Humbler Faith, Bigger God

Finding a Story to Live By

Samuel Wells

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780802879318
• eBook ISBN: 9781467462853
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Finding a renewed Christian story in a time of skepticism and doubt  

Is Christianity just a fairy tale for the infantile? Or worse, a cruel fantasy—the perpetrator of terrible harm and the cause of endless conflict? At most, one path among many? Such questions reflect the skepticism of outsiders and the doubts of insiders—some perennial, some underscored by recent events and movements. 

The answer to these objections isn't a louder faith to shout them down—it's a humbler faith that points to a bigger God. Samuel Wells shows the way through his generous, respectful, and earnest engagement with ten difficult questions about Christianity. In each case he portrays the traditional position and the skepticism of the modern age as two rival stories. Transcending both, he then offers a revitalized Christian story that better renders the radical, courageous, and vulnerable nature of authentic faith. Wells is unwaveringly honest about the failures of the institutional church and acknowledges many people's negative prior experiences of Christianity—making this a book for both Christians and non-Christians who have found the stories of their lives disrupted and now seek a fulfilling and truthful story to live by.

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CRUTCH FOR THE DELUDED?

WE BEGIN WITH WHAT WE MAY CALL a frontal assault on Christianity: the claim that it’s a fantasy, entirely invented, flying in the face of the facts of existence; that God is an imaginary friend. In fact, says this sweeping critique, there’s nothing really there: it’s a figment of the imagination. It’s been created to console those who fear that life is meaningless and to encourage any who suspect that life is without purpose. There may be a social or instrumental use for Christianity, and it may have some emotional resonance, but as far as truth claims are concerned, it’s basically nonsense.

The Old, Old Story and What’s Wrong with It

The Standard Account

A broad account of Christianity might go like this. There was a small nation on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, which we call Israel. It was made up of twelve tribes, but the northern ten tribes were destroyed in the eighth century BC. Only two tribes remained, based around the city of Jerusalem and its glorious temple. But at the start of the sixth century BC, the remnant of Israel, known as Judah, was destroyed and its ruling class was transported five hundred miles away to Babylon.

In Babylon the exiles reflected profoundly on their history and identity. They wrote down stories of how they had once been in slavery in Egypt and how under Moses they’d been brought to freedom. They recalled accounts of how at Mount Sinai Moses had met the God who had brought Israel out of slavery, and had received a covenant that bound Israel to that God forever. They perceived that that liberating God had also, at the dawn of time, created the world out of nothing. They remembered that after the ways of the world had gone awry, that same God had called the great ancestor Abraham to be the father of the people Israel and to inhabit the promised land. They commemorated the way the covenant with Israel, inaugurated in Abraham and renewed in Moses, was tested during forty years in the wilderness but came to fruition when Joshua entered the promised land and by endeavor and miracle subdued that land (sometimes brutally) and made it Israel’s own.

In Babylon the exiles recorded that it was a long time before Israel had a settled pattern of leadership and government, but eventually Saul, and then David, and then Solomon became kings of a united people. After this high point, the kingdom split and departed frequently from the path of the covenant; it was this weakness and shortcoming that led eventually to the nation’s destruction and deportation to Babylon. This was the story Israel came to understand in exile. Yet after fifty years of exile, Israel returned to the promised land, rebuilt the temple and city walls, and resumed the life of the covenant. Domination by the Persians was replaced by that of the Greeks and finally the Romans. But the flame of the covenant remained alive.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, a boy called Jesus was born. He was of the line of David and Abraham but was also fully God. He embraced the heritage of Israel but renewed the covenant and opened it up to all humankind. He healed and taught and proclaimed the kingdom of God—a coming era when all would live in the wonder of God’s presence and just relations between people would be restored. Jesus came to Jerusalem, in the midst of much hostility, and one night reinterpreted the Jewish Passover meal as the way his followers could experience the liberation he was bringing. But that night he was betrayed by one of his followers, and the next day he was disowned by his people and crucified by the Romans. On the cross Jesus took upon his shoulders the sins not just of Israel, stretching back to Abraham, but of the whole world, tracing back to the first human being. Yet God raised Jesus from the dead, in that action defeating not only sin but also death. Before Jesus departed to heaven, he commissioned his followers to baptize those of all nations and take the news of forgiveness and eternal life to the ends of the earth. Ten days later the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, and the church began to grow rapidly.

A former opponent of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, became the leader of the movement to bring the faith to the Mediterranean world. His letters to the new churches spoke of how the grace of God in Christ withstood the judgment due to humankind and of the resultant freedom of the life of the Spirit. Together with the scriptures of Israel, and four accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Gospels, Paul’s letters and those of others came together to form what, by about two hundred years after the birth of Jesus, was called the Bible. The early church struggled with trials and challenges, but in the book of Revelation it recorded its confidence that Christ would return as judge of the tyrants and vindicator of the oppressed.

After three centuries of minority existence and frequent persecution, in the early fourth century Christianity came to be embraced by the Roman emperor and soon by the empire as a whole. Things became more chaotic after the fall of Rome in 451, but Constantinople became the center of Eastern Christendom, whose relations with the Western church eventually broke down. Christianity continued to be spread by monks and missionaries, until by the Middle Ages it was almost unchallenged in Europe, although threatened by Islam on Europe’s southern borders. The relationship between government and church was complex and often fraught. In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation split the Western church, and varieties of Protestantism, seeking to reassert the authority of the Bible over traditions accrued through the centuries, continued themselves to split, with violent conflict sometimes accompanying differences of faith. Meanwhile the missionary movement advanced and fostered the spread of faith in the Americas, in Africa, and in Asia, yet was invariably accompanied by colonial attitudes and structures.

From the late seventeenth century onward, criticisms increasingly surfaced about the accuracy of the Bible’s story, the plausibility of Christianity’s account of the natural world, and the culpability of the church’s use of power. Nonetheless, until the mid-twentieth century, Christianity largely retained its hold on the imagination of Europe and its colonial or postcolonial spheres of influence. Starting in the late twentieth century there came a great reversal, where believing, or at least belonging, became a minority pursuit in the West, while the preponderance of Christians now came from the two-thirds world, or global South.

For the last two thousand years, the life of faith has remained broadly unchanged. It exists on three levels. First, the church is the gathering of the faithful. Believers share together a sacred meal, recalling Christ’s last supper and anticipating the banquet of heaven; they also read the Scriptures, hear interpretation, pray and sing together, yearn for forgiveness, seek reconciliation, and set out to commend the faith to others in word and action. Second, each Christian prays, seeks to be a blessing to neighbor and world in work, strives for growth in faith and holiness through public actions and through relationships, and tries to walk with Christ each day. Third, Christians look for the purpose and presence of the Holy Spirit in the world, through grand events and humble encounters, and pray for the coming of God’s kingdom through which all will be transformed into glory.

Challenges to the Standard Account

The contemporary Western secular worldview is materialist. Immanuel Kant’s project in works like his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason was to save morality from the acids of science—from the suggestion that life has no purpose. Nonetheless, his work discouraged speculation about things we can’t see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. Majority opinion has gradually come to concur. This renders the basic structure of Christian faith problematic. It does so because Christianity has almost universally assumed that what is beyond our sense experience is nonetheless real—indeed, more real than we are.

A materialist worldview says that’s nonsense. When we close our eyes, envision a conversation partner, or open our hearts to a presence greater than all things, there’s actually nothing there. It’s a figment of our imaginations, conjured up by our desire for meaning, our fear of being alone, or our instinct to conform to social expectations. “God” is simply a word for the infantilizing insistence that we make ourselves subject to an unseen external force rather than build up resources and resilience within ourselves. Like a child creating a world of her own, talking to patients on an imaginary ward, bossing her toys with an admonishing frown, or pleading with the goblins to release her favorite fairy, our prayers are attempts to structure our world in ways more pliable and rewarding than the unrelenting ordinariness or fragility of regular life. Such things are not necessarily ridiculous. Prayer has its secular equivalents in meditation and mindfulness—quests for depth, peace, and honesty, shorn of a transcendent frame of reference, although sometimes with their origins in Buddhist practice. Liturgy is an ordered sequence of symbolic gestures and resonant words—and is to be found in many human activities, from the order of a law court to the start of a football game to the traditions of an annual general meeting. Many of the things Christians seek to be and to do—as activists, truth tellers, reconcilers, sources of blessing, contributors to a flourishing society—are amply echoed in secular equivalents; the materialist would say no transcendent dimension of reality is needed to underpin such goals and aspirations. That last part’s just something Christians have made up.

Why might Christians invent such a make-believe realm of an imaginary heaven and a fantasy deity interacting in unpredictable ways with our space-time existence? Perhaps the biggest reason is fear. Our lives are circumscribed by death. In death we face personal extinction, annihilation, obliteration. This is a terrifying, paralyzing, horrifying prospect. Most of us are not foolish enough to try to resist inevitable mortality by building up hopeless fortifications of possessions, reputation, health, descendants, or other fruitless attempts to outwit the all-consuming prospect of our own demise. But it’s understandable that some, finding the future unbearable, construct a system of meaning and purpose that promises to go beyond death and open out a life that never ends. Faith is thus an elaborate system of defiance and denial: denial of the power, finality, and inevitability of death.

Another reason for conceiving the superstructure of deity might be projection. It’s very appropriate to separate worthy human motivations, desires, impulses, and convictions from unworthy ones. It’s quite understandable that one would seek ways to dismantle the less worthy and uphold the worthy by creating public monuments, festivals, celebrations of the worthy qualities, and private rituals and habits that foster such virtues. It’s not a great leap from there to turn those worthy aspirations into an external figure of admiration, veneration, worship, and adoration. There’s no human being whose life and character can sustain such acclaim; consequently, that figure has to be elevated to the level of the divine, eternal, permanent, unchanging. This is how a community can create a deity to fly the flag for its highest aims for its own flourishing. Such a deity can then become the focus for a host of other projections—about suffering, safety, fear, mercy, shame, conflict, justice, and prosperity. Faith, in this sense, is the creation of an external, shared idea that can carry the hopes and anxieties of a whole community—and can serve therapeutic and calming purposes, as well as forge common identity, regardless of whether it’s actually true.

Alongside these two rationales for the invention of a deity, there’s a third, equally plausible and perfectly understandable one: the need to identify a cause of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. When the Bible was written, people had little idea about other planets, let alone a solar system, or a galaxy—still less the idea that there are one hundred million stars in our galaxy and one hundred million galaxies in the universe. The biblical worldview has simply been superseded by astronomical discoveries in the modern era. Is it credible that there could be no life on any planet besides this one? Is it conceivable that a God could have concern for one minuscule planet when the universe is so colossal? Meanwhile there are fewer and fewer gaps in understanding for a “mysterious-cause” God to fill. The Darwinist account of the origin of species notoriously challenges the creation accounts in Genesis; but this no more than the best known of many areas of knowledge where the scriptural account lags behind contemporary wisdom. God seems an outmoded and clumsy name for a series of things that have more comprehensive modern explanations.

Together these arguments constitute the greatest and most abiding challenge to Christianity: it’s all made up. It’s a huge, elaborate, overwrought hoax, based on fantasy and fear. Christians are like Dumbo the elephant, clutching a feather whose power was simply a deception to get them to jump. It’s time they grew up and found that courage and resilience in themselves. There’s no God: deal with it.

A Rival Story, Its Validity and Flaws

A Rival Story

Those who don’t subscribe to any notion of the transcendent, and dismiss Christianity on those grounds, don’t constitute a unified movement. Some were once believers; some have no professed faith; some subscribe to another faith that rules out transcendence, like some forms of Buddhism; others are explicitly hostile. Here I synthesize a constructive position out of a whole range of positions—some of which, like those of the so-called New Atheists, are largely destructive, but others of which, like Marxism, constitute a fully developed alternative story.

At its most aspirational, this story says that it doesn’t abolish wonder, joy, even glory—it simply denies that the universe or anything within it needs something outside or beyond it to explain or cause it. Indeed, some would argue that makes it even more wondrous, because it isn’t the sculpture of an unseen force—it’s self-generating, self-replenishing, self-sustaining. It takes all the waterfalls, rainbows, and sunsets that move Christians to awe and praise and translates them into reasons to glory in the complexity and subtlety of 14.8 billion years of emerging existence since the big bang.

It’s a view that divides phenomena into two kinds: those for which a rational, natural explanation has been found, and those for which a rational, natural explanation will one day be found. It’s great to rejoice in and enjoy the natural world, the workings of the human brain, the extent of the universe and the complexity to be found under a microscope, but there’s no use in seeking a rationale or ultimate purpose of such things beyond the explanations science can or will give. There is no ultimate noncontingent meaning: everything is connected to everything else and requires no external “hand” to trigger, guide, or fulfill it. Death is as natural as birth; our bodies, animated for a season by a life force, have evolved fundamentally to reproduce; whether they do so or not, they eventually yield to the process of decay, which itself fertilizes endless forms of micro-life that contribute to the circle of existence.

The whole universe is thus a self-contained system, and Earth a largely autonomous system of its own. The kinds of singular, unique events to which Christianity is fundamentally tied simply can’t take place within such a system. As the eighteenth-century philosopher G. E. Lessing put it in his 1777 book On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power, “Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” Truth lies in what is always, everywhere so, not in what is supposed to have happened once, however arrestingly.

The Validity and Flaws of the Rival Story

This rival story is helpful to Christianity in two ways: it points out the missteps Christianity has often taken in making its claims, and it encourages Christianity to elucidate the nature of faith.

There’s no question Christianity has mistaken its claim to perceive the why of creation and assumed that gave it privileged insight into the what and how of existence. Some of the pioneers of scientific discovery were motivated by their desire to understand the breadth and depth of God’s ways: for example, in the nineteenth century Gregor Mendel, father of genetics, was an abbot of an order of Augustinian friars. Such people saw no reason that the search for truth should be in tension with the expansion of faith. But whether out of protection of its power, anxiety about its authority, or narrowness of its vision, too frequently the church has seen scientific inquiry as a threat rather than a gift—and provoked aggressive sentiments in its self-made adversaries. While Christianity was the default worldview in the educated West, the church’s voice had to be respected and its misgivings entertained. But having misused that voice so frequently, it hardly deserved to keep it. And it has created a situation where many people feel they need to choose between science and faith.

More significant is the nature of faith itself. The problem with the scientific story is not the expanding range of phenomena for which it offers a rational account: this is a blessing to all humankind. The problems are four. First, it tends to deny that it is itself a story. I’ve deliberately called it a “rival story.” This is not a battle of idle story against factual discovery. It’s a setting of two stories alongside each other, noting tensions and correspondences. Take the periodic table. It’s a brilliant, valuable, and dynamic construction, condensing a great deal of information in comprehensible form. But it’s still a construction, a best guess. It’s not that all the elements really exist on a table. The table is an account—a story. It’s a compelling story—but it’s still a story. All facts are components of a story. Within that story they may be asserted as indisputable facts. But “indisputability” is really an assertion of the universality of a particular story. Stories are, by their nature, particular: they’re told from one point of view. The assertion of universality isn’t a claim to truth: it’s really a claim to power—a way of saying, “You have to accept my story.” The scientific story (assuming it’s just one story) is a plausible, compelling story—but it can’t step out of the slippery realm of story and reach the high, dry ground of fact. It can only tell a more convincing story.

Second, there is only history; there’s no ahistorical truth. When the philosopher said, “Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason,” he was proclaiming a lot of confidence in necessary truths of reason—perhaps a little too much. But he wasn’t in a position to say that accidental truths of history were false. It begs the question, Aren’t there only accidental truths of history—are there any other kind? Today the distinction between arbitrary event and solid, reliable time-independent fact isn’t as clear as it was once thought to be. Christianity rests on certain unrefuted historical claims: notably the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. It’s true that Christianity has regarded as foundational and nonnegotiable a bunch of other quasi-historical claims about events that now, in the light of historical and scientific research, appear mythological: the six-day creation, most obviously. But the core of Christianity is what uniquely happened in Christ; while Christians struggle to prove it, no one has succeeded in disproving it, either.

Third, reductionism overstates its case. It’s one thing to say, “There are rational explanations for most phenomena, and will one day be for all,” but it’s quite another to say, “The only legitimate discourse is about how things work: questions of why they exist are idle, outside the realm of speculation, and fruitless.” Such a claim impoverishes every realm of discourse—even its own. Likewise it’s one thing to say, “Questions of ultimate meaning and purpose can never be answered for certain,” but it’s a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Crutch for the Deluded?
• 2. Catalogue of Betrayals?
• 3. Fairy Tale for the Infantile?
• 4. Drug for the Poor?
• 5. Intolerant Poison?
• 6. Perpetrator of Terrible Harm?
• 7. Cause of Endless Conflict?
• 8. One Path Among Many?
• 9. Arrogant Narcissism?
• 10. Cruel Fantasy?
• A Faith to Live by
• Study Guide