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.

Events

Belief

Creed

Digital

Wisdom

26 September 2024

6 min read

The wisdom of living with the question not googling the quick answer

Are we trading wisdom for apparent certainty?

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A person sits on a window sill with one raise knee.

In much of the work I’ve been involved in, whether writing, coaching, hillwalking, local politics, or international development, I’ve learned to ask questions I don’t have answers to, and sometimes neither do the people I’m with. We sit with the question, decide whether it’s the right one, try to discern what else emerges in our peripheral vision as we focus on it. It takes effort to come to something like an answer, and in doing so, we peel off layers of unknowing. It has taken practice, and it can be slow work. But in searching for good questions, I see they can be an entry point into not just information but wisdom too. And there are many places that are hungry for wisdom.

I longed for better questions and more curiosity when I was a district councillor. Curiosity that made space for residents to share their stories and opinions, curiosity about different political positions and what might happen if we work across divides, about what might be possible if we could get past the way things had always been and imagine what they could become. But the desire to save face, to be seen to be in control, was strong, and I felt it often got in the way of real conversation. To be committed to the process more than the product takes courage, I think. The courage of uncertainty, of saying, “I don’t know”, of putting humility and honesty before status. Sitting with questions can be difficult, perhaps even feeling like a luxury, but they show us ourselves and the world a bit more clearly, offering a pathway to relationship, to collaboration, to humanity, to wisdom.

I have been thinking about the temptation to trade the wisdom of questions for the apparent certainty of instant answers, even wrong answers. It is a temptation that, in our age of one-click everything and the importance of image, is only quickening. It is a temptation that I have been thinking about, wondering if it started with that old temptation in the Garden of Eden. Staring at a painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado gallery a while back, I wondered whether that original temptation set us on a path of instant information but also of depleted wisdom.

As I peered into the painting, a thought sparked: what if God told Adam and Eve they could eat fruit from any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he wanted us to stay ignorant or innocent (something that Philip Pullman explores in his Northern Lights books) but because he knew it was too easy for us to eat from that tree. He wanted us to live, and to search for knowing and wisdom ourselves. Eating the fruit would bypass experience, there’d be no need to develop muscles of thinking and discernment. And he wanted us to be wise, to keep creating and tending the world with him. When those first pulled-from-the-earth humans ate the fruit, it was like us still-dependent-on-the-earth humans asking Artificial Intelligence to write us an essay: we might get what we want, but we’ve bypassed the experience of thinking, creating, discerning what’s ours to say.

This analogy creaks when pulled too far, but it lingers all the same. There’s a quote I’ve long appreciated, from the biologist E.O.Wilson:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Picking the fruit, becoming reliant on AI, gives us information but perhaps not the ability to think, and not the wisdom to make good choices. God wants us to be wise. The Bible’s Book of James says we can ask for wisdom. It is not withheld from us; it is not hidden. It’s everywhere, waiting to be called on.

There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil.

It’s so easy to find answers now — Google solves problems and democratises access to information, unless of course you’re in a part of the world that has no digital access. In rural mid Devon and in rural Zambia, both places I’ve worked deeply with communities, you can’t simply access an online meeting or find the answer to a question you might have. Sometimes this feels a life-giving challenge: it increases the need for relationship, for trust, for community conversation. Other times is hinders progress: it means people can’t access jobs, or basic health knowledge, or government decisions that affect them. Google has changed who can access the world, how we interact with it, how we think and learn. Historically, people memorised poetry and scripture and news. The printing press changed that; words were pulled from minds and printed on paper. Our online existence has accelerated that: I don’t need to stretch my memory if I don’t want — I can find and store what I need digitally. We’ve outsourced our memory, and I wonder whether we’re also outsourcing our capacity to think and discern.

In doing so, we risk disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our places. No longer do we need to rely on each other for knowing and wisdom — we can trust faceless digital forces that profit from us doing so. We risk too our unique ability to think creatively, to discern good sources, to think deeply and with nuance about a topic. If AI learns from everything that has been, it can synthesise and perhaps even extrapolate from that and project forward, but it can’t creatively imagine. It can’t reflect and speak wisdom.

There is an ease and convenience to Google, to AI. There was an ease and convenience to picking the fruit to gain knowledge. But we are not called to ease and convenience. I think we are called to love, to care for our neighbours, and these things are necessarily inconvenient. Digital access to information is a tool, a resource, a gift that benefits many of us in many ways. But it could easily blunt our humanity, becoming a temptation that bypasses the work of truly living. There are no digital shortcuts to the difficult work of community, no AI-shortcut to loving well, just as there was never a shortcut to complete knowledge of good and evil. With information available at the tug of a fruit — a click, a download, a request to an artificial intelligence — I am curious how our ability to sit with questions will change, whether we’ll feel beauty or fear in not having all the answers, whether we’ll lose our ability to discern, and to “have faith in what we do not see.”

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery.

Jesus calls us to questions, to relationship, to love, not to answers that might be easily won but little interrogated. He knew that questions, not answers, were often the best response to questions. Questions to sit with, to hold up as a mirror, to walk as a path to wisdom. He asked a lot of them. Who do you say I am? How many loaves do you have? Do you love me? What do you want? Why are you afraid? The Bible records Jesus asking questions, and sometimes offering answers too. But the point often seems to be the question itself, giving endless chances for people to question their assumptions, and their judgements, and to deepen their faith and make it personal. In doing so, Jesus offered a path to deeper and more meaningful knowledge of God, the world, others, and ourselves. And by asking questions he gave dignity to people, listening deeply to them, loving them, calling them into themselves.

Sitting with questions, with curiosity, is I think an entry point to faith and to mystery. And we have companions as we do this: Jesus, early Christian mystics, prayer, the Psalms, each other – these are all places I turn to dig deeper into the knowing that comes through unknowing. To live with questions and within mystery, to listen deeply to each other, to speak the language of soul rather than certainty, might be difficult and countercultural. But in an age where the future is becoming less certain despite the whole world seemingly at our fingertips, I think it is where our hope is. After all, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”