An Essay In Defense Of Christianity

Rupert Shortt (Cambridge; Author, The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters (2025)), An Essay in Defence of Christianity:

Any bid to commend the claims of Christianity in writing should include a critical caveat. This essay defends a way of life, not a scientific theory such as evolution, or an abstract term like liberty. Whatever view you take of my theme, it cannot be divorced from the personal commitment that gives it its meaning. Like some of the ancient philosophical schools, religion is a path of understanding which can say little to those who have not set out on the journey. Disengaged study misses the point: it is like analysing a poem in terms of the chemistry of the ink on the page.

This thought leads to my main coordinates. You don’t think your way into a new way of living, but live your way into a new way of thinking. Being a Christian should not entail assenting to six impossible propositions before breakfast, but doing things that change you. The practical witness of believers may be their most eloquent statement of faith. G. K. Chesterton got right to the point when he described his creed as ‘less of a theory and more of a love affair’. Now consider the contrast between all this and much English-language philosophy, which tends to neglect the big picture. I would rather follow the lights of earlier thinkers including Cicero — especially his belief that the only fulfilling model for life rests on altruistic endeavour — and later figures who Christianised some of the noblest strands in pagan thought by adding the key precepts on love of God and neighbour. 

So the old warning to producers of agitprop — show, don’t tell — applies on my patch as well. The heart has its reasons; there is a limit to what can be established through argument. The number of people who come to faith as a result of intellectual exchanges alone is fairly small. Yet recognising the limit of a project is not to suggest that it lacks value. Christianity faces a sustained intellectual attack, not least through serving as a lightning rod for more general forms of anti-faith invective. A sense that a high proportion of the fire-breathers now belong in the atheist camp is forcefully conveyed by Francis Spufford in his remarkable book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (2012).

He starts by telling us that his daughter, just turned six, will soon discover ‘that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to church.’ In other words, Spufford explains, she will be told with increasing vehemence over the years ahead that her parents believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities, or that they’re dogmatic, or savagely judgemental, that they fetishise pain and suffering while believing in wishy-washy niceness, and are too dumb to understand the irrationality of their convictions. If you think this reaction is overblown, just look at the cascades of anti-Christian ranting dignified as ‘Comment’ on even quality-newspaper websites. Bigotry is harder to brush aside when it is symptomatic of a broader malaise. An American historian and agnostic who has lived in England and elsewhere in Europe for many years summed up her diagnosis like this. ‘I’ve always seen Christianity as involving an encounter with the depths of experience,’ she told me. ‘Yet so many educated people on this continent seem to associate it with nothing beyond the shallows.’ 

I share Spufford’s faith. In a modest way I also straddle the domains of journalism and letters, in which few practise a faith. I am regularly cross-questioned about my beliefs at social gatherings by slightly bewildered people who consider me normal in other respects; and one of the first things I feel bound to point out is that I don’t recognise my credo in the caricatures often peddled on the other side of the debate. No, the Church does not teach that God is a celestial headteacher, even though some preachers have done a good job of projecting their fantasies and guilt feelings into the sky and giving them a holy veneer. And by the way, the New Testament is a pretty anti-religious collection of books in some respects. It asks us to set aside most conventional images of the divine: to think in terms of a Creator who took off his crown in coming to share our flesh. Penitent Christians do not (or should not) confess their sins in order to obtain forgiveness. They do so because they are already forgiven. That is the insight underlying the doctrine of justification by grace shared by the mainstream Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions alike. ...

Human beings are naturally rapacious. We display a dangerous thirst for unreality, which is another way of saying that we are sinners. Often misconstrued as a spurious notion based on moralising dogma, sin is the basic empirical reality that Christian teaching responds to and makes sense of. That is why the correct definition of a Christian is not a good person, but someone who acknowledges their failure to be good. The most authentic strands in the Christian repertoire — peace, forgiveness, joy, meekness, purity of heart, solidarity — have infiltrated societies without necessarily changing them at root. We should not be surprised by this. The Church regards itself as both a divine society instituted by Christ, and as a human society with a sometimes terrible history. According to Jesus in Matthew 13, the sifting of the wheat and the tares will be carried out by God alone in the fullness of time. ...

Christian experience was distilled from the experience of prayer and communal life over generations. The teaching that emerged in the New Testament and early Church holds that through Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new phase in history has been inaugurated. Human beings discover their destiny in an orientation towards the source of their being; but this is not the orientation of a slave to a master, but the intimate relationship of a son or daughter to a parent. In that relationship, the Christian can become free to imitate the self-giving of God the Trinity — a pattern of loving relationship — who made us and saved us. The Church is the community on earth representing this ‘new creation’. Its chief task is to proclaim and witness to God’s will for universal reconciliation.

Why was Jesus crucified and why does it matter? One of the first things worth noting is that his execution was not accidental. He indicates several times in the gospels that his forthcoming demise cannot be avoided. This was not just because he scandalised the Jewish authorities by presenting his teaching as the fulfilment of the law of Moses, but also because of a more general human trait — our tendency to despise and reject full humanity when we encounter it.

Jesus plainly did not want to die. His anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane is clearly recorded. Yet over and again, he is portrayed as wanting to do the will of his Father above all. This is not to suggest that the Father sought Jesus’s death either. Commentators have drawn an analogy with human parenthood: mothers and fathers are aware that their children may suffer all manner of adversity given the slings and arrows of fortune, but it is not their wish that this should happen. What loving parents hope for is that their offspring will flower as people. The ‘Father’s will’, of which Jesus was so conscious, consisted in being completely human: this was the path that led to the cross. In the words of the Catholic thinker Herbert McCabe, ‘the fact that to be human means to be crucified is not something that the Father has directly planned but that we have arranged. We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.’ Jesus can be seen in this light as the most perfectly human person ever to have existed: for him, to live was to love. ...

I  conclude with a tribute not to a theologian but a novelist – Nicholas Mosley – whose deceptively simple book Experience and Religion (2006) did much to help focus my thoughts some years ago. Like Aquinas, he sees that the space for grown-up Christianity lies between scepticism and fundamentalism. His world view is expressed with a humility reflected in a recourse to parentheses: ‘the world has meaning, is tragic: man can alter it (redeem). This is the point (it is done for him) in religion.’ Mosley thinks that Christianity provides the fullest underpinning for values such as love, hope, truth and freedom, though this need not preclude an open-handed attitude towards other faith traditions. The alternative, he fears, is that ‘everything might be ridiculous’. (Stephen Hawking judged that we are no more than chemical scum in a bubble of galactic flotsam.) 

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. I don’t know for sure that the Christian creed is true in every particular; all serious religious practice ought to involve deep doses of self-criticism and self-questioning; your conscience is in any case the final arbiter of my argument. But Mosley’s warning is a variation on a theme first spelt out in the modern era with haunting force by Nietzsche. The father of modern atheism was at least right about the height of the stakes.

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