As a child I considered myself an atheist - because my dad was - but I happened to attend a Christian school with compulsory church services. Perhaps unsurprisingly, compulsory church didn’t bring me to God, but the school chaplain - affectionately called ‘The Rev’ - reached out to me simply by caring for me, and I became interested in what it was he had that I didn’t. One Lent, when I was fourteen, I decided that I would say a couple of set prayers every day and see what happened. Nothing spectacular happened at all, only by the end of Lent I didn’t want to stop. Around then I also started to attend the non-compulsory services. These were high-speed communions on a Friday lunchtime and, looking back, they were a funny introduction to church, but these services provided me with my first Christian community, and they made me feel loved and valued in a way I hadn’t before.
On going to university I began to doubt more and more about Christianity that I had previously taken for granted. I found the number of churches and ‘types’ of Christianity unsettling. My subject, Classics, didn’t help, in that I was being taught to pull apart and question texts written at the same time, and within the same cultures, as the bible. And compulsory philosophy definitely didn’t help, making me question whether I knew anything at all. “Could you be a brain in a vat?” This essay question is hard to forget, and I still can’t prove that I’m not.
I have never recovered my teenage certainty in my faith. Today I have many standard doubts and questions - why did God allow the recent earthquakes in Nepal? - plus many which are more specific to my day job. I now myself teach Classics to university students, and my research focuses on Roman religion and their many gods: thinking about ‘dead gods’ all day can be an excellent way to wear away at your own faith!
I’ve talked a lot about doubt, and this is supposed to be a post about belief! So what do I believe? Well firstly I believe - and I know this hardly sounds like ‘good news’ - that there is a lot of suffering in this world. Much of this is caused by things outside of human control - a couple who want children but can’t conceive, a family left without a dad because of cancer. But much suffering has human causes, and not just the headline grabbing stories like the grooming of vulnerable children or trafficking of migrants, but common or garden suffering too - a marriage that falls apart because of an affair, a child who develops an eating disorder after being bullied online, an old man who only has his tv for company.
I also believe in the transforming power of love. Not the Disney kind, but the Corinthians 13 kind: love that is patient and never gives up; love which always forgives; love which doesn’t set conditions; love which always hopes. I believe that love of this kind could transform all of the above situations (which is not to say it would ‘fix’ them). In my own family life there have been situations so sad and so difficult that I know that only love like this could have made a difference. That love wasn’t there, but that doesn’t shake my conviction in how much it was needed.
My faith starts, then, from the simple act of looking at the world around me, with all its happiness, but also all its human brokenness. And I am convinced that we need something very different to our normal way of doing things. From there I am drawn to the Jesus we meet in the gospels, who embodies the kind of love I’ve talked about, and whose teachings completely overturn human norms, the way we instinctively act and expect others to act. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ has become such a commonplace of Christian teaching that it’s easy to pass over it, but what a radical and crazy idea! If we all actually did this, how unrecognisably different our world would be! What Jesus calls for us to do is so mad, so unimaginable, so radically different to what we normally do, that it seems to me that here is something which could be enough for the depths of brokenness in our world.
There are days when I struggle to believe in God, especially if I think of him as a bearded man on a throne in the sky. There are days when my heart says yes, but my brain says no, and the academic in me berates me with doubt after doubt. On many days like that I stick my head in the sand and make another cup of tea. But on other days like that I think about these beautiful and profound words:
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us.” (1 John 4:16, The Message Version)
God isn’t just loving. He is love. When I first realised this I was filled with joy, surprised by joy even, as C. S. Lewis described it. I have to keep re-realising it too, reminding myself that no-one is asking me to believe in a bearded man in the sky. Rather believing in God is believing in this radical kind of love, in its power to transform, to make broken lives new, to bring joy where there is pain and hope where there is despair. No matter how many doubts I have, my faith in that love remains firm.
On going to university I began to doubt more and more about Christianity that I had previously taken for granted. I found the number of churches and ‘types’ of Christianity unsettling. My subject, Classics, didn’t help, in that I was being taught to pull apart and question texts written at the same time, and within the same cultures, as the bible. And compulsory philosophy definitely didn’t help, making me question whether I knew anything at all. “Could you be a brain in a vat?” This essay question is hard to forget, and I still can’t prove that I’m not.
I have never recovered my teenage certainty in my faith. Today I have many standard doubts and questions - why did God allow the recent earthquakes in Nepal? - plus many which are more specific to my day job. I now myself teach Classics to university students, and my research focuses on Roman religion and their many gods: thinking about ‘dead gods’ all day can be an excellent way to wear away at your own faith!
I’ve talked a lot about doubt, and this is supposed to be a post about belief! So what do I believe? Well firstly I believe - and I know this hardly sounds like ‘good news’ - that there is a lot of suffering in this world. Much of this is caused by things outside of human control - a couple who want children but can’t conceive, a family left without a dad because of cancer. But much suffering has human causes, and not just the headline grabbing stories like the grooming of vulnerable children or trafficking of migrants, but common or garden suffering too - a marriage that falls apart because of an affair, a child who develops an eating disorder after being bullied online, an old man who only has his tv for company.
I also believe in the transforming power of love. Not the Disney kind, but the Corinthians 13 kind: love that is patient and never gives up; love which always forgives; love which doesn’t set conditions; love which always hopes. I believe that love of this kind could transform all of the above situations (which is not to say it would ‘fix’ them). In my own family life there have been situations so sad and so difficult that I know that only love like this could have made a difference. That love wasn’t there, but that doesn’t shake my conviction in how much it was needed.
My faith starts, then, from the simple act of looking at the world around me, with all its happiness, but also all its human brokenness. And I am convinced that we need something very different to our normal way of doing things. From there I am drawn to the Jesus we meet in the gospels, who embodies the kind of love I’ve talked about, and whose teachings completely overturn human norms, the way we instinctively act and expect others to act. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ has become such a commonplace of Christian teaching that it’s easy to pass over it, but what a radical and crazy idea! If we all actually did this, how unrecognisably different our world would be! What Jesus calls for us to do is so mad, so unimaginable, so radically different to what we normally do, that it seems to me that here is something which could be enough for the depths of brokenness in our world.
There are days when I struggle to believe in God, especially if I think of him as a bearded man on a throne in the sky. There are days when my heart says yes, but my brain says no, and the academic in me berates me with doubt after doubt. On many days like that I stick my head in the sand and make another cup of tea. But on other days like that I think about these beautiful and profound words:
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us.” (1 John 4:16, The Message Version)
God isn’t just loving. He is love. When I first realised this I was filled with joy, surprised by joy even, as C. S. Lewis described it. I have to keep re-realising it too, reminding myself that no-one is asking me to believe in a bearded man in the sky. Rather believing in God is believing in this radical kind of love, in its power to transform, to make broken lives new, to bring joy where there is pain and hope where there is despair. No matter how many doubts I have, my faith in that love remains firm.
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