Tag Archives: Christian Smith

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Gather and Embrace

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There are moments in our lives that have embossed themselves into our memories. Attached to a strong emotion or event, these scenes remain understandably alive in our minds. Other memories remain tucked away less explicably. We cannot articulate why they have made the indelible imprint that they have. Nor can we explain why they return to the forefront of our minds when they do.

I recalled one such moment recently—a snippet of a conversation more than a decade ago. It is odd that I would recall the conversation at all. At the time, the exchange seemed casual, one of many countless exchanges that bounce out of the mind as quickly as they enter. It was one of many conversations with a trusted mentor and friend, but her words at the time seemed little more than a simple, obvious thought. Yet somehow I remembered presently the concern, unbeknownst to me then, with which she spoke those words. She looked at me and said, “Jill, God needs you to receive the things God places in front of you.” Like a sweater on a warm day, I took her words in their simplicity, and casually tossed them aside. But somewhere in the depths of my mind, they were apparently tucked away until I would stumble across them in another light.

“O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it.” This powerful lament of Christ, recorded in both Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, reminds us that the people of Jerusalem were not indifferent to God. They thought they knew God; in fact, they often thought they were acting on God’s behalf. In Matthew’s Gospel this lament is spoken on the heels of seven woes to the scribes and Pharisees—two other groups who genuinely believed they were fighting to protect the God and the religion they they knew. In Luke’s Gospel, significantly, Christ’s lament follows an invitation toward the narrow door of the kingdom of God.

A great majority of the world today reports some belief in the existence of a divine being. One study on faith and belief among America’s youth describes this often generic credence as belief in a God who wants us to be both good and happy, and who is available in case of emergencies. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this widespread outlook in American teenagers—even across different religious backgrounds—as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” “We have convinced ourselves that this is the gospel,” writes a commenter on these findings, “but in fact it is much closer to another mess of pottage, an unacknowledged but widely held religious outlook that is primarily dedicated, not to loving God, but to avoiding interpersonal friction.”(1)

Jesus’s potent lament and metaphor of a hen who longs to reach out to her chicks proclaims the often tragic nature of our professions and what we attempt to receive in the midst of them—whether denying God altogether, casually professing belief in a distant being, or holding firmly to religion and somehow missing love for God in the process. How oft I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not have it. The story of humanity seems very often a story of people missing the point; people who don’t even know what we don’t know.

There are certainly many ways of receiving God and the promises of Christ, though we might find in the end that in our receiving we were more realistically trying to avoid something else. The word “receive” in the dictionary lists more than a dozen definitions ranging from “to hear or see,” and “to greet or welcome,” to more weighty definitions such as “to acknowledge formally and authoritatively” or “to bear the weight of.” Examples from human behavior are equally diverse.

At the time of my mentor’s words, I had thoroughly committed myself to the Christian story. The Christian God, I believed, provided the only answers that could really speak to the difficult questions of life. I had thoroughly accepted Christ and considered myself a part of the story of Christianity. Yet I was constantly questioning in my mind whether I knew God personally and often doubted my own identity as a child of God. I know now that my friend was saying that there is an intensely practical side to receiving God that I was missing. There is a point when we must be still and recognize just who we are receiving, just who has been reaching out to gather us all along.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaims, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (10:15). The Greek word for “receive,” literally means to take with the hand, to take hold of, and to embrace. Much has been said in scholarship of this reference to coming to God as a little child. Jesus’s use of the word “receive” is equally picturesque. The image painted in the text is certainly worth many words, two figures meriting an impression on both mind and memory. To believe that the God of the scriptures exists is to believe that we as people now stand in the presence of God as a Person. To receive God is to reach out to the very arms that have been longing to gather us near all along.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making History

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Ravi Z

If you are familiar with the writing of the new atheists, you will notice that they often portray history as if there is an ancient and on-going war raging between science and religion. Why is it that such simplistic ways of viewing the past can become so prevalent?(1) One theory is advanced by Christian Smith in his book Moral Believing Animals. He argues that one of the central, fundamental motivations for human action is the locating of life within a larger external moral order, which in turn dictates a person’s sense of identity and the way in which they act. He claims that, whether or not they realize it, “all human persons, no matter how well educated, how scientific, how knowledgeable, are, at bottom, believers.”(2)

He suggests this is because “human knowledge has no common, indubitable foundation,”and therefore the way people choose to live and the knowledge they accumulate is all founded upon basic assumptions and beliefs that cannot themselves be empirically verified.(3) This includes the Enlightenment ideas of foundationalist knowledge, the autonomously choosing individual and even universal rationality itself, which he argues “always and only operates in the context of the particular moral orders that define and orient reason in particular directions.”(4)

In order to make sense of life, he suggests that all individuals perceive the world according to an all-embracing narrative, in which factual information about different events and people is woven into a storyline that makes an overall point. The Scientific Enlightenment Narrative, for example, is one that has been popularized by the new atheists:

“For most of human history, people have lived in the darkness of ignorance and tradition, driven by fear, believing in superstitions. Priest and Lords preyed on such ignorance, and life was wearisome and short. Ever so gradually, however, and often at great cost, inventive men have endeavored better to understand the natural world around them. Centuries of such enquiry eventually led to a marvelous Scientific Revolution that radically transformed our methods of understanding nature. What we know now as a result is based on objective observation, empirical fact, and rational analysis. With each passing decade, science reveals increasingly more about the earth, our bodies, our minds. We have come to possess the power to transform nature and ourselves. We can fortify health, relieve suffering, and prolong life. Science is close to understanding the secret of life and maybe eternal life itself. Of course, forces of ignorance, fear, irrationality and blind faith still threaten the progress of science. But they must be resisted at all costs. For unfettered science is our only hope for true Enlightenment and happiness.”(5)

Although this narrative may seem to be the very opposite of a religious worldview, Smith makes the interesting observation that “what is striking about these major Western narrative traditions is how closely their plots parallel and sometimes mimic the Christian narrative.”(6)

They all include a period of darkness followed by redemption, as well as a promise for the future and the identification of potential threats to the desired utopia. He explains that: “So deep did Christianity’s wagon wheels wear into the ground of Western culture and consciousness that nearly every secular wagon that has followed—no matter how determined to travel a different road—has found it nearly impossible not to ride in the same tracks of the faith of old. Such is the power of the moral order in deeply forming culture and story.”(7)

This is a fascinating observation, because it suggests that the Christian way of perceiving the world still informs the worldview of many of those who think they have jettisoned all the remnants of it. He argues that this pervasiveness is not surprising though, as “the human condition and the character of religion quite naturally fit, cohere, complement and reinforce each other,” because they link the narratives with the historical and personal significances at both the individual and collective level.

The fact that the message is so compelling will come as no surprise to Christians, but, above all, Smith’s work illustrates the problem faced by those who insist that they live by science, logic, and empirical evidence, rather than relying on any belief. It also highlights that there is a considerable blind spot in the thinking of many people today, when it comes to appreciating the role religion has played not only in shaping their own ideas, but also in underpinning core aspects of western society. It may be fashionable to dismiss this foundation, but the final word should perhaps be left to the influential German thinker, Jürgen Habermas, who explains that the Judeo-Christian legacy is neither insignificant, nor should it be forgotten:

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”(8)

 

Simon Wenham is research coordinator for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Europe.

(1) Article adapted from Simon Wenham’s, “Making History: The ‘War’ Between Science and Religion,” Pulse, Issue 8 (Summer 2011), pp. 2-4.

(2) C. Smith, Moral Believing Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54.

(3) Ibid., 154.

(4) Idem.

(5) Ibid., 69.

(6) Ibid., 72.

(7) Idem.

(8) Ibid., 153.