Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

Something fun to watch as the year ends... :)

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What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

By Shane Claiborne

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

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Understanding the New Atheism (Part 2)

continued from part 1 here

September 18, 2010, 1:34 pm » Sean McDowell

In the last post we explored the nature of the New Atheism. Now, let’s consider the tactics of the New Atheists and why we must respond to their attacks.

Why the New Atheism Matters

One of the reasons the New Atheists have been so effective is that today’s students can’t think well. As Mark Bauerlein has argued in The Dumbest Generation, the dawn of the technological age that promised to produce a brighter, more intellectually sophisticated young people has had the opposite effect. This generation has grown up in a society driven by images and slogans, not carefully reasoned discourse or critical analysis. It’s not that they are incapable, or even unwilling to engage difficult issues (from my experience, I believe they are both capable and willing). They simply haven’t been trained or properly motivated. And so many fall for the shallow, emotionally charged diatribes of the New Atheists.

Another reason tackling the influence of the New Atheists matters is because the worldview of a young person shapes his or her religious future. In his monumental study on the spiritual lives of emerging adults (ages 18–23), sociologist Christian Smith lists the most common factors for why a young person grows up to be highly religious. They include having highly committed parents (or other influential adults), holding their religious faith in high importance, practicing spiritual disciplines, having few doubts, and believing in divine miracles as a teenager. Yes, beliefs about the supernatural in the teenage years are deeply important for lasting faith. Smith concludes, “By taking a cognitive stand on miracles during the teenage years, youth who do so solidify a certain intellectual and affective structure that is more likely to resist the authority claims of secular modernity than those who do not.”[i]

It’s no coincidence that the New Atheists so aggressively criticize the supernatural basis of Christianity. They criticize the virgin birth, resurrection, incarnation, and other miracles of the Christian faith—all in an attempt to undermine students’ faith.

What the New Atheists Claim

If you had to boil down the main arguments of the New Atheism into one statement, it would be this: Religion is not just false; it’s dangerous and must be eliminated! And by religion, they mostly have Christianity in mind. Richard Dawkins lays all his cards on the table: “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been invented.”^[ii] He continues, “Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind.”^[iii] Clear enough.

They have two main lines of attack. First they raise scientific and philosophical challenges against belief in God and then they raise moral and biblical challenges against the God of the Bible. Let’s examine just one example. Regarding science, Christopher Hitchens claims, “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”[iv] The implication is obvious. Back when we lived in ignorance—before the dawn of science—being religious was excusable. After all, we didn’t know any better. Today, however, science has removed the need for God. His services are no longer required. Is this really true?

First of all, remember that science originated from within a Christian view of the world. Because Christians believed in a rational God and expected to find rationality in the universe created by that God (Ps. 19:1–4), they sought to develop and refine methods for investigating God’s universe. Furthermore, leading scientists who believed in God like Copernicus, Boyle, Kepler, Bacon, and Newton did not see any inherent conflict between faith and science (that is, faith as trusting in what one has good reason to believe is true, not the straw man definition of blind faith presented by the New Atheists). Biblical faith is not belief in spite of the evidence, but belief in light of the evidence. Now to be sure, science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God; but it can point us in the right direction. Simply put, the beginning of the universe points to a Beginner, the fine-tuning of the universe points to a Fine-Tuner, and the vast amount of information contained in living organisms (especially in DNA) points to an Information Giver.

A quick word is needed regarding the New Atheists’ tactical approach in their writings, interviews, and public debates. Hoping that something hits the mark, the New Atheists tend to throw everything and the kitchen sink at people. They provide examples and anecdotes designed to appeal primarily to the emotions, and they—especially Christopher Hitchens—skillfully use sarcasm and humor. But humor is not an argument, and neither is ridicule (and neither is having a British accent).

In my next and final post on the New Atheism, we will explore how we can use the challenge of the New Atheism as an opportunity to impress a biblical worldview on the hearts and minds of young people.

---

[i] Christian Smith, Souls in Transition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 239.

[ii] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 36.

[iii] Ibid., 58.

[iv] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 282.

http://www.conversantlife.com/belief/understanding-the-new-atheism-part-2

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