Paul

The disarming simplicity of your questions (and your own personal response) masks the profundity and reach of their implications. I note that you did not ask for comments - you were just expressing your own position. Will that preclude a response? No way!

1. How can Christ be both God and man? What better way for God to demonstrate his compassion for fallen man in a fallen world, than to come, as John Newman’s hymn had it: ‘In man, for man’?

2. Why is God so absent? One response to this question might be: Why are we so blind to his presence? One person looks at the natural world, and sees only blind, impersonal forces offering no comfort; another sees a natural world (more specifically, the heavens and skies) as declaring the glory of God - “Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” Admittedly, this is speaking of words/speech, but words/speech implies a person who is speaking, which I take to be one of the hallmarks of presence.

3. The babble of voices and conflicting claims of Christianity. Actually, the diversity of intrepetation is something that I personally find attractive. It’s only when interpretation crosses a line into denial of aspects of the story which I would take to be its core components that diversity becomes, for me, a problem.

4. The exclusivism of its claims. Yes, this is what some have called: ‘the scandal of particularity’ (I think!). One issue is that the story of Israel, and hence of Jesus, is not the story of any other faith. Another issue is that through Israel, and Jesus, God addressed more general problems to do with the world in a way that they were not addressed by other faiths. On the other hand, this is not to say that there is no truth in other faiths, or that God cannot be found within them.

5. The unimaginable vastness of the universe. But so far, despite the breathlessness of each proclamation that the most basic forms of life might exist somewhere else in the universe, hard evidence of such has failed to materialise. The burden of proof rests with those who claim that life must exist somewhere else. Meanwhile, the particular problems which arose on earth seem to be unique to the universe, and to have brought out a unique divine response and initiative.

6. Did I detect a slight edge to the phrase God ‘can sit idly by’? How do you know that God sat idly by? I can’t remember who it was, but one Jew who went through Auschwitz and survived said that God was in the concentration camps; that God was there in the Torah - which spoke to every death, whether the perpretators heard it or not. It depends on what you are looking for and how you would expect God to act. Punishment and reward may not always be the immediate signs of God’s activity that it is helpful to look for and expect.

7. That Christians have often been a force for evil in the world. Yes, and the converse is also the case.

So why do I personally believe?

I agree with Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they have found their rest in you.”

I find the biblical story, the person of Christ and the experiences of his followers today and throughout history overwhelmingly compelling, and do so whether I am in a position personally to experience the immediate benefits of the story on the level of my feelings and current experience or not. There are many areas of doubt and uncertainty, disappointment and frustration, but I do not find the source of these to reside in any shortcoming or inadequacy of God; rather I have come to see that truth remains truth whether I am the current and immediate beneficiary or not. In this, my own experiences seem to mirror many of the biblical personalities through whom the story is played out.

P.S.(Added later) I did include a narrative-theological perspective to some of these thoughts in an earlier version - mainly to prevent apoplectic splutterings about modern evangelicalism in Andrew’s capuccino coffee-cup, but it got a bit complicated - and I would have come to the same conclusions anyway - which are slightly different from Andrew’s.