Eighteenth-century German philosopher Gotthold Lessing gave us the concept of Lessing’s Ditch, the “ugly, broad ditch” of doubt that he couldn’t cross with only the assurance of history. The gospel story of Jesus as the son of God? Sorry—the record of history is insufficient to carry us to belief on the other side of that ditch (discussed here).

You say that the gospel authors were inspired by God so that their writings are trustworthy? That is itself a historical claim, and Lessing argues that it fails along with all the rest.

If nothing hangs in the balance then I might believe. Alexander conquered Asia, historians tell us? Sure, I’ll buy that. But now you say that Jesus died to satisfy the sense of justice of a Bronze Age god, the one and only god who created everything? That’s perhaps the most incredible claim possible, and it comes with a lot of consequences. That isn’t to be accepted lightly. Not only does history not back this up (the discipline of History accepts no supernatural stories), but the gospel story looks just like other unbelievable stories from a more gullible time. I can’t cross that ditch.

Evaluating different kinds of claims

Let me take license with Lessing’s metaphor by exploring different kinds of ditches. Let’s say that the depth of the ditch represents the consequences, what you risk if you’re wrong. And the width of the ditch is the evidence gap, how plausible the claim is. This creates four categories.

• Shallow and narrow: the consequences of being wrong are minimal, and the evidence is good. An example of this kind of ditch might be anything mundane that I’ve seen myself—what I had for lunch yesterday or the color of my car.
• Shallow and wide: minimal consequences but poor evidence. One of the stories told about Alexander the Great was that he tamed the unridable horse Bucephalus as a teenager. Believing this and then being proven wrong would have negligible consequences.
• Deep and narrow: big consequences but good evidence. “Driving to the store will be a safe errand” is almost always true, though the unlikely bad outcome can be fatal.
• Deep and wide: big consequences and poor evidence. The claim of the resurrection of Jesus is an example. About this kind of claim, Lessing says, “The problem is that this proof of the spirt and of power no longer has any spirit or power but has sunk to the level of human testimonies of spirit and power” (emphasis added). For some, going along with one’s community has minimal downsides, but for many of us, one’s self-respect is on the line. I must evaluate the claims of the Christian with the same standard that I evaluate the claims of Scientology, Islam, or Harold Camping’s rapture day.

Enter Alvin Plantinga

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has this take on evidence and belief.

Lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Plantinga is lumping together a shallow ditch problem (Is the number of stars even or odd?) with a deep ditch problem (Does an omnipotent god exist who created the universe?). No one cares whether the number of stars is even or odd at any instant, but Plantinga’s God proposal demands to remake one’s worldview.

I agree with Plantinga that the right stance with respect to the star question is agnosticism, because we have absolutely no reason to pick one answer over another. But do we also have no way to evaluate claims about leprechauns, fairies, unicorns, Blemmyes, or toves? In the sense that we don’t know with certainty, yes, that’s agnosticism. But we don’t consider the existence of mythical creatures like leprechauns to be equally in balance like the even/odd star question so that we have no opinion. Do we think leprechauns exist? Do we live our lives as if they do? Of course not. Lack of evidence is the reason for not believing in leprechauns.

Consider other religions: Islam, Shinto, Hinduism. Is the question of the accuracy of these worldviews equally balanced, with observers unable to make a tentative conclusion? Do we throw up our hands in befuddlement? Of course not—believers in those religions have the burden of proof, and it hasn’t been supported.

Now consider the question of the Christian god. Here again this bears no resemblance to the even/odd star question, because the Christianity has had millennia to support its burden of proof. We can be agnostics because we don’t know, but we can also be atheists because the burden of proof has not been met.

Enter another philosopher

William Lane Craig cuts through the problem in his usual blundering way.

It was the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who, I believe, provided the correct response to Lessing. Through an existential encounter with God Himself every generation can be made contemporaneous with the first generation. We are therefore not dependent on historical proofs for knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Rather through the immediate, inner witness of God’s Holy Spirit every person can come to know the truth of the Gospel once he hears it. . . .

So that’s how I leap Lessing’s ditch. Christian belief is confirmed by the historical evidence for those of us fortunate enough to be epistemically so situated as to be able to appraise it correctly; but Christian belief is not based on the historical evidence.

These kinds of arguments help make apologetics the poor cousin to magic. (More on Craig’s uncomfortable tension between evidence and belief here.)

Conclusion

If you can’t get over the ditch with evidence, don’t bother. You can’t cross; get over it. Teleporting over on a lavender cloud of make-believe works for children but not adults who want the truth rather than The Secret.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/16/15.)

Image credit: elyob, flickr, CC
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Many Christians say that the supernatural wonders in the Bible performed by someone on God’s team must be called “miracles.” But look at the currency of these godly people—magic words and curses, talismans and charms, prophecies, life force, potions, divination, numerology, and more—and see if they don’t sound like magic.

Potions

Jesus healed a blind man by making mud with his spit and putting that on the man’s eyes. After he washed his eyes, the man could see (John 9:6–7). This was a tricky potion even for Jesus, because in the earlier parallel story, Jesus needed two tries to get it to work (Mark 8:22–5).

A more complex potion is needed in the trial by ordeal used to test a wife’s faithfulness (Numbers 5:11–31). Curses were written on a scroll, and those words were rinsed into a potion made of dirt and water. The accused woman had to drink the potion. She would miscarry, but only if she had been unfaithful.

Magical names

The Ten Commandments prohibited misusing the name of God, but what is a misuse? Frivolous, careless, or blasphemous use was one concern. That’s why “Yahweh” is avoided within Judaism in favor of Adonai (“The Lord”) or HaShem (“The Name”). When writing in English, Jews might go as far as to write “G-d.” By camouflaging a name that is itself a euphemism, they put themselves two steps away from using the sacred name of Yahweh.

But there’s another angle, explained in Wikipedia:

The ancient Jews considered God’s true name so potent that its invocation conferred upon the speaker tremendous power over His creations. To prevent abuse of this power, as well as to avoid blasphemy, the name of God was always taboo, and increasingly disused so that by the time of Jesus their High Priest was supposedly the only individual who spoke it aloud—and then only in the Holy of Holies upon the Day of Atonement.

This helps explain why God told Moses that his name was “I am” (Exodus 3:14). God was evasive because a name gave someone power. It also helps explain why we call the Christian god “God.” (It’s not like calling your cat “Cat” since “Yahweh” has power.)

Another example is Jacob wrestling God (Genesis 32:22–31). At the end of the contest, God blessed Jacob with the new name of Israel, but God refused to give his name to Jacob.

In the Garden of Eden story, Adam was granted the privilege of naming the animals.

Names having power is a popular idea outside the Bible as well. We see it in folklore, literature, and legend. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus used both a false name and his true name in his fight with the cyclops Polyphemus. Closer to our time, characters that could be controlled by their names include Rumpelstiltskin, Mr. Mxyzptlk (an enemy of Superman), and Beetlejuice. TV Tropes has a long list of additional examples of the power of names in literature, popular fiction, and real life.

Medicine and health in the Bible

We know that bacteria and viruses can cause disease but demons and sin can’t. In Jesus’s time, it was the other way around, and Jesus cured disease by expelling evil spirits (Mark 9:25). Disease was also a consequence of sin (John 5:14; Mark 2:2–12).

We’re told that the touch of a holy man can cure. That’s how Jesus cured a leper, a person with a fever, and two blind men. He raised two dead people by touching them. And the holy man doesn’t even have to be alive! “Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet” (2 Kings 13:21). Touch can also work the other way, and a woman was healed by touching Jesus (Mark 5:30).

Jesus doesn’t even have to be there. He healed the centurion’s servant remotely (Matthew 8:5–13). (More on Jesus’s relationship with medicine here.)

Then there’s the pseudoscience that like cures like. This is the idea of using “the hair of the dog that bit you” as medicine, and we see hints of this in voodoo dolls and homeopathy. The Bible has an example in the Nehushtan, a bronze snake, erected at God’s command, that cured bites from the snakes that God sent to punish the Israelites (Numbers 21:4–9). More here.

Taking the energy from living things

Sacrificing living things can give power to a god. In around 846 BCE, the Israelites and their allies were attacking Moab, destroying city after city as they closed in on the king. The king had one final, desperate ploy, and he sacrificed his son, the future king, to his god Chemosh. The result: “There was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland” (2 Kings 3:27, NET). More on God’s weaknesses here.

Another illustration of the mojo from a sacrifice are the dozens of references to the “pleasing aroma” of a burning sacrifice. These are identified as food offerings, and the energy was conveyed up to God through the smoke. Here, too, we see the extra value in human sacrifices. Sometimes God demanded just the firstborn of the livestock, but not always. In Exodus 22:29 we find, “You must give me the firstborn of your sons.” More on human sacrifice here.

Relics and charms

Can you say “acheiropoieta,” boys and girls? That’s a hard word! This is the category of icons made without hands—basically, icons that are not manmade artwork. The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous one, but there are more. The Veil of Veronica is an image of the face of Jesus imprinted on a cloth when, according to legend, St. Veronica used it to wipe the sweat and blood off the face of Jesus while he was carrying his cross. The Image of Edessa (the Mandylion) is another example. You’ll be relieved to know that the International Institute for Research on the Face of Christ now exists to study these important icons.

Relics of any sort became increasingly important during the Middle Ages. The Second Council of Nicaea decreed in 787 that every church must have a relic—something physical from a saint or Jesus like a possession or a body part. Relics were already moneymakers since they brought pilgrims into town, and this decree increased the demand, both for real relics and fakes. It has been joked that there were enough pieces of the true cross to build an ark and enough nails from the crucifixion to hold it together.

The Roman Catholic Church says that the communion wafer and wine turn into the body and blood of Jesus, which makes them something of an icon.

As an aside, isn’t this reverence of sacred objects unseemly? The second commandment technically is against artwork (“You shall not make for yourself an image. . . . You shall not bow down to them or worship them.”), but this idolatry does seem like a violation.

Up next: curses, magic words, divination, and more.

Concluded in part 2.

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Image from Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs
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Let’s conclude our critique of a Christian ministry’s video series of ten myths about God (part 1).

Myth 7: People are basically good. The Bible says that we have an inherent dignity and that there’s good within us, and we’re created in the image of God. But the guys reject the idea that we’re good at heart. No, it’s like humans are infected with a virus. Our hosts wallow in descriptions of our corruption, depravity, and rebellion against God and in the hopelessness of our condition. (Color coding explained in part 1).

I’ll agree that people suck sometimes. We may not be much, but we’re all we’ve got.

But we start looking pretty good when you consider what mankind has done that God didn’t. We’ve ended slavery as an acceptable institution in the modern world, we feed billions of people with industrial agriculture, and we’ve improved the health of the world through vaccines, antibiotics, clean water, and so on. Human society is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than the Old Testament society that God was responsible for.

Myth 8: All paths lead to God. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Each one felt a different part, and each came to a different and incomplete understanding. This myth says that Jesus is like the elephant, and different cultures just describe him differently. But no, the video dismisses this and tells us that the message of Jesus is an exclusive one. “No one comes to the father but by me” (John 14:6).

To the idea that the sacrifice of Jesus would be called just one path of many, one host called this a slap in the face of the father. I disagree. I don’t see the slap since the “sacrifice” wasn’t really that big a deal.

We’re told that the other options are wrong but are given no reason to accept the Christian path over the others. Or why any supernatural claims are correct.

Let me sketch out the obvious natural explanation: life is scary, and our fragile, imperfect minds have cobbled religions together to help explain the things that go bump in the night. The answers offered by Christianity were okay when it was the only game in town, but it’s not anymore. Humanity has grown up, we have far better explanations, and it’s time to leave childhood superstitions behind.

Myth 9: I go to church, so I’m a Christian. Just like being in a barn doesn’t make you a horse, being in a church doesn’t make you a Christian. Don’t be like the Pharisees, who focused on the godly appearance.

They say that the church is about fellowship and relationship. It’s easy to understand the community among people in church, but isn’t it ironic that God isn’t as obvious? What does that tell us?

Myth 10: Satan is the opposite of God. The myth is that God and Satan are like yin and yang—equal and opposite forces, and we can only hold our breath, hoping that God wins in the end. It’s like comic books where the superhero is equally matched to the villain, and we’re on the edge of our seats until the last scene.

The truth, according to the video, is that this is actually the most boring and mismatched matchup ever. God could, in an instant, wipe out Satan’s works and even his existence. Imagining Satan defeating God is like imagining any of us defeating God. But since Satan has read the Bible, he knows how it all ends. Why then imagine that he’s sticking around to put up with the charade?

Yet again, I wonder if the boys have actually, y’know, read the Bible. For example, it wasn’t Satan in the Garden of Eden, it was a talking serpent. To imagine it was actually Satan in disguise is simply to map Christian thinking into a far older non-Christian story. The book of Revelation vaguely makes this Satan/serpent argument, but it’s simply stated without justification.

We see Satan in one of the Bible’s oldest books. In Job 1:6–12, Satan is “the adversary,” like a prosecuting attorney. Here, “Satan” is a title, not a name. Far from being God’s sworn enemy, Satan is God’s handyman or assistant. Satan tests God’s people to make sure that they are as stalwart as they appear.

Only later in the Bible do we see Satan or the devil as a bad character:

[Jesus said,] “Away from me, Satan!” (Matthew 4:10).

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).

[The angel] seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years (Revelation 20:2).

We can see the complex background from which our modern idea of Satan as a villain arose when we consider the many names and ideas that are often conflated: Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Belial, Beelzebub, the devil, the dragon, the serpent. That we do see Satan as evil in the New Testament only argues that the idea has evolved, something that happens in manmade literature, not in the unchanging plan of an omniscient creator.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/3/14.)

Photo credit: WSJ

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Let’s continue critiquing a Christian ministry’s video series of ten myths about God (part 1).

Myth 4: Jesus is not God. Our hosts tell us that the most important question in the Bible was asked by Jesus: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Correct answer: Jesus is the god-man. There are nonbelievers who say Jesus was a great man and a wise teacher, but they get this big question wrong.

The evidence argues that Jesus was just a legend. The impact of the religion that grew up around his story has been huge, but that alone doesn’t contradict my position. As for Jesus being a great and wise teacher, I don’t find that in the Bible, but if you find some good stuff there, that’s great.

C. S. Lewis said, “Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.” Bullshit. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible and created his famous Jefferson Bible, keeping only the wisdom of Jesus and dropping all miracles.

Just because it’s not history doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain wisdom (but I bet I’d find more keepers in The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran than in the Bible).

We’re also told in this video that “Jesus is presented [in the Bible] as the eternal God, the second person of the eternal Trinity.” Not really, and this brings us to the next myth.

Myth 5: The Trinity was invented. “What the Council of Nicaea said was that the Bible clearly teaches that there is a Trinity.”

The first problem is that, in the Trinity department, this council only rejected Arianism, which stated that Jesus was subordinate to and created by God the Father. The concept of the Trinity (with the Holy Spirit pulled into the partnership) wouldn’t be finalized until succeeding councils.

Now let’s respond to the claim that the Bible “clearly teaches that there is a Trinity.” It doesn’t. Arianism wasn’t popular just out of spite; the Bible supports it. For example, Jesus said, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).

Imagine going back in time and asking Paul to explain the Trinity to you. He wouldn’t know what you were talking about, because the Trinity was a later invention. It wouldn’t have been familiar to the earliest Christians.

Could Jesus have known the truth of the Trinity but not bothered to make it clear in his teachings? Far more likely is that he (or the gospel authors who put words into his mouth) also had no notion of the concept.

What you do see in the New Testament is the divinity of Jesus evolving with time. Sort the books chronologically and see the evolution. In Romans, Jesus was “appointed the Son of God” at his resurrection. In Mark, Jesus becomes divine earlier, at his baptism. In Matthew and Luke, it’s at his birth. And in John, since forever. In a similar way, the idea of the Trinity evolved through the writings of the early church fathers until it was codified in pieces in the fourth century.

I write more about the Trinity here and here.

Myth 6: Good works get us to heaven. That’s true for many religions, but not Christianity. Paul said, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

Yes, the Bible does make clear that faith alone gets you into heaven—except for all the places where it argues the opposite. The Bible also says that repentance wipes away sins (Acts 3:19). And that water baptism is necessary for new life (Romans 6:4–5). And that works are at least necessary if not the sole route to heaven.

• James 2:8–26 acknowledges faith but puts the focus squarely on works, including keeping the Law. For example, it nicely skewers faith here: “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.” (James 2:18–19).
• In heaven, the dead are judged “according to their works” (Revelation 20:12).
• Jesus explains “Love your neighbor as yourself” with the Parable of the Good Samaritan and makes clear that good works like these get one “eternal life” (Luke 10:25–37).
• The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats makes plain that those who make it to the Kingdom do so through their good works. Faith isn’t even mentioned (Matthew 25:31–46).

Our hosts tell us, “You and I can’t do enough good works to get to heaven.” Can they not have read these and other verses that point to the role of good works?

Next, “We’re born with a negative bank account . . . and there’s no way you can work yourself out of this debt we have to God.” This reminds me of the refrain, “I owe my soul to the company store” from the song “Sixteen Tons,” which made clear the debt slavery forced on Kentucky coal miners during the Depression. God owns you just like the mine owned its workers? Not a pleasant image.

And what did we do to deserve getting born with this debt? Apparently, our hosts are also unfamiliar with this verse: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16).

Concluded in part 3.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/26/14.)

Image via David, CC license

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Christians need to more carefully check the arguments they use. Sometimes these arguments blow up in their faces.

One example is William Lane Craig’s use of A.N. Sherwin-White’s rule of thumb about the growth of legend (discussed in detail here). Craig proclaims that legendary growth is slow when he wants to argue that the gospels are reliable history, but then he’s happy to point to legendary growth when he wants to reject the dozens of noncanonical gospels!

Gospel contradictions and airplane crashes

Apologists walk a similar knife edge with the problem of contradictions between the gospels.

The skeptic will demand, How many women went to the tomb? Was the tomb already open when they got there? How many angels were there? What was the women’s emotional reaction at the tomb? Did the women tell the disciples? The gospels disagree on the answers. (I document a long list of contradictions here.)

That the most important part of the Bible is full of contradictions about the easy part—the basic facts of the story—raises questions about reliability of the supernatural parts.

Neil Mammen responds to this challenge with “Gospel contradictions? Why they don’t exist. A Little Experiment to Teach Skeptics about NT Accuracy.” He uses a 2005 incident at Chicago’s Midway airport in which an airplane skidded off the runway in heavy snow to highlight the fallibility of journalists’ reporting.

He looks at five media sources written within days of the event. Each is a one- to three-sentence summary. Here are the inconsistencies he found across the sources.

#1. According to the first source, the plane went through a “boundary fence,” hit two cars, and killed a child in one of the cars.

#2. Now only one car is mentioned, there’s no fence, and it’s a “6-year old boy.”

#3. The two cars and one death are mentioned, but the fence has become a “security wall.”

#4. Now it’s a “safety barrier,” and the car(s) and death are not mentioned.

#5. No cars, no fence, and no deaths.

He wonders what to make of this, since the accounts vary so widely. Which is it—one car or two? A dead boy or a dead child or none? Some truths, some lies, and some errors? Or all lies? Or all errors? Is it a legend? A total fabrication?

He parallels this with complaints about Bible contradictions. You have multiple sources in the airplane story, which is a good thing, because each source can bring new insights. The same is true for the gospel accounts.

The airplane story and the resurrection story each have inconsistencies surrounding their own common core. In Chicago, did the plane hit one car or two? In the Bible, did one, two, three, or more women come to the tomb? And so on. Let’s be consistent, he says—if you want to reject the resurrection story for inconsistent accounts, do the same for this airplane story.

He also emphasizes that this doesn’t point to the gospel story being “a fabrication.”

Just a few quibbles

• First, notice the brevity of the accounts—that’s because they’re photo captions! They work as an abstract of the story, but no one would argue that they’re complete or that they attempt to be. Read the accompanying stories and then let’s talk about serious inconsistencies.
• Caption 4 is just one sentence long. It doesn’t mention the car, thought the accompanying photo might have told that part of the story. For example, here is one such photo. Also, the title accompanying this summary is, “Plane slides off Chicago runway, boy killed,” which adds yet more information. Taking these into account, the inconsistencies go away.
• Caption 5 (here) has been truncated. Add the next sentence, and the boundary fence, car, and death are back in.
• The only arguments I ever hear about the gospel story being fabricated (that is, deliberately invented, like a hoax) come from the Christian apologists. It’s a fun straw man to knock over, I suppose, but it’s a waste of time since that’s not the argument.

And now, let me agree

Using photo captions makes this experiment useless as a comparison, but the larger point is correct. Yes, journalists can be wrong, and articles can be incomplete. Let’s start with this point of agreement to see where that takes us in an analysis of the gospel stories.

Modern journalists are trained to focus on the facts. For some media, fact checkers double check to verify that the story is correct. Journalists can be penalized for errors in their stories. Now instead of modern journalists, imagine the followers of a religious leader in pre-scientific Palestine. Their Truth may not have been bound by any sense of journalistic accuracy.

Now add over forty years of oral history before the gospels are written.

Now make that forty years happen in a foreign culture, a Greek culture already familiar with miracles such as turning water into wine, virgin births, and dying-and-rising gods.

Now separate our oldest copies from the gospel originals by centuries. That’s a long time for rival traditions to fight it out and for copyists to add or delete as their own beliefs demanded. (I’ve discussed this long journey here, here, here, and here.)

Now how much confidence can we have in the account?

The Christian may respond that the Holy Spirit didn’t much care about preserving accuracy. It pleased him to trust fallible human processes to document the Greatest Story Ever Told. He was content to let the gospels look no different from other supernatural musings that we justifiably dismiss to the bins of Mythology or Legend.

Neil Mammen might ask us to look to the overlap of the gospel stories to find the truth, but with this approach, we’ve lost Jesus’s last words, the location where the disciples were to meet the risen Jesus, Paul’s 500 eyewitnesses, and even the explanation for how the story spread (in Mark, the women keep silent), but no matter.

Does this approach work elsewhere—when there are competing stories, do we assume the overlapping part must be true? We usually don’t do this for UFO abduction stories. Or the stories from people who saw the 1917 Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal, an accepted Catholic miracle. Or claims from alchemy. Or the accounts by the eleven Mormons who claimed to have seen the golden plates. Competing tales that are supernatural or at least extraordinary can be and usually are all wrong.

Mammen’s article argues that professional reporters can’t be trusted to get the details right on a mundane story that happened the previous day. But then it expects us to believe the gospel accounts (already suspect because they are full of the supernatural) that were written down decades later? His “little experiment to teach skeptics about NT accuracy” seems to have blown up in his face.

Christians, consider your arguments lest they backfire.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/10/14.)

Image via Alexis Breaux, CC license

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In 2014, I visited the famous Mappa Mundi, an oddly un-maplike map, at Hereford Cathedral in England (more here). A few blocks away is All Saints Church. The current church building was completed around 1330, about the time the Mappa Mundi was completed. After a recent restoration, the church was reopened in 1997.

As churches go, this one is smaller than those that usually capture the tourists. It is certainly smaller than the magnificent Hereford cathedral, for example. What is unusual about this church—and it’s a working church, with four masses each week—is that part of it is now a café.

From the church’s web site:

We have played host to a variety of events, from Shakespeare to flamenco, homegrown jazz to the finest touring classical musical groups.

Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (or “God and mammon,” as the King James Version memorably translates it), but this church seems to have found a workable balance. It has found new roles as a meeting place and community center.

Christianity is always changing. At 45,000 denominations and growing (more here), it evolves faster than Ken Ham imagines animals evolved after the Flood. How must it adapt as conditions in the West change?

Harold Camping’s Family Radio is an example of a failure to adapt. You may remember Camping as the idiot who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011. It’s almost like he didn’t believe his own billboards, because he didn’t sell his assets even though he was telling everyone else that there would be no use for them after that date. If he had sold, there could now be a $100 million Christian foundation doing good works in the world—not a bad consolation to ease the humiliation of Camping’s being so hilariously wrong. But he held on into a world that he was convinced wouldn’t exist. The organization’s assets lost tens of millions of dollars of value, a pathetic reminder of one foolish man’s hubris and overconfidence in ancient stories.

Another option is what I’ve called Secular Christianity or Christianity 2.0, a “religion” where believers and nonbelievers would all be welcome because belief in the supernatural wouldn’t be a requirement. The focus would instead be on community, inspiration, and service. It might be a gentler landing than church buildings simply becoming quaint museums (or bookstores, markets, art galleries, breweries, event sites, condos, and more).

All Saints Church is reaching out to make peace with the secular. Maybe it’s an early adopter of what religion will become.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/5/14.)

Image by Bob Seidensticker
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