Last week, I’m proud to report that I became the first person in human history to use the words “calm down, forlorn hand puppet Ebeneezer” on a blog post. Only the best for the Apologetic Professor’s readership! I mean, you’re not going to see that phrase at some cheap-jack outlet like the Washington Post, are ya? No, indeed, as I hope is illustrated by this historically accurate, yet satisfactorily three-dimensional, graph:
As hard as it is to improve upon such a striking success, this week we attempt to do so by discussing my actual top 5 reasons for believing what I believe. Let’s jump right in!
1. The need for forgiveness. I have done some pretty terrible things in my life, and I feel bad about that. I find a need inside of me to deal with those things. How can I do that?
Well, as far as I can tell, the other major world religions basically tell me – in fact, atheists, too, basically tell me – pretty much everyone on earth basically tells me that I need to try and make up for it as best I can. But that won’t do. That’s not very useful advice. I already knew that before I came to the religious or irreligious systems; that’s what my conscience already tells me. That’s in fact why I feel bad about the things I’ve done; I see that I ought not to have done them, and yet I did them anyway, and I ought to undo them.
Only anyone with any amount of common sense can see that you cannot fully undo anything. When you do something wrong, you have started a chain of events that is completely and totally beyond your power to stop. The best you can do is try to make amends; but that will never be enough to completely eradicate all the possible negative consequences of your action.
What to do? I think Buddha was a great guy that I respect very much; but Buddha’s advice does not help. I love Gandhi; but Gandhi has nothing to say to solve my problem. So, too, with all the great religious teachers from all the great religious traditions. Even Richard Dawkins tells me to behave better; the advice is noted but irrelevant; I already knew that.
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So why am I a Christian? Because only Christ told me something I didn’t know before; only Christ offered a real solution to my problem. Christianity teaches that my sin was horrible; that I cannot fully make up for it. But it’s ok, because Christ stood in my place to do what I could never, ever, ever do: He gave me my life back. He gave me a real chance to start over; to begin each day anew, with a clean slate. Even if everyone else on earth throws stones at me, the Creator of the universe stands there, drawing in the sand, refusing to throw the stone I so richly deserve, telling me that all is forgiven and to go and sin no more. I am forgiven and free, and it is Christ (alone in the universe, as far as I can tell) who did that.
2. The experience of longing for Something beyond this world. I hear the sound of a lonely violin; I see the wild sun lighting the sky red as she sets over the mountains; I feel the rustle of autumn leaves. And…not always, or even often, but once in a blue moon…it makes my heart ache for a better place, for something beyond this world. This positive fact of my existence needs an explanation; and Christianity provides the best one I know of.
3. Specific interactions with God Himself. Independent of my occasional sense that I want something beyond this world to exist (#2), I feel like I’ve interacted with Christ in very specific ways. I have multiplied hundreds of experiences that lead me to believe I’ve actually met God. I’m not sure that any of these experiences would be enough to convince skeptics…but they weren’t designed to convince skeptics. They were designed to convince one skeptic; and they did.
4. My wife. I know this may seem almost like a cop out to many, but it’s an honest recognition of why I believe what I believe. And one of the reasons is simple: My wife has an other-worldly love for people. I have literally wondered at times if she was some kind of angel. She seems like she was dropped here out of Heaven. She is the only person I know who has ever cried when an ambulance went by – carrying random people she doesn’t know, the result of some random event she will never find out about – and started praying for the people. No, she isn’t perfect, but there is something in her that seems to me not of this world. And she says it’s God – and as she is the most honest, upright person I know, why not believe her? (A side note: My daughter is also other-worldly awesome. But my firm belief in Christ pre-dates her by quite a ways, so I don’t think she’s relevant to the question we’re asking here).
5. Intellectual/historical arguments. I’d guess what you probably expected to see in this list was a ranking my top 5 intellectual arguments for God’s existence. Poo poo to that! Of course, I could do that – and in fact, I have an ongoing series grading arguments for God’s existence where I do that de facto – but, really, such arguments have not played a primary role in my own belief in God. (It’s kind of – but not quite – like having an intellectual argument about whether or not my wife exists. Philosophers do debate that sort of thing, and I think it’s a fun evening personally; especially when she’s in the room. But really, at the end of the day, I have a direct experience of my wife, and that seems a little more important to me than the debate about her existence. So, too, with my experience of God – not as direct, perhaps, but no less real).
And yet: It would be intellectually dishonest of me to pretend that such arguments don’t matter. They do matter quite a bit. But they aren’t primary – they are more like a necessary background for belief. I might believe in some vague sense of the Divine, or something out there, without the intellectual rigor of Christian thought. But one of the reasons I believe in Christianity in particular is that it is a thinking person’s religion – it is philosophically defensible, has historical evidence in its favor, and so forth. If Christianity seemed completely divorced from history (e.g., if a lot of evidence suggested that there was no such person as Jesus, or that the places and events of the New Testament were entirely made up), then I would likely not believe in it. If Christianity seemed divorced from reason or objective thought, then I would likely not believe in it. But it isn’t in either case so divorced from reality.
Your opinion of me is WAY too high, but touching none the less.
At the risk of intruding on a tender moment between spouses: thanks for providing a personal explanation of your personal faith, rather than just another abstract and theoretical discussion (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that). I’ll just briefly comment on your reasons (I can’t say much about them, after all, since they’re so clearly personal to you), leaving your first and, to me, most intriguing reason (Forgiveness) for the end.
#2: A longing for Something beyond this world. I don’t think I’ve experienced that longing. I’ve had plenty of moments of “transcendence,” (I don’t know anyone who hasn’t), but for me such moments simply remind me that the world itself, the larger universe of which it’s a part, and the whole fabric of space and time of which I am but one minuscule component, one grain of sand: all of that transcends me and my limited consciousness and brief lifespan. For me, “this world” is itself vast and beautiful enough that longing for Something even vaster and more beautiful seems otiose; and while I know that, for some, the joys of this life awaken a longing for life without end–one life, and one world, is enough for me. (I’ve always had a small appetite.)
#3: Specific interactions with God Himself. You’ve got me there–I’ve never had even one, not even when I was a believing Christian (or, at least, an Episcopalian). I’d say that I envy you, but since I have no idea what you experienced and therefore no idea what I’m missing, envy isn’t really appropriate. I sure am curious, though.
#4: Your wife sounds very nice. Your citing her as evidence of God’s existence reminds me of when Jack Nicholson said to Helen Hunt (in the movie “As Good as it Gets”), “You make me want to be a better person.”
#5: As you say, your other posts have explored the intellectual and historical arguments. My guess is that those arguments rarely persuade anyone, but serve mostly to make sense of, and to articulate, the personal and experiential reasons for believing; for most people, of course, the basic reason is, “I was raised that way.”
Which brings me back, then, to your first reason: Forgiveness. I’m with you on a lot of what you have to say on this topic. I agree that each of us wants, and needs, to be forgiven (and, as much as possible, to forgive ourselves), and I understand that we don’t always get that forgiveness when we need it and from whom we need it. To me, however, this doesn’t suggest the need for a Savior or an Intercessor of some kind; rather, it’s just one more brute fact of life that we have to accept–we’re not always forgiven and we can’t always forgive ourselves, but we get on with our lives as best as we can, despite a certain unavoidable amount of guilt and regret. It might be nice if it were otherwise–but, as they say, people in hell want ice water. (I don’t mean to suggest that we’re in hell; Montana is much too nice for that, though I’m tired of the smoke.)
I understand too that, for many people, believing in the existence of a God who offers forgiveness–and who truly knows exactly what we need to be forgiven for–is one way to cope with our guilt and regret. I don’t think Christianity is the only religion that offers forgiveness–I’m pretty sure that Judaism, for one, got to that first–but there’s no question that Jesus seemed to emphasize it, and that it was and is an important part of Christianity’s appeal. Given that we’re all sinners (or, as I’d prefer, imperfect beings), having Someone to turn to for forgiveness is surely a blessing and a grace–if you can believe it, of course.
So far, so good, though it doesn’t persuade me as to God’s existence or to the validity of Christianity. But what I truly don’t understand, and what I’m hoping you can take time to explain, is what you mean when you say “Christ stood in my place to do what I could never, ever, ever do: He gave me my life back.” Is this simply a way of saying, “Christ forgave me when I couldn’t forgive myself”? In which case, any religion that teaches a forgiving God could make the same claim (“God forgives us when we can’t forgive ourselves”) without need of a “Christ” figure–I don’t see why “forgiveness” in this sense is a special feature or attraction of Christianity. What am I missing here?
(Moreover, the phrase “Christ stood in my place” reminds me of the phrase “Christ died for my sins,” which I also never did and, to this day, do not understand.)
Finally: if others forgive me, but I still can’t forgive myself or put aside my guilt and regret–how does being forgiven either by God or by Christ change that dynamic? The wrong I’ve done is still wrong and, as you say, can’t be undone; so in what sense is my burden of guilt lifted? I don’t mean that rhetorically: I’m honestly interested, if only because I don’t grasp it. And so I’d like to hear more, when you get the time, about the Christian understanding of forgiveness, and about how it differs either from non-Christian theistic understandings or from non-theistic/secular approaches.
I think Jack covered basically what I would have said about 2-5, so I won’t go into those. I too wanted to touch on the want of forgiveness idea in your first reason for being a Christian.
It has been said that Christianity works so well because it causes endless guilt. One interpretation of it goes in these steps:
1) Humans cannot be totally righteous (a departure from Judaism), thus all humans are fallen sinners who require forgiveness.
2) Since there are no righteous humans that could transcend their own nature, no one can save themselves from sin.
3) Thus, by Jesus’s sacrifice – a perfect scapegoat for all sins – all people can be forgiven all their sins, and thus be saved. This is grace, basically a free gift given.
4) But humans by their nature will sin (as said to begin with), and not only do they receive the normal guilt of having sinned again, but added to it they feel more guilt for having scorned Grace and essentially disregarding the death of their savior.
5) Now loaded with double guilt, people are even more compelled to seek Jesus to absolve their sins, which he does, which leads to more sin, which leads to even more guilt, and so on…
Basically ‘Catholoic Guilt’ in a nutshell, and obviously other interpretations of Christianity will tweak what Paul basically said in his letters to the Romans. It could be that the Christian system itself promotes forgiveness so much because the guilt-forgiveness cycle is extremely effective at keeping people thinking about the religion and modulating behavior. It leads me to wonder if the need for forgiveness so expressed isn’t an effect of Christianity itself as opposed to base human nature.
Maybe, or maybe not. In any case when in the lens of Christianity one cannot question the need for forgiveness – we are, after all, worthless sinners not deserving of anything but suffering from the get-go in it. However outside of it I can legitimately ask if we require forgiveness in the first place? Say you are innocent of mind, like a kid. Kids are mean to each other. They wrong each other lots and for many years do not hold direct regrets about it. They don’t require forgiveness because they haven’t the same means of empathy and introspection as more matured individuals – or perhaps it is something else too.
In many pre-Christian cultures and religions, forgiveness wasn’t really required, because if you did anything or the gods did anything to you, it was poetic retribution or simply the way the world worked. In my view, people are good and bad to one another because that’s human nature and the structures we have built for ourselves. Forgiveness can be useful to resolve issues that otherwise could not be resolved (one party is missing, internal guilt, unfixable regrets, etc.), but it certainly can be of detriment.
I actually have a certain constitution that makes me quite forgiving. I simply cannot hold onto grudges that well, and I don’t try to. I’ve been wronged by people and friends and I readily forgive them. I’ve often questioned if that is the proper course – in my case I’ve suffered very little because of it, either directly or indirectly, but it does have downsides as well. Unlike Christianity I don’t think people require forgiveness because I don’t believe they cannot be good on their own. Perhaps it would be nice in some cases to lift someone else’s burdens of guilt or your own, but I see forgiveness as an extremely personal choice that no other can do for you.
Which is where I have troubles thinking of Jesus as scapegoat. You have regrets towards others, towards yourself, and perhaps towards god. There are specific parties involved, and the only one I can see Jesus having any say in forgiveness of is qualms towards god. Just because Jesus forgives doesn’t mean the relevant parties otherwise did, being other people and yourself. I don’t believe responsibility ought to be put onto Jesus to do that, nor can he given the exclusive nature of wrongs and forgiveness. Granted many wrongs cannot be directly righted – in fact most cannot. But why not let the recognition and pain of that fuel you on to do great good therefore? Make yourself better in the present and future, build lovely things and relationships, and improve your fellow man with those fires. Why not utilize pain for something wonderful and better, instead of instinctively trying to seek absolution from it with a third party? It could be that both could be obtained and so get double-goodies, but in my views I must bear my actions out fully and none else can nor should, and I have other means of dealing with my own views on personal wrongs.
Anyway, I just have one other thing I wanted to say that was reminded to me from 1 and 2. A philosopher came into one of my classes and said in brief what his major reason for believing in the Christian god was. It was that since human beings have an emotional state that seeks forgiveness and goodness against personal urges, there must be a god that is rendering or rendered it onto mankind. Or something like that, basically saying the wish for transcendence of the world itself is proof of there being something more, and that the urge for forgiveness means there must be some source of that emotion.
I thought that such an argument could be made for any emotion or urge at all, that a God of Rage must exist because when one becomes angry it is as if possessed by something other than oneself, and imagining a world were you exacted vengeance as everyone occasionally does proves further that such a deity must exist given this argument. But I don’t buy that Ares is any more concrete that Thor or other gods I think are neat and the argument seemed post-hoc justification of accepted beliefs. If it was further the case that the need for intense forgiveness comes from a Christian culture or belief system itself, it would mean it was a developed state instead of a natural state of humanity. I don’t think you hold this same view though, but it reminded me of it so I thought I would share and perhaps get your thoughts on that.
Jack,
A beautiful and fair response, filled with very reasonable questions for which I am afraid I have very inadequate answers. I’ll briefly address only a couple of points here.
(1) About experiencing God: Naturally, we, both of us, can only respond to our own individual experiences. I think you know that I respect yours (and if you don’t, let me say that I do and know other people who I respect who would also say they have not ever experienced anything like the Divine presence), and I know that you respect mine (and in fact you have bent over backwards to be gracious on that point, both here and in past comments).
Which leaves me with this: I actually think it’s an interesting question — how do we approach the fact that some people “experience” God and some people don’t? And I’d say that, on the surface, that seems a point against Christianity. I mean, God is God, right? If even ONE person in the universe has no experience of Him at all, that doesn’t seem congruent with the Christian point of view.
I have no perfect, tidy, intellectual, Christian response to this difficulty. I only have an untidy, imperfect, personal, Christian response, which is: Life isn’t over yet. There was a point in my life where I would have said exactly what you said — and I wondered where God was and why, if He existed, I apparently wasn’t one of the chosen ones. But things change. God isn’t static. He acts in time, which means that sometimes He doesn’t appear to act in time. Now I don’t know why He acts as He does, but I for one have not given up hope that you and other genuine seekers will find Him on this side of the grave. (I don’t mean that to be insulting, and I hope it is not taken that way).
(2) About forgiveness: A perfectly valid question. I can only give you my own personal view of the topic and my own personal experiences, which I fear will be awfully idiosyncratic and boring. I’m not sure anyone fully understands the notion of “substitutionary atonement” or whatever theologians call it. But I DO fully understand the personal need I have for a Savior and why and how Christ meets that need…every day.
However, I’m not going to explain that in detail here — it would take too long. I’m going to write a post about it for a later date. Sorry! I would add that the points you raise are perfectly reasonable and I quite agree with you that it isn’t exactly an easy or obvious idea to get one’s head around. Here, I’ll limit myself to responding to a couple of your smaller points.
(a) I’m not sure I agree that lots of other religions teach about a forgiving God in the same way Christianity does (though of course many of them do use “merciful” to describe God and talk about forgiveness); certainly they don’t teach about it in a way that solves my own problem. Many of them deny the problem altogether; some of them offer fairly weak and contradictory solutions (e.g., saying God is perfectly just and perfectly merciful is real nice, but how do those things fit together, exactly? Christianity provides a real solution). I admit that I’m not an expert on other religions, per se. But I do think, Jack, that if you let those religions speak for themselves, you’ll find that mostly they don’t offer anything like the shocking view that Christianity offers. In fact, many of them find the Christian view quite appalling. (a1) I agree with you up to a point about Judaism, but I think that it’s more complicated and requires a bit of an historical argument which I’m not going to make here. The short version is that Christianity is, in one sense, Judaism extended through time. At least that is what it claims to be: I realize that this is a controversial statement! But modern Judaism, as I understand it, often denies the whole problem of sin altogether (in stark contrast with Old Testament Judaism), whereas Christianity keeps the idea from ancient Judaism fully intact.
(b) I certainly agree that it isn’t a very good intellectual argument for Christianity, or even for the existence of God, to say that I feel a need for forgiveness. It is a starting point in my own journey for peace; the end point of which was Christ. I claim little else for it. Call it a weak intellectual admission that something that’s #1 on my list isn’t a compelling intellectual argument! But I would note that I’m not alone in this experience — Francis Collins (current head of NIH and former head of the Genome project) describes the exact same experience in his clever little book on “The Language of God” (or some such title). His reasons for believing in God may be separate and totally different; but his reasons for believing in Christ are basically the same as mine.
(c) Along those lines, I would note that one of the primary psychological powers of Christianity is this very issue of forgiveness. At the risk of simply declaring something by fiat, I believe that your method of struggling through regret to find peace is simply less psychologically viable than the Christian one. Christianity offers something more like real, lasting, peace — at least to me — than the “struggling through regret” approach. And if you want to know why Christianity often spreads like wildfire wherever it goes, one of the primary reasons is that it offers people real peace with themselves that is hard to find in other places. (To anticipate the deluge: Yes, yes, I know that another reason involves swords and guns, and yet another involves discussions of hellfire. I get that. But to pretend that that’s all there is, well, that’s simply denying history. Christianity has often grown most where it has been persecuted and refused to fight back, e.g., early Roman empire, modern China. And I’d say one of the reasons why is that it simply solves a psychological problem that almost everyone feels).
Sorry — an inadequate reply. Based on yours and Uh-Oh’s excellent responses, I may start a series on the issue of forgiveness to lay out a little more of my own thoughts. Thanks for the comment!
Luke,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I’ll look forward to your extended thoughts on the subject of forgiveness, when you get the time. Perhaps my interest in the topic stems from my Catholic upbringing, which famously inculcated guilt but also (less famously) provided an opportunity for regular confession, penitence, and forgiveness–for some of us, unfortunately, that latter never really took hold. I sometimes think that a good deal of modern counseling and psychotherapy is merely a secularized version of Christian confession, dressed up in pseudo-scientific garb; in a secular culture, it’s ourselves from whom we seem to be seeking forgiveness (or is it from our counselor, who stands in as a proxy for–God?). Anyway, the human experience of guilt and need of forgiveness is unmistakable, and I agree that it’s one reason why Christianity came to flourish (its offer of eternal life, and a final righting of all wrongs, being the other main reason).
Uh-Oh,
An excellent and thoughtful comment as always! I think your critique is very fair and right in many ways. I’ve just at this moment made a definitive decision to write some posts on it in the future, so I’ll constrain myself a bit here to a few responses. (Your comments about Jesus as a scapegoat are very fair, and I hope to deal with those in the future post).
(1) Your point about the possibility of creating guilt/forgiveness cycles makes perfect sense. I’ve thought of that myself, and there really isn’t much of a clear and compelling intellectual response to it. It is possible that I feel guilt because my Christian culture taught me to feel it only to “solve” the problem. It’s possible that it’s more fundamental and that Christianity solves a problem that it did not psychologically create. So is Christianity like the computer virus-protection company who creates the virus in order to sell the cure, or is it like the virus-protection company that sees a virus already created and tries to stop it? It’s hard to say which is true for certain.
I do agree with you that forgiveness is not always a strong cultural theme. I’ve heard it said that there is no word for “forgiveness” in Salish and that many cultures do not have the concept at all. I’d also agree that of course sometimes the Church has historically engaged in that kind of guilt induction/solution behavior (ok, “sometimes” might be a little euphemistic…”often” might be better…”very, very often” might be closer still to the truth), where it did seem to intentionally create guilt and concern over hellfire in order to solve the problem and (as often as not) get money and power.
Over and against this are two facts, one cultural and one personal. (a) It seems to me as if the experience of “doing something I feel was wrong,” though phrased in a lot of ways, is in fact essentially universal (except among psychopaths, perhaps). I think evolutionary psychologists (most of whom are not religious and have no love for Christianity), who study all cultures as much as they can, would, I believe, agree with that statement. We have a moral conscience; we feel bad when we break it. What happens next may be phrased in different ways — in Japan, for example, they may not talk of a “need for forgiveness,” but I have heard talk of great “shame” for actions during wars that were later deemed morally repugnant. So, while I do agree with you up to a point, my own reading of the human landscape is that there is something more fundamental that really does need solving, and one of the reasons Christianity is so popular is that it offers an incredibly appealing psychological solution to the problem. Doesn’t make it true, necessarily; but it also makes it unlikely that is is entirely responsible for creating the problem it solves. (b) Personally, in my own experiences, I think the guilt/solution cycle does not fit. Many of the things the Church grew up teaching me were wrong (dancing, drinking) I never did or cared about. And some of the stuff I felt bad about, I never heard about in church at all. Of course, it may be a case of the fish not being able to explain the water, but I’m quite convinced that the guilt I feel wasn’t created by the church. Mostly, I don’t care what the “church” thinks anyway…only what IS.
(2) I absolutely LOVED your comment about Ares/God of Rage and so forth. A very fair point, and very graciously stated. Yes, you are right. I do think (see my response to Jack above) that, as an intellectual argument, drawing a line from “I feel a need for forgiveness” to “God exists and is forgiving” is very poor intellectual fare. That hardly convinces me, and I’m writing a cite defending my religion! I think it’s more personal than that, and I think your example illustrated part of the difficulty with that line of thinking. It would be more accurate to say that I desire a God like that, and Christianity meets that desire, than to claim that this is a clear intellectual argument for God’s existence.
Having said that, I would also say that the cases aren’t quite parallel in my own personal life, and if they are, the same psycho-logic might apply. I mean, I don’t know that I feel a need for a randomly-aggressive God like Ares. I do feel a personal need for a do-over in many areas of my life. I’d be happy if Ares did not exist, and I’d be happy if Christ did.
Of course, people did invent Ares and so forth, and I do think most of those gods reflect something about human feelings in much the way you describe. Ares = need for power and maybe justice/retribution; Athena = need for wisdom, and so forth. Which leads to the reasonable question of “well, if we invented those gods, maybe we invented Christ, too?” Which is why this isn’t my only reason for believing in Christ; only the most important thing that separates Him from other religious teachers in my mind. (That and His absurdly high standard for loving your enemies. Goodness!) It’s the primary thing that draws me, personally, to Him. If He didn’t provide me peace of mind, I’d still be searching for someone else to do it. But He did; and I am content.
Anyway, if you endured that rambling monologue, you have my deepest sympathies. My only excuse was that you asked me for my thoughts on the Ares issue! Thanks for the comments — very appreciated as always.
Oh, and Kathrene, my sweet wife: I would hate for Jack to feel as if he was “intruding on a tender moment” between us, so for his sake I hasten to add that I meant EVERY word I said about you in the post, and am happy to disagree with you in public about it. I arrogantly claim to know you better than you know yourself! (Yes, I know — it’s hard to imagine me making obnoxious claims — you’ll have to stretch your mind a bit…)
I am angry! I am argumentative! I am a spam-blocking checker! Deny me no argument! Heed no logic! No sentence is unworthy of an exclamation point! I am going to go feed my dog! Mentos candy is slightly good! I go quietly into the night!!!
Out of curiousity, are these reasons in order?
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