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

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 7: Are you sure it’s true?

Someone might still be sceptical about the list above of those things that are true. This is because the word “God” keeps appearing, and you may wish to complain that we had said that God does not do anything, because we are not allowing God to exist as an independently existing personal agent; he is simply an aspect of the human mind. However, we are adopting a method by which every active verb about God is really a passive mirror image of what human beings are doing and imputing to the “person of God” – in which God is not a person but an idea – a hub of spiritual values (albeit one that has “ignited into a personal reality within the mind of the believer”)

So, in rather more convoluted language, we can translate what the list above means literally: –

• Christians do believe in a set of ultimate spiritual values, which for ease of use, they refer to by grouping them under an idea to which they give the name: “God”. In this sense, the word “God” simply means “what is ultimate” and for Christians, what is ultimate is their set of spiritual values
• Christians do believe that Jesus expressed those values perfectly
• (Whatever the actual socio-political details of events that contributed to it) Christians do believe that Jesus’ death correctly expresses their core spiritual value of love to an ultimate degree
• They are right in saying that these beliefs, including the supremacy of love (the love that Jesus showed them), are stronger than death, because it is possible to still believe in them no matter what, including believing in them after Jesus was killed
• They are correct in saying that trusting in their spiritual values – gathered together under the idea of “God” – does enable them to believe that all their sins can indeed be forgiven, and calling on a trust that the death of Jesus expresses the ability of love to forgive all sins is the way to express their complete commitment to the spiritual values that are expressed under the idea of God.
• When Christians say that “Jesus is alive”, they mean that the values Jesus taught them are still valid and powerful in their lives.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 6: So, what is true and not true?

What I believe this review shows is that all the Christian claims are true. Though for clarity we need to say exactly what is true.

It sounds rather damning:-

• God does not exist
• Jesus was not God’s Son
• He was not raised from the dead

However, all these things are true:-

• Christians do believe that the ultimate spiritual values are those expressed through belief in the person of God
• Christians do believe that Jesus expressed those values perfectly
• (Whatever the actual socio-political details of events that contributed to it) Christians do believe that Jesus’ death correctly expresses how much God loves us
• They are right in saying that these beliefs are stronger than death, because it is possible to still believe in them no matter what
• They are correct in saying that trusting in the belief that God does indeed forgive all sins, and calling on a trust in the death of Jesus, and in his resurrection, is the way of expressing complete trust in God, and complete commitment to their ultimate spiritual values.

What we see is that, in practice, Christianity operates in exactly the same way as it always has. Moreover, Christians are entitled to adopt the same terminology as they always have. What is required is a different framework of understanding, and from time to time Christians will have to keep reminding themselves of what it is in order to avoid lapsing into error and saying something that is untrue. However, in practice, this will be rare, and mainly when conversing with those outside the Christian community.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 5: Jesus’ crucifixion as a sacrifice for sin is still effective in our new understanding of God

So, believers in this version of Christianity argue like this:-

God is the voice we create in our heads which calls us to adopt a particular spiritual life and supports us in this life, a voice which makes real and personal the idea of God, which is a repository for all good values

Jesus was an actual person, who lived and preached as recorded in the gospels, who expressed the spiritual values we approve of to an ultimate degree, and who was killed on a cross.

When his followers realised that the spiritual values embodied by Jesus had not been taken away from them by his death, they either experienced this as Jesus being resurrected from the dead, or they have used resurrection as the symbol to express the truth that these values cannot be destroyed and, in this sense, they “conquer death”.

By preaching Jesus as God incarnate, his followers are expressing their faith in the ultimate worth of the spiritual values that Jesus embodied and shared with them.

When Christians today proclaim that, “Jesus is Lord” they affirm their faith in, and commitment to, these spiritual values. Although Jesus is not Son of God in the literal meaning intended by traditional Christianity, he is “Son of God” in terms of being the complete representation of the values that Christians believe are the very essence of God.

By trusting in “what God has done” in Jesus, Christians are declaring their allegiance to his spiritual values, which they have made their own. Although, literally speaking, God has not raised Jesus from the dead (because we are not allowing God to exist, nor are we allowing any miracle to occur, which a resurrection is), we declare that, in our spiritual value system, God (our ultimate value) would indeed become incarnate in the person of Jesus, and he does indeed, love us enough to die for us, and it is, indeed, the case that his and our spiritual values can never be extinguished, and so by saying, “Jesus lives” we declare, “His values are still the mainspring of our lives”. Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us, and this is what we mean when we say that we are Christians because we follow the way of Jesus. We affirm our belief that this is the pinnacle of what love means, and we want to live in tune with this love. And, at the risk of being pedantic, but in order to fully clarify what we mean, we take the sentence, “Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us” and turn around the sentence structure to say that it means the same as, “Our core value is that the willingness to die for love of the other is the pinnacle of truth and meaning in life”. We experience this in ourselves that we are loved in this way, and we want to share this quality of love with others.

Once we have adopted these beliefs, we are able to make use of, and benefit from, the liberating effect from guilt and sin that comes from believing that the sacrifice that Jesus has made is, indeed, sufficient to cleanse us from all sin, completely, no matter what we have done, forever.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 4: How did the person of Jesus acquire universal significance? : Jesus the ultimate sacrifice

However, Christianity goes straight to the bottom line by giving us the ultimate sacrifice. God sacrificed himself in the person of Jesus in order for our sins to be forgiven. Note: This is the God of classical theism here, so you can’t get a bigger conception of God; you simply can’t get bigger than that either in theory or in practice. The Christian message is that God loves you so much that he died as a sacrifice for sin, so that you can be free of that sin. In this belief, people find ultimate and complete freedom.

Clearly, this message only works if you believe that Jesus was the Son of God. If he was just a man, then the Christian claim that God died for our sins is false. However, we are working within the framework of understanding that we will not credit anything beyond what science can tell us of the material universe. So, Jesus has to be a man because he can’t be God, because we are claiming that God does not exist in the traditional sense. God has become an idea which is a hub around which spiritual values are able to collect. So, I think it is possible to translate the old understanding into the new, with a profound meaning still intact.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 3: How did the person of Jesus acquire universal significance? : The basis in the impulse to make a sacrifice to atone for sin

This transforming vision that the love of Christ lives on would, I think, explain Jesus’ appeal to the first disciples, but how did he acquire the global appeal to be the foundation of an enduring world-wide religion?

When people do wrong, they feel bad. They then want to do something to put things right and make themselves feel better. We might argue that this is a key root of religion, and in a variety of ways, religions evolved to enable this to happen, and their basis is very often a system of sacrifice. In order to express your sorrow and “do something” about it, by giving up a bit of your money to buy a sacrificial animal and going through the rites that society prescribes, you “do the right thing” and this counters the effect of your sin. We can see that this is psychologically satisfying and “works” as a system of putting things right. Hopefully, if the person is remorseful, they have made recompense to the person they have wronged, been reconciled to them, and then the sacrifice puts right the damaged relationship with God, and reinforces publicly for society the values that it approves of – and which had been broken – including affirming for the benefit of the wronged person that we disapprove of going against our values. Sometimes, it might not be possible to make amends to the person you have wronged, but making amends to God is deemed sufficient – and, indeed, there’s nothing else you can do. In fact, we have been emphasising the primacy of the inner relationship with God as the heart of a faithful life, and so putting things right with God is of supreme importance.

This desire to put things right seems to be a fundamental human characteristic. It is so powerful that some societies have even adopted human sacrifice as a way to try and express the enormity of the task in putting right serious offences. The sacrificial system works provided people have complete trust that by going through the prescribed rituals, their sin has been obliterated. Even so, it’s possible that some people would still feel guilty; they might feel that what they’ve done is so wrong that it can never be forgiven.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 2: How to understand the resurrection today

If the latter option (that the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection is the way to express the power of the new life that he has opened up to them) is what happened, then we too are free to believe in Jesus’ resurrection in exactly the same way: our experience of joyful new life is exactly the same as theirs, and we use the idea of Jesus’ resurrection to symbolise our faith commitment to these core values and goals. In this sense, the resurrection of Jesus is “true”, not because Jesus’ body was raised from the dead in some new spiritual form, but it’s true, because it is true that the spiritual experiences which the resurrection of Jesus encapsulates are true experiences. (In fact, we might just argue that Jesus’ body was indeed raised from the dead in some new spiritual form – in the sense that his physical body has been transformed into a set of spiritual experiences – which now anyone can have access to, whereas only a few people ever met Jesus in the flesh)

If the former option (that the disciples had a religious experience that persuaded them that Jesus is, in fact, actually and truly, raised from the dead) is what happened, then the first disciples’ religious experiences of Jesus being raised from the dead were false (because we are not allowing the miracle of a person raised from the dead. Note: modern believers are still entitled to believe in the resurrection as traditionally understood and to support this with their own religious experience that the risen Christ comes to them. We are simply exploring what faith in Jesus might look like if we were not allowing any miraculous events that break the laws of science). They believed that they were seeing him again, but it was an illusion. They put 2 + 2 together and made 17; they jumped to conclusions; they felt wonderful inside as a result of their transformed thinking and this led them on to believe that Jesus was alive, when that was not true. If this is what happened, it is extremely likely that it was a genuine, honest mistake. They were not trying to fool anyone or to lie. Jesus’ resurrection is indeed symbolic of the transformation in their hopes that they experienced – so it’s a “true” symbol, but they misunderstood their religious experiences and proclaimed as literal (“He is alive again!”) something that is only true in their minds of renewed hope.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

(A theological exploration in 9 parts)

Part 1: Turning crucifixion into resurrection

When the first disciples met Jesus, they felt as though they were face to face with God. After due reflection, John summed this up in the words that Jesus is God’s only Son, who has made the Father known; grace and truth have been given to us in the person of Jesus.

Then he was killed. It seemed as though all he stood for had been negated. All the disciples’ hopes had been destroyed. They loved Jesus, but his enemies appeared to have defeated him.

If the resurrection did not happen – because we are not relying on anything miraculous – then the disciples’ belief in his resurrection is the most spectacular psychological turn-around you can possibly have. They must have had the most amazing religious experiences you can possibly imagine. What might their content have been?

When they considered all that Jesus had meant to them and all that he stood for, but that all that seemed to have been taken away from them, the thought suddenly struck them, that, no, in fact, those things can never be taken from them. Even though what most impressed them was that God’s grace was revealed in the person of Jesus – hence why they emphasised the doctrine of the incarnation so much – they were able to make the transition that it was in fact their experience of grace – and love, peace, spiritual purity etc – that was the essence of what Jesus meant to them. As they considered this, their grief at what they had lost turned to joy at the enduring legacy of Jesus’ life – which was that the gift that he had left with them or opened up to them through his personal presence could never be taken away from them. As these experiences flooded their minds, they either had a religious experience of Jesus being alive again, or they used the idea of Jesus’ resurrection as the only way to do justice to their new realisation that the gifts Jesus had given them can never be taken away from them, can never be destroyed; they are stronger than death because they have overcome the grief of Jesus’ death and left them with only joy and new life.