Truth isn’t a club

While read­ing The Mak­ing of an Athe­ist I really started to think about what I’m going to call a “mis­ap­plied apolo­getic”. This is really just a nice way of describ­ing “apol­o­gists” who beat peo­ple over the head with “truth”–it hap­pens more than you think. It’s the sort of peo­ple that grab a hold of an idea, take it to be absolutely true (whether or not it is, though as far as they’re con­cerned, it is) and then pro­ceed to tell every­one else how wrong they are. I sup­pose, like me, they for­got to read the end of 1 Peter 3:15. Two exam­ples to illus­trate what I mean; one of these exam­ples is some­thing of an in-house apolo­getic issue–the ‘YEC / Evo­lu­tion’ debate. The other, is con­cern­ing a cer­tain peo­ple group which the church has grossly mishandled.

I learned a long time ago that it wasn’t worth my time to get involved in a YEC debate (for those who don’t know, Young Earth Cre­ation­ism, the view that God cre­ated the world in 6, 24 hour peri­ods, as described in Gen­e­sis 1 and that the uni­verse is only 6,000 — 10,000 years old). For the most part, there is an extreme lack of humil­ity and an atti­tude of supe­ri­or­ity that just shouldn’t be present in the life of a Chris­t­ian. Even if what’s under dis­cus­sion is an in house debate–people tend to look through the win­dows, as it were. Peo­ple are going to notice the lack of humil­ity and meek­ness. To ask a ques­tion, how many peo­ple get caught up on a YEC view of Scrip­ture and dis­miss Jesus as a result? I’m fairly cer­tain that choos­ing not to believe in YEC will not affect anyone’s sal­va­tion, yet some groups insist on it–believe in YEC or oth­er­wise you under­mine the entire foun­da­tion of Chris­tian­ity. One of the most com­mon ques­tions I come across is exactly this ques­tion: “Can I be a Chris­t­ian and believe in evo­lu­tion?” The answer, even though some of us don’t like to admit it, is yes. But to do so we would have to admit that we don’t know every­thing (remem­ber Job 38:4? “Where were you when I laid the foun­da­tions of the earth…”). Peo­ple don’t ask why Chris­tians hate sci­ence for no rea­son. Even if the per­cep­tion was ini­tially a false­hood, it’s quickly becom­ing real­ity. It’s extremely dis­heart­en­ing to me when some of us con­fuse the core mes­sage of the Gospel with these sec­ondary issues. The result is con­fus­ing and only turns peo­ple off Jesus.

The other exam­ple I wanted to men­tion might make peo­ple uncomfortable–homosexuality. The church has severely mis­han­dled the ‘homo­sex­ual issue,’ and while I agree that the lifestyle is sin, I don’t believe that gives any­one the “right” to club them over the head with “God’s word”. I came across a very good video by Ravi Zacharias and he han­dles this ques­tion exquis­itely. Rather than imme­di­ately go to Leviti­cus or Romans, he cre­ates a dis­tinc­tion between a homo­sex­ual lifestyle (which is what Scrip­ture always refers to) and a spe­cific sex­ual dis­po­si­tion. There is a hum­ble­ness and approach­a­bil­ity in this treat­ment of homo­sex­u­al­ity that should be exem­pli­fied by all Chris­tians. Unfor­tu­nately, a lot of the time (some) Chris­tians tend to imme­di­ately run to Leviti­cus or Romans and blurt out (per­haps with­out think­ing) the evils of homo­sex­u­al­ity. Yet at the same time we for­get the evils of (het­ero­sex­ual) lust, greed, envy and glut­tony. Yes, the life style is a sin and we believe so out of love for peo­ple, but we have to approach this issue with prayer­ful, sen­si­tive and reflec­tive hearts. We really do need to be “lit­tle Christs” when approach­ing every­one.

I think this may have turned into some­thing I wasn’t orig­i­nally plan­ning, but I’ve said it nonethe­less. This is some­thing that really grieves my heart, when Chris­tians treat each other and oth­ers unChrist­like. We really need to watch our­selves because it’s by our actions we’ll be judged.

As Niet­zsche said: “I might believe in the Redeemer if His fol­low­ers looked more Redeemed”.