To the Atheist Who Called Jesus "The Magic Carpenter" (And a Warning to Churches)
To the atheist
commenter who referred to Jesus as “the magic carpenter” while claiming to
“understand everything about Christianity” after going to church for 40 years:
No, that's not "what Christianity says Jesus was."
The Christianity of history is about a Trinitarian, sovereign
God who created the world with a plan to express both His loving grace and His
absolute moral perfection and justice through Jesus' (one of the persons of the
Trinity) death on the cross, thereby saving undeserving people from getting
what they deserved, and bringing them into the presence of the infinitely good
perfection of God—which is no small feat, given that you would be instantly
destroyed by the blinding purity and holiness of this infinitely perfect God
were you to stand in front of Him on your own, with all of the ways you've broken
his perfect moral law (hurt others, departed from truth, acted selfishly,
rebelled against God as Creator and King, etc., etc.) still infecting you. A
perfectly good Judge must punish those who break the law, otherwise He would
not be perfect. This is why the cross was such a brilliant move, and it's why
His love and grace have astounded people for millennia.
As the one through whom and for whom everything was created,
Jesus put some things right while He was here (healing, etc.), giving us a
taste of when everything will be put
right in the redemption that is to come, and giving us evidence of who He is by
demonstrating His authority over this world.
These are not "magic tricks."
This Christianity, and this
Jesus, created the best thinkers, writers, philosophers, scientists, and
artists of the last two thousand years. He inspired books, paintings,
sculptures, architecture, and music that still move people to tears to this
day—and sometimes to their knees. This Christianity has depth and gravity
enough to support men and women giving their entire lives to it (or rather, to Him), sometimes while suffering
unimaginable torture.
The term "magic carpenter," on the other hand, is
silly, empty, and small, and couldn’t inspire people to make a chalk drawing on
the sidewalk. You may think Christianity is false, and that's fine. But to
refer to Jesus as a "magic carpenter" is to say you never understood
the Christianity that built Western Civilization. Your church failed you.
You can say Christianity is false. You can even say it's
dangerous. The one thing you can't say is that it's silly and shallow.
If you ever decide to start over, you could start here.
To the churches out
there who use words in the Bible as jumping off points to teach moralistic
“five steps to a more godly you” each week instead of making God the subject of every sermon, preaching what
the text says about who He is and how
He’s working, placing the passage in
the context of the overall story, revealing the Gospel to us, and holding up
Jesus for us to worship:
Wake up.
