Christ Versus Christianity: A short primer for skeptics

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Christianity’s many detractors tend to fall into two camps: those who think it is pure nonsense and those who’ve had a negative experience with a believer, a church, or a faith-based institution.

Furthermore, all of us are impacted by our parental relationships because our early image of God is largely determined by our relationship with one or both parents. If either is emotionally absent or abusive, it damages our ability to trust that a benevolent deity exists and cares enough to be invested in our lives.

Pre-existing ideologies and experiences can be a serious impediment to faith because they always entail a reactionary element. Rather than take the claims of Christianity at face value, those claims are heavily filtered through things past and present that elicit(ed) consternation, condemnation, and/or bitterness — poisonous to both mind and soul.

Skepticism often emerges from this matrix of reactionary sentiment as a defense mechanism that hinders one’s ability to encounter the God Christians claim to know. Jesus’ detractors were all skeptics, both religious or secular. The preconceptions they brought to their encounters with him blinded them to who he really was. The same holds true today. 

The lenses we wear largely determine the world we see.

Both unresolved hurt and obstinate adherence to conflicting ideologies cloud one’s ability to offer unbiased judgement about the claims of Christianity. Many times people are not so much rejecting the person of Christ, but rather “Christianity-by-association” — and rightly so. But one can’t build a life worth living based on what he or she opposes.

Relationship over ritual

The heart of Christianity is a relationship between God and an individual through Jesus Christ. It is experiential in nature and doesn’t translate well into inflexible religious formalities without jeopardizing the centrality of the divine-human relationship. 

God only has children; no grandchildren, and certainly no relatives. 

Thus, each individual must personally (re)establish the sacred relationship no matter how steeped they are in cultural Christianity. Using Job as an example, the Franciscan Richard Rohr puts the matter this way:

Ultimately Job’s story reveals that God cannot really be known through theology and law. God can only be related to and known in relationship, just like the Trinity itself. Or, as the mystics assert, we know God by loving God, trusting God, and placing our hope in God. We cannot really ‘think’ God.

Job’s religious friends and advisers have correct theory but no experience; thoughts about God, but no love of God. They believe in their theology; Job believes in the God of their theology. It is a big difference. The first is information; the second is wisdom.

Function over form

Religion’s reliance on accepted doctrine, ritual, and other cultural formulations can be both a strength and a weakness. Although useful in its ability to provide necessary structure for the ethereal nature of biblical faith, any form of religion-based Christianity can easily supplant the personal encounter and direct experience essential to it. 

Many Christians forget this or else never realized it in the first place. No one can grasp the essence of Christian faith — let alone skeptics — outside of encountering Christ. It’s like reading about a foreign country in a guide book versus actually living there. Night and day.

Religious folks can easily forget that the window dressing only has indirect relevance to what’s inside, while non-believers too often think those decorations are all there is — concluding that Christianity entails intransigent dogma, narrow-mindedness, and self-righteousness. 

Interestingly, the attitudes and behaviors detractors display often perfectly reflects the very charges they make against Christians and Christianity. 

But religious configurations have nothing to do with the heart and soul of Christian faith, and can never, ever be a substitute for it. When Jesus told an inquiring Nicodemus “you must be born again,” it was within the context of explaining that the mysterious impact of God’s Spirit operates far beyond human control and understanding. 

Trying to put that reality into religious forms is like trying to box-up the wind. Believers want others to feel the wind of the Spirit, but the box is all many of them will ever see.

Historically, Christian faith has flourished as the underdog and floundered when a dominant force in society. That’s because it doesn’t fit into predetermined social and cognitive structures — human boxes. Cultural constructs are inadequate to hold the contents of the Spirit. 

God’s ways are so much higher than our own. Mankind’s best hope is to create religious structures that allow God’s elusive Spirit to move in and through them unrestricted — which, in my experience, is to minimize them or get out of the way altogether!

The face of God

Jesus is the self-revelation of an otherwise inscrutable God (John 14:9–11, ESV). The Incarnate One said that access to God can be gained by no other way than through faith in him. Such faith is far beyond mere intellectual assent, as one might “believe” in science or the Bill of Rights. As previously stated, Christian faith is linked to direct encounter, even as it engenders it. 

Neither human intellectual prowess nor our deepest of emotions and sensibilities can probe the essence of faith and the mystery of the Encounter that a sovereign God facilitates with mortal human beings. We are designed for such an encounter — born with a “God-shaped hole” that longs to be filled. 

Nothing you or I or anyone else can think or feel about Christianity can alter the truth that lies behind it. Our beliefs and sentiments have zero impact on its immutable reality. Our opinions, however clever or passionately argued, can’t change that. They have absolutely no consequence, except as paths that lead us toward or away from Christ — life’s only abiding truth. 

Too often we insist on being the center of the universe, the masters of our fate. So we carefully formulate our reality and label everything else false. In our hubris, we claim our intellect and emotion-laced perceptions are the final arbiter of truth, our self-deceiving guides in a world we’ve constructed of falsehoods.

Ironically, by doing so we close ourselves off from the very reality we seek. For good reason, Solomon claimed that “the fear (reverence) of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7a, NIV). Faith alone leads to truth, which reason and senses can never attain apart from it. They can only confirm truth once it has been acquired.

Transcendent faith

There is, however, no true dichotomy between faith and religion. Churches and theology need not preclude faith — a position many believers seem to have taken of late. Biblical faith — based in encounter and ongoing relationship between God and humankind — transcends every box we try to put it in. 

A faith-based relationship can flourish within or outside every religious constraint. God is not limited by man’s ways. He can and does use them for his purposes and glory. For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17b, ESV).

For that reason, it is futile to try to tear down the church and Christianity in general. If the story of Balaam’s donkey teaches us anything, its that a sovereign God is beholden to no limitation within the whole of creation — including human-engineered constraints. 

Echoing the Apostle Paul, we declare that we carry this treasure in earthen vessels (our every human limitation), emphasizing that the value of the treasure has nothing to do with its motley container.

Proof’s in the pudding

I have no illusions that my sophomoric reasoning and inexpertly worded essay will convince anyone to embrace Jesus. I’ve learned it doesn’t work that way. People come to Christ for reasons that defy the machinations of man. 

Many find life’s Treasure through the hardships and suffering that seem an inevitable part of life (a miracle in itself). Struggles tend to break down one’s defenses and open us up to our need for Something beyond our transitory and impossible-to-control existence in this world. Others are drawn to the irresistible love of Jesus they see displayed in individuals, or the compelling power inherent in the written Word.

But for those who doubt that the love of God in Christ is the fulfillment of all they need and seek in life, I offer a challenge from the late Ravi Zacharias. It offers a chance to move from a negative and reactionary position to a positive and proactive one. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

During a radio interview I heard Dr. Zacharias offer his listeners this challenge (not quoted word for word): 

If Jesus is not your Lord and Savior, find a contemporary translation of the Book of John in the New Testament. Read it and take careful note of what Jesus said about himself and his purpose in coming into this world.

When you’ve finished, offer a basic but sincere prayer something like this: ‘Jesus, if you are who you say you are in this book, reveal yourself to me.’ That’s it. No one else needs to know. The exchange is only between you and your Maker. 

If God is real and Jesus is who he claims to be in the book of John, it’s his job (and pleasure) to make that known to you. If not, you’ve lost nothing but a little time and effort, and you can go on with your life confident in your skepticism. But if — perchance — it is true, then you’ve gained the most important thing this life has to offer.

Isn’t that an offer worth exploring?

Please remember: Christendom is only the container believers employ in this world to hold the contents of their relationship with an eternal God. It will not be needed in the world to come. It is but a tarnished travel cup that helps many to drink more deeply of the Living Water. Pity that any should perish believing that a humble cup was reason not to drink. 

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.(John 7:37–38, NIV).