Hi David,
Thanks for your two replies.
It's obviously hard to define a Christian, since there are so many traditions – Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodox, to name but a view. So I think it best to keep it really simple and find something they all agree on. The traditional creeds are a good place to start. So we could say, for example, that a Christian is someone who believes in God, that Jesus was a human being who was this God incarnate, who died and was resurrected for some reason connected with human sin, and who believes in some sense that believing all these things will 'save' them. I'd be happy to take that as a starting point.
I don't know if you're already familiar with Gerald R. Baron on Medium. He is doing great work in the battle against atheism and physicalist science, and is very interested in the relationship between science and a spiritual worldview. He is also a Christian with views, I imagine, similar to yourself. Last Easter he wrote this article on the Resurrection: https://gerald-baron.medium.com/easter-cuts-like-a-knife-bb560a00b07a
I replied with this one:
https://graham-pemberton.medium.com/easter-without-the-resurrection-e19775fb0b4
which contains links to other articles of mine. That should be enough to keep you going for a while.
I agree with you that completely objective voices don't exist, but some are more objective than others. My comment was made in the hope that Tim Keller, or anyone else you recommend, is widely read in the scholarly literature around Christian origins, thus the debates around:
Did a person called Jesus actually exist?
The pagan god material, for example the heavy dependence of Christianity on Mithraism. Thus were the gospels intended to be understood literally as history?
The Jerusalem Church and the role of Jesus's brother James.
Were the gospels written under the influence of Paul?
The editing of the canonical texts in order to conform with later theology.
...and so on.
I would want to hear compelling arguments to answer all these points. Anyway, I might yet take up your suggestion and watch Keller's video.
It's interesting that you were once a non-believer, had a conversion experience and now trust the words of the Bible. Compare and contrast that with the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, who had a 'born-again' experience which got him involved with Christianity, but his study of the Bible and all the associated problems has led him to have doubts, because he has discovered that the text cannot be trusted. He tells his story in the introduction to Misquoting Jesus.
An interesting Christian you may be aware of is Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and Liberating the Gospels. He is not as convinced as you by the Biblical texts.
It may surprise you, given our discussion, that my own conversion experience, which it would appear was much more dramatic than yours, had a strong Christian theme. It was a powerful synchronistic event, in Carl Jung's understanding of that term, which involved a Christian church and a quotation from the Bible. This is how I described it in an earlier article, slightly summarised:
“The experience was a powerful synchronicity along the lines of Jung’s scarab-beetle incident... The external part involved a church and a quotation from the Bible. By the standards of some synchronicities, the coincidence itself was middle-of-the-road, but its effect on me was extreme. I experienced what you might call an explosion inside my head; my mind shattered. For several hours I felt as though I was struggling in a strong current... I have told only a couple of close friends about this. I describe it as “the moment I knew for certain that God existed”. Sceptics might wonder why I chose those words, but in any event it was a dramatic transformation of consciousness, a no-going-back moment, an initiation of some kind”.
That came from a very long article, but if you're interested:
I note that you say we can be drawn to Christ through many paths, and not Jesus. When you say the Bible, I assume that you are referring to a passage in John's Gospel. I think we can probably agree that throughout that gospel Jesus is speaking as if he were the Logos. I think that we can also agree that virtually none of these sayings were known to the writers of the synoptic gospels. What are we to make of that? Was 'John' putting words into Jesus's mouth in line with his own beliefs? These are the kind of objections I would want an 'independent' Christian to answer.
I'm afraid that I find it hard to believe that the human figure of Jesus is the door we must all come to, therefore have to subscribe to Christianity. If the Logos is the door through which we must pass, then the idea becomes more credible, because its equivalent can be found in other traditions, in which case Christianity is not the sole path. Other doors that lead to God, I would say, are: Eastern religions, Sufism, and Kabbalah for example. None of these require a belief in Jesus.
best wishes
Graham
