(In 3 parts)

Addressing the issue of self-hatred in Christianity

Part 1: A firm foundation

I notice in my devotional language that I use words that suggest a degree of self-hatred: eg “I detest my failures and am not worthy to even look at you”. Yet my self-understanding is that I go through life with robust good humour and an almost unfailing positive outlook on life (apart from those occasional low moments that everyone has). What is going on here? In particular, I would like to defend Christian faith against charges of being negative, and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone reading my prayers to take on board negative outlooks on life or on themselves. What can I discover?

The central foundation of Christianity is the greatest good news that anyone could take to heart: that God loves each one of us with an unconditional, never failing, perfect love. As John put it in his gospel, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life”. This is an ever-green foundation for new hope and new life. Of course, we have now introduced the idea of human failure, and Christianity gets enormous criticism from some quarters for being intensely negative and pessimistic by endlessly harping on about sin. Yet, Christians do not see this as pessimistic but supremely realistic. It is the modern tendency to try and side-step the reality of human moral failure that is false and destructive. Christians are facing up to the reality of life and doing something supremely positive about it. In essence, the work of Jesus and the gospel of the Church is a rescue mission to save us. Given that we are in a mess and have a continual tendency to make more messes of life, we need to be rescued from it and so this emphasis in Christianity is completely positive and the ultimate sign of God’s love for us, in that he did not leave us wallowing around helplessly, both suffering ourselves and harming others. So, in this respect, it is the modern secular desire to reject the notion of sin, and that human beings could be transformed for the better, that is so dreary and destructive. In comparison, Christianity proclaims a joyful freedom to live in union with the God of love.

40%. Why 40% of the public have made a mistake

Part 4: God can be understood as the embodiment of profound principles, but, somehow, if we try to extract the principles from the person, they crumble into dust

Hence my bold and aggravating assertion that 40% of the population have made a mistake. Once we clarify what we mean by God and what the cognitive process we are attempting to achieve are, then it becomes a commonplace to say, “Believing in God is the right thing to do”. It is the way to understand reality correctly. And if we want to live well, the important thing is to understand reality correctly.

I should return to the objection that secular-minded people can revere all these wonderful principles that I have – in their terms, wrongly – attributed to God. Some might like what I’m saying, but simply despair that I insist on bringing God into the equation. I can make a practical objection that in practice a secular mindset may well shut off the possibility of the immensely positive experience that I describe as an encounter with God, and which they may wish to portray as a principled commitment by a human person to profoundly good principles – shut off because they have shut down the attitude of faith. However, perhaps the possibility of this positive experience is still open to secular-minded people in practice? Possibly. They would have to say so. However, I doubt that they can precisely because the life-enhancing effect of believing in God is only activated in the “God-faith” circle. Certainly, a person can be inspired by these wonderful principles, but they only “come alive” in the context of a relationship of faith in God, where an appreciation of the person of God inspires a faith response in an ever-deepening life-giving encounter. The human person is elevated beyond measure by the experience of God, which is the same as the experience of believing that you are encountering God. If on a point of principle you have excluded the possibility that this can happen because you have made an active commitment to atheism and a secular world-view then I think it extremely unlikely that you are open to the possibility of faith – and now you are dependent on God surprising you – and even God can find this difficult if he is trying to surprise you against your will.

40%. Why 40% of the public have made a mistake

Part 3: God is not a figure created by faith, but having faith is a vital ingredient of discovering God – it is the classic “chicken and egg” situation

I think the conclusion of this bit of intense reasoning is that when believers say that they encounter God as a real person, there are no grounds for dismissing this as not significant. Rather, for faithful people it is the key truth of their lives. And it really is not sufficient for people without faith to concede that, “That’s all very well for you; I’m very happy for you that you’ve had such an uplifting experience, but I haven’t, so I am free to ignore the significance of what you’re saying”. This way of thinking is still stuck in the mind frame of considering that faith in God is like trying to believe in someone you know is not there. Within the understanding of God that I am promoting, God is definitely there because God and faith are not separate things, and so God is available for everyone to experience. Traditionally, God is the personal agent and human beings put their faith in him. In this statement, both “God” and “faith” are nouns. However, I think that a better understanding is to understand “faith” as a verb. Faith is a way of looking, acting and being. God and faith are in a mutually reinforcing, reflecting back relationship. God is a person potentially existing for the person. The person then “puts their faith” in God (note the active verb at work here). So, the wonder of our understanding of the person of God (goodness, truth, love etc as considered earlier) prompts – or creates – a response of faith in the person of the believer. This faith then “brings alive” the person of God in a deepening relationship.

This process happens! It is not a hit and miss affair, a matter of luck, or personality; it is not the case that some people have the ability to experience God and some do not. The “God-faith” inter-relationship works. It cannot not work if the person is willing to believe. Notice that faith is now a matter of the will, not a mysterious knack that some have and some don’t. This is also a nice parallel with the Christian emphasis on agape, which is love given by the will, not according to some attraction or affection. Again, apologies to those who have genuinely tried for faith and it’s just not happened for them. My first bit of guidance would be to ask if you have failed to find faith in the “God as a thingy thing” that we mentioned at the start. I don’t think you will ever “force yourself” to find that sort of faith – no matter how much of your will you exert. It’s also the case that doubt is the great enemy of faith. If you find it difficult to let go of doubts, then faith will be extremely difficult. Some faithful people do not help by talking about the “certainty” of their faith and that they “know” that God exists. Strictly speaking, no-one knows that God exists, because knowledge of what exists in the world is only obtained through verification, so even the most devout believer only “believes” that God exists. So, if you have tried to believe, but only consider that you have faith if you can be certain that you have faith, then you are asking the impossible of yourself. Faith is always faith. This takes us back to our beginning and the difficulty that 40% of the population have in believing in God. They are sensible people and they understand that it is simply not possible to be certain that God exists. For them, this is a fatal stumbling block that entitles them to dismiss God and the life of faith, but they have simply misunderstood what a life of faith in God entails. The “secret” in terms of understanding what we are trying to do is not to try and have faith in God, but to have faith in having faith. As I asserted, rather boldly and aggravatingly above, having faith definitely works.

40%. Why 40% of the public have made a mistake

Part 2: Look deeper, and you will find a God worth believing in

For me, God is the awareness of the depth and wonder of life, the over-flowing joy in living. He is the call to righteousness, to live according to goodness, truth and love. He is the astonishing ability to judge creatively, cutting through shallow, superficial judgements, and even through profound but limited sound justice, to create astounding life-giving possibilities. He is mercy and forgiveness, all undeserved but given freely and unreservedly, even at great cost to himself. He is compassionate. And before him we fall silent in awe. He is complete, pure simplicity. He is holiness and the call to holiness – that otherness that simultaneously shames and elevates us to a deeper, higher, ultimate and exultant existence – life in all its fullness.

And if you say, “Ah, so what you really mean is that you believe in goodness, truth and love, in deep, creative judgements, in mercy and forgiveness and compassion. Why on earth have you brought God into it to obscure these wonderful principles and entangle them in a fantasy person?”, then I say, “I understand what you mean. But somehow these qualities do not “come at me” as abstract principles; I encounter them as personal, as a person. And if you say, “But there is no person there”, then I agree; I perceive no person to be present in the way that I perceive whether or not a person is present in all other cases”. Yet my experience of these qualities is as though there is a person present who is imparting these qualities to me, and I am not able to say what is the difference between experiencing “as though there is a person present” and experiencing “a person”. In the case of human persons, if I mistakenly imagine that someone is present when really there is no-one, I can answer this question because the presence of a human person is something that I can verify, but I cannot verify if God is present or not. If you want to say that a person is only present when it is verifiable, then we have to agree that God is not present. However, for me, that is what makes God: God – precisely the fact that he is the unique person in the category: “unverifiable persons”.

I am not simply inspired by profound principles. I’m afraid that in my terrible weakness, that is not sufficient. Instead, I meet someone, and I am inspired by that relationship. I am not foolish, and I’m very self-aware, so I fully appreciate how ridiculous this sounds; I understand that according to our understanding of the universe, it sounds impossible. Yet this is how the experience comes to me, and this is what I mean by “God”; this is who I call God; this is who God is – to me. Notice how I continually take something that could be understood as emanating from me, and instead I assert that it is something that comes to me. This could be one of those strange things that the human mind does – reversing the truth so that we are able to “put something out there” so we can see it better as a mirror image reflected back at us. If this is the case, then we are simply incapable of knowing if it is so or not, for if all our normal understanding of reality tells us that we are encountering something outside of ourselves, when really we are encountering something inside ourselves, that we are presenting to ourselves, then we simply cannot tell the difference between the two. And, in fact, even if this experience of God is a self-creation of the human mind, then there is, in practice, no difference between that and the experience of a God who was truly “out there” separate to ourselves.

(In 4 parts)

40%.  Why 40% of the public have made a mistake

Part 1: I agree: there’s no point believing in a God who is not worthy of the definition

A recent census survey showed that 40% of British people are not religious. This is an answer that reveals a self-confident rejection of belief in God and a commitment to a secular worldview.

It would be good to understand the full range of thoughts that lie behind these 40% ticking the “no religion” box, but I expect that a large proportion are thinking that being asked to believe in God is like trying to force yourself to believe in someone you know isn’t there. In this respect, their choice is a noble one: they are refusing to hang onto the shreds of a faithful worldview for which there is not sufficient evidence. They are showing independence and a mature self-reliance, putting humanity first, and refusing to waste time in worshipping God when we should be focussing on our own needs – which are many! It is a bold decision that sweeps away for them the debris of a discredited point of view to open up the way for better things. Some may have tried to believe in God, but find they just can’t do it, and others may think that it would be lovely if God did exist, but our understanding of reality does not allow us to do so. Others will joyfully reject God and religion, regarding faith as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I am going to argue that this 40% of people have made a mistake.

If you conceive of God as “a thing” – like a cat, or a tree, or a pencil or a human person – and you think that being faithful requires you to believe that there is a cat or a tree or a pencil or a human person in the room when it is clear to your senses that there is not, and when the objection is raised, “No, it’s an invisible cat” you find this an absurd idea and then, trying hard to imagine an invisible cat, you further declare that there is no evidence of even an invisible cat in the room – then it is entirely justifiable to conclude that there is no God, so why one earth would anyone believe in him?

However, if we take a more thoughtful look at the faithful point of view, we can declare that this is not a good way to understand God. As a faithful person myself, I agree with the secular point of view because I don’t think that that sort of a God can be found in the room either. However, I don’t want to consign the concept of God to “just a psychological issue” either – though we might be able to agree that it is a psychological issue – but only after we have demonstrated that the statement, “God is just a psychological effect in the human mind” is not the same as declaring, “God does not exist”.

Let’s begin with the “thinginess” in the conception of God “as a thing”. No-one has ever thought that God is an object with a substance like things have substance. And we can all agree that there can be a “spirit” in the room without having to see or touch it – perhaps there is a spirit of sadness in the room, or of anticipation – depending on the mood of the people in the room, or perhaps just our perception of how the inanimate objects in an empty room make us feel when we see a picture of it. Of course, this sort of spirit is entirely dependent on us – the humans who are experiencing it. And in this respect, I think that “God” – whatever God means – will have to be “a psychological issue” in that we have nowhere to experience things except in our minds. However, I believe that a proper understanding of God will reveal that we are talking about “something” much more substantial than “the spirit in the room” even though there is no object in a “thinginess” sort of way in the room.

Faith in God is the answer to the identity crisis

Part 6: Justice is our aim – but faith will get us there

Note: we are not abandoning the struggle for justice in society, but we are declaring a better way to achieve justice for all through the affirming values that come through faith in God, and we are declaring that this is a better route to achieve justice than through the conflict promoted by identity ideology, and through the terrible emptiness implied by identity ideology. In losing touch with the life of faith, secular society has deeply damaged its ability to find grounds for the basis of society. The inadequacies of secular ideology leave people without a satisfying basis for unity and consensus. Tragically for a society that claims to value diversity, it has destroyed the basis for a true valuing of diversity by promoting a hierarchy of identities approved by those in authority, while denigrating other diverse views deemed incompatible with the new supposed orthodoxy. And, in fact, intellectually, this rejection of otherwise valid diverse points of view is required because the basis for society promoted by identity ideology is so inadequate, resting, as it does, on the promotion of officially endorsed identities.

Faith in God is the answer to the identity crisis, for it truly allows all valid(*) diverse points of view to be embraced under the twin approach: you are truly loved – and so is everybody else.

(*) There is the need for this (*), as just about everyone accepts that there are some extreme points of view that should not be embraced. If, for example, someone holds the view: “Kill everyone I hate”, then this is not a diverse view to be embraced. However, even here the power of the faith approach holds true in the idea that God loves the sinner, even while condemning the sin.