Introduction
A friend of mine recently mentioned that he was confused as to what made people believe such ``obvious nonsense'' as Christianity. He'd initially thought that believing in Christianity essentially required someone to have their brains removed, but then had met some ``otherwise intelligent'' people who professed the Christian faith. So he had to readjust his preconceptions, and now thought that such a faith must only have come about through extensive brainwashing at an impressionable age. ``But this doen't explain the born-agains'', he bitterly complained.
On the surface, it sounded very much like he wanted to understand how someone could become a Christian without losing their intellectual faculties, and I thought about writing something to explain my faith; but as I thought about it, I realised that all he wanted was another set of preconceptions which would allow him to dismiss Christianity more readily. His initial attempt to explain away faith - in terms of intellectual bankrupcy - didn't fit the facts, and he needed another one. The lengths to which atheists will go in order to avoid confronting the question of the Christian faith while still pretending to be dispassionate critics always manages to amaze me.
But more on that later. I had been thinking recently that it was time to sit down and formulate more precisely why I believe what I believe, and this comment from a friend spurred me on to write something down about it. This is not going to be a spirited defense of the Christian faith; there are many more eloquent examples of that than I can come up with, and I recommend Steven Gaukroger's ``It Makes Sense'' and C S Lewis' ``Mere Christianity'' as two particular favourites. No, instead this will be a spirited defense of my personal faith - how I came to it, and why I maintain it.
Let me start by going back to the phrase ``an impressionable age'', because it was at an impressionable age that I discovered the truth of the Gospel. I was twelve years old - old enough to perform a critical analysis of the evidence laid before me, but not old enough to be jaded by cynicism and hidden assumptions. I had no religious background, no great tragedy in my life, no emotional need for God. But what I did have was two friends who were somehow different. They showed concern for the people around them; they stood up against what they saw as injustices; and they spoke about a person called Jesus Christ.
I had heard of him. I knew that people thought that he was God and the Son of God, and it seemed a particularly arbitrary belief to me. So how was it that this particular belief was so instrumental in what made my two friends tick? I decided that it was time that I sat down and understood what this whole Christian faith business was about, and I devoured a great many books about it.
I thought that I had to start with the big issue: was there a God, or not? I was aware even at that early age that this was not a question that could be settled one way or another. It was a question of faith. It could not be proven. The so-called ``proofs of the existence of God'' in the apologetic literature I was reading spoke a lot about the possibility of a God, but offered no certainty. And the Bible, the central text of this religion, never once touched upon the question. God was assumed, from the first word to the last. I was not going to get any further in my search for God. I had to leave the question open. I decided that, for the moment, I would allow for His existence, in the sense of Pascal's Wager - if it turned out that He did exist and I had been claiming that He didn't, I would be in a lot of trouble. But I was my no means convinced.
What convinced me was not the big claim that there was a God greater than the whole Universe yet interested in every minute detail of it; what convinced me was the - relatively - small claim: a man has been raised from the dead.
The Resurrection in a Sceptical World
I write this just after Easter. A couple of weeks ago, I joined around six hundred other people to shout out over the city that Jesus Christ was risen. This wide spectrum of humanity - Oxford professors, professionals, students, the homeless - were all in vehement agreement on one thing: Jesus is alive. And this one thing is, let's be honest, not easy to believe. Everybody knows that dead people do not live again, and everyone knows that they are unlikely to be alive two thousand years afterwards.
You see, atheism has a big problem. Much as some atheists think we Christians have no intellectual integrity, I think that some atheists have no intellectual integrity, because they fail - no, sorry, refuse - to investigate possibilities outside their world view. Everybody knows that dead people do not live again, so if people try telling you that a dead man has been raised, then they must be talking rubbish. It's ``obvious nonsense''. Case closed. No need to investigate it.
And if they do think to investigate it, they often do so in a similarly closed-minded manner - what is the best way I can find to dismiss this idea? Maybe all those people who claimed to have seen him after he died were suffering simultaneous mass hallucinations. I have heard this raised as a serious objection to the resurrection. Six hundred people all imagined the same thing at once. It's possible, I suppose, but when you get to that level of improbability you may as well just accept the resurrection as a more likely alternative.
I don't mean to be dismissive of the objections of atheists. I'm actually very thankful for them. Mainstream Christianity has been through two thousand years of such objections and remained unscathed. But at the same time, I'm glad that I didn't approach the resurrection from that perspective. Since I was ambivalent about the existence of a God bigger than the whole universe, I was able to be open-minded about the relatively minor issue of a man being raised from the dead. If there was a God, I would have been more amazed if he didn't do the impossible from time to time.
The first place to look was the historical evidence. And it was overwhelming. Almost too overwhelming. I found multiple independent sources, contemporary and later, Christian, secular, Jewish, Roman and atheistic, historian, journalist and lay reporter, all reporting on the same fact - this man called Jesus was put on a cross, died, and was later found walking around talking to people. As Frank Morrison, author of Who Moved The Stone, has said, the resurrection appears to be the best attested historical fact, ever.
Sure, people wrote about King Arthur, and that doesn't mean that Arthur existed or that he pulled a sword from a stone. The people who wrote about Arthur were writers of myths, and they knew it; the people who wrote about Jesus were writers of newspapers.
Now in our oh-so-intellectual modern world we know about historiography and bias and all that jazz. We have relativism, and we can be skeptical abaout historical evidence. But if you start being skeptical about historical evidence, where do you stop? Once you start seeing historical conspiracies in one place, you have to see them everywhere. Can you believe in the veracity of the moon landings but dismiss the histories of the resurrection? Where do you want to make the cut? Can you believe in anything you have not directly experienced yourself? At some point, skepticism has to bottom out, and you have to trust some piece of historical data at some level. Is it intellectually robust only to trust the pieces that fit your particular belief system and dismiss all others?
Thankfully, again, I was at an impressionable age when I made my historical study of the resurrection. I was not a philosopher. I did not know about relativism or solipsism. I simply knew that if many reliable sources relate an issue of history, it was quite likely to be fact. And at that point, the question of whether or not it was possible became irrelevant.
One of my favourite books on computer programming is The Practice of Programming, and one of my favourite lines in it relates to discovering a bug in a computer program. It says that once you discover a bug that you cannot explain, ``the impossible has happened, and all we know is that it actually did happen.'' Simply saying that the bug cannot exist because it is impossible does not make your program work again. Impossibility is no match for instantiation. Once you find that something has happened, there is no time to dismiss it as impossible.
Once the actuality of the resurrection hits home, the rest of the Christian faith is a walk-over. If a man is raised from the dead, if a man's life is so unique, we reasonably assume that it warrants more careful study. If he can break through death, we become interested in what he did when he was alive. You can look at Jesus as an interesting philosopher, a great moral teacher, or a lunatic, but if he can come back to life after death, then there is something special about him. It is because he came back to life that the church transformed itself from twelve depressed and unstable folk in a room in Jerusalem to a force throughout the world. It is because he came back to life that people were prepared to obey him at any cost, even to the point of martyrdom. It is because he came back to life that his words have the seal of authority. He cannot be an ordinary philosopher, teacher or fool; he is something else. And I really, desperately wanted to find out what.
The Bible
To find out more about this man, I wanted to hear what he did and what he said. I started to look at the Bible to see what it said about him. But first I had to work out whether or not I could trust it.
Thankfully, here too atheists helped me out. The gospels have been subject to criticism, textual analysis and historiography again for the past two thousand years. They are probably the most intensely scrutinised set of documents in existence. At the time, I decided that I was probably not going to come up with any arguments one way or another that had not been proposed in the past two thousand years, and took the gospels at face value. Over time, though, I began to find out for myself that these histories were trustworthy.
The first breakthrough came when I found that there were slight contradictions between the accounts of various stories. Normally contradictions would make the histories less reliable, but then I realised that four different people trying to remember the same event that happened many years ago would probably remember slightly different things. The contradictions show that these are not carefully polished accounts, all designed to seamlessly mesh together to prove a point. They are amateur accounts by eye-witnesses trying to put down what happened in the past five years that changed their lives so much.
The second breakthrough came when I was reading about the woman taken in adultery, in the gospel of John. One verse struck me: John 8, verse 6 - ``And this they said, trying him, that they might have whereof to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.''
It seemed to me desperately important what Jesus had written. But there was nothing - no theological point made about this anywhere. Some theologians had guesses, but nobody knew. No-one drew anything out of it at all. He was just writing on the ground.
So why, I thought, did the writer put this in? What purpose does it serve? What point is he trying to make? Why bother to mention that Jesus was writing on the ground? And then it hit me - because that's what Jesus did! John is not trying to make any clever theological point at all. This is not a crafted narrative by a novelist; this is not some clever foreshadowing that will turn up again later in the plot; this is just an eyewitness account. John remembered that Jesus wrote on the ground, so John noted it down. The fact that this writing was insignificant was tremendously significant to me! I've since discovered that the gospels are full of insignificant little details - only recorded because that's what people saw. I could trust the gospels not because they were such great works of literature, but because they were such naive works of journalism!
But what of the other so-called gospels, the ``gnostic gospels'' and the like? I had to make a decision about the content of the Bible, and how it had come together. There were two ways I could do this. First, internal consistency. I took a look at some of the disputed gospels, and they simply didn't sound right. I got to know what Jesus's words sounded like. The Jesus in the heretical gospels did not have the same power and authority, the same depth, the same love. He was a pale imitation Jesus. Was this the real Jesus, and the church had been presenting a fake Jesus by championing the four gospels we know now? For that I had to turn to my second mode of analysis, external consistency.
I knew that by the time the gospels were circulating, there were still people around who had met Jesus and knew him. They were perfectly equipped to sort out the real gospel from the fake. The fact that the Bible had been collected by the church over time was a bonus, not a problem. It had been put together by people who could vouch for its veracity, and who, it was claimed, were guided by God Himself in collating it. The Holy Spirit leading the church for the past two thousand years seemed happy with what was in the Bible, and I decided not to disagree with Him.
What about the rest of the Bible? You can't surely believe that creation stuff, now, can you?
I must admit that I was extremely naive myself for the first few years of my faith. Once I had decided the Bible was trustworthy, I accepted it wholesale. After all, it claimed to be the very words of God, and that was something worth believing in. It was only when I came to university that I heard the idea that the Garden of Eden was a metaphor, or that Creation was not literally true. It took me a long time to realise that it didn't actually matter.
Right now, I'm not sure what I think of Creation, other than the fact that, however it happened, it was a long time ago and I wasn't there. I am here now, and I concern myself with what God is doing today rather than what He did to form the Universe.
What about science or other religions?
Of course, now I know all about the theory of evolution and quantum physics and the like, and I'm still a Christian. I've never felt that science can replace or contradict religion; they are orthogonal. To go back to the example of programming, I see science as trying to reverse-engineer a routine. And this is a scary thing to try to do; you can come up with some models which are good enough, but you can never tell whether or not you've got it completely wrong.
Science takes a routine, passes in various inputs and looks at the output, and tries to draw a correlation. Let's say we pass in successive integers - 1, 2, 3, 4 - to our routine, and we get a nice series of squares - 1, 4, 9, 16 - back. We might surmise that the routine takes a number and squares it. But we can't be sure. We have to pass in more integers to be a little more sure. And even then, we can't be say for certain. We first have to assume that the routine is consistent. It may not be. It may appear consistent for all the values we happen to input, but we cannot be sure it's consistent for values that we neglect. Now quantum theory is starting to suggest that the universe is actually self-modifying code, but still depends on it behaving in a (relatively) orderly manner.
Second, we can never, ever recover the code for the routine in full. It may just happen that the routine is
sub black_box ($x) {
if ($x == 25.37124) { explode() } # Ha, ha
else { return $x * $x }
}
Unless we're supremely lucky and chance upon 25.37124 as a possible input, we won't know. Science tells you what the code is roughly like; it can never work out the original code, it can certainly never recover the comments, and it makes absolutely no suggestion about who the programmer might have been - in fact, it seems content to believe that the routine came into being without any programmer at all. I know that programs do not do that, and I cannot understand why someone might think that the Universe should.
Science observes, guesses, models; it cannot explain. Science tells me more about the properties of the universe and helps me to glimpse a little more of the originality of its Maker, but it can never tell me that He is replaceable.
Even though I was young, I was not unaware that there were other religions. But I realised that truth was not a supermarket; you can't just buy any brand you like. Even so, in the face of the resurrection, the claims of other religions were not something I gave much time to.
Here is a man who has been raised from the dead. This has not happened before or since. I will listen to what he says. You may have different views. If you die and come back to life, I will listen to what you say too.
What about the church?
Something very odd happens when you tell someone that you have become a Christian. For some reason, they then tend to hold you to a vastly superior moral code, one that they do not hold themselves to and do not even entirely understand. I have never understood why people think that those who have just become a Christian must have a completely perfect moral conduct, when the whole message of Christianity is that moral conduct alone and observance of strict rules cannot bring about perfection and the only way it can be done is via a propitiatory sacrifice.
So when you become a Christian, and then soon afterwards slip up in some way, you can be sure that there will be someone behind you muttering ``Oh, and you call yourself a Christian! What an unChristian thing to do!''
It took me a long time to realise that this applies to the church. The whole history of the Christian church is of ordinary human beings trying to live out what they believe but screwing up in ever more interesting ways. The history of the church is more about what Christians get wrong than what they get right. The church has done some great things, but it has also done some catastrophically stupid things in its time.
So in the same way that I don't see the nagging call-yourself-a-Christian voice as being a disproof of my own Christianity, I don't see the failings of the church through the ages as being a disproof of its faith. They are an example of humans being human and getting things wrong, and a reminder to me of what can go wrong. Sure, a lot of Muslims were killed in the Crusades, and a lot of small boys' lives were wrecked in Boston, but that does not discourage me - instead it reminds me that I should avoid killing Muslims and buggering small boys.
That applies to the church in general, but what about the church in specific? I must admit that I have had an up-and-down relationship with the church. The first churches I attended were full of people mouthing words that they did not entirely believe in order to achieve something that they did not entirely understand. This was not what I had been promised! These people seemed to treat Christianity as some kind of religion, with rules and rituals and magic spells - I did not see it as a religion at all, but as a relationship with a person. I had come across the most important and impressive person in history, and I wanted to know him better and find other people who also wanted to know him better. That's all. I didn't want set formulas and pre-arranged services. When you have a relationship with someone, you don't script your conversations with them.
So naturally I headed off to the more evangelical end of the church spectrum, where the expression of the relationship with Jesus was much more spontaneous, and, I thought, much more real. I also found a bunch of people who were committed to building each other up and building up a community of believers. I enjoyed this for a while - it was warm, it was comfortable, but it was also very claustrophobic. I felt I had been drawn into something that felt a little cultish; I almost felt a dependency on the church, and I decided this was very, very wrong. So I fled.
Unfortunately, when you flee from one extreme, you tend to flee to another extreme. I honestly and firmly believe that the Christian life is one of balance, not of extremes. Everything in moderation. But I had fled to individualism - I felt that I didn't need anyone else to validate my relationship with God - which was correct - and so I could continue to be a Christian without meeting any other Christians. Which was true in theory, but not true in practice. You can be an excellent footballer, but you won't get far if you reject the idea of playing in a team.
In the end, I came to moderation; I returned to a slightly evangelical but middle-of-the-road Anglican church. I returned to enjoying the company of other Christians and ``team play'', but I was also able to enjoy a relationship with God on my own.
Then weird things started happening. I started enjoying liturgy, something I had been dead against before. Instead of being a regimented way of orchestrating a relationship with God, it became an expression of unity between believers. Six hundred people can believe that Jesus is alive, but something powerful happens when they all decide to shout out this fact together.
I started seeing needs in the church, and even more bizarrely, I started spontaneously filling them. People needed help putting chairs away - could I stand aside and watch? There was a need for Bible teachers and children's workers - was I willing to watch that need go unfilled? And more recently, I became aware of a need for help for the church in Japan. Could I stand back, with my skills, and leave it for someone else to do?
What about evangelism and mission?
Everyone's experience of God is different, because He made everyone different. In my case, nothing in my Christian life has come about as a brilliant flash of blinding light and a deep booming call from God. My ``call'' to mission was no exception. It was a slow, sure realisation that there was a need that I could fill. Most people I know hear from God not in flashing lights and loud booms but in quiet, insistent nagging.
As well as having a love-hate relationship with the church, for a long time I had a love-hate relationship with evangelism. I don't like doing it. I am not a natural evangelist. I have never brought anyone to faith in Christ. I don't see that as being my role in life. I know that apologetics do not convince the heart, and hardly ever satisfy the mind. I don't even write this in any attempt to convince; only to inform.
I firmly believe that people can only come to faith in Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit in them, and this is tremendously freeing. There is nothing that I can do to convince anyone, and so I have learnt not to waste my time in pointless arguments. If someone doesn't want to believe, that's fine. I will not try to persuade. People will come to God when He calls them, not when I do.
But I can't get away from the fact that I'm only a Christian because someone told me about it. And I can't get away from the fact that Jesus told anyone that would be his disciple that they have to tell people about it too. He makes it quite clear that he wants the whole world to know about him. He makes it quite clear that there is a need for workers. Once again, am I prepared to sit back and watch that need go unfilled?
What about you?
And that's why I spread the news about Jesus - a man has risen from the dead, and he claims to hold the key to life itself. What does this mean to you? I am not asking you if you believe it. I am not asking you if you think it might just be possible. I am asking you to find out for yourself whether or not it happened. Impossibility is secondary to instantiation.
This man who rose from the dead says that you will find Him if you seek him with all your heart. Are you prepared to put aside your preconceptions, and look critically at what happened that week two thousand years ago? Are you prepared to seek? If you are, and if you earnestly seek, you never know what you might find.