What we Christians believe

One thing you do not need to believe, if you are a Christian, that all the other religions are simply wrong all the time.

If you are an atheist, you do need to believe, that all the religions, through all the time, everywhere, have always been wrong.

And that all the faith people profess and have professed through the history has been simple one huge mistake.

In C. S. Lewis’s word “If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth”.

But being Christian means thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

We, the Christians, can see how people around the world have always sought the truth.

There is something in people that makes them to look for something higher and bigger than themselves.

Something that cannot be calmed down, that tells us that there is something more, that we are missing an integral part of who we are.

“These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

Do you think there is a Natural law that we all can feel in our hearts?

And, as Christians, we believe that the men, and women, were made to be in communion with God.

We were made to need God and seek the truth.

As Christians, we can see that the religions stem from this need to find God.

And we can see that some of them are closer to finding the truth than others.

But at the same time, like in mathematics, there can be only one right answer.

Even though some wrong answers are closer to the truth than others.

Do you believe in a Moral law?

"When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question?"

—Ravi Zacharias

The first big division

The first big division of humanity comes from believing or not in some kind of deity.

Here Christianity goes with the vast majority of people throughout the history.

Christians stand together with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Muslims, Hindus, New Age, and every other religion, in the belief that there is some kind of God or gods.

Against all these religions stand the modern Western European materialists who have come to believe that all religion is a myth, a non-true myth, and a lie.

And thus deny the existence of God.

They believe that people have developed enough to grow up and leave religion behind.

But are people really that different from what we were five hundreds, or a thousand, or even two or three thousand years ago?

People were inventing, living, thriving or suffering, and all the time seeking the truth, trying to fill the hole in their being.

Trying to fill the void with religion and gods.

Trying to find out the truth.

Just like we do today.

“When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most”, C. S. Lewis.

Which moral law should we choose?

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

The second big division

Being a Christian means believing in God, believing in existence of a god.

But it also means thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.

Being a Christian means that you believe that you have found the Truth, and that truth is Jesus.

That is what being a Christian is about.

People who believe in a kind of god can be divided according to the sort of god or gods they believe in.

Do you think We needGod?

“It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right -that it's an idea made up by men? Then, if He doesn't exist, man is the king of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. Who is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity instead of God. Well, only an idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it. Life's easy for Rakitin. 'You'd better think about the extension of civic rights, or of keeping down the price of meat. You will show your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by philosophy.' I answered him: 'Well, but you, without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat if it suits you, and make a rouble on every penny.' He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer that, Alyosha. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a Chinaman, so it's relative. Or isn't it? Is it not relative? A treacherous question! You won't laugh if I tell you it's kept me awake for two nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it. Vanity!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

There are people, called Pantheist, like most modern Hindus, that believe that god is beyond good and evil.

They believe that god animates the universe, the universe is, in a way, god, and we are all part of god.

Christianity, Jews and Islam, have a quite different view on things.

The three religions are also called religions of a book.

For Christians this book is the Bible, for Islam the Koran and for the Jews, the Tanakh, where Christian Old Testament stems from.

All these three religions believe that “God invented and made the universe – like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, “He’s put a lot of himself into it”, but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hand”, C. S. Lewis.

Pantheism believes that everything you find in this world is a part of God.

But if you think that God is really good, that God is goodness, nothing that is evil can be part of Him.

To believe that God is good, to believe in Christian God, you need to believe that God is separate from the world.

That some of the things we see in the world, what we perceive as unjust and evil, are contrary to His will.

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back the soonest is the most progressive man”.

C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity

What is sin?

“For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world – that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God “made up out of His head” as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again”, C. S. Lewis.

This is part of on-going series that I write every Sunday.

The links in the text are to previous posts.

Which moral law to choose?

“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity,' and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

How can you tell if one moral law is better than another?

According to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary Moral law is “a general rule of right living; esp:  such a rule or group of rules conceived as universal and unchanging and as having the sanction of God's will, of conscience, of man's moral nature, or of natural justice as revealed to human reason”.

In totalitarian system one person or party dictates the moral law. The moral law may be based on what is useful and what is not. In this kind of system, the moral law may accept the slavery or euthanasia, because they are useful to the society in general.

C. S. Lewis asks “When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is even better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better”.

So, how can we tell our, or my, moral law is better than someone else’s?

I can say, my moral law is better because it respects the human rights. But the human rights are just a set of moral laws, done by people.

The other person may as well say, my moral laws are better because larger portion of people are happier and wealthier. There is a small portion of people that must suffer or even die, but it is for common good, not for anyone’s personal gain.

Is moral law just democracy? The idea that has most of the people voting it wins. It is the new moral law.

 

According to C. S. Lewis “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others”.

Now, if you believe in relativity. Everything is relative, there is no absolute truth. There can neither be an absolute moral law. Many people claim that this will lead to less injustice. Because people no longer need to fight about who is right and who is wrong.

People don’t need to fight about it. That is true.

But it is also true that they keep fighting.

To quote C. S. Lewis (again) “It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real – a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us”.

If you find this post interesting and want to know more you should read the other posts of this on-going series.

To begin, read Natural law. A post about the law we all have in our hearts.

If you want to know more about Moral law, the post before this one talks about it.

If you agree we need to choose a moral law, maybe you'll agree that We need God.

Moral law

"When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question?"

—Ravi Zacharias

According to The Free Dictionary by Farlex “The rules of behavior an individual or a group may follow out of personal conscience and that are not necessarily part of legislated law in the United States. Moral law is a system of guidelines for behavior. These guidelines may or may not be part of a religion, codified in written form, or legally enforceable. For some people moral law is synonymous with the commands of a divine being. For others, moral law is a set of universal rules that should apply to everyone”.

Moral law is something stated in the personal conscience, not in the law. In today’s speak it is something a person decides to follow, as in I’ll be a Christian and I’ll follow their Moral law, or I’m a Buddhist so I follow their Moral law. There is no one Moral law above another, just personal opinions.

In Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis claims that “The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys”. But what if there is no “real” moral law, with capital letters? What if each one of us is following their own moral laws?

For instance, according to Kant , “the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity – understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others – as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons”.

In other words, there is no higher Moral law. The humans themselves make the moral law from their good will. Sadly we know that not many of us have enough good will to create an universal set of moral laws. And if someone does create them, there is no reason or obligation to follow them, but your duty.

And how many of us are willing to do that duty? Just out of kindness of our hearts.

C. S. Lewis states in Mere Christianity that “Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts”.

According to this, if we trust our instincts to lead the way, to tell us to “do our duty”, “choose the right thing” it will not work. The instincts are not wrong. We need to eat, to sleep, to seek security and we need to procreate. But there is a place and time for all this. And if we trust ourselves to choose what is right and wrong it will not work.

Like Ravi Zacharias says, without a moral Law Giver, there is no moral law. Or in Albert Einstein’s words “God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.” 

 

Did you find this post interesting and would like to know more?

 

To know the basis of Moral law, read first Natural law. 

To continue with the series, read Which moral law to choose.