Yesterday I sketched some of the reasons that I remain a theist. Today I'd like to do the same for why I remain a Christian theist. Or, better, following the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, why I continue to strive to become one. Although there are more, here, in brief outline, are six reasons why I embrace Christianity:
1. The beauty of the story. The Christian account of history is a beautiful love story that tells how, moved by love for mankind, God gave Himself to ransom His beloved and to share eternity with "her" together. It's the greatest love story ever told. If it's not true it should be. We should all want it to be, and I marvel that so many want it not to be true.
2. The beauty of the lives of those who have taken the teaching of Jesus seriously. Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict, has said that,“I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the lives of the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.” When Ratzinger mentions the lives of the saints he's talking about men like Maximilian Kolbe and women like Mother Teresa.
He's talking about the people George Eliot mentions in her novel Middlemarch when she has a character observe that, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
It is because of 2000 years of anonymous people trying to live as Jesus enjoined us to live that we have hospitals and clinics, orphanages and schools, charitable organizations and so much more. Atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas acknowledges this when he writes that, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
3. The beauty of grace. Author Philip Yancey wrote that he left the Christian faith as a young man because there was so little grace in his very strict church. He eventually came back to the faith because he could find grace nowhere else. It's certainly not found in today's secular progressive PC Cancel Culture where people get reported by interns to their employer's Human Resources department for wishing co-workers a Merry Christmas.
Christianity, properly understood, is a way of life teeming with forgiveness and reconciliation, i.e. grace, among ourselves and between God and us. Grace is enormously attractive, and it's the essence of Christianity.
4. The beauty of the moral core. Christianity (or more accurately, Judeo-Christianity) is based on two "laws": Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. There's nothing simpler, more elegant or more beautiful. The whole moral teaching of the Bible is summed up in those two rules. To love others is to do justice and to display compassion - for the poor, for those with whom one deals in business, for our co-workers and our neighbors.
5. The fact of the Resurrection of Jesus. Skeptics have tried for centuries to explain it away, but every attempt to provide a naturalistic interpretation of the historical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as found in the New Testament sounds more fantastic than that a miracle actually did occur and that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. The Resurrection of Jesus is the keystone in the arch of Christianity. It is the confirmation that everything Jesus taught about Himself, this life and the next is true.
6. The beauty of the hope of eternal life. Some folks are content to accept physical death as the end of their existence, but this, for me, is difficult to understand. It's difficult to understand why we continue to invest enormous resources in extending human life through medical technology and do so much to extend our own individual lives through healthy living but care so little about life that we're indifferent to the possibility of enjoying it forever.
To have loved family and friends, to have loved life, and not be thrilled with the hope that there's an even richer, more wonderful existence beyond this one, an existence which we might share with those from whom we've been separated by death, an existence in which those who have suffered will be rewarded and those who caused their suffering will be held to account, strikes me quite frankly as strange.
For these reasons and others, especially the simple but paramount fact that I believe Christianity is true in all its essential aspects, I remain committed to it.
