CHAPTER FIVE Intellectual Barriers to Faith

CHAPTER FIVE Intellectual Barriers to Faith

CHAPTER FIVE

Intellectual Barriers to Faith

A central task of apologetics is to create a situation in which it is possible to come to faith. Part of this responsibility involves the neutralization of a number of potential obstacles to faith. These difficulties are often freestanding, so that the resolution of a single issue can often clear the road to faith. The present chapter is concerned with exploring and countering some major difficulties that prevent many individuals from taking Christianity seriously.

A. GOD AS WISH FULFILLMENT?

Is God really there? Or is our sense of his existence nothing more than a secret hope that our greatest longings might be fulfilled? Is God for real—or is he just an illusion, like a dream in the night? These questions have long been debated in Western civilization. In recent years, however, the idea that God is simply some kind of human wish fulfillment has gained credibility and is increasingly used in anti-Christian propaganda.

The two writers who are especially associated with this development are Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

1. Feuerbach

Feuerbach’s chief work is The Essence of Christianity (1841), in which he argues that the idea of God arises understandably, but mistakenly, from human experience.¹ Religion in general is simply the projection of human nature onto an illusory transcendent plane.² Human beings mistakenly objectify their own feeling. They interpret their experience as an awareness of God, whereas it is in fact nothing other than an experience of themselves. God is the longing of the human soul personified.

We yearn for a being that will satisfy all our desires and dreams—and, by doing so, invent such a being. For Feuerbach, the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ is nothing more than an echo of the deep human longing for immediate certainty of personal immortality. Scripture tells us that God created human beings in his image; Feuerbach declares that we have made God in our image. “Man is the beginning, the center and the end of religion.” God is a human wish fulfilled and sustained by an illusion. Christianity is a fantasy world inhabited by people who have failed to realize that when they think they are talking about God, they are simply disclosing their own innermost hopes and fears. What are we to make of this approach, which is developed in so significant a direction in the writings of Karl Marx?³

First, the context in which Feuerbach developed his ideas needs to be examined. Feuerbach was writing in the heyday of the great German liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1736–1834). Schleiermacher’s theological system rests on an analysis of human experience, supremely the experience of being dependent.⁴ Whatever the undoubted merits of this approach might be, it has the effect of making the reality of God dependent on the religious experiences of the pious believer. Theology becomes anthropology as an understanding of God is reduced to an understanding of human nature.

Feuerbach’s analysis represents a brilliant critique of this approach, which continues to be influential in Western liberal Christianity. The existence of God is held to be grounded in human experience. But, as Feuerbach emphasizes, human experience might be nothing other than experience of ourselves, rather than of God. We might simply be projecting our own experiences and calling the result “God.” Feuerbach’s approach represents a devastating critique of humanity-centered ideas of Christianity. But what of those more reliable versions of the gospel that insist that faith is a response, not to human experience, but to an encounter with the Word of God? Schleiermacher’s approach may be faithful to the biblical insight that Christianity affects our experience. But it seems to have lost sight of an entire dimension of biblical Christianity: that God confronts us in saving judgment through his Word.

The recovery of an emphasis on the Word of God outside us, rather than on our internal religious experience, has been one of the more welcome developments in the twentieth century. For example, consider the writings of Karl Barth, perhaps the sternest critic of Schleiermacher in the Western theological tradition.⁵ For Barth, the reality of God is prior to and independent of any human experience of that reality. Neither Christian faith nor theology is a response solely to some subjective human experience. They arise from an encounter with God through Christ, mediated through Scripture.

Feuerbach, interestingly, has not the slightest interest in the identity or history of Jesus Christ. For him, the character portrayed in the New Testament is simply a fantasy figure who endorses human hopes and aspirations. But traditional Christian theology portrays Christ as challenging our hopes and aspirations, bringing home the reality of sin (an idea which Feuerbach conveniently overlooks) before the joy of redemption can be fully appreciated.

Second, Feuerbach generalizes hopelessly about religions. He assumes (without any cogent argument or careful scholarship) that all the world religions have the same basic core components, which can all be explained on the basis of his atheistic projection theory. All gods, and hence all religions, are simply projections of human desires. But what of the nontheistic religions—those world religions, such as Theravada Buddhism, which explicitly deny the existence of a god?

Third, Feuerbach’s hypothesis is nothing more than a hypothesis. It does not rest on a rigorous experimental foundation but represents a series of dogmatic assertions about how we come to believe in God. His theory has not been proven and cannot be stated in a form that can either be verified or falsified. For example, he argues that the wish is father of the thought. Human beings wish for God, and their longing is satisfied by their invention of that God by a process of projection. But do all human beings long for the existence of God? Take, for example, an extermination camp commandant during the Second World War. Would there not be excellent reasons for supposing that he might hope that God does not exist, given what might await him on the Day of Judgment? And might not his atheism itself be a wish fulfillment? On the basis of Feuerbach’s analysis, it is not only Christianity, but atheism itself, that can be regarded as a projection of human hopes.

But perhaps the most serious objection relates to the logic of Feuerbach’s analysis. At the heart of Feuerbach’s atheism is his belief that God is only a projected longing. Now it is certainly true that things do not exist because we desire them. But it does not follow from this that, because we desire something, it does not exist. Yet this is the logical structure of Feuerbach’s analysis. Eduard von Hartmann pointed this out nearly a century ago when he wrote: “It is perfectly true that nothing exists merely because we wish it, but it is not true that something cannot exist if we wish it. Feuerbach’s entire critique of religion and the proof of his atheism, however, rest upon this single argument—a logical fallacy.”⁶

Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of creation, studiously ignored by Feuerbach, has an important contribution to make here. If we are indeed created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26—27), is it surprising that we should wish to relate to him? Might not a human desire for God be grounded in the fact that he brought us into being, with an inbuilt capacity to relate to him?⁷

2. Freud

Feuerbach’s basic ideas found new life in the writings of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.⁸ In fact, it is probably fair to say that the “projection” or “wish-fulfillment” theory is best known today in its Freudian variant, rather than in Feuerbach’s original version. The most powerful statement of Freud’s approach may be found in The Future of an Illusion (1927), which develops a strongly reductionist approach to religion.⁹ For Freud, religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.”¹⁰

To understand Freud at this point, we need to examine his theory of repression. These views were first made public in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a book that was initially largely ignored by the critics and the general reading public. Freud’s thesis here is that dreams are disguised fulfillments of wishes that are repressed by the consciousness (the ego) and are thus displaced into the subconscious. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904), Freud argued that these repressed wishes intrude into everyday life at a number of points. Certain neurotic symptoms, dreams, or even small slips of the tongue or pen—so-called “Freudian slips”—reveal unconscious processes.

The task of the psychotherapist is to expose the repressions that have such a negative effect on life. Psychoanalysis (a term coined by Freud) aims to lay bare the unconscious and untreated traumatic experiences, by assisting the patient to raise them up into consciousness. Through persistent questioning, the analyst can identify repressed traumas that are having a negative effect on the patient and thus enable the patient to deal with them by bringing them into the open.

By the time Freud had finished, however, psychoanalysis was no longer primarily a form of therapy, designed to liberate people from the hidden tyranny of repressed traumas. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, it had virtually become a global hypothesis, capable of explaining just about anything.¹¹ A substantial doctrinal system evolved, centering on such issues as the Oedipal complex, the theory of instincts, and narcissism. It was hardly surprising that Freud declared that religion could also be explained on the basis of this new system.¹²

The first major statement of Freud’s views on the origin of religion—which he increasingly came to refer to as “the psychogenesis of religion”—may be found in Totem and Taboo (1913). Developing his earlier observation that religious rites are similar to the obsessive actions of his neurotic patients, Freud declared that religion was basically a distorted form of an obsessional neurosis.

Freud’s views on the origin of religion need to be considered in two stages: first, its origins in the development of human history in general, and second, its origins in the case of the individual person. We may begin by dealing with his account of the psychogenesis of religion in the human species in general, as it is presented in Totem and Taboo.

Freud believes that the key elements in all religions are the veneration of a father figure (such as God or Jesus Christ), faith in the power of spirits, and a concern for proper rituals. Freud traces the origins of religion to the Oedipal complex. At some point in the history of the human race, Freud argues, the father figure had exclusive sexual rights over females in his tribe. The sons, unhappy at this state of affairs, overthrow the father figure and kill him. Thereafter, they are haunted by this secret and its guilt. Religion has its origins in this prehistorical event, has guilt as its major motivating force, and attempts to expiate this guilt through various rituals.

This explanation will strike most readers as unconvincing. Perhaps for this reason, most atheistic appeals to Freud concentrate on his account of the origins of religion in the individual. In an essay on a childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci (1910), Freud sets out his explanation of individual religion.

Psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex.¹³

The veneration of the father figure has its origins in childhood. When going through the Oedipal phase, Freud argues, the child has to deal with anxiety over the possibility of being punished by the father. The child’s response to this threat is to venerate the father, identify with him, and project what he or she knows of the father’s will in the form of the superego.

Freud explored the origins of this projection of an ideal father figure in The Future of an Illusion. Religion represents the perpetuation of a piece of infantile behavior in adult life. Religion is simply an immature response to the awareness of helplessness by going back to one’s childhood experiences of paternal care: “My father will protect me; he is in control.” Belief in a personal God is thus little more than an infantile delusion. Religion is wishful thinking.

How are we to respond to this approach to religion? We may begin by noting that Freud has unquestionably been influenced here by writings such as W. Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1898), which argued that the essence of religion was not so much a set of beliefs or doctrines but sacred actions, rites, or cults. It must be remembered that Freud was writing at a time when the ethnographical explanation of religion was taken very seriously and seemed to possess impeccable scientific credentials. That situation, however, has radically changed since then, and such simplistic and reductionist theories have generally been abandoned as unworkable. But in Freud’s day they seemed to point the way ahead. In effect, Freud aligned himself with a scholarly theory that, though significant in its own time, is no longer taken with any great seriousness.

Second, Freud’s theory of the psychogenesis of religion predates his study of religions; it does not arise out of that study. He had, in effect, already decided on his theory before beginning to interact with the literature relating to the field. Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s most distinguished and perceptive biographers, draws attention to a letter in which Freud grumbles about having to read his way through a great many tedious tomes relating to religion. It is rather pointless, he comments, since he already instinctively knows the answer to his question about the origin of religion. “I am reading books without being really interested in them, since I already know the results; my instinct tells me that.”¹⁴

Third, Freud’s theory concerning the origins of religion in the individual is, like that of Feuerbach, generally incapable of being tested. It is a hypothesis, not a fact. Freud could be said to lend psychoanalytical support to Feuerbach, but not to provide the crucial experimental data that would convert a hypothesis into a fact. On the relatively few points at which Freud’s hypothesis is capable of being tested experimentally, it is generally accepted to be wrong. For example, overlap between people’s notions of “God” and “father” seems to occur only where the father is the preferred parent, while most people tend to model God on their mother.¹⁵ Like Feuerbach’s projection theory, Freud’s psychoanalytical atheism must now be regarded as a hypothesis that has not been, and indeed cannot be, proved. The apologist has excellent reasons for challenging naive appeals to the Freudian explanation of faith, which rests upon distinctly shaky foundations.

So be confident on this point. Press home those hard questions. Where do Freud’s ideas come from—hard experimental evidence, or his own atheist prejudices? Where is the historical evidence that Christianity owes its origins to a father complex? Can we accept such a deeply sexist approach to religion? And why should Christians be expected to abandon their faith because of Feuerbach’s projection theory, a hypothesis that in the end, rests upon a logical error?

B. SUFFERING

Suffering poses many problems for faith. At one level, it poses a knotty riddle for the theologian, who has to explain why its existence does not compromise Christian faith. It may reasonably be argued that to treat suffering as a logical, philosophical or theological difficulty is to miss the real point—the emotional and pastoral issues raised for those who are suffering and for those who care for them. This is a fair point, but its importance must not be overstated. Suffering is a problem for Christian apologetics primarily because it appears to demonstrate the logical incoherence of Christianity. The shape of our discussion of the problem of suffering is thus a response to this agenda, set by critics of the Christian faith.

The problem raised for the apologist by the existence of evil or suffering is usually stated in terms of three propositions:

It is often suggested that these three statements are inconsistent: The omnipotence and goodness of God are not consistent with the existence of suffering or evil in the world. All three statements cannot be true at one and the same time. The reality of suffering and evil cannot be denied. It is an experiential reality. Therefore, either God is not allpowerful or he is not good. And so the logical coherence of the Christian faith seems to unravel. A fatal logical flaw has been exposed. Or has it?

Let us begin by considering the history of this question. From the time of Plato onward, the existence of pain, suffering, and evil in the world has been recognized and acknowledged. Christian theology has long learned to live with the reality of pain and evil. It is not as if suffering was a well-kept secret, whose existence has suddenly been sprung on a world that fervently believed that it did not exist. But Christian writers prior to the seventeenth century did not believe that suffering posed any serious threat to Christian belief. Indeed, if I may be allowed a personal reflection, I spent many years working through most of the major works on Christian theology written between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and I cannot recall any of them treating the reality of suffering as a serious obstacle to Christian faith.

Why has the situation changed? The answer lies in a dramatic development that took place during the seventeenth century and that may be argued to lie at the root of modern atheism.¹⁶ A number of writers on Christian apologetics, such as Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne, argued that the best defense of Christianity was to be provided by philosophy. Instead of concentrating on the significance of Jesus Christ for the question of whether God existed and what he was like, an appeal should be made directly and exclusively to reason. Instead of an appeal to the Christian experience of the Holy Spirit, an appeal was to be made to nature. Reason and nature were thus the criteria for the credibility of Christianity. The end result was inevitable. “Christianity entered into the defense of the existence of the Christian God without appeal to anything Christian.”¹⁷

Under the influence of Descartes, this approach to apologetics would prove to have devastating results. The enormous emphasis that came to be placed on the perfection of God by Descartes was compromised by the undeniable fact of the existence of evil and suffering. How could a perfect being allow such imperfection to exist? Yet the “god” of Descartes is not the God of Christianity—it is simply a philosophical idea. “The god of the philosophers” is basically little more than a perfect, ideal, and abstract being, constructed out of the distilled elements of human benevolence. The characteristics of this god are primarily its omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness. Its credibility—but not that of the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:3)—is instantly compromised by suffering.

As Alasdair MacIntyre remarks, “the God in whom the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century.”¹⁸ The god of philosophical theology is a human invention, a product of our reason; the God to whom Christian faith and theology respond is a living and loving being, who makes himself known to us through Christ, Scripture, and personal experience—including, as we shall see, suffering.

Why this digression into history? Because it demonstrates that suffering has only recently been seen as “a final and sufficient ground for skepticism and for the abandonment of Christianity,” whereas in the past it was viewed as no more than a difficulty, “an incentive to inquiry but not a ground for disbelief.”¹⁹ It is only since the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on universal and rational concepts of divinity and justification of beliefs, that the problem of suffering has come to be seen as grounds for disbelief. But Enlightenment rationalism is in retreat.²⁰ Perhaps we shall see a return to the older approach to suffering in its wake.

Second, let us consider the logic of the problem posed by suffering. Let us return to the three propositions noted earlier.

a. God is omnipotent and omniscient.

b. God is completely good.

c. There is suffering and evil in the world.

At least one further premise must be added to this list if a logical inconsistency is to result. As things stand, there is no inconsistency. There would, however, be a contradiction if either of the following were to be added to the list:²¹

d. A good and omnipotent God could eliminate suffering entirely.

e. There could not be morally sufficient reasons for God permitting suffering.

If either of these propositions could be shown to be correct, a major and potentially fatal flaw in the Christian conception of God would have been exposed. But they have not. And the apologist, having been asked some hard questions by the critics of Christianity, has a right to ask some in reply. How do the critics know that there cannot be morally sufficient reasons for God permitting suffering? Are they not putting themselves in the position so devastatingly criticized by David Hume—that of declaring that a better world than that which we know is possible?²²

We may explore the issue of suffering further by considering some arguments developed by C. S. Lewis in his celebrated book The Problem of Pain. Lewis begins by stating the problem as follows:

“If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both.” This is the problem of pain in its simplest form.²³

But Lewis is not content to leave the critic of Christianity holding the moral high ground. He demands that this critic clarify what is meant by those terms “omnipotence” and “goodness.” Too often, Lewis argues, such critics bandy these terms about without really thinking them through.

What does it mean to say that God is omnipotent? Lewis argues, with considerable skill, that it does not mean that God can do anything he likes. Once God has opted to do certain things, or to behave in a certain manner, then other possibilities are excluded.

If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire a meaning because we prefix to them the two other words: “God can.” It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives, not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.²⁴

Lewis then argues that suffering cannot be regarded as arising from a lack of divine omnipotence. Far from it. If God creates a material universe and gives creatures freedom of action, suffering follows on as a matter of course. Having exercised his omnipotence in creating the universe and endowing his creatures with freedom, he cannot block the outcome of that free universe—suffering. “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.”²⁵

Lewis then moves on to consider the implications of that deceptively simple word goodness. Too often, Lewis insists, the meaning of that word is assumed to be self-evident, when in fact it requires considerable thought. For Lewis, goodness is the natural outcome and expression of the love of God. Is suffering inconsistent with a loving God? Lewis insists that we pay attention to the term love and avoid reading into it trivial and sentimental human parodies of the divine reality. We must learn to discover and appreciate divine love as it really is, instead of confusing or identifying it with our own ideas on the matter. God tells us what his love is like. There is no need for us to guess about it. The love of God, Lewis thus argues,

is not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels himself responsible for the comfort of his guest, but the consuming fire itself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.²⁶

The love of God, then, is not some happy-go-lucky outlook on life that makes hedonism its goal. It is a divine love that proceeds from God and leads back to God, that embraces suffering as a consequence of the greater gifts of life and freedom. Real life implies suffering. Were God to take suffering away from us, he would take away that precious gift of life itself. “The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is insoluble only so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love,’ and look on things as if man was the centre of them.”²⁷

So what purpose might suffering serve? There are several echoes of Luther’s ideas of the “strange work of God (opus alienum Dei)”—an idea we explored earlier²⁸—in Lewis’s discussion of the mysterious yet creative role of suffering within the providence of God. Suffering brings home to us the distressing fact of our mortality, too easily ignored. It reminds us of our frailty and hints of the coming of death. “It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”²⁹ In short, it creates a climate in which our thoughts are gently directed toward God, whom we might otherwise ignore. “God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”³⁰ Painful though Lewis’s point may be, there is enough truth in it to make us take it seriously. All must die, and any worldview that cannot cope with death is fatally deficient. Suffering gently prods our consciousness and forces us to contemplate the unpalatable but real fact of our future death and how our outlook on life relates to this sobering thought. It can sow the seeds of doubt about existing outlooks and lay the foundation for a new way of thinking, living, and hoping.

But the apologist cannot be content to remain on the defensive forever. At some point, the full relevance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ must be brought home to the more philosophically minded critics of Christianity.³¹ To discuss suffering without reference to the suffering of Christ is a theological and spiritual absurdity. God suffered in Christ. He knows what it is like to experience pain. He has traveled down the road of pain, abandonment, suffering, and death—a road they called Calvary. God is not like some alleged hero with feet of clay, who demands that others suffer while he himself remains aloof from the world of pain. He has passed through the shadow of suffering himself. The God in whom Christians believe and hope is a God who himself suffered and who, by having done so, transfigures the sufferings of his people.

Some say that nothing could ever be adequate recompense for suffering in this world. But how do they know? Have they spoken to anyone who has suffered and subsequently been raised to glory? Have they been through this experience themselves? One of the greatest tragedies of much writing about human suffering this century has been its crude use of rhetoric. “Nothing can ever compensate for suffering!” rolls off the tongue with the greatest of ease. It has a certain oratorical force, especially when delivered by a skilled speaker. It discourages argument. But again, how do those who make that claim know that? Paul believed passionately that the sufferings of the present life—and he endured many—would be outweighed by the glory that is to come (Rom. 8:18). How do they know that he is wrong and that they are right?

The situation would be rather different if we could listen to someone who suffers a pitiful and painful death and then returns to us from the dead. He would speak with authority and insight on this matter. Or if God himself were to declare that the memory of suffering and pain were to be wiped out. And the wonder of the gospel is that Christ has died and risen again. God has indeed spoken on such matters.

It is here that the resurrection of Christ becomes of central importance. The Resurrection allows the suffering of Christ to be seen in the perspective of eternity. Suffering is not pointless but leads to glory. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ may, through the resurrection of Christ, know what awaits them at the end of history. It is for this reason that Paul is able to declare with such confidence that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18). This is no groundless hope, no arbitrary aspiration. It is a hardheaded realism, grounded in the reality of the suffering and resurrection of Christ and in the knowledge that faith binds believers to Christ and guarantees that we shall share in his heritage.

Christianity has been unequivocal on this point, and its voice must be heard. The sufferings of this earth are for real. They are painful. God is deeply pained by our suffering, just as we are shocked, grieved, and mystified by the suffering of our family and friends. But that is only half of the story. The other half must be told. It is natural that our attention should be fixed on what we experience and feel here and now. But faith demands that we raise our sights and look ahead to what lies ahead. We may suffer as we journey—but where are we going? What lies ahead?

The word heaven seems inadequate to describe the final goal of faith. Perhaps we should speak more expansively of the hope of eternal life, of the renewing of our frail and mortal bodies in the likeness of Christ’s glorious resurrection body, and of standing, redeemed, in the presence of God. But however we choose to describe it, the promise and hope of our transformation and renewal, and of the glorious transfiguration of suffering, are an integral part of the Christian faith. This glorious thread is woven so deeply into the fabric of our faith that it cannot possibly be removed.

The language of “prizes” and “rewards” is helpful in many ways. It reminds us of the need to complete the race in order that we may receive the athlete’s crown as a prize (2 Tim. 4:7–8). It reminds us of the need for training and discipline in the Christian life in order that we may have the stamina we need to persevere. But this way of thinking about the relation between suffering and heaven can also be misleading. It suggests that heaven is thrown in as some kind of consolation in order to keep us going here below. This danger is avoided if we pay more attention to the intimacy of the connection between suffering and glory.

When a seed is planted in the ground, it begins to grow and will eventually bear fruit. Can we say that its bearing fruit is a reward for its growth? No. We would say that there is an organic and natural connection between one and the other. One flows naturally into the other. It is not a question of declaring, in some arbitrary way, that a seed that grows will be rewarded with fruit, or that the prize for growth is fruit. Rather, germination, growth, and the bearing of fruit are all part of the same overall process. They are all stages in the natural cycle of growth and development. One follows naturally from the other.

The New Testament is unequivocal. Suffering and glorification are part of, but represent different stages in, the same process of growth in the Christian life. We are adopted into the family of God, we suffer, and we are glorified (Rom. 8:14–18). This is not an accidental relationship. They are all intimately connected within the overall pattern of Christian growth and progress toward the ultimate goal of the Christian life—being finally united with God and remaining with him forever.

We are thus presented with a glorious vision of a new realm of existence. It is a realm in which suffering has been defeated. It is a realm pervaded by the refreshing presence of God, from which the presence and power of sin have finally been excluded. It lies ahead, and though we have yet to enter into it, we can catch a hint of its fragrance and hear its music in the distance. It is this hope that keeps us going in this life of sadness, which must end in death.

But is it for real? Is this hope anything more than wishful thinking, a pitiful aspiration on the part of human beings who long for a better world than that which they now know and inhabit? We are all familiar with the tedious taunt of believing in “pie in the sky when you die.” The implication would seem to be that Christians are so unrealistic about life that they need such fictional morsels to keep them going, where others can cope with the grim realities of life unaided.

Karl Marx regarded this outlook on life as little more than nauseating sentimentality.³² The promise of the final removal of suffering and pain in the kingdom of God distracted us from working for their elimination here and now. To use Marx’s famous phrase, Christianity is “an opiate for the masses,” a kind of anesthetic or narcotic that dulls our senses and prevents us from changing the world for the better.

Marx has a point. So great is the attractiveness of the Christian hope that it is natural to become fascinated by it and to want to focus our thoughts on it. It is all too easy to become so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly use. If Marx’s criticism serves any useful purpose, it is to remind us that we have a Christian duty to work for the transformation of the world as we know it, removing unnecessary causes of suffering. The vision that is held before us is that of trying to bring the peace of heaven to the turmoil of the earth. The Christian hope ought to be a stimulus rather than a sedative. It should spur us to action within the world, rather than encourage us to neglect it.

But when all is said and done, Marx’s comment merely reinforces the power and importance of the Christian hope. It does enable us to cope with suffering in the present life. Just as a soldier fights on toward the end of a long war, sustained by the knowledge that peace will one day come and he will be reunited with his family and friends, so the Christian continues his pilgrimage, sustained by the knowledge of the joys that await him. Marx is a reluctant, yet eloquent, witness to the power of the Christian hope to enable us to cope with the dark side of life.

Furthermore, Marx evades the vital question concerning the Christian hope: Is it true? If it is, Christians can hardly be criticized for believing in it. Either it is true, or it is not. Which is it? Let us be absolutely clear on this. If the Christian hope of heaven is an illusion, based on lies, then it must be abandoned as misleading and deceitful. But if it is true, it must be embraced and allowed to transfigure our entire understanding of the place of suffering in life.

Just as suffering is real, so are the promises of God and the hope of eternal life. This is no spiritual anesthetic, designed merely to enable us to cope with life’s sorrows while they last. The death and resurrection of Christ, linked with the giving of the Holy Spirit, are pledges, sureties, and guarantees that what has been promised will one day be brought to glorious realization. For the moment we struggle and suffer in sadness mingled with bewilderment. But one day all that will be changed for the people of God:

God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away (Rev. 21:3–4 RSV).

In that hope, we go forward into life in faith. We may not know exactly where that faith will lead us. But we do know that, wherever we go, the God of all compassion goes ahead of us and journeys with us, consoling and reassuring us, until that day when we shall see him face to face, and know him just as he knows us.

C. RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

One of the most perceptive analysts of the consequences of pluralism for the Christian churches is Lesslie Newbigin, who is able to draw on his substantial firsthand experience of Christian life in India as he reflects on what pluralism means—and does not mean!—for contemporary Christianity. In his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin remarks:

It has become a commonplace to say that we live in a pluralist society—not merely a society which is in fact plural in the variety of cultures, religions and lifestyles which it embraces, but pluralist in the sense that this plurality is celebrated as things to be approved and cherished.³³

Newbigin here makes a distinction between pluralism as a fact of life and pluralism as an ideology—that is, the belief that pluralism is to be encouraged and desired, and that normative claims to truth are to be censured as imperialist and divisive. With the former, there can be no arguing. The Christian proclamation has always taken place in a pluralist world, in competition with rival religious and intellectual convictions.

Ancient Israel was acutely aware that its faith was not shared by its neighbors. The existence of other religions was simply a fact of life for the Israelites. It caused them no great difficulties, in that they believed that theirs happened to be right, whereas others were wrong. The same pattern emerges in the New Testament. From the first days of its existence, Christianity has recognized the existence of other religions and the challenge they posed. Initially, Christianity faced a challenge from Judaism, which was rapidly replaced by the challenge of Roman civil religion, various forms of Greek religion of late antiquity, gnosticism, and various pagan mystery cults.

Christianity was born amid religious pluralism; that pluralism has now reemerged, both as a social reality and a theological issue, in the West. In recent decades, widespread immigration from the Indian subcontinent to the United Kingdom, from former French colonies in Africa to France, and from the nations of the Asian Pacific Rim to Australia and the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, has brought the issue home to Western society, which had hitherto been shielded from it. The issues raised by the existence of other religions are considerable and would merit books in themselves. This section will identify and discuss only some of the more significant ones.

The rise of religious pluralism can directly be related to the collapse of the Enlightenment idea of universal knowledge. Often there is a crude attempt to divert attention from the collapse of the Enlightenment vision by implying that religious pluralism represents a new and unanswerable challenge to Christianity itself. The Princeton philosopher Diogenes Allen rightly dismisses this as a spurious claim:

Many have been driven to relativism by the collapse of the Enlightenment’s confidence in the power of reason to provide foundations for our truth-claims and to achieve finality in our search for truth in the various disciplines. Much of the distress concerning pluralism and relativism which is voiced today springs from a crisis in the secular mentality of modern western culture, not from a crisis in Christianity itself.³⁴

Yet these relativistic preconceptions have become deeply ingrained in secular society, often with the assumption that they are to the detriment of Christian faith. For the apologist, the central issue is, Given that there are so many religions in the marketplace, how can Christianity claim to be true?

Let us note a difficulty here. The word religion needs further examination. In his classic but highly problematic work, The Golden Bough (1890), Sir James Frazer made the fundamental point that “there is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy everyone must obviously be impossible.” Yet largely because of the homogenizing tendencies of modern liberalism, there has recently been a determined effort to reduce all religions to the same basic phenomenon.

But who makes the rules that determine what is religion? The rules of this game determine the outcome—so who decides on them? Underlying much recent Western liberal discussion of “the religions” is a naive assumption that “religion” is a genus, an agreed-upon category. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. John Milbank, in an important study, makes the point that the “assumption about a religious genus” is central to

the more recent mode of encounter as dialogue, but it would be a mistake to imagine that it arose simultaneously among all the participants as the recognition of an evident truth. On the contrary, it is clear that the other religions were taken by Christian thinkers to be species of the genus “religion,” because these thinkers systematically subsumed alien cultural phenomena under categories which comprise western notions of what constitutes religious thought and practice. These false categorizations have often been accepted by western-educated representatives of the other religions themselves, who are unable to resist the politically imbued rhetorical force of western discourse.³⁵

We must therefore be suspicious of the naive assumption that “religion” is a well-defined category that can be surgically distinguished from “culture” as a whole.

It is important to see that a cultural issue is often brought into this debate: It is implied that to defend Christianity is to belittle non-Christian religions, which is unacceptable in a multicultural society. Especially to those of liberal political convictions, the multicultural agenda demands that religions, in order to avoid the dangers of imperialism and triumphalism, should not be permitted to make truth-claims. Indeed, there seems to be a widespread perception that the rejection of religious pluralism entails intolerance or unacceptable claims to exclusivity. In effect, the liberal political agenda dictates that all religions should be treated on an equal footing. It is but a small step from this political judgment to the theological declaration that all religions are the same. But is there any reason for progressing from the entirely laudable and acceptable demand that we should respect religions other than our own to the more radical demand that we regard them all as equally valid manifestations of some eternal or “spiritual” dimension to life?

In its most extreme form, this view results in the claim that all religions lead to God. But this cannot be taken seriously when some world religions are avowedly nontheistic. A religion can hardly lead to God if it explicitly denies the existence of a god or any gods. We therefore need to restate the question in terms of “ultimate reality” or “truth.” Thus refined, this position might be stated as follows. Religion is often determined by the circumstances of one’s birth. An Indian is likely to be a Hindu; an Arab is likely to be a Muslim. Therefore, it is argued, all religions must be equal paths to the truth.

This makes truth a function of birth. If I were to be born into Nazi Germany, I would likely be a Nazi—and this makes Nazism true? If I had been born in ancient Rome, I probably would have shared its polytheism; if I had been born in modern Arabia, I would be a monotheist. So are both polytheism and monotheism true? No other intellectual discipline would accept such a superficial approach to truth. Why accept it here? It seems to rest on an entirely laudable wish to allow that everyone is right, which ends up destroying the notion of truth itself. Consider the two propositions:

Is proposition b in any way implied by proposition a? For the form of liberalism committed to this approach, mere existence of a religious idea appears to be a guarantor of its truth! Yet no one seems prepared to fight for the truth content of defunct religions, such as classical polytheism—perhaps because there is no one alive who is committed to them, whose views need to be respected in a multicultural situation.

The fatal weakness of this approach usually leads to a modified version, which can be stated thus: “Any view that is held with sincerity may be regarded as true.” I might thus be a Nazi, a Satanist, or a passionate believer in the flatness of the earth. My sincerity is a guarantee of the truth. It would follow that if someone sincerely believes that modern Europe would be a better place if six million Jews were to be placed in gas chambers, the sincerity of those convictions allow that view to be accepted as true. British philosopher of religion John Hick summarizes the absurdity of this view: “To say that whatever is sincerely believed and practised is, by definition true, would be the end of all critical discrimination, both intellectual and moral.”³⁶

It is therefore more than a little ironic that the most significant advocate of the pluralist “truth-in-all-religions” approach is this same John Hick, who argues that the same basic infinite divine reality lies at the experiential roots of all religions—but that this reality is experienced and expressed in different ways in the various religions. “Their differing experiences of that reality, interacting over the centuries with the different thought-forms of different cultures, have led to an increasing differentiation and contrasting elaboration.”³⁷ (A similar outlook is associated with English Deism in the late seventeenth century, which held that there was originally one universal rational religion, which gradually became corrupted and evolved into the various religions of the world. There is no historical evidence for this dogmatic assumption.)

This approach thus suggests that the various religions may be understood to complement one another. In other words, truth does not lie in an “either-or” but in a “both-and” approach: All differences within religions are “differences in perception, not reality.” This naturally leads to the idea that dialogue between religions can lead to an enhancement of truth, in that the limited perspective of one religion can be complemented by the differing perspectives of another. Since all religions are held to relate to the same reality, “dialogue” thus constitutes a privileged mode of access to truth.

On the basis of Hick’s homogenizing approach, no genuinely conflicting truth-claims can occur. They are ruled out of order on a priori grounds. By definition, religions can only complement, not contradict, each other. In practice, Hick appears to contradict himself here, frequently declaring that “exclusive” approaches to religions are wrong. For example, he styles the traditional “salvation through Christ alone” statements of the 1960 Congress on World Mission as “ridiculous”—where, by his own criteria, the most stinging criticism that could be directed at them is that they represent a “difference in perception.” The inherent absurdity of Hick’s refusal to take an evaluative position in relation to other religions is compromised by his eagerness to adopt such a position in relation to versions of Christianity that threaten his outlook, both on account of their numerical strength and their noninclusive theologies.

When all is said and done, and when all differences in expression arising from cultural and intellectual development are taken into account, Hick must be challenged forcefully concerning his crudely homogenizing approach to the world religions. It is absurd to say that a religion that says that there is a God complements a religion that declares, with equal vigor, that there is not a God (and both types of religion exist).³⁸ If the religious believer actually believes something, then disagreement is inevitable—and proper. As the distinguished American philosopher Richard Rorty remarked, nobody “except the occasional cooperative freshman” really believes that “two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good.”³⁹ Hick has predetermined that there shall not be differences among the religions, and there the matter rests—for him. Where contradiction arises, we are confronted with cases of special pleading, or death by a thousand qualifications, as Hick argues, by introducing increasingly implausible subsidiary hypotheses that so qualify his original views as to render them virtually devoid of meaning. Having dogmatically determined that all religions possess the same core structure, Hick ruthlessly forces them into the same mold—a mold that owes nothing to the outlooks of the world’s religions and everything to the liberal cultural agenda that so obviously inspires Hick’s theories.

Hick’s defense of the homogeneity of all religions often seems to rest on a refusal to allow that there are decisive differences between religions, even where these obviously exist. For instance, the Hindu practice of bhakti cannot be described as (and thus assimilated to) “worship” when it so clearly relates to a network of ideas centering on the systematic appeasement of potentially vengeful deities or seeking favors from them.

Furthermore, the notion of “truth through dialogue” has merit if, and only if, the dialogue is between parties who are describing the same thing. Dialogue, from its Socratic form onward, rests on the assumption that participants share a common subject matter and that certain truths can be agreed concerning this subject. Through the process of dialogue, each participant comes to share an increasingly sympathetic understanding of the viewpoint of others—and by doing so, comes to a deeper understanding of the central subject area itself. But it has never been shown that the different world religions share a common subject matter. It has often been asserted that they do, but there is a world of difference between the assertions of those with vested liberal cultural precommitments and the disinterested comparison of religions.

One of the most serious difficulties that arises here relates to the fact that, on the basis of Hick’s model, it is not individual religions that have access to truth; it is the Western liberal pluralist, who insists that each religion must be seen in the context of others before it can be evaluated. As many have pointed out, this means that the Western liberal doctrine of religious pluralism is defined as the only valid standpoint for evaluating individual religions. Hick has set at the center of his system of religions a vague and undefined idea of “the Eternal One,” which seems to be little more than a vague libera idea of divinity, carefully defined (or, more accurately, deliberately not defined, to avoid the damage that precision entails) to include at least something from all of the major world religions Hick feels is worth including.

To develop this important point, let us consider a well-worn analogy concerning the relationship between the religions. Lesslie Newbigin describes it and makes a vitally important observation:

In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant…the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of it. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmations of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind, there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth, which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality that relativizes all the claims of the religions.⁴⁰

Newbigin brings out with clarity the arrogance of the liberal claim to be able to see all the religions from the standpoint of one who sees the full truth. The liberal pluralist is the king; the unfortunate evangelical is the blindfolded beggar. Or so the pluralist would have us believe. Perhaps a more responsible—and considerably less arrogant—approach would be to suggest that we are all, pluralists included, blind beggars, to whom God graciously makes himself known.

But what framework is to be used for understanding the religions? Elephants have limited potential in this respect. John Hick and Wilfrid Cantwell Smith object to interpreting both the place and the contents of other religious traditions from a Christian point of view. But they seem to miss the point that they have to be interpreted from some interpretative standpoint—and if they have excluded, as a matter of principle, a specifically Christian viewpoint, they are obliged to adopt one which, by definition, is non-Christian. Furthermore, Hick appears to labor under the misunderstanding that where Christian frameworks are biased, those of liberalism are neutral and disinterested. Yet one of the more significant developments in the recent sociology of knowledge has been the realization that there is no neutral point from which a religion or culture may be evaluated; all vantage points imply a valuation. Hick and Cantwell Smith naively assume that their liberal pluralist approach is “detached” or “objective,” whereas it is actually nothing of the sort.

To give his case more academic credibility, Hick argues that there is a common core structure to all religions. The various religions represent equally “valid” and “real” experiences and apprehensions of the one divine reality. (Note that the fact that there is only one divine reality is assumed to require no proof—but polytheism cannot be dismissed as easily as this.) On the basis of this assumption he declares that all religions “are fundamentally alike in exhibiting a soteriological structure. That is to say, they are all concerned with salvation/ liberation/enlightenment/fulfillment.”⁴¹ It may reasonably be observed, however, that these concepts of salvation are conceived in such radically different ways that only someone who was doggedly determined, as a matter of principle, to treat them as aspects of the same greater whole would have sufficient intellectual flexibility to do so. Do Christianity and Satanism really have the same understandings of salvation? Hick would probably reply that Satanism does not count as a religion, thus neatly illustrating that his theory works for those religions he has preselected on the basis of their ability to fit his pluralist mold. A more neutral observer, relieved of the necessity of insisting that all religions of the world are basically the same, might reasonably suggest that these religions do not merely offer different ways of achieving salvation—they offer different understandings of salvation altogether. The Rastafarian vision of a paradise in which blacks are served by whites; the old Norse concept of Valhalla; the Buddhist vision of nirvana; the Christian hope of resurrection to eternal life—all are so obviously different. How can all the routes to salvation be equally “valid” (a favorite liberal Modewort) when the goals to be reached in such different ways are so obviously unrelated?

The idea that all religions are the same, or that they all lead to the same God, is thus little more than an unsubstantiated assertion that requires a refusal to acknowledge that there are genuine and significant differences among the religions. It is a kind of fundamentalism in its own right. Only in Western liberal circles would such an idea be taken seriously. (It is not accepted by any Muslim writer I have spoken to.) But what would the Christian apologist wish to say in response about the place of Christianity among the religions?

Michael Green, drawing on his considerable experience as an evangelist and the resources of much recent writing on the relation between Christianity and other religions, perhaps says all that needs to be said:

No faith would enjoy wide currency if it did not contain much that was true. Other faiths therefore constitute a preparation for the gospel, and Christ comes not so much to destroy as to fulfill. The convert will not feel that he has lost his background, but that he has discovered that to which, at its best, it pointed. That is certainly the attitude I have found among friends converted to Christ from Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. They are profoundly grateful for what they have learned in those cultures, but are thrilled beyond words to have discovered a God who has stooped to their condition in coming as the man of Nazareth, and who has rescued them from guilt and alienation by his cross and resurrection.⁴²

The Christian attitude to other religions rests firmly on the doctrines of creation and redemption. Because God created the world, we expect to find traces of him throughout his creation; because God redeemed the world through Christ, we expect to look to Christ for the salvation that the Christian gospel promises. The Lausanne Covenant (1974) states this foundational belief in the uniqueness of Christ by rejecting

as derogatory to Christ and the Gospel every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions and theologies. Jesus Christ, being himself the only God-man, who gave himself as the only ransom for sinners, is the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name by which we must be saved.

John Calvin made a forceful distinction between the knowledge of God the creator (a universal knowledge, available to all peoples, including Christians), and knowledge of God the redeemer (a specifically Christian knowledge of God). The Lausanne Covenant states this: “We recognize that all men have some knowledge of God through his general revelation in nature. But we deny that this can save.”

The question therefore becomes: How can we be saved? Who is our savior? And it is here that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, grounded in his resurrection, becomes of central importance. No other person has ever risen from the dead and conquered death. In no other person does God become incarnate. So important are these issues that we shall consider them and their implications in the two sections that follow.

Yet a point must be noted before proceeding. The pluralist agenda has certain important theological and apologetic consequences. It is a simple matter of fact that traditional Christian theology does not lend itself particularly well to the homogenizing agenda of religious pluralists. The suggestion that all religions are more or less talking about vaguely the same thing finds itself in difficulty when it comes to certain essentially Christian ideas—most notably, the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. These distinctive doctrines are embarrassing to those who wish to debunk what they term the “myth of Christian uniqueness.” We are invited, on the weak and lazy grounds of pragmatism, to abandon those doctrines in order that the pluralist agenda might be advanced.

In response to this pressure, two major Christological and theological developments may be noted. First, doctrines such as the Incarnation, which imply a high profile of identification between Jesus Christ and God, are discarded in favor of various degree Christologies, which are more amenable to the reductionist program of liberalism. Second, the idea that God is in any sense disclosed or defined Christologically is set aside because of its theologically momentous implications for the identity and significance of Jesus Christ—which liberal pluralism finds an embarrassment. Let us consider these two points in more detail.

First, the idea of the Incarnation is rejected, often dismissively, as a myth. Thus John Hick and his collaborators reject the Incarnation on various logical and common-sense counts—yet they fail to deal with the question of why Christians should have developed this doctrine in the first place. There is an underlying agenda to this dismissal of the Incarnation, and a central part of that agenda is the elimination of the sheer distinctiveness of Christianity. A sharp distinction is thus drawn between the historical person of Jesus Christ and the principles he is alleged to represent. Paul Knitter is but one of a small galaxy of pluralist writers concerned to drive a wedge between the “Jesus-event” (unique to Christianity) and the “Christ-principle” (accessible to all religious traditions and expressed in their own distinctive but equally valid ways).

It is significant that the pluralist agenda forces its advocates to adopt heretical views of Christ in order to meet its needs. In an effort to fit Jesus into the mold of the “great religious teachers of humanity” category, the Ebionite heresy has been revived and made politically correct. Jesus is one of the religious options available; he is one of the great human teachers of religion.

Second, the idea that God is in some manner made known through Christ has been dismissed. Captivated by the image of a “Copernican Revolution” (probably one of the most overworked and misleading phrases in recent writings in this field), pluralists demand that Christians move away from a discussion of Christ to a discussion of God—yet they fail to recognize that the “God of the Christians” (Tertullian) might be rather different from other divinities and that the doctrine of the Trinity spells out the nature of that distinction. The loose and vague talk about “God” or “Reality” found in much pluralist writing is not a result of theological sloppiness or confusion. It is a considered response to the recognition that for Christians to talk about the Trinity is to speak about a specific God (not just “deity” in general), who has chosen to make himself known in and through Jesus Christ. It is a deliberate rejection of authentically and distinctively Christian insights into God, in order to suggest that Christianity, to rework a phrase of John Toland, is simply the republication of the religion of nature.

Yet human religious history shows that natural human ideas of the number, nature, and character of the gods are notoriously vague and muddled. The Christian emphasis is not on the need to worship gods in general (Israel’s strictures against Canaanite religion being especially important here), but on the need to worship a God who has chosen to make himself known. The doctrine of the Trinity defines and defends the distinctiveness—no, more than that: the uniqueness—of the “God of the Christians.” The New Testament gives a further twist to this development through its language about “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” locating the identity of God in the actions and passion of Jesus Christ. To put it bluntly: God is Christologically disclosed.

This point is important given the obvious confusion within the pages of The Myth of Christian Uniqueness concerning the nature and identity of the god(s) or goddess(es) of the pluralists. Pluralism, it seems to be, possesses a certain tendency toward self-destruction in that there is, if I can put it like this, “a plurality of pluralisms.” For example, a vigorously polemical defense of “pluralism” (a word used frequently throughout its pages) may be found in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. According to the authors, Christianity has to be seen in a “pluralistic context as one of the great world faiths, one of the streams of religious life through which human beings can be savingly related to that ultimate Reality Christians know as the heavenly Father.” Yet having agreed that Christianity does not provide absolute or superior knowledge of God, the contributors proceed to display such divergence over the nature of God that it becomes far from clear that they are talking about the same thing.

But there is a more important point here. Pluralism is fatally vulnerable to the charge that it reaches an accommodation between Christianity and other religious traditions by willfully discarding every distinctive Christian doctrine traditionally regarded as identity-giving and identity-preserving (to say nothing of the reductionist liberties taken with the other religious traditions). The “Christianity” that is declared to be homogeneous with all other “higher religions” would not be recognizable as such to most of its adherents. It would be a theologically, Christologically, and soteriologically reduced version of the real thing.

It is thus not Christianity that is being related to other world faiths. It is little more than a parody and caricature of this living faith, grounded in the presuppositions and agendas of Western liberalism rather than in the self-revelation of God. And it is related to theologically reduced and homogenized versions of other living religions. Dialogue turns out to involve the sacrifice of integrity. The identity of Christianity is inextricably linked with the uniqueness of Christ, which is in turn grounded in the Resurrection and Incarnation. We may now turn to consider these.

D. THE RESURRECTION

If Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, never to die again, he would instantly stand out as being distinct from every other person in history. There would be something dramatically different about him. He would be unique. The only question remaining would relate to the nature of his uniqueness—a question that Christian theology has answered in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Yet the apologist will be aware that the resurrection of Christ proves a major stumbling block to many people.⁴³ The reasons for this center on three issues: the improbability of the event, the unreliability of the New Testament witnesses to the event, and its irrelevance to life.

The New Testament is permeated by the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The consequences of this event, both for the personal experience of the first Christians and for their understanding of the identity and significance of Jesus himself, dominate the horizons of the New Testament writers. The astonishing developments in the perceived status and identity of Jesus took place on the basis of their firm belief that the one who was crucified had been raised by God from the dead. The cross was interpreted from the standpoint of the Resurrection, and Jesus’ teaching was accorded reverence because of who the Resurrection disclosed him to be. Jesus was worshiped and adored as the living Lord who would come again—and not merely revered as a dead super-rabbi. The tendency to “think of Jesus Christ as of God” (2 Clement 1:1) is already evident in the New Testament. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the most important developments in the Christian understanding of the identity and significance of Jesus Christ took place, not during the patristic period as a result of the questionable influence of Greek metaphysics, but within twenty years of the Crucifixion itself.

Of course, modern critics of the Resurrection argue, it was easy for the first Christians to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. After all, belief in resurrections was a commonplace at the time. The first Christians may have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus was raised from the dead when something rather different actually happened. Although the crude charges of yesteryear (for example, that the disciples stole the corpse of Jesus from its tomb, or that they were the victims of mass hysteria) are still occasionally encountered, they have generally been superseded by more subtle theories. Thus, to note the most important, the Resurrection was really a symbolic event, which the first Christians confused with a historical event due to their uncritical presuppositions.

In response to this, however, it may be pointed out that neither of the two general beliefs of the time bear any resemblance to the resurrection of Jesus. The Sadducees denied the idea of a resurrection altogether (a fact Paul was able to exploit at an awkward moment: Acts 23:6–8) while the majority expectation was of a general resurrection on the last day, at the end of history itself. The sheer oddness of the Christian proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus in human history, at a definite time and place, is all too easily overlooked by modern critics, even though it was obvious at the time. The unthinkable appeared to have happened and, for that very reason, demanded careful attention. Far from merely fitting into the popular expectation of the pattern of resurrection, what happened to Jesus actually contradicted it. The sheer novelty of the Christian position at the time has been obscured by two thousand years’ experience of the Christian understanding of the Resurrection—yet at the time it was wildly unorthodox and radical.

To dismiss the Christian understanding of the resurrection of Jesus because it allegedly conformed to contemporary expectations is clearly unacceptable. The idea that the resurrection of Jesus can be explained as some sort of wish fulfillment on the part of the disciples also strains the imagination somewhat. Why should the disciples have responded to the catastrophe of Jesus’ death by making the hitherto unprecedented suggestion that he had been raised from the dead? The history of Israel is littered with the corpses of pious Jewish martyrs, none of whom were ever thought of as having been raised from the dead in such a manner.

The second attack on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus mounted in recent years is based on the parallels between pagan myths of dying and rising gods and the resurrection of Jesus. In the first part of the present century, a substantial number of scholarly works drew attention to these pagan and gnostic myths. Perhaps J. G. Frazer’s Adonis, Attis, Isiris is the most famous of these in the English-speaking world. It was argued that the New Testament writers were simply reproducing this myth, which was part of the intellectual furniture of the ancient world. Rudolf Bultmann was among many scholars of the period who argued for such influence on the resurrection accounts and beliefs of the New Testament, and who then proceeded to take the logically questionable step of arguing that such parallels discredited the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Since then, however, scholarship has moved on considerably. The parallels between the pagan myths of dying and rising gods and the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus are now regarded as remote, to say the least.⁴⁴ For instance, the New Testament documents take care to give the place and the date of both the death and the resurrection of Jesus and identify the witnesses to both. The contrast with the ahistorical narrative form of mythology is striking.

Furthermore, there are no known instances of this myth being applied to any specific historical figure in pagan literature, so that the New Testament writers would have given a stunningly original twist to this mythology. It is at this point that the wisdom of C. S. Lewis—who actually knew something about myths—must be acknowledged. Lewis realized that the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus bore no relation to real mythology, despite the claims of some theologians who had dabbled in the field. Perhaps most important, however, was his realization that the gnostic redeemer myths—which the New Testament writers allegedly took over and applied to Jesus—were to be dated from later than the New Testament itself. If anyone borrowed any ideas from anyone, it seems it was the gnostics who took up Christian ideas.

The challenge posed to the historicity of the Resurrection by these theories has thus passed into textbooks of the history of ideas, but an important point remains to be made. We have seen how allegedly responsible academic scholarship, regarded as competent in its own day, was seen to pose a serious challenge to a central aspect of the Christian faith. It was taken seriously by theologians and popular religious writers. Yet the sheer provisionality of scholarship seems to have been ignored. Scholarship proceeds by evaluation of evidence and hypotheses, a process that takes decades; and what one generation took as self-evident is often later demonstrated to be wrong. The fate of the Resurrection myth is a case in point: in 1920 it was treated virtually as an established fact of serious and responsible scholarship; three-quarters of a century later it is regarded as an interesting, if now discredited, idea.

How many more such theories, which now seem persuasive and a genuine challenge to the Christian faith, will be treated as obsolete in fifty years’ time? Christianity can hardly be expected to abandon its proclamation of the risen Christ as Savior and Lord on such flimsy grounds. Furthermore, as anyone who works in the field of the history of ideas knows, it is remarkable how rapidly the assured presuppositions of one generation are abandoned by another! Christianity has a duty to speak for two thousand years of history, as well as for the future; it cannot allow the short-term preoccupations of modernity to dictate its character for posterity.

A third line of criticism of the historicity of the Resurrection comes from the German sociologist Ernst Troeltsch, who argued that, since dead men do not rise, Jesus could not have risen. The basic principle underlying this objection goes back to David Hume and concerns the need for present-day analogues for historical events. Before accepting that an event took place in the past, we need to be persuaded that it still takes place in the present. Troeltsch asserted that since we have no contemporary experience of the resurrection of a dead human being, we have reason for supposing that no dead man has ever been raised.

Of course, since Christianity insists that the resurrection of Jesus was a unique historical event, the absence of present-day analogues is only to be expected. If people were raised from the dead on a regular basis, there would be no difficulty in accepting that Jesus Christ had been raised. But it would not stand out. It would not say anything, either about the identity of Jesus himself or about the God who chose to raise him in this way. The Resurrection was taken so seriously because it was realized that it was totally out of the ordinary—unique in the proper sense of the word.

Nevertheless, a more sophisticated reply to this line of criticism is needed. The most vigorous response to Troeltsch’s criticism has been made by Wolfhart Pannenberg, who points out that Troeltsch adopted a remarkably dogmatic view of reality, based on questionable metaphysical presuppositions, a view that effectively dictated what could and could not have happened in history on the basis of his preconceived views. Troeltsch, Pannenberg argued, had already laid down in advance that the Resurrection could not happen. The argument seemed to move as follows:

But this is unacceptably superficial. The philosophical question of induction, noted earlier, does not allow the conclusion to be drawn from the premise. Observation does not determine fixed laws that may be used to determine whether something did or did not happen in the past. It merely establishes the probability of events of a certain type.

For Pannenberg, the decisive factor in determining what happened on the first Easter Day is the evidence contained in the New Testament and not dogmatic and provisional scholarly theories about the nature of reality. How, asks Pannenberg, are we to account for the New Testament evidence? What is its most probable explanation? The historical evidence liberates us from the dogmatic metaphysical presuppositions about what can and cannot have happened in history that underlie Troeltsch’s critique of the Resurrection, and it allows us to return to the Jesus of history. For Pannenberg, the resurrection of Jesus is the most probable and plausible explanation of the historical evidence. Perhaps it lacks the absolute certainty the more fundamentalist of metaphysicians seem to demand—but, as Bishop Butler so carefully demonstrated in his Analogy of Religion, probability is the law of religious life, whether orthodox or deist.

E. THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST

Modernism has laid down two fundamental challenges to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, especially as it is expressed in the doctrine of the Incarnation. First, it is wrong. Our growing understanding of the background to the New Testament, the way in which Christian doctrine has developed, the rise of the scientific worldview, and so on, force us to abandon the idea that Jesus was God in any meaningful sense of the word. Second, it is unnecessary. Christianity can exist without the need for such obsolete and cumbersome ideas as God becoming man, traditionally grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and expressed in the doctrine of the Incarnation. In a world come of age, Christianity, if it is to survive, must learn to abandon these ideas as archaic and irrelevant.

It is significant that most recent criticisms of the Incarnation, such as those expressed in The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), demonstrate a tendency to concentrate on objections to the idea of incarnation, rather than on objections to the basis of the idea. After all, the idea of God incarnate in a specific historical human being was quite startling in its first-century Jewish context, whatever may have been made of it in the later patristic period, and the question of what caused this belief to arise requires careful examination. Of central importance to this question is the Resurrection itself, a subject studiously ignored (along with the major contributions to the incarnational discussion by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jürgen Moltmann, Walter Kasper, and others) by most of the contributors to The Myth of God Incarnate.

The idea of incarnation is easy to criticize: it is paradoxical, enigmatic, and so on. But everyone already knows this, including the most fervent advocates of the idea. And it is absurd, even offensive, to suggest that those who regard a belief in the Incarnation as legitimate are intellectually hidebound or trapped in their traditions, unable to think for themselves. The question remains, and always has been: Is the Incarnation a proper and legitimate interpretation of the history of Jesus of Nazareth?

The fact that something is paradoxical and even self-contradictory does not invalidate it. Those who have worked in the scientific field are only too aware of the sheer complexity and mysteriousness of reality. The events behind the rise of quantum theory, the difficulties of using models in scientific explanation—to name but two factors that I can remember particularly clearly from my own period as a natural scientist—point to the inevitability of paradox and contradiction in any except the most superficial engagement with reality.⁴⁵ Our apprehension of reality is partial and fragmentary, whether we are dealing with our knowledge of the natural world or of God. The Enlightenment worldview tended to suppose that reality could be totally apprehended in rational terms, an assumption that still persists in some theological circles, even though it has been abandoned as unrealistic elsewhere. All too many modern theologians cry “Contradiction!” and expect us all to abandon there and then whatever it is that is supposed to be contradictory. But reality just is not like that.

An example of this approach deployed against the principle of the Incarnation is provided by John Hick, who asserts (“argues” is not the mot juste) that the idea of Jesus being both God and man is logically contradictory.⁴⁶ Quoting Spinoza, Hick asserts that talk of one who is both God and man is like talking about a square circle. Hick’s consistency at this point is difficult to trace since he is already committed to the belief that all the concepts of God to be found in the world religions—personal and impersonal, immanent and transcendent —are compatible with each other. Indeed, such is the variety of the concepts of divinity currently in circulation in the world religions that Hick is obliged to turn a blind eye to the resulting logical inconsistency between them—only to seize upon and censure this alleged “inconsistency” in the case of the Incarnation.

But Hick cannot be allowed to make this robust assertion concerning the logical incompatibility of God and man unchallenged, and his less than adequate knowledge of the development of Christology in the medieval period is clearly demonstrated in this matter. The fact that there is no logical incompatibility between God and man in the Incarnation is demonstrated, and then theologically exploited, by that most brilliant of all English theologians, William of Ockham.⁴⁷ Ockham’s discussion of this point is exhaustive and highly influential, and it has yet to be discredited. Indeed, it is confirmed by the superb recent study of Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate,⁴⁸ which has received considerable critical acclaim within philosophical circles.

Let us look briefly at some of the points that might be raised here. Under what circumstances might the idea of Jesus Christ being both God and man, divine and human, be considered a logical absurdity? We can bring out the point at issue by considering Spinoza’s example of the square circle, made to bear such theological weight by Hick. Why is the idea of a square circle an absurdity? Because “square” and “circle” both occupy the same space on a logical map. They are both examples of shapes. A single shape cannot conform to two irreconcilable forms. It is one (a square), the other (a circle), or neither (perhaps a triangle, or some ill-defined shape). “Circle” and “square” thus define mutually exclusive categories of shape: a shape cannot be both of them at one and the same time.

But now consider Jesus Christ as God and man. What common logical area is occupied by “God” and “man”? Of what species are they both examples? In fact, they occupy no common ground; God is creator, man is a creature. As Thomas Aquinas stressed, divinity and humanity occupy no common logical—or even, as his famous distinction between essentia and existentia makes clear, ontological—territory. They are totally distinct. The parallel between the square circle and the Incarnation is thus devoid of any serious logical basis.

Again, at the purely logical level, it is interesting to challenge Hick as to why “divinity” and “humanity” should be treated as irreconcilable.⁴⁹ They are different—but why should they not coexist? Square circles do not exist, for the simple reason that they are mutually exclusive categories of shape. But why should not divinity and humanity be complementary? On the basis of what logical rule can such a possibility be excluded? A trivial example is suggested by a colleague of mine who has both British and Swiss citizenship. Dual nationality is a common enough occurrence to make its theological potential worth exploring. Hick’s crude analysis of the logic of the Incarnation suggests that the following are logically incompatible:

But consider my friend Francis, who is fortunate enough to have dual nationality.

A logical contradiction exists if, and only if, being British excludes being Swiss. But it does not. And why, at the logical level, should being human exclude Jesus from being divine? Might he not be a citizen of heaven as well as of earth?

The charge of logical incoherence thus remains unpersuasive, except to those precommitted, for whatever reason, to anti-incarna-tional viewpoints. At times Hick seems to reject incarnationalism because of the difficulties it raises for his theory of religions, which is more than a little disrupted by the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation. Hick’s interest in challenging the doctrine seems to be motivated by a quite different agenda, concerned with the homogeni-zation of religions—a process to which the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is a serious stumbling block.

More seriously, Hick seems to work on the basis of the assumption that he already knows exactly what God is like, and that on the basis of this knowledge he is in a position to pass judgment on the logical niceties of the Incarnation. But this is obviously not the case. (None of us has privileged access to God in this way; we are all limited in our knowledge of God, which is why the news that God has revealed himself is such good news. We need to be told what God is like; left to our own devices, we would wallow about in confusion and chaos.) Hick may be saying that there is a logical problem involved with classical theism (a philosophical system) in relation to the Incarnation—but this merely suggests that classical theism is not necessarily compatible with Christianity. (This point has been made in recent years with increasing force by theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel.) It is not to discredit the Incarnation. Hick may be in a position to say that God is totally unable to come among us as a human being and that the Incarnation is impossible on account of who and what God is—but if he can do so, he would seem to have access to a private and infallible knowledge of God denied to the rest of us. And do we really fully understand what is meant by that deceptively familiar word human? Many of us would prefer to say that the Incarnation discloses the true nature of divinity and humanity, rather than approaching the Incarnation on the basis of preconceived ideas of divinity and humanity.

Critics of the Incarnation appear to envisage their criticisms as establishing a new, more relevant and universal version of Christianity. But what might this new version of Christianity be like? The inclusion of the word “new” is deliberate: historically, Christianity has regarded both the Resurrection and the Incarnation as essential to its historical self-understanding, and any attempt to eliminate or radically modify them would seem to lead to a version of Christianity that is not continuous with the historical forms it has taken in the course of its development. In the following section, we shall look at the consequence of the elimination or radical modification of these two traditional ideas.

Let us suppose that Jesus was not God in any meaningful sense of the term. Let us suppose that he was a man, like the present writer in every way (although hopefully a nicer person), but far superior religiously and morally, and that everything Christianity has wanted to say about the significance of Jesus can be said, and said well, without the belief that he was God as well as man. Let us see if this can actually be done.

First, let me explore a comment made by Paul Elmer Moore, the American Platonist who became a Christian late in life. He wrote powerfully of the “loneliness of an Ideal world without a Lord” (see pp. 30–31). He longed for Platonic forms to turn into a face—into something personal. Without the Incarnation we are left in the realm of ideas, unable to put a human face to God. We are left in a world of ideas and ideals—a chilly world, in which no words are spoken and the tenderness of love is unknown. The Incarnation allows us to speak with authority of God being personal. It speaks of God entering into our history, and allows us to abandon the cold and unfeeling world of ideals in favor of a world charged with the thrilling personal presence of God. That difference matters profoundly.

Let us develop this point in a slightly different direction. On the basis of a number of important works reflecting the spirit of Enlightenment modernism, it is clear that a central idea congenial to the modern spirit is that Jesus reveals to us the love of God. It is frequently pointed out that the modern age is able to dispense with superstitious ideas about the death of Jesus (for example, that it represented a victory over Satan or the payment of a legal penalty of some sort), and that instead we can get to the real meat of both the New Testament, so movingly expressed in the parable of the prodigal son, and modern Christianity—the love of God for humanity. In what follows, I propose to suggest that abandoning the ideas of resurrection and the Incarnation means abandoning even this tender insight.

This may seem an outrageous suggestion to make, but I cannot see how this conclusion can be avoided. How may the death of Jesus Christ on a cross at Calvary be interpreted as a demonstration of the love of God for humanity? Once modernism dispenses with the idea of incarnation—that Jesus is God—a number of possible alternative explanations of the cross remain open.

All of these are plausible within the framework of modernism. The idea that the cross demonstrates the love of God for humanity cannot, however, be included among this list. It is not God who is dying on the cross, who gives himself for his people. It is a man—an especially splendid man, who may be ranked with others in history who have made equally great sacrifices for those they loved. The death of an innocent person at the hands of corrupt judges is all too common, even today, and Jesus cannot be singled out for special discussion unless he is something or someone qualitatively different from us.

Someone might, of course, immediately reply that Jesus is a higher example of the kind of inspiration or illumination to be found in all human beings, so that he must be regarded as the outstanding human being—and that for that reason, his death assumes special significance. But his is a remarkably dogmatic assumption—that Jesus is unique among human beings in this respect. One of the puzzles about The Myth of God Incarnate is that its contributors seem content to dismantle what they term the “myth” that God became incarnate in a human being—only to make extravagant claims about the religious superiority of Jesus, which cannot be justified by their basic assumptions. Commenting on these trends, a perceptive American theologian notes:

Extravagant claims are…made about the supreme religious worth, the sublime teaching, the transforming power, the overwhelming and vibrant God-consciousness, the tremendous ability to challenge and change people, and the contagious spirituality of Jesus…After reading such romantic pap, one wonders why anyone would have bothered to crucify Jesus. Such Christologies try to explain the existence of Christianity apart from the discontinuity and shock of cross and resurrection, and so end by making highly inflated claims about the “human” Jesus.⁵⁰

The uniqueness of Jesus was established by the New Testament writers through the Resurrection and the subsequent recognition that Jesus was none other than the living God dwelling among us. But this insight is given and guaranteed by two doctrines modernism cannot allow. It would seem that modernists are prepared to retain insights gained through the traditional framework of resurrection and incarnation—and then declare that this framework may be dispensed with.

But this is clearly questionable, to say the least. If the traditional framework is declared to be wrong, the consequences of this declaration for each and every aspect of Christian theology must be ascertained. Discard or radically modify the doctrines of resurrection and incarnation, and the idea of the “uniqueness” or the “superiority” of Jesus becomes a dogmatic assertion without foundation, an assertion that many with more humanist inclinations would find offensive. We would be equally justified in appealing to other historical figures—such as Socrates or Gandhi—as embodying the best of Christian moral behavior.

This point becomes more important when we return to the question of how the death of Jesus can be interpreted as a self-giving divine act, demonstrating the love of God for humanity. It is not God who is on the cross—it is a human being. That point must be conceded by those who reject the Incarnation. It may then be the case that God makes his love known indirectly (and, it must be said, in a remarkably ambiguous manner) through the death of Jesus Christ, but we have lost forever the insight that it is God himself who shows his love for us on the cross.

What the cross might conceivably demonstrate, among a number of other, more probable, possibilities, is the full extent of the love of one human being for others. And as the love of human beings can be thought of as mirroring the love of God, it would therefore be taken as an indirect demonstration of what the love of God is like, in much the same way that countless other individuals have given up their lives to save their friends or families throughout history. But whom did Jesus die to save? None, save possibly Barabbas, can be said to have benefited directly from his death, yet it would seem that modernism would like us to understand Jesus’ death as making some sort of religious point that will enrich our spiritual lives. But this is not how the New Testament writers understood his death (not least because they insisted on interpreting that death in the light of the Resurrection, a procedure regarded as illegitimate by modernists), and it is certainly difficult to see how it would have cut much ice in the hostile environment in which Christianity had to survive and expand in the first period of its existence.

Had Jesus died in western Europe in the modern period, such an interpretation of his death might have had a certain degree of plausibility—but the historical significance of Jesus’ death was determined by its historical context, and we are committing historical errors that parallel those of the ill-fated nineteenth-century “quest of the historical Jesus” if we project modern cultural preoccupations onto the event of the death of Christ. The interpretation modernism wishes to place on the death of Christ is culturally conditioned by the social and personal values of Western society and is imposed on (rather than discerned within) the history of Jesus.

The traditional framework for discussion of the manifestation of the love of God in the death of Christ is that of God humbling himself and coming among us as one of us, taking on himself the frailty and morality of our human nature in order to redeem it. To deny that the lonely dying figure on the cross is God is to lose this point of contact and to return to the view that Christianity overturned in its own day and age—that “God is with us only in his transcendence” (Don Cupitt). A divine representative—not God himself—engages with the pain and suffering of this world. It is his love, not God’s, which is shown. And to those who might think that this difficulty may be eliminated by developing the idea of God allowing himself to be identified with the dying Christ, it may be pointed out that the exploration of this idea by Moltmann and Jüngel leads not merely to an incarnational, but to a Trinitarian, theology. In order to do justice to the Christian experience of God through Jesus Christ, we cannot view Jesus Christ merely in terms of his function—we are dealing with an identity of being, rather than just an identification of function. Jesus acts as and for God precisely because he is God.

A similar point may be made in relation to suffering. As we noticed earlier, twentieth-century apologetics has recognized that any theology that is unable to implicate God in some manner in the sufferings and pain of the world condemns itself as inadequate and deficient. The twentieth century has witnessed previously unimagined horrors of human suffering in the trenches of the First World War, in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany, and in the programs of genocide established by Nazi Germany and Marxist Cambodia. The rise of “protest atheism”—perhaps one of the most powerful sentiments modern theology must address—reflects human moral revulsion at these acts. Protest atheism has a tendency to select soft targets, and there are few targets softer in this respect than a nonincarnational theology.

An incarnational theology speaks of God subjecting himself to the evil and pain of the world at its worst, in the grim scene at Calvary. God suffered in Christ, taking upon himself the agony of the world which he created. A nonincarnational theology is forced, perhaps against its intuition, to speak of a God who may send his condolences through a representative but who does not (or cannot, for fear of being accused of logical contradiction?) enter into and share his people’s suffering at firsthand. And for a modernist who rejects substitutionary theories of the Atonement, God can hardly be allowed to take on himself his own punishment for the sins of humanity through a human representative who suffers instead of and on behalf of man.

In 1963, the English Sunday newspaper The Observer publicized John Robinson’s book Honest to God with the headline “Our image of God must go.” The image that Robinson had in mind was that of an old man in the sky. But the “image of God that must go” in the face of the intense and deadly serious moral criticisms of protest atheism is that of a God who does not experience human suffering and pain at firsthand—in short, a nonincarnational image of God. Many of those who criticize the Incarnation seem to realize the force of this point and attempt to retain it despite their intellectual misgivings. A nonincarnational theology is fatally flawed. Perhaps in the end it will not be the protests of orthodoxy that destroy nonincarnational theologies, but protest atheism, which rightly detects the fundamental weakness of such a theology.

A final point concerns the permanent significance of Jesus Christ. Why is he of such importance to the Christian faith here and now, some twenty centuries after his death? The traditional answer is that his significance lay in his being God incarnate—that in his specific historical existence, God assumed human nature. All else is secondary to this central insight, derived from reflection upon the significance of his resurrection. The fact that Jesus was male; the fact that he was a Jew; the precise nature of his teaching—all these are secondary to the fact that God took upon himself human nature, thereby lending it new dignity and meaning.

But if Jesus is not God incarnate, his significance must be evaluated in terms of those parameters which traditional Christianity has treated as secondary or accidental (in the Aristotelian sense of the term). Immediately, we are confronted with the problem of historical conditioning. What conceivable relevance may the teachings and lifestyle of a first-century male Jew have for us today, in a totally different cultural situation? The maleness of Christ has caused offense in radical feminist circles: Why should women be forced to relate to a male religious teacher, whose teaching may be compromised by his very masculinity, as well as by the patriarchal values of his cultural situation? And why should modern Western humanity pay any attention to the culturally conditioned teaching of such an individual, given the seemingly insuperable cultural chasm dividing first-century Palestine and the twentieth-century West? And even the concept of the “religious personality” of Jesus has been seriously eroded, as much by New Testament scholarship as by shifts in cultural perceptions.

For reasons such as these, a nonincarnational Christianity is unable to convincingly anchor the person of Jesus Christ as the center of the Christian faith. He may be the historical point of departure for that faith, but its subsequent development involves the leaving behind of the historical particularity of his existence in order to confront the expectations of each social milieu in which Christianity may subsequently find itself. Jesus says this—but we say that. This may be acceptable in a first-century Palestinian context—but that is acceptable in a modern Western culture in which we live and move and have our being. Jesus is thus both relativized and marginalized. Many nonincarnational versions of Christianity accept and welcome such insights—but others find them disturbing and perhaps unconsciously articulate an incarnational Christianity in order to preserve insights which they intuitively recognize as central.

Critics of doctrines such as the divinity of Christ tend to work on the basis of two presuppositions. First, that there exists a theological equivalent of precision surgery, which allows certain elements of the Christian faith to be excised without having any detrimental effect whatsoever upon what remains. Second, that by eliminating logical and metaphysical difficulties a more plausible and hence more acceptable version of Christianity will result. Both these assumptions are clearly questionable and must be challenged.

To return to our surgical analogy, we are not talking about removal of an appendix (a vestigial organ serving no useful purpose), but about the heart, the life-pump of the Christian faith. As C. S. Lewis so perceptively noted: “The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it.”⁵¹ Far from being an optional extra, the divinity of Christ, given expression in the doctrine of the Incarnation, is an essential and integral part of the authentically Christian understanding of reality.

Faith in the Resurrection and Incarnation is what kept and keeps Christianity growing and spreading. The sheer vitality, profundity, and excitement of the Christian faith ultimately depends on these. In a day and age when Christianity has to fight for its existence, winning converts rather than relying on a favorable cultural milieu, a nonincarnational theology despoiled of the Resurrection has little to commend it. It is perhaps significant that many critics of the Resurrection and Incarnation were themselves originally attracted to Christianity through precisely the theology they are now criticizing. What, it must be asked in all seriousness, is the converting power of an incarnationless Christianity?

The history of the church suggests that such a version of Christianity is a spiritual dead end. To recall the words of Thomas Carlyle: “If Arianism had won, Christianity would have dwindled to a legend.” To its critics, incarnationless Christianity seems to be scholarly, bookish, and devoid of passion, without the inner dynamism to challenge and conquer unbelief in a world in which this is essential for its survival. But this is where history will pass its own judgment. Only a form of Christianity that is convinced that it has something distinctive, true, exciting, and relevant to communicate to the world in order to transform it will survive.

F. SIN AND SALVATION

The ideas of sin and salvation, together or in isolation, are often seized upon by opponents of Christianity as classic examples of outdated and pessimistic relics of a bygone age. A world come of age can well do without such vestiges of the religious dark ages, we are told. This criticism stings because of a recent failure to preach about sin or to even allow it to remain a serious theological option within mainstream Christianity. In the headlong rush to develop a doctrine of cheap grace acceptable in the liberal cultural marketplace, the idea of sin has been conveniently omitted from the mainstream Christian agenda. Thomas C. Oden summarizes this modern trend:

We have learned in modernity to keep fashionably silent about the incarnation, atonement and resurrection and to develop theological positions less controversial and more agreeable with the assumptions of modernity—that Jesus is a good teacher (with minimum “mythological” additions), that God is good, but would not dare to judge our iniquities, and so on. In only one century of focussing on the ethical relevance of Jesus’ teaching, we have almost forgotten how to speak of and pray to Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of the world. In the well-intentioned attempt to deliver the Christian message in a language acceptable to moderns, we have peeled the onion almost down to nothing. We have cheated our young people out of the hard but necessary Christian word about human sin and divine redemption.⁵²

Sin needs to be put back on the theological agenda—fast. The ideas of sin and salvation need to be explained, and some of the misunderstandings associated with them eliminated.

1. What Is Sin?

“Sin” is a complex idea. It is too easy to focus attention on individual aspects of sin, and neglect as a result the fundamental idea underlying them all. In its proper sense, sin does not refer to individual acts of sin, whether omission (failing to do something we know we should have) or commission (doing things which we know we ought not to have done). It is a state, an underlying condition. And just as an illness has visible symptoms, so sin (the state) produces visible acts of sin. Sin causes sins. And just as a competent physician knows that there is little point in treating symptoms while failing to deal with their root cause, so the Christian proclamation declares the need to deal with our state of sin, rather than merely with individual acts of sin. A worldview that deals only with individual sins is little more than a puritanical moralism such as Pelagianism. That is most emphatically what Christianity is not.

Sin is an underlying state of alienation from God. It is like a flaw in human nature—not a flaw created by God, but a crisis resulting from the fallenness of humanity. It expresses itself at every level of human existence—personal, social, and structural. At the personal level it is experienced in many different ways:

—in existential anxiety about death;⁵³

—in a sense of unfulfilled yearning for something undefinable, which no created object can ever satisfy;⁵⁴

—in a sense of moral guilt;

—in a sense of frustration, in that our highest ideals seem permanently beyond us.

—in a desire to be totally independent of God, ignoring both his existence and his demands on us.

At the social and structural levels, sin expresses itself in the radical selfishness that characterizes humanity. Philanthropic philosophies founder on the rock of human nature. It is as if there is something flawed about human nature that proves incapable of achieving the high ideals laid down by these well-meaning, yet totally unrealistic, philosophies. The great liberal dream was that education would change this situation radically and produce a generation of morally enlightened and responsible people, dedicated to the construction of a better world. Sadly, the history of the world lends little support to such a utopian dream. All too often, education seems to turn out people who are merely informed and self-centered.

These sorts of reflections could be extended, but there is little reason for doing so. The basic point the apologist needs to stress is this: There is something seriously and radically wrong with human beings. It is pointless to blame human ills on society—what is society, if it is not other human beings? To talk about people “being corrupted by society” is merely to evade the fact that we are corrupted by other people. This basic flaw in human nature—rather than any one of its many consequences—constitutes the essence of the Christian idea of sin. But the Christian will insist that sin is not primarily a moral concept. It is theological. At the root of our predicament lies a flawed relationship with God. The heart of sin is alienation from God. That state of alienation is the root of the human dilemma and must be addressed if our situation is to be transformed.

Thus far we have talked about sin in rather abstract and general terms. The time has come to be a little more precise and to appeal to well-established models of sin that have a distinguished history in Christian theology.⁵⁵ Four such models are especially helpful in apologetic contexts because they have considerable potential to illuminate the themes of both sin and salvation.

a. Sin is like an illness. Chronic physical illness provides one of the most powerful models of sin. It implies loss of a state of health and a present state of debilitation and weakness in which the way we are is considerably less than the way we could be. The Greek verb sozein, “to save,” has the root sense of “to make whole” or “to heal,” indicating the very close association between the concept of salvation and healing. Augustine of Hippo declared that the church is like a hospital—full of people who know that they are ill and need help, and who are prepared to entrust themselves to the care of the healing Christ. Sin is like a genetically inherited disorder—something we are born with (“original sin,” a concept further below). The model is also important in helping us understand how sin persists in believers, a theme which we will explore presently.⁵⁶

b. Sin is like moral guilt. Sin puts us in a wrong relationship with God. He is holy; we fall far short of him. He is righteous; we fall far short of his righteousness. One of the basic ideas here is that of falling short of a mark, failing to hit a target. There is a moral component to sin: knowing what God expects of us, we fail to meet it. Salvation includes as one of its vital components the idea of the cancellation of moral guilt and the forgiveness of sins. The death of Christ leads to the removal of our guilt:

Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

he was bruised for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that

made us whole,

and with his stripes we are healed (Isa. 53:4–5 RSV).

c. Sin is like an enslaving force. Sin entangles us. It is like a muddy swamp; once we are trapped, we are unable to break free. Someone has to pull us out. It is like an electromagnet, holding us as if we were iron filings. Someone has to turn the current off if we are to break free. It is like gravity, which drags everything to the ground. An apple suspended on its own in mid-air will fall to earth, just as a human being will fall into sin. It is like being addicted to a narcotic. We find that we cannot break the habit. One of the finest expositions of the way in which sin traps us is provided by Paul (Rom. 7:13–23). All Paul’s good intentions are frustrated by a power (sin) which he finds at work within him and which he knows he cannot control. His concluding comments are vitally important: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24–25). The power of sin can be broken through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which liberate us from the stranglehold of sin.

d. Sin is like existential alienation. Existential analysis is the new kid on the apologetic block.⁵⁷ Although it could be argued that its roots go back at least as far as Martin Luther (1483–1546), its modern use dates from the 1930s.⁵⁸ In his penetrating analysis of the structures of human existence, the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguishes between two different ways of existing: inauthentic existence and authentic existence. The former is a fallen way of existence that ignores the harsh realities of life, a way of existence in which human beings lose their distinctiveness by “falling into the world” and by failing to achieve their full potential. The latter is a fulfilling way of existence, in which we achieve our full stature of life, fulfilling our human potential. Although God does not come into Heidegger’s thinking in a big way, the Christian apologist can easily remedy this deficiency by recasting his analysis of existence within a Christian framework.

We see the same dichotomy in the New Testament, with its brilliant imagery of death and life (Rom. 6:3–8), darkness and light (John 1:5; 1 Peter 2:9), sin and grace (Rom. 5:20–6:1), lostness and “being found” (note the three parables of Luke 15). Two ways of existence are mapped out and described. One is the way of darkness, lostness, sin, and death—unredeemed life, in all its bleakness and self-centeredness. The other is the way of life made possible through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is offered to us as a gift.

Often, these models of sin are merged in Christian thinking, preaching, and praise. For example, these two extracts from well-known hymns combine elements of the model of sin as a power and of sin as guilt. In Rock of Ages, Augustus M. Toplady writes:

Let the water and the blood,

From thy riven side which flowed,

Be of sin the double cure,

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

The death of Christ cleanses the sinner from both the moral guilt and the spiritual power of sin. Charles Wesley includes the following lines in O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing:

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

He sets the prisoner free.

The power of sin is broken, and its moral guilt canceled, through the saving death of Christ. These hymns provide a useful model for the apologist in that they show the considerable potential for building up an overall comprehensive picture of sin—before going on to explore the purpose and power of God in dealing with it through Christ.

2. What Is Original Sin?

The term original sin probably owes its origin to Augustine of Hippo. The idea, however, is thoroughly biblical and is deeply embedded in the Christian proclamation. The basic idea is this: we do not become sinners by committing acts of sin—we demonstrate that we already are sinners by those acts. In other words, sin is something that is there from our birth, from our origin (hence the phrase original sin). The flaw in human nature is not acquired; it is “built in.”

Infants are not free of sin until they are contaminated by the sins of a fallen world. They are born into that fallen world and share its fallenness from the moment of their birth. Christians have always insisted that Christ is the Savior of all people. And that implies that everyone has something he or she must be saved from—in other words, sin. And as Christ is the Savior of infants, as much as of anyone else, it follows that even infants have something from which they need to be saved.

Another way of putting this may be more helpful apologetically. Sin is the antithesis of salvation. It is the “before” to which salvation is the “after.” We are not born believing Christians; we have to become believers. Original sin is that state into which we are born—the state of unbelief or lack of faith. This is expressed by the idea of “being born again” (John 3:3, 7: there are strong semantic links here between being “born again” and being “born from above”). The doctrine of original sin basically affirms that we are born with a need to be born again. It points to our natural state being that of alienation from God. God has to enter into our lives in a salvific manner; he is not naturally there in this way. We are born in darkness; we need to respond to God’s call to enter into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9).

Apologetically, the idea of original sin allows us to break free from the moralist shackles that so often confuse people’s thinking about sin. Original sin is obviously not a moral idea—how can one talk about infants doing immoral things? It is a theological idea, concerned to point out that our natural state, from birth, is that of estrangement from God. But the gospel proclamation is that of reconciliation to that same God through Jesus Christ. Original sin thus does not present formidable difficulties. It needs to be explained as the negative presupposition of redemption. It is an affirmation of the universality of sin that comes prior to the affirmation of the universality of the proclamation of redemption.

3. Why Do Christians Continue to Sin?

The hypocrisy of Christians is a constant source of complaint outside Christian circles and a perennial thorn in the flesh of Christian apologetics. So what can be done about it? Apart from wishing that their fellow Christians would be less prone to public lapses into sin, spectacular or otherwise, apologists need to explain the manner in which Christians are forgiven sinners. They nevertheless remain sinners (note Karl Barth’s famous term Sündermensch, which embodied his conviction that the human person [Mensch] could never be separated from sin [Sünde]—whether Christian or nonbeliever). Christians are those who

There are thus past, present, and future elements to the Christian understanding of the relation between salvation and sin.⁵⁹ Sin remains a real presence in the Christian life (1 John 1:8–10).

Christianity proclaims the reality of sin, not the perfectibility of human nature. It is secular ideologies—such as liberalism—which proclaim the latter and find themselves utterly frustrated by its perennial contradiction by the harsh facts of life (a point stressed by Reinhold Niebuhr). This point is made forcefully by the English novelist and apologist G. K. Chesterton, who stresses the reality of sin and its implications for human life. For example, he notes that the Christian church in the United Kingdom was criticized heavily in the aftermath of the First World War (1914–18) for failing to prevent the outbreak of war. Yet this, he argues convincingly, is simply an example of a frustrated secularism trying to transfer its own failings and weaknesses to Christianity:

It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the church was discredited by the war—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the church is right. The church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.⁶⁰

The reality of human sin and our inability to control it or eliminate it—of which the First World War was so telling a symbol—make redemption from outside the human situation a necessity. We are, quite simply, unable to redeem ourselves. As the Roman historian Livy remarked, surveying the moral chaos into which Rome had degenerated in his own day and age, “We have got to the point where we can bear neither our vices nor the measures necessary for their cure.”

So how may a theoretical framework be constructed to account for the continuing fact of sin in the lives of those who are being saved? Why does sin persist in the life of the saints? And how can God treat sinners as if they are righteous, without lapsing into immorality? It would be a legal fiction for God to pretend that sinners are not sinners.

Martin Luther provides us with an answer.⁶¹ Luther’s emphasis falls upon the promise of God to forgive sinners. Our justification rests in the grace and mercy of the God who promises. We remain sinners—although forgiven sinners—who are assured that we will one day be righteous because of God’s faithfulness to his promises. We are thus sinners in fact but righteous in hope. Luther sums up this situation in his famous maxim simul iustus et peccator (at one and the same time a righteous person and a sinner). Luther explains this situation by means of a medical analogy:

It is just like someone who is sick, and who believes the doctor who promises his full recovery. In the meantime, he obeys the doctor’s orders in the hope of the promised recovery. And he abstains from those things which he has been told to lay off, so that he may in no way hinder the promised return to health…Now is this sick man well? In fact, he is both sick and well at the same time. He is sick in reality—but he is well on account of the sure promise of the doctor, whom he trusts, and who reckons him as already being cured.

We are both ill (in that we are still not healthy) and healthy (in that we are on the road to recovery). Just as you can think of someone on the mend as being ill and healthy at the same time, so you can think of forgiven believers as simultaneously sinful and righteous. The justified sinner

is at one and the same time both a sinner and righteous. He is a sinner in reality, but righteous by the sure imputation and promise of God that he will continue to deliver him from sin until he has completely cured him. So he is entirely healthy in hope, but a sinner in reality.

In other words, the justified sinner’s righteousness rests on the promise of God, not on his or her present state of righteousness. The promised gift of righteousness is both eschatological (in that it rests in the future) and present (in that the believer, knowing that God is faithful to his promises, may have sure knowledge now of his future righteous state).

Figure 5.1 The relation of righteousness and sin in justification

God treats the sinner now on the basis of what he knows the final outcome of the process of justification to be.

We can represent this situation diagrammatically (figure 5.1). The present situation of the believer is represented by point A on this diagram. The situation on the final day, when the healing and forgiving promise of God finds its final fulfillment, is represented by point B. But the believer, even though remaining a sinner, may know of this final outcome of the process of justification now—and thus, although continuing to remain at point A, knows what that final outcome will be. The believer may thus have knowledge of the future righteousness and final elimination of sin, in effect existing at both points A and C simultaneously. There is a strongly eschatological element in Luther’s thought on justification, salvation, and forgiveness, mingling the “here and now” and the “not yet.”

So there is no legal fiction, no deception on the part of God. The verdict of justification—that is, the declaration of righteousness—is based on the final outcome of the action of healing grace. Just as the Old Testament prophets spoke of the future as if it were already present (the so-called “prophetic present”), so God, knowing what the end result of our justification will be, is able to declare that believers now possess the status of righteousness on the basis of the fact that we will one day possess the nature of righteousness.

4. Will Everyone Be Saved?

The apologist often encounters difficulties arising from the idea of universal salvation. If everyone will be saved, what is the point of listening to the gospel, let alone responding to it? G. K. Chesterton put the situation pithily: “We very much hope that all will be saved—but we must act on the presumption that they will not.”

The New Testament proclaims the universal saving will of God. God wishes all to be saved. “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:13). But this is only half the story. It is a very important half of that story, to be sure. But if there is one failing that has crippled Christian theology since its beginning, it is an unwillingness to tell the full story about central Christian beliefs. For example, it is so much easier to speak about Jesus being just a man, or just God, and to ignore the knotty problems that arise from having to speak of him being both God and man.⁶² But responsible theology demands that the full story be told, regardless of the intellectual difficulties this raises. The full story is this:

a. God very much wants everyone to be saved;

b. Salvation is conditional upon our response to Christ.

Romans 10:7–17 is an excellent summary of these points.

So how are we to handle this apologetically? By devising analogies and illustrations that illustrate the internal rationality of the Christian approach. The following is offered as an illustration. The cross shows the love of God for us and brings home the full extent of his care and compassion for his world. He very much wants all of us, as his creatures, to respond to his love. But God has created us with freedom to accept him or reject him. Love offered to someone does not imply that that person will love you in return. Every high school student soon discovers that just because you love someone does not mean that he or she will automatically love you in return. It is not something that can be imposed on someone. God may love us, but that does not coerce us to love him in return.

The doctrine of universal salvation initially seems attractive. It seems to be very good news. All will be saved. But on closer inspection, this seems to amount to some kind of spiritual authoritarianism. All will be saved, whether they like it or not. Human freedom is compromised. And, as every apologist knows only too well, the idea of spending eternity with God is profoundly unattractive to many people! The idea that this is going to be forced on them will hardly strike them as good news!

Try to imagine the following scene. An individual does not want to be saved. He is very grateful to God for the offer, but with all due respect, he wishes to decline it. Are we to imagine God forcing him to accept it? That is not love—it is dangerously close to rape. No. God respects our God-given freedom. The offer of salvation is real. God’s desire that we accept it is real. But the ball is in our court. A response is needed, but that response need not be forthcoming. It is our decision. Jesus asked the ill man by the pool of Bethzatha, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6 RSV). It was up to him to respond to that real offer of healing. And so it is up to us to decide whether to accept the gracious offer of healing that comes to us through the gospel.

The basic logical structure of this approach is the following:

This account obviously glosses over the questions theologians will want to discuss concerning the respective human and divine contributions to salvation, especially the question of the role of grace in prompting our response to God. This is not the place to enter into the complexities of the Arminian-Calvinist debate. Our concern is simply to demonstrate that the idea of universal salvation, which initially seems both attractive and plausible, actually includes a number of less palatable ingredients.

These, then, are some of the individual difficulties with which the apologist must expect to engage in the course of the defense of the faith. They are fairly specific problems that can be laid out on the dissecting table and handled individually. But not all difficulties are of this kind. Often a cluster of hostile ideas are bundled together, building up to give a cumulative case against Christianity. The ideas are seen to be linked together so that to counter one is not necessarily to remove the difficulty. These collections of ideas and attitudes are usually referred to as “worldviews,” a rough English translation of the German term Weltanschauung. It is the clash of worldviews that often sets the scene for Christian apologetics. The chapter that follows deals with some of the more significant worldviews the apologist is likely to encounter.

↑ Back to top