The Paradox of Belief

There is an old joke about a sceptical husband who came home and said to his more pious wife, “That parson of yours is a hypocrite”.

“What makes you say that?” asked his wife.

“Well, you know he’s always going on about how lovely it will be when we die and go to heaven. I saw him crossing the street in town this morning, and a fast car suddenly came round the corner. Judging by the way he ran, I’d say he’s in no particular hurry to get there!”

A more recent story comes from Peter Rollins in a talk he gave at Greenbelt this year. He was listening to a preacher who was a firm believer in divine healing. He eloquently insisted that if only we believe we can be healed of anything. Then, at the end of the service, one of the congregation had an accident and appeared to have broken a bone. The preacher’s first reaction was to say “We must get him to the hospital”!

We all know that even the strongest believers temper their beliefs with common sense. In spite of all the positive things we say at funerals, we all go to the doctor when we are ill and even centenarians hope to get better.

Some Christians claim to believe that anyone who is not a born again believer will go to hell to suffer for eternity. But many of them have unbelieving loved ones who have died. Believing what they do, how can they sleep at night? I once heard of a fundamentalist Christian woman who was found preaching in the street in the early hours of the morning calling on her neighbours to repent. Her husband, who had the same beliefs as she did, immediately called a doctor and got her admitted to a mental hospital. It seemed to me at the time that what she was doing was not mad at all but perfectly logical in the light of the beliefs she held. After all, if your unbelieving neighbour could die at any moment and go straight to hell, there is no time to lose. If a building is on fire you don’t wait for an appropriate moment to raise the alarm!

This paradox applies to many aspects of religious belief. On Remembrance Sunday congregations heartily sing:

                “Sufficient is thine arm alone,
                And our defence is sure.”

But many of those singing are in army uniform, and only a small minority of Christians are pacifists.

We preach the message of Jesus that we do not need to accumulate possessions because God will look after us from day to day, but how many of us turn down a chance to have some savings in the bank or to join a pension scheme? We believe Jesus was right when he said “It is more blessed to give than to receive”, but how many of us take even a slight risk of impoverishing ourselves by giving to those in greater need?

There have been in history only a few people who have really, literally believed the Christian message. Some have been outstanding saints like Francis of Assisi, but most of the others have been dangerous fanatics, willing to torture and kill people “for the good of their soul”.

What does it really mean to believe? Are all our “beliefs” dishonest and hypocritical? Or are they aspects of some deeper truth that common sense feels after but cannot explain?

New Creation or Old Rules?

I have just finished reading Tom Wright's Simply Christian. I already knew his theology was a bit more conservative than mine, but as he is a very popular author I thought I would see for myself.

His approach is very contemporary, in that he begins with the human sense of God. The first part of the book is entitled 'Echoes of a Voice', and it talks about how we get hints of God through the universal sense of justice, the way in which spirituality springs up everywhere, the beauty of the world, and the centrality of relationships. So far so good.

Where I really part company with him is in his views on sexual morality. Having said lots of inspiring things about awakening and new birth into the freedom of the new creation etc., when he comes to the final chapter - the practicalities of Christian living - he falls back on the traditional rules. He contrasts a truly Christian perspective with the idea that we all have the absolute right to seek our own pleasure and self-fulfilment. Of course we can all agree that, in sexual relationships as in everything else, selfishness spoils everything. But the conclusion Wright draws is completely dogmatic.

He says (p198) that, in contrast to the Greco-Roman culture of the time, the Jews and the early Christians "insisted that sexual activity was to be restricted to the marriage of a  man and a woman. The rest of the world, then as now, thought they were mad. The difference, alas, is that today half the church seems to think so too."

He grounds his view theologically by talking of the vision of the Kingdom as "the  marriage feast of the Lamb" and so on, and says: "Marital fidelity echoes and anticipates God's fidelity to the whole creation. Other kinds of sexual activity symbolize and embody the distortions and corruptions of the present world."

I think this is a gross over-simplification, and a slander on all those people who live truly unselfish lives and express Christ-like love in relationships that do not conform to this "norm". Wright himself talks about "new creation", Surely the essence of new creation is that it is new, not the restoration of something supposedly laid down from the beginning. As I see it, one of the main themes of the Bible is that God is constantly leading us on into new discoveries. His very name can mean "I will be who I will be".