The Curious Case for Christianity
Does such a strange religion have a place in the modern world?
I agree. Christianity is strange and challenging.
I understand how many, particularly in the West, look at “the mythology of Jesus” — the stories of his immaculate conception, his casting-out of demons, his miraculous healing of the sick, his crucifixion as a slave and his subsequent resurrection — and say that:
- it’s mythological
- it’s unscientific
- it’s archaic
- it’s just about being good
Now, this is not a Christian apology. Not in a traditional sense.
But having grown-up at a High Church Anglican boarding school, having studied theology at Oxford University, and having lost my faith in my 20s, I recently found myself to be revisiting my views on faith (the reason for which I may explain another time).
And having come across these viewpoints again and again, I thought I would write down my responses. Now, I want to add that it has been many, many years since I studied theology and any responses I have here are far from being any kind of systematic theology. In fact, they’re more a stream of consciousness.
But here we go…
(1) Its mythological
I found myself reflecting on the words of the author JRR Tolkien, himself a devout Roman Catholic, who said, “A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound, a myth can be true”.
For the pragmatic modernist, a myth is just a lie. It is simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, and it certainly signifies nothing of any kind of importance except as a fairy tale or as high fantasy.
For us, who have grown-up in a post-Reformation culture of individualism, where our focus is on the primacy of self-fulfilment and success in the eyes of others, myths have no place.
Believing in myths, we look as though we cling to an unthinking past that cannot and must not be challenged, rather than cleaving to bright future of modernity in the latest “contemporary thought” … often that has appeared on social media.
For Tolkien, however, myths were far more than stories that we cling to. They are stories that exemplify truths that it is impossible to explain by mere fact. Whereas facts are utilitarian and demand both verification and replication, myths point to deeper truths than finite science can provide.
(2) It’s unscientific
For us who have been schooled in the scientific method, where ideas must be submitted to rigorous, laboratory-condition analysis before being accepted as true, this is equally challenging as these myths and their deeper truths are impossible to fold into the laboratory conditions.
Which surely means that modern science should relegate the mythology of Christianity to the outer darkness as fanciful nonsense.
But that does not explain why a study by the Pew Research Center of over 2500 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 found that over 50% of them believe in some sort of deity or higher power.
Not only that, but that this research has been regularly repeated since the start of the 20th century and, despite the extraordinary scientific advances that they layman believe should disprove the existence of God, has shown the same level of belief with unerring consistency.
Science does not comprehensively disprove the existence of God or those numbers would be vastly different. But then again, as we explain below, Christianity (and all religions) are not just about the existence of God but also about the purpose of humanity.
(3) It’s archaic
The insinuation here is that ancient minds were clearly less bright than our modern minds and that myths were needed to answer questions on the existence of evil, the reason for death and the purpose of life.
Firstly, ancient civilisations were far from stupid.
One could argue that they were not just as bright as we are now, but even brighter. One need only look at the genius of their philosophies, the complexity and accuracy of their mathematical calculations, and the marvels they could create with limited technological equipment (compared with today).
Yes, their “ancient texts” tried to find a way to explain some of the workings of the physical world. Yes, they also provided answers for how people could live in communities in harmony and with common causes, cares and concerns.
But the myths also offered deeper truths into the reason for existence.
They were written in such as a way to be understood by the audiences of the time; to be told around the hearth or in community settings.
We might see them as prosaic and strange, but our writings too will sound archaic in the distant future. We cannot foresee how we should write in a way that reflects the perspectives of a reader in millennia from now so as to suit not only their understanding of the world but also suit the myriad of different ways that history may develop.
And just because those myths and understandings of the world might be prosaic and strange to our modern ears, does it necessarily make them wrong?
(4) It’s just about being good
The mythology of Christianity also offers its adherents a purpose.
While people may now conjecture that all Jesus meant to do was to teach people to be good to each other, one must bear in mind how his instructions on how to be good were utterly alien to the ancient world.
How on earth did a religion that was so utterly contrary to the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean win out as the dominant religion of Europe and the Ancient Near East.
“The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
Had Christianity never won-out as the dominant religion in the Mediterranean and then the dominant culture in Europe, it is likely that we would be seeing the world through very different eyes.
Rather, everything that we understand as being “good” comes from our Christian heritage. The foundations of our modern Western liberal democracy are built upon the Christian assumption that all humans have innate value and worth.
Indeed, so suffused are we today by Christian assumptions that it requires an almost preternatural imagination for us to appreciate how utterly tiresome they might have seemed to many Greeks and Romans.
So where am I going with this?
Well, I said that this was no standard Christian apologetic or systematic theology. Instead, it is the stream of consciousness of someone who feels that, before condemning Christianity to the pit of mythological, archaic, unscientific nonsense that does not fit with the modern world, we should consider it again.
Yes it’s strange and odd.
But its strangeness has been the source of all our culture in the West.
And the audacity of its oddness to resonate with people for the last two thousand years means, at least to my mind, that there is a kernel of truth in there.
Or is that just a myth?
