This article is going to be a tad bit unusual. While I wouldn't call it a 'personal testimony', it is personal in that it will explain some of the reasons that brought me to Christian theism, the view of God held by historic Christianity. As such, unlike the other articles on this blog, it will include some measure of biography.
As a child, I did not think much of the biblical stories I was told, at Sunday school or at home. Such stories, as they were taught to me, always seemed to be variations on the (supremely boring) theme of 'Be a good boy, and all will be well; be bad, and there will be trouble'. I found Greek and Egyptian mythology, with its heroes and monsters and wonderfully chaotic gods, to be far more entertaining.
I was fifteen years old when I discovered the New Testament. It was the summer holiday, and we were spending it in Brittany, a cold and wet part of France. This summer was particularly rainy, I think. I needed something to kill the time. For reasons that still elude me, I decided to solve that problem by reading the Gospels, focusing on Mark and John.
There was something intriguing about the central figure unveiled in these texts, the man Jesus of Nazareth. For one thing, his ethical teaching and attitude to life struck me as wise and profound. For another, his apparent aversion to established religion appealed to my teenage mind. But as I look back on that summer, I think that what most captured my attention was the texts' insistence on the very particular and intimate connection between Jesus and God. In a memorable exchange, Philip, one of the disciples, asks him to 'Show us the Father!'. Jesus' response is baffling: 'Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father' (John 14:8-9).
To see him is to see the Father, the Supreme Good and ground of all things. Other writings of the New Testament put it nicely:
"…Christ, who is the image of God" 2 Corinthians 4:4
"The Son is the visible image of the invisible God" Colossians 1:15
"The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." Hebrews 1:3
There is, as it were, an extremely close 'family resemblance' between the Father and his Son. Thus, the biblical authors tell us that to know the very character God, we need look no further than Jesus.
Why does this matter? Because what we see – indeed, what I saw – when we look at Jesus is a life that overflows with love, mercy and grace. We see a man who embraces those on the furthest margins of society – prostitutes, lepers, foreigners. A man who welcomes those who recognize their failures but rightly rebukes the self-righteous and the powerful. More shocking still, a man who would rather endure shame than to inflict it on his enemies, suffering the ultimate shame of crucifixion out of love for them.
This, the New Testament authors tell us, is what God looks like.
That much I understood fairly quickly. It took me much longer to understand the further, even more radical claim that Jesus is somehow included within God's identity, 'God in the flesh', giving up divine prerogatives in order to take up human weakness and suffering. The early Christian hymn in Philippians 2 puts it beautifully: "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men" Summer faded away, but my fascination with Jesus did not. My readings and investigations led me to realize that the conception of God expressed in the New Testament was unique and revolutionary. As the late Professor of Indian Philosophy Noel Sheth put it, while the idea of the divine coming as human is present in various religious traditions, "it is this 'folly of the cross' (…) that is uniquely Christian" (2002). Sheth is alluding to St Paul's famous quip that "Christ crucified" is "a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor. 1:23). The notion that God would love mankind sacrificially would have been utterly astonishing to all (which, by the way, puts to rest the popular canard that early Christian theology was plagiarized from pagan myths).
I eventually came to the conclusion that Christian theism is not only unique, it is uniquely true.
No doubt, a crucial factor was that it seemed to satisfy deep-seated desires which I share with many (if not all) of my fellow human beings. Most of us want to feel valued, honoured and loved, especially when much of the world around us makes us feel otherwise. It is quite telling that French secular philosophers Lucien Jerphagnon and Luc Ferry have named their short book on the subject, La Tentation du Christianisme, the ‘temptation’ of Christianity.
Admitting as much invites the charge that my conversion was the product of wishful thinking, having irrationally succumbed to the ‘temptation’. Let me first say in my defence that there was plenty in the Christian faith that I did not find appealing. Fifteen year-old boys don’t readily admit that they are in desperate need of redemption. And so much still confused me.
More importantly, I distinctly remember being motivated in no small part by an argument along the following lines. I took it for granted that God, if he exists, is the Supreme Good. That is, the very essence of God is that he is the greatest imaginable good, a being absolutely perfect in all respects. Whether this is a good way to think about God, or whether it is reasonable to think that there exists a Supreme Good, is not the issue here. What matters is that I believed it, and that, given this belief, it was reasonable for me to identify this Supreme Good with the God of Christian theism, rather than, say, Aristotle’s prime mover or the Vedantic Brahman.
Why is that? Because I could not, and still cannot, conceive of a greater good than sacrificial love. Any being, no matter how powerful, wise and so on that failed to exemplify sacrificial love would also fail to qualify as the Supreme Good. But, if Sheth and others are right about the uniqueness of the ‘folly of the cross’, it seems that, at least as far as I am aware, there is only one conception of God on which God exemplifies sacrificial love. At the very least, that the God of Christian theism exemplifies sacrificial love is a powerful reason to prefer it over alternative conceptions, even if this reason is overridden by other considerations, though it wasn’t in my case.
Many objections come to mind here. First, aren’t judgments of goodness wholly subjective? Isn’t what I consider to be ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ just a matter of personal preference? Secondly, many of my fellow Christians will doubtless chide me for putting the epistemological cart before its horse. Perhaps it is mistaken to rely on intuitions about goodness in order to evaluate alleged divine revelations. Perhaps we should instead allow revelation to shape our ideas of the good. Finally, and relatedly, doesn’t my reasoning seem to imply that we can just ‘reason our way up’ to the Supreme Good, with no need for revelation whatsoever?
It isn’t the purpose of this short article to rigorously articulate and defend the motivation that led me to Christian theism, though I hope to do so another time. I will only offer some brief lines of response to the objections mentioned here.
Regarding the first, it seems to me that at least some kinds of judgments of value are objective. Certainly, judgments about the taste of a wine, or the excellence of a musical performance, will at least partially depend on subjective factor. But I’m not sure I can bring myself to believe that the goodness of, say, consciousness, meaningful friendships and indeed sacrificial love are merely a matter of personal or social preferences and desires. These things, to paraphrase Aristotle, are not good because they are desired, but rather desired because they are good.
The second objection points to a much wider debate about the relationship between reason and revelation. To only briefly describe where I sit in this debate, though I think there is wisdom in not taking one’s fallible intuitions about the good too seriously, I cannot see how one can even accept the contents of any revelation in the first place without relying on one’s rational intuitions in order to decide whether or not to trust said revelation.
Regarding the third, I certainly don’t think that reason, by itself, can give us the ‘full picture’ of God. But I’m inclined to think that rational intuitions are not unlike our capacity to recognize faces. If I haven’t seen you for a very long time, I might forget what your face looks like, and hence be unable to picture you in my mind. If I randomly stumble upon you, however, my mind may be able to recognize you. Likewise perhaps in the case of God: unaided rational intuitions don’t really allow us to know what God is like, but they allow us to, so to speak, know him when we see him – that is, to recognize him when we encounter him through revealed scripture and religious experience.
This, I believe, is what happened as I turned the pages of the New Testament. I couldn’t have imagined that God would be like that. But when I encountered this strange Nazarene -- well, it just had to be him. Noel Sheth, Hindu Avatāra and Christian Incarnation: A Comparison