Our Community, a religious-based social structure, has a worldview and belief system that sets it apart from all the world’s other religious or secular communities. While various specific features and items of belief occur in other religions (e.g., sanctity of marriage, inspiration of Scripture, non-participation in politics), as a whole, we have a stack of peculiarities in belief and practice. Very few, if any, of the world’s religious systems deny the immortality of the soul. Our model of the atonement and the nature and work of Jesus is unique. We abstain from socially accepted institutions and practices such as voting, politics, lawsuits, activism, and secular organizations. We oppose military service and premarital sex and endorse only permanent monogamous heterosexual marriage. We have no use for “rights” or patriotism. We reject the standard model of Darwinian evolution in favor of special creation to account for our presence. We value faith more than commerce as we focus our lives on willing volunteer service instead of material success. We recognize the world is full of religious people, but we hold that only one worldview, scriptural based, can provide the necessary guidelines for a life of true faith.
If we live by this faith, we ought to find ourselves continually on the edge of discomfort; ill at ease in the work-a-day world, unsatisfied with quotidian pursuits, knowing little other satisfaction than an unseen God and a future promise. True, we have a social support system among those of like belief. We’re all in the same boat, but what if that boat has a leak? What if it’s on the wrong course? We’ve got nothing else, for we just don’t fit socially, religiously, politically, or morally into anyone else’s boat. What society around us holds dear we often reject outright. Living in this arrangement yields at best discomfort, and, in some cultures, outright persecution.
One would think that to choose such an awkward lifestyle one must have firm and unswerving dedication to one’s belief system. Back to the previous analogy, one would have to know of a certainty that his vessel was seaworthy and directed to a known port. One would need either a formidable arsenal of reasons to believe—or have a fanatical attitude about religion. We would expect members of a radical, intellectually sophisticated religious community to have mastery of apologetics, religious philosophy, and rational arguments to bulwark their position. No one would embark upon the demands of a life of faith insecure in the reasons for doing so. The price is far too great and the reward far too intangible.
I’m not sure we have a satisfactory apologetic structure, that is, one commensurate with the enormous demands it must support. We do have a well-developed evidential tradition in certain aspects of apologetics: Scriptural integrity (unity of message), prophecy, historical verification, and appeals to design in nature probably comprise the bulwark of our “reasons to believe.” However, given the number of people who leave — or never join — our body for these very reasons, we need to reexamine this area. I think we have, in general, a profound disconnect between the social demands of our faith and our ability to construct an internal apologetic to support those demands. This predicament results in dissolution of faith, and then the eventual moral, spiritual, and productive failures that invariably ensue. People who lose faith find excuses for other lifestyles, other interests, and other pursuits. Often disguised by the scope of moral declension, the core issue — attempting to live the hard life of discipleship without adequate rational support — can remain undiagnosed. The availability of a robust apologetic and a rationally sophisticated approach to religion will not cure the temptations of human nature, but it can bolster the faith that will give us mastery over our lives and circumstances.
I have chosen a vehicle known as ‘The Hard Questions’ to demonstrate what I mean. Within our community, we will find those who don’t even recognize the connection between answering the hard questions and the status of their faith, those who recognize but don’t ask, those who ask, but can’t answer to their satisfaction, and those who have successfully challenged their faith with these issues. All of them can appear to live very committed lives of discipleship as far as any human can tell — only God knows the truth of our hearts.
Knowledge and faith
It takes almost no faith to believe what we commonly call “first principles.” Taken as doctrines qua doctrines, they make obvious sense, form a coherent whole, and readily match up with the world in which we find ourselves. It doesn’t take a great adventure of mind, for instance, to realize that when we’re dead, we have no conscious existence, or that human nature is the real enemy of God; we don’t live in a world of combatant deities. One supreme God makes supreme sense; the Trinitarian view is metaphysical and theological nonsense. And on we could go. The truth, per se, is reasonable, logical, comprehensive, sophisticated, and anything else a rational mind would want. To accept it as truth is no great act of faith; it’s an act of common sense.
What does take faith is to change our thinking if we at one time believed otherwise, or to accept what we grew up with even after critical investigation. Either way, it’s a great internal mental challenge. Those who grow up in any sort of committed Christadelphian home eventually have to make that faith their own, and that proposition can be just as daunting as the process of unlearning and rejecting the basic principles of another persuasion. That’s just the internal mental challenge.
It also takes faith to accept the truth in a social context, regardless of how one comes to know it. We become a different “kind” of Christian; we reject millions of others who go by that name and we suffer the pain of not feeling at all at home in an alleged “Christian” nation or society. We are creationists, not evolutionists, and thus put ourselves at odds with an overwhelming majority of the academic world. We’re on the outside of all political and patriotic affairs in which every country is awash. The social consequences of accepting what would otherwise be obvious truth are profound.
So great faith is required to accept ‘the truth’ as we commonly call it, but not because the truth itself is hard to believe. Rather, the difficulty arises because believing it requires a strong personal and emotional commitment to become an outsider to society.
It’s no wonder, then, that many cannot abide in a community that is so socially awkward. It also follows that among those who remain part of the community, some do so by minimizing the social cost.
Often, those who have the most trouble are those who cannot buttress their commitment because they can’t answer, to their own internal satisfaction, the gnawing questions that a believer must settle in order to function at the level of commitment called for by discipleship. It certainly holds true that someone without reasons to believe will easily find a way to avoid the social inconveniences of belief. Would you make the great sacrifices of discipleship if you weren’t even sure that this mode of life was really the right one? Our ability to substantiate our faith will, to a large extent, determine the strength of our commitment to discipleship. Other factors exist, but this series of articles will focus on those issues that directly impact the belief process.
The ‘Hard Questions’
Every now and then for some, and perpetually for others, we ask ourselves the ‘Hard Questions.’ As a matter of fact, we ought to, at least periodically, ask these questions for our own good, and to have something to offer to people who do struggle with these issues.
What are the Hard Questions? There’s no definite list, but I’ll give some examples below. You can’t answer the Hard Questions by looking up a proof text or a highlighted verse in your Bible. You can’t answer them with, “Brother Zipp says…” You can read and think, but you can’t ever be sure about the Hard Questions, and when you think you are sure, there’s bound to be a new wrinkle awaiting you.
You can avoid the Hard Questions, but chances are your faith will remain slim and superficial. You might find your life just fine nonetheless, but that probably means your life is superficial, also. You won’t get very far without grappling with the Hard Questions; you might get seriously dizzy trying to sort them out, but you’ll always be better for the effort.
Enough of this, let’s offer a few examples of the Hard Questions, grouped into topical areas.
- Does God really exist? How can I know for sure?
- How can we be sure about an invisible, unheard God?
- Did Jesus really live and die on the cross and rise bodily from the dead to immortal life? How can I know for sure?
- What information conclusively testifies to the Kingdom of God? How can I be certain that my hope really will come to pass?
- How do I know the Bible, and the Bible alone, is God’s word? What independent criteria do I have to demonstrate this?
- How can I conclude that the Bible is the only source of truth if I’ve never even read other religions’ sacred texts?
What would I believe if I grew up in another culture that had no Bible available?
Why should I believe that I’m special just because I was born into a certain family?
What about all the seemingly ‘good’ people who never heard of Jesus?
If God wants all people to be saved, why have so few over the course of history had access to the Bible?
Is it correct to claim a single avenue of approach to God?
What about others who call themselves Christians? Is it correct to exclude them? How could we be the only ones with “truth?”
How much do we really need to know? Isn’t religion supposed to be simple? What does knowledge have to do with faith, anyway?
How do I account for the religious experiences (visions, miracles, and the like) of people with widely discrepant religious beliefs?
Does any religion have any superiority over any other one? Don’t they all ultimately believe in the same God?
If people have love and faith, does it matter what they believe? Isn’t living a good life good enough?
How can a loving God permit such overwhelming evil to continue so long in the world?
Why does God sometimes allow the children of believers to die?
- Don’t scientists, historians, philosophers and other people who have studied such matters usually reject religion?
- People have been thoroughly convinced for hundreds of years of Christ’s coming in their lifetime; what’s different about ours?
- Biblical ethics is unquestionably a product of its times. Why should we strap ourselves to it now?
- Society has changed so much since Bible times — shouldn’t we just adopt the principles of love and tolerance and forget the specifics?
- Only fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of Scriptures — shouldn’t that be a warning to us?
What is faith, anyway? How do I know if and when I have it? Can I really change my personality to fit what God wants? Is morality necessary? Is it even possible? Will God still love me if I’m not sure He exists? Can I be a Christadelphian if I have doubts?
Can I ever be satisfied that I can answer these questions without reservations or doubts?
- What does God really expect from me?
- I believe the truth, but I have no sense in my heart that God is really there. What gives?
How can Christadelphians represent the body of Christ when they have so many factions?
I have seen so much hypocritical behavior from those claiming to be Christ’s people. How can I trust anything they say?
Facing the ‘Hard Questions’ is not easy
Those are examples of the Hard Questions. Doubtless you have some you would add. They tend to center around three issues: the core principles of theism in general, the concept of an exclusive religious community, and the disharmony between our worldview and prevailing social, academic, and moral values.
Perhaps the sight of these in print will stun you; you believe we should never raise these issues in public. Perhaps you think that you put all these to bed in your pre-baptism interview. Perhaps it shocks you to think that, decades after baptism, a person can still grapple with these issues. You can avoid them, or treat them with pat answers, or think they’re so obvious that they don’t need to be revisited, but none of those approaches will satisfy the truly committed seeker or the disillusioned doubter. People do vex over these questions, young and old alike. People stake how they live their lives on how they deal with questions like these. Many avoid a life of faith because they can’t find satisfactory answers.
Although it’s not fashionable to question any of the above values, at least in communal worship and study, I know of a certainty from many conversations that some believers find a disconnect between the mental and social demands of living as a disciple and the concomitant proofs required to under gird the belief system. It’s time for many to open a discussion of the Hard Questions.
In the following series of articles we will investigate these, and many other related topics in a wide variety of knowledge areas. We want to know how to answer these types of questions for our children, our friends, and ourselves. In the course of these articles we will respond to many of these specific issues, but more importantly, we will learn the principles of responding to the intellectual and cultural challenges to faith as a whole.
For those eager for “the answers,” please be cautioned. Although we can marshal impressive tangible evidence in response to many of the questions, this series largely aims at other goals than providing a list of catechismal answers. We hope to develop methodologies or strategies of dealing with these or any similar issue. We will look at many overarching issues such as the nature of evidence and how to rightly frame a question. We will hone our investigative skills and also learn much about how to continue in faith when we can’t answer a given issue. By and by we will cover all the issues specifically, but our first task requires some lessons in framing a useful analytical structure to deal with these and like issues.
Next: Basic definitions and concepts of moral and intellectual dilemmas.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One