What Christianity Got Right

“All religions are essentially the same, right? I mean, they all believe in a higher power and they all urge us to behave morally.” 

There’s a name for this. It’s called syncretism, the belief that ‘all religions are compatible’. This way of thinking is well suited to today’s moral relativism and democratic anthropology. We want to build a tent so big that almost everyone…and everything…fits in.

To say that someone is wrong or that someone is more right than someone else goes against the modern grain, unless we’re talking about politics – in which case I am always right and everyone else is always flat out wrong, right?

From a Christian perspective, it is laudable to admire the spiritual practices of Eastern religions, the historicity of Judaism, and animism's respect for the natural world. But it is a great mistake not to recognize and appreciate the beliefs and practices that make Christianity different from all others.

Christianity, especially Catholicism, is unique among the world’s faiths. I do not wish to debate whether various Christian doctrines and rituals have congruence with other religions. I will assert, however, that taken together, these doctrines clearly make Christianity unique…in very important ways.

It is fashionable now to believe that all faith is superfluous. After all, science is close to giving us all the answers we need, isn’t it? And you certainly don’t need God to show you how to be ‘good’, do you? Sound familiar?

We live in an anti-clerical age; in many ways the Church has brought this on itself. Church has lost the courage of its convictions; it no longer knows how to talk about what it believes. Like a shy middle schooler, it is desperate to fit in…which only makes its isolation more pronounced.

In the Middle Ages, bishops sat next to nobles at the king’s banquet table. Oh, how the hierarchy hungers to regain such lost respect! But as any high school survivor knows, respect is won by having convictions and sticking to them, by standing up for yourself, and by living an authentic life, i.e. a life consistent with your professed beliefs.

For Christianity, I’m afraid that that ship has sailed! While specific congregations hold on tenaciously to certain doctrines, the Christian Weltanschauung (world view) has all but disappeared. Christianity cannot survive by tacking its counter cultural doctrines onto secular scaffolding. Christianity is the most radical ideology extant in the world today. By far, bar none! Own it! You can’t hide it. But just how radical is it? Let’s take a peek at some of its greatest hits:  

• Trinity – God is not some single minded despot. God is process and Trinity is the minimal structure necessary for process. (A > B > C > A)

  
  

• Logos – “In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came to be through the Word… In him was life and that life was the light…and darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1 – 5)

  
  

The order of the Universe is not the product of chance but a manifestation of God. God is order and order God.

• Incarnation – ‘Godmen’ abound, demiurges that combine aspects of divinity with aspects of humanity. Christ is different; Christ is “true God and true man,” wholly human and wholly divine. 

Christ is the superposition of two distinct states of being. Apparently, the Council of Nicaea was hip to Quantum logic long before Schoedinger. 

Incarnation turns the Universe inside out...like an old sock. God created, sustains, and redeems the spatiotemporal world; he is the Alpha (Father) and the Omega (Son) and the Spirit that infuses every moment in between. But this same God is also a quantum (one life) within that world. The whole is a part of itself.

• Transubstantiation – The material world of ‘substances and accidents (qualities)’ is real; it is not an illusion. But neither is it ultimate reality. Neither time and space, nor matter and energy, nor substance and accident are immutable. Bread and wine can…and do…become the Body and Blood of Christ (Eucharist). “Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine.” (Bob Dylan)

  
  

• The Great Commandment – Loving your neighbor as yourself is not just an ethical precept. It identifies the self with the other and with God. (Yet the crucial distinctions are not blurred.) Whatever you do for or to others, you do for or to God, and for or to yourself. Ethics is Trinitarian too. 

Every subject is its own object and every object its own subject. English verbs come in two voices: active and passive. Neither captures what is going on during an event. Expressing the Christian world view calls for a Middle Voice, a grammatical form that has disappeared from most Indo-European languages. 

How can we expect to sit at the cool kids’ table when we don’t even speak their language? 

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  Eternity – The spatiotemporal world is limited by space and time. It had a beginning and it will have an end. But whatever happens happens and cannot unhappen. To be is to be eternally. Being is eternal. Being is eternity.

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  Resurrection – We endure, not as ‘shades’ but as ‘glorified bodies’, wholly material, wholly spiritual. Christianity is not an Idealism (Hegel) but a Materialism (Marx). Death marks the end of our temporal lives, but it clears the deck for eternal life.

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  Apocalypse – “The last enemy to be destroyed is death…that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15: 25, 28) 

  
  

If these doctrines are true, they cannot exist as footnotes to contemporary, secular culture. To believe these things and then to live life as though they made no difference is madness. Christianity cannot exist as part of contemporary culture; it is an alternative to it. It is the antidote. We can’t do without it!

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