(Note: We will be posting exceptional content from other writers from time to time. Please enjoy this beautiful essay from my friend Rupert, a writer and editor in the UK
-Ayaan)
Any bid to commend the claims of Christianity in writing should include a critical caveat. This essay defends a way of life, not a scientific theory such as evolution, or an abstract term like liberty. Whatever view you take of my theme, it cannot be divorced from the personal commitment that gives it its meaning. Like some of the ancient philosophical schools, religion is a path of understanding which can say little to those who have not set out on the journey. Disengaged study misses the point: it is like analysing a poem in terms of the chemistry of the ink on the page.
This thought leads to my main coordinates. You don’t think your way into a new way of living, but live your way into a new way of thinking. Being a Christian should not entail assenting to six impossible propositions before breakfast, but doing things that change you. The practical witness of believers may be their most eloquent statement of faith. G. K. Chesterton got right to the point when he described his creed as ‘less of a theory and more of a love affair’. Now consider the contrast between all this and much English-language philosophy, which tends to neglect the big picture. I would rather follow the lights of earlier thinkers including Cicero – especially his belief that the only fulfilling model for life rests on altruistic endeavour – and later figures who Christianised some of the noblest strands in pagan thought by adding the key precepts on love of God and neighbour.
So the old warning to producers of agitprop – show, don’t tell – applies on my patch as well. The heart has its reasons; there is a limit to what can be established through argument. The number of people who come to faith as a result of intellectual exchanges alone is fairly small. Yet recognising the limit of a project is not to suggest that it lacks value. Christianity faces a sustained intellectual attack, not least through serving as a lightning rod for more general forms of anti-faith invective. A sense that a high proportion of the fire-breathers now belong in the atheist camp is forcefully conveyed by Francis Spufford in his remarkable book Unapologetic (2012). He starts by telling us that his daughter, just turned six, will soon discover ‘that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to church.’ In other words, Spufford explains, she will be told with increasing vehemence over the years ahead that her parents believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities, or that they’re dogmatic, or savagely judgemental, that they fetishise pain and suffering while believing in wishy-washy niceness, and are too dumb to understand the irrationality of their convictions. If you think this reaction is overblown, just look at the cascades of anti-Christian ranting dignified as ‘Comment’ on even quality-newspaper websites. Bigotry is harder to brush aside when it is symptomatic of a broader malaise. An American historian and agnostic who has lived in England and elsewhere in Europe for many years summed up her diagnosis like this. ‘I’ve always seen Christianity as involving an encounter with the depths of experience,’ she told me. ‘Yet so many educated people on this continent seem to associate it with nothing beyond the shallows.’
I share Spufford’s faith. In a modest way I also straddle the domains of journalism and letters, in which few practise a faith. I am regularly cross-questioned about my beliefs at social gatherings by slightly bewildered people who consider me normal in other respects; and one of the first things I feel bound to point out is that I don’t recognise my credo in the caricatures often peddled on the other side of the debate. No, the Church does not teach that God is a celestial headteacher, even though some preachers have done a good job of projecting their fantasies and guilt feelings into the sky and giving them a holy veneer. And by the way, the New Testament is a pretty anti-religious collection of books in some respects. It asks us to set aside most conventional images of the divine: to think in terms of a Creator who took off his crown in coming to share our flesh. Penitent Christians do not (or should not) confess their sins in order to obtain forgiveness. They do so because they are already forgiven. That is the insight underlying the doctrine of justification by grace shared by the mainstream Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions alike.
Nor is Christianity flawed science. If God is simply an expedient for plugging ever-shrinking gaps in our knowledge, then I am an atheist as well, and so are countless abler advocates of faith. The religion-as-bad-science fallacy derives from scientism: an insistence on forcing all truth onto a scientific template. If you think that the only meaningful utterances are either mathematical or provable in a test tube, then you’re rejecting ethics, aesthetics and much of culture, as well as spirituality.
But let me try to be as fair as possible to my dining companions. Their questions are nothing if not vital. They may be appalled at the role of religion in fomenting conflict (if a little anxious that singling out one body in discussing the world’s current woes will draw charges of Islamophobia); or rightly outraged by faith-tinged misogyny and the hounding of gay people down the centuries – injustices that obviously persist; or alarmed by the rejection of scientific rationality evident in some parts of the Christian world; or concerned that religion is given a privileged place in the public square. And they may of course just think that confident talk of agencies and perspectives beyond the tangible is silly at best.
Given the size of this menu, I shall need to crave your patience in fashioning a set of counter-arguments through a look at different areas in turn. If we were to trace a common thread in the views of the more historically minded of hardline secularists, a group including Christopher Hitchens, it might run like this. When Western Christendom was at its zenith during the Middle Ages, people were overwhelmingly ignorant and superstitious. Science and other forms of learning wilted. Witches and heretics were burned at the stake. The achievements of Greece and Rome lay discarded. The better informed will salute the medieval Islamic scholars who promoted study of Plato and Aristotle, thereby helping to reverse the tide and usher in the Renaissance. The Reformation formed another positive development, in part because it unwittingly accelerated Christianity’s eclipse. The rebirth of science was followed by political enlightenment. Western societies reached adulthood; the theocratic schemes of clerics were kept at bay by the separation of Church and State. In time, all sensible people will share the outlook of modern men and women ‘come of age’.
This narrative has almost attained the status of a humanist catechism. But while not totally false, it stands in need of heavy qualification. Far from destroying classical texts, Christian monasteries preserved many of them, helping to save Western civilisation during the Dark Ages. Learn a little about the Oxford calculators of the fourteenth century, for example, and you can see impressive continuities between medieval and Renaissance science. Before resisting Galileo – a battle more attributable to the clash of combative individuals than to scientific matters as such – the Catholic Church had repudiated biblical cosmology in favour of a Greek model based on the movement of the spheres. (Incidentally, orthodox Christianity does not hold the Bible to be factually inerrant. Scripture itself nowhere claims such a status. And the Protestant fundamentalism on which the New Atheists rely for plausibility is a new kid on the block in historical terms, owing much to culture wars in the United States.) What’s more, intellectual historians worth their salt will tell you that the discoveries of Newton, Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus marked not so much a liberation from religious authority as a break with long-dominant aspects of Aristotelianism – a move already triggered in the later Middle Ages.
Secularists who upbraid the Church over horrors such as the Crusades and the seventeenth-century wars of religion are on solid ground. But they tend to overlook the huge role of the State in stoking strife. Even in the seventeenth century, violence increased in proportion to the amount of sovereignty claimed by the State – and for the scale of their violence, twentieth-century atheistic regimes exceeded anything witnessed during the periods of church ascendancy. In a powerful discussion of this subject, David Bentley Hart has observed that ‘The Thirty Years War [1618–48], with its appalling toll of civilian casualties, was a scandal to the conscience of the nations of Europe; but midway through the twentieth century . . . even liberal democracies did not scruple to bomb open cities from the air, or to use incendiary or nuclear devices to incinerate tens of thousands of civilians.’
As Hart realises, the case for the defence extends deeper than this. Pre-Christian religion regularly mandated self-mutilation and human sacrifice. The weak were despised. Christianity’s stress on the radical equality of all, and the founding of hospitals, schools and other philanthropic institutions, were genuinely revolutionary. Legislation enacted under Roman emperors such as Theodosius II and Constantine raised the status of women. Even slavery – an institution common to all pre-modern societies that reached a certain level of wealth – was described as blasphemous as early as the fourth century by Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa. Though the blasphemy persisted for a further 1,500 years, it was finally curtailed on the initiative of Western Christians.
I do not say all this to score points, still less to exonerate the Church. Human beings are naturally rapacious. We display a dangerous thirst for unreality, which is another way of saying that we are sinners. Often misconstrued as a spurious notion based on moralising dogma, sin is the basic empirical reality that Christian teaching responds to and makes sense of. That is why the correct definition of a Christian is not a good person, but someone who acknowledges their failure to be good. The most authentic strands in the Christian repertoire – peace, forgiveness, joy, meekness, purity of heart, solidarity – have infiltrated societies without necessarily changing them at root. We should not be surprised by this. The Church regards itself as both a divine society instituted by Christ, and as a human society with a sometimes terrible history. According to Jesus in Matthew 13, the sifting of the wheat and the tares will be carried out by God alone in the fullness of time.
I am even less keen to disparage the achievements of non-Christian pioneers and cultures. Democracy was invented in the ancient world; goods such as freedom of speech derive mainly from the Enlightenment. We owe much to many sorts of forebear. But I am concerned to question lazy or ill-informed readings of history, and I worry about the assumption that we can preserve what is best in Christianity while abandoning belief in God. Principles such as human rights and human dignity may not automatically survive once commitment to the infinite value of every life has faded away.
Meanwhile, let us at least concede that Christianity deserves a hearing, even though Christians themselves should display due humility, given the Church’s sometimes terrible record. If you think this sounds wishful, or that I am gazing down the well of history and simply catching my own reflection, then let me caution that a pillar of orthodoxy such as St Thomas Aquinas thought a balance needed to be struck between the twin vices of too much religion and too little. I have already implied that aggressive secularism displays the second of these vices, while fundamentalism – what Aquinas would have called superstition – belongs in the first. The Church is not incapable of error; its representatives can easily make statements going far beyond the basic natural perception of the mystery of existence. Such statements can lead to mistakes, conflict and other evils, including the idolisation of community identities. In certain respects, the history of religion maps onto the entire social history of humanity. One implication of this is that religious leaders function better as sources of influence at some distance from political leaders, not as wielders of direct power themselves. Correspondingly, while faith groups should be allowed to express their views on the issues of the day, they should not undermine the democratic process. Roman Catholicism is not the only branch of Christianity to have had difficulties with this idea, though its record has improved greatly since the Second Vatican Council, 1962–5.
I have argued that the performance of the Church is not in itself evidence for the truth or falsity of the creeds. So although the ground-clearing so far has been necessary, it is also at a tangent to my main theme. Let us return to the inquisitorial dinner parties. When the subject of intellectual history has been broached, I have regularly been drawn back to biology and cosmology. I accept Darwin’s world-transforming idea, and emphasise that I have learnt much from the professional writings of Richard Dawkins. But our focus is not on Dawkins the distinguished zoologist, but on his status as a poor student of theology. Science tells us about the connections between phenomena. It explains how this or that process has taken place, but cannot say why. Christians, Jews, Muslims and other monotheists see God as the answer to a quasi-scientific conundrum only in the sense that they do not think that the world made itself.
For now, we can note a sharp cleavage between those who see no special significance in the fact that there is something rather than nothing, and others who view the very existence of the world as profoundly suggestive. In his book A Universe from Nothing, the atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss only acknowledges in passing that his account of how the world emerged from ‘nothing’ assumes the prior existence of a quantum vacuum. But where did this come from? You cannot have something unless something else gives. That is scientific truth as understood both by an ancient pioneer such as Aristotle, and by science today. For a believer, of course, the ultimate source of all is God. It is not unreasonable for the atheist to counter that we cannot know about transcendent reality, and no set of human scales is equal to the task of weighing questions about the ultimate ground (if any) of creation. In reply, the three Abrahamic faiths underline the widespread impulse to push against the boundaries of what can be said. Believing that the universe arose from nothing and that this cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, these traditions all hold that the world is related to a reality that does not stand alongside it, but in some sense holds or includes it.
Yet how can believers move from reasoning that the world was created to talking with any confidence about what critics often term their imaginary friend in the sky? We might start to answer this by noting a set of insights voiced by the philosopher Roger Scruton. Although he was a non-believer for decades, the final chapter of his memoir, Gentle Regrets, is entitled ‘Regaining my Religion’. It includes a cluster of suggestive insights. First, that there are certain truths about the human condition that are hard to formulate and hard to live up to, and which we therefore have a motive to deny. It may require moral discipline if we are to accept these truths and live by them. For instance, there is the truth that we are free, accountable and objects of judgement in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Or that we are motivated not only by desire and appetite, but by a vision of the good. Or that we are not just objects in the world of objects, but also subjects, who relate to each other reciprocally. Scruton adds that this way of looking at the world ‘deploys concepts that are given to us through religion, and to be obtained only with the greatest difficulty without it’. He has paraphrased the point elsewhere, pointing out that while many people are uninterested in technical arguments about the existence of God, they do ask questions about how to live. And in pursuing an answer, ‘they often stumble upon moments, places, relationships and experiences that have a numinous character – as though removed from this world and in some way casting judgment upon it.’ Scruton is here echoing an idea found both in some contemporary philosophy and in much older thought: that aspects of reality – the face of another human being or an accomplished work of art, say – point to inexhaustible layers of meaning. Reflection on experience in the round sharpens awareness of a bottomless mystery, the most appropriate responses to which are awe, gratitude and a heightened sense of ethical imperatives.
Rowan Williams has built creatively on these principles. As he put it to an audience undertaking the Alpha Course for Christian enquirers, ‘Our existence as intelligent creatures – loving, risking, questioning – somehow fits with the idea that God is a God of loving intelligence, who loves what’s different.’ There is no irresistible argument for the truth of this, so we are always left with the need for a step into the unknown of some kind (some call it a leap of the imagination). And for the Christian, the process is harnessed by listening to the words of Jesus and taking in what he does. Bit by bit, people piece the gospel elements together to arrive at the conviction that Christ is the revelation in a human life of what God is like. Conversion experiences vary: St Paul’s was famously sudden. A more common Christian path includes taking biblical and church teaching about God and his gifts on trust, but then finding this move retrospectively vindicated by experience. It could hardly be otherwise, given the shape of my argument at the start of this chapter.
It is time to put a little flesh on historical claims about Jesus. Many liberal believers, let alone agnostics and atheists, have doubts about the reliability of the New Testament. An example comes in Alan Isler’s novel Clerical Errors, where a priest educated in the 1950s and 60s loses his faith and speaks for many in asking, ‘How can any rational creature not see in the story of Christ the pattern of countless pagan myths, the universal romance of the sacrificial god, his apotheosis and his rebirth?’ This question has a period feel, a point overlooked in two fictional bestsellers, Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary and Philip Pullman’s fundamentally misconceived The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It isn’t over-simplifying a complex picture to say that many scholars are more confident about the gospels’ reliability than several generations ago. One robust summary of Jesus’s message might run like this. In common with other rabbis, he expounded Scripture, enjoined his hearers to observe the central elements of Jewish law, and emphasised God’s love for the outcast. More remarkable was his absolute renunciation of violence and insistence on self-giving love as the supreme virtue. He proclaimed the arrival of the Kingdom of God, with all that it entailed in terms of the espousal of the poor and weak, the casting out of evil spirits, and the release of those resources of generosity and compassion which are so easily deflected by social convention and spiritual legalism. This mission led to Jesus’s death, which he accepted, sensing that his crucifixion and subsequent vindication by God would have redemptive power for the community of believers he inaugurated.
He believed this because he made one especially audacious claim from the start of his ministry: that the question how people relate to him and to what he says will govern how they relate to the God he addressed as Father. On this understanding, Jesus was acting like the Creator who chose Israel at the dawn of the biblical narrative. God had chosen a group of slaves to be a people; and Jesus, in selecting his fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes, was repeating and re-embodying this choice. He was claiming a level of creative freedom for himself usually associated with God alone.
Christian experience was distilled from the experience of prayer and communal life over generations. The teaching that emerged in the New Testament and early Church holds that through Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new phase in history has been inaugurated. Human beings discover their destiny in an orientation towards the source of their being; but this is not the orientation of a slave to a master, but the intimate relationship of a son or daughter to a parent. In that relationship, the Christian can become free to imitate the self-giving of God the Trinity – a pattern of loving relationship – who made us and saved us. The Church is the community on earth representing this ‘new creation’. Its chief task is to proclaim and witness to God’s will for universal reconciliation.
Why was Jesus crucified and why does it matter? One of the first things worth noting is that his execution was not accidental. He indicates several times in the gospels that his forthcoming demise cannot be avoided. This was not just because he scandalised the Jewish authorities by presenting his teaching as the fulfilment of the law of Moses, but also because of a more general human trait – our tendency to despise and reject full humanity when we encounter it.
Jesus plainly did not want to die. His anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane is clearly recorded. Yet over and again, he is portrayed as wanting to do the will of his Father above all. This is not to suggest that the Father sought Jesus’s death either. Commentators have drawn an analogy with human parenthood: mothers and fathers are aware that their children may suffer all manner of adversity given the slings and arrows of fortune, but it is not their wish that this should happen. What loving parents hope for is that their offspring will flower as people. The ‘Father’s will’, of which Jesus was so conscious, consisted in being completely human: this was the path that led to the cross. In the words of the Catholic thinker Herbert McCabe, ‘the fact that to be human means to be crucified is not something that the Father has directly planned but that we have arranged. We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.’ Jesus can be seen in this light as the most perfectly human person ever to have existed: for him, to live was to love.
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Little has been said so far about the corporate implications of Christian belief. The gospels do not set out a particular manifesto, but it goes without saying that a thirst for justice in all its dimensions – including environmental stewardship – should be priorities for anyone seeking to follow Jesus. I have already pointed out that Christians were instrumental in ending the slave trade; one might also instance the place of Catholic social teaching in helping shape the trade union movement and the European welfare state. Protestants, especially, did much to forge the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Faith-based conviction has mobilised millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, usher in democratic transitions, foster human rights, and relieve suffering. In recent decades, religious movements have helped end colonial rule and promote democracy in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals owe much to the biblical notion of jubilee.
Another implication of my case is that faith communities are justified in giving public voice to their beliefs through foundations such as church schools. I view efforts to restrict these establishments – which in Britain do much to serve the wider population, not just a core constituency – as marks of secular authoritarianism. At the same time (and here I am conscious of writing in very general terms), the thoughtful believer should always be aware of the limits of public policy. Private behaviour matters deeply – more so than most politicians are allowed to say.
I conclude with a tribute not to a theologian but a novelist – Nicholas Mosley – whose deceptively simple book Experience and Religion (2006) did much to help focus my thoughts some years ago. Like Aquinas, he sees that the space for grown-up Christianity lies between scepticism and fundamentalism. His world view is expressed with a humility reflected in a recourse to parentheses: ‘the world has meaning, is tragic: man can alter it (redeem). This is the point (it is done for him) in religion.’ Mosley thinks that Christianity provides the fullest underpinning for values such as love, hope, truth and freedom, though this need not preclude an open-handed attitude towards other faith traditions. The alternative, he fears, is that ‘everything might be ridiculous’. (Stephen Hawking judged that we are no more than chemical scum in a bubble of galactic flotsam.)
Please don’t misinterpret me. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. I don’t know for sure that the Christian creed is true in every particular; all serious religious practice ought to involve deep doses of self-criticism and self-questioning; your conscience is in any case the final arbiter of my argument. But Mosley’s warning is a variation on a theme first spelt out in the modern era with haunting force by Nietzsche. The father of modern atheism was at least right about the height of the stakes.
Rupert Shortt is a Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge. His books include God Is No Thing: Coherent Christianity (Hurst) and Outgrowing Dawkins: God for Grown-Ups (SPCK). His latest publication, The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters, will be published by Hodder in September 2024