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Saturday, November 30, 2019

Two kinds of Christians

One of the striking things about many apostates, at least militant apostates like Bart Ehrman, is how easily they make the adjustment to life as an atheist. They don't think they put much behind them when they put Christianity behind them.

This goes to a related issue. You can have two Christians who are equally zealous, equally devout, but one loses his faith while the other perseveres. And this can be unnerving. In a sense, that's a good thing. It's a deterrent to getting cocky. 

The standard Calvinist explanation is that an apostate was never saved in the first place. 1 Jn 2:19 is duly quoted. Apostates and freewill theists consider that special pleading. The No-True-Scotsman fallacy. But that's an argument for another day. 

On the face of it, the Reformed explanation, which I think is correct, fails to explain the divergent trajectories of two equally zealous, devout Christians. And here I'd like to make an observation:

The similarity may be quite superficial, because they are Christian for different reasons. On the one hand there are Christians who are Christian because they believe they are sinners, and Christ died for them to spare them damnation. That inspires gratitude. You might say he's a sawdust trail Christian. Some become pastor and missionaries. 

Now, up to a point there's nothing wrong with that. It's great as far as it goes. But it's a Christian solution to a Christian problem. It takes the Christian framework for granted. So it's only valuable within that framework. 

If, however, you lose your faith in the framework, then you have nothing to lose by losing your faith. The Gospel is only the antidote if you accept the diagnosis. If, though, you come to believe that sin is just an artificial theological category, and you no longer believe the theology that sponsors it, then Christianity is the answer to a pseudo-problem. 

On that view, apostasy is cost-free. You can be very zealous so long as you operate within that framework, but if you cease to find it convincing, then you can shuffle it off because you never had any real stake it in. The value was internal to the system. The value was conferred by the theological paradigm, and has no value independent of the paradigm. From that viewpoint, it's easy to make the transition from Christian to atheist. 

But there's another kind of Christian. His identity is bound up with Christianity at a much deeper level. You might say he's an existential Christian. In a sense, he comes at it from the opposite end. He appreciates the fact that everything of value hinges on the Christian faith. There's everything to lose if Christianity is false. It's not just about sin and salvation, but what makes anything important. What makes something good? What, if anything, makes life worthwhile? 

It's far more difficult for a Christian like that to give up on Christianity. And even if he does, he's more likely to return to the faith. He understands what's at stake in a way that the first kind of apostate does not. So while, to all appearances, both kinds of Christians may be equally zealous, equally devout, what motivates their faith is fundamentally different. The existential Christian may be less outwardly zealous than the sawdust trail Christian, yet his roots run much deeper. He's a Christian because he has to be. 

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Well, I suppose it's comforting I'm in the second group, then (a little?). I was listening to Japanese Society and History today, and on the chapter on religion, the authors explained how the Japanese don't have a concept of sin or an objective good or bad, so a lot of Western concepts that came from theism just don't make sense to them. The authors also were obviously not so hot about these Western ideas. Instead, the Japanese believe in duties and are concerned about how one's actions would affect others (to whom they have a duty). I just thought how easily that collapses if you start asking where these duties mysteriously come from, and why one ought to follow them. Unless it's objectively wrong to shirk one's duty (which we still haven't explained the origin of), so what if you ignore it? I'm sure there's more to it, but it didn't seem all that promising, even though the explanation came from a sympathetic source. I'm not in a market for another worldview, but if I were, I don't know where I'd go.

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  3. Some of us leave the faith, and we don't make a big scene as we're walking out the door. We don't post on social media about all our doubts, we don't seek out an audience to make out doubts known. When I left the faith I just kept quiet. It was a horrible experience, lots of sleepless nights, lots of anxiety to the point of having mental breakdowns and making multiple trips to the ER.

    To make a long tory short, after 7 years I found me way back to the faith unlike others who traveled down the same path as I did. I look back now and I see where God was treating me as a son by the misery I was enduring, and not as a bastard. (Heb 12:5-8) I look back and see my silence and I was in a way self quaranteening so as not to cause others to stumble. What was the difference between Bart Ehrman and myself? I went out the door as quietly and as delicately as I could so as not to cause any damage to others. I didn't see it that way at the time, but that's what I was doing. Bart just wants to be the bull in the china shop.

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  4. Robert I'm glad you're back. Im greatly encouraged to hear your testimony.

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  5. Steve, didn't you write a thesis paper on this topic some years ago? Don't know where one could find it online.

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    1. I wrote a thesis on apostasy, but didn't addressed this particular issue:

      http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/07/apostasy-perseverance-ebook-by-steve.html

      The thesis is somewhat uneven since I wasn't feeling all that great at the time.

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