Throughout the history of Christianity we are faced with a rather difficult dilemma. We are constantly bridging two lands, there is a land that we have already been to and must keep going back to and a land that is our future. The concept is frustrating to the human mind, but completely necessary. In essence we are beset by a rather horrible dilemma which is how do we live in a world over which we have very little control. Therefore, I am not going to argue my Christian belief with anyone who is not willing to listen. It isn't arrogance, quite the opposite. It is humility. I am not in charge of getting people into heaven, but rather I am just in charge of playing my part.
In this area, Christians have a wonderful advantage. Our point is being made through us not by us. We do not have to prove the validity of our arguments. The first Christians lived in a culture whose hostility makes our current culture's hostility towards any opposing viewpoint look positively quaint. The atheist dismisses the Christian as being a fool, the "theist" dismisses the atheist as being damned. Round and round we go, well, at least no one is dying. No one is being nailed to crosses or fed to lions or having his or her country leveled to the ground. In short, the only thing we Americans have to worry about is the momentary discomfort of having someone look at us as if we have just uttered the most absurd nonsense.
This is not to say that I do not believe atheism to be problematic at best. It seems to have certain errors that grind my philosophies in particular ways. Atheism could very well be true. A world absurd enough to have a God would certainly be absurd enough to not have one. And if there is no God, well, Pascal's wager finds me quite well. However, I am digressing.
Nonsense though. Is that all we Americans have to fear? This is a country that stood up to the most powerful empire in the world because it thought "hey, just thinking out loud here, but what would happen if we elected our leaders? Just a thought." This is a country that fought itself to end slavery. This is a country that braved torturous months to go West into an uncertain future. The list goes on. Now, however, we are a country that is afraid to simply ask questions at a dinner party. Perhaps Americans have never been the best philosophers or theologians, but we are still human and that means we can buck the systems and cultures around us and say, "well, why not?"
I am not going to argue faith with anyone. People who argue against someone else's belief systems are almost always in it for the wrong reasons. We must argue for our own ... but even that is not quite it. We must share our happiness. A long standing belief in Western Thought is the centrality of happiness. Aristotle put happiness at the chief aim of humanity and Christ talked about "happiness" in the beatitudes. St. Thomas Aquinas would synthesize the two thoughts by calling the ultimate happiness: God. We all should believe that the most happy place we can think of is the thought we are most willing to share. And, to a Christian, that happy place is God. Don't bother trying to argue that that particular place is unhappiness to you or a certain group with whom you associate. To the Christian, God and all the things that go along with him are simply happiness.
I can imagine that there are many calling into question certain checkered spots in Christian history while seeming to leave out all the good its caused. By this "logic", systems apparently must be executed perfectly by human beings in order to be true; as though all of nature can operate from a completely different origin. Nothing in this world is perfect, one merely has to read the Bible to see that.
However, there is a great danger that all human beings share, both nontheist and theist alike, because we are all of us homo sapiens. We all wish for everyone to follow along with what we think is best. Christians identify this, quite rightly, as wanting to play God. And whether or not you believe in God or not, you must come to the realization that each and every one of us wants to dominate over the other person. Nietszche called this the "will to power" and the real question is if it is right or wrong.
It seems to be manifest that it is wrong. Societies that follow a cult of a leader who wishes to dominate and control everyone seem to lose their luster sooner or later. Be it the atrocities of Nazi Germany or velvet-fisted animal brutality of Augustus' Rome, people catch on that there is a sickness to the domination. (What has been the main problem with the current American wars has not been that they have happened, but that they may have happened for the wrong reasons and executed with the wrong ethics.)
Yet we know the opposite to be true as well. We love cultures where the leader, as selflessly as any human can, gives himself or herself over to helping others. We swoon over Gandhi and Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. because they wished to live in societies that valued the greatness of humanity and not the greatness of the self. The Christian finds that perfection in Christ. India and America and Christendom have done brutal things when these cultures have looked out for the interest of single individuals or privileged groups, but these are aberrations and because they are aberrations we find them so sickening. These aberrations are not the beliefs to which we want to adhere.
In Western culture the aberrational sickness was all we knew. Carthaginians with human sacrifice, Greeks with xenophobic racism, Romans with bloody games, and Gothic tribes with familial loyalties; this was the world into which Christ entered. He entered into the mess that human pride had erected. He told us what to do and for the most part we tried to do it. The result was that the most barbarous hodgepodge of people ended up a little better than before. And for all our talk of how that was just white-wash over our real history, we have never been able to escape the myth. If that is the case, than everyone believes the myth and denies the truth that we are all selfish people out to dominate one another. This is what is commonly known as crazy talk. If humble and self-giving love were a lie, and everyone knew it was a lie; it would have been dead quite some time ago. However, everyone really truly wants to believe that they are good and benevolent people and not really wanting to steamroll over someone else. Even Nietzsche didn't make it very far with his own will to power. It seems that only Christ seems to stand alone as the great, inescapable "superman" of Western culture.
What does all this mean? To be perfectly frank, nothing at all. Each and every human being will believe in something regardless of whatever evidence is before them. Atheists pull out their hair at the stupidity of theists, while pharisees in false theistic clothing rant and rave about how atheists and theists just won't accept their evidence. Such people have limited imaginations and no real faith.
I know I am not going to change anyone's mind or heart. I believe in a God who will do that if people will let Him. My faith is not in a powerful personal will. My faith is in a God who, in spite of all the odds, went and became a little nobody from a backwater of a vicious empire; and turned Himself into the greatest engine for change in all of human history. I have more important things to do than quibble about the reality of what I believe. I don't know if I am right, but each and every day it seems to make more and more sense that this thing I believed in stupid faith might actually be the truth and happiness I need. If anyone disagrees, that is fine; but please, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
1 comment:
This is really interesting, Philip. May your life, more than your words, be your testimony for Christ...and may Christ, more than the Bible which is sacred because it tells us Who Christ is, be the content of your testimony.
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