Newman Questioning Faith

Indirect Journeys of Belief through Terrains of Doubt
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-4335-8926-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 152 Seiten

Sort through Your Questions and Find a Path from Doubt to Faith Do you have honest questions about faith? Or have you walked away from a faith you once had? Perhaps you've been part of a faith tradition, but you've begun to question parts of what you've been taught. Students and young professionals today are submerged in a culture of cynicism and doubt. Many identify as nonreligious but wrestle with questions about God's existence, the meaning of life, and whether it's possible to find goodness and beauty in this world. After 40 years listening to hundreds of people's stories of faith, Randy Newman has come to see that answering spiritual questions usually involves a series of twists and turns, not a direct ascent from one belief to another. Our political view, family background, understanding of sexuality, and religious background all play a part in our faith journeys. If you or a friend are navigating terrains of doubt, you'll find Newman to be a faithful guide. He'll help you sort through your many questions and find solid answers.   - Culturally Aware: Touches on matters of morality, identity, suffering, sexuality, and science - Accessible: Newman mixes thought-provoking anecdotes with a clear and compelling message about the Christian faith - A Tool for Winsome Apologetics: Written to help those who doubt to answer their questions about the Christian faith; will also help Christians strengthen their beliefs and share them with doubting friends - Written by Randy Newman: Senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute

Randy Newman (1956-2024) served as senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute, and was formerly on staff with Cru. He authored several books, including Questioning Faith; Questioning Evangelism; and Bringing the Gospel Home.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Newman, Randy

Leseproben

1

The Question of Motives

What If We Aren’t Blank Slates?

Christopher Hitchens, the famed atheist, converted Alex.1 In fact, he converted him twice. From the time he was just fourteen, Alex devoured Hitchens’s scorching atheist rants in Vanity Fair and on an ever-expanding list of skeptical websites. Raised in a rural, anti-intellectual community, Alex grew in rage to match the wrath of his hero, the author of the bestselling God Is Not Great.

I knew none of this when I first met Alex. He was twenty-five at the time and worked for a Christian organization in the same office building where I worked. When I asked him how he got connected to a Christian organization, he told me about his two conversions. I was intrigued. He began with Hitchens. Two journeys—Alex’s and Christopher’s—shape this chapter and help us consider the question of motives. They show us that we all bring more to the table than mere intellectual curiosity.

Alex loved the ways Hitchens mixed brilliant articulation with piercing wit. Alex felt proud in rejecting his parents’ Christian faith, his so-called Christian school, and, as he described them, other “knuckle-dragging Baptists” he knew. Watching hours of YouTube videos of Hitchens skewering his opponents armed him with both substance and style for ridiculing hypocritical Christians.

Hitchens wasn’t just an atheist. He called himself an “anti-theist” and bombarded religious people with relentless attacks, bolstering his claim that “religion poisons everything.”2 Older atheists like Bertrand Russell engaged in philosophical arguments that were out of reach for most nonacademics. They seemed tame compared with Hitchens and other so-called new atheists. Hitchens held back nothing. He even wrote a tirade against Mother Teresa. For Hitchens, nothing was beyond the pale. And Alex ate it all up with glee.

As Alex recounted his journey from presumed faith to rejected faith to newfound faith, I kept wondering if there was more to the story than mere changes in intellectual beliefs. In addition to rational arguments, I wondered what other dynamics contributed to this journey. I’d heard enough personal stories to know they include more than just logic and reason. We’re whole persons, not just brains on a stick. And we approach the topic of faith with a menagerie of motives, not just intellectual curiosity.

Below the surface, Hitchens’s message resonated with Alex for more than just intellectual reasons. They both saw and experienced disgusting hypocrisy in the Christianity they were immersed in from childhood. For Hitchens, it came through a nominally Christian school in the UK. For Alex, it permeated a nominally Christian school in the southern US. Both settings failed to live up to the Christian mottos on their walls and the sermons preached in their chapels. Both schools’ administrations merely winked at sexual abuse, leading both young men—Hitchens and Alex—to declare themselves atheists before the age of sixteen, with no shame or felt need to justify the newfound label.

“Hitchens gave me reasons to believe what I believed,” Alex told me, quickening his speech. “More than that, he provided a replacement for the Christianity of my upbringing, an all-encompassing worldview without holes. Atheism also gave me approval to live the way I wanted.” The connection dug deeper than just ideology. “Hitchens was full of rage and so was I,” Alex continued. “It was as if he dismissed Christianity for the same reasons I had. Both of us rejected the so-called Christian faith we saw at our schools and said: ‘If that’s Christianity, I don’t want it. And no one should want it.’”

At that point in our conversation, Alex paused and shook his head in what looked like unbelief. I asked him what was going on inside him and he struggled to find words. “I’m kinda amazed,” he began. “So many twists and turns. I really was a very different person. I almost don’t recognize that guy back there.” I’d heard these expressions of contrasting personhoods before. Even so, I found Alex’s story unique. Our journeys often manifest commonalities with others’. Yet, somehow, every story is unique. There is only one trail to the top of Angels Landing in Zion National Park. But everyone’s experience up that path is distinct.

Christopher Hitchens’s journey to anti-faith involves more ingredients than just intellectual disagreement and condemnation of hypocrisy. In his memoir Hitch 22, he gives ample space to sexual experimentation outside the bounds of traditional morality with no accompanying guilt. Finding those experiences pleasurable, he gained fuel to mock the intolerance of anyone who condemned any sexual expressions simply because of religious prejudices. Hitchens went further. “I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.”3

The Story behind the Stories

One other trauma may have contributed to Hitchens’s atheism, although the link may not seem immediately apparent. In his memoir, he detailed a fond affection for his mother while disdaining his cold, “morose” father. His painful recounting of the horrific suicide of his beloved mother may point to an iceberg of which his public debates against Christians was only the tip. In a radio interview upon the release of Hitch 22, Hitchens summed up that episode and its effect on him this way:

My father was, as you say, a lifelong Navy man, so I had this rather morose Tory in my background who was hit off brilliantly, by contrast, by my mother, who I always called Yvonne. And I call her Yvonne in my chapter, because it’s a stylish name and because she was a stylish girl.

And her story’s a tragic one and it ended tragically, in that having waited I think rather too long, because divorce and separation were extremely frowned upon in that set in those days. She did take up with another man after my brother and I had grown up, and it didn’t quite work out. In fact, it didn’t work out at all. And they made a decision to put an end to their lives and committed suicide together in Athens.

I think I had a chance to save her and failed to grasp it. She tried to call me from Athens and failed. Though I might have just missed the call by a few minutes, I don’t know. But I’ve always been certain that if she’d heard my voice, she wouldn’t have done it. So I’ve been trying to write my way out of that ever since.4

“Trying to write my way out of that ever since.” Can you imagine the pain just below that surface? Hitchens was renowned for his capacity to consume alcohol. Is it possible that self-medication for emotional pain explains more than just a preference for the taste of Johnnie Walker Black?

Unexpected and Unwanted Turns

At some point, Alex’s delight in Hitchens took a surprising detour. Hitchens condemned large numbers of people who didn’t agree with his political views (like his support of the Iraq War), always claiming a kind of moral high ground. But Alex wondered how he could do so. To word it the way Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.” And “if there’s no infinite God, then there’s no virtue either”5 and, by extension, no objective basis to condemn anything. Alex wondered what foundation Hitchens used for his moral pontifications. Suddenly his hero seemed a little full of himself.

Alex wasn’t the only one who observed this inconsistency. More and more public figures poked at what might have been a chink in Hitchens’s armor, asking, “If there is no god, on what basis do you make moral judgements about right and wrong?” Hitchens dismissively and repeatedly responded:

Morality is innate in human beings. . . . Religion didn’t create morality or make moral judgments first. People found morality within themselves and religion followed. . . . The awareness of the difference between right and wrong is innate in human beings . . . and it can be observed . . . in societies where Christianity has never yet penetrated. . . . Religion gets its morality from humans. It’s a feedback loop.6

But Hitchens’s insistence that “morality is innate” didn’t resolve things for Alex. He wrestled terribly for quite some time. He wondered: If morality is innate in people, why isn’t it innate in all people? If Christopher Hitchens is right for condemning Saddam Hussein, why didn’t that innate sense of right and wrong evolve in the many followers of Hussein? When Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, for what he deemed moral reasons, why hadn’t all his secular, liberal, fellow journalists agreed, based on their “innate” sense of right and wrong? Even more disturbing to Alex was the thought that perhaps Hitchens’s morality flowed more consistently from a theistic worldview than from an atheist one.

This did more than create intellectual headaches for Alex as he began his freshman year in college. Hitchens’s failure to consistently defend his view of ethics triggered panic attacks in Alex, along with sleeplessness and a sense that a...