Anonymous Apologist

Let me start by telling you about my brother. My brother is an academic; he studied English at University up to a Master level and currently works as an editor for one of the world's largest publishing companies. He is an atheist, if anything he’d call himself ‘a little Bhudist’. I keep asking him where he keeps his little Bhudist. He doesn’t find it funny. He had the same up bringing as myself; he went to Church until he was about 13 years old and a few times since then. The reason he is an atheist is that he believes that many Christians are crazy confused illogical people, who know what they believe, but don’t know why they believe it. He believes that there is no truth in what Christians say and that what science says provides more evidence for him to believe in what it says, than Christianity and religion do. He is just one of millions of people in this country and around the world who believe this.

People generally believe what seems rational to them. Adam Smith, one of the greatest Economists ever, based his theories of free trade on several assumptions, one of which was the assumption that people are rational. Christianity may make sense to us; indeed the gospel to those who are being saved it is the power of God, but foolishness to those who are perishing. To many, it seems like Christ is foolishness and Christians have given up their brains. It’s not because Christianity is something irrational; I believe it is the truth. But the Western view of Christianity and religion as a whole is that it is idiocy to believe in God.

From the birth of the Church, there have always been secular philosophers and thinkers who have opposed the Christianity saying it is illogical and irrational to believe. And the Church fought back, St. Paul was a tremendous thinker and was not only well versed in the what we have as the Old Testament today, but in poetry and the arts and philosophy, which he used to persuade people of the truth of the Gospel. Since then, there have been many more Christian thinkers, such as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, and whenever secular philosophy or beliefs have brought arguments against the Church, the Church has fought back with reasoned and rational answers. Martin Luther was a great thinker who was able to reason why we should believe in a God, why we should read the Bible and believe it and do what it says.

Whenever the world threw up an argument, the Church would fight back, until the end of the 1800s when people like Darwin and the philosopher Burtrand Russel battered Christianity so hard, we backed down and gave up.

And this is the crux of what I am writing about. The Evangelical Church, as a whole, and that is we have stopped thinking. There is almost an anti-intellectualism in the evangelical Church today, which was not present two hundred years ago. The term ‘anti-intellectualism’, I use to mean we are don’t like people who think, or try to reason or even understand our faith, or use their brains to worship God; we leave that to the scholars and the theologians, but it doesn’t have a place in Church, it’s through us in which Christ meets the world.

Why is it important to think and worship God with our minds? Looking at the Bible, it is one of the things Jesus put an emphases on. When Nicodemus asked Jesus what the most important commandment was, Jesus replied “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”. We could look at what each of these is referring to and how to apply this to our lives, but I want to focus on Loving God with our minds. Jesus put the strength, the soul, the mind and the heart all together; that is what makes a human, and we should worship God with all of these things. Loving God with our minds isn’t the only way to worship God, or even the most important, but it can not be neglected.

When we don’t seek to understand proper knowledge of our faith, our beliefs become just emotions without reason or substance. We take the view that since Christianity is the "right" religion and all the other ones are "wrong" that we're OK and don't have to worry anymore; we don’t try to understand what we believe. I’m not saying that emotion is wrong; there is an important place for experience in faith, but by itself, it can be dangerous.

Horace Walpole said that “Life is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel.”

At the moment, it seems like the Church is very 'touchy-feely'; whatever works for you, you can believe in. Emotionalism in the Church should be balanced with understanding, and at the moment, generally the Evangelical Church does not think.

There are two areas where this can be especially dangerous. Letting our emotions lead us can allow false teaching to come into the Church and it can damage our witness to those outside the church, as it has with my brother. Why should people believe what we believe, when we don’t know why we believe, what we believe?

This is something that has been happening even from the start of the Church. If you read Paul’s letter to the Churches, in many of the letters, there is something in reference to standing strong in the faith which was taught by Paul and the other Apostles.

In Hebrews 5 verses 12 to 14, the writer rebukes the Hebrew church for not truly understanding their own faith. He writes, "In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil." (NIV). You can see from these verses, gaining an intellectual understanding of the difficult teachings of scripture help Christians distinguish good from evil.

Paul also commented on this in the Epistle to the Ephesians when he warned that "We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ." (Eph 4:14-15 NAS)

The truth is that there are people preaching things in Churches today, often unintentionally, which are not true to the gospel. But how can we tell if they are twisting the truth if we have not understood or reasoned our faith ourselves? The reason I started with this area and the reason I’m writing about it here is that in the different churches I’ve attended, someone preached a sermon which contained things which didn’t seem right to me. But the truth was that I didn’t know what I did believe on that matter, so I went away and started reading about it and talking to other Christians about it. I spoke to people at the Church where I heard that sermon to try and understand why they believed what they had preached on and I spoke to people outside of the church who were opposed what had been taught.

I’d like to think that if I were to say that Jesus came back two years ago and we’ve all been left behind, I hope I’d raise some eyebrows. But sometimes false teaching is extremely subtle. In Galatians, Paul speaks about how he rebuked Peter for slipping back into treating Jews and Gentiles differently with regards to the gospel. Peter used to eat freely with the Gentiles, which was forbidden by Jewish law, and yet when the Jews turned up, Peter turned back to his old ways of only eating with Jews. It wasn’t necessarily that Peter had changed his mind, but he had stopped thinking; he had forgotten why he had stopped being so strict about his eating regulations. Sometimes I find that I have been doing something in error, with the best intentions, because I have not thought it out.

Heresies might not just be something taught, but the way in which the Church operates. Is there something that we do in Church that we don’t understand why we do it? If so, we shouldn’t necessarily stop doing it, but try to understand why we do it. Why do we believe in the Trinity when there is no reference to the term ‘Trinity’ in the Bible? It doesn’t mean that teaching the trinity is wrong, but that we have not thought.

We should know what we believe and why we believe it. Because many have thought that faith alone is good enough to sustain the Christian life, the church has become intellectually lazy. And because people don't want to study doctrine, they will sometimes accept teachings that are heresies without realising it.

I’ve outlined some problems here and tried to show why this is important, but what is the solution? How do we solve this? What does worshipping God with our minds look like individually?

I don’t think that worshipping God with our minds is a matter of being an academic or intelligent. My Grandfather, fondly known as Granddad Smith, is not an academic; when he left school he became an apprentice in an engineering firm, which is what he did for the whole of his life. Coincidentally, I’ve also got a Granny Smith. She doesn’t like apples. My Granddad is not necessarily the sort of person who you’d think of as an intellect, yet at the Church he goes to, every Sunday evening they run an hour of teaching where people can learn about their faith at deeper levels.

This is a matter of learning and studying. I know that as we get older, we find it harder to learn; I’ve found that at University - it is not easy, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it. If living with students has taught me anything, it’s those who are interested and motivated in what they are learning who succeed. Maybe we need to change our mindsets so that we are motivated to learn about our faith.

Up until about 18 months ago, I didn’t really care for theology - I didn’t see the point in learning any theology, but over the last year and a half, I’ve discovered that reading theology and understanding where our faith has come from and why we believe what we do to be one of the most interesting and joyous things I can do. I’ll stress again that it is not easy to read theology, but I don’t think that it is not an excuse not to understand our faith. There are lots of books available which simplify theology, not taking away from it, but explaining it in different ways, hopefully making it easier to understand.

If the church were to take this seriously, it might mean changes in the way in which we do things. What does a thinking Church look like?

A thinking Church shouldn’t just agree with everything they hear, but should think about it and test it. If someone says something that I’m not sure I agree with or that I’ve never heard before, I’d go and research it and talk to people and think about it and read my Bible and pray about it and ask God for understanding.

There are secondary issues in the Bible that people don’t agree on. That may not mean that one party is wrong and the other right, but maybe God is bigger than our understanding and we can only settle with I don’t know. One of the best Church that I’ve come across for this area are a Church who say “this is the issue; this is what some people believe. This is what other people believe. Based on the Bible, interpreting it as best we can, this is what we believe as a Church. If you read the scriptures differently and have been enlightened otherwise, that’s fine, but this is where we are.” This is especially important for understanding what we believe and what others believe.

A thinking Church should ask questions. When we stop thinking and asking questions, we stop growing. If there is something that we don’t understand that we feel we should, we should be pro-active in trying to find the answers. If you’ve sat here today and as you've read, thought who is St. Augustine? What is a Thomas Aquinas? What is so special about Luther, or Edwards, or Wesley, or Calvin? Then please, go away and find out about them because they will help you to understand your faith better.

A thinking Church shouldn’t cut out the juicy bits; preachers especially shouldn’t just say “but I won’t bore you with the dull theology behind it.” We should know the Bible, and that involves getting into the Bible daily and asking God for understanding and wisdom as we read it. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with reading just a few verses everyday and really getting to grips with them.

A thinking Church should cater for everyone, not just those who are intellectual or academic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach at depth, but maybe we should change our style of teaching so that we can teach at depth in a way which helps everyone.

A thinking Church should apply the wisdom and understanding given to them.

I read a book a couple of years ago called ‘Why do you believe what you believe about Jesus?’, and I think we should all try to answer that question. What we need are thinkers to defend the gospel. St. Peter says always have a reason for your faith for those who ask; the word reason there means ‘defence’; effectively defend the gospel. We need to be a thinking Church and thinking disciples.

I started by telling you about my brother and I want to finish by writing about him as well. I said that my brother believes Christians to be irrational crazy people. However, he also has a friend who is a Christian; a chap called Simon. Simon worked for Youth for Christ several years ago and went on to study something to do with computers, up to PhD level. And Simon is a challenge to my brother, because he is a level headed clear thinking rational person, who is a Christian. And this challenges my brother because if Christians are level headed clear thinking rational people, then there might be some truth in what they believe.

As a result of this, and because my brother is an academic and works in a publishing company, he read ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is a ardent atheist who writes a lot about why he doesn’t believe that there is a God. I was chatting to my brother about this over Easter; I’ve not read the God Delusion, and so asked him what the gist of it was and he said many of Dawkin’s arguments were based around the fact that Christians don’t think or try to defend themselves when people attack them with intellectual arguments. Sadly, I understand what he was saying.

However, there are people who are defending the gospel by thinking. When my brother said that Dawkins believes that Christians don’t argue back rationally, I said do you know that there is a book called ‘The Dawkins Delusion’ by Alister McGrath. 'Yes' he said, I work in publishing don’t you know, and I’ve read that one too and I think it answers Dawkin’s points very well, but it doesn’t go on to try to make God a rational thing to believe in. The Church needs thinkers, the Church as a whole needs to think and understand the faith that we have, if we are going to love God with the whole of our heart and the whole of our souls and the whole of our strength and the whole of our minds.