Leap of Faith

"It is often implied that belief in Christ requires a leap of faith."

The stereotypical televangelists haven't done much to encourage us that there is more to Christianity than simply having faith in faith itself.

Is believing in God just mysticism, deprived of content and contrary to rationality?  Must the intellect and knowledge be set aside in order to believe in God, making our faith irrational? Was our faith simply invented, as the atheist Sir Julian Huxley said, because man functions better if he acts as though God is there (even if he isn't)? I don't think so.

Optimistic Humanism - A True Leap of Faith

I recently read the book The God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer. (1) He argued that since the Enlightenment, when leading thinkers argued that feelings (things only true for me but which we can't be certain of, such as love, beauty, religion, prayer, etc., things they assumed irrational) should be separated from the physical world, or facts (things true for everyone, assumed to be logical and rational). This is secularism, a modern religious belief that grew out of the pride of human achievement, marginalizes God, and masquerades as science or reality. The culture of our universities in the U.S. is infiltrated with this belief.

The problem with secular humanism is that there can be no true meaning or purpose found in the impersonal, physical world alone. How can there be if man has simply risen by chance out of the primordial soup and one day will disappear back into nothingness? There is only one way, and that is to create one's own meaning and purpose...by making an irrational leap of faith! Optimistic humanism is, then, unadulterated faith despite its claims to rationality and reality. In the end, however, humanism (aka, rationalism) can only lead to despair because those things that make us human - hope of purpose and significance, love, morality, beauty, spirituality, indeed, our personalities - are by the humanists own definition irrational. Those things also rose by chance from the impersonal and are ultimately unfulfillable; they are meaningless.

However, if God exists and we are made in his image, we can have real meaning and we can have real knowledge through what God has communicated to us.

Christianity: The Most Rational of All

Christianity is realistic because it says if there is no truth, there is also no hope. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished; let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die (2). In Christianity the value of faith depends upon the object towards which the faith is directed: To the Christ who in history died upon the cross once for all, finished the work of atonement, and on the third day rose again in space and time.

This makes Christian faith open to discussion and verification. When Paul was asked whether Jesus was raised from the dead, he gave a completely non-mystical and nonreligious answer in the 21st century sense: "There are almost 500 living witnesses; go ask them!" (3) This is the faith that involves the whole man, including his reason; it does not ask for a belief into the void. (4)

Perhaps C.S. Lewis put it best:  "Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair."

Footnotes:

1. Much of this post is based on Shaeffer's book.

2. 1 Corinthians 15:13-19:  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

3. 1 Corinthians 16:3-8: For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me...

4. An excellent resource on this topic is the book The Case for Christ, written by former atheist Lee Strobel, who set out to disprove Christianity and found it to be more credible than any of the objections to it.