Wow. This message from a former Christian provides a lot of food for thought. It’s far too long to adequately excerpt it here, but I’ll give you this snippet to whet your appetites.
"Finding Christianity’s truth began to appear to me more like having to tilt your head and squint and stand back far enough, until you began to see how the claims of Christian apologists ‘matched’ what scant partisan evidence there is in the N.T. In the end I found myself standing back so far that I was outside the fold."
It’s well worth reading and I’d be very interested in discussing it here. After you’ve read it, please come back here and answer these questions.
Christians: Do statements like Ed’s challenge your faith? If so, how? If not, why?
Atheists/Agnostics: Do stories like Ed’s remind you of your own? Explain.
“Do statements like Ed’s challenge your faith?”
No, I’m afraid they don’t challenge my faith. People come to faith and lose their faith for the darndest reasons. The reasons we offer to explain our new faith or to explain our lost faith so often have nothing to do with the reality.
Most of us struggle day to day. Most of us cannot answer all of the intellectual difficulties that can be and are posed to our faith. But as Newman said, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”
The human heart has its own reasons, both to believe and to disbelieve.
May God have mercy upon us.
“Honest searching and earnest questioning will be honored by God…”
Which is just another way of saying that those who don’t come to the same answer you did are dishonest and not earnest.
“I am Howard’s brother-in-law, and I’m an Evangelical.”
“Hi, Howard’s brother-in-law”
Wow, it looks like I’m missing out on some very exciting topics here. It’s good to be out of my cage on this third Sunday of Lent…
Catholicism explains everything VERY, VERY, VVVEEEERRRRRYYYY thoroughly, but it is all built on faith, not on reason. Faith is a fertile substrate upon which reason can grow. That is a fundamental difference I see between Catholic and Evangelical apologetics. Catholics realize (as did Paul) that the message of the cross is foolishness to the Greeks (the erudite, the rationalist, the modern, the pagan, the manicheist) and a stumbling block to the Jews (the earthy, the animistic, the fecund, the tribal Joe Bloes of the world).
The weakness of Evangelical apologetics is that it actually seeks to convert, a la, I’ll convince you of the rational truth of my religion. Any faith that you can actually wrap your head around is probably not a faith worth having. Catholicism seems (to me at least) to say: put on the glasses of faith, then you’ll see the rationality, apprehended all at once as one glorious tapestry. Believing is seeing. Not the other way around.
Who comes to the Lord thru apologetics? Who? It dragged Theo away, for God’s sake! For the Christian, believing is seeing. We **choose**, WE CHOOSE, WE CHOOOOOOOOOSE what to believe. People believe what they want to believe. We may think we believe what we’re convinced of but that’s only because we’ve convinced ourselves so thoroughly to believe what we want to believe. They may not realize it, but in the endgame what you believe is the way you wanted to believe, and the way you wanted to believe was governed almost entirely by the way you wanted to live your life. Free will is not (I repeat not) an illusion…
This has been my great lenten discovery: People believe what they WANT to believe. I cannot say: “I cannot believe in the Assumption of Mary.” I can only say: “I will not believe in the Assumption of Mary.” Or as I’m beginning to say: “Lord, I believe (or want to believe) in the Assumption of Mary. Help my unbelief.”
For all my being an “apologist” for Christianity here and around the internet from time to time, I’d rather be the anti-apologist. The guy who says: Yep, that’s what I believe… and if that’s what you want to believe, that act as though you believe it and eventually you will. If you have to understand it all first, you’ll never believe, because you’ll never be able to wrap your head around the truth. Actions speak louder than words, and words speak louder than mere sentiments. Practice charity… and eventually you will believe.
Cheers!
. . . after some hemming and hawing, these guys do have a point. But there always followed some long-winded and convoluted b.s. about how everything could still be okay, even though the whole thing was a historical and philosophical shambles. So I jumped ship.
Actually, that would mean your theology would’ve started in the year 2033, whereas you’re granting that the Catholic theology started at the time of Christ. Not that that’s what you meant, though.
As a protestant, I wouldn’t mind if our theology lagged 2000 years behind:)
C.S. Lewis said “where there is a difficulty, we can expect to find a discovery”. Honest searching and earnest questioning will be honored by God (it is one of the joys of our salvation that THE MAKER OF EVERYTHING chooses to reveal tidbits of His creativity to us personally thru Holy Spirit). In fact, I feel like it is better to leave the church for a time if you are not going for the right reasons, if you are not fellowshiping and involving yourself in service, etc, than simply to show uip and warm a pew. At least you are then being honest with yourself and your God. I do admire Ed for his honesty (I am assuming this is what he is being, anyway I have no reason to doubt that he is). Holy Spirit can do anything, but our hearts are much more sensetive when we are not trying to sell them something.
Christian:
God has a plan for Ed. He will lead him thru whatever dark valleys will bring him to a closer understanding of Himself. You will find many things in Christianity as a religeon; some true, some doubtless instigated by men and held as tradition (God doesn’t mind tradition). People become discouraged trying to decipher systems when there is not deep relationship with Jesus. I’m not saying that Ed does/did not have this relationship, but if it were there, how could you persist in doubt? If it was/is not there, He is undoubtedly longing for it to be. Ultimately, though, everyone will stand before their Maker and all truth will be revealed. The fact that many people have reservations and even have very good reasons for these reservations does not mean that my relationship with Jesus is all in my imagination. It informs aeverything I read and leads me to whatever meagre understanding I posess. He also lets me know it is okay that I will not understand everything. My realtionship with Jesus is based not just on reason, but faith and experience. It is as real as I can know anything to be.
I find, coming from the evangelical/semi-fundamental background that I do, that too many Christians from my neck of the theological woods tend to try to explain every little thing — which is where some of the more reasonable skeptics get their best excuses to dismiss Christianity.
My bro-in-law was saying the other day that one of the things he admires about Catholic theology (in contrast to Protestant theology) is that it still embraces the mystery of certain teachings (using the actual word “mystery” even), whereas certain other sects of Christianity try too hard to make their faith sound totally logical.
Maybe that’s a little of what repels folks like Ed. I think the apologist slant of many of my Christian brethren can come off as little more than insecurity — and many people won’t buy what you’re selling if they don’t think you’re all that sold on it yourself.
In honor of my absent bro-in-law, that’s my two cents…
Just a note on howard’s brother-in-law. I had always gotten exactly the opposite impression — namely, that Catholicism explains everything very thoroughly. Honestly, I’d always been under the impression that a well-read Catholic could typically win most any religious debate, simply because there’s such a huge corpus of Catholic theology to draw from, whereas Protestant theology lags 1500 years behind, and the Orthodox theology is all about “it’s-a-mystery-don’t-ask-questions”. I think the reason Catholic theology manages to preserve the mystery so well is that the topics on which theological debate go on are simply mysterious to begin with; whereas Protestant theology, throwing out most of the sacraments, really has a semi-Gnostic divide between what is earthly and what is heavenly, Catholic theology weaves the two together into a beautiful tapestry. Things like the Catholic notions of Imago Dei, the Eucharist, Orders, and other things literally create a more direct connection with God than Protestant theology allows for. For instance, Catholics believe that the ministerial priesthood actually includes a potestas sacra; basically, that the priest’s blessing carries something with it, that the priest can confect sacraments, that the priest is God’s instrument in a very direct way. Protestants reject this. Catholics believe that Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity are present in the Eucharist, whereas Protestants don’t. . . well, kinda don’t (excepting orthodox Lutherans and Anglicans). Catholics have a rather high conception of the Imago Dei, whereas Luther and Calvin, with Total Depravity (amongst other things) managed to reduce humans to just below the scum on the bottom of one’s shoe.
Anyway, to cut the ramble short, Catholic theology, though highly defined, very codified, and extremely well-thought out in light of other views, weaves Earth and heaven together in a way that Protestant theology just doesn’t, thereby preserving mystery.
Pontificator, I’m glad you stopped by and contributed. 🙂 How has your faith life been lately? I read with great interest your appraisals of the sad shape the Anglican Church is in.
Theo,
I apologize if i came off sounding condescending. That was not my intention at all. I really believe that our merciful God does extend mercy to us even when we are wrong. As often as not I am sure that I am the one who is wrong.
My point within the context of the statement was that God does not just zap us when we are looking in the wrong places for the truth. He corrects and draws and guides us back. At some point obviousely time cuts the search for truth short, but I believe that if you are looking, He will help you find.
I’m sorry if what I said wasn’t clear.
Yup. Been there, done that. I too had the experience of defending Christianity vigorously and rigorously for several years–so much so that I alienated a few friends in the process–only to feel less honest the more intense my defense became.
An extended metaphor I used a few years ago while explaining this to a friend is that Christianity is like a huge machine. It’s been built and rebuilt and modified and fixed up and bubble-gummed re-painted and expanded and remodeled for thousands of years now. All the builders and rebuilders and modifiers and fixer-uppers and bubble-gummers and painters and expanders and remodelers are, of course, quite proud of their work and the way they have kept this machine running. After all, it is no small task to maintain a particular worldview for thousands of years as the world changes rapidly around it. But all too often I found that the job of the ordinary Christian is merely to circle the wagons around the machine, so to speak, to stand with their backs to this gigantic monstrosity, listening to it shake, rattle, and hum while constantly affirming its stability, uniqueness, unity of design, etc. People on the outside, though, can easily look over their heads and see something that looks absolutely ridiculous, like some kind of hopeless, fantastical Dr. Seussian contraption. Meanwhile, every now and then, ordinary Christians turn around, so to speak, and get an eyeful. Suddenly they’re terrified. (Find a minister and ask how many people have shown up in private with desperate concerns about the viability of the scriptures, church history, and the faith itself, precipitated by, say, actually reading the Bible and finding something terrifying in its pages.)
After a while, I got tired of passively defending the machine, so I decided to get in on the action of maintenance, the dirty work of theology–smoothing over the lumps, making sure things work right with a changing world and problems or contingencies that were never explicitly anticipated by the scriptures, things like that. Off to the Christian university for me, with seminary on the horizon. But then I realized that all the people who were doing that work were just like me, and that the whole thing was made up by people, some of whom had good intentions, some of whom did not.
Furthermore, amongst the theologians, thinkers, and ministers I encountered, there was a surprising–no, astonishing–number of them who, while they toed the party line in public, were not shy about admitting their doubts in private. Though, as we all know, woe be to that Christian scholar who says these things in public, e.g., John Robinson, John Spong, Robert Funk, John Crossan, Hans Kung, et al. I would go down to the library and, like a good, honest Christian, read these guys’ books, feel shaken to the core, and then go knocking on the doors of thinkers and theologians, and even my own pastor, to have them debunked. Well, no, I was was told, after some hemm