Countless words have been written promoting or provoking atheism, most of them thoughtless. While many would declare it the “new religion” or a “final nail in the coffin,” it’s really just a washed up celebrity with a facelift. Followers of Christ have more or less responded in wild throes. Some are running scared from the whole thing, like it will eat up their children and gobble up their churches. Others ignore it like you would a bear outside a tent, holding a shaking flashlight and hoping it’ll go away. Worse still are the straight sloppy attacks that are only panicked gunshots in the dark.
Before atheism was cool and long before everyone started brandishing it like the new hot pants, I was a faithful card-carrying member. I used to idolize them: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, before they all became megastars. I thought I was in the “know,” superior over “them,” a thoughtful, well-reasoned, open-minded champion of a new era. I had my preprogrammed defenses, my impenetrable arguments, my fortress of opinions. No Christian could possibly stand against cold, hard, unchanging logic. It was simple: Jesus probably never existed, and if he did he had a twin, and religion was the answer to a weak-willed people afraid of their own mortality. Faith was poison, I thought, and death was final.
Salvation was not an overnight revelation. It wasn’t apologetics or philosophy or debating skills that won me. No tragedies brought me to church; there was no quarter-life crisis. Really it was seeing the sincere efforts of faithful Christians living out the truth, not perfectly but passionately, and I knew it couldn’t be any human effort. No natural person could have this sort of joy, compassion, and peace in the face of trials and trouble. I almost came to the truth in reverse: seeing the life of Christ worked through these men and women pointed me back to two millennia ago where it all began. I was horrified this could all be real. Slowly but certainly I found that it was. From atheism I hopped to agnosticism, to deism, to theism, and finally to Jesus Christ. I realized I had shut off entire areas of my brain while I was an atheist, and to this day it remains dizzying to have them opened wide.
Unfortunately the battlefront between the New-Old Atheism and Mainstream Evangelicals has been a stalemate of trench warfare. Both sides have built ivory towers beyond the grasp of any sensible communication. The least thoughtful of both sides have taken the platform. Here are some common arguments from evangelicals to atheists that only promote the standstill and should be taken out of the arena.
1) “Being an atheist means you’re an immoral, relativistic, depraved sack of lawlessness.” – This is the worst sort of accusation because of its extreme, presumptuous caricature. Postmodernism does not include a license for murderous rampage. Immorality runs through the fiber of humanity, saved or not. Christians forget that both sides have had enough killers and tyrants to bust the seams at Guantanamo. The everyday atheist doesn’t torture babies, plant bombs in nurseries, and run a drug cartel. Atheists will actually go out of their way to prove they have a moral compass, donating to this and that charity and attending all sorts of rallies. So the question should really be, “What is the reason for doing anything right?” Ego, reputation, status, self-righteousness. Ultimately they’re in it for themselves, and they would say it’s supposed to be that way. Except they forget the part about God’s judgment, which counts our righteous acts like dust on a scale.
2) “You can only get the Bible if you’re a Christian like me.” – Yes, there’s a verse about the perishing who see the Bible as foolishness. But the context is that those perishing are the constantly resistant people from Romans 1, who by their suppression of the truth were given over to exactly what they wanted: nothing to do with God. Otherwise Scripture is as simple as a USB device: plug and play. All throughout history a broad spectrum of people have picked up the Bible and found total fulfillment in its pages: the hardest criminals, the wealthiest leaders, the poorest souls. If a man alone on an island were to find a Bible, not only could he be saved but his one-man church and one-man worship service might look very different than what passes for liturgy today. To preemptively dismiss a whole group of people with a condescending wave of the hand is to give up on them. If nothing is impossible with God, then there are no impossible cases.
3) “My proof is better than yours.” – Some weapons we wield: Intelligent Design, all my scientific data on the resurrection, my infallible nine-point doctrine, and the archaeological correlations of every occurrence in the Old Testament. These things do have value until they become weapons of spiritual assault. This is my Alamo and I’ll die defending it. There’s a lot of screaming at the top of our strongholds when instead we could have real conversation about the life-stuff that’s happening now. Extrabiblical data is helpful but the Gospel doesn’t need scaffolding. I’ve counseled the sixteen year old kid with a hatred for all things God and no surprise: my knowledge about the flaws of Darwinian evolution didn’t faze him. How could that be? Isn’t the Cambrian explosion of fully developed life-forms doing it for you? I thank God for scholars and sound minds and I’m thankful for great apologists, really, but no one should spill blood over stuff that essentially isn’t the core of the Bible. Too many have grown disillusioned with the shouting match, distancing themselves from all the fist-pumping.
4) “Let’s talk about it some more next week, and the week after, and the week after that.” – At some point all the midnight discussions must end. Semantic discourse only goes so far. One more biblical proof of the pottery shards from the Babylonian Captivity won’t send your atheist friend into a spiritual epiphany. If anything the continued discussion will harden hearts on every side. It’s enough just to be there. It’s enough to let him or her see what you do. It’s enough to share the Gospel gently and let it speak for itself. It’s more than enough to pray. The more you rely on arguments, the less you rely on the Holy Spirit. There’s nothing deeper to that equation.
It would appear that I endorse a “theology of ignorance” or “pleading the Fifth,” but really we complicate the Gospel with excessive posturing. The so-called war against atheism is hurtling us into a bipolar people, on one side the proud atheist and on the other the haranguing fundamentalist. Buried beneath these facades are real fears: the Christians in fear for losing their church, the atheist in fear of losing the so-called rational mind. On closer inspection those fears are unfounded: it points to our unwillingness to release familiar institutions. Both sides are pulling for invisible territories that will not build a united ground: certainly it will never lead to Christ.
The typical cliché is that living out the truth will win them to Christ. It is a true cliché. To that we have added Evangelism Cubes, ad hominem, and unfair hyperbole. The bottom line is God’s love: Jesus came for us and demolished every stronghold, every sin, every self-righteousness. And an empty tomb is an empty tomb. Some would call this simplistic, but today’s complexity has only interfered with the bottom line. To shout, “This proves that Jesus loves you” is altogether different than assuring “Jesus loves you.” The cross is a hard message, but it’s no better to stand in the way. We can only stand in the shadow and point.
–
