Why believe?

I was recently asked to serve my parish's bookstore ministry by writing a blurb in the church's monthly email newsletter in hopes of driving more foot traffic to the store after Liturgy on Sundays. For my inaugural effort, I did a high-level overview of Fr Andrew Stephen Damick's Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape. My "hook" was an assertion that Orthodox Christians in the deeply pluralistic West bear the burden of 1 Peter 3:15 much more heavily than do their brothers and sisters in historically Orthodox lands, and even more heavily than other Western Christians due to the rather exclusive nature of Orthodox historical claims. "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you," urges the Apostle Peter to his readers. I've gotten to thinking in the days since writing the above blurb about how I might answer if thusly called to account, and this post is an effort to flesh out that account prior to being put on the spot. And frankly, I am prone to calling myself to account on a semi-frequent basis, so what follows is something of how I tend to answer the challenge.

But first, a clarification. When I say that Orthodox Christians in the 21st-century in the global West bear a heavier burden of witness than most other Orthodox Christians, I by no means insinuate that our lives are harder. That crown belongs unequivocally to the Christians of the Middle East, perhaps not coincidentally the cradle of Christianity itself. By "heavier burden", what I mean is that the question "Why believe?" often entails several more layers of response for we in the West than does the same question in lands that have essentially been insulated from modernity and its resulting pluralism. The chiefly pre-modern makeup of the global East means that most who would ask a Christian "Why believe?" are likely already believers in some diety or another. Here in the West, belief in anything is an issue that precedes questions of "which God," and still further up stream from questions of "denomination".

So to answer the first question, the reason I believe in a god at all boils down to the fact that I just don't perceive strict atheism to be a serious intellectual conclusion. Enough has become known about the complexity and the order of the universe that the idea it has all come from uncoordinated probability (which itself sprung from nothingness) is, to me, a fundamentally religious belief, and even a larger leap of faith than deism. On that note, I would say that I believe deism to be the most reasonable philosophical starting point for any non-Christian who would engage the claims of historic Christianity.

Skipping questions about the probable age of the universe and the manner of creation, let's simply establish that I do believe in a Creator. The next question would be, "Which Creator?" Buried underneath that question is a chain of assumptions, beginning with that the Creator of our universe desires "belief" on the part of human creatures. Frankly, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to assume this. Setting aside questions of theodicy, it seems unreasonable to me that a supreme super-being (or collective of super-beings) who would go to the trouble of designing a universe of such complex and immense proportions as ours would then desire to immediately disassociate from said creation. And if maintaining a connection to Creation is granted, then a desire to be perceived, even known in some capacity, by creatures is reasonable by extension. Subsequently, it stands to reason that such a Creator might weave the means of coming to such a knowledge into the fabric of Creation itself, or alternately (or additionally), would reveal Himself in any variety of ways post-creation. From this, we can assume after tens of thousands and/or millions (whatever your preference) of years of human history, that if such a means of knowledge is indeed present, a non-trivial portion of the human population will have arrived at such a knowledge by now. Taking into account its volume of adherents worldwide as well as its continuity with Judaism, arguably the oldest formal religion still in practice, it's reasonable to thus arrive at the God of Christianity.

SPOILER ALERT: I do believe in the God of Christianity.

But I don't want to suggest that such a belief should be undertaken merely as a conclusion at the end of a series of casual, logical deductions, nor do I mean to say that the above chain of reasoning will inevitably resonate with any or all inquirers. I also don't mean to imply that my own belief in the God of Christianity came about as a result of such reasoning. Transparently, the foundations of my belief were inculcated in my identity from childhood, such that my entire encounter with questions about God and belief has taken place inside the womb of Christianity. But contrary to the idea that such an experience can be dismissed as lacking credibility, I would say that it has provided at least one circumstantial advantage, namely, that I've been exposed to a breadth and depth of Christian intellectual and theological resources that untold number of inquirers have passed Christianity by without ever having access to. In this way, I count myself as privileged and endeavor to treat with grace my unbelieving peers whose life experiences vastly differ from mine.

But really, why the God of Christianity? The reality is that, due to variation in constitutions and experiences from person to person, there are a number of different paths, whether intellectual, spiritual, or even miraculous, that can bring a person to Jesus, and such paths can be so complex as to defy this medium's capacity. It also bears noting that, in matters of religion, especially the Christian religion, there is such a thing as spiritual knowledge. Many have approached the Cross on the basis of mere deductive reasoning, but none have embraced it in this manner. As the scriptures say, "The cross is folly to those who are perishing," that is to say, to those who await death without having been given the grace to enter into the mystical death of Christ on the Cross (in historical Christianity, by means of water baptism and partaking of the Eucharist).  Put more succinctly, while the God of Christianity can be deduced through reasoning, communing with Him is another matter entirely.

All this is to say that while belief in God (even the God of Christianity) is reasonable, deducing Him is not the wellspring of hope for which Christians must ultimately give an account. Hope springs from communion, communion with God and thusly with His image bearers, and as such, any accounting we give for our hope must culminate with, and even center on, an invitation to communion.

In my next post, which could be weeks or even months away because I have five kids and no life and can't make a habit out of writing until 3AM, I'll write a bit more personally about why I believe Christianity provides the True encounter with the Creator of the universe, and further, why I have found that aforementioned "communion" to be most desirable in the context of the Orthodox Church.