Archive for March 12th, 2009
Discourse on Bertrand Russell’s, “Why I am not a Christian”
Thursday, March 12th, 2009I started reading Bertrand Russell’s book, “Why I am Not a Christian” It seems a strange book for a pastor to read, but then I want to understand why he, and by extension, others of similar intelligence and bent are not Christians.
I should first note that it is a dangerous thing to read materials that may cause one to question their faith or identity in Christ. I read it because I have already questioned and found my answer. I now simply wish to understand better the arguments that others may find.
I’m going to take notes and note agreements and exceptions here…
In the first page of the book Russell defines what he means by the word Christian. He describes it as a word with a very loose definition in today’s day and age. “Some people mean no more by it that a person who attempts to live a good life.” He goes on to note that if that were the meaning of the word, then there would be “Christians” in every sect of religion, Buddhist Confucians, Mohammedans, etc. There are people in all walks of life trying to live a “good life”
He says, “I think you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. the word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times to St. Augustine and ST. Thomas Aquinas.. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.”
Then he goes on to as What is a Christian? Before I look at Russell’s answer to what is a Christian, let’s examine his idea of the word Christian first.
I have to agree, at least in greater part, that in the current day, the word has little meaning compared to the early centuries. In the third century AD to be called a Christian was to be accused of treason against the empire. To call yourself Christian was tantamount to signing your confession of treason, and was enough for the Romans to seize your family and property and sentence you to death. By the time the fourth century came around and Christians were growing in number not dying out, the empire realized that they should embrace Christianity as a state religion. Constantine was converted to Christianity, and declared that all of Rome was now Christian. this is the first place we see the word used as a class descriptor, not defining the core beliefs of a group, but the outward religious conformance.
True in the days of Augustine, and then Thomas Aquinas, there were creeds, and credos defining what it meant to be Christian, trying to separate out the depths of meaning from the outer political definition.
Today the term Christian is moving more and more back toward the derogatory meaning it had before Constantine.
Russel goes on to ask “What is a Christian?”
He states that today there are at least two essential points to define a Christian, “The first is one of a dogmatic nature – namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not thin that you can properly call yourself a Christian. The, further than that, as the name, you must have some kind of belief in Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men.”
There is a point of contention. Yes, I believe that you have to believe in God and immortality, of the soul, but I believe that you must believe that Christ was divine. For the best and wisest of men is little more than the worse and most foolish of men. As an aside let us consider the view of a forest form 30,000 to 40,000 feet in the air. While you may be able to distinguish a very few individual trees, you can not tell for certain which trees are very tall and which are very short. even if one is only 20 feet tall and the next is 200. From six or seven miles in the air one can not distinguish the difference. I surmise, that while God did come and live among us, that when there is judgment, as there must be for Christianity to be real, then from the height of that judgment our best and our worst (man kinds best and worst) are not so different.
Russell goes on to explain that in former times to be Christian also required that you believe in Hell. Now to the meat of that statement, “In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religions settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.” (Obviously Russell was British) The tone of this sentence is almost tongue-in-cheek, and yet he bases a large portion of his premise on this very questionable determination. A Christian believes in Hell, because of their “dogmatic” belief in God and the deity of Christ. Christ states that there is a hell where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. As a result Christians must also believe in a literal Hell. In case Russell doesn’t’ come back to this point, let us discuss the literal Hell that a Christian believes in. I freely admit I am extending my belief of Hell and it may or may not stand up to the definitions laid out in church history.
First of all, Hell is real. Is it a literal place? Is Heaven a literal place? In the fact that heaven is in a spiritual realms that the physical realm is not privy to, then yes it’s a physical place. Hell is also in the spiritual realm. I stated above that Hell is not a place of punishment, that was incorrect, hell was set aside as a place of eternal punishment for the angels that fell from Grace. In that regard Hell is a place of punishment, it was never intended to be a punishment for the eternal soul of man. Now, let us examine this further. If you believe that God created mankind, then you will also believe that God created man to be with God. Since the fall of man where Adam and Eve took the knowledge of good and evil over the knowledge of God, we as a species have been separated from God. That is our punishment, the human soul is not intended to live outside of God, and as a result, the soul of non-believers is dead. it can not live outside of God. Man is so used to this that they hold to the bipartite nature of man as laid out by Plato and other Greek philosophers. All we see is the shadow of what is real, but to us the shadows are the only reality. Does the fact that all we have ever seen are the shadows mean that the reality which casts the shadows is any less real? But that is a different discussion for a different time.
For purposes of our discussion here we can take the stance that mankind was created to be with God and by act of sin mankind chose to be separate from God. As a result we are now susceptible to spending an eternity without that very thing which we were made to be part of. To be separate from God for all eternity, as such we will be in a hell of our making simply because we are separate form the light, from the creator, from the one who IS. The punishment of hell isn’t a punishment meant to change us, as hell is not intended for us at all, it’s a holding place for the fallen angels, and it’s a place of eternal separation, keeping us at length from God because we chose in life not to believe in Him and Christ who was and is Him and was sent by Him.
