I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Christian

Before I say anything else, I'd like to be clear on one thing: I never have and never will ally myself with the slogan "it's a relationship, not a religion." Christianity is a religion and while it is true to say that it is also a relationship, to say that it is a relationship instead of a religion is to deny our entire intellectual heritage and our intellectual validity. If we want a seat at the table when the naturalists and postmodernists argue over the nature of evil, the existence of moral absolutes, and the purpose (or absence thereof) of life, if we want to shine a lantern amongst the philosophical will o' wisps of our age, then we must stand firm and profess boldly that the Church is all that it is and nothing less. We must not give in to the anti-intellectual fads or the connotations that secularists have pinned on to our language.

However, my attitude when it comes to being identified as a "religious person" is quite another thing. It is quite truthful and fitting that the word "religion" should be used to describe Christianity as a whole, but only occasionally would I ever admit the word "religious" to be an appropriate adjective to assign to a person. There are three main reasons for this, but first I think it is best to explain how the word can be used appropriately.

Obviously, the use of any adjective is only sensible in the presence of other possible characteristics which would exclude it; when we say that something has a given characteristic (such as the color blue), we are implying that there is another characteristic it could have had but doesn't have (such as the color red) because that role is taken up by the actual characteristic. Thus, a church service is properly called a religious gathering because it is intentionally connected to the religion of Christianity instead of being a mere party which is not consciously structured around any ideology. If written down and distributed, the sermon delivered at the service would be considered a religious speech or essay because it was openly founded on the intellectual framework of a religious worldview. An essay written by the same man for an audience of nonbelievers would not take the same ideas for granted and for this and other reasons it would not necessarily be considered a religious document (or at least not religious in the same way) even if the point of the essay was to advocate a Christian worldview.

Now my first objection to being called religious is that in at least one very important sense there is no other kind of person. A religion is a comprehensive set of beliefs which includes a supernatural understanding of the universe and typically involves reverence for someone or something. The problem is that every single person who has ever lived has had to struggle with the questions of God, life after death, and fate, not to mention the fact that beauty and ethics are also either supernatural or nonexistent. Additionally, even those who deny the existence of the supernatural still subscribe to some ideology which answers all the same questions that a religion (as a set of comprehensive beliefs) must answer. Everyone has something that they hold sacred whether it is God or freedom or science, and everyone has some definition of goodness that they hold to whether it is human empowerment or the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or the glory of God.

You might come across people who treat these issues as mysteries and claim to be ignorant or neutral concerning them (and you may even be such a person yourself), but they are neither evidence of ideological neutrality nor an exception to a generally true rule. If you sat down with such a person, you would easily find out what they really believe by either trying to persuade them of a particular worldview or asking them a particularly radical question concerning whatever issue it is they claim to be ignorant of. In the former case you might explain to an agnostic what Hindus believe (with most agnostics I suspect that eastern philosophy would be particularly effective) and then they would probably either show interest or express distaste at certain points, thus betraying their vague but still present assumptions about reality. In the latter case if the person in question is not certain of the objectivity of moral law you might ask them if the Holocaust was an evil act---I'm sure you can imagine the results for yourself. The point of the matter is that those who don't claim to have any ideology really do have answers to the essential human questions, they just  have very vague answers along with divisions within themselves between multiple and conflicting answers. In short, everyone has some ideology and everyone is guided in their actions (or at least in how they believe they should act) by that ideology. There is still the division between those whose ideologies include the supernatural and those whose ideologies exclude it, but if the word "religious" is to be used to describe someone who is fervent in their beliefs that is really a very small difference.

Of course there is still the sense in which people use the term to describe someone who is specifically dedicated to a "spiritual" ideology rather than a secular one. The problem with this case is simply that such a usage covers too broad and diverse a group. Christianity may agree with Islam about the existence of God and the inherent goodness of that God, but they are still fundamentally opposed to each other when it comes to salvation. On top of that there is the difference between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which teaches that God is essentially without any kind of personality and that everything (including all evil things) are part of Him, and it may be wondered if the rift really is any wider between the two than it is between either of them and any given secular philosophy. Add to that the fact that some religious worldviews are actually atheistic, and it is very hard to see how referring to a person as "religious" could be even remotely helpful in really describing that person.

Finally, there is the issue of behavior. In this case, one might be called "religious" because of the way in which they behave. Thus a "religious person" is someone who adheres to high moral standards. The problem is that even outside Christianity the issue of whether or not someone is a believer is determined first and foremost by what they believe and what they are trying to do. This use of the word implies a viciously legalistic attitude which is at least partially inaccurate in terms of religion in generally and wildly inaccurate when it comes to Christianity in particular. The Christian creed is founded on the doctrine that we are all evil and that we can never be justified in the sight of God except by His own death on our behalf. It is true that if we are saved we should behave better than we would otherwise, but that doesn't make falling short of God's commandments proof of hypocrisy. I once saw a scene on television in which a man said that he probably shouldn't be in a church with all the sins in his life, and I was simply shocked. If your life is full of sin (and I can guarantee you that it absolutely is) the first place you should be is a church!

It is for these reasons that I resent being called religious. It is a singularly useless term which I once used as an agnostic to say that a Christian is a certain kind of person just as a mailman is a certain type of person rather than someone engaging in the relationship for which we are all made. I'm not a religious person. I am not someone who is defined by regular church attendance. I am not a special kind of person. I am an evil wretch who knows he's an evil wretch, knows that only God can fix that, believes that God has done something to fix that, and lives in dependence on the mercy of that God. I'm a Christian.

Betrothal

I am reminded
By the idiotic grins
And the moments of sheer joy
Reminded of how she was promised to You
Reminded of how I was promised to You
Before this all began

It costs me nothing
Some money
A few years of patience
An education I would have gotten anyway
And the whole time she is eager for me as I am for her

When did I ever rescue her?
Did I ever romance her with wisdom and power?
When evil arose in her, was I there to rebuke it and war against it?

But You...
Well that pursuit is something else
You have searched
The depths of your beloved's heart
And You called her name
Before she knew it
In all the days of her life
You have provided for her

You make the storm
Sing and pound out Your love song
And hundred little things fall into place
By the authority of Your affectionate will
You come into her hidden shelter
And there attend to her

When the days turn dark
When the monsters come out
And all her friends fail her
When she is at the mercy of the merciless
Then You appear
As the utter darkness closes in
Your light flashes out
Tearing through that fearsome wickedness

When she wallows in the miseries of sin
When she turns her back on that light that once saved her
You do not give up on her
You have gone into her infernal shelter
With a word You blasted it to bits
She set her eyes on Fafnir's accursed gold
And at once you reduced it all to dust
You cut away her sin
And tenderly returned her to Paradise

Who am I
To care for Your beloved?
Who am I
To be called Your beloved?

Logic is Your Friend

In the history of popular thought there has emerged a very odd idea that logic is something cold, selfish, and oppressive. To the best of my understanding, this arose in the Romantic Period of the 19th century and became popular in the later half or so of the 20th century, but in this I may be wrong. The issue of importance is that in the imagination of modern America, the perfectly logical individual is imagined at best to be like Spock from Star Trek, or at worst to be like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reason is presumed to be the enemy of emotion, and if it is not completely amoral then it is at least utilitarian and as such justifies many things that are quite clearly wrong. In my response this notion, I aim not to point out that this image of logic is misunderstood while still ultimately true, but rather to show that the modern understanding of logic is fundamentally wrong. Reason is intrinsically linked to both our emotions and to morality.

To start, there is the illusion that reason is against emotion. While it is true that the two must at times war with one another, that is only when our emotions behave in unnatural (I use the term "natural" here in reference to the nature instilled in us by God at Eden, not the twisted and sinful nature which emerged from the Fall) ways or are in unnatural circumstances that pit them against what is good, and when our emotions are working as they should in the kinds of circumstances for which they were made, reason supports them. The image Plato suggested for a healthy mind was one of a chariot in which one horse was emotion, one was spirit (that is to say, energy), and the rider was reason. It is true that reason must struggle against emotion, but only insofar as emotion falls away from its own true nature and purpose.

Now to understand when logic should and should not fight against emotions, we must first understand what that "true nature" really is. Emotions can be divided pretty neatly into passions, intuition, yearnings, and hungers (it will only be necessary to discuss passions and intuition in detail since yearnings and hungers parallel them). A passion is very easily defined when we consider the root word of "pass" which appears in it, indicating that a "passion" is a "feeling that passes." It is a feeling such as anger or happiness or sadness which comes to us at one time and not another depending on our circumstances. Intuition is another thing entirely; it is a feeling which does not emerge out of our current circumstances and certain intuitive feelings cannot even be imagined to be stronger in one moment than in another. When we say that if A is equal to B and B is equal to C then A and C must be equal, we are speaking from the authority of intuition. We are also speaking from intuition when we say that killing someone else for the sake of convenience is wrong. We cannot prove that our intuition is true (and I should add that while some beliefs may become so ingrained in our us as to behave like items of intuition, they are still distinct) and if we had to go on proof we would be sentenced to never know anything. If I dismiss the laws or morality as they are presented to me through my feelings then I shall lose any concept of "right and wrong" at all, and if I do away with the laws of logic as they are revealed through my intuition then I shall never have any method by which to build up an alternative set of laws.

In terms of the relationship between passions and intuition, passion can tell me that I am sad at having lost a loved one, but only intuition can tell me that this passing is sorrowful. What's more, my passion can be a hatred for someone else who has written a better essay than me, while my intuition tells me that the essay is admirable and it is actually my bitterness than is hateful. In other words, a passion is an event within me, but intuition is more like a window or a copy of life's own constitution carved into my soul.

It will be noticed now that while logic must often struggle against our passions, it is nonetheless founded on our intuition, or rather that half of it which we call the "laws of logic." Of course, logic itself is founded only on what our intuition reveals to us, and the intuition itself never professes to be more than an image within us of something greater than and outside of us. The question still remains as to what logic says about how we should behave. As has already been mentioned, a very odd idea has gotten out which says that behaving logically means behaving selfishly or in a utilitarian way. This is odd in many ways, but one way that immediately jumps out at me is that both the selfish campaign and the utilitarian campaign face the invincible enemy that is time; the man whose first priority is survival will one day die and the state of general happiness which the utilitarian hopes to achieve can never be more than a particularly high peak among the hills and valleys of history. In any event, logic can never support selfishness because no course is ever logical or illogical except in the context of some objective good. Utilitarianism can be supported through logic, of course, but it is not the only such attitude. In fact, in like of our own biases, our inability to know what certain actions will result in, and the disastrous consequences of utilitarianism seriously carried out (namely Nazism and Communism) over the last century build a rather solid logical case against utilitarianism.

Neither is the idea that the logical man is unemotional any more weighty. While the moral side of intuition does not demand our total assent in the same way that the logical side does, we must accept that at least some of it is right or else we shall not have any morality at all. Thus, in so far as we have defined the moral items of intuition and assented to them, they must be the guiding forces in any truly rational decisions we make. What's more, they must be the guiding forces in how we react to our own emotions. If I am bitter about something that is good I must suppress my bitterness, but if I am instead happy over that good thing then logic must demand that I embrace that happiness. Even when we are fighting our bad emotions we should still be trying to encourage the good ones. As such, we find that even when logic is at war with passion, it is not trying to stomp it out so much as it is trying to reshape it into some form that is not only aligned with objective reality but is also thriving in that role.

The Captive Lord

The whole prison shudders
The stones shake
The bars creak
In terror
A whisper runs down the hall

Do you think you can hold Him down here?
Down in the labyrinth of forgetfulness
You would chain Him up
With snide arguments
You would shut Him up
Behind thick doors of disdain
But He built this fortress
From the loftiest tower
To those deep dungeons
And it remembers His touch

It all happened before
He taught the trees to grow
And they hung him on slabs of wood
He coaxed obstinate rock into malleable metal
And they impaled him with iron nails
He gave the earth its form
And they threw His corpse inside it
He was there when Death was born
And trembled at their reunion

Lay down your arms
Put aside your tools
They will not obey you anyway
Even now they mutter to each other
Gossiping of the unfolding plan

Watch as you lead Him to His cell
See how the prisoners stand up straight
See how the guards salute
Welcome to the new base of operations

God's Sovereignty

When I became a Christian, the one doctrine that gave me more trouble than any other was that of God's ultimate sovereignty, that its, His ultimate authority before which we literally have no rights. It is the idea that there is no part of my life that I can claim to be fully and rightfully my own. It is something that is central to the entire Christian mindset and lifestyle, but it was also something that nearly a decade and a half of secular upbringing had left me quite uneasy with. Ultimately, I found the answer to this difficult question of how God can have such authority in another question, that of where purpose comes from or (to put it another way) that what the meaning of life is.

What is Meaning?


To start, there is the issue of the definition of meaning (I should mention that while there may be some technical differences, for now I will be using the terms "meaning" and "purpose" interchangeably). This is a very difficult question to answer as the most obvious (and perhaps the most sensible) answer seems to simply be that it is what it is. It is almost too raw, too fundamental to describe. However we may get a somewhat more extensive answer by considering the phenomenon of a dying person reflecting on their life and asking if it was meaningful. In this quite human scenario, we are first able to discover that meaning is "above" the meaningful person just as beauty is above a beautiful object. If someone on the verge of death finds that they are satisfied with their life then their life is pleasing because it was meaningful, not meaningful because they are pleased with it.

Thus it is clear that the "height" of purpose above us means that it is what gives us value, or at least that some aspect of our value comes from it, but from this same scenario we are also able to glimpse another aspect of purpose. This characteristic is the timelessness or eternal nature of meaning. The dying individual is concerned with purpose in a new way because they have a sense of judgement (even among atheists and agnostics I believe this to be true, when we see our lives coming to an end it is part of our nature to anticipate some kind of summing up of our life) and when we search for meaning we tend to ask what we will leave behind. When it comes to the anticipated judgement it is worth noting that we are rarely concerned with skills and entirely amoral accomplishments and while I may be wrong I also suspect that the interest in pleasure is something that emerges when death is simply in the near future and that it is typically withered away when death is just around the corner. This is because all these things are temporal and we expect to leave them behind (even with skills which we might expect to keep we still see how vulnerable they are to death as we often see so many of our most reliable faculties all but obliterated in the final days) whereas our purposefulness is the one thing we expect to carry on with us to the great hereafter. It is the subject matter of our judgement when we must leave everything else outside the courtroom. Do not be deceived in this matter; meaning is either eternal or it is one big fraud, no matter how many millions of years it might last. The issue of death is not simply that our mortal lives are too short, it is that they end at all and if meaning also has such an end then it counts for nothing.


Does Morality Demand Meaning?


So how far does the reach of purpose extend over the abstract and spiritual realm? Can we have morality without meaning? I ask this question because there are many who would say they are content not to have objective meaning in their lives; I have even seen bumper stickers reading "the purpose of life is that there is no purpose." As far as I can tell, such individuals are split between the nihilists who reject the objective existence of any non-physical entities such as purpose or beauty and the postmodernists who find liberation in rejecting such objective and powerful standards as ultimate meaning. In both cases, one thing that neither of these groups are able to genuinely let go of for so much as a single day of social interaction is morality. Those who reject anything beyond the natural world often regard the spreading of scientific knowledge and naturalist ideas as the right thing to do, postmodernists quite paradoxically insist on treating other systems of ethics fairly and open-mindedly, and both groups tend to insist on a moral standard when it comes to human interactions (such as not harming others without just cause) in their own daily lives. In either case those who would deny objective moral law might argue that they only advocate the efficient and safe functioning of human civilization which is to say that they are advocating pleasure, but at the same time it is often true that putting the good of society first (while being perfectly beneficial for the majority of people) causes more harm than good for the individual in question. What's more is that if there is no objective good then the desire to live a moral life is quite arbitrary and there is absolutely no argument that can be given against someone who chooses to live the "fun but short" way.

So morality is inescapable. Does that then mean that anyone who would live an ethical life must also bow to purpose in general and ultimately to whatever "ultimate purpose" there might be for life and the universe as a whole? Can we have morality without meaning?

The answer I ultimately come to is "no" partially because I find the separation of ethics and purpose literally inconceivable (to quote C.S. Lewis, "I mean that the act of believing" such to be true "is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility.") and also because of one very practical difficulty. Every culture in human history has adhered to a system of right and wrong and they have also all accepted the same fundamental laws of morality, however every culture differs in regards both to how certain laws should be honored and in the level of emphasis they place on each law. The result is that we are able to see things done in one society in obedience to morality that are considered abominations in another society as both cultures believe in the same ethical laws but at the same time differ in their views on which laws have priority. The laws of ethics must clash, and in that clash there must be something else that decides the victor, something that transcends them. In other words, for moral law to function, it must do so in obedience to purpose.


Can We Create Our Own Meaning?


Now since all earthly things eventually pass away, if we are to find purpose we must address the question of ultimate meaning, of why anything exists at all, in order to find the eternal root of meaning and to understand what is and is not meaningful. But in order to tackle the question of why we are all here we must first answer one simple question: Can we create our own purpose?

The answer, not surprisingly, is that we cannot. If we derive value from meaning and if we have any sense of judgement attacked to the idea of meaning, then it must come from something greater than us. If meaning comes from us then it is not meaning just as a square that has only three sides is not a square. This may seem obvious, but it is essential to the question of why we exist in clearing away the nonsense. For instance, going by this principle we must accept that we do not exist to be happy since that would mean we exist for our own sake.
What Other Options are There?


But what does that leave? What ultimate meaning can we find that does not violate this principle? Do we exist to do good deeds? that can't be it firstly because the definition of "good deeds" comes from meaning and secondly because the most common and universally recognized good deeds are actions by which we serve other people and if neither I nor my neighbor are good enough to justify our own existence then it makes no sense to say that we are good enough to justify each other's respective existences. Do we exist for family and friends? The same problem emerges. Do we exist for friendship and kinship themselves? But if we are living within those two abstractions then we are doing so by not regarding them but rather the actual friends and kin. Do we exist for nature? But nature is just as mortal as we are and besides that what could we ever do for it?

The only way we can have purpose is if it comes from something or someone so inherently good that it has no need to justify its own existence. The only possible candidate is God.


So, returning to the original question, how can the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty over our lives be justified? I think a better question might be "How can we ever justify holding anything at all back from God and live even one second of our lives for the sake of anything that excludes Him?" The answer to that question is easy: we can't.

God is Glorified

What does it mean for God to be glorified? Typically, when we talk about glory we are talking about fame and renown, but that can't be all there is when we talk about God's glory. In fact, even when I consider what it means for Christians to be glorified in Heaven what I find is not enough. In that instance I conclude that "glory" refers to approval from God, the delight of knowing that we have pleased our Father, but surely God's glory is not a matter of Him patting Himself on the back. The Bible says that we exist to bring God glory, so what does that mean? If we are talking about miracles or transformed lives bringing glory to God on earth it is enough to say that glory refers to fame, but at the same time the reason God desires that kind of glory is in order to love and be loved by us. It is a means and not an end. Is God better off for having received our praise? I should think not. Is He better off because we love Him? If that relationship really does cause Him to be "better off" then surely it is because it allows Him to love us rather than because our love for Him. So then how is He benefitted (while I would never say that God could not have been perfectly fine and eternally joyful without having ever created a single other living thing, I seriously doubt that Creation was the result of a whim) by loving us? The only answer I can produce is that by loving us God is able to be more Himself. It is in the nature of God for Him to be creative, wise, beautiful, humble, and, most of all, loving and through Creation and the drama that has unfolded since then He has been able to demonstrate and act upon those qualities. The Bible even says that God is love, which I take in a very literal and platonic sense. For God to be glorified (in a cosmic sense) is not for Him to be famous or approved of, but rather is the pouring out and fulfillment of God's own inherent nature and goodness.

Whispers

There is something on the winds
There is a breeze coming out of Bethlehem
There are whispers in the air

Out to the East
There are whispers
"Look up to the sky"
They softly say
"Look up and see
The celestial celebration
Hidden in plain sight"
A sigh goes out to the East
"Look up and see
The sign of the Anointed"

Out to the mountains
To the forests
To the depths
There are whispers
"The Maker is back"
They say with gentle ferocity
"Can't you feel the Artist's touch?
Can't you feel the slow return to completion?"

Up into the Temple
Into the very Holy of Holies
There are whispers
"The Child is coming"
They proclaim into the solemnity
"The One with the authority
To break the seals
He will make you new
He will clear away
That by which you are shamed
And He will pour you out into the world"
They drift into the ancient tombs
Inserting themselves
Into the sleep of the prophets, the judges, and the kings
The dark silence of Sheol
Is interrupted by single message
"The Promised One is born"

Down into the streets
To a child born blind
Among others
"A day is coming soon"
They announce cheerfully
"The Prince has been born
So that He may deliver to you
Your inheritance
You will be cut off
Marked by the Angel of Sorrows
Cut off from the world
So the Prince of that world
Will not find you"

Across the skies
Upon the breeze
The whispers go out
They break open
The breeze unlocks
Over shepherds in the night
And the song of angels
Is heard with all its terror and wonder
"Glory to God in the Highest!
And peace on earth to those
On whom His favor rests!"

There are whispers on the air this night
Of a baby lying in a feeding trough
Of a Savior who cannot speak
Or care for Himself
Or control His own bladder
There are whispers this night
Of the God who
By His greatness
Became small
Who in His wisdom
Became ignorant
The Baby
That would destroy
And the remake
This wretched world
The God of all-comsuming
Undignified Love