What Christianity Is Not

I'm on the comeback trail, still recovering from the mysterious HBWAV, but ready to get back on the blog. My intention had been to begin after this break by responding to comments left following my earlier question, "What would count as evidence for Christianity to you?" I'm going to put that off a day or so, though, in view of things I've seen in comments here and elsewhere.

If we're going to make any headway on evidences for Christianity, we need to be clear about what this "Christianity" is. I wrote an outline description on August 17. Now it almost appears there would be room for a series on "What Christianity Is Not." For misconceptions are rampant.

One person I've encountered, for example, suggested that "thinking Christian" is an oxymoron. Just to give that an historical test, consider whether the following believers would be considered unthinking: St. Paul, Augustine, William of Occam, Aquinas, Galileo (yes, he was a believer), Luther, Francis Bacon, Berkeley, Newton, Washington, Wilberforce, Lincoln, Faraday, Carver, M. L. King Jr., Solzhenitsyn, Tutu. The list could be much, much longer; I've intentionally chosen names that should be familiar, that would be least controversial on a list of thinkers.

Many thoughtful people, including A. N. Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer, have pointed out it is no coincidence that science arose out of a Christian milieu. All other worldviews have tended toward philosophies of directionlessness (the Oriental cycle of time and reincarnations) or confusion (the Norse, Greek, Roman, and other pagan views of gods in conflict making the world their playtoy). Only Judeo-Christianity posited a God and a world of order.

In universities today, philosophy and history departments are rather heavily influenced by excellent Christian scholarship. About half of scientists are believers in God.

No, Christianity is not a place of unthinking. Yet there are those who pounce on some of the more difficult conceptual problems in the faith, like the problem of evil, as if no Christian had ever heard of such questions before. Those same people should realize that no one has wrestled with those problems at more length, with more thousands of volumes produced, than we Christians have ourselves. We do not claim glib answers are adequate--but we do claim there are good answers.

This calls to mind a previous discussion about whether Christianity has accomplished any good in history. The answer is unequivocally yes: despite flaws and errors, Christianity's influence on the world has on the whole been tremendously valuable and important. Somehow, though, a huge portion of world history--both actions and ideas--has dropped out of public sight, and what remains is a distorted, prejudiced view colored only by impressions of the Crusades and misleading stories of the Galileo incident. This is not just a few people; it's a growing theme in media and popular culture. (I had some quotes to support that from Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry, by Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, but the book has disappeared in a pile around the house somewhere.)

The question is, how has the Western world suddenly become so blithely yet desperately ignorant of our Christian history and heritage?

Christian thinkers in recent decades have noted a lull in evangelical scholarship from the late 1800s onward for several decades. This is admitted, and it is the Christians themselves who are turning the light back on themselves. Christian scholarship is shining much more strongly than it has in a long time.

I'm not sure, though, that this public ignorance of Christianity has so much to do with that historical lull. Christianity has been pushed out of education and out of much of the public sphere, to the extent that I have seen a school textbook that says the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving was a feast of giving thanks to their Indian neighbors and helpers. (For the record, yes, they did say thanks to the Indians, but the chief point of the feast was giving thanks to God.)

Maybe people think they know what Christianity is, and that they don't need to understand further. As I see Christianity portrayed in popular culture, though, it's a far cry from the reality I experience in my life and in the lives of hundreds of friends, church members, and so on. There are, of course, false pictures of Christ and Christianity even in places that claim to represent him truly. The north star that guides us is Christ himself, and the Bible as our guide to him. A church that represents him in both truth and grace is probably going to give you a more accurate representation than one that sacrifices either for the other. I wish you could visit my church in Seaford, Virginia. I pray that there's a great one near you, wherever you live.

Now, I take it as a strong obligation that if I am going to disagree with someone, I'm going to understand them first. Readers here know that in the eight or nine months of this blog I've studied and reviewed books that stand strongly against Christianity; books by Carroll and Gross, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett; I've also reviewed a Dawkins book that I read before starting the blog, and I read a text on evolution by Mayr without reviewing it here.

I credit a number of the conversation partners in the comments here--non-believers--for giving Christianity the serious thought it deserves. I'm not saying we'll ever all agree on this earth, but we have to give each other the respect of serious, thoughtful discourse. I wish the rest of the world would treat Christianity the same. Learn who we are and what we believe before you assume you know what you are criticizing. Thanks for granting us that respect.

Posted: Sun - August 28, 2005 at 07:01 PM |

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What Christianity Is Not

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson