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.
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