Book Two: What Christians Believe

Chapter One: The Rival Conceptions of God

If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of truth.

But being a Christian does mean that where Christianity differs from other religions, then Christianity has the right answer just as in maths, there is only one answer to a sum.

For those who believe there is a god or gods, there are the Pantheists who believe God is beyond good and evil and something can be good or bad depending on the point of view. They also believe that the universe is part of God. The other group are the Jews, Muslims and Christians who believe that there is good and bad and what is really bad cannot be a part of God. And God invented the universe and if the universe is destroyed, God is still there just as a painter does not die if his picture is destroyed. 

But if God is good and He made the world, why has it gone wrong? I used to argue against God because there is so much cruelty and injustice. But how did I get this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. In my very act of proving God did not exist, in other words, the whole of reality was senseless, I found i was forced to assume that one part of reality - my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. 

Chapter Two: The Invasion

Some people has the idea of God "making religion simple" as if 'religion' were something God invented and not His statement to us of certain unalterable facts about His own nature.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat or obvious or what you expect. Reality is something you could not have guessed. This is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. 

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power behind death, disease and sin. Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God and was good when he was created before he went wrong. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence, and will are in themselves good. The creature has to choose to be bad. Christianity believes that this universe is at war but it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in the part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

Chapter Three: The Shocking Alternative

We may say how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power? A mother's will is for a child to keep his room tidy but it is sensible for her to say, "I'm not going to make you tidy the room every night. You have to learn to keep it tidy on your own." It is her will for the room to be tidy and also her will that left the child free to be untidy. In any entity, we often make a thing voluntary and then half the people don't do it. 

Of course God knows what would happen if the freedom He gave us was used the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. We may disagree but there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source of all our reasoning power. We could not be right and He wrong, anymore than a stream could rise higher than its source. The option is for God to create a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings. (My thots: option between having a child versus a doll? A toy dog vs. a real dog?)

The moment you have a self, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre. That was the sin of Satan. He also put this thought into the head of our ancestors, that they could 'be like gods', that they could be their own masters and be happy. But God designed man to run on Himself just as cars run on petrol. 

This is key to history. Civilizations are built up, excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back to misery and ruin. Because they are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans. 

And what did God do? He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong. Some of us do try very hard to obey it, most don't. Then, he selected a group of people, the Jews, and spent several centuries hammering into their heads what kind of God He was - that He cared about the right conduct. 

Then comes the real shock. Amongst these Jews, there suddenly came a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. He told people their sins were forgiven, without consulting other injured parties and behaved as if He was the party chiefly offended. If He was not God, these words would only imply amazing silliness and conceit. Yet, even His enemies did not get the impression of silliness and conceit. 

Some say, "I can accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don't accept His claim to be God." A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. So, either Jesus was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. 

Chapter 4: The Perfect Penitent

Now it seems to me obvious that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God who has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.

And the Christian belief is that Christ came to pay the penalty of sin for us and put us right with God and give us a fresh start; just as a kind friend might pay the fine for a petty crime another committed and cannot pay. The latter would hopefully not commit the crime again. But fallen man who thinks he can set up on his own, is not simply an imperfect creature who needs to improve. He is a rebel who needs to repent, and unlearn all of the self-conceit and self-will. It means undergoing some kind of death. Here is the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent but only a good person can repent perfectly. 

Can we do it if God helps us? If He gives a little of His love and His reasoning powers to us, we can love and reason. Unfortunately, now we need to repent through surrendering and dying to self. But this is one thing God, because of His own nature, has never done. He cannot give us what He has not. So He became man and did it, and He could do it perfectly because He was God. 

Some people complain that if Jesus suffered as God, it must have been easy for Him. A child can learn to write from an adult who would find it easy or from another child who is also learning. A man drowning in a rapid can say no to another trying to save him with one foot on the river bank and another in the water. To whom will you look for help if you don't look to him who is stronger than yourself?

Chapter 5: The Practical Conclusion

The Christian belief is that if we somehow share in the humility and suffering of Christ, we shall also share in His conquest of death and find new life after we die and in it become perfect and perfectly happy creatures. This means much more than trying to follow His teachings. It also means baptism, belief and partaking Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper. 

I believe this on His authority. Believing things on authority simply means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think is trustworthy.   

None of us has seen the Solar System with our own eyes or the defeat of the Armada. But we believe them because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do religion would have to be content with knowing close to nothing all his life.

You have to look after the natural life your parents gave you. Similarly, you also have to look after the Christ-life given to you. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way, a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but one who is able to repent and pick himself up and begin again - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing and enabling him to repeat the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. 

Others who do good try to gain approval of God and other men, but Christians think that any good he does come from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but God will make us good because He loves us. Christ operates through Christians. The whole mass of Christians are actually the cells of His body. 

Some of us think it is unfair that this new life is only confined to those who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him. But the truth is God has not told us what the arrangements about the other people are. If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing to do is to remain outside yourself. If you want to help those outside, you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. 

Another common objection is this: why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Well, Christians think that He is going to land in force one day, and He is delaying it to give us the chance to join His side freely. You will not think much of the enemy's spy who decide to join us only when the victory is declared to be ours!

When God comes in force, it will be the end just like when the author walks onto the stage, the play is over. When God comes in force, it will be so overwhelming that it will strike either awesome love or horror into every creature depending on whose side we are on. It will be too late then to choose side. 

Book One: Right & Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

This is my attempt to summarize CS Lewis' book, "Mere Christianity". The New Yorker says of this classic: "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way."

Dedicated to Alex Phang, Deno Au,  Teo Cheng Lee and Yap Lai Fong whom I count to be among these "good men".

Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature

We have all heard people quarrelling. They say something like, "How would you like it if someone did the same to you?" Educated and uneducated, children as well as adults. The reply is seldom, "To hell with your standard!" but usually some attempt to justify that the offence has not gone against the standard or if it does, there is some special excuse." It looks as if both parties had in mind some kind of Rule of Fair Play or Decent Behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they had agreed. 

This law was called the Moral Law or the Law of Human Nature because it seems everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. There may be one or two odd individuals who did not know it just as there are a few people who are color blind but the race as a whole thought the idea of decent behavior was obvious to everyone. And why when an obvious wrong is committed to someone, there is a general outcry from those who know of the wrong being done. 

Chapter Two: Some Objections

Some say isn't the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and was developed like other instincts? But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling you ought to help whether you like it or not. Eg., hearing a man in danger crying for help. You desire to help but you also desire to stay out of danger. You will find a third impulse that tells you that you ought to help and not run away. 

One might think the love of humanity is safe but if you leave out justice, but you may find yourself breaking agreements or faking evidence in trials for the sake of humanity. Criminals can be set free to harm others while never paying the price of their crimes nor learning from them behind bars. 

When you compare two viewpoints over, say, whether a war should be fought, you are comparing them with some Real Morality, admitting that there is a real Right, and the views of some may be closer to the right Right than others. 

The conclusion then is that although the difference between people's ideas of Decent Behavior makes you suspect there is no one standard, yet as we ponder whose idea closer to what is Right, just the opposite is proven. 

Chapter Three: The Reality of the Law

There are two odd things about the human race: 

Firstly, they are haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency or morality. 

Secondly, they did not in fact do so, at least not all the time. 

The Law of Decent Behavior is quite definitively real - a real law which none of us made but which we find pressing on us. 

Chapter Four: What Lies Behind the Law?

Thinking man had always wondered about how the universe came into being. There are three common views: the materialist view, the religious view and the Life-Force view. 

The Materialist View: People who take this view think that matter and space just happen to exist and have always existed. By one chance in a thousand, something hit our sun and planets are produced. By another thousandth chance, chemicals necessary for life and the right temperature occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive. Then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us. 

The Religious View: What is behind this universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know, with consciousness, purposes and preferences. It made the universe partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, in order to produce creatures like itself -- I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds.

The Life-Force View: People who hold this view say that life on this planet evolved from the lowest forms to Man not due to chance but due to the 'striving' or 'purposiveness' of a Life-Force. (We can ask "Does this Life-force have a mind?" If answer is yes, then, a mind bringing life into existence and bringing it to perfection is really a God. If answer is no, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind strives or has purposes? One reason why people find this view so attractive is that a Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like the troublesome God. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God you can switch on when you want, but it will not bother you.) 

Chapter 5: We Have Cause to be Uneasy

We have only got as far as Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the bible or the churches. We are trying to find out what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. On our steam, we have two bits of evidence about the Somebody: the universe He has made and the Moral Law He has put into our minds. While the universe tells us He is a great artist, the Moral Law actually tells us more about Him just as a man's conversation will tell us more about the man than the house he has built. We can conclude that the Being is intensely interested in right conduct -- in fair play, unselfishness, courage and truthfulness. You can conclude He is 'good' but not indulgent as there is nothing indulgent in the Moral Law that tells us to do the right thing regardless of how painful, dangerous or difficult it is to do.

Some of us might say a good God is a god who forgives. But only a Person can forgive. We have only established that the power behind the Moral Law is more like a mind than anything else. It could be an impersonal mind, then there would be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you give the wrong answer. And it is no use too saying that if there is a God of impersonal absolute goodness, then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. The issue is one part of you agrees with His disapproval of human greed, trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your case but unless He really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior, then He cannot be good. We need a power that holds people accountable for bad behavior but if He does not make an exception for the times that we ourselves exhibit less than decent behavior, we are in a fix! A Power like this can be either a great safety or a great terror depending on how we have responded to His Moral Law. 

Some people talk about God not revealing Himself to make it plain but meeting the gaze of absolute goodness is unlikely to be fun if we have not been absolutely good!

Why this roundabout way to get to the subject? This is because Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises forgiveness. It therefore has nothing to offer people who do not know they have anything to repent of and who do not feel they need forgiveness. It is after you have realized there is a Moral Law and a Power behind that law, and that you have broken the law and put yourself wrong with that Power, that Christianity begins to talk. Not a moment sooner. 

Next... Book Two: What Christians Believe