A compelling objection sometimes raised against Christianity is that it’s merely a patchwork of ancient beliefs. Once we study the history, so these critics maintain, we quickly find that Christianity is virtually indistinguishable from the competing beliefs of other ancient cultures. This objection carries some force because even a cursory examination of historic Christianity quickly reveals striking parallels with other cultures. As we argue here, however, this observation doesn’t represent a real threat to the church but merely arises as a result of Christianity’s status as a historical religion.
One of Christianity’s distinguishing features is that it claims to be historical. The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, for instance, maintains that the Bible was written by human beings under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Yes, these writers had access to divine revelation, but they were also people of their times—family members and citizens of a particular place and time. And when they wrote, their writings came through the prisms of their own personalities. Islam, for instance, maintains that the prophet Muhammad directly transcribed a message of revelation from Allah. Hinduism’s most sacred writings pertain to the eternal, timeless dimensions of being that exist beyond the illusory confines of our tangible world. In a very real sense, the sprawling and messy details of historical circumstances are, therefore, illusory. Indeed, even the individual self ultimately proves to be an illusion in the Hindu vision of reality.
In his book The Gospel In a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin uses the phrase “the logic of election” to describe Christianity’s historical specificity. A conspicuous example would be the nation of Israel. Why is this tiny group of people chosen by God to bear His light? It could just as easily have been another group, such as the Assyrians. The logic of election means that if Christianity is to play out on an actual historical stage, it will do so in specific times and places. How could it be otherwise? If the world and all that we know are not ultimately illusory, divine interactions will necessarily come about through concrete people, times, places, and circumstances.
A further implication here is that cultural influence is inevitable and not always a bad thing. The book of Proverbs, for instance, relays wise sayings that were on display in the broader culture of the Ancient Near East. The fact that the book incorporates these popular elements and tropes of a culture is not evidence of its integrity. As Newbigin and others are quick to point out, language itself is a necessarily communal vehicle of communication. Quite simply, it’s not possible to use language without some level of cultural influence. It is “common currency,” so to speak.
The celebrated opening of John’s Gospel appropriates the trope of the “Logos,” which had a rich tradition of philosophical thought behind it in ancient Greece. Far from using this trope in a static fashion, however, John boldly declares Christ to be the culmination of this tradition. This is not an act of compromise that taints the purity of the Gospel. Rather, it represents a stunning intellectual breakthrough.
The supreme example of Christianity’s historical unfolding, however, is Jesus’s incarnation. Here once again, we see the “logic of election” at work. If God is to reveal himself in human form, it will come about through one specific person in a specific time and place. The key question here is: Was Jesus who he claimed to be? Modifying an argument from C.S. Lewis, we have four options: 1) He was a legend, 2) He was a liar, 3) He was a lunatic, and 4) He is Lord.
Let’s take these four in order. Regarding his possible status as a legendary figure, the evidence for Jesus’s actual existence is overwhelming, and very few scholars would deny that a figure named Jesus existed. To those who affirm Jesus’s existence but deny his divinity, perhaps insisting that his resurrection consisted of an elaborate hoax, it’s worth pointing to the striking accumulation of evidence in favor of the resurrection.
The fact that the Gospels report women as the first eyewitnesses is highly revealing since the testimony of a woman was not considered formally credible at the time of their authorship. If the writers wanted to fabricate an airtight hoax, they certainly wouldn’t want to feature women as key witnesses. Another arresting detail concerns the biographies of Jesus’s disciples. All of them, to a man, underwent a profound moral transformation after their time with Jesus. And most of them died as martyrs. Moreover, legends take considerable time to develop, and the full account of Jesus’s resurrection took hold and spread at such a rapid pace that this theory proves exceedingly unlikely. To date, one of the best books on this subject is Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
Was Jesus simply a liar, a conman, or a religious charlatan? The possibility is there, of course, but it’s worth pointing to the nature and lasting influence of his teachings. Put simply, the moral teachings we have from Jesus have effectively shaped not only our modern Western culture; they have effectively shaped the Western conscience. This, for instance, is the argument of Tom Holland in his magisterial history of Christianity, Dominion. According to Holland, even those who would never crack a Bible or darken the doorway of a church have nevertheless had their moral sensibilities shaped by Christ’s moral vision. Why do we default to thinking that the most vulnerable members of our society ought to be protected, for instance? It’s a position that’s by no means self-evident, and it’s certainly not evident in the pagan world of the past. If Jesus was indeed a liar, he has the odd distinction of introducing some of the most profound moral teachings known to humanity.
C.S. Lewis’s stark claims about Jesus’s identity are designed to keep us from falling prey to the tendency to see him in neutral terms—viewing him as a kind of benign moral teacher. If we take to heart his claims, however, we see that he made some astonishing statements. He claimed to be able to forgive sins (Matthew 9:10); he shocked his followers by telling them to eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:53-58); he claimed to be God (Mark 14:62). The nature of these claims is too radical to allow for a neutral response. After serious consideration, we are confronted by Christ’s question to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”
As we’ve seen, the notion that cultural influence compromises the truth of Scripture only obtains if Christianity is ultimately ahistorical and impersonal. Since this is clearly not the case, cultural influence need not derail our faith. The foremost question concerns the nature of Jesus’s identity.
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Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life in the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.