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

Belief

Creed

Easter

2 April 2024

5 min read

What have Easter bunnies to do with the resurrection?

As we emerge from the Easter weekend, Graham Tomlin unpacks why Easter is more than an illustration of new life.

Graham Tomlin

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

the first signs of Spring breaking through

Bunnies, chocolate eggs, crocuses. It’s that time of year again. The dark bleakness of winter is giving way to life and colour as the soil warms. We finally feel sun on the skin, wake up to early dawns and longer days.

Across the world, festivals celebrate the coming of Spring. The Qingming Festival is a traditional Chinese carnival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, observed by ethnic Chinese people across the world as a celebration of the new season. In the festival of Holi, Hindus across the world douse each other in brightly coloured powder or water, as a celebration of burgeoning love, and a prayer for a good harvest from the new growth in the land. The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer published a book that was to become famous: The Golden Bough. It was one of the first works of comparative religion in an age which was gradually becoming more knowledgeable about the religions of the world. In it, he identified a motif in many of the world’s religions: the concept of a dying-and-rising god. He saw the pattern repeated in fertility rites connected to the annual renewal of nature from the ‘death’ of winter. Gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus - and Jesus - were examples of the same pattern.

The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems to be one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

These days, you often hear a similar version of this account. Christianity, we are told, is another form of the same story found in so many religions. Christians just took over and erased the earlier annual celebrations with their own version. Christmas was just a replacement for Yule, the ancient pagan winter festival. Easter recalls Eostre, a spring goddess from western Germanic lands, whose festival took place in April, connected to the spring equinox.

Today, we have lambs, daffodils, young rabbits and eggs. All of them emerge at this time of year and are, for us, signs of the rebirth of nature. It always seems miraculous, that from the deadness of winter, life is reborn. No wonder the ancient pagans, and religions all over the world, for that matter, found ways to celebrate new life, and to endue this season with mythical wonder.

It was tempting for James Frazer to bracket Jesus as just another of these myths of the death and rebirth of nature, the dying and rising god. Bunnies, eggs, Osiris and Jesus were all symbols, pointing to the same thing – the annually repeated miracle of new life in the Spring.

Yet this misses the point of what the early Christians said about the Resurrection. St Paul wrote: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” His point was precisely not that this event was another illustration of the annual renewal of nature, the cycle of death & rebirth. It was something new altogether. It was the once and for all breaking of the cycle, spelling the end of death and its repeated power over us. Christ breaks through the dark wall of death so that millions of other can follow him through the breach into the light beyond it.

It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day.

The Resurrection of Jesus was the ‘firstfruits’, like the very first crocus of spring, the first apple on the tree. It was like a man breaking the four minute mile, a human being walking on the moon. A barrier had been broken that had always seemed impregnable and nothing would ever be the same again. It was the beginning of an entirely new creation that will one day come into fullness. It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day. The endless cycle of rebirth is suddenly folded out into a linear trajectory, pointing forward to the day when all shall be made new.

CS Lewis attributed his conversion at least in part to a conversation with JRR Tolkien which persuaded him that the story of Jesus – his incarnation, descent into death and resurrection to new life - was not just another example of the ancient myth of the renewal of the world, but was the thing towards which all the myths pointed – it was, as he called it in a famous essay, ‘myth become fact’. It’s worth quoting him to get the point:

Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.

Of course, there will be echoes of resurrection in the other faiths of the world. Of course there will be pagan figures who look like Christ. Rabbits and eggs are to be enjoyed not frowned on as they point to the one great miracle. They are to be welcomed, not disowned. Lewis’ point is that the Resurrection is both myth and fact – myth become fact. The Resurrection doesn’t just point to the rebirth of the world. It is the rebirth of the world.

Now of course, Christians can’t prove it. They can, to be sure, point to evidence that the tomb was empty, that the profound, world-shattering effect on the disciples and even the rest of human history can only be explained by something truly extraordinary. But you can’t prove an event that by its very nature breaks the normal cycle of cause and event, death and rebirth, proof and disproof. You can only believe it and then re-build your whole view of the world around it. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. It provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview except one of which it was the basis.”

So, no, we can’t prove it. But we can at least do the early Christians the justice of acknowledging what they were saying and what they weren’t.

Because this is the central Christian claim – that the Resurrection is not a metaphor for something else – for the rebirth of nature in the spring, or for the fertility of nature. In fact, it’s the other way round. The rebirth of nature is a metaphor for the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus is not an illustration of something else. It is the one thing of which everything else is an illustration. In the light of the Resurrection, the renewal of nature in spring is not yet another round in the endlessly repeated cycle of death, rebirth and death again, but it points forward to the day when “the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.”