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Christianity

What is the Story?

The world is in a mess, people are suffering, and there are forces at work which are making things worse, but God is actively involved - mainly through partnership with people - in making things better; eventually there will be a society of love, justice and freedom, which is open to anyone who wants to live in such a society.  Building this society (sometimes called 'the Kingdom of God') is a difficult and costly activity, but ultimately it is the only thing worth doing, and everything we do either works towards that end or is ultimately worthless.

What is the Evidence?

Jesus and the early Christians were very concerned about reason, evidence and sound argument.  The early Church constantly reasoned with people and argued for the truth of their message on the basis of the evidence their listeners were familiar with.  Nowhere in the New Testament is there any mention of 'blind faith' or any suggestion that this might be a good thing.

Jesus and the early Christians pointed to various things as evidence of the truth of this message.

• The Old Testament.  Much of the Old Testament points towards a future fulfillment of God's promises and the desires of His people; this is what they were looking forward to, even if they did not know or understand it at the time.
• A New Reality.  While Jesus' ministry sprang out of the Jewish faith and culture, it was radically different - both from the Judaism of His day and from every other religion and philosophy of His time.  Jesus taught universal brotherhood (we are all God's children), welcomed the poor and despised, treated women as equals (in Christ there is neither male nor female), enjoyed living (went to parties, and was accused of being a 'winebiber'), refused to place boundaries on God's love, and rejected violence and power as ways of building God's Kingdom.  This was an announcement and demonstration of a completely new way of being human, open and accessible to everybody
• Teaching and Miracles.  These went hand-in-hand: the miracles (seen as the activity of God through the Holy Spirit) confirmed and illustrated the content of the teaching; all the miracles were teaching the people involved about the character of the God who was being seen to act.
• The Resurrection.  The cross and resurrection of Jesus has many meanings; one important meaning is that God confirmed that he was present in Jesus' ministry, that the things Jesus taught about Him were true and could be relied upon.

The documents of the New Testament contain these strands of evidence and reasoning, along with eyewitness accounts of some of the events.  Since the New Testament was completed, the nature of the evidence has changed - the eyewitness testimony is no longer available.  If we take the New Testament documents at face value (so not claiming that they are entirely without error, but that they are essentially what they claim to be, mainly accounts of various events and letters to people and churches) then a few points are clear.

• The Christian church started because a bunch of people became convinced that Jesus, the Rabbi they had known and followed for around three years, who had been executed in public, had been resurrected and was alive again.  They were so convinced of this event that they spent the rest of their lives telling people about it, and about His life and message, many of them eventually dying horrible deaths because they refused to deny this truth.
• The message they preached (about Jesus and the Kingdom of God), demonstrated to be essentially true by the death and resurrection of Jesus, and further evidenced by the activity of the Holy Spirit in their lives, then transformed the lives of the next generation of those who became convinced of its truth.  The Holy Spirit then transformed their lives, and this was seen as further evidence that the message was true.

The existence of the Church is a historic fact which nobody denies.  The New Testament documents, and the documents written by the following generations of people who followed Jesus, now called 'Christians', are historically reliable texts: we have many copies, dated close to the time they were originally written.  If anyone wants to maintain that these documents provide a fundamentally false account of the start of the Church, they need to provide an alternative plausible explanation.  Many have tried.

What are the Objections?

There are a few big objections frequently raised.  There are (Christians believe) adequate answers to all of them.

• Scripture.  The Bible cannot be trusted: it is contradictory and unreliable as history.
• Suffering.  The existence of suffering proves that God is not good, not powerful, or not there.
• Science.  Modern science provides us with the answers we need: we don't need religion any more.
• Salvation.  Other religions tell us to be nice to each other: there is nothing unique in Christianity.