I have mentioned before
how very difficult I find it to read the works of George MacDonald. After a lengthy rest from them and in a
careless moment, I found myself dipping back into the Unspoken Sermons.
It was a mistake. George
MacDonald, a man writing in the north of Scotland over a hundred years ago
nonetheless has a terrible ability to reach down through time and punch me
right in the theology.
The particular sermon
that I have been struck down by is The Truth in Jesus in Volume 2. In a few pages, he strikes straight at the
things that have vaguely concerned me about my own faith, tearing them out and
holding them up to the light so that I can see them properly. Frankly, they are not a wholly comforting
sight.
I have said before,
although possibly not in this blog, that I occasionally worry that my faith is
too intellectual. I love the minutiae of
theology, I love discussing and debating it.
Recently a friend on Facebook shared the interview with Stephen Fry that
I attempted to answer in a previous post, and it sparked an extremely lengthy
debate that wandered over all sorts of theological territory. I manfully (as I supposed) stepped up to the
plate and argued my side of it, explaining my own beliefs and attempting to
defend Christianity from the criticisms and questions levelled at it. To what extent I have succeeded in that, I
don’t know, but I have been reasonably satisfied with my own performance. I have spent a long time crafting an, in my
opinion, rational, intellectually defensible, reasonable (in the truest sense
of the word) theology, and then spent some time testing it by explaining and
defending it in numerous debates.
Then that terrible
mistake of reading George MacDonald.
Here is the passage that threw iced water over my self-satisfaction:
“Whatever be your opinions on
the greatest of all subjects, is it well that the impression with regard to
Christianity made upon your generation should be that of your opinions, and not
of something beyond opinion? Is
Christianity capable of being represented by opinion, even the best? If it were, how many of us are such as God
would choose to present his thoughts and intents by our opinions concerning
them? Who is there of his friends whom
any thoughtful man would depute to represent his thoughts to his fellows?
If you answer, ‘The opinions I hold and by which I represent
Christianity are those of the Bible’, I reply that none can understand, still
less represent the opinions of another, but such as are of the same mind with
him- certainly none who mistake his whole scope and intent so far as in
supposing opinion to be the object of
any writer in the Bible. Is Christianity
a system of articles of belief, let them be as correct as language can give
them? Never.”
He then goes on to say
that he would far rather have a person who held any number of obnoxious
untruths but lived in the faith of the Son of God than one whose beliefs he
agreed with totally, but who didn’t live their faith.
“To hold a thing with the intellect is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by
and that which the man I mean lives by is the love of God and obedience to His
law so far as he has recognised it. (…)
What I come to and insist upon is, that, supposing your theories right,
and containing all that is to be believed, yet those theories are not what make
you Christians, if Christians indeed you are.
On the contrary, they are, with not a few of you, just what keeps you
from being Christians. (…) No opinion, I repeat, is Christianity, and no
preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of
the living God. (…) I do not say that this sad folly may not
mingle a potent faith in the Lord himself; but I do say that the importance
they place on theory is even more sadly obstructive to true faith than such
theories themselves.”
As I’ve already said,
I’ve occasionally wondered whether I don’t over-intellectualise my faith. G.K. Chesterton said that one’s religion
should be less of a theory and more of a love affair, but I’m afraid that mine
is definitely more of a theory, and I spend a lot of time pondering theological
questions and points of apologetics. I
hope that my specific beliefs are not too obnoxious, and I also hope that I
live my faith at least occasionally (when I remember to), but nonetheless I am
keenly aware that my Christianity is theoretical rather than visceral.
I am also aware that when
I take up my Keyboard of Justice and attempt to defend Christianity from its
detractors and critics, I am wholly failing to do so. Straw man arguments of the most ludicrous
sort are a very common tool of angry online atheists who portray Christianity
as a grotesque caricature of itself, and then wonder why anyone would believe
it. I have realised that I myself have
done something not entirely dissimilar.
I end up not defending Christianity, but theology, and as a result end
up portraying the theology as Christianity.
“Is it well that the impression with regard to Christianity made upon
your generation should be that of your opinions, and not of something beyond
opinion?” It is not well at all, Mr. MacDonald.
Part of the problem is
that we are born into a culture in which the ruling paradigm is
scientific. The objections raised
against Christianity tend to be scientific ones, or at least based on a
scientific notion of rationalism, and therefore the arguments against these
objections are couched in the same terms.
Rational objections are raised, and therefore we feel that we must offer
rational answers. I have said before in
this blog that Christianity is not rational (or rather perhaps, not
rationalistic; there is more to be said on this, probably elsewhere), but such
an answer would not only not satisfy these detractors, it would make them think
that there was no answer at all.
I think that this will
probably bear a whole other blog post to chew over, but to return to my main
point for this post, have I ended up crafting this splendid rational model, and
then had the foolish temerity to make out that it is Christianity. Christianity isn’t thought or deduced or
calculated, it is lived and breathed and acted.
It is easy to forget this in the joys of mental gymnastics.
They (whoever they are)
say that the first step towards solving a problem is to admit that it
exists. Despite the overall tone of this
post, I am not overly interested in self-flagellation, sack-cloth and
ashes. I will always maintain that
Christianity is not and has never been about making people feel bad about
themselves, or afraid of either God or whatever might come hereafter. It is about self-awareness in the most
empowering and optimistic way. I do not think that I am a terrible person, just
not necessarily a very good Christian. I
try to live by the teachings and tents of Christ, and I occasionally even
succeed briefly, but I spend far more time pondering the theory (and with no guarantees
that I’m even getting that right) than I do thinking of how I can set about the
practice. It’s a struggle. When I see people online hurling vitriol at
my faith, I feel duty-bound to defend it lest they assume that there is no
defence, but in doing so I am forced onto a field and into a defence which do
not suit the subject.
I find that I am mostly an
armchair Christian, an amateur Christian theoretician, which is to say not a
very good Christian at all. Well then,
as long as I remember that, and aim upwards, things should come right. I won’t attempt to theorise about the how, I’ll
just try and believe in the result.
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