Let’s play a theological version of “Jeopardy!” I’m going to give you an answer. Your challenge is to provide the question. So, here goes:
Answer: This person famously wrote, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.”
Question: ?????
The list of famous atheists is long. There’s Voltaire and David Hume. Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre. More recently Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have made headlines heaping contempt on the perceived intellectual flimsiness of religion.
It’s perfectly understandable if you named one of these thinkers or some other famous sceptic. But the correct answer is a young C. S. Lewis. Yes, that C. S. Lewis. The famous Christian author. The guy who gave us The Narnia Chronicles, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and many more classics of the faith.
You may already know that Lewis converted to Christianity under the influence of his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien. And I bring up Lewis’ conversion because it helps us understand what it means to follow Jesus. For starters, we have to die. Here’s how Jesus put it:
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (Jn. 12:24-25)
We have to die to whatever we’ve been using to prop up our lives for ourselves. In other words, we have to relinquish whatever brand of atheism we’re practicing.
And you know, you don’t have to reject the existence of God to be an atheist. You can even be the most regular of regular churchgoers and still be a functional atheist.
It all comes down to betting your day-to-day life on something less than God, especially something that you can get or achieve on your own. Richard Rohr likes to talk about the three P’s: power, prestige, and possessions. Timothy Keller named sex, money, and power as our favorite idols.
We can worship idols from a church pew just as surely as we can anywhere else. As Lewis writes, “The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen.” (from Mere Christianity)
The atheism of Lewis’ early years was explicit. Intentional atheists like the young Lewis frequently portray Christians as weak. Instead of standing on our own two feet, they claim, we lean on this God stuff as a crutch.
What Lewis discovered—and what he wove throughout his Christian writings—is deceptively simple. Even when you’re standing on your own two feet, you’re still standing on something. We must always ask of ourselves two questions. What am I standing on? Is what I’m standing on sturdy enough to bear the weight of my being?
None of us is immune to functional atheism. Authentic discipleship in the contemporary world involves dying to functional atheism one day at a time, lifelong and life wide. It’s a conversion process that includes self-examination, reflection, and repentance.
Okay, so that dying stuff is pretty hard work. But there is a remarkable upside to authentic discipleship. Eternal life. Starting now.
We begin to see how things really are. As Lewis once wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (from “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory)
When we believe in the manger, the cross, and the empty tomb, we see through the illusion that celebrity or wealth or status will make our lives worth living. We are relieved of the burden of earning love or getting applause with our achievements. We were created by love for love. And that love is inexhaustible and relentless. That’s how things really are. Full stop.
I heard that phrase somewhere and like it myself. Can't remember who used it, though.
As always, a great reflection. It brought to mind an old hymn whose words rang out to me. "...On Christ the Solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand." Enough said.