Do we really believe?

Just taking a short look on the flipside of some of my arguments over the past series, I recently read an article in The Times which was somewhat depressing. The atheist author, Jamie Whyte, declares that:

‘The vast majority of Christians display a remarkably blasé attitude toward their approaching day of judgment, leading lives almost indistinguishable from those of us open non-believers. Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.’

The ‘behavioural test for belief’ refers to the idea that our beliefs should affect our behaviour; from this, he concludes that since Christians are almost indistinguishable from non-believers, we must not believe in what we say we believe. 

He’s got a point, really. Arguments and well-meaning efforts by Christians to ‘defend’ the faith may be common in this age, but so is the rate of divorce between “Christian” couples.

When an atheist can pick up on the fact that we don’t act in accordance to our beliefs, we know something must be awry with our displays of Christianity. Or do we? When we read an article or hear words like that, our first instinctive response is usually a defensive one. Just take a look at the comments section. It’s a fairly natural reaction, to be fair; no one likes being told that their belief is a sham, or that we live in self-delusion. But then again, what’s natural isn’t necessarily right, or good.

It might be a bitter pill, but on reflection, we have to see that Whyte has a very strong point. After all, if Christians were known for acting like they were out-of-this-world (as we so clearly should be), we could just defeat Whyte’s argument by citing the countless examples where Christians change societies and lives for the better. But these days we don’t have so many of those. Jesus himself said that ‘all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’. But the very existence of this article shows that this doesn’t really seem to be the case. Instead, we’re apparently known for flaming hypocrisy.

So, if critics like Whyte are right, how should we respond?

I honestly feel that God uses such articles to convict us. (Even Jesus rode a donkey, *zing*). Of course, whenever our failings become apparent, we often don’t want to hear it (as one look at the irrelevant accusations against science and atheism within the comments clearly demonstrates).

But such responses stem entirely from our pride. It’s obvious that they do nothing to answer for our inaction and worldliness. It’s hard being told we suck as Christians, especially by an atheist, of all people! But if it’s true, we need to hear it, and something needs to be done about it. Excuses and irrelevant responses do nothing to defend our advance the case of our God – they merely serve to defend ourselves. And if such messages aren’t coming from our churches, then thank God they’re still coming from somewhere. 

After all, CS Lewis made pretty much the same point in The Weight of Glory:

‘Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.’

And I’m also reminded of the introduction The Divine Art of Soul Winning, by J. Oswald Sanders:

‘”Even if I were utterly selfish, and had no care for anything but my own happiness, I would choose, if I might, under God, to be a soul-winner; for never did I know perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness of the purest and most ennobling order till I first heard of one who had sought and found the Saviour through my means. No young mother ever so rejoiced over her first-born child, no warrior was so exultant over a hard-won victory.” So spoke that matchless winner of souls, Charles H. Spurgeon. Only those who have never given themselves to the exercise of this divine art would be disposed to quarrel with him for the seeming extravagance of his statement.

And yet, despite the fact that this “perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness” is within the reach of the humblest and least capable believer, comparatively few seem sufficiently in earnest to strive after its attainment. A passion for souls is rare among church members today. The great mass of Christian people feel not the slightest responsibility for the souls of their fellow men. It never so much as dawns on them that they are their brother’s keeper. If they can manage to save their own souls, that is the end of their concern.’

So, let’s search for that infinite joy. Let’s quit with the excuses. Let’s stop defending our pride, and let’s start attacking the strongholds of the enemy with the love that should mark us out. Lest we end up like the Church in Laodicea – Revelation 3:14-20:

‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.’

Above all, that’s what I think we should do when faced with articles such as Whyte’s. Let us use his accusations as salve, so we can see ourselves for what we really are; let us be earnest with ourselves in the face of our obvious failings; let us repent seriously of them; and then let us open the door to let Jesus intoour lives again. Everything else should follow from that. And when it does… v21:

‘To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne.’

 

The ‘God is not great’ delusion pt.3

[Continued from part 2, here]

In part 2, I proposed that (in short) the best way to shine up the ‘God is not great’ delusion is not to argue about it, but to live it, by letting and allowing the great, amazing, radical grace of God to transform our lives in a really tangible, visible way, no matter how hard it may seem to channel this radical grace through our not-so-great/amazing/radical selves. Because the testimony of a radically changed life simply cannot be argued with.

However, one’s testimony has the greatest power not as a spoken speech or written essay, but as the visible changes in one’s life. It is very easy for someone to ignore a spoken or written account of the miracles and momentous events of your life; it is not so easy for someone to ignore your life itself when it is lived out in front of them. If we work towards radically transforming our lives, as we should, this alone will powerfully affect only those who already know you well.

Of course, this is important, but in a sense it is not enough. We may be demonstrating to our close friends (and hopefully our enemies) that our God must be great, but the circle of influence is likely to stop there. If we want to turn the current mainstream view of God upside down, more must be done in order to get out into the mainstream.

Part 2 very much dealt with the idea that ‘God gave us our lives and souls to restore and change’. But at its core, Christianity is a religion concerned with servanthood, selflessness; serving the needs of others. Those kinds of words. Being released from and fighting against our own addiction to sin is all well and good, but God didn’t just give us our own lives to restore and change. He gave us the lives of others, as well. Matthew 9:35-38:

‘Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field”.’

Fundamentally, my point is simple. We were commanded to evangelise. Therefore, we should evangelise.

Supporting reasons are numerous, even when only focusing on how to shine up the ‘God is not great’ delusion for what it really is. A simple extension of the thrust of the argument from part 2 is that evangelism/introducing people to the life-changing nature of Jesus will hopefully lead to complete changes in their lives, which will then create a whole new ‘good fruit’ visible to a whole new circle of people. If repeated enough, it’s plausible that eventually, enough people will become visibly awesome Christians that our concept of God becomes recognised in the mainstream as something pretty cool too. 

[Of course, a disclaimer: evangelism is not just important for the sake of glorifying our God. Evangelism is intrinsically important, because every soul on this planet is Jesus-deprived. But it is important to note that the two are inextricably linked; by properly satisfying that God-shaped hole in people's hearts, we hopefully end up transforming lives, producing good fruit, and impacting many others by proxy. I wish only to note the wider impact we could have via evangelism, if only to convict, encourage and stir us more readily into action.]

For another, deeper reason, I want to focus specifically on this part of the passage:

‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’

Crowds, harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 

We still have those today, in depressing abundance. Yet Western society generally turns a cold, blind eye. We become the contradiction of people with shopping bags filled with extraneuous goods walking past beggars sleeping in the streets. But, just as how in part 2 I wrote of Christians needing to be radically nice relative to ourselves, we must also be radically nice relative to the norms of society. 

This means doing something about the ‘harassed and helpless’, or as Jesus describes them elsewhere, the ‘least of these’. In some areas, Christians have been okay at doing this, e.g. Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce. Today, Christians in the West still make up a large proportion of all charity and volunteer organisations. Homeless shelters, prison ministers, drug clinics – quite a few organisations of these have a generally Christian focus. One of the writers of the Alcoholics Anonymous guidebook was a Christian minister. Obviously, this is good work that should be continued and expanded.

Yet many of these surviving organisations are firmly rooted in history. They help those who are often ‘helpless’, but no longer ‘harassed’. Unfortunately, today, harassed people are often ignored even by the church. The targets of harassment have moved on. In Britain at least, social groups known as chavs are particularly targeted as worse-than-useless.  The first result of the Google search for ‘Christian Chavs’ turns up ‘Did you mean: christian chavez ’, which pretty much sums it up. More outreach to alienated groups like these can, and must, be done.

After all, these are fruitful avenues for evangelism. The ‘helpless’ beneficiaries of social-justice organisations are those who may also respond best to ‘preaching the good news of the kingdom’. Those who are most aware that they are sick also realise that they need they doctor.

The ‘harassed’, on the other hand, may respond with initial resentment at any contact approaching evangelism. But at the same time, being harassed, neglected and scorned by the world at large, they could potentially respond well if we somehow found a way to communicate the love of Christ towards them. 

Nevertheless, the relative ease of evangelism isn’t my focus on the necessity and importance of reaching out to the ‘least of these’. It’s the opposite, in fact. Most people would agree that it takes some great effort to transform the lives of, say, addicts, or chavs. And naturally the greatness of God is most clearly displayed to the external world when it is lives such as these which become utterly changed. Although every believer’s full, honest testimony speaks volumes about the power and love of God, the world finds it much harder to ignore when drug dealers and thugs start distributing love and fighting injustice instead of dishing out weed and attacking one another. 

Indeed, the most impacting testimony I ever heard was from a former murderous heroin addict (in short). It was responsible for a complete renewal of my faith. So just imagine and dream with me a society where chavs are getting lairy for Christ, transforming their tight-knit crews into fellowships and churches, and acting to positively impact the lives of those around them. A society where chavs themselves volunteer to help the helpless and communicate the awesomeness of a God who gave their lives hope and meaning. A society where chavs are harassed only because no-one has any other adequate response to how and why they’ve become so radically nice. In short, a society where chavs aren’t known as bad eggs, but good fruit.

And alongside that society, let us create a society where addicts turn up to rehab with no signs of withdrawal symptoms, because they’re addicted to God. A society where the homeless remain homeless only in order to imitate Jesus more fully. A society where God’s work is undeniably displayed in all, for all to see. 

It sounds impossible. Thankfully, that’s God’s domain. Indeed, we must remember that it is only by the strength of the Holy Spirit that we can even dream of doing such things.

But we must dream to do them, first. After all, why else do we pray for God’s kingdom to come, here on earth as it is in heaven?

 

* * *

 

I recently stumbled upon this quote from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller which I feel summarises the gist of the arguments of the past three posts:

‘There are some guys who don’t believe in God and can prove he doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. If I walk away from Him, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything.’

Likewise, from the opposite angle, I believe that the key to exposing the ‘God is not great’ delusion is not intellectual. It is in the things we do. It is about the identity of God, our tree, as shown in our own identities as His fruit. It is in our social impact when we take both those identities and shine like stars in an overcast world. It is the deep emotional changes we must bring about, as we follow God to restore, transform and fulfil people’s hearts and souls.

If we can do this, if we can truly bring God’s kingdom down to earth, then the undeniable greatness of our God will surely be with us every step of the way.

So, let us demolish proofs and build heaven instead.

 

The ‘God is not great’ delusion pt.2

[Continued from part 1, here]

As I launch into the second part, I’d like to make it clear, again, that argument and debate has its definite uses. I’m constructing an argument right now, for instance. God gave us our minds and intellects to use, sure.

But I’m also sure that, more importantly, God gave us our lives and souls to restore and change. And if we want to stand a chance of glorifying our God, of dispelling the idea that He’s ‘not great’, then our lives and souls must play an integral part. We cannot simply argue for the greatness of our God; we must show it in every pore of our lives too. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes. ‘Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words’, as St. Francis of Assisi said.  A tree won’t be described as a great tree if its fruits only look great, or if the advert or product description describes them as great; they must taste great, too, through every fibre of their flesh. And if our lives and personalities are indistinguishable from the average Joe’s, then we might not be displaying bad fruit, so to speak, but neither are we giving people any reason to view our God as anything special.

So how exactly can we distinguish our lives from those of non-believers? What marks – or rather, what is meant to mark our lives as Christians? Standard Christian theology holds that after our conversions the Holy Spirit works in us to transform our lives, and that the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Galatians 5:22-23). It may be standard theology, but it’s entirely true. Christians should be submitting to the Holy Spirit in order to become the most contented, nicest people on the planet.

That’s all very well and true, but in the context of books denouncing our God, there is the sense that this is, perhaps, not quite enough. When we talk simply of our own personalities, is it really possible to become ‘radically’ nice in a way that shows the greatness of God?

I believe so. By writing of ‘our own personalities’, I may have masked the fact that the personality is not just some self-contained aspect of our selves; personality is also about how we interact with others. And my choice to use ‘nice’ – perhaps the most unassuming adjective in the English language – to sum up the fruits of the Spirit can’t have helped in imagining radicalism of any form.

Nevertheless, people we generally describe as ‘nice’ tend to be loving, they more often seem happy than not, they are patient, kind and good, they don’t usually let you down, and again they are usually unassumingly gentle and temperate. (Anyway, every time I use ‘nice’ from now on, read: ‘displaying the fruits of the Spirit’.)

Of course the question remains on how it is possible to be nice in a radical manner that befits our awesome God. There may be some people for whom simply ‘being nice’ in the traditional sense is a new and real challenge; for these, being radically nice might be the same as actually being nice. And those who know you and see the change to niceness, coinciding with belief in some God, might then be inclined to take a much more positive view of this God. Similarly, for those of us who may already view ourselves as generally ‘nice’, to us there may be some people with whom ‘being nice’ in the traditional sense is a new and real challenge, and the same as above applies.

It is important to note this: radicalism is not an absolute but a relative measure. Radicalism only means something when set against the norm. What is considered extremist religious action today was the norm during the Crusades, for instance. My point is that being ‘radically’ nice doesn’t necessarily involve giving away all our possessions to the poor. Often, it can be just as radical to try putting a smile on the face of that kid in your class whom you and your friendship group usually mock. Or befriending that guy even though he’s leery, boring, and needs to wash more. Or buying a drink every week for the colleague who unceasingly tears you down for your beliefs. Or simply making that conscience decision to stop hating that someone that did those things against you, to try and forgive them for their wrongs, and to act accordingly.

There’s a word that describes such actions. That word is ‘grace’. In the face of any extenuating circumstances or reasons, we can choose, with the help of the Spirit, to simply be nice to those to whom we’re not normally nice. They may not seem to deserve it; we may not feel up to the challenge. But if we’re serious about showing the effect of God and his amazing grace in our lives, we need to start reflecting that grace to those people who don’t normally see it from us.

Of course, those who don’t normally see us in a great light are often those to whom we don’t want to be particularly grace-ful. Indeed, the places in our lives which are most in need of ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ are often the places where we either find it hardest to cultivate such fruit, or where we simply don’t want to cultivate the fruit. Yet if we are serious about being great fruit that reflects our great God, then we must become radicals from our very selves. As Jesus himself said, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’.

It might be hard for us to seek out those relationships that we perhaps won’t get much out of, and it will be harder still for us to be nice to those whom we dislike somewhat. But firstly, all things are possible through Christ who strengthens us; secondly, we simply have to do it. If fruit is 95% delicious yet 5% rotten, it’s still bad fruit. But if we can manage to show even the faintest glimmer of that grace in the parts of our lives where it doesn’t normally shine, the sudden, surprising, unheralded burst of light will give the very impression of greatness.

And those who may have unfortunately experienced the uselessness of our rotting cores, or conversely those who completely bash the fruit that we are, wrecking the taste, texture, etc; it is these people who will most notice the greatness of a God who can turn such formless mush like us into the sweetest fruit.

For the ‘God is not great’ delusion to be recognised as it is, we must first live as nice we can, extending grace in every single aspect of our lives. Our lives need to be utterly, wholly transformed, in order to serve as testimony to the greatness of God. And really, though it may seem like these notions of God being a delusion or an all-encompassing poison are new, the solution has been around for a long time: 1 Corinthians 10:31b:

‘… do it all for the glory of God’.

To be continued… in part 3 I want to look at extending this, in order to defeat the delusion not just in our own personal spheres, through the people who know us, but just, well, everywhere.

 

The ‘God is not great’ delusion pt.1

Both the religious and secular worlds cannot have failed to notice the recent surge of antitheist books on the market – and their growing popularity. Indeed, Richard Dawkins’ bestselling ‘The God Delusion’ argues that atheists should be proud of their [lack of] religious belief; in support of this Dawkins has also launched a campaign encouraging ‘closet atheists’ to ‘come out’.

There has been a wealth of response to such books, especially from the religious corner. Naturally, none of us like being told that the God we so diligently follow is ‘not great’ at best and a delusion at worst. This post obviously falls into that same category.

To be honest though, I haven’t actually read any of these books. This is not another response in the long line of counter-arguments. I will, however, look at (what Wikipedia tells me is) a common thread in antitheist arguments, not in an attempt to rebut it, because quite frankly it’s a point with a lot of truth behind it.

The American subtitle to Christopher Hitchens’ ‘God is not Great’ expresses the view that I want to address: ‘How religion poisons everything’. In short, Hitchens describes religion as ‘violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children’. Similarly, in ‘The God Delusion’ Dawkins ‘sees religion as subverting science, fostering fanaticism, encouraging bigotry against homosexuals, and influencing society in other negative ways’.

I’m sure those of us whose lives have been transformed by our faiths would beg to differ, but a quick step outside the realm of personal experience will unfortunately lend a lot of weight to that statement. In the modern era alone, self-styled Christians bomb abortion clinics; religious sectarian violence tears apart not only the Middle East but places like Ireland; the list continues fairly extensively.

Of course, there are many arguments that dismiss the relevance of those we label as ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘extremists’. One could say that a God or religion should not be judged or dismissed based on those who can’t actually be described as ‘true’ followers. Jesus is quite clear in promoting an ethic of love, forgiveness, non-retaliation, etc. we say. We could point out the legacies of the few specifically-atheist countries that have existed, such as Communist China several decades back, or Soviet Russia with its gulags and pogroms. We could also point out the areas where religion has done a lot of good, like in the actions of Wilberforce, or Martin Luther King.

But is that really all we can say in response? That, oh, extremists don’t count; if religion were abandoned, humans would still do really bad things; and religious people do good things too!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mocking these counter-arguments; to my eyes they seem entirely valid. Because of these counter-arguments, I don’t see there being a convincing case via this thread alone for the abolition of religion. But this post isn’t really about the flaws and merits of any particular argument. Because above and beyond these arguments, the fact still stands that today, to the secular world, religion goes hand in hand with irrelevance and inaccessibility at best, and violence and bigotry at worst.

Naturally, given the nature of the media, it’s the extreme aspects of religion that attract the most attention. And when fighting against extremism, reasoned debates and discussions unfortunately have no impact. We can argue that the existence of extreme violence and persecution in atheistic states implies that religion should not to be blamed for the same things in religious states, but this does little to shift religious-motivated bigotry and violence off the news-cycles. Extremism is what dominates and attracts attention.

When Jesus himself says that we can judge a tree by its fruit, we can see why people such as Hitchens go that extra step and declare our God as ‘not great’. When God’s purported followers go around spreading violence and bigotry, the tree from which they sprouted isn’t exactly reflected in the best possible light. Although we may argue that religious ‘extremists’ should not be counted as fruit of this specific tree at all, the extremists beg to differ. And since their voices are far more prominent, they usually win out. If an extreme group call themselves Christian, that’s what they’ll be called, however much we argue our viewpoint.

Again, I’d like to stress that that I have no beef with the use of arguments to defend our faith. But as the saying goes, offence is often the best form of defence. If extremism is what dominates the news-cycle and popular perceptions of our faith, we’d better get radical too, so that people notice the tree for its good fruit, rather than its bad. Because if we want people to realise the delusion of describing our God as ‘not great’, we’ve got to give them substantial reasons to do so.

To be continued… in part 2 I’ll describe a few of my thoughts on how we could be radical, extreme Christians, in the best possible way.

 

At the start of this journey…

… this is where I’m at.

My first summer as a serious Christian has almost drawn to a close. I’ve attended various summer meetings and conferences, done various projects, served in various ways, read various things, and failed in many others. I’m sure I’ll write about many of them in posts to come. It’s been an enlightening period of my life in many ways.

One truth stands above them all, though. It’s one I’ve learnt before, and it’s one I can see myself having to relearn in the future. No matter how things might feel, I most definitely have a long, long way to go. I’m often caught thinking that things are just peachy between me and God, before some crisis hits me and I totally lose it, again. Spiritual maturity is still a long way off for me yet.

I hope that’s a good thought for me to keep in mind as I start this blog. If I spurn out a few good, profound posts along the line I know I’ll be tempted to feel chuffed with myself, but I hope I’ll remember this and stay grounded. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that Jesus told us to ‘take up our cross daily‘. The trials and tribulations of being a Christian are not just temporary obstacles that are thrown in our way from time to time – it’s a constant struggle. Each minute spent watching Friends, when I have friends who need my time and prayer; all the songs I play about serving when there’s a family around me that would appreciate the actions I’m singing about; things like that.

I hope setting down some of these thoughts permanently in blog form will help to change this – although I’m wary that blogging itself might become an obstacle to actually living as a Christian, too. Hence the need for me to write that worry down right from the onset.

But for now, let’s pray that ‘searching for grace’ will be a fruitful exercise for me, at least, and hopefully for any of you readers out there. And should I inadvertantly slip up, let me remember ‘… where sin increased, grace increased all the more’ (Romans 5:20b)*.

*(Not that I’m advocating a search for grace through deliberate sin!)