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March 30 - April 22, 2020
While a Christian profession of faith has many good reasons and evidence to support it—as the very title of this book states—it still requires faith, which (Christians believe) only God can give. It is therefore purposeless and cruel to mock unbelievers. Rather, they deserve our prayers and our friendship.
First, since our respective views of reality are based in great part on faith, we must stop expecting the rest of the world to simply bow its knee to our particular set of faith assumptions. We should not attack, mock, and speak as if our beliefs are self-evident to all decent people.
One way to deal with the divisiveness of religion has been to control or even forbid it with a heavy hand. There have been several massive efforts to do this in the twentieth century. Soviet Russia, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge, and (in a different way) Nazi Germany were all determined to tightly control religious practice in an effort to stop it from dividing society or eroding the power of the state. The result, however, was not more peace and harmony, but more oppression.
How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?
Berger concludes that we cannot avoid weighing spiritual and religious claims by hiding behind the cliché that “there’s no way to know the Truth.” We must still do the hard work of asking: which affirmations about God, human nature, and spiritual reality are true and which are false? We will have to base our life on some answer to that question.
If you insist that no one can determine which beliefs are right and wrong, why should we believe what you are saying? The reality is that we all make truth-claims of some sort and it is very hard to weigh them responsibly, but we have no alternative but to try to do so.
Skeptics believe that any exclusive claims to a superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true. But this objection is itself a religious belief.
It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.
What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing.
Broadly understood, faith in some view of the world and human nature informs everyone’s life. Everyone lives and operates out of some narrative identity, whether it is thought out and reflected upon or not.
Even the most secular pragmatists come to the table with deep commitments and narrative accounts of what it means to be human.
Statements that seem to be common sense to the speakers are nonetheless often profoundly religious in nature.
Although many continue to call for the exclusion of religious views from the public square, increasing numbers of thinkers, both religious and secular, are admitting that such a call is itself religious.
Most religions and philosophies of life assume that one’s spiritual status depends on your religious attainments. This naturally leads adherents to feel superior to those who don’t believe and behave as they do. The Christian gospel, in any case, should not have that effect.
Why would such an exclusive belief system lead to behavior that was so open to others? It
was because Christians had within their belief system the strongest possible resource for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality was a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Reflection on this could only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who were different from them. It meant they could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents. We cannot skip lightly over the fact that there have been injustices done by the church in the name of Christ, yet who can deny that the force
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Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities.
Many people who take an intellectual stand against Christianity do so against a background of personal disappointment with Christians and churches. We all bring to issues intellectual predispositions based on our experiences.
common grace. James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift comes down from above…from the father of lights.” This means that no matter who performs it, every act of goodness, wisdom, justice, and beauty is empowered by God. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill “graciously”—that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.
Think of people you consider fanatical. They’re overbearing, self-righteous, opinionated, insensitive, and harsh. Why? It’s not because they are too Christian but because they are not Christian enough. They are fanatically zealous and courageous, but they are not fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, or understanding—as Christ was.
Because they think of
Christianity as a self-improvement program they emulate the Jesus of the whips in the temple, but not the Jesus who said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). What strikes us as overly fanatical is actua...
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What is the answer, then, to the very fair and devastating criticisms of the record of the Christian church? The answer is not to abandon the Christian faith, because that would leave us with neither the standards nor the resources to make correction. Instead we should move to a fuller and deeper grasp of what Christianity is.
malleable. Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit reality, we now seek to control and shape reality to fit our desires.
If Christianity were the truth it would have to be offending and correcting your thinking at some place.
If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation.
Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.
As Romans 1:24 says, God “gave them up to…their desires.” All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that?
It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science proves that no other causes could possibly exist.
There would be no experimental model for testing the statement: “No supernatural cause for any natural phenomenon
is possible.” It is therefore a philosophical presupposition and not a scientific finding.
However, Christians may believe in evolution as a process without believing in “philosophical naturalism”—the view that everything has a natural cause and that organic life is solely the product of random forces guided by no one. When evolution is turned into an All-encompassing Theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, feel, and do as the product of natural selection, then we are not in the arena of science, but of philosophy.
Rather, he or she should concentrate on and weigh the central claims of Christianity. Only after drawing conclusions about the person of Christ, the resurrection, and the central tenets of the Christian message should one think through the various options with regard to creation and evolution.
miracles. They lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder.
We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken.
Jesus’s miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.
Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.
An individual’s self-sacrificing, altruistic behavior toward his or her blood kin might result in a greater survival rate for the individual’s family or extended clan, and therefore result in a greater number of descendants with that person’s genetic material. For evolutionary purposes, however, the opposite response—hostility to all people outside one’s group—should be just as widely considered moral and right behavior.
Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.
“If all cultures are relative, then so is the idea of universal human rights, so how can I decide to impose my values on this culture?”
If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is “moral” and another “immoral” but only “I like this.” If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law?
The fact is, says Leff, if there is no God, then all
moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be no external moral standard by which a person’s feelings and values are judged.
He is also pointing out (as are Dershowitz and Dworkin, in their own way) that despite the fact that we can’t justify or ground human rights in a world without God, we still know they exist.
If the world was made by a God of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are wrong. If the world is fallen, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see.
If a premise (“There is no God”) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (“Napalming babies is culturally relative”) then why not change the premise?
It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all these gifts.
Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.
Identity apart from God is inherently unstable.
If I am a grass field—all the cutting will keep the grass less but won’t produce wheat. If I want wheat…I must be plowed up and re-sown.
