A recent Telegraph article reported a significant uptick of youth identifying as Christian in Britain.  According to the article:

The figures, show that more than one in five (21 per cent) people between the ages of 11 and 18 describe themselves as active followers of Jesus, and 13 per cent say they are practising Christians who attend church.[1]

This is significant, in part, because older studies put it at around between 5% and 6%. This has been so surprising that the data has been doubted, retested and reconfirmed. So I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on here, but the data is solid.

However, even more interesting than this increase in Christian youth in Britain is one significant piece of why they are identifying as Christians: the church buildings and cathedrals. Man I love millennials!!

What’s so interesting about this is that we live in a day and age where beautifying a church building is often seen as wasteful, at best, and contrary to the communication of the gospel, at worst.

But this is out of step with the history of the church. Some of the greatest buildings in the world are places originally designed for encountering God. Many times a particular congregation lacked the means to build beautifully, but they still structured their places of worship not merely for function but to foster a certain kind of experience.

Merely emphasizing function for communicating truth also seems simply out of step with how humans approach the world, in what we come to place our faith and affections. Reason and evidence are important and they are important for everyone (even ironically for those who decry reason and evidence). However, we also have deep longings. Mere truth doesn’t satisfy. Truth is, by definition, dispassionate. We may assent intellectually to something because it is true, but we don’t typically give our life for those things that are merely true.  We give our lives to things that are true, beautiful and good.

What’s in a building?

We build church buildings today almost exclusively for function. Function is of course not unimportant. If there’s no door to get into the building, then this is a problem. But we seem almost completely unconcerned about the kind of experience a building will give. There are some incredibly beautiful doors out there!

Does it sound strange to talk about beauty affecting our experience?

Consider what it would be like to read a book (even a really good book) sitting in a single chair with bright fluorescent lights in a high school gymnasium. Then consider what it would be like to read the same book here.

Or in a great coffee shop or out in nature.

The point is that the experiences depend in part on our environment. Being surrounded by beauty importantly changes and greatly enhances the experience. When we are surrounded by beauty, it more fully engages our souls. We are not just rationally engaged, but we are engaged in deep parts of our souls.

If this is right, then why wouldn’t we include beautiful aspects in our worship environments? When the experience is only rote and rational, then we have not presented the full picture of who God is.

Now I’m not saying that having a really beautiful building would thereby show the beauty of God. It has to be more than just this. But the general point is that we should surround our worship activities with beauty as a way to point to and reflect our brilliant and beautiful God.

God as the ground of objective beauty

The reality is that we have lost all sense of beauty in our current culture (both inside and outside of the church). When I have taught in secular settings, many students come into my classroom believing that truth, goodness and beauty are merely subjective opinion. This is not the case in my current Christian context. Almost all of my students come in thinking that truth is objective. Slightly less (but still in the majority) will think that moral goodness is also objective. But when it comes to beauty, this flips. Almost all of my students come in believing that beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder. It’s almost beyond comprehension to think that beauty is an objective value, that someone can be wrong about what one thinks is beautiful.

The reason people struggle with this, it seems, is because there is such a diversity of opinion when it comes to music, art, styles, interior design, etc. But notice we’ll be careful to say that a diversity of opinion about truth doesn’t make it such that there is no objective fact of the matter. People disagree about the shape of the earth, but this doesn’t make it the case that there’s no fact of the matter. It’s simply that some (maybe many) people are wrong in their opinions. We’ll also say that from the fact that there’s a diversity of opinion about moral values, it doesn’t follow that morality is subjective. It seems to me that the same exact thing should go for aesthetic values.

What also helps is getting clear on the difference of something’s being objectively beautiful and someone having a taste for something (i.e., being enjoyed or liked). I can like 80’s death metal (I don’t) or Funyuns (I REALLY don’t), but it doesn’t follow that these are objectively beautiful. Can we at least agree that Funyuns are lacking in the aesthetic value category?!

So if we can make sense of that, then I think it makes sense to ask what grounds the existence of this value (just as it does for other values like morality and logic). My own view is that beauty and aesthetic values make most sense on a theistic worldview. Just like moral values, God is the very source of objective beauty.

So though we are surprised that young people in Britain are converting, at least in part, due to the beauty of a building, we shouldn’t be. People can find the God of beauty in the beauty exemplified in the world and we would do well to make this part of the case we make.

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[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/17/one-six-young-people-christian-visits-church-buildings-inspire/

As Christians, we are called to faith. But what does “faith” mean? Atheists often tell Christians (i.e., you know, people of faith) something like the following:

Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”[1]

Peter Boghossian: “pretending to know things that you don’t know” and “belief without evidence.”[2]

Richard Dawkins once said “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”[3]

For many atheists, all that one has to do is get Christians to admit that they believe Christianity on the basis of faith and this is sufficient to refute the view. After all, how could you win a rational debate if you admit to pretending to know something you don’t know?! To concede this seems to be to surrender before the war even starts.

The only problem here is that there is no thoughtful Christian I know would say this is what they mean by faith. Maybe Christians should get to say what they mean by faith?! This would likely help the dialogue, or so it seems to me.

So, at best, these are mere caricatures of faith. I will suggest that faith is best understood as ventured trust. I will also argue that everyone has faith and that faith is in no way contrary to reason.

What then is faith? As a first pass, we should understand faith as simple trust. When we trust, there is always some thing (or person) that we trust. This is to say that faith always has an object. That is, one cannot have faith in some nebulous way. There must be some thing or person one has faith in. So this could be a chair one is considering sitting in. Or one could trust an airplane one is waiting to board. Or one may place one’s trust in a person to whom one is about to say “I do” in a wedding ceremony. The object of one’s faith would be the chair or the airplane or the soon-to-be-if-all-goes-well spouse.

Notice that, on this understanding of faith, faith is not, by itself, a set of beliefs, or a proposition, or even a claim. So an immediate problem with the above caricatures of faith is that they do not place faith in the right sort category. Faith cannot be “belief without evidence” since it is not a belief to begin with. It is a state that may involve beliefs or may be caused by beliefs, although it is not itself a belief. Rather, it is a state of trust.

But we don’t have faith in something from a distance. Faith seems to connote the idea that we trust in action. When we genuinely place our faith in an object, we always venture something. If we trust the safety of the airplane, but we never get on board, then we haven’t really placed our faith in the airplane.

Faith requires not trust from a distance but an entrusting ourselves where we venture or risk ourselves and our wellbeing to some thing or person. To truly place our faith in a chair, we must sit down and risk the chair’s collapsing. Or a much better illustration is the risk one takes when one gets married. A healthy marriage requires us to entrust virtually every area of our lives to our spouse and this opens us up to the deepest hurt when there is betrayal. A toxic marriage is of course one in which there is deep distrust and suspicion. But the marriage will also suffer if one merely trusts from a distance. A healthy marriage requires us to jump in with deep and mutual ventured trust.

Faith requires not trust from a distance but an entrusting ourselves where we venture or risk ourselves and our wellbeing to some thing or person.

Everyone has faith, in this sense, insofar as they entrust themselves to someone or something. Again, when we get married, we entrust our feelings, wellbeing, livelihood, possessions, etc., to our spouses. When we fly on an air plane, we entrust ourselves to the aircraft, the pilots, the mechanics who serviced the plane, etc. When we do science, we entrust ourselves to certain methodologies, prior theories and data, and our empirical and mental faculties. There is nothing unique about Christian faith other than the object of that faith.

What is the object of Christian faith? Christian faith is entrusting ourselves to Christ and venturing on the truth and reality of the gospel. We place our faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. It is not merely the truth of the gospel and it is not merely the evidence and reasons constitutive of the knowledge of the gospel, but we are literally entrusting ourselves to Christ and His gospel.

 Faith and Reason

What is the relationship between faith and reason? Unfortunately, there have been Christians (not typically very thoughtful) who have conceded something like the above caricatures of faith.

The notion that faith and reason stand in some degree of tension is a view called fideism. On the one hand, the fideist might say reason plays a role, but only carries us so far. That is, we might know some truths of Christianity by reason and evidence but, at a certain point, reason and evidence run out and faith, in a way, takes over or fills the gap.

Or the more radical fideist might say that you have your rational pursuits on one hand (science, political platforms, automobile repair, etc.) and your faith pursuits on the other, and never the twain shall meet. Evidence literally has nothing to do with and might even be detrimental to what one believes on the basis of faith. When it comes to challenges to the faith, the fideist can always shut down a challenge by appealing to that old canard “we just got to have faith.”

Though it is not uncommon for Christians to make this appeal when their Christian beliefs get pressed, fideism has always been a minority view. Most Christians think that reason and evidence are very important for faith. They don’t believe things they know ain’t so and they certainly don’t merely pretend like they are true. They have faith in Christ precisely because they have become convinced by the preaching of the gospel, the testimony of the Spirit, the richness of Scripture, a work the Lord has done in their own lives, answers to prayer, a world that appears designed and finely tuned, needing an explanation for value, purpose and hope, science, philosophy, logic itself, etc. In fact, I don’t know of anyone for whom reason has played no role whatsoever in coming to faith.

As long as we don’t narrowly restrict the notion of reason (as discussed above), we should see that faith and reason are perfectly compatible and, indeed, are importantly related. Reason, on my view, is a tool for coming to know what sort of object upon which we should venture our trust. Reason helps us to know what objects are trustworthy–or what we may call faithworthy.

Reason helps us to know what objects are trustworthy–or what we may call faithworthy.

We will often have competing reasons when we consider where to place our faith, and we often times venture trust with less than ideal reasoning. This fact requires that we engage the life of the mind and carefully consider and weigh out our reasons as we grow in faith.

[1] Mark Twain, Following the Equator (New York: Dover, 1989), 132.

[2] Peter Boghossian,  A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2013), 23–24.

[3] A lecture by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec 94), http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1994-12religion.shtml.

Typically, when we come to believe something, we simply add that belief to other beliefs that we already have. When we join or agree to something, we simply add that association in with the other things that we are already about.

CS Lewis says:

The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this. We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else call it “morality” or “decent behavior,” or “the good of society” has claims on this self:  claims which interfere with its own desires. What we mean by “being good” is giving in to those claims…But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes. In fact, we are very like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will be enough left over for him to live on.

But Christianity is not like this.

We don’t join a club that meets on Sunday mornings and leaves the rest of our lives alone. At least we don’t if we take the teachings Jesus seriously. The call of the gospel is complete. It is for our whole lives. There is no piece of one’s life that remains untouched given the strong claims Jesus makes. Jesus says that to follow him, we must take up our cross. Just think about how drastic this is. He likens our call to discipleship to being on the way to one’s own execution. When it was time for a prisoner to take up his cross, the prisoner’s life was over with no exceptions. At least in prison, there is something of a life, albeit one that is highly regulated and hindered in various ways. All of that is past as one shoulders one’s own death instrument.

Lewis goes on:

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it…Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself; my own will shall become yours”

The call of the gospel is to make Jesus Lord. And this is hard indeed. We like being lord. It fights against everything deep within us to not be lord. Many religious folks have never accepted the gospel precisely because they approach religion on their own terms. They remain lord over their religious activities. But notice that is not the Christian gospel. The gospel calls for our entire selves with all of its desires, plans for career, relationships, our marriage or whether we’ll even get married, our children, our commitments, goals, wishes, hopes, etc. It requires all of that. Anyone who thinks this is a breeze has likely only joined the club of Christianity that meets on Sunday mornings for a moderately enjoyable time of music, community and coffee. The genuine call of discipleship, by contrast, is a hard call indeed.

But it is a good call and it is life. In fact, according to Lewis, there’s a sense in which it is easy.

He says:

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly.

The problem is that we can’t remain lord, as tempting as it may be, and find genuine satisfaction. When our lives are all about us, then even our best of moral actions are hollow attempts at pleasure. For example, if it’s all about us and we agree to help a friend, it seems we will only be using our friend for the pleasure it brings (or perhaps the pleasure it brings later given that our friend now “owes us one”). But this is hollow and fleeting. With our own pleasure as our goal, we often find ourselves miserable. This is the (so-called) paradox of hedonism.

Again, most religious folks make Christianity all about them. But Christianity as a mere religion (i.e., devoid of the gospel) is not all that great. There are, it seems to me, far better and more interesting religious traditions. Christianity, qua religious tradition, especially the protestant and non-liturgical version is average, at best!

But there’s the gospel. And it is good news.

Lewis goes on:

And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

Christianity is easy precisely because it is not about trying hard. It is not about trying at all. It is about stopping. It’s about giving up. You literally cannot set out to make, through effort, Christ Lord of one’s life. If we are using efforts to achieve this end, then we back to only being religious. We are forcing Christianity on our own terms and we haven’t accepted the gospel. The gospel is one of surrender of taking up one’s cross. Though this is extremely hard, in one sense, it is extremely easy, in another, since there is nothing I have to do.

It is why Jesus can say that his “yoke is easy.” A yoke is only easy when the young ox stops striving against and submits to the older and larger ox. There is, according to Jesus, rest to be found here to the extent that he calls all who are weary and all who are heavy laden to come.

Though it is hard, it is what makes us whole. It is in giving up our efforts for pleasure where we find genuine pleasure.

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