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas could assert that ‘Any creature, in so far as it possesses any perfection, represents God and is like him, for he, being simply and universally perfect has pre-existing in himself the perfections of all his creatures’. This means that the things that are said about the creature can also be said about God, its Creator.

A simple concrete illustration would bring clarity to Aquinas’ dense philosophical argument.

For instance, when we say ‘Solomon is wise’, we are attributing wisdom (which is a perfection) to Solomon. According to Aquinas, that perfection – wisdom – can also be attributed to God since the creature resembles the Creator.

However, a further qualification must be made. Although we can say that both God and Solomon are wise – that they both literally possess wisdom – God’s wisdom and that of Solomon are radically different.

And because of this difference, ‘wisdom’ is not used univocally of God and Solomon, although they both possess that perfection. Neither is ‘wisdom’ used unequivocally because that would suggest that God’s wisdom is not only radically different from that of Solomon, but totally so.

But if that were indeed the case, the assertion that ‘God is wise’ would be meaningless to us because we would have no idea what constitutes divine wisdom, what it looks like.

Human wisdom is therefore analogous with divine wisdom. This means that there are similarities as well as profound dissimilarities between the two.

In addition, God alone possesses true wisdom and all creaturely wisdom, however excellent, is always derived from and therefore dependent upon divine wisdom. This means that words used analogously of God and creatures apply primarily to God and only secondarily to creatures.

Analogy therefore helps us to understand how the Church is able to talk about God with human words. As the English theologian of the last century E.L. Mascall puts it: ‘The function of the doctrine of analogy is not to make it possible for us to talk about God in the future but to explain how it is that we have been able to talk about him all along’.

This doctrine of analogy has important implications for the theological language of the Church.

Because words can be used analogously to describe God and creatures, our statements about God do describe his divine nature (e.g., God is really wise). However, because the words we use for creatures are used of God only analogously, they can never adequately speak of him.

To fail to understand the limitations of our language when it is used for God is to be in danger of idolatry – of creating misleading and harmful distortions by reducing God to our concepts.

The doctrines of creation and revelation show that the Christian’s speech about God is not merely an expression of his existential angst or his attempts at self-projection (Feuerbach). The Christian is able to say something objective and true about God’s being and character. The doctrine of analogy explains how this is done.

In the past three decades, a number of Christian writers and theologians have registered their alarm over the worrying decline in doctrinal literacy among Christians today. Theologians such as Alister McGrath and David Wells and historians like Mark Noll have written anxiously about this disturbing erosion of theological astuteness.

The early evangelicals, like the Reformers of the sixteenth century, were profoundly concerned that the theology of the Church is firmly established in authority of the Bible. Although they acknowledged that there are cultural, historical and political aspects to the Reformation that must never be dismissed or trivialised, they nonetheless correctly insist that it was primarily about doctrine and theology.

But today’s evangelical churches that trace their roots to Luther, Calvin and Wesley have not taken seriously enough the Reformers’ emphasis on doctrinal and theological rigour and clarity.

In the contemporary church, there appears to be a shift from doctrine to life, from theology to spirituality. This shift itself in many ways reflects the modern malaise, the tendency to dichotomise and even polarise aspects of reality that in fact belong together, like faith and reason.

In similar vein, some modern evangelicals have become suspicious and even dismissive of the tradition of the church, justifying their position by a naïve interpretation of the Reformers’ privileging of Scriptural authority (Latin: sola scriptura). The sophistication of the Reformers’ understanding of the relationship between Scripture and tradition is often missed when evangelicals resort to simplistic slogans such as ‘Back to the Bible’ or ‘No Creed but the Bible’.

This has not only resulted in an anaemic fundamentalism that refuses to be nourished by the rich theological and spiritual heritage of the church. It has also opened the door to an idiosyncratic subjectivism, and a corrosive relativism and pragmatism, all of which will prove detrimental to the church’s self-understanding and mission.

Christians must take doctrine and theology seriously if they truly believe that God has revealed himself and that what is true about him is contained in the pages of Scripture.

Christians must take doctrine seriously because the Christian Faith is not a woolly collage of attitudes and responses to some vague notions of deity. Neither is it an amorphous and idiosyncratic assemblage of subjective spiritual experiences.

The Christian Faith is based on God’s self-disclosure, first through his dealings with Israel and finally and supremely in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God.

At the heart of the Christian Faith therefore is not doctrine, but the person of Jesus Christ who is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (John 14:6). Doctrine develops as the church reflects on the identity, meaning and significance of Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth as her illuminating Guide (John 16:13).

Christian doctrine is therefore firmly and deeply rooted in the testimony of Scripture about the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. It is the church’s speech about God, an endeavour that can only be undertaken because God has first spoken about himself through Scripture.

Doctrine is therefore not something the church has invented; it is not the result of philosophical speculation or fanciful guesswork about deity. Rather doctrine is the church’s rational response to God’s revelation, a way of speaking about God that is authorised by God himself.

There is a complex and dialectical relationship between Scripture and Christian doctrine. As we have seen, the doctrines of the church must be faithful to the testimony of Scripture, which is the Noma Normans non Normata (Latin: ‘The norm of norms that is not normed’).

But doctrine as the church’s understanding of God in turn provides the framework and substance to guide the Christian’s reading and interpretation of Scripture. Put differently, the individual Christian cannot adequately understand Scripture apart from the tutelage of the church and her doctrines.

The Reformer John Calvin understood very well the essential role of doctrine in helping Christians interpret Scripture correctly. In fact, he wrote his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion (1454) for this very purpose.

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Thus, in the preface of the Institutes Calvin writes: ‘Although the Holy Scriptures contain a perfect doctrine, to which nothing can be added – our Lord having been pleased therein to unfold the infinite treasures of his wisdom – still every person, not intimately acquainted with them, stands in need of some guidance and direction, as to what he ought to look for in them, that he may not wander up and down, but pursue a certain path, and so attain the end to which the Holy Spirit invites him.’

Thus the Institutes together with the Rule of Faith and creeds of the early church provide the hermeneutical and theological framework within which Scripture must be read and understood. In this way, Christian doctrine puts a check on the subjectivism and relativism that is endemic in the way in which some evangelical Christians (and churches) interpret Scripture.

Doctrine is important because it not only protects Christians from error but also from deception. Scripture contains numerous warnings about false teachers who peddle their destructive doctrines.

In Matthew 7:15, Christ warns his disciples to ‘Beware of false prophets’. And in his letter to Timothy, Paul spoke about Christians who will abandon their faith in pursuit of heretical theologies: ‘The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons’ (1 Timothy 4:1).

Such warnings demonstrate the importance of sound doctrine.

It is in light of these dangers that Paul exhorted Titus to ‘teach what is in accord with sound doctrine’ (Titus 2:1). The church of today must take this injunction serious not only because the threat of heresies has not abated, but also because in our confused world, the villain has become the hero.

The inimitable G. K. Chesterton, with his characteristic perceptiveness, saw this quite clearly in the middle of the last century. ‘The word “heresy”’ not only means no longer being wrong’, he writes in Heretics, ‘it practically means being clear-headed and courageous’. Thirty years later, the American sociologist Peter Berger confirmed this in his book, The Heretical Imperative (1980) in which he points out that today it is in fact necessary for one to be ‘heretical’.

The need for the contemporary church to take doctrine seriously cannot be overstated. Sound doctrine will build up the people of God. It will enable Christians to be discerning, to be able to tell truth from error. And it will enable them to escape the corrosive acids of heresy that will eventually destroy their faith.

In June 2011, I wrote an article for The Straits Times on multiculturalism in Singapore at the invitation of the The United Nations Alliance of Civilisation. In the article, I argued that the Government’s approach has succeeded in fostering social cohesion in multi-racial Singapore. I suggested that the Singapore model could provide insights on how the West could address some of the conundrums it is experiencing with state multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is no doubt one of the defining features of Singapore history and society. Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, is right to identify multiculturalism as one of the ‘soft powers’ of the nation-state, together with leadership and governance.

The Bible provides a number of powerful pictures of cultural diversity. For example, in Revelation 7:9 (ESV), we have the wonderful portrayal of the multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” praising God in the new creation.

Ethnic and cultural diversity are not the result of human rebellion and sin. They are part of God’s good creation, an expression of the inexhaustible originative genius of the Creator. Cultural diversity should therefore be celebrated.

Undergirding this great diversity is a profound unity. The story of the creation of Adam and Eve underscores the fact that human beings from every race and culture share the same genetic ancestry. And, as Genesis 1:26 makes clear, all human beings are created in the image of God and are thus equally valued and loved by their Creator.

The Incarnation brings out the importance of our shared humanity and the value of cultural and ethnic identity in a way that is at once profound and elegant. In taking up our humanity, the eternal Son of God affirmed its goodness and value. And in coming as a Jew in the Incarnation, the Son underscores the significance of ethnic identity.

Human rebellion and sin, however, has distorted and perverted the unity and diversity of the human race in grave and destructive ways.

Firstly, it introduced enmity and mutual suspicion into cultural diversity, fracturing human relationships and turning ethnic identity into an idolatrous ethnocentricity. Secondly, as the story of the Tower of Babel indicates, it promoted a false unity that is in fact a species of tyrannical totalitarianism.

Sin can also corrupt our philosophies and practices of multiculturalism, causing them to be short-sighted, parochial and alienating.

Multiculturalism could easily be hijacked by postmodern relativism that insists that morality is relative to particular cultures. Such moral relativism, when mixed with the rhetoric of tolerance and a penchant for political correctness, could foster the belief that members of one culture have no right to make judgements about the practices of another culture or tradition.

In some cases, even legitimate observations or criticisms could lead to charges of racism, Islamophobia or homophobia. For example, Thilo Sarrazin was asked to step down from his position on the board of the Deutsche Bundesbank for writing a book that criticised Muslim immigrants for refusing to integrate into German society.

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Here then is the unsettling irony: Imbued with moral relativism, multiculturalism can become an extremely intolerant ideology.

Multiculturalism could also promote a species of irrationalism and a naïve emotionalism that can unleash chaos in public life and may prove detrimental to social stability. By substituting slogans – “racism”, “intolerance”, “Islamophobia”, and “homophobia” – for rigorous thought, multiculturalism could induce a subtle but destructive intellectual and moral stupor.

Multiculturalism may sometimes use the language of “cultural rights” to legitimise traditional practices even though they violate the dignity of certain members of the community. Female genital mutilation, which is practised in certain Asian and North and Central African countries as well as immigrant groups and which is deemed demeaning and unethical by many, is a case in point.

On its own, multiculturalism appears quite incapable of resolving the conflict between “cultural rights” and universal rights.

Finally, multiculturalism could lead to the radical insularisation of individual ethnic communities that may cause societies to become fractured, fragmented and divisive.

This is largely the problem with multiculturalism in Europe, which led Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the former French President Nicholas Sarkozy to declare it an “utter failure”. David Cameron hit the nail on the head when he said that state multiculturalism in Europe has not worked because it has “failed to provide a vision of society”.

Instead of engendering a more inclusive society, multiculturalism can foster a segregating parochialism that alienates communities from each other and from the rest of society.

Multiculturalism is about acknowledging, respecting and celebrating our cultural differences and particularities. But it should also be about how we must transcend these particularities in order that we may build our common life together.

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Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity. This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of the Methodist Message. 

Speaker: Prof Ang Peng Hwa
Venue: Bible House Level 4 Seminar Room
Time: 8pm – 9.30pm

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