Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Official Report 653KB pdf

---

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, for which our speaker is Dr John Lennox, guest speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast for Scotland.

It is a great honour for an Ulster Scot to be invited to address you. It is a remarkable sign of grace that you have me here.

James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist whom Einstein ranked with Newton, inscribed over the door of the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge:

“Great are the works of the Lord, searched out by those who take delight in them”.

Yet today, an ill-conceived but highly vocal attempt is being made to use science to abolish God from public life. The tragic irony of that is that it forgets that, in the words of Lord Mackay,

“all human law making is dependent on the objective reality of Almighty God for its validity.”

It was Christianity, not atheism, that originally gave us the universities that educated us, the liberties that permit us to propagate our views and the laws that protect us.

Members of the Scottish Parliament, I congratulate you on your appointment as stewards of those laws and defenders of the freedoms that they enshrine. I encourage you and all of us to reflect on the source of those laws and freedoms. For if there is no eternal base for values that are external to humanity, how can anyone’s standards be anything but limited human conventions?

Abolish God the Creator and you remove the ultimate source of human dignity—the fact that men and women are made in God’s image. We need to reaffirm that dignity in a world that is rapidly losing the roots of meaning and identity in a sea of relativism. What is more, there is an urgent need to have the courage to affirm the centrality of marriage and its importance to society’s wellbeing and to the emotional and moral stability of the children who are our future.

In an increasingly fragmented, uncertain and lonely world, men and women need a message of real hope. For centuries in Scotland, that hope has been found in the central message of Christianity—Christ himself. Yet that message is sometimes tragically lost in sectarian violence. That is a tragedy, for those who use guns or fists in that way are not following Christ; they are disobeying him.

Jesus forbade the use of weapons to defend him or his message. To the Roman provincial governor Pilate, Jesus said:

“My kingdom is not of this world, otherwise my servants would have been fighting”.

He explained further:

“To this end I was born and to this end I came into the world that I might bear witness to the truth”.

Pilate said, “What is truth?”, perhaps more wistfully than cynically. He could see what is self-evident—that truth cannot be imposed by violence, especially when that truth has to do with forgiveness, reconciliation and peace with God through trust in Jesus Christ.

Thank you.

I inform members that a revised section A of the Business Bulletin, showing proposed committee membership, is on their desks.