What is the appeal of Jesus?
Part 8: A new settlement for religion
We could stand back and say that Christians are not worshipping God (conceived as a person); they are worshipping a set of spiritual values, which they set up as the centre of their lives. We might say that they have personalised this set of values. You can argue that this is a mistake – based on our primeval tendency to personalise and anthropomorphise abstract principles. However, these principles or values are very easily experienced as being personal, and the ideas about God being a voice which we create in our minds supports the experience of God being personal rather than just a set of ideas.
My claim is that Christianity within this new framework of understanding of who God is and what he does would be quickly indistinguishable from traditional mainstream Christianity. The believer would focus (as is the case now) on their relationship with the person of God, finding in this meaning and purpose and a rich inner spiritual life that they find supremely fulfilling. They would engage in community life with their fellow Christians and engage in their mission programme of relieving poverty and suffering, fighting injustice and spreading their message.
However, they would have complete intellectual compatibility with secular, atheistic culture, (there will still be massive differences on morality, values and outlook) as there would be no conflicting truth claims, and so it would not be necessary to ask people to adopt the Christian package of ideas regarding metaphysical realities if they wanted to join the religion. Instead, Christians would be able to make the appeal: your framework of reality is based on the Big Bang and evolution and the discoveries of science; so is ours, but if you adopt the life of a Christian you can have the completely compatible dimension of a full spiritual life. This has currently been only understood to be available to those who adopt a religious life that has points of conflict with this framework of reality – but no longer.
Christians can thus make a very attractive offer:-
- Not: choose us or a scientific world view
But, choose one of the following:-
- A scientific world view and complete selfish pursuit of consumer pleasure
- A scientific world view and giving a bit of time and money to good causes
- A scientific world view and a fairly strong commitment to an ethical way of life
- A scientific world view and an overt commitment to one of the great secular altruistic ideologies
- A scientific world view and an overt commitment to Christian faith, giving all the altruism of the secular altruistic ideologies, but also a rich inner spiritual life.
I’m not suggesting that Christianity has a monopoly on rich inner spiritual lives, and I feel sure that there is an atheist equivalent, but I do claim that it’s unlikely that an atheist ideology can provide as rich an inner life as religion can. Therefore, it seems a reasonable claim that living a Christian life would be the best option available to everyone
Spiritual Devotion 