{Essay} In Defense of Christian Logic

When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going—provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

1.
The Bright Church is an impressive church; among the more impressive ones I have seen in my short time in Singapore. It is located in a converted community auditorium: plush, immovable cinema-seats for the congregation and hard acoustics up-front, soft carpeting as you’re making your way to your spot and lots of warm yellow lights all over the hall. There’s an iMac at the back, in the tech booth, controlling the duo visual-projectors on both sides of the auditorium, and as you enter from the left entrance during service you’ll see the screen’s soft purple glow spilling over the acoustic controls and reflected off the glasses of the resident tech. The Bright Church is dedicated to quality, is dedicated to showmanship, and all this work and money shows in their weekly service.

The Bright Church is, of course, not this church’s real name. The church itself does exist, and it does indeed do good work for the community in which it serves. But because I do not have very nice things to say about it in this essay I am keeping its name a secret: and just as well, for the Bright Church represents all that is shiny and loud in today’s Christianity. It represents the modern church, home to the young and impressionable; modern in the sense that is the kind of church where you get rock music and Tongues and lessons on the Supernatural. You will find this church wherever you are, in any denomination, in any city in the world, if you’re willing to look hard enough. The Bright Church is popular and pervasive because it is a hip version of the church designed to net and save the modern Christian. And it is fairly successful at doing just this.

The sermon this evening is by one Pastor Mark. He is a youth pastor, and this is a youth service on a Saturday night. He goes on stage to talk about healing. He shows us a scene from Finding Nemo, where Dory and Marlin are diving into a trench to find a pair of goggles they had lost. The water slowly turns dark around them, and soon we can only hear their voices on a black screen.

“Ever tried going into the unknown?” Pastor says. “It is scary, like swimming into the dark.” He then tells us that he is going to talk about healing, and how much it was like going into unknown territory for him, because he did not believe in it.

The Bright Church is pretty big on healing. They believe that if you pray to God, God would ‘surely heal you’. The only thing that will prevent healing from happening, they say, are the negative thoughts that the Devil plants in your head, and so they preface each healing session with prayers to God, asking Him to remove all the doubts from the prayed-for Christian’s brain.

Pastor Mark tells us that he had struggled with the idea when it was first introduced to him, in the Bright Church. "Doubt," he said, "is very dangerous. It is usually the result of logic." He goes on to say that he was later convinced of God’s supernatural healing, and that he told the Lord: "I told God, I'm not satisfied. I want to see at least one amazing healing, a healing that is impossible. I am still waiting, but I am sure God will let me see it. If God is a healer then definitely He will heal!" He ends his sermon with: "I want you to know that our God is not a God of just logic, he is a God of miracles and signs. And we should believe in a God like this. Do not use logic, for logic brings doubt; instead - believe in Him, and He will let you see amazing things."

I want to talk about that last sentence, that conclusion Pastor Mark makes about the Christian faith. All around me are accepting young faces nodding in the soft yellow down-lights of the Bright Church’s auditorium, and I worry for them. I am not concerned with whether or not you believe in Christian healing. I am concerned only with what you think of logic, and by extension doubt, and why the former no longer seems present in the Bright Churches of today. This is important to me because as I am sitting here, in this plush auditorium seat, listening to Pastor Mark and making notes in the margins of my notebook, I find myself looking back on my Christian life and finding in it - every last part of it - a direct contradiction to the good Pastor’s blind, illogical faith. It may be important to you because too little Christians are using their brains lately, and too little Churches encourage it. More and more of us are practicing a form of Christianity with much zeal and little knowledge, and while this doesn’t seem like much of a problem, so long as you are saved, the idea that Christianity is good like this begins to crack and fissure when you look at the Bright Churches of today, the generation of young Christians they are creating between them, and the way these Christians are living their lives in a world that watches them closely.

Let me begin with an anecdote.

2.
A classmate of mine, a non-believer, wrote recently of one such Christian experience. She was at a Christmas party with her boyfriend, who was a member of the church, when a Christian couple approached them. “I hated the feeling of being singled out,” she said, “let them say what they have to say and maybe they’ll let me go unscathed.”

The guy opened by asking her if she knew the bible well. Thinking that he meant every verse of the bible, my classmate said that she did not. How offensive is it if a non-christian like me claimed to know the bible well anyway? she thought. And so the guy began on a long-winded story of what the Bible said, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with a short illustration of how Christians go to Heaven and attain eternal life, and how everyone else (her especially) would eventually go to Hell.

“So do you believe in Jesus Christ?” he asked.

“No.” My classmate said, annoyed that he was shoving Hell in her face.

The guy was stunned. And it was then that he decided to try a different approach, one that was both at once more horrible and very frightening, and typified this zeal and little knowledge so encouraged by the Bright Churches of the world:

… basically, he wanted a friend to come to the Good Friday party but his friend's travel plans clashed with the party so he couldn't come. So he prayed that his friend's travel plans would change. And it did! Their friend got a severe asthma attack and had to terminate his vacation early, and hence was able to make it for the party.

I was honestly traumatized by this story. The fact that this twisted story was supposed to convince me to believe in their all-loving God was especially chilling.

But his wife explains "We're sad that he got sick, but to us it further reaffirms our beliefs that our God is real and is a God who answers our prayers."

Things pretty much went downhill from there. It is a given that this was the wrong thing to say to anyone - regardless of whether it’s a believer you’re talking to, or a non-believer. But it’s the replies to the other elements of Christianity that I find most revealing:

“I have a question”, my friend said, “How is it fair that Christians get to go to Heaven whilst everyone else goes to Hell? What about those people who never got to know about God at all? Do they deserve to go to Hell for something they never had a choice in?”

His wife replied for him: “If so, God will judge accordingly to what the person has done in their lifetime. So possibly people who have not known God but has done good in their lifetime will go to some place in between.”

“But they will never get to go Heaven right? How is this fair since they never had a chance to?”

“Oh,” She replied, “Judgement Day will only come when the Bible has spread worldwide.”

This believer's well-intentioned words reflect a Christianity that has no thought to it, a Christianity that is simple, and easy. (Christianity is neither). There is very little that is biblical to the answers that my classmate received, and for good reason: their words are the result of a modern Christian trend to disregard logic (simply because 'logic leads to doubt'); a Christian trend that is more than happy to feed congregations on diets of healing and loud songs and charismata, and very little reasoned Christian theology. As one character in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood says, mockingly: "If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet" and sweet is precisely what this trend seeks to do. Why get bogged down in deep-thinking about the Word, in learning about faith, when you can have the sweet fulfillment of emotion in the mountain-top experience?

The answer today is that you don’t have to. The historian Mark Noll concluded, in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." And this is true. There is little reason in the Bright Churches of today. We do not encourage it. This makes sense, somewhat: it is not attractive to do so. The Bright Churches teach of validation by Spirit (or validation by experience) on the one hand - which is exciting - and watered-down theology on the other. You may have heard people sharing all kinds of things from the Book, often by using stories with absolutely no relation to the message at hand; I once sat through a sermon where the preacher talked about Moses and the burning bush, and how the burning bush represented the fire that should be burning within all Christians; how God wants us to burn like that.

3.
I am a Christian - an Anglican - and I have been one for my entire life. In the period that I have been Christian, I have doubted my faith more times than I care to admit, or even to count. All Christians doubt their faith. It is how you deal with that doubt that matters.

When I was 14 I discovered the Charismatic movement. I was invited to a rally organized by a church of the denomination, and I fell head over heels for it. It was amazing. At that age, when I had first begun to doubt my faith, I found solace in the 'Spirit' - in the mountain-top experiences, the emotional highs (induced by music); in the camps and the churches where the worship was better and the rallies more exhilarating and the selection of young Christians infinitely more fun and vivacious than in my own church. It was an emotional experience, and I thought that feeling those feelings meant that I was growing closer to God. And for a while, all was good.

By 16 I believed that I needed to attend church camp at least twice a year, for my 'spiritual growth'. I literally needed it. I did not know what spiritual growth meant, I vaguely connected it to that feeling I got when I attended church events. This began to be a problem, because I soon realized that no matter how many highs I got from concerts and camps, no matter how many soul-touching, skin tingling ‘spirit encounters’ I had, the emotional conviction I had to ‘change my life’ usually wore off before the next week had gone by.

At age 17 I was a liberal thinker, a Christian in name but not in thought, a believer that did not in any way subscribe to the Christian worldview of things, but paid lip-service to it. Christianity to me was a loose set of moral codes, designed to keep me in line, and while I obeyed them casually I didn’t pay much attention to it: I just did enough to make me feel good about myself. And this was, to me, perfectly logical: it seemed that Christianity as a way of life was disgustingly close-minded, especially when put side-by-side to the liberating open-mindedness of the modern world. Why should I insist that my God is right, and your God isn't, when we can all just get along without stepping on each others' toes?

Time passed, and I turned 18, and then something changed the way I thought about Christianity. At age 18 I found the answer to that particular question. At 18 - 18 years after I first became Christian - I discovered the answer to everything I had possibly thought to ask of Christianity, and I found it in a book - a book! - of all things. I cannot today say that I do not believe in the acts of the Holy Spirit, for I discovered this answer through a curious series of events that led both me and Paul, one of my closest friends - to the heart of our faith. But here is the thing: I didn’t discover this answer through just believing. Christianity, at its core, is built around an incredible, radical idea - an idea that either has to be the absolute truth, the only truth; or a lie created by a person of terrifying intelligence - the devil, perhaps. All of Christianity that we know: our understanding of God; Christian morality; lessons on heaven and hell; the nature of man, is built around this singular, wonderful idea. Christianity is no different from any other religion on the planet if it is taken without it. And this idea is not a simple one. You cannot just fall onto it, with blind belief. You can be led to it, by the Holy Spirit; you can discover it, through a period of searching ... but you cannot, under any circumstance, get Christianity without first using your brain somewhere along the way.

4.
And here we find ourselves with several objections. Two spring to mind immediately. First, you may disagree with me that Christianity is neither simple, nor easy. Simple is beautiful. Shouldn’t the truth be simple?

I do suppose that it's reasonable to say that the best truths are simple, and that simplicity is elegance, etc. It is the mathematicians after all who say that "the math is beautiful!" when they have a simple solution in front of them. But let us not indulge in such idealistic notions: the world is not simple. It never has been. Mathematics is an abstraction of a complex world, and when a mathematician says something is beautiful what he really means is that he has found some elegant logic in his abstraction of the universe. Real things are more often than not unsimple and complicated: the model of an atom, for instance, is nothing at all like the diagrams you see in school textbooks and the like. It can only be truly expressed as a mathematical equation. But there is more to it than that. Reality is often not just unsimple, it is also weird. Could any of us, when we were younger, have discovered the human mechanism for creating a new human being on our own, without being told? I believe in Christianity partly because it has just that scent of strangeness about it, one that makes it feel real - like something that no man could've come up on his own had you given him enough time to think about it. And this is precisely why it takes a certain amount of thinking to Christianity (or rather, Christianity will demand a certain amount of thinking from you), because it is a nuanced, wonderful, real thing, one that does not bear watering-down in any way.

The second objection you may have with me is this: what need is there for Theology? Why should you complicate matters and say that Christians today must learn to think, must allow their religion to teach them to think? Is a blind faith not better?

Now I must concede that in the past a blind faith was very much possible, because people led simple lives. But a blind faith today holds no ground. Not in a thinking, educated world. I have just shown you one example of what happens when a non-thinking Christian attempts to explain Christianity (itself a nuanced, complicated thing) to a thinking non-believer. And that is one problem. But here is another, and this is the bigger one: if you do not hold to Christian theology (the study and understanding of our faith), then you would most certainly have gotten hold of some theology or another. A simple way to test it is this: if someone comes up to you, and says that Christianity is a close-minded mistake, and then tells you that pluralism is so much better (why insist one religion is correct, when you can have many all teaching good things?) and you cannot give a satisfactory answer ... then you may have to do some thinking about your faith. There is a veritable marketplace of ideas out there today and if you cannot understand where your worldview stands in that marketplace, how it holds up, against the other ideas ... then you are in for a rather large spot of trouble. You cannot not think today, and you will always hold some kind of standard to which you live your life to. If it is not Christianity, then it would almost certainly be something else. Sometimes that 'something else' is compatible with the faith. Other times it feels right but it isn't; theology is how you tell the difference.

This is related somewhat to false teachings and mistaken churches: we all know that there are many of them out there. There always has been, even in the time of the apostles. Most of them, I have found, are so subtle, are so nuanced, that the problems with their doctrines aren’t obvious to even the mature Christian. Take the prosperity gospel, for instance: how are you to argue against the overabundant love of God? How are you to argue against the compelling ‘grace message’ (as if grace has not been a part of the Christian message since the Apostles), that leaves out certain subtle nuances of grace that are important to the understanding of other, less-exciting parts of Christian belief - Christian morality, for instance. I am not interested in calling out these teachings one by one - there are many others who are more experienced and more driven than I am. I am merely asking for Christians to start using their heads. Their faith would be a better thing for it.

5.
But perhaps I have not been convincing enough. How is an unthinking faith bad, really? To understand this, you would first need to understand that there is, in Christianity as in life, more than just simple good and bad. C.S. Lewis describes it like this: "… so many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive."

(This is also, by the way, why Christians believe that sex before marriage is bad: what they really mean is that sex is good, but the exclusivity of sex with your spouse is infinitely more beautiful and sacred and secure and is therefore better. And it is because casual sex would deny you this experience that Christianity teaches to only have sex within marriage. A more plebeian explanation is that when you have sex with someone, you are giving a precious part of yourself away. Like pasting a piece of paper to another piece of paper. If you do not do this within the Christian covenant of marriage (where the assumption is that you will not separate); when you break up, you would have to tear these two pieces of paper apart, and in so doing leave a part of yourself with the other person - a person whom you do not love nor would care for in the grand scale of things. In this way, you are hurting yourself over and over, in ways that you won't begin to understand.)

But enough with the digression. Why is a blind faith bad? An unthinking faith - in today's sense of the word - is not bad because it is unChristian. Faith - any faith, is certainly better than none. But a faith that is centered on a rich understanding of God, a faith that is moved not by 'pastor told me so' or by 'we do this because we should do this' but instead through the daily miracle of grace, through this nuanced, complicated idea at the heart of Christianity, is infinitely better than an unthinking, non-understanding faith. And that is why the blind faith is bad. It is bad because a faith like this robs people of something much, much better; something that God intended all Christians to have: a more complete vision of God in the Christian life.

Another way to think of it is like this: the more you look at Christianity the more you will find that all of Christian action (and thought) is fueled by gratitude. Not by a fear of Hell, nor by some surface feeling of love, but by gratitude to Christ. And this is strange. It is perfectly possible to fear without reason. It is also possible for two people to fall in love without any idea about why they are attracted to each other. But it is simply impossible for a man to have gratitude to another man without first understanding what that other man has done for him. And so it is with Christianity. If you do not understand what God has done, in all its nuances, then you are not expressing your faith in a way that it was meant to be expressed.

Do not mistake this for an argument for mere intellectualism. It is not one. It is instead an argument for using your head in Christ, as with other things. Do not settle for just the loud music, for just the Tongues and the visualising exercises the modern church so loves to use. Christianity is more than that. Learn to find it.

6.
There is one last point that I would like to make on logic, if only for the sake of completeness. It is about this idea that it is dangerous to approach God with logic, that it is dangerous to mix belief and thought together. One of the reasons, I think, that Pastor Mark came up and warned against reason and doubt in Christianity was due to this belief that it is dangerous to bring logic into the Christian picture. It is as if, upon approaching the Christian religion with some thought, the whole edifice would crumble and collapse upon itself.

This is simply ridiculous.

I would like to make it a point of contention here that it is safe, no - in fact it is ideal, to approach our God with logic. The Bible tells us that it is so; it even shows us in nearly half of the New Testament … all the letters in the Epistles are, after all, well-constructed arguments for Christ. But if the simple fact that the apostles themselves approached their God with logic and reason does not convince you, then perhaps this will:

Scripture tells us that we were all created in God’s image, and it bears to reason that our faculties for logic and thought ultimately come from Him as well. Man’s intelligence is a mere drop in the ocean of God’s logic, and it is simply ridiculous to think that we can out-argue God himself. C.S. Lewis provides us with a useful illustration: we cannot possibly attack God and succeed, because it would be as if we were sawing off the branch on which we were seated on. If, we do attack God and we do win, then it would mean that the very logic which we used against Him would unravel - like string on a fly-rod - because our tools for reason come from Him which we attack.

This leads me to a second point: that doubt is good for the Christian believer. I opened this essay with a quote from C.S.Lewis, one which illustrated just this truth, but I should stop here to note that I am talking about a very specific kind of doubt. There are two kinds. The first is the kind where, when you are given all the evidence for God, you still reject it outright - in this manner you are doubting Him, and the Bible condemns this kind of doubt. The other kind is much like what a scientist feels when he is performing an experiment. He does not doubt his results, but he questions how they came to be, and this causes him to begin searching for the correct answer. It is this second doubt that I am talking about when I say that doubt is good for the Christian believer, because it is the kind of doubt that would lead to thinking about the Christian faith. As theologian Clark Pinnock writes: ‘It strives at laying the evidence for the Christian gospel before men in an intelligent fashion, so that they can make a meaningful commitment under the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. The heart cannot delight in what the mind rejects as false’ (emphasis added). And this is true: until you find something your mind accepts as wonderful and real, your faith cannot fully grasp the realities of the Christian religion.

Practically, this means that you should ask all the difficult questions that the Bright Church doesn’t want you to ask. Do not expect them to have the answers. Do not expect me to. But if you ask enough, and you pray enough, I am convinced that the spirit of God will lead you to the right places, to find those answers that matter most to you. Do not think that this means easy deliveries, passed down from heaven and into your head. You may find it in weird places - in a sermon you chanced across, in a book you find lying on your aunt’s shelf. Not everything has to be flashy to be considered an act of God. And I am convinced that this will be true for you as it is for me, for it has worked for me, unfailingly so far, and I am certain that it would continue to do so.

I would like to close by pointing out to you that all the great Christian thinkers in the history of the faith have always been non-Christians to begin with. They doubted more than I have ever doubted, and this strove them to find truths I have yet to discover. The Apostle Paul was a brilliant Pharisee before his conversion, Saint Augustine was a pagan intellectual, C.S. Lewis a convicted atheist who argued most aggressively against all faiths, before he finally gave in into becoming what he calls ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in All-England’. For it is true what he says: look for truth and you may find comfort; look for comfort and it is certain that you would not find both.