Sunday 1st September 2024
For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.
It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions,
and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age …
Titus 2:11-12 (NIV)
Real Christianity
My brother sent me a recent article from The New Statesman by Madeleine Davies, with the title: The rise of cultural Christianity: Why religion is thriving in a non-believing age.*
Apparently “a YouGov poll in 2020 found that, even among those who identified as Christian, nearly half said that they didn‘t believe in God or a higher transcendent power.”
Yet historian Tom Holland is one among a growing number of voices arguing that we cannot understand western culture and civilisation without appreciating the influence of Christianity on it, and that the Christianity which has had that influence is fundamentally supernatural.
He points out that the values we take for granted, such as the fundamental equality of all people, “come from believing in mad things, that there is a God who created all human beings equally, gave them an inherent dignity because they‘re created in God‘s image. You know, it comes from the belief that these were taught by a guy who got nailed to a cross and then rose from the dead and offers the promise of eternal glory in life. These are obviously, objectively to a rationalist perspective, mad things. But the madness is precisely what makes them so powerful and has made them so powerful … People want the supernatural, they want the strange, they want what they don‘t get out of a Labour Party manifesto.” (And presumably he would say the same of other political manifestos).
Now, we might want to add that we should not simply give people the supernatural and the strange because that is what they want, but because it is true, and also because it is powerful. But surely Holland and others like him are on to something. This is the only message which has the power to transform lives for the better and for ever – what CS Lewis famously called the message of ‘Mere Christianity.’
It is only the grace of God as found in Christ and his coming that will enable us to say ‘No’ to the worldliness that comes so naturally to us and to say ‘Yes’ instead to the godliness and other-person-centredness that comes from another world. And it is only because the grace of God has actually appeared in time and space that we can be taught by it. That should help to give us confidence to make sure that others hear this message, and also to increase our own desire to keep hearing it ourselves.
Lord, we need your grace more than we know. Give us grace to receive your grace, to be taught by it, and to teach it to others. Amen.
Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)
* You can read the full article here: https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2024/08/the-rise-of-cultural-christianity?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb