Forever Young

After a heated debate about evolution and creationism I once told my housemate "never let me marry Eleanor Matthews". If you know me at all, the irony will not be lost on you. I've now been dating said Eleanor Matthews for nearly ten months. I kind of regret saying that now.

Me and Ellie were brought up in very different traditions of Christianity. These days I prefer to avoid the labels, but if it helps she came from quite a 'Conservative Evangelical' background. My background is typically more 'Charismatic'. Before I got to know people who thought differently to me, I pretty much thought they were wrong. That they didn't have much to offer, and that I did things the 'right way round'. They were loopy conservatives who took the Bible too literally, thought the holy spirit was dead and stood on street corners condemning people to hell.

There's such an arrogance in that. For years, I have sat comfortably in my own opinions, read books by people I agreed with, listened to talks from people that from the same school of thinking as me. And pretty much all that does is confirms your own thinking. It narrows your mind. I had been so caught up in 'Christianity as told by Josh Cockayne' that I had little room for the opinions of a girl with something vastly different to say.

 The problem with that is that you close yourself off to anything valuable that other people, and other schools of thinking have to offer. It's so easy to scoff, to criticise, to pick holes in people's theology. It's easy to say that Conservative Christians are nutjobs and that Charismatics are wet and spineless. It's so easy to spend all of our time squabbling over the right way to do things, and the right way to read this passage. What's difficult, and what I'm trying to learn to do more and more is to recognise the good that people have to offer. To take my head from out of my own bum and allow myself to try learning from people who might be able to teach me something new. It's really hard to break prejudices, opinions that have been lodged for so long. It's hard to see past someone's theology, the way someone reads the Bible and to listen to what they actually have to say.

What I'm not endorsing is unanimous relativism, the thinking that says "everyone is right in their own way". I'm not even saying we shouldn't disagree with people. I just think we could try and understand people a bit better. I know for me, I often judge what someone has to say before they even speak, before I even open the first page of their book. It's valuable to be able to disagree with someone for what they actually have to say. And actually, we might learn something from them. We might actually find they've got a point.

I've learnt a lot since I said "never let me marry Eleanor Matthews". I think we both have. I think I'm still pretty caught up in my own prejudices. I get unreasonably defensive any time I'm challenged. But I think that I'm definitely more open to being taught. At the end of the day, all Conservative Christians are not nutjobs. I still disagree with a lot of what they think, but I have a deep respect for Christians with the consistency to follow through what they believe and what they think God requires of them. I think I can learn a lot from that.

I am wrong quite a lot of the time. I know that. I reckon that most 'breeds', boxes', 'denominations', (whatever you want to call them) of Christianity have flaws in their thinking. I think most of them have plenty wrong with them. I think some are probably closer to 'truth' than others. But importantly, I think we can learn something about God from all of them. The minute that I'm not prepared to listen to what someone else has to say, I've missed out on something vital I could learn from them. At the end of the day, I don't want to be a 'Charismatic Christian', I don't want to be liberal, or evangelical. I want to be able to follow Christ. I don't want to be comfortable in the box I started off in, I don't want to have the same opinions in ten years time as I have now. I want to be in a position to constantly be challenged, be rebuked, be wrong. I want to be in a position to learn from John Piper, Rob Bell, Brian McClaran, John Stott, whoever the next liberal/ conservative pinup boy might be. I'm pretty sure they've all got something to teach me.

I think we'll only gain real maturity in faith when we start to know what we really think about things, what we really believe, when we're able to learn from people who think differently. If we just feed ourselves the same,  unchallenging, belief embedding content we've always heard, then I think there's the risk that we stay forever young in faith; never challenged, never thinking differently. It's quite an impoverished position to be in, because at the end of the day, we deny ourselves some quite profound and life changing perspectives on life and on faith.

When did we become so cut off from each other as Christians that we have made each other the enemy? When did we get so arrogant in our opinions that we denied what others had to say before they even opened their mouths. How did I get to a point where I could dismiss what might just turn out to be my future wife after one theological discussion? I really hope that I am able to stop counting out what God might have to say to me, what he might have in store for me because of my own ignorance and my own prejudices.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

Desperately procrastinating from writing what I hope will end up being more regular blog entries, I stumbled across a provocative little gem. After making about the third espresso of the day I sat down to read the BBC news feed for the fourth or fifth time and found an article titled: "Can Religion tell us more than Science". The joys of going to an afternoon Church.

It started promising and interesting. John Gray maintains that the New Atheists have kind of missed the point when showing religion to be an inadequate scientific thesis. Which I agree with. But the main opinion of his text I fundamentally disagree with. The crux of his position is summed up in the last sentence of the piece:
"What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live."

Religion, he maintains, is all about behaviour and not particularly about belief at all: "Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all."

It got me thinking- is that really true? I realise that some of my thoughts on faith might come across a little bit that way. I think that faith is absurd and rationally inexplicable, I don't feel particularly like new atheism has much threat to my faith. But surely what we believe is vital, its central to how we act. Otherwise our actions, our behaviour might be fulfilling and enjoyable on one level but surely they're ridiculously inconsistent. I don't quite understand how we might believe without it moving us to action. It is beyond me.

Consistency is probably one of the things I value most in a person and one of the things that I think might be lacking in a lot of modern Christians. I find it troubling that someone's indifference and agnosticism towards a deity might lead them to attend worship devoted to one every week. But it scares me. This attitude towards faith is only increasing. And honestly I find it totally and utterly at odds to the teachings of Christ. It makes no sense to say "what matters is how we live", inferring that to follow Christ's teachings is somehow valuable in its own right. The idea of following the teachings of Christ without any faith, without any belief is one that I think Christ would have found utterly ludicrous. You only need to pick the New Testament up and read it (which surely is contained in the notion of religious practice) to find that belief matters.

Matthew 22:36-40. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Love God, love people. That is the heart of Christianity. It escapes me how I ought to love something or some being that I don't believe in. It escapes me that my devotion and practice of daily devoting my life to Christ might be an empty gesture. It is actually pretty offensive. It is only from belief that true behaviour can stem. Sartre calls this notion 'bad faith', the idea that we pretend that we are only objects like trees and rocks. He describes a waiter who 'plays the part of a waiter', he is so wrapped up in 'being a waiter', he denies that there is any choice, any belief involved. This notion is at the heart of Sartre's account of morality.

And that strikes me as the heart of the problem of the dying Church of the UK: Apathy and inconsistency Thousands of people acting and living out the 'Christian life' in Bad Faith. Ticking the 'I go to Church' box on their conscience. They are Christians as objects, they live their lives in complete bad faith. But they never let the radical words of Jesus transform them, never let worship escape the box they put it in. They don't allow their minds to be transformed. And most of them don't have a clue what they believe.

I believe that faith can change your life. That Christ can change your life. I believe that. We might see new atheism and passionate unbelievers as a barrier to this. I don't. Dawkins might be quite an angry, influential speaker and commentator on modern religion. But at least he's consistent. At least he acts on what he believes. To be honest, good on him. And I hope that he wakes people out of apathy. Out of the lie that what you believe doesn't matter. Because it does.

Christianity needs to learn to do the same. To wake people up who are sleeping in their Churches. Who are filling pews, who have been 'living' without belief in complete bad faith. Consistency is so important at the heart of modern radical Christian living. We need to be people who are brutally consistent. If we believe that Christ's promises are true, we need to live them in our lives. If we don't, if we are feeling doubtful and far from God, why go through the motions? We need to not to sing "In Christ alone my hope is found" when we don't really believe a word of it. We need to not preach that Jesus has changed our lives if we don't think that he has. We need to learn how to be consistent. Communities of people who believe what we believe and act what we believe. There is a lie that says that putting a brave face on, of acting like everyone else is acting is the right thing to do. It is a lie that belief doesn't matter. And it is dangerous to live in bad faith. This is what Jesus says about it:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’"

I find that terrifying. That is a stark warning against apathy, bad faith and inconsistency and it is one we need to take a little more seriously than we do.

Running on Faith

I believe because I can do no other. I wasn't argued into faith, I wasn't persuaded into faith. I became self conscious and I believed. I'm not alone in this. Others can remember the first time they had faith. My mate James for example became a Christian 5 years ago. He was at a festival with me and my friends when he got out of his seat and went to the front to respond and never looked back since. I don't think anyone persuaded or argued him into it. He just got up from his seat and walked into faith. Today he is introducing people to Jesus left right and centre, he is devoting his year to serving God and his Church. It astounds me. All because of that one moment when he leapt into faith.

 Recently I can't get away from the absurdity of faith. Understand me when I say 'absurd'. I don't mean absurd in the sense that we might often hear it. Absurd carries quite a few negative connotations, we might say "The big bang theory is an absurd theory." When we say this we usually mean it's unreasonable or that we disagree with it. When I say that faith is 'absurd that's not quite what I mean. Sartre uses the notion of absurdity to refer to all of existence. Things exist and we are confronted with their existence but there seems to be no meaning behind them. There's some pretty hilariously pretentious pieces (apologies Sartre fanatics) when Sartre talks about being confronted by the absurdity of a tree trunk as a form which confronts his senses but which has no meaning, when we strip away the names we give it, when we experience things as they actually are, we see that they're utterly absurd.

For me that's a pretty good account of faith. I've become increasingly disillusioned with apologetics, with the whole McGrath/ Dawkins spat. It once used to fascinate me, I used to want to be able to argue any atheist into the ground. Now I can't really be bothered. Partly because the arguments don't always convince me, but partly because I think that faith isn't a proposition to be proved at all. Don't get me wrong, there's a use in discussing apologetics if it helps people to see that the Christian faith isn't absolutely bonkers. But it irritates me.

Kierkegaard argued that faith is a paradox, he held that the rational mind cannot ever comprehend God fully or prove that he exists. Faith is all about risk, faith is about leaping into something absurd. I daily leap into the absurd. I choose daily to trust in God. You might have read up to here and think that I'm actually a bit of an idiot. That I've lost a grasp on rationality and am just looking for a way to cling onto some stability that has been indoctrinated in me. Surely that's a possibility, but I don't think it's the truth. You see the thing is we daily leap into the absurd. All of us. None of us can fully understand the universe, the existence of consciousness, life our own existence. When we confront things as they really are, stripped away from all the meaning we bring to them, all we have left is absurdity. Christianity isn't a proposition at all. It's a complete overhaul of my being.

I endorse Christ to you wholeheartedly. I believe that he has redeemed me. That he has set me free from my own self centered universe, I believe that he offers me life eternal. But following Christ is a total worldview. It is a lens that infects every aspect of my existence. It is not something I can be persuaded of in the same way that I can be persuaded that there used to be dinosaurs walking on planet earth. I believe that faith in Christ is the ultimate fulfillment and it brings hope and truth to everything.

But at the same time it's utterly absurd. I cannot tell you why I believe. I believe because I can do no other. I am transformed into faith. That is why I am increasingly frustrated with the limits of rationalism. At some point we all have to leap. That is why Kierkegaard claims that faith is so offensive to rationalism, it threatens the very basis of it. It is a frustrating splinter that cannot be removed, even amidst the tightest argument, there always exists the slightest doubt. I have chosen to leap fully into Christ, and into his promises. I'm not an irrational idiot. But I will constantly fustrate the humanists of this world with my faith. Because faith cannot be eradicated by debate. When we start to enter into the view that rationalism is the only option, faith might diminish, might fade into the background. But I cannot escape the absurd, I cannot shake off faith. It is the most real thing to me.

We need to show faith, we need to model it. That is why I think my friend James leapt into the unknown that day; he saw faith amongst him. I leap every day into what sometimes seems paradoxical and unknown. My hope is that other people will see the power of faith and choose the same.