Faith in Christianity is beyond reason but is not contrary to it

There is plenty of evidence for Christianity, which is sometimes described as the anvil that has broken many hammers.

The short essay, ‘One Solitary Life’, reminds us of the impact of Jesus on history.

The twelve verses of Isaiah Chapter 53 accurately predicted aspects of the the death and burial of Christ.

Isaiah was written very many centuries before the birth we celebrate at Christmas.

The cosmic claims of Christ are maybe best captured in Isaiah 9:6, which forms that stirring chorus of Handel’s Messiah: ‘For unto us a child is born ... the mighty God’.

Claims like this are either bogus or true, and there can be no sitting on the fence here.

CS Lewis succinctly captures this theme: ‘Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse’.

Intelligent people often seem to pass by the evidence for Christ in the busyness of life.

Sometimes retirement, or a career break, or a life trauma of some form, draws people to carefully explore the evidence with fresh eyes and to believe it.

At a deeper level could it be the case that enlightenment rationalism, or a ‘man is the measure of all things’ worldview, blinkers some intellectuals from the truth of the gospel?

Faith is beyond reason but it is not contrary to it.

There is a tradition (expressed by Anselm and Augustine) of seeing faith as a lens that we need in order to interpret the world.

We ‘believe in order to understand’, as Augustine says, rather than understanding to believe.

With his characteristic brilliance C S Lewis summarises this idea: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’

Many of the great promises of the bible are centred on what theologians refer to as ‘the consistency’ of God.

The modern NLT translation rendering of Jeremiah 29:13 captures this beautifully: ‘If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.’

A prayer attributed to Walter Raleigh runs as follows: ‘Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves; when our dreams have become true because we dreamed too small; when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

‘Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, We have lost our thirst for the waters of life. Disturb us, Lord, to dare boldly; to venture on wider seas Where storms will show your mastery, not ours; Where in losing sight of land we shall find the stars.

‘This we ask in the name of our captain, who is Jesus Christ.’

Would a ‘freethinker’ like Brian McClinton dare to pray this prayer at the start of the 2019 year?

That all who seek find is one of the greatest promises of scripture.

Daily bible readers in Protestant Churches have found this to be true over many generations, and that is why we recognise that Jesus is the reason for the season.

James Hardy, Belfast