MysteriousFaith

Why Do Spiritual People Object to Christianity?

If Christians are serious about sharing their faith with others, they must be willing to address the most thorny of issues. Perhaps no more difficult set of issues revolves around questions of the character of God, the reason for existence, and the complexities of religion across time and history. Richard Harries has the courage to analyze these difficult issues in his book, God Outside the Box.

Book Review - God Outside the Box: Why Spiritual People Object to Christianity by Richard Harries

Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, asks the question of “why do spiritual people object to Christianity?” What a provocative question! Answering such a question requires an author willing to write at the level of those who find themselves within this category - spiritual, but un-interested in Christianity. If Christianity is to make itself attractive again to such people, it must begin to recognize that people can be good, sincere, honest, and spiritual, outside of a communal Christianity.

If we view God as being involved in the lives of all people, regardless of their interest in Him, we begin to catch a glimpse of God pursuing us, finding us, searching for us. Within this search is the desire of Him to know us, and for us to know the ultimate joy, contentment and value a life of grace, love and mercy provides. It is within such a living knowledge that the identification of salvation should be more fixated - less on a decision and more on a maturing journey, a progression of seeking truth and finding it. This process of getting older and more mature is a journey - it is something that happens day by day, moment by moment - it is constant, it is inevitable, and it is a process.

For many, myself included, our own spiritual journey progresses towards a point where we initially recognize that God must exist. We may then begin to seriously dwell on what it means to be a creature, and accept that we are obligated to a Creator outside of our reality. This introspection then takes our sight from being purely inward to outward and upward, where we accept that our odyssey is a spiritual one, and that we are two steps into our own spiritual journey. It is the next step that for many, once again certainly for me, it becomes easy to leave the journey. This step is the step of accepting Christianity.

To accept Christianity I had to set aside a set of very bad experiences with legalistic, highly sectarian Christians who had left me damaged goods with respect to anything remotely associated to Christianity. For you perhaps it is dealing with an oppressive father, or a grandmother who raised you in a religious environment that was un-necessarily mean spirited and controlling. At this point in my own spiritual journey, had you asked me to accept God and to accept Christianity as I then knew it, I would have chosen to leave my pursuit of God and make life out as best as I was capable of doing on my own. If having a relationship with God meant being a Christian, I had no interest in such a situation.

My objections to Christianity were ultimately resolved - I was blessed to meet Christians who shattered the myths of what I thought it meant to be Christian. I discovered writers who had similar up-bringing and who had also lost their faith, only to find God again. I became increasingly confident that what I had explored was only minimally Christianity - it was more appropriately an authoritarian environment that an overly literal Bible interpretation enabled. I discovered the personality, teaching, and life of Jesus for myself, without any systemized theological baggage. He was mine, and I became His.

It is into the lives of people such as myself that Richard Harries introduces his book, God Outside the Box: Why Spiritual People Object to Christianity. As a bishop in England, he has come to see a set of issues commonly presented to him by people who object to a life of faith within the community of Christianity. They do not deny the need and authentic quest of the soul for genuine spirituality, but they do deny that Christianity is the best means by which to accomplish this.

Harries’ book covers all of the following topics, each related to why spiritual people object to Christianity:

• The Despot God
• The Male Boss
• Eternal Punishment
• The Oddness of Praise
• Why Did It All Begin?
• Does God Have Favorites?
• What About Good People Who Are Not Christians?
• Why the Cruelty and Horror in Nature?
• Religion Is Stuck in the Past
• Religion Is Divisive
• Religion Keeps People Immature
• Life Today Is Just Too Good For Religion
• Christianity Is Anti-Life
• Christianity Bangs On About Guilt and Sin
• Christians Eat God
• Christianity Is Just for Wimps

Of these topics, I resonated most with the questions of eternal punishment (the teaching of Hell, Why Did It All Begin, Religion is Stuck in the Past, Religion is Divisive, and Christianity Bangs On About Guilt and Sin.

I loved his chapter “On Not Talking Too Much.” This is a topic more pastors, theologians, and lay-Christians should be more adamant about: that there is much we do not know, understood, that is at best veiled mystery! Harries quotes Dionysius at length:

“Indeed the inscrutable one is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by not intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore itself transcending existence, it alone could give an authoritative account of what it really is.” (page 146)

We have too many systemized theologies that, when taken to logical conclusions, become either heresies, or inconsistent with other parts of revealed Scripture. Rather than live with tension, Christians attempt to wrap up everything in a nice, neat container - easy answers for hard questions. This is a sign of weakness and something that people who are not a part of the Christian community rebel against. From time to time I will review an atheist work or website and am struck by the number of times they rightfully rebel against Christians who trivialize complicated arguments.

Harries addresses nicely what it means for a Christian to live rightly by faith, but to be content that faith does not require answers to every question (otherwise it would not be faith): “…if Christians have a confidence about their faith, it will be a confidence that has a particular quality about it, not dogmatism but a quiet conviction that can coexist with a full apprehension of all the arguments against the maintained position.” (page 147).
The study of essential doctrine and core theology is critically important, but it is not necessary to understand the Trinity or to be able to explain the historicity of Christ’s resurrection in order to be spiritual. We can all be thankful that people exist who study and know the answers to these important questions; however, theology can sometimes also mask the more simplistic, core life-changing parts of Christianity. Would apologetics be as necessary if Christians were to be more Christ-like? What constitutes an effective apologetic? A full grasp of thorny theological issues, or a simple and straight-forward love of the world? Where theology is necessary, it often exists to respond to heresies that deny something Christians hold as essential to the nature of God. Hilary of Poiters is quoted by Harries at length with respect to this issue:

“The errors of heretics and blasphemers force us to deal with unlawful matters, to scale perilous heights, to speak unutterable words, to trespass on forbidden ground. Faith ought in silence to fulfill the commandments, worshipping the Father, reverencing with him the Son, abounding in the Holy Spirit … The error of others compels us to err in daring to embody in human terms truths which ought to be hidden in the silent veneration of the heart.”

To me, no more profound thought was expressed in Harries’ book than the following: “What the Church needs is people who believe in shutting up; that God is not a talking God; that we do not have the word of God, we have the silence of God. That’s all there is, and that’s what makes us tick; that’s what we want to bring others into. The purpose of Christian talk is to get us to stop talking.” (page 150)

previous post: A Disagreement Among Friends: A Review of Dispensational Theology
next post: March 2004 Bookshelf

• Posted in Book Reviews
• no comments
• Trackback
• April 9, 2004

• Bookmark on del.icio.us
• Bookmark on Digg

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website