The most fundamental belief in Christianity, of course, is the conviction that God exists, but this claim means different things to different people. A recent poll shows that 94% of Americans believe that God exists, but it's not clear that these people all share the same concept of God. For example, is the God one believes exists intimately involved in the world or is He/It remote, indifferent, and impersonal? Is God just the universe, or some part of it, or is God a transcendent being which created the universe and cannot be identified with any aspect or combination of aspects of it?
Christianity has historically answered those questions by affirming that God possesses, at a minimum, the following attributes:
1. Personality: I.e. It is appropriate to refer to God as He. It is the case that God is self-aware and aware of the world in which we live. He cares about this world and cares about us. It makes sense to speak or pray to God because it matters to Him.
2. Transcendence: God is other than the world of space/time and matter and not identifiable with it.
3. Extraordinary potency: His power is at least great enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. He may be more powerful than this and, indeed, may be able to do anything which it is logically possible to do, but He is at least this powerful.
4. Extraordinary knowledge: God knows at least enough to have created the universe and to work out His will in it. His knowledge may be greater than this in that He may know everything that it is logically possible to know, but His knowledge is at least this great.
5. Eternality: God has no beginning and no end.
6. Moral perfection: God always acts in the best interest of His creation. He is the exemplar of Love and is the source of all moral categories and understanding.
7. Omnipresence: There is no place in creation, either spatially or temporally, where God is not.
8. Ultimate causality: God is the source of all that we can possibly experience. He is the creator and sustainer of the universe. The entire cosmos is ultimately contingent upon Him.
When Christians assert the existence of God they are claiming that a being with at least these attributes exists. Many Christian believers may not be able to articulate this concept of God off the top of their head, but if they were to be shown the list they would surely agree that these qualities accurately describe what they mean by God.
In any event, nothing else about Christianity (or anything else in the cosmos and in life, for that matter) would make any sense whatsoever were not the case that God exists. This is the foundational theological belief for theists in general and Christian theists in particular, and everything else is based upon it and flows from it.
Why place the authority of Scripture next after belief in God in order of logical significance to a Christian's set of beliefs? The existence of God is something which presents itself to us through natural revelation, through the world and our experience in the world, but apart from special revelation, i.e. the Bible, none of the claims of Christianity have any grounds for belief. Extra-biblical sources offer only scant mention of the existence of Jesus let alone anything about him of religious significance. All we would have to rely upon would be an oral tradition that would be expected to be distorted over centuries of time and hence of exceedingly dubious reliability.
So, unless the Bible, or at least the New Testament portion of it, is held to be authoritative in the life of the individual and of the church there is very little reason to believe any of what Christians do, in fact, believe. There is, apart from what's contained in the New Testament, nothing we can know that is unique to Christianity. This is, of course, why skeptics are at such pains to discredit the historical relaibility of the New Testament. They realize that in doing so they strike at the heart of Christian faith.
What, then, does the New Testament tell us that is of vital and essential importance to a Christian understanding of the world? Most fundamentally it tells us that man is burdened by a kind of spiritual affliction. It teaches us that we're out of harmony with God, alienated from him, and headed for cosmic ruin. There is about us some sort of fatal flaw that we have inherited from our earliest progenitors, something philosopher Alvin Plantinga has suggested might be called trans-world depravity, that influences us to often choose evil rather than good.
How this has come to be the Bible doesn't make precisely clear but that it is the case that man often chooses evil is abundantly confirmed by our daily newspapers.
The story we glean from the Bible goes something like this, if I can be permitted to fill in some gaps with speculation: God is characterized as, inter alia, the perfection of love. Love "desires" something to give itself to, to lavish itself upon, and so God created the world, and specifically mankind, as objects of His love, much as parents create a child to love.
God wished to live in a maximally fulfilling love relationship with man, but such a relationship requires that love be both freely given and freely requited. God could have created us in such a way that we had no choice but to love Him in return, but that would have been to create us as robots. It would have been like programming the screen saver on your computer to flash the message "I love you" over and over. Thus, God made us free to choose to love Him or not, and in so doing He bestowed upon us the essential element of our humanity and the sine qua non of our dignity, our freedom.
Our relationship to God is like the relationship of a bride to her husband. God institutues marriage between a man and a woman for many reasons but one is to illustrate for us our relationship to Him and to remind us of it every day.
Man has used this freedom badly and unwisely, however, and in so doing has alienated himself from God. The Bible suggests that we're like an unfaithful bride whose husband comes home to find her cavorting with His worst enemy. We have demanded our autonomy. As a race, we've made it plain that we don't wish to be tied down to Him. Our infidelity has alienated us from God, the source of our life, and consequently death is our fate - both physical death and eternal separation from the source of life, the source of all that is good in our existence. This is what it means to be "fallen."
Yet, though broken-hearted and crushed by our continued betrayals, God has not abandoned us. Throughout the ages He has continued to woo us, to cajole us, to try win our love back to Him.
"But," the skeptic will object, "You've given no reason, no proof, why one should believe this story or the Bible that contains it."
That's true. I haven't, nor could I. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that, at the very least, the Bible is correct in its significant historical affirmations, but the evidence is not dispositive. It doesn't amount to a logical proof. Someone who wishes to withhold belief will certainly be able to find reasons to do so.
The fundamental question is this: Do we trust the Biblical witnesses to be writing the essential truth, or don't we? If the narrative I've traced resonates with us, and if we are not already dead set against the Christian worldview, then perhaps we're willing to give the Biblical witnesses the benefit of the doubt. If we are totally opposed to the Christian story, however, if it would upset us beyond our endurance were it to be true, then we simply won't accept their testimony. Whether we accept it or not, though, is not a matter of intellect, it's a matter of the heart. It's a matter of whether we would be delighted or disappointed to discover that the story of man's redemption as related in the Bible is true.
The Christian desires it to be true and finds the evidence sufficient to warrant his confidence in it. There's no point in trying to convince someone who doesn't wish it to be true that it is, since such a person's objections are not intellectual but emotional or psychological. At any rate, for the remainder of this series on basic Christian beliefs we'll simply follow the Christian assumption that the Bible is reliable in conveying truth about God's plan to win us back to Him. The next thing we need to understand about that plan is that our physical death is not the end of our existence.
Continuing our series on basic Christian convictions we turn next to the idea of eternal life. One of the things we learn in the Bible is that death is not the end of our existence. Man has always yearned to live, to survive the death of his body, but apart from any revelation from God he has no reason to think that there's any life beyond this one.
The New Testament makes it clear, however, that the death of this physical body is not unlike the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Just as the butterfly emerges transformed from the chrysalid, so, too, we are assured, we take on a whole new form of life and being.
This makes, or should make, an enormous difference in the way we view this life. If the atheistic materialist is right and death really is the end for each of us, then this life has precious little meaning. Death obliterates everything, nothing we do ultimately means a thing. Our lives are like the flash of a firefly's light in the dark night. It appears and then it's gone, forever. If death is the end then there's no reason at all why anyone should live one way rather than another. Nothing really matters, so whether one lives like Adolf Hitler or Mother Teresa it's all the same. When Hitler and Mother Teresa died they both ceased to exist, their fate, their destinies were the same so what difference did their decisions about how they would conduct their lives ultimately make?
If death is the end, there's no ultimate justice, no recompense for those who've done terrible things and caused great suffering. Such people will not be punished and those who've done wonderful things fare no better than those who didn't. So what's the point? If death is the end then we're just temporary assemblages of atoms that are destined to become topsoil. There's no dignity or value in being just a lump of flesh and bone. If atheism is true then man has no dignity or worth. He's just an animal to be herded and manipulated to suit the whim of whomever has the power to impose his will on the rest.
Christians, however, believe that when we die something of us lives on. Call it our soul, the totality of information that gives an exhaustive description of who we are. This information that describes us exists in the mind of God and is reinstantiated in some other body, some other mode of expression, when this material body is no longer able to function. Because our soul is information in the mind of God, it never ceases to exist. It's always in His database, as it were, ready to be downloaded at the next iteration of our existence. Because of this each of our lives, being eternal, is infinitely important and meaningful. Because of this we can hope that justice does exist and we have a reason for believing that the moral choices we make really do matter. Our eternal destiny may hinge upon them.
Why do Christians believe this? What do they base their hope upon? Consider just a few of the words of Jesus on the topic:
"Whoever believes [in me] may have eternal life." (Jn.3:15).
"He who believes in the Son has eternal life." (Jn.3:36)
"But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst but the water that I shall give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." (Jn.4:14)
"Already he who reaps....is gathering fruit for life eternal." (Jn.4:36)
"My sheep hear my voice...and I give eternal life to them and they shall never perish; and no one will snatch them out of my hand." (Jn.10:28)
It's clear that Jesus believed that there was life after physical death, but this raises a question: Why should we place confidence in the words of an itinerant rabbi who lived in an obscure corner of the world two thousand years ago. The answer is that Christians have always believed that Jesus was not just a rabbi, not even just a man, but that he is in some sense divine. That He is God.
The question remaining from our previous post in the series on Christian belief is why the words of a 1st century Jewish rabbi should carry such enormous metaphysical weight with Christians today. The answer, we said, is that for two thousand years Christians have believed that Jesus was not just a rabbi, not just some specially chosen messenger from God, not just a prophet, but that he was God Himself.
Certainly this is what the Bible teaches about Him and what He said about Himself. Consider a couple of examples from Paul writing about Jesus:
And here's John describing Christ:
And Thomas:
And here is Jesus speaking of Himself:
It is the belief in the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus that separates Christians from other monotheists. It is a belief unique to Christianity among modern world religions. It is also what makes Christmas so significant and special to believers. As the world turns toward Christmas eve we've resolved to keep well in mind why it is that Christians have always thought this birth, this child, to be full of mystery, wonder, awe and love. The Creator of the world, despite our rejection and betrayal of him, is born into the world as a human, to human parents, in the meanest surroundings, so that ultimately He may one day coax us back to Himself. Christmas reminds us all of the depth of His devotion to us. It reminds us that God chose to identify Himself with us in our humanity by sharing in our suffering and enduring an awful physical death, all of which He did as an expression of purest love. It was completely gratuitous. He needn't have done it, but for reasons we can't really understand on this side of eternity, it was apparently the only way He could win us back.
Christmas reminds us that God became man and dwelt among us, but couldn't Jesus have been mistaken about who He was? Couldn't He have been lying? Couldn't He have been deranged? Yes, He could have been any of these which is why we are not just left with a record of what He said about Himself but also a record of what happened at the end of His life. It was these events which authenticated the claims that He and others made about who He was.
Taken as a whole the Bible points insistently toward the salvific role of sacrifice, and Christians have long held that this recurrent theme is a kind of prelude to the greatest sacrifice in history: The sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. Jesus' death is seen by Christians as being more than just a martyr's execution. It has for 2000 years been viewed as a substitutionary atonement for the sin of all mankind.
Our betrayal of God - our falleness - requires, in the Divine economy, that our self-imposed estrangement from Him be permanent. The divine law demands a complete divorce with no reconciliation, but Divine Love also has its demands and it was out of that love that God refused to give up on His beloved. He chose rather to do all He could to redeem mankind from the stringent requirements of the law.
His solution was to take our place, to die physically in our stead, to pay the price for our sin. Somehow, even the temporary death of an infinite God was commensurate to the eternal deaths of finite men. God's death in Christ settled a debt that otherwise could never have been paid and insured that even though we still must endure the fears and sufferings of physical death ourselves, our separation from God need no longer be forever. There is now a chance for reconciliation, both corporately and individually. Because of His death, ours is now more like a birth into a new existence, a reunion with the creator and source of all that is good in this world.
But a question arises: Was the death of Christ sufficient to guarantee that no one at all would be left out of eternal union with God? Christians have historically given several answers to this question. One answer is that this salvation from eternal death is granted only to those who repent of their sin and accept Jesus' forgiveness and own Him as their God. This pretty much limits eternal life to Christians and is a view called "exclusivism" by theologians.
Another answer to the question says that Christ's death paid the price for everyone's sin and therefore everyone will ultimately have eternal life. This view is called "universalism" since salvation is seen as extending to everyone who ever lived no matter what their life was like.
A third view, called "inclusivism," falls between the other two. It agrees with the exclusivists in that it maintains that apart from Christ's sacrifice no one would have eternal life, but it also partly agrees with the universalists in believing that God accepts into His bosom more than just those who've made a willful decision to accept Christ as their savior. It holds that salvation is a matter of the condition and attitude of one's heart toward God.
Jesus' work on the cross is the price paid to secure salvation for anyone who obtains it, but those who never heard of Jesus, or who for cultural reasons, perhaps, find it exceedingly implausible that Jesus' death was a divine gift are nevertheless not excluded from receiving it. People whose hearts are open to God, people who, indeed, may be infatuated with God, are embraced by Him even though their understanding of His redemption is inadequate or attenuated. After all, whose understanding isn't?
Theological conservatives (fundamentalists and evangelicals) tend to hold the exclusivist position, liberals (e.g. unitarians) tend to be universalists, and moderates tend to be inclusivists.
But what of those who choose not to accept Christ, whose hearts are closed to God, who would prefer that He not even exist and who would find eternity with Him to be a kind of hell? A possible answer to this question is that God compels no one to love Him. He forces no one to accept His embrace. Those who find the very idea of God repellant, who want to have nothing to do with Him, will be given their way. They will be, for as long as they wish and/or as long as they exist, separated by their own volition from the source of everything that is good. They choose for themselves a destiny devoid of the love, peace, happiness, and intellectual stimulation that flows from God.
It's a tragic choice, but God will not force us against our will to choose Him. It might be noted that if this is true then universalism must be false. People can choose not to accept heaven. Read C.S. Lewis' fanciful description of this state of mind in The Great Divorce.
For the final post in our series on Christian belief we'll consider the foundational event upon which all of Christendom is based, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If Jesus had only performed miracles, affirmed His deity, and died a martyr's death on the cross, He would have been promptly forgotten by time within a generation or two after his death. He would have been regarded at best as a pious dreamer and at worst a fraud and charlatan.
The Resurrection, however, authenticates everything He said and did during His life. It stamps His ministry with the words, "this must be true." Paul writes that if Christ is not raised our faith is worthless and we're still in our sins (I Cor.15:16-19). In other words, Christianity rests on the fact of the physical, historical Resurrection. When Jesus was asked for a sign to confirm His teaching about Himself He enigmatically replied that if His body is destroyed in three days it will be raised back up.
Jesus' Resurrection has always been the firmest ground for Christian belief in a life after death. Because God raised Him, Paul writes, we can have a realistic hope, indeed an assurance, that He can and will do the same for us.
But, a miracle like this is awfully hard to accept in our modern world (See here for more on the topic of miracles and the modern mind). People just don't come back to life once they are dead. What's the evidence for believing that a resurrection is really what happened?
We should start by asserting that there is nothing impossible, either logically or physically, about such an event. A revivification would only be logically impossible if there were some sort of contradiction entailed by the proposition that a dead man came back to life, but there's nothing self-contradictory about this. It would only be physically impossible if naturalism is true, that is, if there is nothing to reality but matter and energy. Yet although many people believe that naturalism is true no one can know that it is. If God exists, If God is real, miracles are possible. Since it is certainly possible that God exists it is therefore physically possible that a dead man could have been brought back to life.
Yes, the skeptic replies, but it's highly unlikely, and we should parcel out our belief according to what our experience shows is most likely. Our experience shows that any natural explanation, no matter how implausible, is still more likely than that there was an irregularity in the laws of nature because those laws are uniform and unbreakable.
This of course, begs the question, as C.S. Lewis points out in his little work On Miracles. We can only know that the laws of nature are uniform if we know that there are never any irregularities, i.e. miracles, but we can only know that there are never any miracles if we already know that the laws of nature are uniform.
Again, if there is a personal God then miracles are indeed possible and we need to consider the plausibility of an alleged instance of one based upon the evidence. In the case of the Resurrection of Jesus, the evidence, as many Christian apologists have pointed out, starts with the fact that the thing that we can be most certain of is that the tomb was empty on the first Easter morning.
How can we be sure of that? Because all that the early opponents of Christianity had to do to stamp out the nascent "heresy" in their midst was produce the corpse of the man the Christians were saying had risen from the dead, but this they never did. Moreover, a significant number of the early disciples gave their lives for their belief that Jesus was alive. This is inexplicable given the fact that no sane person sacrifices his life for something he knows is a lie. Moreover, the earliest official accounts of what happened at the tomb claimed that the disciples stole the body, but why did the authorities spread that story if the corpse was not missing?
The question, then, is not whether the tomb was empty, but rather how did it get that way?
Several theories have been placed in circulation to offer an alternative to the Biblical proclamation that Jesus was radically transformed into something much different than He had been prior to His death. We'll consider just two of the most popular.
The first, as noted above, is that the followers of Christ stole the body, but this is totally implausible. These were men and women, peasants and fishermen, cowering in hiding, afraid that the authorities were going to come to arrest them. To think that they were able to sneak past the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb, roll away a heavy stone, and steal the body without drawing notice is difficult to believe. But even if this is what happened, why weren't the disciples arrested and questioned for breaking the law and stealing the body? Again, if this is what happened why were these same men willing to suffer torture, imprisonment, hardship, and even martyrdom to proclaim to people what they knew to be false, that Jesus was alive?
The second theory is that Jesus didn't really die but merely passed out and later revived in the tomb. This is even less plausible than the first hypothesis. Consider His condition. He had been without food, water, and medical care for over two days. He had been horribly scourged, nailed to a timber, his shoulder and elbow joints would have dislocated as he hung from the cross-beam, and he had been speared in the side so deeply that bodily fluids gushed from His abdominal cavity. Even so, we are asked to believe, He somehow only passed out on the cross and revived while in the tomb. Despite His weakened state, He managed to roll away the heavy stone at the entrance, sneak past the guards, and appear to His disciples in such triumphant glory that they were convinced He had actually been brought back to life by God.
If this is what happened, of course, the disciples would have soon realized that Jesus was in bad shape and had not been raised to any genuinely new life at all. Furthermore, Jesus would eventually have died and His followers would have known that. How then do we explain the willingness of these men and women to undergo torture and execution, all the while steadfastly refusing to renounce their conviction that Jesus had overcome death?
To be sure, the implausibility of these theories is not a proof that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead. There could have been some other explanation for the empty tomb that no one knows about. But what the difficulty in explaining the empty tomb does do is give credence to the testimony of the eye-witnesses, it shows that the person who is willing to give the scriptural narrative the benefit of the doubt is not taking an irrational position. For the person who believes that God exists, there is no compelling rational argument against the claim that the Resurrection actually occurred. Indeed, the only argument against it is the skeptic's certainty that miracles don't happen.
Something, however, did happen that morning in a remote corner of the world which forever transformed history. Whatever it was changed thousands of lives in the immediate aftermath and millions more thereafter. It must have been dramatic. The Gospels tell us that it was the astonishing sight of the risen Christ, and there is no reason, other than that we just don't want it to be true, not to believe that witness.
Our earlier posts on Christian Belief can be found here(I), here(II), here(III), here(IV), here(V), and here(VI).
RLC