Last week, I posted to facebook a link to a page on our church website introducing my new series of messages. It’s a series where I promise to tackle some of the biggest questions of life and faith. However, an atheist friend of a lady in our church saw the post and posted a number of questions of her own. I thought I would take some time to write one or more blog posts about the questions she posed.
You can see the first post in this series here: Questions from an Atheist: Part 1.
Question 3
Why, as my faith was dangling by a thread and I wanted help so badly, did these questions get me thrown out of church?
For too many churches and too many Christians, tough questions are not well-received. Especially for people who haven’t fully examined their own faith, tough questions can seem threatening to them. They are afraid to deal with the question because they are afraid of losing their faith. Your questions threaten their faith, and your questions show your lack of faith, and that also is threatening because after all, faith is a virtue, right?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let me say it clearly: Faith is Not a Virtue.
I’ll illustrate this. Back in the Old Testament, we read a story of a guy named Elijah who went to the top of a mountain to confront hundreds of prophets of an idol named Baal. For hours, these prophets of Baal cried out to their god asking him to prove himself. He didn’t. Eventually, Elijah stepped up, said a simple prayer, and Yahweh, the God of Abraham proved himself in remarkable fashion. You can read the story for yourself in 1 Kings 18. At the end of the story, the prophets of Baal are killed by the leaders of Israel.
What does that story teach? The virtue isn’t in having faith. Four hundred prophets of Baal had faith. The virtue is in having the right faith. Or to be more accurate, the virtue comes in believing the truth over lies.
To make it clear: Believing Truth is a Virtue.
The sad reality for the history of faith is that people somewhere along the way began to believe that faith was it’s own virtue. As the religious life of the Christian church began to get more and more bogged down with more and more “addons” like praying to saints, transubstantiation, papal indulgences, etc. more and more of the Christian life became about “having faith.” What that meant was, “Trust the people who told you what to believe and stop asking questions!”
This is sad because two things result. First, people start believing stupid things when they take their “beliefs” on “faith.” Someone can tell you that babies who aren’t baptized go to limbo, but babies who are go to heaven. Someone can tell you that the earth is the center of the universe and everything revolves around it. Someone can tell you that if you give money to the pope, he can get you a better situation in the afterlife. Someone can tell you that it doesn’t matter what you believe, just so long as you believe it sincerely. If you have to take things on faith, you just might believe all of these stupid things.
Secondly, when people think faith is a virtue, people stop believing the true things. That’s the problem with truth. Truth has evidence. Once you have determined something is true, there is not as much need for faith. In other words, the more I learn what is true, the less “virtuous faith” I have.
Churches have far too often told people to “just believe” or to “have faith” but God never did that.
Jesus walked right up to doubting Thomas and said, “Touch me.”
Tough questions are what help us move away from mere “faith” and into truth. Therefore, any church that throws a person out for asking tough questions has made a mistake.
However, there is one caveat to this. There are actually two kinds of people who ask tough questions. One kind of person is an honest inquirer. That person really wants to know the answers, and is willing to submit himself or herself to the discovery of truth. The other person is a smoke-screener. This person really only wants to use “difficult” questions as a way to deflect the conversation away from the truth. This person has made up his or her mind about the overall truth of God or faith and is not actually interested in hearing good answers. Any church that continues to indulge the second kind of person is probably wise to stop and gracefully allow them to move on.
Question 4
If we were created in God’s image, and if we are the body of Christ, why, when we say we haven’t got a clue what the hell God or Jesus is up to, the answer is “He’s nothing like us!”?
This question expresses frustration with the way Christians often deal with the toughest questions in life. When the questions get really tough, well-meaning Christians will often say something like, “Well, God works in mysterious ways.” or “God isn’t like us.”
Of course, those statements are often used like a punt in football. “I can’t make any more progress here, so … ‘We don’t understand God!'”
I don’t like those answers.
But there is actually a good reason to sometimes use an answer like that.
Even though God made humans to be in his image, we are painfully insufficient to understand what he is really up to in the world. He isn’t that mysterious. We are that ignorant. More than that, we are also stained by selfishness and sin. Now, that last statement presumes a belief in the biblical teaching on the nature of humanity and sin, but not everyone starts out there, so I’ll skip it for now.
God, if he exists, is the creator of the entire universe. He made the billions of galaxies and their uncountable number of atoms. Beyond that, he has created to date more than 8 billion humans and has plans for even more. Beyond that, he has created a world that is so interconnected that events on one side of the globe can create seismic shifts on the other side of the world. The fact that Hitler didn’t die as a child led directly to the death of over 6 million Jews, but if he had died as a child, would we be in a better world now? There’s no way for us to predict how the world would be different. Because of Hitler, nuclear weapons ended up first in the hands of the USA. Without Hitler, the development of nuclear weapons and therefore nuclear power could have taken a very different turn, and who knows what would have happened in that world?
Who knows? Actually, God would know. A God who can create every atom of the universe, put them all in motion, and observe them individually, could reasonably be able to predict with great accuracy what the possible futures might hold. What if Hitler did die as a child? A Supreme Creator would likely be able to know. What if a world where Hitler dies as a child is actually worse than a world where 6 million Jews die under Hitler’s watch? God might know, but we never could.
Therefore, if a God like that were to create human beings “in his image” it would be astonishingly foolhardy for us to conclude by that phrase that we would have knowledge comparable to his.
A simple analogy will prove the point finally: A 6-month old child can rightly be said to be in his father’s image, but when the dad covers his eyes to play peek-a-boo, the child has no idea what just happened or why! The father has disappeared! If two 6-month old children could talk to each other, you might hear one of them say, “Why does your dad disappear all the time?” Only for the other to respond, “I don’t know. He works in mysterious ways!”
Yes, God works in mysterious ways… but it isn’t because God is mysterious. It’s because we are really that ignorant!