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| What's So Great about Christianity |
A
thread of secular-themed perspectives has flared up in the public arena to
short-circuit Christianity’s claim to relevance in modern society.
Sceptical
authorities, across the disciplines, are approaching Christianity from a
combative angle, to diminish the faith into a residue of primitive
dispensations.
Secularist
notables such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sigmund Freud, Karl
Marx, Fredrick Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, have emerged as the poster-boys of
the “post-Christian enlightenment.”
The
gangly coalition has diffused incredulity to a point where secularist outlook
is the new mainstream among laboratories of culture, while Christianity is fast
becoming a preserve of extremists and isolates.
However,
besides its sustained mojo outside cultural elites, Christianity boasts a rich intellectual
tradition which merits closer recognition in the creative arts, criticism and
apologetics.
Some
of the most enduring influences in the annals of literature, John Milton, Samuel
Johnson, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.S Eliot, G.K Chesterton and C.S
Lewis, wrote overtly to “justify the ways of God men.”
In
the realm of apologetics, Lee Strobel, Carl Wieland, Ray Comfort, Alister and
Joanna McGrath and others have demonstrated that Christianity is far from the
intellectually bankrupt syllabus of errors that it has been branded to be.
Had
great minds such as Joseph Addison, Blaise Pascal and Isaac Newton lived today,
they might have been labelled the black sheep of science and philosophy, owing
to the near consensus that the God hypothesis is anathema from academia.
The
few apologists still holding their own are lone criers, out of pitch with the
symphony of their time, but it would be grossly prejudicial to muzzle them on a
“truth by numbers” mob justice clause.
D’Souza’s
apologetics toolkit “What’s So Great about Christianity” is an example of the
growing inventory of articulate and forceful refutations of the “God is dead”
hypothesis.
“What’s
So Great about Christianity” is an unsparing examination of the arguments and rhetoric
underlying the secularist ferment.
The
achievement of the book is its commitment to open inquiry. Open inquiry not
only promises rich academic pickings but acknowledges that both believers and
non-believers may be on different levels of the same ontological ladder as
honest truth-seekers, hence deserve equal attention.
So
instead of tapping into indoctrinatory mode and riding roughshod over alternate
schools of thought with more dogma than reason, D’Souza engages atheists on
their own terms (but does not allow them to leave to leave the boxing ring with
nosebleed).
The
book short-circuits such simplistic and overstretched assumptions as
“Christianity is obsolete,” “an intelligent person cannot believe the Bible”
and “Christianity has been disproven by the Bible.”
However,
De’Souza’s problem statement paints a bleak picture of Christianity’s
functionality in the contemporary laboratories of culture.
“No
longer does Christianity form the moral basis of society. Many of us now reside
in secular communities, where arguments drawn from the Bible or Christian
revelation carry no weight, and where we hear a different language spoken in
church,” D’Souza observes.
“Instead
of engaging this secular world, most Christians have taken the easy way out.
They have retreated into a Christian subculture where they engage Christian
concerns.
“Then
they step back into the secular society where their Christianity is kept out of
sight until the next church service,” he says.
D’Souza’s
prefatory alarm faults today’s Christians for being one more bunch of post-modernists
who live a gospel of two truths; the religious truth reserved for Sunday and
the secular truth which applies the rest of the week.
The
problem with such a comfort zone is that it belies the self-sustaining convictions
and institutes of Christianity and shirks the responsibility to “contend
earnestly for the faith.”
Christians
have embraced with relief Gould’s peace brokerage, the supposition of “Non-overlapping
magisteria” (NOMA), which divides the public arena between reason and faith.
NOMA
rules that the secular society relies on reason and decides matters of fact while
the religious community relies on faith and decides on matters of values.
Christians’
acceptance of the pact and a generally pacifist disposition in the realm of
debate has not spared the faith a series of polemics from atheists and
agnostics unapologetically bent to antagonism.
“The
God Delusion,” “End of Faith” and “God is Not So Great” are among the
aggressive anti-faith polemics which seek to dismiss Christianity at all costs.
The
best way to get around the hostility is not retreating deeper into oblivion and
ceding free ammunition to sceptics. Nay, man to man, fire for fire, argument
against argument.
There
is no room for ambiguity and pacifism (in the realm of debate not warfare, lest
I play into the hands of gleeful literalists) in Christian thought.
Christianity
is by its very nature a clarion call to controversy. The Great Commission is a
mandate of universal evangelism (based on specific not ambivalent claims) which
does not come with a guarantee of safe sail but anticipates hostility, reproach
and tribulation.
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| Dostoyevsky |
“If
every effect in nature has cause, what is the cause of nature itself? Is it
even remotely reasonable to suggest that nature created itself? If for a single
instant there was nothing in existence – no matter, no universe, no God – then
how could there be anything at all?” queries D’Souza.
It
rationally follows that the world was made and someone made it even though, on
the level of empirical enquiry, we may not be able to determine what kind of
creator made the universe. That creator and intelligent first cause
Christianity calls God.
“Our
world looks so physical, yet we can know with scientific certainty that it was
the result of a force beyond physics…Science has discovered a reality which it
had previously consigned to the domain of faith,” D’Souza says.
Observes
Gerald Schroeder: “Theology presents a fixed view of the universe. Science,
through its progressively improved understanding of the world has come to agree
with theology.”
D’Souza
attributes the “survival of the sacred” to the fact that some of the most
important ideas and institutions of modern life emanate from Christianity
Atheism
is more of a death-knell than a stimulus to such key values such as relief and
elevation for the suffering and the preservation of the family institution.
D’Souza’s
book is, however, needlessly flawed by his erroneous classification of
Christianity as a Western religion.
Western
Christendom has, through subservience into an instrument of political
expediency, done more harm than good to Christianity.
Complicity
with, participation in and perpetration of unforgivable atrocities such as the
Inquisition, crusades, slavery and colonialism shows that the Westernisation of
Christianity did more to manipulate, pervert, contradict and undermine than to
advance the faith.
Christianity
has a universal import which cannot be compartmentalised into narrow
demographics as to do so forfeits Paul’s rainbow manifesto that “There is
neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
There
still remains to answer atheists’ charge about Christianity being a menace to civil
peace – a charge buttressed by the foregoing atrocities.
Thankfully,
Dostoyevsky wades in just on time. His novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” tells a
story of the grand iniquistor, in which Christ himself appears before the
tribunal, only to be recognised, thrown into prison and told to “go and never
return again.”
“The
reason is clear. Christ’s teachings are those of a peacemaker. They are the
very opposite of the persecutions and violence that has sometimes been
perpetrated in the name of Christianity,” D’Souza says.
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