Sample 3

Introduction

The atheist Christopher Hitchens once admitted to a preacher in the back of a taxi that the best argument for the existence of God was the fine-tuning of the universe. Equations now show that this universe of quarks and stars and bosons is like what you would get if you flipped a universe a quintillion times and a quintillion times it landed heads. (The chances? Astronomically low.) If you were opening this book for a proof of the existence of God, well, there, you have it. You can look it up. The more we discover about the universe, the more it looks like it was planned with eye-popping precision. The world, it seems, was made. It’s the argument for the existence of God I might be giving if I were in a debate with Hitchens: but I’m not in the back of a taxi, and I’m also not in a tux in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union. I wonder where I really am at the moment: and honestly, I’m beginning to think that I live among people who aren’t actually all that interested in a statistical analysis of God’s existence after all. I see a generation in which people are less interested in arguments about the existence of God and more interested in having fewer arguments.

In a postmodern age, Christianity isn’t in a debating chamber. It’s not being debated: it’s simply demoted, deconstructed.

You could say that Christianity isn’t as much argued against as much as it’s being wedged out of the position of moral legitimacy – as if, it turns out, you don’t need to think about any religious codswallop anymore now that the “experts” have thoroughly associated Christianity with all the bad stuff in world history. While intellectuals used to attack Christianity in regard to its truth, our postmodern age attacks it also at its beauty (the music, literature, art, and poetry of the West is sidelined) and its goodness. Our popular view of history associates Christianity with the guilt of bad “-isms” of racism, sexism and colonialism. This history begins when the pious put Renaissance men like Galileo under house arrest, followed by the “wars of religion” and the Salem Witch Trials and the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this view of history, Christianity is a tool that people use to control other people. Good, true, and beautiful? – no, you’ve got to see through them to the raw exercise of power. Christianity has been reduced to the status of being dethroned from the position of moral legitimacy. This is the story that we live in; this is the water we swim in. The newsfeed on my phone that I didn’t install keeps sending me articles about the culture wars and preachers having affairs. All this makes me shrug.

This leads me to the point of this book.

At this moment, we don’t just need to know Christianity to be true in the sense of equations: we also need to know that it is good.

But what do we mean by “good”?

If by “good” we mean that Christianity offers us one tradition among many to lead us to kindness and inclusivity – that’s one thing – but if by “good” we mean that you didn’t create yourself, and the world looks like it has been created for a reason, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t shake the sense that everything has to do with a love costing not less than everything, but you also know that even if you give it your best shot, you don’t have what it takes to get there – now we’re talking about something much more than merely “good.” We’re looking for a Good that comes to us to remake us. In this Good we can also find our rest: because this is what we were made for, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in this.

The moment that Christianity is this kind of “good” is the moment it is, once again, the good news.

This is the reason why I have written The Epistle to the Americans. I want the good news to appear good again. And for that to happen, the first thing that we’ll have to do is to face the postmodern age we live in head-on. If I have one aim in this book, it is for Christianity to make sense to one of the most unreached people groups: ordinary Americans. Demographic surveys show that if people had to select a religious identification from a dropdown box, more Americans each year would select “None.” It’s time to start seeing them as a group of people who deserve to hear the good news spoken in their native language. These Americans don’t stay up at night worrying about sin. But they do stay up at night wrestling with the self. Isolated, uprooted, and restless, they feel within their own instability. Their self does not have what is needs: self-affirmation, self-love, self-care. But that is the problem with the self: it is inherently instable, and needs to be filled. That is why in this book, my goal is to retell the story of redemption not solely as God saving us from our sin, but saving us from ourselves. The gospel for our postmodern age is that our disease goes all the way down – not just in society, but in the self – and that God in Christ went all the way down to confront the self’s oppression. This, it turns out, is not a new gospel, but the gospel we find in the New Testament. And so while we’re told we really need to deconstruct Christianity, in the following pages, we’ll see how Christ deconstructs us.

For now, in this introduction, I only want to say one more thing. It’s probably the case that if you’ve come across Christianity from journalists and online algorithms, you’ve heard about the wolves in sheep’s clothing, and little about the sheep. From them you will rarely hear a good word about Christianity except for a regime-approved, syncretic version of it. That would not be for the first time in history. In the second century AD, rumors swirled about what the followers of Jesus were doing in secret and tales of incest and cannibalism circulated (they did claim to love one another and to eat the body of a resurrected man, so rumors naturally spread). Early Christian authors invited their readers to listen to alternative sources and to investigate the faith for themselves. In that way, I offer you this book as a different way to learn about Christianity than the cesspool of “news” in this postmodern empire. Let us now begin with an invitation lifted from one of those second-century epistles:

Start all over again, clearing away what you’ve been told – and now listen, as if you were hearing a new teaching for the first time.