faith

My wife and I saw Prince Caspian on the big screen this afternoon. It was worth a matinee, and it's cool to see the special effects team that brought the Middle Earth trilogy to life use their talents to realize a series that always been closely related, at least to me. In Narnia, as in Middle Earth, the first rule of warfare is to make sure the forest full of sentient, angry oak trees is on your side.

Aside from the slightly wooden performances from the children who play Narnia's kings and queens in exile, it was an enjoyable film that will probably ensure that the franchise makes its way to at least the fourth or fifth book. The Last Battle is unlikely to ever make it to screen due to its relatively grim and disjointed apocalypse theme, but A Horse And His Boy would still be pretty cool.

I grew up goddy. To be sure, I never reached such august heights as co-hosting an episode of the 700 Club, that’s an impossible act to follow. But I grew up deeply steeped in American Evangelical Christianity. Vacation Bible School? Check. Being on the vanguard of the home-school movement complete with science curriculum that thought Young Earth Creationism was the result of proper Bible interpretation and scientific observation? Check. Not being in the Boy Scouts but the far more obscure Christian Service Brigade? Check. Doing a post high-school Youth With a Mission “Discipleship Training School”? Check. Moving to California at age 20 and joining a safe non-denominational church out of habit? Check. Spending several years being a junior high youth group leader, in part driven by my own poor experiences in such groups? Well, now we’re heading off the checklist. We’ll also leave out the part about starting to volunteer in said role, way back when, to try and get to know a cute girl, as that transcends both religion and culture (and it also never works).

A few years back, when I had long since abandoned political conservatism but still considered myself a Christian, one of my persistent frustrations was the profoundly flawed ideological litmus tests the Christian right applied to political figures. Having married themselves to the Republican party in exchange for token gestures on pro-life issues, the Christian right accepted the assumption that Democrats (with a few exceptions) were agnostics, atheists, and anti-religious. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, supported "family values" and were considered good Christians.

Discussions in other forums spawned by my previous post seem to have boiled down to an essential question.

How do we establish the trustworthiness of Christianity's claims about Scripture in a way that multiple, contradictory claims by other faiths are not all rated as equally trustworthy?

So far, the person who started the conversation with me keeps appealing to presuppositional dodges: "If we first accept that Scripture is true..." isn't a very reassuring start to a discussion of why Scripture is trustworthy. I wouldn't normally press this particular point, but the original question was his and I'm hoping that I can salvage something out of it.

Anyone out there who has something to offer, please chime in. It's not an attempt at a sucker-punch; I'm just trying to suss out how reasonable this expectation even is.

It's been quite a while since I posted anything here, and I'm afraid that the reasons are a bit complex. There are a number of pieces I find myself wanting to put together, some of which even fit with the mission I scribbled down for the site when I started it. (A review of Franky Schaeffer's book, 'Crazy for God,' and an article exploring Francis Schaeffer's role in the birth and growth of the Christian Right are both on the table. For now I've just got a link to the MeFi thread I started on the topic...)

Most of the things that are occupying my thoughts, however, are a bit more vague and not entirely pleasant. For quite some time I've seen myself as fundamentally Christian -- someone who accepts the essential exclusive-truth-claims of Scripture. I hammer away at many aspects of Christian culture that I perceive as damaging and destructive, but I always explained this as trying to protect the essential core of Christianity.

More and more, though, I've come to the conclusion that this essential core I have been defending is not, in fact, Christianity. It's not the chewy nougat center of orthodox doctrine: it's basic human decency, a bedrock of moral and ethical care for others that I believe any decent human being needs to hold onto. One of the fundamental difficulties faced by Christians is that Scripture, when read on its own terms, contradicts many of these basic, fundamental principles.