Reasonable, because real

On Sunday I preached from the opening part of Acts 17, and amongst other things noted that Luke reports that the apostle Paul "reasoned", "explained", and "proved" the content of the Christian message in the synagogue.  A noble response to the message, according to Luke, was not so much to just take Paul's word for it, but to "examine the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so".  Because he was in the synagogue, Paul was able to make use of the Scriptures as an acknowledged authority, in a way that we mostly won't be able to do in our context, but the broader point I was making was this: the gospel is the sort of thing that can be discussed, argued over, reasoned.

To put it another way, the gospel is reasonable, because it is real.  Contemporary Western culture wants to put a hard border around a world of 'facts' which can be debated, and to put religious claims outside that border, in the world of 'opinions' and 'beliefs'.  Some people think they're doing religion a favour here - putting it outside the grubby world of argument and within a transcendent realm where you can hold your beliefs in a mystical way without being bothered.  Others think, more accurately, that they're defending the secular order against dangerous religion - it neuters religious opinion by making it the sort of thing which one can't really discuss.  Either way, the point is that religion may be a nice interpretive story that people tell themselves to find meaning in the world, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth (not, at least, the everyday sort of truth which concerns the way things are), and therefore can't be argued over, except in ways unrelated to truth: we can argue, for example, about whether religion is helpful or harmful, but not about whether it is real.

The whole Bible stands against this point of view.  Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of Christ's resurrection, in history, at a particular place, in reality.  If Christ didn't rise, Christians are pitiable fools.  The book of Acts stresses again and again that the message proclaimed by the apostles has to do with public, accessible events: these things were not done in a corner.

If this is true, it is possible to argue, to reasonably engage in a demonstration of the truth of Christianity.  (I don't mean here the sort of Enlightenment reasoning, as if a person sat down with nothing but their intellect and the world around them ought to be able to arrive at Christian conclusions; I mean that given God's revelation in Christ in history, it is in principle possible to discuss the reality or otherwise of the Christian faith).

I argued on Sunday that there is one thing in particular that it is incumbent on Christians to know about: why do they believe that Jesus rose from the dead?  There are some good resources out there on this question.  N.T. Wright's big book on The Resurrection of the Son of God is the very best, in my opinion, setting the question in its historical context and showing that there really is no other plausible explanation.  Some of the arguments are summarised in the first part of his more popular level Surprised by Hope, which might be more manageable.  It doesn't seem to have got the attention it deserves, but Daniel Clark's little book Dead or Alive? is a helpful introductory presentation of the evidence for the resurrection set in the context of a gospel presentation, and would be a good one to have on hand to give away.  And of course there is still the classic Who Moved the Stone.

On the broader question of the rationality of faith, a good introductory run through many of the questions that people ask about Christianity can be found in But is it Real? and Why Trust the Bible? by Amy Orr-Ewing.  I continue to find the argument of C.S. Lewis in Miracles to be deeply convincing, though I'm aware it has its detractors.  The Reason for God by Tim Keller is excellent.  I would warn against many more philosophical works, for example those by William Lane Craig, not because there is nothing useful in them but because in my view they ultimately depend too little on God's revelation in Christ.

Have others found particular books (or other media; I'm aware that I don't really engage much with audio or video presentations, just because I like books better...) helpful in thinking through the rationality of faith?

Why I am a Christian

There are lots of ways you could tell this story, of course, with the emphasis falling in different places.  There are plenty of circumstantial factors that would have to be borne in mind - pre-eminent among them the fact that I was born into and raised within a family where the Christian faith was sincerely believed and seriously practised - and I'm sure many people would want to reduce the whole answer to the sum of circumstances like that.  For myself, I could also give an 'upper storey' account of why I am a Christian, pointing to the agency of the Holy Spirit enabling my agency in belief - an account which would, of course, only be plausible for those who were also operating with a commitment to Christian faith.

But this is the account of the middle storey, the account of what reasons I could give for being a Christian.  If somebody were to ask me why I believed, and of course people do ask just that, this is the answer I would give.

Incidentally, for me faith is not a thing that comes easily.  I know that for some people it does, and over time my attitude toward that has changed.  For a long time I tended to think that those who seemed to have an implicit trust in God were just being naive.  I was a bit patronising about it, to be honest: they don't seem to have wrestled with the hard questions at all, how can that be genuine faith?  (The implication being that my own belief was somehow more valid for being more complicated).  Well, I repent.  Simple, straightforward faith is a great and glorious gift of God, and not to be despised.  Perhaps rather to be envied.  But that's not where I am or have ever been.  I walk somewhere on the border of Christianity and atheism, and I'm thankful that I've typically kept to the faith-full side of the border.  But why?

There are three reasons, basically.  The first and most foundational is that I am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.  At first this simply meant that I found the testimony to this event convincing: I read the accounts and I thought the witnesses seemed sincere, in a position to know the truth (or otherwise) of what they were saying, and ready to venture a great deal on this testimony (their lives, in fact).  I was struck by the lack of art or manufacture about the various strands of testimony to the resurrection.  Even the inconsistencies struck me as evidence of truthfulness; nobody inventing a story would do it that way.  When I have doubts about aspects of Christian faith, I circle back around to the resurrection: I don't see how it can be explained away, and everything else rests on it.

Of huge help to me in thinking about the resurrection more thoroughly was Tom Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God.  Wright sets the testimony to the resurrection within its context, showing that this wasn't something anyone - Jewish or pagan - was expecting, and yet that it did in the end  fit within the Jewish story, as the fulfillment of the ancient hopes and promises.  It's a really big book, but if you're serious about thinking through whether this really happened - and what it would mean if it did - this is the place to go.

The second reason is basically this from C.S. Lewis:  “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.” In other words, putting the resurrection of Jesus in its place at the centre of my view of the world causes everything else to make sense. In particular, I know of no other worldview, religion, or philosophy which enables and encourages me to be a human person, and to take my humanity and personhood seriously, in its glory and its limitations. The world is a confusing and often dark place, and human thinking about the world is a muddle. Contemporary culture seems to be elevating that muddle to a position of unassailable orthodoxy. But I keep wondering - can you live as if this were true? Can you really live as if you were a meaningless blip in a meaningless universe? With Jesus, I find that the world, and my life, and indeed the very darkness and muddle, receive a powerful explanation. It's like the sun rose, or someone turned the lights on.

The third reason is that this morning, like almost every morning, I spent some time speaking with God and listening to him speak to me. Which is to say, I am a Christian because I know (relationally) the God who made the universe.

I'd be interested to hear why you are, or are not, a Christian. Let me know.

Seriously, though...

On Sunday after church I was discussing with a couple of guys what might be wrong with our churches.  (This wasn't a reflection on the service in which we'd just been participants; I hope not, as I was the preacher).  The thing that sprang to my mind was just this: we're not very serious.  We don't take things very seriously at all.

To a certain extent, as one of my friends pointed out, this is just because we live in an informal culture, and it is hard to be informal and serious.  I think there is a lot of truth in that.  After all, when we want to do really serious things in life - I have in mind the big occasions, like getting married, or burying someone - we still reach for formality.  It wouldn't seem right to mark those huge things with an informal tone.  Seriousness does demand a certain level of formality.  Isn't it a shame we don't consider meeting with God's people for worship to be serious in this way?

I wonder though - if we don't know how to be informal and serious, perhaps it is a bigger problem that we don't know how to be joyful and serious.  In fact, there is no 'perhaps' about it: this is a bigger problem.  Informality is a cultural preference; joy is a gospel command.  It is interesting that as I was thinking about this I had an encounter with Father Christmas - not in the flesh, which would be odd and also unseasonal, but in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I'm currently reading with the boy.  Here's Lewis:

"Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly.  But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn't find it quite like that.  He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still.  They felt very glad, but also solemn."

And this bit:

"Lucy felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still."

Perhaps there is something we could learn from Santa...

The Weight of Glory

A friend recently posted a link to the little essay by C.S. Lewis entitled The Weight of Glory.  I’ve read it before, of course, but as I read through it again sitting in the corner of a café on holiday, I could barely hold back the tears.  Since weeping in public is not the done thing, I did of course restrain myself.  This is the paragraph that really got me:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we  betray  ourselves  like  lovers  at  the mention of a name.

This is my experience; this is absolutely my experience.  Right down to the attempt to fend off my heart pain by labelling it and mocking it, this is what I do.  I am a nostalgic, but I know others who are trying to escape their pain in other ways – always dreaming of another place and another time, a place and time which is more real to us than the world around us, but which we have never seen or touched.  We know that we belong there and then, and yet we are here and now.  So deep is the anguish that we cannot even speak it.

And I know that there are many, many ways of explaining this feeling away, and Lewis names just a few of them.  But are we sure – really sure – that we are not explaining away a moment in which we knew truth, and knew it to be good and beautiful, and felt that it was beyond us?

Might not this experience mean something?