By James S. C. Baehr
January 27, 2005
Jesus preaches to the people in John, and they abandon him. He looks out upon the Twelve, and seems discouraged to ask: Will you leave me also?
We have nowhere else to go, they say. We have nowhere else to go.
It's hard to be a Christian. It's hard to believe Jesus when he speaks these hard words. It's hard to hold onto this faith with all of its paradoxical claims, with all of its supernatural mystery, with the problem of pain. People look at the tsunami and say they can't believe in a God who would allow that. These natural disasters do happen. It is hard.
It is hard to believe it and follow Him, but how much harder to abandon Him? How much harder to reject faith? How much harder to be a skeptic. The problems are different. We have the problem of explaining and accepting Jesus bodily resurrection. They have the problem of explaining where justice comes from, whether right and wrong have any real meaning, whether human life has any intrinsic value or was just the product of random chance and probability, whether love means more than just chemical reactions, whether religion is anything but a sociological invention created to control people. The philosophical challenges the skeptic faces are mind-boggling. They have led some of the greatest minds of all time to utter despair. Nietzche died in agony alone.
I think the truth, though then, is that the disciples were right when they realized: we have nowhere else to go.
Their contention, though, would only be true if the philosophical challenges of Christianity were lesser than those of skepticism. I believe they are. The greatest challenges of Christian faith lie rooted in its supernaturalism. There is no greater stumbling block to the unbeliever than the supernatural claims of the Bible. The acceptance of those impossibilities is absolutely essential, though, to an acceptance of the full faith.
I spent the last term in Oxford, doing a study program affiliated with Christian schools and universities in the US. As many of you know, the Oxbridge don CS Lewis is a great hero to intellectual evangelical Christians. Perhaps he is our greatest modern hero. He is that because he was both a keen rationalist and a solid supernaturalist. His personal story of ideological transformation from committed atheist to world-renowned Christian apologist means a lot to evangelicals who face the challenge of presenting their faith to an apathetic and agnostic age. Perhaps the story of his changed mind can shed light on the divide between faith and skepticism.
Lewis changed his mind in part because of a talk he had with JRR Tolkein and Hugo Dyson as they walked a park path outside of Magdalen College. Lewis and Tolkein were bound together by a shared love of myth. Lewis asked Tolkein, though, how he could believe the gospel account when it conformed to all sorts of pre-Christian myths. God coming down in the form of man. A god being killed by his followers. Gods coming back to life through resurrection. Tolkein said he believed the Gospel account precisely because it did conform to those pre-Christian myths. As Lewis scholar Lyle Dorsett quotes Tolkein as turning to Lewis,
"He said, 'Jack, don't you understand that people had a glimpse through their imaginations of the truth that was going to happen, and they tell stories about what they're longing for? And that it actually happened two thousand years ago? It's not just in somebody's mind. It's not just a story. It's a place in history. There was a man named Jesus, and plenty of literature that was non-Christian testified to this, and to much of what he was like. And so this is the myth that became real.'"
Tolkein has also been quoted as saying, "The wonder of the gospel is this: Jesus Christ is not one more story pointing to those great truths, but Jesus Christ is the truth to which all the great stories point."
Lewis soon became a believer in this true myth. Both he and Tolkein went on to make myths themselves, in the creation of two of the most popular literary worlds of the 20th Century: Middle Earth and Narnia. They were mythopoeic writers – ones who engaged in the process of myth-making.
I think Lewis found that he had no place else to go. He talked of being the most reluctant convert. I think he found the philosophical challenges of faithlessness too great to bear, though, and ultimately too purposeless and irrational for all their claims of logic.
In truth, the skeptical worldview is another myth, another story by which people come to order their world. Which is the more persuasive, more true myth? Maybe we could compare two myths and come to some clearer understanding.
As many know, CS Lewis Narnia series encapsulates spiritual values in a mythic form. The world of Narnia is one where forces of good and evil battle over epic plains. The human children who become protagonists in that story are led by a heroic Christological lion named Aslan. The stories are permeated by Christian faith and metaphor. They have been beloved bestsellers for many years. This past November, they stood at 91st bestselling books of all those listed on Amazon.
In the last decade, another Oxford writer decided to try his hand at a mythic series. Philip Pullman's created world has been widely lauded. He has been often called the "anti-Lewis." Pullman's series follows the path of several children caught up in similarly mythic quests. Pullman expresses his atheism in the series, and intended it to help spread that philosophy to a new generation. His skepticism expresses itself in the trilogy, which culminates with the children killing "God" – who really isn't a god, but a feeble and senile old being - and ending the tyranny of the "kingdom of heaven" – and the sadistic church that upholds it.
I think a reading of these two series would prove interesting to anyone interested in myth and truth. Lewis books were criticized by some of his closest friends, including Tolkein who didn't think they were well considered enough – he wrote them hastily and mixed literary elements freely. Pullman's books are fascinating, incorporating numerous innovations that make the stories hard to put down. From a literary standpoint, then, I think Pullman ends up with better written novels. But Lewis work is strongest when he uses it to encapsulate his fundamental philosophy – the words of his Aslan character are profoundly moving. Conversely, Pullman's trilogy proves weakest when it becomes a vehicle for his theological vision. When the children kill God, for example, the result is not clarity but more muddled confusion. His vision is ultimately unsatisfying.
I read a lot of poetry in Oxford and one poet I read was Geoffrey Hill. His poem, Genesis, intrigued me a lot. It's a recreation of the creation story. It includes this very intriguing line:
"By blood we live, the hot, the cold
To ravage and redeem the world
There is no bloodless myth will hold."
I'm not totally sure what Hill was getting at with his poem, but to me, the "bloodless myth" embodies the secular, skeptical vision. Ours is a gritty and bloody creation, though, like our earthy faith.
The skeptical myth cannot hold. The mechanistic naturalistic story does not satisfy. It may be able to explain chemical reactions well, but it fails to answer the deepest questions of the human spirit.
Jesus tells us hard truths and many abandon him.
"Will you leave me also?" he asks.
Do we have anywhere else to go?
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