Today a question is being asked concerning Christianity. Indeed many think that it is not just any question but rather the question. The question is nothing other than this, ‘is Christianity true’? To one side there are many who are raising their voice in claiming that Christianity is not true while on the other side there are people claiming that it is. The lines have been drawn between people like Harris, Dawkins and Dennett on one side and a host of Christian apologists on the other.
However this question concerning whether Christianity is true is a dangerous one for those who love Christ because its seeming innocence almost always belies a deep assumption that ought to be interrogated. In the popularised battle playing out today in the West between those who claim that Christianity is true and those who claim that it is not the latter are winning hands down (with only a couple of Pyrrhic victories being claimed by the other side). Why is this? Well it can at least partly be explained by the fact that most believers have accepted both the question and the interpretation given to it as legitimate and then attempted to answer it with a resounding‘yes'.
Yet it is very acceptance of the question, ‘is Christianity true’, that lies at the heart of why Christianity is losing the popular debate being brought to the fore by the ‘new atheists’. For there is a much more basic question that one must ask before this question can be understood properly. The question that one must ask is not, ‘is Christianity true’ (at least not yet), but rather ‘what is it that Christianity claims when it claims to be true’. To put it another way, the issue is not to attempt to ascertain, on rational or empirical grounds, whether or not the claims of Christ are true, but rather to work out what did Christ meant when he claimed to be the truth. Without asking this we end up simply embracing the commonly accepted definition of truth, we accept the rules of the game that is being played and then wonder why we are losing.
In short, let us first understand what Christ means by the word truth (which is no easy task) and then meditate upon the truth, or otherwise, of Christianity. So what is the truth of Christianity? Here I find the work of Michel Henry insightful in his phenomenological commentary on John entitled I am the Truth. The truth of Christianity is life. The implications of this are vast… I shall pick up on a few of them in my next post
