Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology
Ours is a time in which all the old truths have seemed questionable, all the old habits indefensible, and all the old passions unthinkable. Since Christianity is no longer a new religion and since Christians are often leaders in the power systems of the world and therefore often implicated in its evils, many men and women ask us whether Christianity, and thus the Gospel, makes any sense. They ask, to put things very bluntly, if Christianity is good for you. Does following the way of Jesus make you a better person? Does the church help people live in community in better ways? If there is a God, is this God good? Critics of Christianity such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens tell us that God is not great, and that religion (at least they don’t just try to finger us!) is the source of all the evil in the world.
Now a lot of their rhetoric is nonsense. Let’s be clear about that. Many of the critiques are ill informed about all sorts of things. They set up straw people to knock down. They pit the most ignorant Christians and against the best informed non-Christians. So there is much of the noise we can safely ignore as the last rantings of a publicity-seeking, sensationalistic media and public.
But is that all there is to the brouhaha? Surely it is fair to say that many of us Christians (and other religious people) are confused about what our faith really teaches. We adjust to a series of compromises with worldly structures and react out of fear when we should act out of hope. The critics have a point there. To provide a real answer to the intellectual challenges facing us, then, Christians have to be clear about a few things that our faith actually teaches. Here are some:
1. There really is only one God, and we are not it! The great Christian confessions such as the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed, to say nothing of the Bible, are organized around the confession of the supremacy, transcendent goodness, and honor of God. The center of the faith is not the faith itself, much less any laws, practices, ideas, doctrines, etc. deriving from the faith. God is God, and we are all seekers in need of redemption.
2. The human approach to God comes through radical submission to the way of love. Christians vigorously pursue nonviolence in all we do. We join in the criticism of the relentless pursuit of money and power. We strongly question any human system that turns people into commodities. We disdain privilege in all its forms. We believe that God calls us to love all our neighbors as ourselves.
3. We also believe that all human systems are flawed, some very deeply. Some Christians call this original sin, and of course we debate just how deeply flawed humans are. Surely the evidence is complex. But it is also incontrovertible. When St. Paul said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, he was simply stating the obvious. It follows from this fact that no human system can command our final, unquestioning loyalty (not a nation, not an economic system, not even a way of doing family).
4. We Christians think that vigorous pursuit of truth is a worthwhile goal, and that we have nothing to fear from honest inquiry. We think that our congregations should be places in which such inquiry occurs.
5. Our faith is deeply intertwined with hope. Our critics misunderstand what we mean by hope, and frankly many Christians do too. We seem to see heaven as an escape from this world, as a kind of ace up God’s sleeve to make everything right. But that’s not what Scripture says. It talks instead about living lives that participate in God’s work of redeeming humanity. It talks about a God who can balance mercy and justice just right so as to bring about the final elimination of evil (something we can just barely conceive of). That’s a different view than the one attributed to us, and it’s different than the one we sometimes hear in church.
This is a long blog post. Thanks for sticking with it. More next time!