Christian Faith
* , in the simplest sense of the word – i.e. faith that God is who He says He is, and that His promises, as given by and through Christ, are true - is repulsive. One cannot get around it. To do so would be dishonest. It is not then surprising that Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples that they, as he is and was, will be hated and rejected. Christians will always be the “fragrance” of Christ, but, as the Christian New Testament itself affirms, their fragrance – Christ’s fragrance – will be to many the fragrance of death.
But how is this so? How can the ‘odor’ be the smell of life to some and death to others? And why is the smell more often offensive than not?
The Christian New Testament gives us an explanation by using light imagery. Christ, “the light of the world”, came into the world. Previously, according to orthodox Christian teaching, man lived in darkness, lacking direct access to God and following the longings of his black heart. Now, since Light has shown upon man, and since light and dark can not coexist, one of two reactions must occur. Man is left with the choice of being destroyed, of having Christ shine down upon him, or he can flee, hoping to preserve his life, further into darkness.
Yet even for those who let Christ shine upon them, Christianity is at times offensive. In fact, I might go so far to suggest that anyone who has had contact with Christianity, both those who accept and reject it, have it one time or another been offended by it. The reason: it offends the self and insults our basic instincts, intuition, knowledge and wisdom.
Why is the self offended? My life experience, what little it may be, suggests to me that the self - man’s innermost parts containing his drives, desires and unconscious thoughts – hides itself from man. Because of this man is not only unaware of himself, but also can never become completely aware of himself. Is it any wonder that we only gain self-insight, often painful, through interactions with others? The other gives us access to ourselves. He or she is a verbal and physical mirror, reflecting and reacting to what we say and do. While others can help us to know our selves better, to hope to know our self completely is an impossibility.
Man has been search of his self throughout history. Countless theories and explanations have emerged but none has gained hegemony. The ancient Greek inscription, γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself), haunts us. Once a challenge, it is now a cruel mockery of our many unsuccessful attempts. Religion failed to provide man with a satisfactory answer, so he turned to philosophy. Philosophy proved equally mute, so he turned to science which led to the eventual emergence of psychology. Psychology’s theories explaining the self are numerous and perhaps the most robust attempts at doing so. But, once again, psychology has proved not to offer man one, dominant explanation of the self, but a plurality of competing models that one can easily drown in.
One of the earliest branches of modern psychology was Freudian psychoanalysis. Coincidently, one of Freud’s main ideas was that part of man is hidden from himself by himself. In early Freudian texts, Freud proposes a model of the mind divided into three parts, the conscious, pre-conscious and the unconscious (the ‘first’ topological model which was later replaced by the id, ego and super-ego model). In this model, the conscious mind is a small portion of the brain which holds only our immediate mental life – perceptions, ideas, emotions, wishes, desires and memories. The pre-conscious mind holds all that is still easily accessed by the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind holds all that is purposely and instinctively withheld from the conscious mind. This ‘repressed’ metal life holds everything that it believes to be harmful to the individual – inappropriate desires, painful memories and emotions, harmful ideas, etc. While I do not personally agree with many of the premises of psychoanalysis, this one I find interesting and useful for this discussion.
Now, what does Christianity tell us? It says that we are sinners and that our beings are positioned in a state of rebellion towards God, both consciously and unconsciously. It tells us also that, because of this state of sin, we are condemned to death.
Thus, if Christianity is true, we see why man has failed to obtain self-knowledge. It is because such knowledge is death to the self; it is, as psychoanalysis suggested, highly dangerous and must be repressed, shoved into the dark corners of the mind, hidden from the outside world, sealed within us. We also see that, as a result of this ‘repression’, when confronted with its Truth, our deepest parts are offended. They are threatened and must die a humiliating death or fight till their last breath against the Truth that desires to root it out and destroy it.
Such a reality, if it is reality, is terrible and painful to accept. To believe it is to condemn oneself – every desire and action – as proceeding from a broken self. Such knowledge, if acquired and internalized, would lead to an infinite state of despair such that life is threatened. We would desire death because we would realize that death and destruction is the only humanly conceivable way of rectifying the situation, of cleansing our self of our self.
Christianity tells us that we are to die. It gives us what it claims is a mirror of the soul, and tells us, as the ancient Greeks did, Know Thyself. Our response, if we are able to believe the mirror is not a fun-house mirror, will be despair to the point of death. Yet, this is not the end. Immediately after, quite unbelievably, (this is the moment of offense to human intuition) Christ tells us that if we let our self be ‘crucified’ (our inner self, not our physical body), then we shall be raised up again in a new self. This additional statement appears absurd. By human logic, in light of what Christianity tells us, we deserve to die and it would be unfair for us to escape our punishment. Is it not better to heroically accept our judgment and let God strike us down? No, God demands the last scrap of our human dignity. It tells us that we must lay ourselves down at Christ’s feet in faith. We must believe that death is better than our current lives, that through death we find new life, and that our instincts and intuitions (including our highly valued logic), our knowledge and wisdom (however ancient and respected) are wrong. This is, in fact, to terrible for all of us – both the believer and the unbeliever – and what makes the Christian Faith, and those who swear by it, so easy to despise and hate.
*It is unfortunate that I must begin my essay with such a problematic term. Although, perhaps foolishly, I attempt to define Christian faith in the ‘simplest sense of the word’, my definition may very well be problematic for many. Faith, a topic discussed and debated for centuries, is by no means easy to define. Ironically, this does not exclude from it being something simple - something the most foolish man or women could grasp and practice.
