A Dream of Biblical Truth!

For several months now I have been wrestling with my understanding of the Bible as God's word.  What does it mean to say that the Bible is the word of God?  Is it the case that it is 100% accurate in all aspects?  What about the 6 day creation in Genesis?  What about Adam and Eve?  What about Noah and the flood?

The reading had been doing had been taking my thought processes down what could be called a more and more Liberal Christian line.  I'd read Karen Armstrong's "The Bible: A Biography", John Shelby Spongs' "Rescuing the Bible from Fudementalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture" and, most recently, Peter Enns "The Bible a Tells Me So".  I'd also read books on Biblical archaeology.  Reading all these books led me to the conclusion that the Bible, whilst still unique and Holy Spirit inspired, was really a collection of human responses to their experiences of God.

The trouble with this view of the Bible, as I thankfully very quickly realised, is that it really does mean we can pick and choose which bits we want to accept and which bits we don't like very much and can safely leave to one side.  It gives us a pick n mix Bible that we can interpret as we like, because it is all about human experiences of God and who is to say that our personal understanding isn't as valid as somebody else's?

I was troubled and wondered if I was on a slippery slope that could eventually compromise or even destroy my Christian Faith!  This came to a head after a FaceBook posting where I expressed concern at the criticism levelled at me by a congregation member after I referred to the "myth of Noah's Ark" and suggested that whilst there may have been a flood it certainly wasn't world wide.  Most of my Christian friends said there was nothing wrong with what I'd said, but one friend, a Methodist Local Preacher who I greatly respect gently challenged me.

My friend suggested that I was indeed wrong!  He wrote that when he'd gone through his conversion experience God had convinced him that the early chapters of Genesis are not myth, but actually a true account of the origins of the earth and that there really was a worldwide flood.  This is a man whose intelligence and integrity I respect, whose preaching ministry is used by God and whose understanding of science is probably better than mine.

Was I wrong?  Was I being deceived?  Was I more interested in pleasing people and conforming to the beliefs of secular society than in pleasing God and faithfully teaching his word?  I remembered reading in Billy Graham's autobiography that he had faced a similar dilemma; to believe absolutely in the truth of the Bible or to compromise with the latest scientific theories.  Billy chose to believe in the Bible as the word if God!

Which way should I go?  More than anything I wanted to be faithful to God, not worrying about what others thought or says to me, focussed only on serving my Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer!  I prayed to God and asked that he would make things clear to me.

That night I had a dream.  Frustratingly I can't remember the exact details of the dream, but through it God made it abundantly clear to me that the liberal and progressive Christian understandings of the Bible are indeed a slippery slope and that I should hold onto the truth that the Bible is indeed God's Holy Spirit inspired words to humankind.

Subsequent to that dream, which was only a few nights ago, I have done some more research into scientific theories like the Big Bang and naturalistic evolution and discovered that they are not based on firm facts and objective observation, but are, in fact, quite speculative and not particularly good science.  A very helpful book in this endeavour has been "After Eden: a Understanding Creation, the Curse and the Cross" by Henry Morris III.

I have not, I emphasise, abandoned the rules of Bibilical interpretation I was taught during my Local Preacher training and my time as a Student Minister, but I have returned to the classic evangelical understanding of scripture as the word of God.  Like Billy Graham I have decided that if there is conflict between scientists opinion and God's word then I will choose God's word!

The Confidence to Talk About God!

I sat down with my copy of The Methodist Recorder this afternoon and read with interest the report from the recent meeting of the Methodist Church Council.

One thing that particularly caught my eye was a statement attributed to our General Sectetary, Martyn Atkins, who is reported to have "asked council members for their views on how the Church and individual Methodists might recover their confidence in speaking about God."

This set me thinking, thinking about why Methodists seem to be reluctant to share the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Can it be that at least some are reluctant because their faith is so watered down that they are no longer convinced that they have any good news worth sharing?

Some Christians, particularly those of liberal and progressive persuasion, have cast doubt on the traditional evangelical understanding of Christ.  They no longer seem to believe that Jesus died on the cross in our place, taking the consequences of our sin in his own person.  They no longer seem to believe in the need for confession and repentance of sin and of the need to confess Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.

These same liberals and progressives even seem to believe that all religions, or indeed even no religion, provide equally valid paths to God.  If any religion will do; if any faith path, no matter how bizarre, leads to God then why tell anybody about the Christian faith?  What is the point?  We're all going to heaven anyway - at least that is what they believe.  What do they think Jesus meant when he said, "I am the way, the truth and the life.  No-one comes to the Father except through me"?

If we are, as Christians, to recover our confidence in speaking about God then we must first recover our faith in the Christian message that has been preached since the earliest days of the Church; that through Christ's death and resurrection we can find forgiveness and eternal life if we confess and repent of our sins and accept him as our Lord and Saviour.  We must recover our confidence in the Bible as the uniquely inspired word of God.  We must reject compromise with contemporary societal values that are clearly in conflict with Scripture (and I confess that there are some things that are not clear) and hold to the eternal truths and values of the Christian religion.  Only then do we stand any chance of being confident to talk to others about God, because we will have something worth talking about!

Responses to Jesus - A Sermon for an Epiphany Covenant Service

I want you to imagine a stable in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.  By firelight a mother holds a newborn baby.  Three ornately dressed men approach the stable quietly and reverently.  As they enter the woman turns round.

 “Who are you?” she screeches.

“We are three wise men.”
"What?"
"We are three wise men!"

“Well what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o clock in the morning?  That doesn’t sound very wise to me.”

This scene is, of course, from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a film that is not at all blasphemous since it very clearly points out very early on that Brian is not Jesus.  This scene from that film contains all the elements that Christians associate with Epiphany; a star over a Bethlehem stable, a mother within cradling her baby and three kings bearing gifts.  These are familiar from countless nativity plays, and yet if you really read and look into the text a rather different picture emerges.

For a start off, there is no suggestion in Matthew’s gospel that Jesus was born in a stable.  Indeed, we are told that the visitors from the East “went into the house.”

Next, whatever they were, these visitors from the East were not kings.  The Good News Bible calls them “men who studied the stars”.  Other translations call them Wise Men, Scholars, Magi or Astrologers.  In fact, I couldn’t find a single translation that calls them kings. And we don’t know how many of them there were.  Matthew’s gospel tells us there were three gifts; it doesn’t tell us how many men brought the gifts.

Some people will say that none of this matters, that what is truly important is the message of the scripture, and they are absolutely right in one sense, and wrong in another.  The author of Matthew’s gospel wrote these verses for a purpose and all the elements are included for a purpose.  He was a Jew writing to a Jewish Christian community and we need to bear that in mind as we study this text.  He was a Jew, writing to a Jewish Christian community about how several different people responded to the birth of Jesus and his message was not only relevant for them, it is relevant for us too and has much to say to us as we think about the Covenant promise we will make later in this service.

This morning we’re going to look briefly at three different responses to Jesus from our gospel narrative, and hopefully think more deeply about our own response to Jesus.

First let’s take a look a King Herod’s response.

Now it has to be said that Herod was not a very nice chap.  In fact his name is ranked with other infamous despots throughout history, evil men like Genghis Khan, Vlad The Impaler, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  Herod was King of the Jews but he wasn’t even a Jew, he was of Idumean extraction and had been given the throne of Judea by the Romans.  He was, in effect, a puppet king.  To try and claim some legitimacy in the eyes of his people he’d married a Jew, the sister of the High Priest; but he was hated by the Jews and for good reason.  Herod was a multiple murderer, responsible for many deaths.  He had his beloved wife Mariamme killed, along with her mother and younger brother, the High Priest.  He also put to death Mariamme’s Grandfather, the High Priest Hyrcanus.  Three of his own sons were executed at his command because he feared they might try to take the throne from him.  He also planned the murder of a crowd of Jewish dignitaries imprisoned in the hippodrome of Jericho to coincide with his own death and thus ensure widespread mourning following his own funeral.  Fortunately this order was not carried out.

Yet Herod is not remembered by history for any of these evil deeds, he is remembered because of the way he responded to Jesus.  According to Matthew, when he heard from the wise men that the King of The Jews had been born his decision was immediate; a rival claimant to his throne could not be tolerated.  It did not matter to Herod that this ruler was the longed for Messiah, the Son of God; all Herod could see was that he had a rival claimant to his throne and he knew how to deal with rivals; he killed them.  Herod could not see beyond his own personal greed and lust for power, he could not see that wonderful act of God had taken place; all he could see was a personal threat and so he had innocent babies murdered in order to eliminate a threat to his authority.

Matthew includes this account of the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem to make a theological point.  One of the concerns of the author of Matthews gospel in to portray Jesus as the new Moses.  The original Jewish Christian readers of this gospel would have immediately thought of Pharaoh’s slaughter of Jewish male infants when Moses was born and drawn the conclusion that Jesus was at least as great as Moses, because of the violent opposition to his birth.

Before we leap to condemn Herod for his attitude to Jesus we should consider that there is a little bit of Herod in all of us, a part of us that wants to put our own needs and desires first, a part of us that’s wants to control our own destiny free from God’s rule.  There is part of us that will resent the Covenant promise we will be making because we don’t want to surrender everything we have and are to God, despite all that God has done for us.

Now we’ll take a look at the response to Jesus of the Chief Priests and teachers of the Law. 

It is easy to overlook them as they are barely mentioned in our passage, but they are there.  Herod asks them where the Christ is to be born and they basically reply Bethlehem.  That is it, their only appearance in the passage and yet it tells us volumes about their attitude to God and his Messiah.

The original Jewish Christian readers of Matthew’s gospel would have understood exactly who they were and why Matthew mentioned them.  These chief priests and scribes knew their scriptures, they were able to tell Herod straight away that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.  But did they go to Bethlehem to see the Messiah?  Did they lift a sandal to go in the right direction?  No!  They knew a Messiah would be born in Bethlehem and that if the Wise Men were right this birth had taken place, but they did nothing at all about it.  This is a danger facing religious scholars in every age, they can get so wrapped up in their studies that the studies become all and they forget that what they are studying is real.  The chief priests and scribes had great knowledge of the scriptures, but that knowledge proved to be utterly useless so far as their own salvation was concerned.

You find this unfortunate attitude amongst religious scholars today; university theology professors and theological tutors who are so obsessed with the origins and authorship of various books of the Bible, of their date of composition and so forth that they forget to consider the message the scriptures actually contain.

It is very easy for some people to become obsessed with reading books about Jesus, with watching TV programmes about Jesus, with debating with others about Jesus and to forget the actual basics of spending time with God in prayer, of reading the scriptures devotionally, of worshipping in church and of living the Christian life.  It’s a trap it is easy to fall into.

As we prepare to make our Covenant promise we must remember that whilst it is good to find out as much as we can about Jesus it is far more important to put our efforts into our relationship with him.  Christianity is first and foremost about relationship; the relationship between ourselves and God made possible by Jesus of Nazareth.

The third response to consider this morning is that of the wise men themselves.  Their response stands in sharp contrast to that of Herod and that of the chief priests and scribes.  Their response was the correct response.  The response of the wise men was to seek Jesus out and worship him.

The Wise Men were gentiles.  They were not Jews.  The first people to visit Jesus and worship him in Matthew’s gospel were not Jews.  This is important because it reminds both Matthew’s original readers and us here today that Jesus came as Saviour of the whole world, tying the beginning of this gospel with the end of it when Jesus says “go and make disciples of all nations.”

The wise men were serious about seeking Jesus.  The Bible doesn’t tell us how long their search took; it may have been days, weeks or even months.  We do not know how far they travelled, though some scholars have suggested they came from Mesopotamia, which we know as Iraq.  We do not know how far they travelled or for how long but the wise men undertook their journey determined to find Jesus and not to stop travelling until they did.

How far are we willing to go to meet Jesus today?  We may not have to undertake a physical journey, but we do need to spend time seeking Jesus if we really want to meet him and know him.  We need to spend time reading the word of God in the Bible if we want to meet and know Jesus, we need to spend time talking with God as we pray in Jesus’ name if we want to meet and know him and we need to help others to meet Jesus by showing them his love in the way we live our lives.  The wise men were deadly serious about finding Jesus.  How serious are we about knowing him?

The three gifts of the Wise Men show how much they understood about Jesus. .  By presenting Jesus with gold they were acknowledging that he was a king.  Jesus was King of the Jews by birthright because he was of the line of David, but he was also the heavenly king of kings whose reign would never end.  By presenting him with incense they were acknowledging that Jesus was a priest.  Jesus is our great High Priest who fulfilled that role by bringing man and God together by his glorious self sacrifice.  Myrrh was used for embalming the dead.  The gift of myrrh was an acknowledgement that Jesus would die on the cross, a foretelling of his ultimate fate.

Like the wise men we have the advantage of knowing who Jesus was, what he came to do and his ultimate fate.  We know from the gospels and other books of the New Testament that Jesus was and in not only a king, but the Kings of Kings who was raised from the dead and is seated at God’s right hand in heaven, the King who will return to this earth in glory to rule forever.  We know that Jesus was our great High Priest who spent three years teaching us what God is really like and what our Heavenly Father wants from his children, to love and worship him forever.  We know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins so that we might be forgiven.  We know much more than the wise men knew, yet their response was to worship Jesus.  What is our response?

Today we are holding our covenant service.  Covenant is another word for agreement.  The agreement we make with God during the covenant service is a profound and far reaching one.  We promise to give ourselves fully and completely to God, to allow him complete control over every aspect of our lives both now and in the future.  We promise to give God everything, to hold nothing back.  That is the response we should make to Jesus.  He gave everything for us.  He came from the glory and majesty of heaven into the form of a helpless baby.  The God who had limitless power endured the limitations of a human being.  He suffered rejection, torture and one of the most horrible forms of execution ever devised by man for us; all because he loves us.  He gave everything for us.  What can we do in response but worship him and give him everything we have and everything we are?

A Balanced Christian Diet!

Apologies to those of you who have clicked through to this blog post thinking it will give you nutritional information.  That’s not what this is about.  The balanced diet I refer to is a balanced diet of Christian reading.  Allow me to explain.

Up until going to university the only Christian book I’d ever read was the Bible, the RSV as a matter of fact.  I’d been vaguely aware that there was Christian literature available, but wasn’t all that interested since my faith at that stage was of a very loose and notional variety.

It was after coming to a deeper understanding of the Christian faith and making a personal commitment to Christ that I became aware of all the Christian books I’d been missing out on, partly because I was given ‘The Cross & the Switchblade” as a gift shortly after I made the commitment.  This book had me hooked from the first page and had a profound and lasting influence upon my life and faith.

I soon found the local Christian bookshop and devoured works by Christian authors like David Watson, Michael Green, AW Tozer, Billy Graham and several more whose names escape me.  As the years passed and I married and our daughter came along I continued with the reading I have always loved.  I read authors like Joyce Meyer, RT Kendall, Martyn Lloyd-Jones and many more.  They all had one thing in common: they were all fundamentalist or evangelical Christian authors and their writings confirm and strengthen what I now realise was an evangelical faith that bordered on fundamentalist.  It didn’t matter to me though, at the time, as I was pretty intolerant, saw the world in black and white and thought that anybody who didn’t agree with my faith stance was themselves lacking in faith.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but it is true.

It was following God’s call to become a Methodist Local Preacher that led to a change of mind.  I started on the ‘Faith & Worship Course” and very early on requested a meeting with my Circuit Superintendent.  It seemed to me that the course was far too liberal, questioning things that I didn’t feel needed to be questioned and challenging what I believed were essentials of the Christian faith, such as the inerrancy of scripture.

My very wise Superintendent asked me about what I’d read by way of Christian literature and commentaries over the years and gently suggested that maybe I should read books by authors whose theological viewpoints I might now agree with.  Because I trusted my Superintendent I did as he suggested.

Over the next few years, as I finished my Local Preacher training, candidating for ministry and undergoing pre-ordination training, I read very widely.  I read classics like John Robinson’s “Honest to God”.  I devoured the writings of Karen Armstrong and John Shelby Spong.  I discovered the works of John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and read essays by other members of the Jesus Seminar.  I have found the works of Borg, and also Brian McLaren particularly helpful.  That is not to say I haven’t continued to enjoy works by evangelical authors too, particularly the works of NT Wright.

I haven’t suddenly become a liberal, or a progressive or post-modern or any other label you might wish to come up with.  I have had my faith challenged, on one occasion almost to the point of destruction; but undertaking and maintaining a balanced diet of Christian reading has, for the most part, been of enormous benefit to me both as a Christian disciple and Methodist Probationer Presbyter.  My understanding of scripture has increased greatly and my preaching enriched as a result and my faith is actually deeper and stronger.

If you only ever read books from one Christian theological stand then, at the start of this New Year,  I urge you to deepen and broaden your reading.  It may challenge you, it may surprise you and it may unnerve you but, ultimately, it will be worth it.

A Change of Title Revisited

So I changed the title of this blog to avoid being labelled as a particular type of Christian, and then had it pointed out to me that both 'modern' and 'post-modern' are also labels.

So, a final change.  Reflections of A Methodist Presbyter also labels me as a certain type of Christian, as a Methodist: but it also describes that which I believe God has called me to.

So from now on that is the name of my blog.

Hope to see you all soon....

Some Things For The New Atheists To Think About!

As you will be aware from yesterday’s blog post I unwisely tried to engage with some New Atheist on Twitter and found I could not do so effectively because of the 140 character limit; which allowed for the atheists to make pith and shallow remarks but left no space for a detailed and considered reflection.

I see in this blog today a chance to address some of the main criticisms the New Atheists have of God and the Christian faith, both in the hope that it will give them something to think about and to demonstrate that there is intellectual rigour in the Christian faith.  I also hope that it may help my sisters and brothers in Christ in their discussions with atheists.

So, who are these New Atheists.  The key figures in the new atheism are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Victor J. Stenger and the late Christopher Hitchens.  They and those who have been convinced by their writings are the New Atheists.  Unlike the traditional atheists who were content with people of faith continuing to believe in God; the New Atheists are actively trying to promote their belief that there is no God with an evangelical zeal that puts some Christian believers to shame.  Ian S. Markham calls them ‘fundamentalist atheists’, arguing that they share with Christian fundamentalists ‘the equally clear assertion of uncompromising truth’ and that they also share ‘an unambiguous assertion of a worldview in which the authors are entirely confident that they are right.’

The central tenet of atheism is the conviction that there is no God.  The existence of God cannot be proven.  Theologians like Thomas Aquinas advanced various ‘proofs’ for the existence of God.  In The God Delusion Dawkins provides good arguments against Aquinas’ proofs and, in fact, those arguments failed in the seventeenth century.

A summing up of the New Atheist position would be that there is no scientific proof for the existence of God and that ‘God almost certainly does not exist.’

Alister McGrath explains the atheist understanding of science as ‘the only reliable tool that we possess to understand the world.  It has no limits.  We may not know something now – but we will in the future.  It is just a matter of time.’ (The Dawkins Delusion)  In another work McGrath points out that there are limitations to science, writing:

‘A theory can be plausible enough to gain our trust, even though some of its predictions and promises lie in the future.  In short: it is about faith – a point long appreciated by Polanyi and other philosophers of science.  So when Dawkins speaks of “proof”, he actually means something rather weaker, such as “good reasons for believing that something is right,” whilst realising that it cannot actually be proved at present.’ (The Twilight of Atheism)

Christians are not rejecting science.  We are, in fact, being more faithful to the concept of science and its inbuilt limitations than some New Atheists.  In line with this we can legitimately point out that it is the province of science to explain how things work, whereas it is the province of theology to explain why things work; in others words science can tell us what the laws of physics are and theology can offer an explanation as to why there are laws of physics to discover.

New Atheists tend to have a very one-sided and uninformed understanding of God as presented in the Bible.  Dawkins has described what he calls ‘the God of the Old Testament’ as ‘arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.’  Dawkins goes on to describe Jesus as God’s ‘insipidly opposite Christian face, “gentle Jesus meek and mild”’ (The God Delusion)  Christians will immediately recognise both of these as gross distortions of the God we worship.

Dawkins himself admits that his portrayal of Jesus ‘owes more to his Victorian followers than the man himself.’  Christians will readily acknowledge that there are problematical passages in the Old Testament that appear to portray the God Dawkins describes; these passages are sometime difficult for us too; and, of course, some passages are open to misinterpretation.

An example of one passage Dawkins misunderstands would be Genesis 22:1-19 where Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his only son Isaac.  At the last minute God prevents the death of Isaac and a goat is provided for sacrifice.  Dawkins calls this a ‘disgraceful story’ and ‘an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships.’  What he fails to understand is that this story is included in the scriptures to demonstrate that God does not require the child sacrifices common in the ancient Middle East; the exact opposite of Dawkins’ interpretation.

One of the central planks of New Atheism’s opposition to faith is the evil that has apparently been perpetrated throughout history in the name of faith.  In his preface to The God Delusion Dawkins writes:

‘Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion.  Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ-killers”, no Northern Ireland “troubles”, no “honour killings”, no shiny suited bouffant-haired evangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.’

Of course, not all these are references to Christianity, but some are.  As a Christians I humbly apologise for the corporate sin committed in the name of the church.

I also acknowledge the hurt caused to New Atheists by our sometimes antagonistic and hate filled engagement with them.  Richard Dawkins has cited examples of hate filled comments he has received in correspondence from ‘Christians’ that are too disgusting for me to print here.  Sam Harris has had his share of hate letters from Christians.  In his introduction to Letter to a Christian Nation he wrote, ‘The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.  While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible.  How do I know this?  The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.’  Not only are these Christians discrediting themselves; they are, by association, discrediting the church and the scriptures they would claim to hold dear.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus told us to love our opponents.  We provide a poor witness when we show hate instead and we are failing to honour our Lord!

The New Atheists like to claim the support of science for the belief (and it is a belief, not a fact) that God exists.  Richard Dawkins has written that ‘Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply’, using Einstein as his primary example.  Dawkins is being very selective in his approach and there are great scientists who articulate their Christian faith very clearly.  Dr Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, has written:

‘I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism.  That now lay in ruins as the argument from the Moral Law (and many other issues) forced me to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis.  Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out that it often is.  Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief.’ 

Geologist Kenneth Hsu has written ‘We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy.  It is about time we cry “The Emperor has no clothes.”  John Polkinghorne is a well-known scientist who defends his strong Christian faith and he has written several books on the interface between faith and science.  Finally, if there is a great scientist of our age it must surely be Stephen Hawking who, although not a professing Christian, has written, ‘It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as an act of God who intended to create beings like us.’  Dawkins is simply being disingenuous when he implies that great scientists do not have faith and the witness of those scientists who do give New Atheists reason to look again at the question of God’s existence.

New Atheists have trouble dealing with the person of Jesus.  Christopher Hitchens resorted to commenting on ‘the highly questionable existence of Jesus’ when in fact no serious scholar of history questions Jesus’ existence.  He also tried to slight the character of Jesus by accusing him of being one of a number of ‘deranged prophets roaming Palestine’.  Christian apologist C.S. Lewis indeed proposed this as one of the options when considering Jesus, stating that Jesus must either be mad, bad or the Son of God.  Lewis concluded ‘it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend and consequently… I have to accept the view that He was and is God.’   Dawkins tackles this point and suggests another possibility ‘that Jesus was honestly mistaken’ whilst failing to provide any justification for this view.  As a Christians I would argue that Jesus was and is exactly who he claimed to be because of his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead.

In Jesus God lived amongst us as a human being and revealed himself to the world.  Jesus gave his life on the cross to save us from the consequences of our rebellion against God and the resurrection proves that all Jesus claimed for himself was and is true.  Many have offered convincing proofs for the resurrection, from Frank Morrison in Who Moved The Stone to N.T. Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God.  Respected scientist John Polkinghorne has also offered proof for the resurrection, writing:

‘One of the strong lines of argument for the truth of the resurrection is the astonishing transformation of the disciples from the demoralised, defeated men of Good Friday to the confident proclaimers of the Lordship of Christ at Pentecost and beyond, even to the point of martyrdom.  Something happened to bring that about.  I believe it was the resurrection and that if Jesus had not been raised it is probable that we would never have heard of him.’

Resurrection is outside the realms of natural possibility and could only come about by the intervention of a supernatural God, the very God Atheists claim does not exist.  John Polkinghorne has written, ‘if a person believes in the resurrection then a simply secular reading of the gospels will no longer be sufficient.’  Paul made the same point about the centrality of the resurrection to Christian faith when he wrote ‘if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.’ (1 Cor 15:14).

If you are an Atheist reading this, then please think about what I’ve written.  You may well still disagree with me, but hopefully you will have gained a better understanding of the Christian faith and may not be so rigorous in attacking that faith.

If you are a Christian reading this then I hope that I have demonstrated that there are positive ways in which the Christian church can engage with the New Atheists.  We can discuss together the things we have in common like the appreciation for and understanding of science, both its achievements and limitations; and we can remind New Atheists that the seed bed of the scientific disciplines was Christian faith .  As Kepler said, ‘Science is thinking God’s thoughts after him.’  We can engage with science in our apologetics.  We can sincerely repent of the corporate sin of Christianity, of our oppression of and violence those who do not think as we do.  We can offer to New Atheism the witness of respected scientists like John Polkinghorne.  Finally, and most importantly, we can witness to Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, the Jesus who lived and died and rose again and who is still encountered and experienced today.

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