Redefining Christianity
Correcting Common Misrepresentations of the Faith
There seems a palpable yet uninformed distaste for Christianity, particularly among the areligious, but among those from different religious traditions and even among lukewarm or pseudo Christians as well.
I have found, when speaking to people outside the faith about Christianity, that they tend not to abstain therefrom on logical and informed bases but have, rather, put very little thought into their abstinence, seeming motivated more so by a vague feeling of unease, stigma, or implausability; I have found that, in pushing further toward the root of this feeling, I am met predominantly by parroted misrepresentations of the faith; and I have found that, when these misrepresentations are corrected and the true nature and terms of the faith are explained to them, they not only take a great deal of interest in it, but are also much more open and receptive to Christianity as a whole.
The implicit conclusion of these findings can be broadly understood through Jordan Peterson’s statement, Atheists reject God, but they don’t understand what they’re rejecting. More precisely, atheists do not reject God, but the strawmen thereof put forward by popular culture.
It is my heart in writing this, then, to help bring about the understanding that has faded so from our culture, and to help clarify the terms of Christianity so that those outside the faith may see in full what they are rejecting, and, by grace, that they may be moved by it.
Perhaps not the first, but the most foundational commonly held misconception I come across regards what we mean when we say “God.”
Most people are at least peripherally aware of the Trinity, but a stark minority understand what it is and what role it plays.
As a consequence, when someone outside the faith hears the word “God,” they think of the magical cloud man who created the world, fights the Devil, and smites wrongdoers, and it is true that we have God the Father (though conception of him is more nuanced), but the Son is also God, as is the Holy Spirit, so, while we can use “God” to refer to any of them, the word “God” itself must refer to something deeper.
So what do we mean when we say “God?”
To understand this, we need a foundational understanding of the Trinity.
The Trinity is made up of three persons
The Father
The Son
The Holy Spirit
and one essence (nature)
The essence is what we most foundationally call “God”
We can understand this through necessary and sufficient conditions:
The persons of the Trinity are each sufficient condition for God, such that if you have any of the persons, you have God
And
God is a necessary condition for the persons of the Trinity, such that you must have God if you have any of the persons
So, when we say “God,” we are generally referring to the common essence shared by the three persons, which, then, is what we must characterize if we are to “understand” God.
The divine essence is characterized in a number of ways throughout the Bible, all of which are echoed in following theological texts.
To offer an inexhaustive list, God is defined as:
Goodness (James 1:17, Summa Theologica I Q6 A3)
Beauty (Psalm 50:2, St. Augustine Confessions Book X Chapter 27)
Truth (John 14:6, De Vera Religione)
Being (Exodus 3:14, Summa Theologica I Q3)
Logos (John 1:1, On the Incarnation)
Conscience (1 Kings 19:11-13, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent)
Love (1 John 4:8, On the Trinity)
To restate, these are not qualities posessed by God, but definitions of God (the divine essence), implying both that all of these things are descriptions of the divine essense (that God is the form of these things, in Platonic terms), and, subsequently, that all of these things are different iterations of or labels for the same essence.
This means that order (logos) is good, beauty is truth, being is beatiful, order is being, etc, and that all of these, in their purest most absolute form, are God.
Accordingly, I will be using “Good” or “Goodness” (note the capitalization) to refer to the entirety of this list for the remainder of this work.
Because all worldly Good is imperfect, it can only reflect God’s essence, but if there is Goodness itself; Goodness in its purest form, we can say, then, that there is God, and so we can understand the persons of the Trinity as persons who are, all, of Goodness in its purest form.
They are each God, in that they are each wholly of the divine essence.
Though each person plays a different role, and holds a different relation to the others, each person is God. This does not mean that there are three Gods, but that there are three persons all of which bear the essence of God absolutely and so are all God, in the same way that I could say I am real, and you are real, and your spouse is real, and it does not mean that there are three different Reals, or Realnesses, but rather that there are three things that are real.
So, God is not the magical cloud man (exclusively); God is Goodness, and Beauty, and Truth, and anything else that follows from the transcendentals (the aforementioned three listed items).
Now that we understand (rudimentarily) what God is, we have the foundation needed to properly understand the next topic I see oft misrepresented: Heaven and Hell.
Heaven is commonly portrayed as the magical city in the clouds, where everything is laced in gold and we can satisfy all of our wildest whims with the snap of our fingers, and Hell, as the lake of fire and brimstone, and, while this imagery is derived from scripture, such interpretation misses the point entirely.
Heaven and Hell are, in fact, quite simply defined.
Heaven is
With God (Revelation 21:3)
and Hell is
Without God (2 Thessalonians 1:9)
To be in Heaven is to be wholly and completely in God’s presence, and to be in Hell is to be deprived wholly and completely of God’s presence.
We can contextualize this with simple syllogisms, as follows:
The reason Heaven is imagined to bear the subjects of all of our worldly desires is that our finite minds are incapable of conceiving of being in the presence of absolute transcendental Goodness, and so we substitute in worldly pleasures. It is depicted to us in terms we can understand, and, as we are finite creatures, this means reducing the infinite perfection of God to the scope of finite pleasure and fulfillment.
Likewise, the reason Hell is explained to us in terms like the “lake of fire and brimstone” is that our finite minds are incapable of conceiving of the absolute despair that would come from the abscence of transcendental (infinite) Goodness, and so the closest we can come is to depict it as the worst imaginable worldly pain and anguish.
They are not literal representations, however, but metaphorical ones, meant to help us crudely imagine the sensations or state of being of these places (which are, in themselves, more akin to states of being), which are, simply, With God, and Without God.
Try for a moment to imagine the abscence of all Goodness, and you will find it, very quickly, to be utterly inconceivable to the extend of logical incomprehensibility. This, among other justifications, validates the above.
The reason this is so incomprehensible is that all things of this world are good creations tainted by sin.
In the same way that worldly goodness is a reflection of God's essence but is not pure and absolute and so is not God itself, worldly communion with the essence of God (and the sensations and state of being consequent thereto) is a reflection of heaven but is not heaven itself as it is not a pure or absolute communion (worldly things are imperfect and, as such, there will always be some absence of God mixed in (no matter how present he feels), and Heaven is the absolute presence of God.
Likewise, unjust circumstances or being subject to evil are reflections of Hell, but are not Hell itself, because God is still there to some extent, there is an immediate silver lining or an ultimate Good that comes out of any evil, and so, though God may be less present than usual in those times, it is not the absolute absence of God (all that is good), which would constitute Hell, but is, rather, a pale reflection of it.
Continuing on this topic, let us look briefly into the pathways to Heaven and Hell, which are Truth and Sin, respectively.
Sin is generally understood to be something akin to evil doing, or to those more skeptical of the faith, things the church believes to be morally wrong, and, as with the other topics, these are both technically correct in a sense, but both conceptions leave room for misunderstanding, and, perhaps misrepresent the essence undergirding our topic as well.
Sin as “evil doing”
This definition is problematic in that it frames evil as a thing in and of itself, and, while it is true that evil is a real; objective thing, evil does not exist in and of itself, but is, rather, merely the privation of Good.
God is Being
God is Good (from these we can deduce ‘Being if and only if Good’)
All things are Good (all things necessarily have Being, and so have Goodness)
Evil is not Good (Evil does not have Goodness)
Evil is not a thing (Evil does not have Being)
Sin as “things the church believes to be morally wrong”
This definition is problematic in that it frames the moral wrongness as though it originated in the church and is subjective, when, in fact, the church believes these things to be morally wrong because they are morally wrong, as revealed through conscience and in scripture, and their valuation as morally wrong began not in the church but in the beginning, with God.
I would like to clarify that I am not affirming every moral claim made by every literal; physical church or denomination, but am, rather, using church in biblical terms to refer collectively to the true people of God.
The latter concern holds more or less the same in regard to Truth (generally referred to as Good in this context), among others which will be touched on later in this section, but it would be more pertinent than going through these concerns one by one, in gaining a deeper understanding of these concepts, to learn why “Truth” instead of “Good.”
As previously discussed, Truth is interchangeable with Goodness, Beauty, Love, and so on, and, as such, it would not be incorrect to identify the opposite of Sin as Good. The reason I choose this term in particular, thus, is not the essence it points toward, but, rather, its derivation and association with its counterpart.
“Sin” comes from the Greek ἁμαρτία, which was an archery term, meaning “to miss the mark,” mark, of course, referring to the target. Scripture holds true to this concept, adapting the term only by a shift in identification of the target from a literal material thing which is meant to be hit to a metaphysical target which is identified as the law of, and, by extension, essence of God (1 John 3:4), and which is hit or missed through the alignment, or lack thereof, respectively, of action and thought therewith.
To sin is to miss the target, and the target is alignment with the divine essence.
“Truth,” from treowþ, conveys faithfulness, reliability, and alignment with what is real or constant. This is why it was chosen in lieu of Good. While all of these things are, in fact, Good, Truth specifically refers to a rightness and steadfastness; a proper initial alignment and an adherance thereto. Such conception is expressed colloquially in the term “true as the arrow flies.”
Living Truthfully, then, can be seen as indistinguishable from living out Goodness, not only due to the unity of the two as God, but also due to our understanding that Truth is alignment with what is real or constant, and that Goodness, and not evil, is what is both real and constant.
Moral goodness is a facet of transcendental Good, Divine order (logos) is Good, logic and reality are grounded in divine order, and Truth, even in the most limited and modern terms, is alignment with logic and reality. Therefore, to live Truly is to practice moral goodness, as moral goodness is built into the system of logic and reality.
Moral law is part of reality, and so to live in alignment with reality (Truth) is to live in alignment with moral law.
Those unfamiliar with the faith misunderstand this dynamic. They tend not to have drawn the connection between Truth and morality, and, as such, believe that the two can be separated from each other, such that an action, take lying for example, could be both untrue and moral, given the right circumstances.
Herein lies, again, the significance of using Truth instead of Good in this case. Consequently of the way these terms are used in our culture, good is taken to refer to moral goodness, which is taken to be distinct from Truth, and from this it follows that when we say Good is the opposite of Sin, which is true, we mean that the opposite of living sinfully is to live in a state of perpetual politeness and unconditional acceptance, which is abjectly false as will be demonstrated in the following section, and, subsequently, that the path to Heaven is not one of Truth, purity, and righteousness, but one of the lowest-order, most superficial; proximally-oriented (particularly regarding the domain of time) generosity.
When combined with the other misunderstandings we have gone over thus far, the prototypal non-believer is left with the following framework:
We avoid Sin (evil actions / things the church believes to be morally wrong) so that God (the magical cloud man) does not get angry and send us to Hell (the lake of fire and brimstone), and we do Good (politeness and superficial generosity) so that God (cloud man) is pleased and sends us to Heaven (the magical gold laden cloud kingdom which bears the subjects of all of our worldly desires)
When, in fact
Hell is without God, God is Truth, and Sin is misalignment with Truth, so by sinning we definitionally distance ourselves from God, which consequently sends us to Hell (the ultimate state of being distanced from God)
Heaven is with God, God is reality, and Truth (Goodness) is alignment with reality, so by living Truthfully, we definitionally bring ourselves closer to God, which consequently sends us to Heaven (the ultimate closeness to God)
Every Truth brings us closer to God, and every Sin pulls us farther.
Thus, God does not vengefully condemn us for our Sin, but grants us our decision to to turn away from him (Romans 1:28).
As a point of clarification, I am not in any way affirming salvation by works. Sin is the pathway to Hell, and Truth to Heaven, it is simply that we cannot choose not to Sin, and so rather than living perfectly Truthfully ourselves, which we cannot do (Romans 3:10), we must, by faith, take on the perfect Truthfulness of Christ, who, by grace, took on the Sin of all those who believe in him (John 3:16).
“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” As such, our last topic in this work will be Love.
Most frequently, and perhaps, even, more dangerously than the others, I see Love misunderstood. In common parlains, it has come to mean something akin to acceptance, satisfaction with present state of being, or something to that effect.
Those outside the faith will often, for example, make the case that, because Jesus calls us to love all people (Matthew 5:43-44), we, as Christians, must then celebrate all people’s ways of life. Similarly, they will say "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8), from which they draw the same comclusion.
Their base claim, that we are called, as Christians, to love all people, is correct, this is indeed a core tenet of the faith, and God is indeed Love. The problem, as you may have guessed, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to love someone.
Allow me to bring onto the table another piece of scripture:
"For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth." (Proverbs 3:12)
The best secular conception of love I have come across thus far is “The best of you serves the best of them.” To love someone is not to praise them unconditionally, but to have their best interest at heart, and to act out that orientation; it is not to take them as they are, but to will that they may improve.
Universal Love, which is biblical. is often confused for Universal Acceptance, which is fundamentally non-Christian.
God’s love is likened to that of a father for His son, in whom he delights.
Imagine, for a moment, that you have a son. You love him, you care for him, and you want nothing but the best for him. Now imagine that your son has a drinking problem.
You are, then, faced with two options: you can face the discomfort of confronting him about his problem such that you can steer him in the right direction, or you can choose to let the behavior persist and stand by while your beloved son drinks away his life.
It is quite plain in this scenario that the loving thing to do is to help your son, and this is so plain, in fact, for the reason we previously discussed:
If you love someone, you want the best for them… and the best for them is not alcoholism.
This is not limited to drinking however. As we have laid out in the last two sections, Christianity teaches that what is best for someone is to be in alignment with the divine essence, which is to live in accordance with God’s law; to live out Truth.
It follows, then, that if someone is living in Sin, misalignment with the divine essence, that we are called to correct them, not in spite of but because of our love them.
"For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth.”
This is confirmed amply throughout scripture:
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:5-6)
"Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness” (Galatians 6:1)
"Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins" (James 5:19-20)
"For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?" (Hebrews 12:6-7)
"Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him" (Leviticus 19:17)
And so on…
The response to this that I see most commonly is a pivot of sorts. Rather than addressing the scripture, or the larger argument itself, those in opposition will retort with scripture of their own, citing passages like Matthew 7:1, which says “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and arguing from that basis that one should not speak out against another’s Sin.
Yet if we read even four verses further into that chapter we see that what is being condemned is not the correction of sin, but Hypocricy, which is called out by name.
There is another verse which illustrates this quite well.
"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." (John 8:11)
Everything we need to understand this concept is here. First, Christ says that he does not condemn the woman who had been found guilty of a grave sin, which shows us, as we are to follow Christ’s example, that we are not to condemn sinners.
This is, in fact, a fundamental presupposition. Within the faith, it is understood that all people necessarily Sin. This is, as you will learn through our futher exploration in later works, why we need Christ (scotist christology aside), and is also our basis for forgiveness.
By accepting the fact that you sin, you leave behind any justification for hating others for their sin.
This does not, however, make sin permissable (if it were permissable it would not be forgivable as there would be nothing to forgive), and it does not free us of our obligation to help others away from their sin.
For next, he says, “go, and sin no more.” By Christ’s example alone, we see that we are to call others out of Sin, and we see, too, that this is not judgement, as we are indeed called away from, but an exercise of Love.
In simplter terms, Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner.
Thus, Universal Acceptance, as is assumed by those less familiar with the faith, is not only distinct from the Universal Love commanded in scripture, but is antithetical to it, as to stand by while others live in Sin is to let them actively destroy the best in themselves: their alignment with the divine essence.
I have found, living in a culture that is rife with loneliness, uncertainty, and distruction; one that seeks to tear down its own foundation, and which repays its constituents for their engagement therewith by leaving them lost and confused, that the withering of faith that permiates it must, perhaps more urgently than ever, be turned back; the seedlings which have begun to wilt waiting for the sun need, at last, to be nourished, and there is no better nourishment for the soul than faith.
Even many of the world’s most prominent atheists acknowledge the personal and social utility of faith, and Nietzsche, who was staunchly critical of Christianity, predicted with stunning accuracy, the consequences that have insued from widespread secularization.
Do not misunderstand me to be suggesting faith on the basis of utility, I believe the word because it is True, and I am primely concerned that our neighbors be brought to faith so that they do not continue to turn away from it in their last moments. I do, however, mean to suggest that most if not all of the problems that fester in the modern world are directly consequent of a lack of faith, making a restoration thereof not only needed for salvation in the end, but deeply and presently needed as well.
It is our commission as Christians to steward the world, to steer the culture, and to bring others into faith.
I pray, then, that, if you are not acquainted with or open to the faith, the material we have just walked through together may help you understand in full what you are turning away from so that you might, at a minimum, be able to engage in informed discussion of the topic, that it might open your mind to the faith, and, by grace, that it may speak to you such that you may come to know the peace of the Lord,
I pray, if you are already a person of faith, that everything we have laid out may aid you in articulating the subject of your belief, and that it may help you guide others to the grace and beauty of the word,
And I pray that my faith and my heart in writing this are clear, that you may recieve all that I have put forward.
Soli Deo Gloria
"Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)
Blessings,
William J Martin-Bernat