Looking through some of my old Word files, I came across some jottings from the 2000-2001 period, when I was first being introduced to Christians and what they believe. Here is part of an email I wrote to a friend in 2001:
“I am starting to sense that there might be something in these Christian claims of God’s existence, after all. On Thursday, a friend of whom I’ve become rather fond asked to pray for Divine revelation for me before I left. I felt apprehensive, as though I was being offered the chance to open the floodgates, but I wasn’t yet ready for the water that is promised to come out. And that feeling brought about a slight sense of alarm; how could there be any apprehension towards my being prayed for without the mustard seed of belief that could engender such a feeling? After all, the prince only begins to become enchanted by the princess when he senses there is such a thing called love.
But at the risk of misusing a quote from your own holy book, I’m struggling to discern from the Christian folk how the wheat and chaff sit so comfortably together in their belief system. Many Christians seem to have some unpleasant attitudes and poor manners, and they seem to believe some crazy things – about the age of the earth, about how apparently evolution is unscientific, and several other odd beliefs about the world. It disturbs me that people who claim, in one hand, to be in a relationship with the Creator of the universe, can, with the other hand, showcase such intellectual and epistemological ineptitude that even atheists of average intelligence would comprehend as being ridiculous. Being naturally more feline than canine, I have a feeling that any faith that swills through my veins is likely to involve a more solitary pursuit than one that cleaves to the mainstream denominations.”
Reading those thoughts twenty five years later, I was considering why it is that Christians don’t make as much of a positive impact on unbelievers as one might expect, given the church comprises people who know the Creator of the universe. Now, I don’t want to be harsh on the church - it’s full of humans, and we humans are all flawed and sinful. So it’s not as though we didn’t have difficult machines to manage as we tried to plough the land to make fertile ground. But if pressed, I think the biggest failing of the Christian church (of all denominations) is in not using a relationship with God as the inspiration to fall in love with all truth, in failing to seek enough of the truth, and in neglecting to treat the truth as a quest for advancement and exhilaration.
When I was first exploring the faith, and learned that Christ equates Himself with the truth, I was surprised at how many false things Christians believe. It became clear that it’s easier to believe in God than it is to tell the truth – which ought to strike us as strange, given that Christ is the truth. It felt like the church resembled a catering college full of people who loved food but didn’t like cooking all that much. It’s not that we should expect a believer to suddenly rid themselves overnight of all the false things they believe. But if Christ is the truth, and Christians love Christ, I was surprised that generally believers didn’t exhibit a repertoire of beliefs and views that suggest they love the truth with any kind of tangible quest for advancement and exhilaration.
A profound thing about truth and God is this. If we seek all truth, we will find God, but if we find God, we won’t necessarily seek all truth. To seek all truth means we unremittingly demand of the world that it reveals more and more truths that we can store in our arsenal - on what is factual, on how to behave, on how to treat others - and that when we acquire them, we love them rather like family members. But it’s possible to find God by recognising Christ as Lord, yet still not fall in love with the truth in a way that stops us believing false things. If Christ is the truth, then this means that even Christians are guilty of failing to love God in some ways, because when they cleave to falsehood, they are failing to love truth, and therefore failing to love God in some aspects of their walk. If Christ is the truth, then to love Christ means to love truth, because truth points to God - and every time we love truth, we are acting in a way that pleases God and draws us closer to Him. To love God without treating the truth as a quest for advancement and exhilaration means dishonouring God in aspects of life by not loving the full truth.
