I am currently reading ‘What is the Point of Being a Christian?’ by Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican Friar, that won the Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing, chosen by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury. The genesis of the book was that the author had a friend- a committed Christian- who had a son who kept on at his father saying: “What is the point of being a Christian? What do you get out of it? Why carry on?”
So Timothy Radcliffe wrote the book to address those questions as he feels that younger people are seeing themselves as the ‘Last Generation’, through the despair they feel about the world and who are living through a kind of crisis of hope and in it the author explains why he thinks the answer to his friend’s son’s questions is a clear and concise one: “The point about ‘why be a Christian?’ is simply: “Because it is true”. That is important because our faith points us to God who is the point of everything, in other words the ‘point’ of Christianity is to point to God as the meaning of our lives so that we can have the confidence that there is after all some ultimate point to human existence to turn despair into hope.
However, the book realises that in itself is not enough to convince people to be Christian, to successfully engage with people you have to show the difference being a Christian makes not just to your own life but those around you-the impact of it all. Go back to 2nd and 3rd century where people talked about how astonished they were at how the early Christians loved each other, one person said of them “ …they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking way of life, they dwell in their own countries but simply as sojourners (temporary residents), as citizens they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners…”.
Where the book hugely succeeds is in Timothy Radcliffe’s eloquence and wit but he focuses on what you could call ‘the strong meat of belief’, bridging that gap between academic and popular theology.
He is at his best when he outlines for example what the Church tends to be against what it could and should be. He comments that people should look at Christians and be puzzled by our astonishing liberty and freedom, but that often Church and the Christian community is usually seen as something which is telling people why they must not do what they want and must do what they do not want. What we need to be is a place of evident freedom, courage, joy and hope- somewhere that is a home for everyone, especially those whose lives are a mess. As the author makes clear “..It is fitting that the first Christian to make it to Paradise was the thief who was crucified beside Jesus.”
The image of what we should be as a Church in order that the unchurched are willing to learn from us is a place where we can speak convincingly about God being a place of mercy and mutual delight of joy and freedom- as Radcliffe says “If we are seen to be timid people, afraid of the world and afraid of each other, then why should anyone believe a word of what we say?”. What a challenge!
How do you read the Bible? I ask because we rightly often talk of the need for regular, ideally daily, study of the scriptures, but we spend less time explaining how best to understand them.
There has for example been a tradition of ‘Bible inerrancy’, that is to say that the Bible is without error or fault in all its teaching. The problem with that belief is that it is humans who have written and edited the Bible- not God. He is infallible. We are not.
Part of the problem I suspect is that some Christians tend to take a very fundamental approach to Bible literacy to such a degree that they can interpret what is said as meaning exactly what it says. In a lot of cases that is true- for example when in Matthew 22:37-39, Jesus says:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
That is a direct commandment we must follow-no ifs, no buts- it needs little analysis or thought about what Jesus means by that.
But elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments, prophets and indeed Jesus himself, use metaphors to make a point and they were never intended to be taken literally but as a vivid illustration of what we should do-they told stories to make a point because that is how we understand things. I suppose the most obvious one is Jesus’ teaching earlier on in Matthew 5:29 when he said:
“If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into sin”.
To believe that Jesus want us to self-amputate our eye if it is a problem is a horrifically false reading of the Gospel, although rather scaringly, it is claimed that one Christian scholar, Origen of Alexandria, self-castrated himself because of his literal reading of another part of Matthew -gulp!. What Jesus means though is if there is something about you that makes you sin then you should get rid of it or at least avoid it. For example, if you have a group of friends who are not good or healthy for you, or who take you away from God and his teachings, then change your relationships with them-they may not be good for you.
I recall the great writer CS Lewis rejecting the literal reading of the Bible because of a number of passages which disproved the argument that every statement in Scripture must be historically true. They are not falsehoods but when reading something in the Bible I think we need to ask ourselves one overriding question- what is this author trying to tell me? Are they reporting a literal event or piece of teaching that I need to accept and act on, or is it maybe a metaphor that requires us to understand in order that we should live our faith and our lives to the glory of God?
I am very interested in what you could call the search for the ‘Historical Jesus’- in other words what does empirical historical or archaeological evidence show we definitely know about Jesus and his life, compared with what we know and believe through our faith.
Not too long ago a fairly naïve and uninformed writer questioned whether Jesus ever existed, and in the most recent surveys carried out by 'You Gov' and the Church of England around 25% of people in England think Jesus was a fictional, rather than historical figure, which is rather scary.
So, what do we really know and how do we respond to people who question Jesus’ very existence?
Well, historians and archaeologists will generally talk about what they call the ‘Historian’s Creed’, that is to say that they can be sure there is strong corroborative evidence to say the following is true: a) Jesus lived in 1st century Palestine, b) He preached and healed amongst people, c) He gathered followers but also enemies, d) He was executed on the orders of Pontius Pilate and e) within a short period of his death churches and followers of Jesus emerged.
Beyond that, theologians will say that the other things we know happened as recorded in the Gospels- e.g., the Virgin birth, the slaughter of innocents, the feeding of the 5000, the Resurrection etc may have happened but they cannot prove it to a high degree of satisfaction. That is not their fault because they have to be able to say that because for example they found this testimony or that object, then that proves something happened. They are also among the first to make it clear that it would be unreasonable to expect to find much empirical evidence about people living in the 1st century-but clear evidence of Jesus and the impact he had is there.
For me however, the most powerful evidence is that there was an incredible ‘energy’ following Jesus’ crucifixion that demonstrates something extraordinary took place, people started to follow him, churches were set up to worship and praise Him. People -the Christian martyrs- chose to die rather than deny Jesus’ divinity-they knew the Truth and in short, things changed for ever.
One of the more interesting snippets of news recently was the well-respected study undertaken by the news agency Reuters which concluded that we are gradually becoming a nation of ‘news avoiders’. It revealed that 46% of us avoid reading, seeing, or hearing the news, and it is a worldwide trend too.
When asked why this was, people referred to the news bringing down their mood, creating a feeling of powerlessness over events, and that it led to arguments that they would rather avoid. One person perhaps summed up the mood when they said “ (the news can) trigger my anxiety and things can have a negative impact on my day.”
I suspect a lot of us would recognise that. Part of the issue is that generally speaking the news tends to be typically negative -it generally does not report positive events but instead focuses on what we might call the ‘doom and gloom’. In recent weeks the headlines have been about death of the people in the Titan submersible, reports of parents being jailed for killing their children, people attacked in terrorist atrocities, high inflation, strikes, the war in the Ukraine and even a Bishop questioning how ‘safe’ the Church of England is- the list goes on …
It is very understandable why people switch off or avoid the news- in terms of our mental health we are impacted by our environment, we react to what we are told or experience, and anything that can reduce our anxiousness is of course welcome.
What I have found that works well is to avoid news either first or last thing in the day – otherwise you can either start the day negatively or your sleep suffers if you take in bad news. It is better to take news in sometime in between.
As Christians though, avoidance of the news does come with its own challenges because of the belief that we should be ‘in the world but not of it’- that really comes from John 17:11 where before Jesus is arrested he says a prayer for his disciples:
“I will remain the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one”.
If we avoid the news, avoid the reality of this world, we lose the ability of fellowship with the other travellers on our journey for we are Christ’s Ambassadors. That means we need to love and serve the people of this world, but without what could be termed ‘entanglement’-this means we bring the ‘salt and light’ to the world, but to do that we must not isolate ourselves from it. That can be very difficult especially with a world that may feel alien to many of us.
I feel that as fellow believers that means we need to be aware of and engage in the world, but we need to do it carefully and selectively. Be aware what bad news can do to us but also take on board what is happening to allow us to give Jesus’ alternative. It is a careful path to tread so choose wisely!
