2024 Week 41
Hello, Springers!
Questioning Christianity is something we all have done. That’s why we chose it as our Listen and Learn topic for four weeks at Dinner BELL. We also all have people in our lives that we know and love who are questioning Christianity.
This week I presented the idea Every Position Is a Faith Position. One part of the talk pointed out the problem with “subtraction stories” that people tell themselves.
A subtraction story (coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor) is the story of someone coming to a position of unbelief. Someone may say to themselves, “I believed in God and I was a good person who followed Christian morals of kindness and human dignity, but then I quit believing in God (I subtracted Him) but kept the ethics and morality. I didn’t need God to have those.”
For many people this seems like a plausible option for living a moral life without the requirement of belief in a higher being. The problem, as I stated it, is that Nietzsche still thinks you’re a Christian. Here’s what I mean.
Terry Eagleton, a literary critic and atheist said this:
Nietzche sees that [Western] civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested….Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapley and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots….
(quoted in Tim Keller Making Sense of God, p. 47)
Tim Keller explains it further:
Nietzche’s point is this. If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian belief, whether you admit it or not. (ibid.)
Subtraction stories are not the same as coming to unbelief by way of reason alone. It’s helpful to point this out to those who think they have abandoned faith in order to live by reason. The truth is that every position is a faith position. The better thing to do is to compare belief systems and the object of one’s faith.
I borrowed heavily from Tim Keller’s own Questioning Christianity presentations and from his fantastic book Making Sense of God. I hope our first week of Questioning Christianity was an encouragment to you. The best way to grow in your faith is to get in a conversation about it with someone else, especially someone who doesn’t believe what you do.
We want to make Valley Springs a place where those who wrestle with doubt and skepticism can come and find people who will walk alongside them. We want to provide honest responses to honest questions.
Is there someone you’d like to invite to Dinner BELL and then to stick around for Questioning Christianity? Is there a question that you could bring on behalf of someone you know? Don’t be shy!
We respect questions and the people who ask them.
in Christ,
Pastor Tag