Justin Brierley’s new book The surprising revival of belief in God tells the stories of various public intellectuals, commentators, scientists, and novelists who came to believe in God or confess their faith in Christ.
As British radio show host Amazing For more than a decade, Brierley has been at the forefront of hundreds of debates on the most controversial issues facing Christianity in a secular society. He found his faith not weakened but strengthened when he saw “the intellectual strength of Christian history as it was tested by atheists, agnostics, and people of other faiths who appeared in the emission “.
Unfortunately, both in the world and in the Church, it often seems that Christianity is supposed to take a back seat to philosophy or science.
Is faith for the unenlightened?
In the Western world there is the myth of Enlightenment – the idea that it is bold and courageous to put aside the silly superstitions of past eras and that the “come of age” thinker must reckon with the reality that this world is all that exists. It’s immature, a little childish, to cling to religion for comfort. “Dare to know!” “Immanuel Kant” is the rallying cry, and Bertrand Russell’s “unwavering despair” in the face of absurdity is the only “solid foundation” on which to build your life. If you are intelligent, you will face reality and roll your eyes at the pedantry of the peasants.
In the Church, there is a fideist myth that Christianity does not need to make intellectual sense to be emotionally satisfying. The whole point of faith, we are told, is to take the plunge, to believe what is incredible. It is therefore no wonder that many believers water down the truth and reject the idea of serious education in philosophy and science as pretentious. We expect to fail when we debate with academics and intellectuals, and so we reduce our faith to a personal, private thing that “works for us,” whether or not it can be properly defended in the public sphere.
The Cabin and the Castle
Believers struggle with feelings of inferiority and we often feel protected by the world. It is as if the intellectual tradition of the Church were a crumbling, poorly constructed cabin, barely able to withstand the rain. Oh, it may provide a personal fireplace of warmth, but not much more – nothing that we hope we can prove deeply convincing to others. Meanwhile, the atheists and agnostics of our time inhabit a towering edifice of unassailable arguments.
The reality is that we live in a great castle, an intellectual tradition that dates back to the Hebrew Scriptures, a heritage that incorporates the best of the great Greek philosophers, a model of thought refined by the great medieval philosophers. and modern theologians, a movement that has bequeathed the towering minds of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas (and these are just the As).
Why should we cringe when secular writers say this world is all there is, but still hope that we will live as if there is a moral order in the universe? Why accept such a logical inconsistency? Why restrict our minds to a reductionist philosophy that cannot admit even an ounce of the supernatural, lest all naturalism be denounced as a sham?
There is no reason to think that the world’s condescension toward Christianity is deserved. Nor is there any reason to feel shy or embarrassed about what we believe, as if no intellectual could accept the truths offered by Christianity. We may not know about all the ancient treasures, but we live in a castle, not a cabin.
Go exploring
My daughter recently shared the gospel with a friend and she responded well to some of the spiritual and existential questions that came up. I told her that if she was asked a question that she wasn’t sure how to answer, she should say that she would look into it and answer it later. I want her (and her friend) to assume that there are many good answers in the Christian tradition that can be found through a little study. We might have to explore an old hallway or rummage through one of the castle’s closets, but we have no reason to step back and say something stupid like “That doesn’t make any sense, but it’s this is what faith is for!
Come to think of it, it’s not just in our evangelism that we need to remember that we live in a castle. In a time of widespread doubt and deconstruction, we should expect that young people growing up in our churches will face challenges in their faith.
What is needed is an environment in which pastors and church leaders grapple with the big questions of life, so that when young people encounter some obstacle, they say to themselves: I’m sure there are Christians past or present who have asked the same question, and I should look up what they said.. We need a church that presents Christianity as a castle, not a cabin, to develop in the hearts of young believers the instinct to go exploring.
Confident enthusiasm
Speaking the truth confidently does not excuse arrogance. There is no room for pride here. On the contrary, exploring the castle should give us a feeling of respect for the riches we have inherited, a reverential gratitude at the glory of this treasure.
We want to be passionate people who persuade others to enter the castle, not a belligerent presence at the castle gate, shouting at our neighbors. So let us engage the world not from a place of inferiority or embarrassment, not with some stultifying doctrine or compromised creed, but with confident enthusiasm and bottomless joy.
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