Here’s our third post on how we can respond to common objections raised to our faith. Actually, many questions we may be asked aren’t objections, they’re asking if our faith is relevant to concerns our friends have; and together it’s good to think through our responses to these.
Does your faith have anything to say about climate change?
Yes! It would be foolish to imply that our faith provides a specific programme for combating climate change; but what it does is provide the fundamental motivation for unselfishness, which is what is needed most for action at this time. People don’t realise just how much the Bible has to say about this: about our responsibilities to care for the earth and our fellow-creatures, and God’s holy frustration with those who destroy it (Rev 11:18); and much more besides. (Please see https://petelowmanresources.com/ecology-and-the-bible/. ) And the really crucial question is, what ideas or internal power can help us, me, to really combat our/my selfishness, so that the changes happen necessary to deal with climate change? Is the real problem that we have no way of combating our lazy selfishness? (And indeed no compelling ethical reason for saying such selfishness is wrong? Groucho Marx: Why should I care about posterity when posterity’s never done anything for me?) Direction by God’s Word, and by God’s Spirit, is the ultimate solution to this, available to each of us; but, tragically, so often ignored, even at this crucial moment…
Similarly we may be asked, Does your faith have anything to offer about my mental health? Again, the answer is surely yes; what Christian faith offers includes a mind and self-image becoming healed by grasping the enormous love of God our Father (the one ultimate, trustworthy Father!), demonstrated in the incredible event of the Cross; a supportive, caring community; and God’s Spirit’s loving power inside us, gently transforming each part of us into the people we would long to be.
But then again, questions we’re asked often come down to whether the church is outdated and bigoted, white-colonialist and racist. This often reflects amazing ignorance; many people don’t realise that Christian faith is by far stronger in many parts of what’s called the Global South (Nigeria, Kenya, many other African countries – or Brazil, Korea, Singapore, the South Pacific countries, etc), than in western Europe. But even in Britain, God’s Church is most certainly not a `pale stale`, whites-only thing. The fastest church-planting movement in the UK has of late been the black-majority Redeemed Christian Church of God. As a pastor I was thrilled that my own church had at times up to 40 nationalities involved together, and I know that many churches in London and elsewhere are similar; a sign of God’s presence that our friends need to see!
But isn’t the church evil?
It’s true that church is a place where broken people come and get mended. So if you visit any church, something’s gone wrong unless you can find there some people in the early stages of the mending process. Indeed, let’s be honest: because of how broken people – yes, we broken people – operate, some still-quite-broken people can sometimes even end up in leadership. Or, because `power corrupts`, being a leader can sometimes lead to our `breaking`, our slipping into becoming unlike Jesus. But there’s the thing: if you want to know if Jesus is worth following, look, above all, and carefully, at him. (That is: slowly absorb his self-revelation in his biographies, the four Bible gospels.)
Then again, when people ask this question we have a great chance to talk about the difference between `religion` – trying to earn our way to God by what we do, which never finally feels as if it has `worked`, and Christian faith, trusting Jesus for salvation only by what he has done for us. But that sort of `religion`, trying to earn our way to God, never satisfies; we never know if we’ve done enough. But this, in turn, leads to guilt, frustration, and anger.
That’s why the Bible tells us that religion can lead to violence. The first murder recorded by the Bible, Cain killing Abel, is about religion that doesn’t work.
Also, because of its great importance to our hearts, religion will always be at risk of being deliberately hijacked by bad people, people who actually believe very little of it, for their own ends. It’s happened throughout history, and it happens today.
Not surprisingly, Jesus uses much of the sermon on the mount to reveal just how religion goes wrong.
But where do we find the standards to critique religion when it does go wrong? Most people who criticise organized religion do so on the basis of values based firmly in biblical Christianity.
Our prayer is for our friends to reach the point where they may say, `I don’t like organized religion, but my Christian friend is ok and their church is surprisingly alright`- when they sense the real life of the Spirit in our diverse community.
But don’t you say that your God hates homosexuals?
God certainly does not hate homosexuals! He loves and values them so much – and we mean, including practising gays – that he died in colossal agony for every homosexual, just the same as for straight people. We love gay people too (I’m thinking of personal friends); we don’t believe homosexual orientation is a sin; we rejoice when there are non-practising gay people active in our churches, including in upfront and leadership roles; and (given the percentage of people who are homosexual in orientation) we pray that there will be many more.
We also look forward to God bringing more gay people, including practising gay people, into our activities, and look forward to them turning to Christ, growing in holiness, and seeking God’s control and direction, just as we each and all need to do. Each of us in different ways has tendencies towards thoughts, feelings or actions that are out of step with God’s will, and result from the Fall; and this is no worse than any other such tendency.
God does indeed say clearly in the Bible that homosexual practice, equally with any other kind of sex outside marriage of a woman and a man, is wrong. Again, that doesn’t make it a worse sin than many others we do. But following Jesus is ultimately about trusting (and obeying) him; and in this case, that means faith that he knows best about our sexuality.
We are very aware that the Bible’s teachings about sex raise very difficult and painful issues for many gay people, as indeed for many heterosexual singles; and we pray that any gay person will feel welcome in our services as they wrestle with them, whether they agree with us or not.
But in the end we all need the humility to allow God’s will to be surprising to us; that’s how we know he’s a real, personal God, not one we’ve made up to say just what we want him to.
Resources: www.livingout.org – a site partly for celibate gay Christians; truefreedomtrust.co.uk is another. Also briefly, https://petelowmanresources.com/is-jesus-anti-gay/ and https://petelowmanresources.com/god-and-the-gay-christian-a-review/ .
Books: Is God Anti-Gay?, Sam Allberry – short, biblical, by a celibate same-sex- attracted Christian. Born Again This Way, Rachel Gilson; A War of Loves, David Bennett; and Gay Girl Good God, Jackie Hill Perry: three fine, personal books by same-sex-attracted people who have `been there done that`. The Plausibility Problem, Ed Shaw – excellent and, again, by a celibate same-sex-attracted Christian. And for in-depth study of the relevant Bible passages (eg Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-14, 1 Timothy 1:10, and Leviticus 18 and 20), see Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice. Gagnon is not totally an evangelical but this is a superb, courageous, and very thorough scholarly study of the Bible passages on this matter and the related issues.
But doesn’t the Bible accept slavery?
Slavery is evil; again, look at what the Bible says in 1 Timothy 1:10.
It’s good to be aware, though, that the old testament word `ebed` often translated `slave` doesn’t mean what we might expect; it can have various meanings, including working man, or husbandman, or royal official (ie the king’s servant), or even worshipper. When God called Israel they were a nation of runaway slaves escaping from serious slavery; so it’s not surprising that, though they inherited the near-eastern system of labour, it became transformed. In the old testament an `ebed` can appeal to court against their boss, and the boss can even be executed if they maltreat the `ebed`. Kidnapping and slave-trafficking are crimes punishable by death (Ex 21:16), and Deuteronomy 23:15-16 has the command, unparalleled in any surrounding culture, that a runaway slave should not be handed over – which would have undermined the entire system if that were really equivalent to what we call slavery. It wasn’t, and in fact Exodus arranges a ceremony for the `ebed` who prefers the arrangement they have and doesn’t want to be free. This was not what we call slavery.
Neither was the Roman system, although it was worse than the Hebrew system for which the same English word is sometimes used in Bible translations. But Roman `slavery` was not permanent; there was not a big separation between slave and free; it might even be entered into voluntarily, as a means to a special job or to climbing the social ladder. It was a system that could certainly go wrong (just like marriage!); but again, it was not what we call slavery. Nevertheless the Roman system was seriously flawed, and so in the Bible we find Paul telling Philemon to treat his fellow-Christian Onesimus `no longer as a slave but … as a dear brother… both as a man and as a brother in the Lord` (Philemon 16). This must have transformed the whole system within the Bible-obeying church.
Tragically, however, the institutional church then allowed itself largely to lose the Bible, until the Reformation. But we still need to ask, who eventually broke slavery?
Melvyn Bragg, author of The Book of Books (not apparently a Christian as we understand it), writes, `In every recorded civilisation we have the acceptance of slavery. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, African kings, Indian princes, Chinese war lords… for millennia it seemed a natural and inevitable part of the human condition. But here it was abolished: perhaps the greatest humanising act in history.` Why? (It was immensely costly: compensating the planters for the freed slaves cost a sum up to half the British government’s annual budget!) Bragg says: `The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible… People like William Wilberforce, who had a revelation after reading the Bible and saw it was his mission to have the slave trade abolished, and embarked on a passionate Christian mission fuelled by a daily reading of the King James Bible. He finally succeeded, at the cost of his health and his fortune.` Once the church really rediscovered the Bible, slavery was doomed.
Bragg notes also the massive influence of the Bible on the slaves themselves. Black slaves in their millions in America educated themselves through the King James Bible (taken to them first by English preachers like George Whitefield). Many preached it and became leaders. They read it, read Exodus, saw Moses had said to the king about the enslaved Jews “Let my people go,” and this became their rallying cry. Bragg notes that this pattern reaches all the way through to Martin Luther King: the people who really moved the non-violent civil rights movement forward in America were the black, Protestant Bible-lovers saying ‘Set my people free’ and quoting from Isaiah. `When Martin Luther King was shot he was alluding to the King James Bible.` (On all this, see also ch.4 of Tim Keller’s brilliant The Reason for God.)
I pray that this may help! More questions of a different kind in next week’s post…
