Them

One of my frustrations with the blogosphere, and contemporary American culture at large, is that it is not well suited to topics that take more than 500 words to cover. Communication must adapt, however, and in every system, there is a solution. In today’s media, it is called “To be continued…”

Over the next few posts I will be dealing with some larger issues that I have refrained from addressing due to my inability to express myself succinctly on certain topics. Hopefully, these multi-part posts will provide the proper venue for dealing with these issues. They might also be dramatically dull, but they are immensely fascinating to me. Hopefully they will be worthwhile to some degree.

I recently had a long, long conversation with a friend of mine about the utility, purpose and worth of the Gospel, particularly as it relates to the confusing world we live in. I stated that I believed the Gospel to be the only hope for mankind; a strong claim in a pluralistic world where we find increasing incompatibilities and mutual incomprehensibilities across the broad spectrum of religious, ethnic and cultural divides.

My friend’s position, and a compelling one it is, questions whether the great weight of the innumerable failings of the church over the last two millennia crowd out the good it has done, and even draws into question its validity as an institution in the first place, let alone its ability to claim any sort of superiority over other systems of belief.

He is not alone in this opinion, of course. There are many who would agree with him asking what right the church has to claim any moral or ideological high ground. Crosby, Stills and Nash summed up the sentiment of this dissenting opinion well in the chorus of their song “Cathedral.”

“Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all.”

What argument is there to support the Gospel against these accusations? While there are many Christians who lack the capacity to explain or defend their beliefs at all, much of the remainder would attempt to defend of their faith through some kind of dissertation on the wonder of Salvation, the truth and importance of the Resurrection, attempt a comparative analysis of Christianity vis-a-vis other religious systems or get caught in the quagmire of attempting to defend the historicity of the Scriptures.

All of these defenses have value insomuch as they help explain the what of Christianity, but, salvation aside, they don’t go very far down the road of explaining why, which is the essential question in the first place. At least not the why our culture is asking. To explain that why, you have to find something that is unique, something that is intrinsically and uniquely valuable which is the sole purview of the Christian Faith.

This explanation mush be universal and translatable beyond the borders of cultures, nation-states, ethnicities and languages. It must be a hope that can live within any cultural context without destroying it. It must address to the essence of our humanity, rather than a particular expression of it. It must have a solution for the suffering and divisiveness that is now so visibly endemic in our world.

The reason I believe the Gospel is the one hope of the world is that I believe it holds just such a universal hope that addresses a universal need. I believe it is the only system of belief that doesn’t have a “them.”

To be continued...

Comments

[Terryll]

I'm feeling a book deal out of this one...