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Christianity is true and relevant but is it exciting? The question is especially important today where people run after flashing lights and stimulants in search of adventure albeit in self-destructive and safe form. Shane Claiborne considers how Christians differ from non-Christians and says:
If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you “Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.” … But if you as the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent. We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else; they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way. (The Irresistible Revolution Ch 5)
Indeed, most people might be able to list more things Christians don’t do than the things they do. Today we can be perfectly acceptable and even esteemed Christians by being safe and playing the part. We attend Church, donate to charities, perhaps work in our community and do all the things expected of us and none of the things Jesus told us to do. Indeed we sometimes feel reassured that we need do nothing because God is working and we cannot and should not work unless called. In some circles any form of doing is itself taboo by a bizarre twisting of the Gospel.
Take for example the sermon on the mount: In Matthew 5 Jesus speaks highly of the poor in spirit (v3), the mourning (v4), the meek (v5), the oppressed and persecuted (v10-11), the righteous (v8,16), all the things I am not. Then he warns (if not condemns) those who are angry with their brother (22) or those who have wronged another and not settled it (v25) or those with a roaming eye (v27) and it is here I find myself. He then tells us to love our enemies (v44) and finally, to be perfect (v48).
Just what are we supposed to do with this list? We know we cannot fulfil it. Shall we do the bits we can and ignore the rest? Did Jesus say all this just to show how we can never attain righteousness? I used to think so.
But what if we really are expected to attain to righteousness all these things by the power of God working in us? What if being a Christian is about being empowered and motivated by the Spirit to be righteous and that this is real imputation? What if we need to hear Paul’s words:
work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose Phillipians 2:12-13
Let’s take a look at some other hard passages which could do, but never do:
Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbours; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14:12-14)
We could get out of this hard task by proposing that Jesus was just talking to his host at the time and not the greater Christian world. However what if we really tried doing this? Why don’t we really invite people we would not normally invite and see what happens?
I happen to be actually inviting my moderately rich neighbours for lunch tomorrow but according to Jesus I should be inviting the poor, crippled, lame and blind. I could excuse this by saying: Lord, nobody I know is poor, crippled, lame or blind. But there is that old folks home around the corner. Lord, their food is probably better than what I can cook. But maybe they need company. Lord, I’m not that much of an conversationalist and besides they’ll probably think I’m crazy.
At what point do we just start trusting Jesus and stop trusting our experience and social norms? I wonder if the great saints weren’t just ordinary people who actually did trust Jesus and it led them to adventure and extraordinary lives. How is Jesus going to save the world if His body, the church, is doing so little?
Each time I talk to someone about Jesus it is exciting although it was hard at first. Each time it’s an adventure and the highlight of my day. Is this not the real, imperishable fruit? Bringing folks a step closer to God?
What if we started taking Jesus seriously and living out the Gospel? If the Gospel is good news to the poor, lonely and oppressed then it has to involve meeting their needs. A hungry beggar needs food and company above all else and any message in words, no matter how joyous, is not going to be received as Good News. We need to act:
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power. (1 Cor 4:20)
Jesus sent his apostles out in Matthew 10 with the task of preaching and meeting peoples needs. The guidelines were:
- Go, preach the kingdom is near (v6)
- Help them, meet their needs in power (v7)
- Trust in providence (v9-12,19,20)
- Be careful (v16-23)
- Fear not (v26-31)
- Expect suffering and opposition (v14,21-23,34-37)
- Be bold (v27,32)
Jesus didn’t say anything about preaching atonement forgiveness of sins if people become Christians. His basic concern was that people realise and see that the reign of God is near by hearing the Gospel and experiencing healing. His advice to the messengers was to be bold, trusting, careful and strong.
Why, oh why does my faith not match this model? How exciting it would be to be an apostle and really travel about without money, trusting in God and preaching His glad tidings! Should I start small or go all out, forsaking family and friends. The risk is huge and there will be suffering and opposition but the comfy alternative is to stay put and pay Jesus lip-service.
Shane Claiborne decided one day to follow Luke 14:13 and it changed his life taking him to Calcutta and the homeless of Philadelphia. He wrote about it in The Irresistible Revolution and described how actually putting Jesus word’s into practice is what living the Christian Life is about (more). If Christians live just like other people then what reason to other people have to question their lifestyle?
Jesus never forced himself on people but fascinated them. When Jesus was asked: are you the Messiah (Luke 7:18-22) his basic answer was: what do you see happening? If someone asked you: are you a Christian you should say: what do you see happening in my life?
One of the key components of Darwin’s theory of evolution is what he called “slight variations” but which neo-Darwinists call “random mutation”. But I don’t think the mutations are random nor that we can call any process or sequence truly random without claiming omniscience.
Consider the following regular sequence:
ABABABABABABABAB
This sequence is obviously not what we would call “random” but why?
- Because we see a pattern namely, a constantly repeating “AB” subsequence
- We feel because we have understood or characterised the sequence
- There is a reason for each letter (specificity)
- A simple rule describes the sequence (type “AB” eight times)
Now consider the following “random” sequence:
QAEDTGUJOLWSRFZHIK
We have no obvious pattern, not even the repetition of characters. We call it random, why?
- We see no pattern
- We don’t understand how the sequence is characterized
- We see no reason for each letter (no specificity)
- The “rule” for describing the sequence is as complex as the sequence (type “QAEDTGUJOLWSRFZHIK” once)
But why should we call something random just because the rule for generating it is complex? The following sequence has a complex rule but it’s not random:
ABDGKPV
(The rule is: Proceed through the alphabet skipping an increasing amount of letters.)
We can’t even say complexity is an indicator of randomness. As humans, when we see a complex sequence we don’t understand we call it “random”. We can never be sure that it is random because we can never know if there is indeed a law or algorithm defining which character comes next. “Random” means we don’t know how it was generated.
Getting back to our random sequence (QAEDTGUJOLWSRFZHIK). Perhaps the best minds in the world would agree, even bet the farm, that this is random until they tried to type it and noticed the pattern which is only obvious on a swiss-german keyboard (typing diagonal pairs down the first 2 rows, skipping even columns and then starting again from the 2nd column skipping all odd columns). You just never know ;-)
Now for a “really random” sequence:
UKSDJDMXWPALKDJIWQ
Here I really cannot explain the trick – I just typed with my eyes closed – it seems to me to be properly random (if that exists). Perhaps if a monkey did the same thing you’d see something like this:
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKKKKK
This is a much simpler sequence and we see what we call a “pattern” as the primate battered the same keys repeatedly. We thus assume it was regular and not random. However this would be a mistake because both sequences were both produced unconsciously, that is, without intent and purpose and yet we call only one “random” and the other one “regular” because we think we see a pattern. Yet the pattern was not something the monkey intended to do. We still have an arbitrary pattern.
What’s the real difference between my “random” pattern and the monkey’s? Is there any? Or were they both non-random?
Although we can probably not trace them there were reasons behind each of my strokes in the “really random” sequence. I can’t tell you what they were but my fingers did not switch to “random” mode and just fly around the keyboard. As I was typing I considered how I could move around the keyboard enough to avoid a pattern and tried to use all my fingers roughly equally. I tried to “make” random and in doing so reasoned each key with limited specificity but not zero specificity.
In summary the verdict “random” is always tentative – it’s our way of saying “this sequence is complex and we don’t know to specify it without writing it out in full”. In fact, if something were truly random it would not be up for investigation, it would cease to be science. Is Darwinism not science after all?
This has profound consequences for the debate about whether life’s complexity and elegance indicates intelligent design. We say a species evolves into another species by random mutation and what we really mean is “we can’t see any direction or purpose here” or “why did God do it like that when this way would have been quicker?”. This reminds me of when emminent scientists pronounce something useless (like an appendix) and we only have to wait a few decades to have this proved incorrect when someone finds a use (Appendix Function). It’s not difficult to prove something has no use or cause – it’s truly impossible. Thus I believe Theistic Evolution is a realistic view for a believer to hold and reject the assertion that “there is nothing for God to do” – it’s Him doing it, holding it all together, but we can’t see it so we call it “random” and take it for granted.
Consider the following syllogism:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist
- Objective moral values exist
- Therefore, God exists
Nietzsche was an influential atheist who realised and made explicit the first premise and even went as far as predicting the disappearance of all values as belief in God subsided and the powerful dominated. The modern atheist will not go this far but will affirm premise 1 with the proviso that subjective moral values will see us through – “who needs religion to be good?”. As effective as subjective morality may turn out to be, the argument is not answered – the atheist who agrees with the first premise must demonstrate that objective moral values do not exist in order to cast a doubt on God’s existence. I have not found that atheists can deny premise 2 and have noticed a common misunderstanding which I would like to highlight:
The absence of agreement on a moral standard is not evidence of the absence of such a standard.
The typical atheist argument is as follows: if we look at different cultures we see a great diversity in moral practices. In some cultures polygamy is prohibited, in others it is the norm. Similarly, homicide is actually permissible in all cultures under varying circumstances (from abortion to infanticide, revenge murders, right up to self-defence and wars). Therefore, the atheist concludes, morality is not universal and therefore not objective.
This, I would argue, is to misconstrue the second premise which is not “morality is uniformly practiced”. The theist, who believes in objective moral values, is quite aware that the absolute morality they believe in is not practiced universally, even within their own culture, even by themselves. But that is not the issue. The theist is not saying: “my standard is the standard” but “there is a standard”. Indeed, the Christian would add “…of which we all fall short”.
So how do we reason that such a standard exists? By looking at how people behave when the moral standard is violated. Assuming no objective moral values existed you would expect someone when falsely accused or hurt to respond “I did not like that, but that’s just my personal preference”. In fact, the person will respond more like we would expect if objective moral values did exist: “Hey! You can’t do that! That’s not fair! That was wrong!”. No hint of personal preference there or sign that the unjust action might be right in the perpetrator’s frame of reference or culture. We do not let terrorists off the hook because that sort of behaviour is acceptable, even praiseworthy, in their culture.
If we look at other cultures we see that this principle is indeed universal. When someone is wronged in any culture they will appeal to a standard which is higher than any particular person or cultural norm. It may be culturally acceptable for a rich man to rape a woman in certain cultures but the woman (and possibly also the man) will still know that it is really wrong despite its popularity and the status quo. In doing so they do not appeal to personal preference but to a general, universal and objective law. It is this appeal to an objective reference which we expect the other person to acknowledge which will, in practice, reveal how we really think about and expect morality to operate – that is objectively.
Finally, the atheist is not justified in assuming that for something to be objective it must be universally acknowledged. There are a great many people today who still believe the earth is flat. Unanimous assent may be the atheists measure of objectivity but it amounts to nothing more than consensus. Since, by the atheist’s view there is nothing higher than man to judge, consensus among men is taken as objective. But this is not what objectivity means – objective means true independent of observer or subject – “objective” basically means True in the absolute sense. It is nonsense to appeal to man as the measure of all things much less to all men in establishing objectivity.
Objectivity is something we can strive for but not obtain as we are all subjects and consensus among subjects is at most what we can call intersubjective verifiability. Whilst reality is an instance of the objective (existing whether we acknowledge it or not) objectivity among humans is illusory – no one can say “I am objective” for it would be a subject saying “I am not subjective” or “I am not a subject”. Reality is always objective, but our ideas about it are not – we are not objective.
We thus see that objective morality does exist even if we cannot exactly stipulate and practice it perfectly. We are aware of the standard hovering over our heads or “written on our hearts” yet unable to fully grasp it. Nevertheless we know that some things really are wrong no matter how many people think otherwise and indirectly affirm a law-giver who is unswayed by culture, natural selection and personal preference. The big question is: “What is the nature of that law-giver?”…
