A friend’s blog sent me to this article by an atheist who thinks Christianity is good for Africa.  I appreciate the atheist’s thoughts and observations that people seem more at peace because they were converted.  He even credits the reformed tradition that emphasizes the direct connection man can have with God specifically (see priesthood of every believer).  He also realizes that a major breakthrough must take place in one’s philosophical/spiritual framework in order to make the kind of changes that he sees in the African Christians.  The question I have is what event, fact, or experience can change someone’s worldview?  And are they really better off for believing in Christ if you are truly an atheist?

First, as a theist, or specifically a Triunist, my worldview was changed when the Holy Spirit penetrated my heart.  When this takes place, the heart is convicted of sin and pointed to Christ.  The event of Christ dying for the sin that condemns us and his resurrection is realized as the saving event of God.  It is factual in the sense that God has entered our history and became an event.  The infinite, eternal, Creator God entered the finite, temporal world by taking on the created nature of a man.  He became the great incognito as Kierkegaard called him.  The infinite God became hidden by the finite human nature he added to himself.  The Christ event alone does not “shake up” one’s philosophical/spiritual framework.  One must have the experience with the Spirit who draws us to the Son who died under Pontius Pilate and was sent by the Father. Christianity, in other words, is empirical and experiential.  Add that God has spoken his Word and given us the ability to think his thoughts after him, it is also rational.

Now, if you are an atheist, you don’t buy any of that.  You think we have made up some God to make us feel good or protected.  We may be happier–someone has stats that our sex lives are apparently better (I don’t want to know the evidence they have for this or how they got it)–but shouldn’t we be pitied because it is false hope and false happiness.  Paul makes this exact argument in I Cor 15.  If the Christ event did not happen, our experience with the Spirit is not authentic and we walk around duped when we should be getting doped!  I agree with Nietzsche wholeheartedly, save us from our superstitions.  We are to be pitied, not seen as good for offering false hope to Africa.

Now, what is the point in all this.  When I was first converted people used to say, “good for you, faith is good for everyone.”  I had no idea what they meant.  It sounded like what a parent would say to their child when they are first potty trained, “good job, everybody poops.”  Faith has become abstract and generic since the days of Schleiermacher, father of liberalism, who defined conversion as “a feeling of absolute dependence.”  “The faith” (come hear a sermon on Jude 3 this Sunday) has a definite content, subject, object, and experience.  False faith is to be pitied and someone needs to penetrate the false philosophical/spiritual framework.  As Christians, we should be more bold with the gospel.  Non-Christians, who I hear read our blog often, you should be engaging us to rid us of our superstition.  Deride and pity us, don’t cheer us on in what you consider absurdity.

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