Back to school -- with doubts about Jesus  | September 02, 2005

By Frank Stirk

Here is an article that is fascinating for a number of reasons. It is beautifully written, and inquires into some of the more subtle challenges facing believers in our multi-religious world and societies. Significant scholars are interviewed and cited, good social and moral analysis obtains, along with a genuine concern for the spiritual growth of believers, especially young people. Yet astoundingly, in the midst of such a sensitive and delicate inquiry, we find a quote collapsing Rael, Buddha, and Allah as comparable objects of religious commitment, and all equally rejection-worthy. What are better ways to respond to the challenges identified in this article?

UNDERGRADUATES at Canada's post-secondary Christian schools may have spent years in church before they arrive on campus, but a growing number of them are coming with questions that suggest they harbour some doubts about Christianity's core message.

"They're not convinced that there is such a thing as objective moral truth. They're not convinced that Jesus is the only way. They're not convinced really that other religions aren't also ways to come to God," says Paul Chamberlain, an associate professor of philosophy at Trinity Western University in B.C.

"I mean, you come to an apologetics class and you find way more than ten years ago that they themselves are waiting to be convinced of stuff like this."

Their questioning raises serious concerns about these students' ability to give a credible defense of their faith -- their personal apologetic -- as they begin charting their own lives. But it is also symptomatic of the pervasive influence of the culture on society, and its potentially debilitating effect on the church.

"You have all these churches chasing after the purpose-driven life and things like that, and the purpose-driven life doesn't even touch on what I call the church influencing culture," says Stuart McElvie of Winnipeg, the first Canadian graduate of the Centurion program, a rigorous apologetics course sponsored by Prison Fellowship Ministries.

"We're so entrenched in evangelical Christianity with bringing someone into a relationship with Christ and then getting them into a church and missions, that we miss this whole extremely important aspect of what the church is here to do."

Chamberlain believes the skepticism of some students is a product of the prevailing post-modernist mindset -- with its doubts about the established order, and a relativistic 'live-and-let-live' attitude toward all religions.

Avoiding conflict

"It just seems somehow to many young people wrong and abrasive to simply look across at someone else's way of looking at the world, and way of coming to God -- and call it wrong," he says.

That is an attitude fraught with danger for Christians, maintains Avery Cardinal Dulles, a Jesuit and professor of religion and society at New York's Fordham University. Writing last year in the academic journal First Things, Dulles warned that those who tolerate other people's belief systems simply for the sake of avoiding conflict risk impairing their own faith witness -- if not muting it altogether.

"This withdrawal from controversy, though it seems to be kind and courteous, is insidious," he wrote. "Religion becomes marginalized to the degree that it no longer dares to raise its voice in public . . . . The reluctance of believers to defend their faith has produced all too many fuzzy-minded and listless Christians, who care very little about what is to be believed."

Array of religions

For Christians in Canada, the temptation to stay silent may be all the greater -- given the vast array of religions currently practiced here.

"Canada is now a significant locale for every major world religion, and a centre for hundreds of new religious movements," James Beverley, professor of theology and ethics at Tyndale Seminary, noted three years ago in Faith Today. Consequently, he added, "your Christian witness may demand finding out what it means if your neighbour follows, say, Swami Prabhupada, or Rael, or Sun Myung Moon, or Lord Buddha, or Baba Ram Dass, or the Kaballah, or Allah -- or some combination thereof."

ACTS seminary student Kent Bergstrom, who switched from computer science to study apologetics under Chamberlain, believes another contributing factor is the assumption that the relativism which is inherent in the sciences and mathematics must be universal.

"When we take the implications of all our sciences and we just deliver everything over without any modifications to the religious realm, that's a mistake," he tells CC.com. "It's a mistake of every generation to kind of generalize something, and then apply it to religion."

As well, religious faith for many Canadians is becoming an increasingly private affair, divorced from both the church and the halls of power.

Jesus 'a way'

Five years ago, a national survey found that approximately two-thirds of those polled agreed that Jesus' death and resurrection "provided a way" for the personal forgiveness of sins, and that "the Bible is the inspired word of God." Yet only 20 percent said they went to church at least once a week; and 40 percent said they never went at all. But even many churchgoers are shallow in their faith.

"I've been consistently struck by the amount of biblical illiteracy among Christians in churches," says Chamberlain. "You can pick just a simple parable, a simple story of Jesus, that you think most Christians would know -- and although they may know about it, they will not really have any idea what it means."

Another survey done just three months ago found that, while 64 percent of Canadians still view religion as important to their lives, 72 percent disapprove of any attempt by religious leaders to try to sway political decision-making. But neither should Canada's faith community envy their American brethren, where religious beliefs are more openly expressed and more often evoked politically, and where upwards of half the population claim to adhere to conservative Christian values.

Blunted witness

Sam Reimer, who teaches sociology at Atlantic Baptist University, in Moncton, New Brunswick, argues that the very success of the evangelical movement in the U.S. has actually blunted its 'born-again' witness.

"It's not distinctive, and it's very low-cost," he says. "And so you have all these people who believe the right things, go to the right churches and who say they're evangelicals -- but their devotion is very low. I basically think that asking people in the U.S. if they're 'born again' is pretty much a worthless measure. Everybody and their dog says they're 'born again.' And why do they do that? Because it's so typical."

In his 2003 book, Think Like Jesus, pollster George Barna, whose specialty is the health of America's churches, reported that only one-in-seven born-again adults relied on the Bible as their moral compass, while fewer than one-in-10 had a truly biblical worldview.

The result is a large body of believers who profess to be 'new creations in Christ,' but whose lives are morally no different from the rest of 'secular' society. For example, surveys show the divorce rate among Christians is either equal to or even higher than among non-Christians.

'Committing treason'

"Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity," laments Baptist theologian Ronald J. Sider in his 2004 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. "By their daily activity, most 'Christians' regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord -- but with their actions, they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex and self-fulfillment."

Yet despite -- or perhaps because of -- having fallen so wide of the mark, many Christians appear eager to do better. Chamberlain senses this not only among his older seminary students, but also by the "sheer numbers" of people who attend his off-campus seminars on apologetics.

"They really want to learn, because they are out sharing their faith, and they recognize their deficiencies," he says. "It's an obvious reflection of a real desire for people to know how to live -- and express their Christian truth claims and worldview -- in this culture."

McElvie has encountered a similar response to the course he now offers churches on how to change the culture by living a biblical worldview.

"Everybody that I've been talking to about it and teaching, they're just hungry for this stuff," he says. In fact, there is now a profusion of apologetics programs and studies available to Christians who want to go deeper in their faith. But McElvie believes there can be no genuine reversal apart from a "more godly" church.

"The church can no longer sit in its little cocoon in denial and not take ownership of the morally depraved culture that we're living in," he says. "Darkness can't overcome light. The only way darkness can grow is by the light becoming dim."

Chamberlain agrees. "We really, truly need very, very sound biblical teaching by some of the best biblical teachers around. If we could have a really firm grasp on what these biblical principles mean for our world, we can at least know how to live them out," he says. "And then we need to learn how to communicate that to the people around us."

Ray of hope

Even those with the bleakest assessments of how Christians are living out their faith can see at least a ray of hope. In his 2000 book Growing True Disciples, Barna found that nine out of 10 Christians said they would listen to the specific advice their churches gave on how to personally grow spiritually and would follow most of it. As Sider commented in his book, "That suggests a lot of openness to more solid biblical discipling."

Perhaps, says Bergstrom, Christians are again getting serious about they say they believe. "Christians can take up a cynical, more relativistic attitude toward their faith only for so long, before it starts to rot and they start to thirst after something with substance to it. And that's what's happening," he says. "You can only tread water for so long. Eventually you've got to say, 'I'm going to stand on this island.'"

Posted by admin at September 2, 2005 02:51 PM