Sunday Faith Series: Christianity - Genius or Madness?

There are two common binary considerations associated with Christianity - one is: Is it true or false? - and the other is: Is it good or evil? I prefer to frame it a different way by asking; Is it genius or madness? If it is madness, it is probably false and evil too, whereas if it is genius, it is probably good and true. Hang on, I hear you object - why can't it be a work of genius in its moral proclamations, but not in the least bit true when it comes to its claims of Jesus' divinity?

It's a fair question. Telling us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to be charitable, compassionate, kind and morally excellent is hardly wisdom that could not have been thought up by an excellent human. But as C.S Lewis reminds us in his 'Lord, liar or lunatic' trilemma, Jesus made claims to have co-equality with God, so as long as we accept that the scriptures are an accurate portrayal* then Christ couldn't have been thoroughly excellent if He either a) told so many lies about being God, or b) was under so many false misapprehensions.

Christianity is based on the proposition that Christ is God in human flesh - not a mere man. Therefore, to consider Christianity as true or false, or good or evil, means to consider it in terms of genius or madness. If God loves us, and can see that by ourselves we are all pretty wretched, ego-stroking, status-mongering, selfish creatures, then there may be a certain genius to the creation story - one that even the world's greatest human genius probably wouldn't have the imagination or audacity to think up.

Consider the story. Thanks to His penchant for autonomy and volition, God creates a world full of humans, and gives us the freedom to be ourselves. In being human, we learn, we grow, we slip, we fall, we have joy and gladness and pain and hardship - the whole rich tapestry of experience. Yet constrained by the limitations of being human, God knows that the only way we can reach the destiny for which we were created is to have help - rather like a teacher helps a pupil, or a parent helps their child. God's cosmic story is that He would be born into this world in a backwater village in ancient Palestine, live as we live, suffer immense pain and torture, die under the most horrific circumstances and then demonstrate through the resurrection that bodily death is not the end.

It sounds a strange way to bring justice to the creation story - and I remember it certainly sounded positively bizarre before I became a Christian. But a God who helps us to salvation and to renewal by nailing all our sins to the cross, and inviting us into His kingdom with love and grace, may just be demonstrating the work of a Divine genius - the work of such genius, in fact, that no group of people would be crazy enough to make it all up and proclaim it as the pivot around which the rest of existence revolves.

Surely an ordinary man or a woman, even if they were a genius, wouldn't have thought of such a peculiar thing - it makes for strange consideration at a human level. Why couldn't God have just forgiven us without needing to come down to earth and suffer as a man? Perhaps He could have chosen that method - but the idea of a God who loves us enough to put Himself in our shoes, live all the earthly hardships that we live, and suffer grief, pain, humiliation loss and death for us might just be so something so ingenious that ordinary humans would never entertain it.

You may object that that kind of reasoning could justify all sorts of nonsensical ideas about God. We could just as easily envisage a God who became a five dimensional object, or a God who juggled 100 balls with one hand for a year - the imaginative possibilities are endless.  But hold on, the alternatives may be endless, but they do not have the same gravitas as the real accounts of Christianity. It takes something quite remarkable to change the whole course of human history in the way that Christianity did, and to inspire such a multitude of creative excellence - theology, apologetics, literature, poetry, art, music, architecture, and so on. And let us also not forget the numerous martyrs that died for their faith by standing up to oppressive authorities and refusing to renounce their beliefs. This Christian faith is no ordinary thing. I have no inclination towards false dichotomies or faulty trilemmas - but it seems to me that such an extraordinary thing is either the work of a Divine genius or else it is utter madness.

I won't deny that the idea of an infinitely good God seeing everything we do and knowing our thoughts and our intentions better than we do sounds very much like madness. I also won't deny that the idea of Heaven being a gift earned for us by Jesus on the cross also sounds a bit like madness too. The first one sounds a bit like madness because it involves God as some kind of surveillance camera in the sky from whose attention we can never escape. And the second one sounds a bit like madness because it means that our bad deeds are not quantifiable in terms of desert - so a genocidal dictator and a nice lady volunteering in a charity shop can both be with Jesus in paradise by accepting God's free gift.

But once we conflate the two 'mad' ideas, we see them both in a more enriching way, as two complementary sides to the same golden coin. So much so that even our day-to-day sins - like uncharity, a bad temper and selfishness are up for continual re-examination when we have a relationship with God. But on the other hand, our continual efforts to improve and be better people are part of the grace-centred relationship with God too. So while God sees everything we do, and knows our thoughts and our intentions inside out, He views us not as reproachable sinners but as forgiven sinners. He sees us as sharing in the victory that Christ's free gift won for us on the cross. 

* Not everyone accepts this claim, of course - but given that faith in God involves faith in the accurate propagation of His word, it's a bit of a moot objection.