After the fall: the Post Office scandal and the search for justice

Falls from grace, like that of the Post Office’s CEO, prompt Graham Tomlin to dissect the problems of justice and mercy.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tense-looking woman, sitting at desk, stares into the middle disance.

Lia Williams as Paula Vennells in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

ITV Studios/ITV.

It was November, and I was in Rome. With the new year on the horizon, newsagents were displaying calendars for 2024. One in particular seemed to show up in just about every street vendor available: the ‘Hot Priest Calendar’.

It had pictures for every month of young, bronzed, good-looking priests, resplendent in brand new, ironed black clerical shirts, smouldering into the camera. I've no idea whether they were real priests or just models in clerical garb. I didn't buy one, but it did get me thinking of why they had produced it. Was this a recruitment drive for clergy in the Roman Catholic Church? Something for the nuns to put on the wall of the convent? It was hardly aiming to attract women by saying if you become a Catholic you could bag one of these hunky chaps, as priests are, well, supposed to be out of reach.

I suspect it was just trying to tell the world that the Church is cool after all. That the church is for good-looking, shiny people, not just the regular ones with wrinkles and expanding waistlines.

The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.

I was thinking of this recently while watching the story of the Post Office scandal unfold. This dreadful story is, to be frank, a bit of an embarrassment for the Church of England. This horrendous miscarriage of justice has its heart not just a Christian but a priest. I met Paula Vennells once. While I was Bishop of Kensington, we planned a big conference for all the vicars in the Diocese of London. At the time, Vennells’ star was rising in ecclesiastical circles. People had just noticed that the head of the Post Office not only went to church, but was also ordained, and so she was getting invited to speak at all kinds of conferences. She agreed to come and, to be fair, was gracious, unassuming, polite. There was nothing to suggest she was soon to become the object of public opprobrium that she is now.

She would definitely not go on a Church Calendar these days. But then who would? The last decade has seen a succession of scandals and falls from grace – Harvey Epstein, Huw Edwards, Russell Brand, Philip Schofield - and Christian leaders are not exempt. Jean Vanier, Ravi Zacharias, Mike Pilavachi – the list goes on – and now Paula Vennells. We Christians hang our heads, as it seems such a deep failure - how can someone profess to be a Christian – even a vicar - and yet do such things? The embarrassment and shame are real and proper and yet there is, in my view, something at the heart of it which seems to be mistaken.

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws get exposed.

Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian who opposed the Nazis during the Second World War and somehow survived. His was a crucial voice in the German church and nation as it struggled to its feet again after the trauma and destruction of those years. The big question Germany faced at the time was how a modern sophisticated Christian nation had been so easily seduced by evil? They also struggled with the question of shame. What were German Christians to do with the guilt that hung over them after the Nazi years?

Thielicke was a brilliant preacher and drew huge crowds to his church in Hamburg. In one of his sermons he took as his text St Paul’s line, that Christians are “a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, on tablets of human hearts.” He asked his congregation the question: what kind of letter are you? Is a Christian meant to be an advert for God? Is the Christian a shiny product of divine handiwork so that God, like some marketing agent, says ‘Look at her – isn’t she is fine person? Wouldn’t you like to be like her?’

When she was being feted by all, we might have said that about Paula Vennells. But not any more. And that’s the problem of celebrity Christians, or celebrities of any kind for that matter. They are used as adverts for the brand they profess, religious or otherwise: “Use this shampoo, follow this diet, believe this religion, like this celebrity does, and you could be like them.”

Celebrities are celebrated because we believe they are different from us ordinary mortals. But sooner or later, it turns out they have the same temptations, their bodies sag, their flaws tend to get exposed in the extra scrutiny they face in a gossipy age like ours. The hunky priests in the calendar may look good but I suspect their lives are as shadowy and compromised as the rest of us. Every now and again you find a life that is remarkable, but even then there are dark corners. Mother Teresa famously said that she rarely experienced the presence of God and struggled with lifelong depression. If we are meant to be adverts for God, we’re not very good ones.

Thielicke’s point was that Christians are not meant to be adverts for God but letters from him. And the letter, written on the human heart, says something like this: “Here is a poor, weak human being with their own strengths and frailties, moments of courage and moments of great weakness, struggling to live a good life but failing much of the time. And yet, despite that failure, God still forgives, accepts, loves and stands by them.”

And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible.

It sounds scandalous I know. Hearing about the Post Office scandal, all we want is for the perpetrators to be found guilty and punished. And rightly so. Justice must be done. Paula Vennells and her staff seems to have stuck stubbornly to the laughable view that the Post Office had been infiltrated by hundreds of criminal sub-postmasters, intend on defrauding the public purse. They lacked the sense or courage to question their own IT system, despite being warned it was faulty.

Yet divine and human justice work in different ways. Not least because God, unlike human judges, sees the dodgy things we all do, not just those whose sins get found out because they are in the public eye. Human justice systems must take their course, crimes must be punished, and attempts made to turn around the lives of those caught in patterns of criminality. Yet underneath human justice lies divine justice, which promises an ultimate judgment, even for those who escape human justice. Yet at the same time, it offers not just justice, but mercy - the gift of a more profound and ultimate forgiveness, which, if accepted, does not override the penalties of human justice, but enables the possibility of redemption in the longer term.

Martin Luther often used a Latin phrase to describe Christians – that they are simul iustus et peccator - ‘at the same time righteous and sinful’. Like an alcoholic who is never encouraged to say that were an alcoholic, but that they are a recovering one, an honest Christian doesn’t say ‘I was a chronic worrier, greedy, someone who struggles with lust,’ but ‘I am such things, and yet faith in Jesus makes a difference in helping me not to be.’ St Paul once said: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst.’ Not I was the worst, but I am. I remember Frank Bruno once saying “I’m not much of a Christian – I’ve been a sinner all my life.” He hadn’t quite understood - Christians are only ever recovering sinners.

Paula Vennells and the others responsible for the Post Office scandal will have to face justice one day. It may, for some, even mean prison. But, as many in our prisons up and down the country know, lots of people find God in prison - not as a literal ‘get out of jail free card’ – the justice system doesn’t play Monopoly – but a realisation that however bad your crimes, however murky our misdemeanours or sly our sins, forgiveness is possible. And forgiveness is not an excuse. It doesn’t say ‘it didn’t happen’, but it says, ‘it did happen’ and it was bad, but a new start is always possible, and the love and forgiveness of God is available, even for the worst of people - for good-looking priests who struggle with temptation, for celebrities who fall from grace. Or even ordinary people like us.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.