If my opinion counts, I think you should be forgiven for any hesitation or suspicion toward Christianity.
In our time, you should be cautious when you hear grand claims of “truth,” spiritual or otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you start from skepticism or end up rejecting the Christian story. In our time, any soul brave enough to consider spiritual things at all deserves nothing but God’s grace. In our time, spirituality is hard.
The Struggle For Spirituality
What a time it is. In just four generations, electricity, penicillin, telecommunications, two world wars, particle physics, pesticide, plastic, spaceflight, a globalized economy, microchips, the internet, and social media have completely reshaped human life.
Beliefs that stood immovable from prehistoric times have collapsed into dust. The earth is round and it is quite small. Our lives are sustained against the hostile void of space by the thinnest wisp of delicate atmosphere. Perhaps we have always known the fragility of our situation. But we are the first generation to see our existential vulnerability, in photographs taken from 3.7 billion miles away.
Breathless, the human creature scrambles to adapt. We stumble into an emergent world by fits and starts. Most of our starts are dead-ends. Some of our fits are catastrophes of planetary scale. Still, the unstoppable engine of change grinds on, working either progress or the apocalypse.
The issue is far from settled. Whatever our final form will be, it is clear that the fundamental evolution of every aspect of human existence will continue, without our permission and in complete disregard of our misgivings, into a promising, terrifying, and always unknowable future. Such is humanity’s place in space and time. But with today’s technology, that unknowable future approaches at ever-increasing, unprecedented speed. We can all feel it in our bones, but there is nothing we can do to stop it or prepare for its arrival.
Our Souls Still Ache
From a safe distance it might be possible to see a miracle in the last hundred years of human evolution. We are not afforded a safe distance. We experience evolution as the actual substance that is unmade and reshaped. The process is deeply unsettling. Worse, we have nowhere to turn for reassurance or perspective.
Academic inquiry, protest movements, and internet comment sections have completely deconstructed our cultural institutions. People with smartphones are forced to rethink the campfire philosophies of our primordial ancestors on our own, in real time, as our world unravels.
What is a human being? What is my place in the cosmos? What is my place in human society? What is the meaning of my individual life? What is my purpose? What is my value? What impact should I aim to have on the world? Who should I become? Where is it all going?
These are no longer the recreational thought-games of idle intellectuals. In an age of cultural upheaval, mass despair, and rampant suicide, the old existential questions have regrown their teeth. Every primeval, subconscious doubt native to the human mind demands a new answer from each person – or else.
The Christian Story Used to Help
The story at the heart of Christianity has provided such answers for several billion people of diverse ages and cultures since it was first proclaimed on Pentecost over two thousand years ago.
- According to the Genesis creation narrative, human beings are creatures of earth inspired with God’s own divinity. We were lovingly made to tend the natural world for our own well-being and the flourishing of creation.
- According to the Exodus story, our societies do not exist to exploit or enslave the individual. They exist to protect the freedom and dignity of each person in a cooperative economy of mutual respect.
- According to the Gospel accounts, God so loved human beings that he became one of us in Jesus Christ. God met us where we are so that whoever believes in him will be remade in his image and inherit eternal life.
- According to the letters of Paul, believers in Christ are the first creatures of a new natural order that began with the birth of Jesus. The new creation will be completed when Christ returns at the end of the age, to remake the cosmos without entropy, suffering, or death.
- Christians get to announce the future renewal of all things, even as we live as “first fruits” of that renewal right now.
- To empower our new lives of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control, Christ sends us the power of his own Holy Spirit. According to the Gospel of John, the Spirit unites us with our Creator and all creatures. The Spirit helps us to follow Christ’s commands through the trials and tribulations of life. The Spirit remakes us in the image of Christ, the true Human that we are meant to become.
I wish we could still believe it. If we could, we would find a solid foundation for our lives in an age of chaos and upheaval. But even when we want it, simple belief is just out of reach in our time. Humanity is evolving, and even simple faith in the goodness of the universe is something that we each have to fight for.
After years of struggle, I put the pieces of my faith back together into a spirituality that is meaningful for me. Subscribe for the next chapter in Rebuilding My Religion to see how I did it.
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