Why do highly educated people–I’m thinking especially of our university colleagues–reject the claims of Jesus Christ? Many people better qualified than I am have written at great length on the subject, but let me offer one thought here. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll sum up my point in this shorthand way:
- The main problem is often not that our colleagues think Christianity is untrue.
- The main problem is often that they think Christianity is ugly.
The words we hear winging their way towards us when we open our mouths about Jesus on campus are often not “false”, “untrustworthy” and “delusory”, but “discriminatory”, “blinkered” and “simplistic”.
So our task is not simply to convince people that Christianity is true. I think we need to operate in terms of the richer notion of “credibility”, which is by no means less than truth, but also encompasses the idea that Christianity is good, or beautiful, if you like.
The idea I want to begin to develop in this post is the following: the way that the bible speaks about truth is different to the way our colleagues think about Christian truth; and the way the bible speaks about truth is exactly what people who think Christianity is “blinkered” and “simplistic” need to hear, and it should be a breath of fresh air for them.
What is truth?
Many people we have contact with are nonplussed by the idea of truth. Let me suggest one contributory factor: Ever since the Renaissance and the birth of the modern era, reality has increasingly been seen as divided between meaningless rationality and meaningful irrationality. Facts are what we can measure, but they don’t tell us what life is all about. And ultimate meaning must therefore be beyond what we can rationally grasp or measure, and can be accessed through some sort of non-rational mysticism.
You’ve got a dichotomy of fact and value: disenchanted truth and uncognizable meaning. And if this is your model of truth then you’re going to smell a rat when anyone comes up and says ‘let me tell you about ultimate reality’ using pictures of crowns and stick men, and a whole bunch of words. But Christianity is uniquely placed to short-circuit this false dichotomy of meaningless rationality and meaningful irrationality.
Jesus is the truth
Here’s the thing: on this dichotomy between objective factual knowledge and private, subjective experience, where would you place knowing a person? Is knowing a person like knowing a measurement, or like a mystical experience? Neither. It blows the categories.
And Christianity is not about knowing meaningless facts or irrational meanings, it’s about knowing a person: Jesus Christ.
Jesus doesn’t say “let me tell you the truth”, he says “I am the truth” (John 14:6). The deepest truth about the origin, course, and destiny of the universe is a person, or as Paul says in Colossians 1:16: “all things were made by him and for him”. You can’t get more basic, more fundamental, more original, more analytic, than the personality of Jesus Christ the God-man: all laws, all principles, all equations, all facts derive from him, they don’t found him. For the Christian, God’s personhood cannot be broken down into constituent parts that are more fundamental, more original, than God himself. Knowing true facts about Jesus is a means to the end of knowing Jesus himself in and through those facts. Jesus is the truth.
Jesus is attractive…
And Jesus is also what is most beautiful, most attractive about Christianity.
Jesus who, to put it crudely, ticks all the boxes of the sort of people I mentioned above. He hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes, he was not bourgeois but homeless working class, he had a thriving social ministry, he shaped an ethics we still admire today, and best of all he saved his most vitriolic language for the smug religious hypocrites our colleagues also scorn.
…but he’s no poodle
But we’re not yet done. So far, all I’ve done is paint a Jesus that panders to the particular prejudices and likes of the sort of colleagues many of us in Western universities will have. It is also true of Jesus, however, that he is the one who said “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29), and “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37), which our colleagues will most likely find spectacularly unattractive.They find some things about Jesus beautiful, and others ugly. And the reason for that is their cultural conditioning.
Encouraging our secular colleagues to be less ethnocentric and dogmatic
So the challenge we might launch at that point is for people to become a little less ethnocentric and dogmatic (though it would be polite not to use those inflammatory words).
Tim Keller puts it like this (I paraphrase):[1]
You go up to a colleague in your university and ask: “Do you agree with the bible’s teaching about turning the other cheek and forgiving your enemy?” –They reply “yes, I like that”.
You continue, “Do you agree with the bible’s teaching that sexual intercourse should be kept for lifelong marriage?” – “No, I don’t like that.”
Now go up to someone in (for example) Saudi Arabia, and ask the same questions. “Do you agree with the bible’s teaching that sexual intercourse should be kept for lifelong marriage?” – “Yes, I like that.”
“Do you agree with the bible’s teaching about turning the other cheek and forgiving your enemy?” – “No, I don’t like that. Where’s the justice in that? Where’s the honour in that?”
Why should our cultural sensibilities trump hers? Why should our culture be necessarily better than hers?
Keller continues (I paraphrase again):
Our great grandchildren are going to be just as embarrassed by our cultural prejudices as we are by those of our great grandparents’ generation. Will they look back in 100 years’ time and say “Gee, I wish we could turn the clock back to 2014, because we sure had it all right back then”? I doubt it.
So when we engage with the attitude that thinks Christianity ugly, one thing we are seeking to do is to encourage people to a greater level of cultural relativism, not less; and we are pointing them towards a more complex and nuanced engagement with Jesus, not to a closed mind and simplistic one-dimensional truths.
[1] Tim Keller, Three addresses given at the Evangelical Ministers Assembly 2008, downloadable from the Proclamation Trust “PT Media” website.
10 stars, so good, thank you!