2008
I asked agnostic Jason (June 2008) if he thought a Christian revival was possible. He also understood the idea immediately but was sceptical about revival phenomena such as miracles of healing. I asked him what the church needed to do. He said: “The things any religion needs to have a revival are patience - unity and patience.”
It echoed what my old pastor had once said, ‘If you want to save souls, you will need tonnes of gentleness and tonnes of patience’.
I have a sneaking respect for agnostics. Sure, they are on the fence over the whole existence of God thing, but they sometimes take a no-nonsense approach to life. Plus, rightly or wrongly, they are trying to keep their options open. They also tend to happily keep alive the tradition of blaming God when things go wrong without feeling that they have committed some cognitive dissonance in doing so. Usually less scripturally literate than the atheist, they are still a much-misunderstood community. As I’ve mentioned to more than one of them before, ‘Blaming God is actually an act of base faith’. Your friendly agnostic is not usually going to have much trouble over-thinking why the scraping of his car window free of frost one bitter winter morning is not a good reason to blame God. And let’s face it – it’s a good reason to blame God. That frost didn’t get there for no reason and let’s bet those neighbours can afford some gadget which prevents their car windows from freezing up. Or else, their car windows are clear and free of all frost completely! That would be just like God, to single us out for a very special frosting of the windows. And this on top of everything else! It’s not what I need right now!
I find this train of thought compelling and am sometimes party to it too. It makes absolute sense at the time before people start complicating things with issues like global warming and ‘putting things into perspective’ or ‘counting your blessings ™’.
The agnostic position is, of course a spectrum – some veer closer to the idea of there being no God at all. Others are half-persuaded, but unwilling or unable to make a greater commitment.
Concerning the agnostic relationship to a Christian revival, I have found that they understand the concept, but not the specifics. There is always an opinion on God, on Jesus, on revival, on churches, on prosperity preachers and on the meaning of life or the existence or otherwise of the soul. There are various perspectives. Most will see Jesus as a good man who they really don’t want to get on the wrong side of. They will happily criticise Christians, especially those with power. Some of them, of course, barely give any thought to faith issues at all. The idea of agnostics finding a book or blog about revival as particularly compelling is not likely. The response would be ‘It’s just religion, isn’t it?’ I could say, ‘Yes, but it is so much more than that, it is concerned with issues like the meaning of life and whether God exists and miracles and issues at the core of what it means to be human’. And they would answer, ‘That’s right, religion.’ It’s a nice box to put mysteries in if you are undecided on these issues.
So, our agnostics will, of course, believe in revival. It’s hard not to, being as they are historically verifiable events. But they will doubt whether they are really from God and may see them as a form of mass hysteria or hallucination. There are so many perspectives within this one group (which encompasses so many other races and communities) that it is hard to say that there is a consistent position. If there were it might be expressed in a similar way to this:
‘If your Christian revival would make things better then why hasn’t God sent one to us? Is it because he doesn’t exist? And why is that frost only on my car windscreen?’
Of course, when I choose the frost analogy, I’m not really only talking about frost…
No comments:
Post a Comment