TO SWEDEN AND BEYOND!

Sweden, ahh Sweden, look at the caption on this picture and then visit my last blog post where I talk about Tim Keller’s quote.

The explicit idea here is that a country that has a majority atheist population can prosper just as well as one with a religious one. Implicit here though is again this common misconception that all religious people think that all non-religious people are inherently evil. What we Christians forget to remember is that all people are made in the image of God and similarly all people are affected by sin. We are all in need of a Savior, even those of us who already believe and worship Him still need Him. This is what the biblical worldview teaches and affirms. That should not make us Christians arrogant at all; rather it should implore us to be humble, and spur us on to show our gratitude for salvation and new life in the Kingdom of God by showing others that there is another way of thinking, living, and acting.

I could turn this into a question of whether atheists can be good but let us save that for another post (to give an immediate answer to this question just to wet your appetites, I would argue “yes” and there have been good atheists, but the question then becomes, how does one good (let’s say selfless) atheist justify why his friend a bad (selfish) atheist should live his way? How can he call his way “good” and the other way “bad”? What moral system must the good atheist borrow from another religion or worldview to make such a claim? But I digress…

Sometimes I honestly wonder if posters like these are just made to make people laugh in their cubicles or if people would actually use these to build a worldview without noticing the other side of the coin.

With that being said, let us return to Sweden.

Sweden is a part of Europe and being part of the Western system of thought, prizes individuality highly. One of the guarantees of European Constitution, the International Declaration of Human Rights as well as our own Bill of Rights is that of Freedom of Religion. The entire country of Sweden could become Hindu, atheist, Christian, Muslim or any other system of thought and ideally they would not be bothered from anyone within or without its borders.

Here’s the kicker. What worldview created the idea that man was worthy enough to have these rights? What system of thought gave man the inherent dignity and self-worth? Europe at one point was the central hub of Christianity and hundreds of influential Christian thinkers came from within its borders. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley just to name a few, and even at the highest point of what historians call the Enlightenment, there had to be this uniting of trying to get ride of the idea of God yet somehow retaining the idea that humanity has inherent worth. James Sire in his book The Universe Next Door writes that there were many naturalists and humanists that still retained the Christian system of morality, but it was when people began to the godless foundation of naturalism to its logical conclusion did they find that they nothing left on which to stand. So they either had to retain the borrowing of another system, or try to create a moral system from a by-definition immoral foundation.

From this outworking you get someone like Fredrich Nietzsche who said freedom is nothing more than a herd mentality and that without God, supermen would be needed to play God in a society and if you have someone thinking they or the government they are a part of gets to play god, then that means it is they who decide(s) who lives and who dies and they who then decides who is even worthy of life.

Enter Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and so many others. This herein lies the crux of my argument. A country like Sweden in the midst of Europe that for centuries had laws based on the Christian worldview retained those same laws that Christianity gave them like freedom, hence atheism had the chance to rise. Look at the former Soviet Union or communist China for a contrast. When tradition is thrown out the window, and all competing worldviews are eliminated and made illegal except Marxism which is based on naturalism, that is when you have disaster, economic downward spirals, and massive bloodletting by the millions. That is when you have the “wasteland” that the above poster describes. The Soviet Union tried to build a utopia and failed, now that country has been run like a mob state. The only reason why China has become the economic powerhouse is because it is really only communist in name only. It has allowed capitalistic practices under Dong Xao-ping which would have never been allowed under Chairman Mao.

When atheism is put into public policy and made the political philosophy that drives your government, that is when the “wasteland” appears. So, honestly, don’t look at Sweden. It may be atheistic but people still have the freedom not to be.

(An interesting question here resides: If religion is supposedly on its way out the door as hardcore atheists would hope, and it will continue to erode away as long as man has the freedom to choose because man is by nature good, then why is it that both Christianity and Islam are growing rather than shrinking?)

Don’t look a Sweden. Try taking a look at history instead.

A recent poster from a friend (the same one I mentioned in my older posts) had a picture of David Radcliffe (you may know him better as Harry Potter), said that he is a militant atheist when it comes to legislation governing morality (which I would assume he is also against morality governing legislation) [and I would further assume he is referring to Christian morality].

It is interesting he uses this term “militant atheism”. I have been debating with friends recently who insist that atheism is not a comprehensive worldview but only a component of it. What am I to do when it is the atheist himself who calls himself that? How should I respond? Can I respond adequately?

There is no such thing as a society or culture that doesn’t  have a worldview under-girding it. It determines what a society deems as the good, true, and beautiful, and also what it views as evil, bad, or detrimental to it. I ask, if Christianity should never be an under-girding worldview anywhere, which is a better alternative?

Let me clarify something here: I do not advocate for laws forcing people to be Christians. That is not how the Kingdom of God works. I come out of the Anabaptist tradition of Christianity, who were persecuted by many of the “state” churches in Europe who tried to force them to adapt “their” version of the faith. God cherishes a person who chooses out of recognizing the inherent goodness and love of God to follow Him wholeheartedly, without forced coercion. When the church and the state become one or even mix together wrongly, there may be a few benefits (like the Edict of Milan which stopped the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire). Often enough however, it is not the state that becomes holy, rather it is the church that becomes corrupt.

Mainly because the Body stops relying upon and trusting in the Head that is Christ and begins depending on a helmet (a great deal of flash and flare on the outside, but inside a willingness to sacrifice the body to advance its own ends, no matter how sincere they may be. With separation does come one main benefit: No forced conversions (which I’m pretty sure Christ wasn’t into anyways).

However, much of what we know and value in Western culture comes from a decidedly Judeo-Christian worldview: Doing good to all people, the inherent dignity of human beings, reconciliation with enemies rather than revenge to preserve honor. Even the ideals of truth, justice, and love are not mere conventions, but absolutes.

Tim Keller does a thorough job of doing this in The Reason for God. Within the first chapter, Keller argues that “Christianity provides a firm basis for respecting people of other faiths” and cites Scripture affirming so (Mt. 5:16; 1 Peter 2:12). That assumes some overlap between the Christian set of ethics and those of any particular culture and religion (which by the way can be great starting points for evangelism a.k.a. ask them what they believe, find common ground, then show them where Christianity agrees or maybe disagrees).

Keller writes,(p. 19-20)

“The biblical doctrine of the universal image of God, therefore, leads Christians to expect nonbelievers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs could make them. The Biblical doctrine of universal sinfulness also leads Christians to expect believers will be worse in practice than their orthodox beliefs should make them. So there will be plenty of ground for respectful cooperation.

Christianity not only leads its members to believe people of other faiths to have goodness and wisdom to offer, it also leads them to expect that many will live lives morally superior to their own. Most people in our culture believe that, if there is a God, we can relate to him and go to heaven through leading a good life. Let’s call this the “moral improvement” view. Christianity teaches the very opposite. In the Christian understanding, Jesus does not tell us how to live so we can merit salvation. (emphasis mine) Rather, he comes to forgive and save us through his life and death in our place. God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

Christians, then, should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than they are. Why? Christian believers are not accepted by God because of their moral performance, wisdom, or virtue, but because of Christ’s work on their behalf. Most religions and philosophies of life assume that one’s spiritual status depends on your religious attainments [you earn your own salvation]. This naturally leads adherents to feel superior to those who don’t believe and behave as they do. The Christian gospel, in any case, should not have that effect.

It is common to say that “fundamentalism” leads to violence, yet as we have seen, all of us have fundamental, unprovable faith-commitments that we think are superior to those of others. The real question, then, is which fundamentals will lead their believers to be the most loving and receptive to those with whom they differ? (emphasis his) Which set of unavoidably exclusive beliefs will lead us to humble, peace-loving behavior?

One of the paradoxes of history is the relationship between the beliefs and the practices of the early Christians as compared to those of the culture around them.

The Greco-Roman world’s religious views were open and seemingly tolerant-everyone had his or her own God. The practices of the culture were quite brutal, however. The Greco-Roman would was highly stratified economically, with a huge distance between the rich and poor. By contrast, Christians insisted that there was only one true God, the dying Savior Jesus Christ. Their lives and practices were, however, remarkably welcoming to those that the culture marginalized. The early Christians mixed people from different races and classes in ways that seemed scandalous to those around them. The Greco-Roman world tended to despise the poor, but Christians gave generously not only to their own poor but to those of other faiths. In broader society, women had very low status, being subjected to high levels of female infanticide, forced marriages, and lack of economic equality than had previously existed in the ancient classical world (See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Harper, 1996), Chapter 5: “The Role of Women in Christian Growth.”). During the terrible urban plagues of the first two centuries, Christians cared for all the sick and dying in the city, often at the cost of their lives (Ibid. ch. 4, 6, 7).

Why would such an exclusive belief system lead to behavior that was so open to others? It was because Christians had within their belief system the strongest possible resource for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality was a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Reflection on this could only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who were different from them. It meant they could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents.

We cannot skip lightly over the fact that there have been injustices done by the church in the name of Christ, yet who can deny that the force of Christians’ most fundamental beliefs can be a powerful impetus for peace-making in our troubled world?” (Keller, pg. 20-21)

Whether it is Radcliffe supporting militant atheism or Bill Maher’s thoughts that if America could only get ride of religion so as to be as secular as classical Athens was (though that’s debatable), there is this underlying idea that if we finally rid ourselves of religion there will be peace. I respond that there willalways be a worldview (Christian or otherwise) that provides a foundation for society and culture. A completely secular worldview has been tried before in our history and even if there was any progress, the cost was massive amounts of human death (French Revolution, Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, Mao’s China, etc).

Get rid of religion in general and Christianity in particular and there will be peace? No. I maintain Christianity which follows Jesus’ teachings consist of the very things that make for peace.