This House believes that Jesus is God

Fr Richard, helped by a bevy of supporters from CaSSoc, successfully proposed the motion “This House believes that Jesus is God” at the University of York Dialectical Union last night.

In defence of the motion

“This House believes Jesus is God.”

Mr President,

Thank you for the invitation to this House to propose and defend the motion that “This House believes that Jesus is God”.Thank you, also, for granting me an extravagantly generous extra five minutes in which to do it. Fifteen minutes is a most ample allocation of time for a case which theologians, churchmen and saints have had two thousand years to defend with what - it must be admitted - has been only a limited degree of success.

The most recent statistics for this country alone indicate that just under half the population believes in God at all; that figure drops to 20% when it comes to this precise motion, that Jesus is God.

It seems that the Victorian poet was right:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

So I feel like the young David going into the field against the giant Goliath armed only with a small bag of stones; or like the Dutch boy, with only my fingers to plug the hole in a dam in order to hold back the overwhelming tide of unbelief.

Thank you, Mr President, for allowing me a generous fifteen minutes to be taunted by Goliath as coming “against the giant with sticks”!

David, the House will remember from their Bible stories, declined the offer of armour, sword and helmet for the fight. “I cannot go in these,” he said, “I am not used to them.”

Thank you, too, Mr President, for inviting me to champion this motion in a contest in which - as the young David saw as he prepared to meet Goliath - the usual weapons will be of limited use. I cannot convince this House, or anyone else, that they believe that Jesus is God on the basis of clear, rational demonstration which are the standard instrument of the debating chamber and the court room; nor will I be able to convince the House by means of experiment, the preferred method of the scientist in his laboratory.

On a battlefield in which most of the combatants believe that the only rational grounds for giving assent to a proposition are reasoned argument and empirical demonstration, I must be deprived of both those weapons. Those strategies have their uses but they are inadequate for thiscase. The motion I am proposing and defending cannot be proved by such means alone. Religious faith is a more complex matter.

A Nineteenth Century Catholic writer had this to say about liberalism in religion:

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with the recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment of liberalism and that liberalism in religion is wrong.

So neither do I propose to defend this motion from a liberal point of view. I do not propose to argue that it does not much matter whether this House believes that Jesus is God in the sense that he is the origin and end of all that is, who holds all things in being, and who brings all creation to judgement; or that he is God only in the sense that he might be one’s “higher power” in some vague, but ill-defined, sense.

A defence like the second one might be made to  justify religion as a harmless (but ultimately meaningless) matter of each individual’s choice; to hold that one might defend the assertion that “Jesus is God” as something which, though it could not possibly be objectively true, may be personally helpful to some. Such a subjective defence might rescue religion for the private sphere; but to argue that religion cannot be objectively true would render it impotent in the public domain – which in some places it has, in fact, largely become.

The reason why I raise the possibility of a liberal defence of religion in this context is because it seems to me interesting that such a defence should ever have been attempted at all. Liberalism continues to be a powerful force in many churches and denominations – including my ownCatholic tradition. “By all means believe that Jesus is God if you want to and if you find it helpful”, the liberal position seems to say. “It doesn’t much matter, because religion can never be objectively true, and is really only a matter of sentiment.”

This is the intellectual equivalent of sawing off the branch upon which one is sitting. The end result of it are empty churches and the dire statistics I cited at the beginning. Some account needs to be given for why such a defence of religion was attempted at all.

Modern Philosophy since at least the time ofDescartes in the 17th Century has been obsessed with certitude. “Doubt everything,” said Descartes, “until you get absolute certainty”. It is the basis of his famous Cogito argument. The only thing of which I can be truly sure is my thinking self.  John Locke takes a similar position. For him all knowledge is derived from experience: the mind is a blank slate at birth and ideas are formed through two sources of experience, sensations from the external world and reflection on the internal operations of the mind.

This “Copernican Revolution” in thought, brought about by thinkers like Descartes and Locke, was spectacularly successful in the development of the empirical sciences, in bringing about improvements in technology, in increased productivity, and in raising the standard of living of society as a whole. It also had the effect of making the philosophy that went before it seem sterile and unproductive.

At exactly the same time as this successful intellectual revolution, the Church was faced with the most disastrous event inits history: the division brought about as a result of the Protestant Reformation.

Religious liberalism, at least in its modern form, has its origin in this troubled period of the Church’s history, when religion was faced with a crisis on two fronts, weakened and rendered less credible by internal division, and faced with an external intellectual threat.

Liberal religion was one response, an attempt to salvage something of the external elements of religion while abandoning itslife-giving essence as intellectually indefensible.

The mistake in this move is to think that the only means whereby we can give our unconditional assent to anything, the only way in which we can ever meaningfully say “I believe....” is by way of absolute rational and empirical certitude in the manner of philosophers like Descartes and Locke.

Of course this is hardly ever how we do, in fact, give our assent to propositions. Life is not like that. We frequently give our assent in the absence of absolutely clinching arguments. And it is usually in the most important questions of life that we do this.

When someone makes their wedding vows they can never be entirely sure that the other person loves them. They cannot have absolute certainty. There is no way that they can prove love with the absolute certainty expected of the scientific method or of legal process. Yet this is often exactly what religious people are expected to produce in order to be considered reasonable.

What couples getting married do rely on, what in fact we all rely on in the great decisions of life, is the convergence of probabilities. “This person is willing to give up things she enjoys doing in order to be in my company.” “She is willing to go against her parents’ wishes to be with me.” “She laughs at my jokes.” Each one might be completely false. Each might be a deception. But taken together the convergence of probabilities makes it possible for me to assert that she loves me. The individual threads of a rope may be as weak as a silken thread. Woven together that form a rope that can moor a liner.

The same 19th Century writer had this to say:

Science gives us the grounds or premisses from which religious truths are to be inferred; but it does not set about inferring them, much less does it reach the inference; - that is not its province. It brings before us phenomena, and it leaves us, if we will, to call them works of design, wisdom, or benevolence; and further still, if we will, to proceed to confess an Intelligent Creator. We have to take its facts, and to give them a meaning, and to draw our own conclusions from them. First comes Knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief. This is why Science has so little of areligious tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

The important distinction is between the need for certitude and the quest for understanding. The first is neurotic (at least outside of science and law) the second is deeply human. I know that I would not wish to marry someone who suggested putting a tracking app on my phone or who might set a private detective on me, in order to have absolute certainty about me before they are willing to say “I do”!

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed; it is the heart of a heartless world; it is the soul of soulless conditions. The writer of these words recognised the beauty and power of religion. He recognised the value of its teachings. But he went on to write: “It is the opium of the people.” Marx was sympathetic to the moral value of Christianity. He could not accept its supernatural foundations. They were, to him an illusion, and a dangerous illusion, one which had been used to deceive the poor into accepting exploitation by the rich. Marx was not entirely wrong. Yet when Marxism itself proved unable to bring about the promised Utopia, it disintegrated into a murderous dictatorship as brutal as any that had been seen before.

Nietzsche was more cynical. For him Christianity was a slave religion, privileging weakness over strength, weakening any society in which it took hold. The strong man alone has the power and the right and the will to determine the moral values of the society he rules. Nazi Germany was the end result of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

To be sure, the Christian Gospel is a beautiful idea which would, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, have been very beautiful had it ever been tried. Nevertheless, again and again, in spite of all arguments to the contrary, and all spectacular failures, and frequent hypocrisy, it is something that people come back to. It is to give some account for why this is so that I agreed to propose and defend the motion that this House believes thatJesus is God as he himself claimed to be.

We know that, in the words of St Paul, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies."

But still we long to have the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christianity confirmed and supported not by wealth, nor by force of arms, not by political manipulation, but by the sheer, absolute and irrefutable power of God. We want to believe it on the ground of a higher authority than any that can be found in this changing world.

To show that this house believes that Jesus is GodI do not think that I need to prove with rational, demonstrable certainty thatJesus is God. What I may need to do is to convince the members of this House that in loving the teaching of Jesus and accepting his divine claims, this house is made up of normal people; to prove that this house includes within it enough people who are not afraid of being thought fools for recognising that rational and empirical certitude are not the only grounds for assertions of belief; that the members of this House reach decisions, come to conclusions and give their assent, not as automata, or as machines, or as algorithms but as normal sentient beings.

In supporting the motion that “This House believes that Jesus is God”, its members will not be admitting that they are credulous; they will be proving that they are human.

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