A Short Response to Matthew Adelstein’s “Why I’m Not a Christian”

There is so much I want to say about Matthew Adelstein’s intrepid and worthy essay. But the more I think about it, the more I see there’s one thing to point out above all else: He does not answer the question implied by his title.

A more accurate title would be, “Why I Do Not Have an Especially High Credence in Christianity”. But having a high credence in Christianity is not the same thing as being a Christian.

What is it to be a Christian? It is to take up the Christian life in faith. And doing that does not require an especially high credence. Someone can faithfully take up the Christian life even while the creeds are awash in uncertainty for him.

I am well aware that some would reject this because they defend a “doxastic view” of faith. I won’t attempt a refutation of that view here. But a good place to start is a little essay by Dan Howard Snyder and Dan McKaughan, “The Fellowship of the Ninth Hour.” Better yet, read Tennyson’s In Memoriam.

For my part, I think that one can reasonably take up the Christian life from a place of hope. One can hope that God so loved the world he sent his only begotten Son. One can hope that, not only does God save the world, he rolls up his sleeves and enters our suffering in order to save it. And one can hope that in the fullness of eschatological time God will wipe away every tear.

If we start with Christian hope, we can go further still. We can allow that hope to grip our affections and fill our imaginations. And in that case, it might make sense to endeavor to live in light of that hope, by finding other like-minded hopers, or by seeking to ritually and symbolically align ourselves with the hoped-for prospect—in a word, by going to mass and praying the psalms. And we will not know why Matthew Adelstein is not a Christian until we know why he thinks it makes little sense to cherish such hopes as these and to wrap our lives around them.

Here, then, is the issue as I see it. Suppose we are already theists, and we want to know, not whether we should think Christian theism is true, but whether we should be Christians. To answer this, we need to think about two things.

The first is the comparative hopeworthiness of the major theistic options. This will factor in both our total evidence for specific creeds plus an evaluation of their desirability. The rationality of hope generally depends on some interaction between those two things—both the plausibility and the goodness of the hoped-for prospect.

Now, Adelstein gives us considerations that, he thinks, should lower our credence in the Christian creeds. Alright, but does he think those considerations positively rule them out? As long as they might be true, they might remain worthy of hope. Whether they are worthy of hope will depend on just how good and beautiful they are. Perhaps it will also depend on what we might hope for instead.

To illustrate, suppose as non-religious theists we wonder, Why should I hope Christianity is true rather than Islam? If I am right, then we need to ask value questions about their comparative theologies. For instance, is there good reason to want God to be three-persons enacting their love for each other from eternity rather than one person merely disposed to love should persons come along? To want Christ to be God incarnate saving the world by entering it? To want the cosmos to be somewhere God has been, so that the sun shining on our faces now once shined on the face of God? (Well, you can see how I would answer those questions from the biased way that I have asked them!)

But that is only the first thing we need to think about, if we want to think philosophically about whether we should be Christians—the rationality of Christian hope. Taking up the Christian life is a further step. So the second thing we need to think about is the rationality of living as a Christian in light of that hope.

This will no doubt include some person-relative factors. The Christian life will be costly in different ways to different people. At the same time, the Christian life promises many benefits, assuming you can find a decent church. (Can you? For what it’s worth, I have been able to find one wherever I have lived in the US.)

Indeed, at its best, the Christian life offers us a great deal. It offers us rituals to structure our sense of time; an expansive community governed by norms of love and openness but held together by a fixed conception of the sacred; shared spiritual disciplines for personal growth; healthy ways of dealing with moral transgression, our own and others'; a meaningful way of interpreting, in a word, the painfulness of beauty, that sweet unbearable ache that we feel when we are hiking the range or watching the horses in pasture; the hope of a life to come in which things are finally set right for sufferers of the world’s worst evils; and, beyond all this, practices of worship and prayer that make room for encountering God’s love even while we remain uncertain of his reality.

Granted, many of these practical benefits can be found in other religious traditions as well. If you are torn between Christianity and Islam—if both seem equally plausible and equally beautiful to you—then I have not given you much reason for taking up the Christian rather than the muslim life. But my point here is to locate the question we need to answer. Actually answering it takes more. It takes a monograph. Or—my preference—a conversation around the firepit with our Christian and Muslim friends and whoever else wants to join.

In brief, if someone wants to tell me why he is not a Christian, it will not be enough to explain why his confidence in the Nicene creed is lowish to middling. That can only be part of the story. The other part is answering: Why not be gripped by the Christian hope? And, if you are so gripped, why not take up the Christian life? But this may well be the point at which philosophy leaves off and autobiography begins. And that should hardly surprise us. Naturally, our sense of our life’s narrative will shape what kind of future we find intelligible for ourselves. And the question of whether to be a Christian just is a question, put to ourselves, about whether a certain kind of future can be ours.

Monument to Tennyson, Isle of Wight