all our reasons

There is a lot of money poured into apologetics. We speak as though it matters. Funny how far we've come: a few hundred years ago "the church" spent all its time denying the validity of reason as opposed to faith. All were supposed to believe things based on the authority of the church, or the authority of Scripture.

And we find ourselves now in a setting where the authority of the church has been sufficiently crushed, and now we find the masses of evangelical Christianity attempting to shore up the shoddy foundation of Scriptural authority. We offer our apologies.

To do so we have thus found an awkward alliance between Christians and Enlightenment rationality. We haven't gotten very far trying to win arguments by appeals to blind faith, so now we have started buying up stock in the rationality department. After centuries of persecuting rationalists in universities . . we now bemoan our underdog status as professors lose jobs for squeamishly giving favor to intelligent design. Meanwhile forgetting that in centuries past it was the professors losing their heads (literally) for following the course of Enlightened thinking. Christendom whines that turn-about ceased to be fair play when we lost our power and privilege.

Nonetheless Lee Stroble turns out a new best-seller every year trying to convince us that we have no reason to doubt . . . that we are just as in the right as we have ever been. Should everyone else come around to our rationality maybe we could reinstate the Inquisition in a few years. Lord knows the neo-crusades are going on as splendid as crusades ever go.

So, we try to jockey for spots on the board of directors for the rationality project. While in the meantime, we try to deny admission of other faiths. After all, Christianity has been around long enough to seal up that discussion . . . obviously we are the only ones who have ever connected with God. Everyone else who appeals to their own faith in God must be way off, and if I need prove it allow me to pull out any of my vitriolic apologetics books.

Christendom's circular formula: to win a debate between faiths, appeal to reason. To win a debate between various rationalities, boil it down and then call it a leap of faith. Superiority is achieved.

The problem in my mind is that the world ceased caring about our dualistic thinking a long time ago.
We say Jesus was born of a virgin. But, so was Caesar . . . so therefore God has as many misses as hits in the parenting department.
Jesus raised from the dead . . . well, that's far from being a unique story in antiquity.
Jesus was sinless, perfect, etc. Which is why he looks so utterly inhuman in every theatric account of him I've ever seen.

These are a few of the concepts that come to mind when I say that the issue with Jesus has ceased to be historicity . . . but rather meaning. Apologetics may shore up shoddy foundations, but they don't manage to do a damn thing for those who have ceased to care about apologies. I ceased believing in the virgin birth as a historical fact a long time ago . . . so my question is, if we start from there can you tell me that it still has any meaning??? I think that applies across the board when we read our Bibles. People will choose to believe or not believe based on their experience of the world and their attitude toward truth, BUT the question isn't do I believe that the stories happened, but rather do I believe they carry any meaning into my context.

We can pour through history books and find all manner of strange and obscure facts, but the question remains do they mean anything.

We have to also remember that this is a question that always continues from generation to generation. All of us ask it regardless of the answers others have found, for us it is new and pertinent. There is no formula to answer the question of meaning. No one can simply point the way to it. Meaning is illusive and the possibility of finding only a void remains significant for all of us.

If God acted 2000 years ago or 2 weeks ago, but ceases to act, to be present, to be real from this point forward then all the apologies of our past are worthless. All the arguments for intelligent design are superficial if this same Designer has ceased to play a major role in the mundane events of our daily lives. AND, perhaps more important is that all the facts against an intelligent design also amount to nothing should we experience the meaning of such stories in spite of the doubts we may have.

The point is that for the individual believer, what is crucial is not the rational OR the irrational appeal, but the existential experience of meaning. We can amass volumes of reasons which reach to the sky, and the likelihood is that meaninglessness will continue to prevail across our society. People will parrot their "belief", but their lives and attitudes will continue to reflect the worthlessness that continually haunts them.