Nigel Biggar: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar about what attracted him to an academic life, why books became an important part of Nigel’s life, what captured him about History, why Nigel went from studying history to ethics and morality instead, How Nigel became a Christian, the deep existential question about what draws you to faith, religion and God, How Nigel sees the sea of humanity wrestling with this idea about what is right what is ethical and what is moral, wars and religion, Colonialism and the West, And why the West should be grateful for Colonialism.

Episode Summary

• What captured Nigel about History
• Why Nigel went from Studying History to ethics and morality instead
• What attracted Nigel to an Academic life
• Why books became an important part of Nigel’s life
• How Nigel became a Christian
• The deep existential question about what draws people to faith, religion and God
• How Nigel sees humanity wrestling with the ideas of what is ethical and what is moral
• Wars and Religion
• Colonialism and The West
• Why the West should be grateful for Colonialism

Nigel Biggar: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student well-being, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. He’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get a chance to meet Christians who are living out their faith with a life of success and flourishing. Today, we’re speaking with Professor Nigel Biggar. Professor Biggar is professor emeritus of the Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He was the former director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life. He is an ordained British Anglican priest renowned theologian and world-renowned ethicist. He first obtained a bachelor of arts in modern history at Oxford, added a master of arts in religious studies from the University of Chicago, studied at Regent College in British Columbia, and completed a Ph.D. in Christian theology at the University of Chicago. Professor Biggar, delighted to have you join us. Thank you for fitting this into what must be a very busy schedule.

Nigel Biggar
Brendan, it’s my pleasure to be with you. Glad to have this conversation.

Brendan Corr
You’re currently located in the UK?

Nigel Biggar
Yes, yes. I’m speaking from my home just outside the centre of Oxford. I wasn’t born here, I was born in Scotland, but I’ve lived in Oxford three times in my life, and lately since 2007.

Brendan Corr
Most of the listeners will know Oxford only from British TV shows. It has an immense sense of attraction and romance about the way it is. Is it as picturesque to live in as it is to watch some of those crime shows?

Nigel Biggar
Well, as you know Brendan, when you live in a place, you take it for granted. And I’ve lived here so often, I take it for granted. But I will report to you that I have an American friend who spent several years here as a student, and whenever he comes back he says, “This is a beautiful city.” And it is. It’s a small city. It only has a population of about 170,000 people. But the heart of it, of course, is mediaeval, lots of mediaeval colleges and buildings. And it’s a very walkable city. We do have a motor car, my wife and I, but I prefer to walk everywhere and I can do that. And in fact, from where I’m sitting right now, on the western side of the city centre, I can walk into open fields in five minutes. And there’s a canal five minutes away. I plan this afternoon to take a five-mile walk around, into the countryside. It’s just gorgeous.

Brendan Corr
I’m glad that you’re able to enjoy that delight and we can only imagine what it must be. Professor Biggar, you mentioned that you’ve spent most of your life at Oxford, which speaks to the fact that your sense of call, your life has been given to the pursuit of learning and of engaging deeply in thinking. What attracted you to that life, that life of the academic, that life of the intellectual?

Nigel Biggar
Well, like most people really, you concentrate on what you think you’re good at. So, throughout my school years, primary school and secondary education in the schools I was at, I was very successful and I majored in that. Although my father’s family, my father’s Scottish family, has a tradition of providing members of the Scottish national rugby team. At the age of 12, I was 6’2”. I think I rather disappointed my father by not becoming a rugby player, but I was never really very interested in sports. I think my mother was a reader and so early on, from a very early age, I devoured books. I still devour books. My father, by contrast, I don’t think he ever read a book in his life. He read the sports pages of the newspapers every day. So it was partly my mother’s influence as a reader. We weren’t a particularly conversationalist family. We didn’t sit around the table debating things very much. But my school years were very encouraging and I was very successful, at least until… My undergraduate career was a disaster actually, but I persevered. I went to Regent College in Canada, as you alluded to earlier, and it was there that my academic career recovered, without having any strong sense of what my career should be. And I think most people after university, most people don’t have much idea of what they’re fitted for in life, but they just follow their noses. They push it open, they push doors to see if they’ll open and they do. And I knew I had abiding intellectual questions and I wanted to pursue them. My parents, although somewhat bemused, supported me. And one thing led to another, I ended up with a Ph.D. and then I ended up with a job. And make a very long story short, I got to where I am now.

Brendan Corr
It’s interesting to hear that you were conscious at an early age that there was an inclination to find learning, both engaging and relatively easy. Did you make use of that at school? Was that something that you found engaged and drew you into the level of success, or was it something that just happened without much thought while you were at secondary school, for example?

Nigel Biggar
No. I think, yes, I’ve always been a bookish person. I think partly, Brendan, my childhood, I was born rather in a big house, about two miles out of a very small market town in southwest Scotland. I had a brother, but he was six years older than I am. So whenever I was in one place, he was another. I didn’t really see very much of him. So I spent a lot of my childhood at home alone, not feeling lonely, but I learned to be solitary, and that did wonders for my imagination. And as I say, from an early age, I remember reading books that now in retrospect astonished me that I was reading Graham Greene at the age of 12. I’m not sure I appreciated him very much, but there I was. My brother was also a serious book reader, both of us much more so than our parents actually.

Brendan Corr
So if that was not foreign, but not nurtured at home, who directed you to these pursuits? Who put a book in your hand such as that?

Nigel Biggar
Yeah, so both my brother and I went away to boarding schools. I went away to prep school at the age of eight. The schools I went to, neither of them were front-rank, high-powered places, but they were good schools and serious schools. And I suppose in both those places, my intellectual and academic inclinations were nurtured and encouraged. All my life, history has been my preferred interest in reading. And there was a schoolmaster in my prep school in Scotland. I remember his name, Mr. Cooper, who was a remarkable man. He had a handlebar moustache, all white. I think he must’ve been in the Air Force in the war or something. And he always wore shorts, khaki shorts, no matter what time of year, shorts. But he was really entertaining and fascinating about history, and I think that’s, certainly, he was someone who really encouraged and inspired me to read history.

Brendan Corr
There is often a character in our own stories that opens a world of ideas and imaginings to it if you had a teacher such as that. But there’s a moment when it transcends even that character, that inspirational character. When did you get captured by history? When was it the features of learning the past and mapping meaning out of people’s lives enthralled you?

Nigel Biggar
That’s a very good question, Brendan. I think, yeah, well, why did history so fascinate me? It may have been partly, I mean, I live in an old country and I lived in the countryside. If I stepped out of my bedroom into the corridor, there was a window there, just over the brow of a hill, about three or four miles away, I could see the outlines of a ruined castle. And here I’m at age 68 describing to you what I saw at the age of six. So clearly, it made an impression. So I was aware of living in an old place with, and the best images of the past around me. Thinking about the past, I mean, it’s different, unlike what the moviemakers make it these days. Because movie makers these days don’t like to give us a past that’s different, they like to make the past reflect us. Which is a great shame, because what’s interesting about the past is the difference. And I think that’s always fascinated me.

Brendan Corr
I want to come back to that notion of the tendency of our age to project its meaning and its identity forward and backward. I think this is part of what you were trying to convey in your book on colonialism. We’ll come back and revisit that space. For you, or for many people who are at school, history is learning dates, learning a sequence of events of history. But you must’ve very early realised that it was more than that, that it was a window into some type of human experience.

Nigel Biggar
Yes. That’s interesting. I certainly love my dates. I remember, I can still recite them. Boring though it was, actually, it did me the benefit of giving me some framework in which to understand how on earth we got to where we got to. And I rather regret that school kids these days tend not to learn dates, because they just don’t know when things happened. But I love my dates. So I think certainly in my early years, history was presented to me as featuring really important people. And that’s an immediate way in which history can grasp your attention because you’re dealing with human beings and fascinating human beings who do great and strange things. So to this day, I remember that Mr. Cooper, way back in the 1960s, described Mary Queen of Scots as his puppet. He was clearly very keen on Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m not really sure she, I’m not sure she deserved that really, but I still remember that. So it was a fascination with people in the past. And of course, I had my own family, and I was born 10 years after World War II. And when I was 10 years old, 1945 seemed a century ago to me. Now, of course, it was a very short time indeed, and I was surrounded by reminders and vestiges of an enormously important part of history my own parents have taken part in.

Brendan Corr
So that sense of seeing the outworking of the narrative of the world, the narrative of humanity’s shared experience of the war was something that you were conscious of.

Nigel Biggar
Very much so. And I think it gave me an abiding sense that what I have enjoyed, the environment I have enjoyed and the institutions I have enjoyed, didn’t fall out of heaven. They were achieved, they were built, and they cost people in the past. And so I have been sensitive to the fact that my world is not eternal. It’s contingent, it’s dependent, it’s fragile, and it may not be here forever. And I think to myself, that’s a very healthy view to have of the present. I fear if today’s kids lack a sense of historical depth, they also lack a sense of the contingency and precariousness of what they have and therefore a sense of gratitude.

Brendan Corr
I think that’s a very deep concept to latch on to, that the world in which we operate, the social world, the constructs, even the economy that we are gaining benefit from, isn’t self-sustaining. It isn’t self-perpetuating. It’s not self-evident in lots of ways. It is the product of human endeavour, and people’s work and decisions are what enrich our experience every day.

Nigel Biggar
Yeah. No, I think that’s right. And I think it’s important to be grateful and humble about that because it also makes one careful. You don’t take it for granted.

Brendan Corr
No presumption. I was thinking when I was reading some of your own history, your narrative, and your story, it was interesting to me that you had your undergraduate degree in history, but that you’ve ended up in this field of ethics and morality. What brought that change? What shifted it from the stories of people in their past to making sense of why they were making decisions and the rightness of those decisions?

Nigel Biggar
Yeah, that’s a crucial part of my story. I mean, the intervening thing, which we can talk about later, is theology. Because I began my first degree in history and then subsequent degrees in theology. Although, as you rightly point out, I focused on ethics. But sticking to the question you’ve just asked about, from history to ethics. I grew up in Britain, as I said, in the late ’50s and ’60s. The ’60s in particular were throughout the Western world, a time of cultural change, of the beginnings of the throwing over of conservative, conventional morality, particularly sexual morality. And I was aware of that. I was aware of that. In Britain in the ’60s and early ’70s, I was at secondary school, ‘68 to ‘72, in my teens, all sorts of the heroes of the past and the conventions of the past were being mocked. Monty Python came onto the scene and other comedy programs where younger people, as they do, mock their fathers and their grandfathers, and I laughed with them. Except I do remember one of the figures of mockery, I think in a Monty Python sketch, was an RAF pilot, a Second World War pilot. To our ears, the way he spoke was terribly portioned, odd, and laughable. But I did reflect on this young pilot, no matter how he spoke, he took risks… my security, my future, that none of us took or have ever needed to take, and here we were mocking him. So I’ve always had a reservation about the cultural revolution of the ’60s. Nowadays, I refer to my inner Edwardian, which maintains itself and has always resisted that. So I think moral questions arose in my mind early on. In fact, the first letter I ever wrote and published in a newspaper, at the age of 15, was on that question.

Brendan Corr
And so you rightly pointed out the point of connection or the bridge between simple history. I shouldn’t say simple history, that’s not what I mean, but the notions of an account of the past and making sense of it. For you, that bridge was theology, that it was the bringing together of story and the things that are transcendent, the ideas and the values and principles that beyond the frames of the picture unfold for history?

Nigel Biggar
Yeah. So I wasn’t brought up in a church-going home, Brendan. My parents didn’t go to church. My mother was the daughter of a lapsed Methodist daughter of a Methodist lay preacher. My father was a non-church-going Presbyterian. I once went to Sunday school at my local Presbyterian church and was bored and never went again. So my parents themselves did not communicate Christian faith to me. But I do remember experiences even before I got to my prep school, where my headmaster and mistress were evangelical Christians. There’s one particular experience of a direct intuitive religious sense that I had. But when I went to my prep school, as I say, my headmaster and mistress were evangelical Christians. She used to read us Bible stories in the dormitory before lights out at night. I went to Christian camps for the ages of 11, 12, and 13. And in secondary school, I responded to a call to accept Christ and was a Christian thereafter. I think looking back, what was attractive about Christianity? I think, yes, the vision of a world where there are important things that are not physical, that are spiritual. And that there are moral anchors, spiritual anchors, and principles that are not ephemeral. That seemed to me to be enormously attractive. And so there was a connection between my faith and then… In my early 20s after my history degree, I hadn’t quite figured out just how ethically concerned I was, but I wanted to study theology just to understand better why I believed what I believed as a Christian. So I started off with theology, but within a few years, it had focused on ethics, which in fact had been my driving concern for a long time, I think.

Brendan Corr
So you became a Christian around 13.

Nigel Biggar
Yes.

Brendan Corr
You were discovering this penchant spirit, the intellectual life, and dealing with ideas. Many people struggle with a sense of contest between those two things, a life of faith versus a life of dealing with abstract ideas and propositions. Did you ever face that dilemma internally? Did you have to resolve that?

Nigel Biggar
Well, in a sense I’ve spent the whole of my life resolving it. In my case, and I think in most cases, what draws you to faith and religion and God is deeper than simple thought. Deep, existential, spiritual needs and intuitions are what draw you. But yes, since most people around me, including my family, were not Christian, the question to me was, “Nigel, why do you believe this stuff?” came early. And in a sense, I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out why I believe this stuff. That’s why I wanted to study theology at… I decided that I do believe it and I could give fragments of reasons why I believe it, but I wanted to be able to give a better account of why I believed it. The fact that I’m still a Christian means that I came to the view some long time ago that intellectual integrity and Christian faith need not be at odds with one another. I mean, to be frank, Brendan, believing in God raises all sorts of questions to which easy answers are not always to be found. But my response to that is that if you don’t believe in God, that also raises questions to which easy answers are not to be found. So whether you’re a theist or an atheist, both of us have large questions we can’t answer. And so, I don’t feel on any weaker ground than a non-believer on that.

Brendan Corr
Can I push a little deeper into that proposition that you described of the reasons for our faith? They do include the intellectual, they do include having a reasoned faith, and why do I believe what I believe? But you spoke about there being something more-

Nigel Biggar
Existential or spiritual.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, more existential. There is something, that is that verse in scripture, ”… placed eternity in the heart of mankind.” There’s a proposition or there’s a book out that’s been recently done, said that you are what you love. That there are these inherent drives and… or an element about humanity that is quintessentially about where we place value and where we place worth and meaning that is beyond the cognition. Is that what you are describing?

Nigel Biggar
Yeah. So I mentioned earlier that even before I was informed by my Bible-reading headmistress at prep school, I had, as there were some independent experiences that were quite significant, I think. In the early ’60s, there was a film released, a Hollywood film, a blockbuster called King of Kings, quite a famous film, actually, about the story of Jesus. And I went to see this at the age of six with my father. And I remember coming back home and lying in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling, praying that God would, I was weeping, that God would take off Jesus all that happened to Jesus and put it on me, which looking back is a slightly precocious thing for a six-year-old to be saying. But here’s the thing, Brendan, I was praying. No one taught me to pray. I don’t think anyone taught me to pray. I wanted to do it, so I did it. The other thing is, clearly, the story of Jesus had impressed me deeply, and the loneliness or solitude of Jesus and what weighed him down impressed me deeply. And this wasn’t something I was taught. I saw it. I saw it. My father didn’t react that way, I did. So when I talk about, as it were, the pre-intellectual or pre-cognitive springs of faith, that’s the experience I refer to. And what was driving me there? Well, clearly, clearly there was something admirable, and beautiful about the story of Jesus I’d just seen. You spoke of love, so I responded in love to what seemed to me to be beautiful. Now, the story of Jesus is tragic, well before the Resurrection, it’s a tragic, terrible story of persecution and oppression. So it wasn’t beautiful in a saccharine sense. It was in a sense morally beautiful. since then, I have observed my heroes are all of that type, Thomas More, Sir Thomas More, who was executed by Henry VIII, and Helmuth James von Moltke, the anti-Nazi resistance who was hanged for his pains in 1945. The solitary person who somehow stands out from the crowd for the sake of what’s right and true has always been enormously attractive to me. I mean, I say this advisedly, Brendan, God knows why.

Brendan Corr
Yes. I appreciate what you’re saying and the essence that the complexity of our human state involves those deeply emotive elements that need to resonate with the things we understand, things we don’t understand about ourselves and about life. Let’s chat a little then around, you might’ve had a phrase there about the beauty of the story of Christ and the notion of somebody as the single individual who stands against all opposition and all challenge for what is right. That notion of what is right, the focus of some of your work ethics, and morality, you have found that what is right is defined by your Christian faith. How do you see the sea of humanity wrestling with this idea about what is right, what is ethical and what is moral?

Nigel Biggar
Yeah. So as a Christian, I am bound by a Christian worldview, dogmatically, if you like, to suppose that there are universal moral principles. I tend to think of those in terms of the basic components of human flourishing. Different people impact those differently. Justice, experience of beauty, concern for the truth, we can elaborate on those. But I do believe there are universal moral principles. And I think empirically I can support that if you like, dogmatic belief. And so, it doesn’t surprise me that human beings from very different cultures and even very different times of history, parts of history, can find certain moral things in common. They have similar moral institutions. Not exactly the same, because how we understand moral principles varies according to our cultural context, and varies according to circumstances. So you can have at ground level, if you like, a lot of moral variety or plurality and still have, at a basic fundamental level, a lot of agreement. So how do I see the sea of humanity? I think we all live in the same world. It is my view that there are certain moral fundamentals that all of us intuit, and perceive more or less. Now, as a Christian, I also think that our moral perception is limited because human beings are limited. Sometimes we just make mistakes. And it doesn’t matter where you live in the world, you make mistakes, and you get things wrong just because your understanding is limited. And worse, as a Christian, I believe that we’re sinners. So sometimes we deceive ourselves, and sometimes we avert our eyes from truths. And so we get things wrong, not just because we’re ignorant, but because we’re dishonest, and that applies to the sea of humanity. So, I think in that respect, I’m in the same boat as the rest of humanity. I do think, however, that certain traditions, and especially Christianity, throw a sharp, illuminating light on moral truth, which makes unambiguous certain features of the moral world that everyone perceives more or less.

Brendan Corr
The arguments that we’ve been exploring are some of the ideas that at this moment in time, this culture that we occupy is the construct of human interactions and human imaginings and ideas. Ideology drives things, and the experiences we have, and what we decide are the rules of engagement, so to speak, in our relationships are constructed by ourselves. The idea of that being consistent, that being unchanging, there being an enduring part of that. You as a historian have seen the shift of what is acceptable, what is considered ethical, and what is approved of as being moral. Does that not stand against the notion of a Christian continuity of good and evil?

Nigel Biggar
No, I don’t think it does. So here’s one example that’s not… Why, it is a bit historical. In 2013, I went to Hong Kong to attend a conference on war and peace, East and West, exploring Christian and Confucian, or Chinese, ethics of war. Now, what I discovered there was that… I had written a book on the Christian just war theory. And this is a theory of the justification of war that developed in the Latin Christian West, starting with St. Augustine in the early 400s, systematised by Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s, and then developed thereafter. Articles about ancient Confucian and mediaeval Confucian ethics of war show that the ancient Chinese, the mediaeval Chinese, came up with ideas about what to constrain war or under what conditions war was justified. That in many respects was the same as the Christian just war theory, in spite of the fact that until the 19th century, thereabouts, western civilization, Latin Western civilization, and Chinese civilization hardly communicated, almost entirely independent of each other. These two traditions of ethics came across many of the same things. So that’s why I think there’s empirical reason to suppose that notwithstanding cultural and historical differences, there are similar principles that recur. Now, you talked about, yes, historical development. So for example, slavery, about which these days we talk a lot and we focus irrationally and for political reasons, I think, on Western European, British involvement in slavery. But until the mid-1700s, slavery, and slave trading were universal institutions practised in every continent, by people of every skin colour. Now, we now regard that slavery and slave trading as abhorrent. There was a moral revolution, I think, in England and northwest Europe in the late 1700s, pioneered not least by evangelical Christians, that gave rise to the movement for the abolition of slavery. But here’s the point. First of all, most people lived with slavery for centuries because it was a fact of life. People could tell when slavery was being unnecessarily cruel, in the way that we can tell. But for them, for a variety of reasons, it wasn’t so obviously immoral as it is to us. In the late 1700s, there was something of a development of moral intelligence or education, but it did happen. So things that people had regarded as acceptable 50 years before, they came to regard as intolerable, and that does happen. And yet, I think if we look back in history, we can see that people could still tell whether slavery was unnecessarily brutal, or unnecessarily cruel, and they could tell the difference between violence that was necessary and unnecessary. And the fact of the matter is that somehow if it were true that we are all locked into, as it were, our cultural silos, where I have my culture as my view of slavery and your culture of slavery if we were locked into those things, no culture would ever change. Because my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth. Never the twain shall meet. What you claim has no authority over me and vice versa. But the people in a moral environment can begin to perceive something is wrong here. And I suspect that many people over many centuries had thought something was wrong here with slavery and slave trading, but it seemed impossible to stop it. So, like all of us, when we are faced with impossible tasks, we put them aside. So the idea that something was wrong with slavery, which gained momentum in the late 1700s, was probably not the first time people have thought of that. But for a variety of reasons at that time, it was able to, as it were, gather momentum and then became a public fact.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, I understand what you’re describing, the account that you are presenting there. And I guess where my thinking is heading is along the lines or leading to the question about your most recent book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which has drawn some criticism from folks about defending what they see as an immoral practice and trying to figure in your thinking, is it the morality that has changed? Is it the people that have changed? Is it the standards that have changed? Why is it that you could write with unpacking, not necessarily approving, but at least a sympathetic view of colonialism, and others consider you’re trying to defend the indefensible?

Nigel Biggar
If European colonial endeavour was, as my critics describe it, I would agree with them, it would’ve been indefensible. It’s just that, as a matter of fact, I know enough about it to know that the description commonly given that British colonialism was nothing but a litany of racism and oppression and exploitation and wanton violence, it’s just not true. So it’s partly that, but it’s also, I find quite ugly, frankly, about the, what I’ll call the moralistic judgmentalism of many people about our past, our colonial past, is the lack of historical imagination, the failure to understand that circumstances in the past were very, very different. In particular, those of us who live in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, America now in the early 21st century, and Western Europe, enjoy, most of us, unprecedented levels of wealth, health, and security. And we live, we’re fortunate to live in strong states, which being strong can be very discriminant in their use of violence. That means even strong states authorise police to use firearms sometimes. Of course, in the US a lot, but in my own country, not so much. But in the past, the thing about the past is states were usually very weak, life was generally insecure. That’s why most people own firearms of their own because they are under threat. And when you’re under constant threat, you’re fearful, you’re anxious, and you are much more likely to resort to violence in self-defence and appropriately so because your circumstances are so insecure. So I think it’s partly just my knowing the facts about the past and knowing that actually there were people in the past who used imperial power for good purposes. I mean, as I said, the abolition of slave trading, and slavery by Britain. Britain was amongst the first states in the world’s history to do that. And then the British Empire employed imperial power all over the world to suppress slavery. I know about that. For some reason, my critics don’t want to know about it. They could do it but they don’t want to know about it. The other thing is just realising when we judge the past, our ancestors lived in very different circumstances. If we’re humble enough and sensitive enough, we need to take that into account before we judge them.

Brendan Corr
Yes, I hear what you’re saying. It’s exactly the tracing back to the comment that I noted in an earlier phrase that you used, that we, the modern world, or the modern age, tend to project itself into other stories and has an absolute self-absorption with its self-definition and its sense of priority so as to completely overshadow or outweigh any other perspective, any other time, any other context.

Nigel Biggar
Can I give you an example?

Brendan Corr
Yes.

Nigel Biggar
There was a film that came out, I think about a year ago, called Bronte. And this was about the Victorian novelist, Emily Bronte, who was the author of the famous Victorian novel Wuthering Heights. Now, Wuthering Heights is a story of grand sexual passion. Now, the filmmaker, the 21st-century filmmaker, decided Emily Bronte could not possibly have written such a novel unless she herself had had a living experience of wild sexual passion. So the film, as it were, purports to reveal the truth, the truth about Emily’s own personal experience, which is what led her to write this book. Well, the truth about Emily Bronte, as far as we know, is that she remained unmarried to the end of her life. She never had any sexual affairs. She was stuck up in the moors of Yorkshire, and yet she wrote this book. Now, to me, that’s really interesting. It’s interesting because it calls into question our present assumptions that people can only write about their own lived experience and that any successful human being has to have had some wild sexual fling. But the 21st-century filmmaker just could not cope with that, and so, allowed the 21st-century viewer to see a reflection of themselves in the film, which, to my mind, is boring. I know us. I don’t need to see us again. Tell me something different, which might make me reflect on us critically and might illuminate us in some way. But you’re right, it’s narcissistic… which I find tedious myself.

Brendan Corr
Exactly. I hear what you’re saying. It’s almost like… We’ve been talking about morality in terms of judging right and wrong, but it’s a more complex concept than that, isn’t it? Because in this space, we’re imagining an inability to imagine. The morality of today is so individual and so self-expressive, that that morality is the thing that pervades and permeates every interpretation of everything else. It is only about our age and our concept and our experience with absolute self-absorption, which is part of the ideology.

Nigel Biggar
Yes. And it’s self-confirmation. It’s proving that our, here’s the irony, it’s proving that our morality’s universal. It was always the case, and I just think that is, which, it’s just so thoughtless and it’s so dishonest and it’s so lazy.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, lazy’s a good word for it, and oversimplified, isn’t it? It’s so un-nuanced and unsophisticated.

Nigel Biggar
What’s interesting about the past is it really was different, and we need to contemplate that.

Brendan Corr
You started with that. Before we draw things to a close, I did wonder whether or not you had any reflections on why the strident opposition to the colonial past seems to be so concentrated on British colonialism and little mention of other eras or other colonial enterprises that preceded it. Is it because it’s the most recent? Is it because it was the most successful, or is it none of those?

Nigel Biggar
A very important question, Brendan, and you’re quite right, and no one cares about the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Rome, and Greece. No one cares about more recent Arab empires the Zulu Empire or the Comanche Empire or even the present Chinese Empire. The focus is all on Europe and especially the British Empire. So that raises the question of why. I think there are two reasons. One is that the assault on British colonialism is the British or commonwealth equivalent of the assault on race in America. And I think a lot of the obsession with racism and colonialism is something that we in the Anglosphere have imported from America because of America’s dominant cultural influence of which you’re aware, and I’m aware. Certainly, I think I can back that up with reference to the chronology in 2020 when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. I think it was in October 2020, was it? December? The Black Lives Matter movement experienced a resurgence in America, and in no time at all, it appeared in Britain. It appeared in Britain, and you have a placard. I have a memory of an English woman holding a placard at a BLM protest here in England. And the placard bore the words, “Disarm the police.” The oddity is that, as most people know, the British police are not normally armed. But this lady had not noticed that Britain is not America. So I think we quickly imported this Black Lives Matter notion that America is radically racist because of slavery. And then in Britain, Britain is radically racist because of slavery and, yes, because of our colonial history, which is all about slavery. So that’s one reason. The second reason is, I think, and it’s a broader reason that I think the British Empire stands as a proxy for the West. There’s a historical reason for that up until the end of the First World War thereabouts, or the 1930s, Britain was the leading power, or the British Empire was the leading power in the Western world until it was overtaken by the US. And then to some extent, US dominance since 1945 was built on the British Empire. I mean, some of the US military bases were British imperial bases. And so the British Empire stands really for the modern record of the West, and therefore the attack on the empire is an attack on the record of the Western world. And the claim is the Western world is radically racist and oppressive. And I think, particularly at a time when the likes of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and President Xi are rattling a sabre over Taiwan and threatening Southeast Asia, it’s a bad time to be denigrating the West. I’m not saying that the West doesn’t deserve criticism, Brendan, of course there are lots of things to be critical about the West, but to denigrate it indiscriminately in the way in which the decolonizers do is a politically dangerous thing to do at this time.

Brendan Corr
Yes. So beware of the oversimplification either way to completely exonerate the past or to completely repudiate the past.

Nigel Biggar
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s have the whole story, warts, but also the good bits.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, agree.

Nigel Biggar
In the case of the British Empire, by all means, let’s remind ourselves of slavery between 1650 and 1800. Let’s also remind ourselves of the 150 years of imperial penance in stamping out slavery from Brazil to Malaysia.

Brendan Corr
Very good. I’m thoughtful as we draw our conversation to a close, Professor, of the teaching of Christ himself talked about logs and moats and the will to point fault at the cultures of the past and be completely ignorant to the massive problems that we might be facing in our own culture. Can I thank you for the work that you’ve done in helping point out some of those logs and moats? May you continue to do that as we reflect on where we’ve come from and the story that has brought us to this place so that we can learn from it and allow the light of the Lord to illuminate our way forward.

Nigel Biggar
Thanks, Brendan. Thanks very much for this conversation. These are really important matters and it’s great to have a chance to have an honest and open conversation about them.

Brendan Corr
Thank you. God bless.

Nigel Biggar
You, too.