How to Explain Your Faith: Reissue

By John Pritchard

This books addresses the fact that apologetics today needs to operate on the basis of dialogue and conversation rather than proclamation and persuasion. It will help you talk more confidently with your friends about the hope that keeps you going. And during those times when you find that you are questioning your faith, the answers and ideas here may help you come to a deeper understanding of what you really believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780281072552

John Pritchard

John Pritchard was born in Wales in 1964. His NHS career began with a summer job as a Casualty receptionist in his local hospital, after which eye-opening introduction he worked in administration and patient services. He currently helps to manage the medical unit in a large hospital in the south of England. ‘Dark Ages’ is his fourth novel.

Book preview

Part One

WHY BOTHER?

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1

Starting far enough back

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What they say

‘What’s all the fuss about religion and spirituality? Life is life. You are what you are. You do your best and enjoy it. There’s no need for this other dimension of religion.’

‘Christians go on about a spiritual journey but that makes far too many assumptions. I’m not even sure there’s a journey to go on.’

‘Religious people usually give me answers before I’ve got questions. I don’t know if I’ve got any questions anyway.’

Star quote

The Church doesn’t come into it. I just live my life as I believe I should live it, and make my decisions and hope they’re good ones, and have respect for other people. That’s it.

Londoner interviewed in a research project

Key issue

Believers and non-believers seem to live in different worlds. Believers assume too much. They think that everyone is unconsciously asking profound questions that need a ‘religious’ answer. But believers are sometimes still stuck in tired, predictable language and frozen forms of religion. These inherited expressions of faith often lack any real power to communicate to generations not brought up on the Christian story or the Church’s liturgies. Much religious language has died. Believers need to start further back.

The Church can sometimes seem like a horse-drawn wagon being pulled along on square wheels. It’s incredibly hard work for the horses. As it happens, inside the wagon is a cargo of round wheels. After struggling along for some miles one of the men driving the wagon team says: ‘Look, we’ve got round wheels in the back. Why don’t we try those?’ The result is ridicule from the rest of the crew. ‘These wheels were good enough for our parents and grandparents; we’re not going to sell our heritage down the river!’ So they struggle on, with everyone getting more and more exhausted and frustrated.

If only believers had more imagination!

What you might say

All kinds of basic human experiences have the potential to point beyond themselves. When people fall in love, for example, that intensity of relationship seems to push at the doors of something even bigger, something that love is only part of. It’s as if you’re falling into something vast and overwhelming. Some people try to make out it’s only a functional activity that’s really about sex. The same people might say that a kiss is just the coming together of two pairs of lips for the mutual transmission of microbes and carbon dioxide! But most people, when they fall in love, know they’re in much deeper emotional territory. And some people recognize the experience as a doorway to a far, forgotten land.

It’s the same with experiences of wonder. They point beyond themselves. It could be a furious sky full of storm and power. It could be standing at dawn gazing at Annapurna as sunlight strikes the awesome peaks around you (my experience). It could be listening to Beethoven’s Ninth or standing before Michelangelo’s Pietà. Or the exhilarating experience of riding a motor-bike at high speed, or of running when every part of you is humming with life. A recent survey found that feelings of awe were attached by people to a range of other, less obvious things, such as maths, being at sea, castles, flying, cemeteries, battlefields. We’re taken out of ourselves, inspired, literally in-spirited. Something beyond us seems to reach out and take hold of us.

Some of these experiences draw out of us a sense of gratitude. Feelings of full-blown thankfulness rise up within us before we have time to censor them. It could be having your finger clasped by the tiny hand of a new-born child. Or coming home after a long time away. Or watching dolphins leap out of the sea. It’s as if we’ve been given a gift and we need to thank something or someone for it. Christians call that something or someone, God.

There are times when we find that we’re looking inside ourselves and don’t know the way around! Our internal geography is more complex than we realized. Perhaps we have a bit of space on a long train journey, or we have a big decision to make, or we’re facing an emotional crisis, and one thought just leads to another. Soon we find we’re getting lost in space – inner space – and we realize that there’s as much to explore inside ourselves as there is to discover outside ourselves. And that makes us feel a little dizzy, or lonely, or maybe even a bit scared. And sometimes what we discover inside us isn’t very pleasant, and that’s quite unnerving. But as well as the dark material, what we also find inside the caverns and mountains within us is a huge spring of compassion and tenderness. Our response to the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 was a testimony to that deep mercy. Again, this natural human experience of soul-searching draws us on to a larger map. It suggests that beneath the surface in any of us lies a massive substratum of complexity, energy and imagination.

The experience of tragedy also takes us to deeper places and more stretching questions. It might be the loss of a relationship or of a loved one; a horrific natural disaster or planes flying into the World Trade Center. We might be facing our own emotional disaster or the unimaginable slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We might be staggered at the way the guards at Auschwitz listened to Mozart in the evening and turned on the gas ovens in the morning; or be unable to comprehend how a terrorist can smile as he blows himself up along with scores of innocent bystanders. All of this faces us with darkness of a profound order and we need some hefty thinking to cope with it (see chapter 10 on suffering). Religious faith doesn’t lessen the darkness but it is at least well practised in struggling with the problem. The Christian faith has the darkest of all symbols at its very heart – the crucified God. Life is both glorious and tragic on the same canvas, and Christianity doesn’t duck the ambiguity or run the other way.

All these experiences, of love and wonder, of gratitude and soul-searching and tragedy, are invitations to look deeper. They offer thresholds into a bigger world of imagination and faith. There’s no compulsion to follow that path or to see these things as questions: the exper-iences can simply be seen as incidents and accidents in the chronology of that insignificant little animal homo sapiens. But for millions of people the invitation to look deeper is quite persuasive. Dag Hammarskjöld, the first Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote: ‘I don’t know who – or what – put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Some-one – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that therefore my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.’

The heart of the matter

These deep experiences seem to point to life on a bigger map, a map that might be the most accurate and useful one we can find for the journey we all have to make. For many people, this map is called ‘faith’.

Quotes for the conversation

When the black teenager Stephen Lawrence was killed on the streets of South London, the woman who cradled him as he died murmured over and over again to him: ‘You are loved, Stephen, you are loved.’

It is love, not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world – whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Oscar Wilde in The Ideal Husband

There’s something charming and enchanting about the human spirit, in spite of our great negativity and fantastical laziness and indifference. There’s also this mysterious thing called love. We may be really crooked and awkward and corrupt, and we mess things up. But once we fall in love with somebody or an idea or an action, that love itself suddenly makes us see the world differently… It’s amazing what people do when they fall in love. We’ve got so many things inside us as part of our make-up. I think what is just needed is for those wonder elements in us to be touched, those springs of regeneration to be awoken.

Ben Okri, novelist

My eyes are almost burned by what I see. The fruit, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head … I lift an orange into the flat, filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly, I am intoxicated by the colour. Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such insignificant fruit … I want to bow before it, loving that blazing, roaring orange colour … I cannot hold the ecstasy of the moment and its passionate intensity. I am filled with a sense of love.

Brian Keenan, recounting an experience during his long imprisonment in Lebanon

One thing, truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.

Rilke, Austrian poet

For the past 80 years I’ve started each day in the same way. It’s not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and play two preludes and fugues by Bach. I can’t think of doing otherwise. It’s a sort of benediction on the house. But that’s not its only meaning for me. It’s a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with the awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

Pablo Casals, cellist

In the film Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell is asked what he will do with his life. He says: ‘I know God made me for China. But he also made me fast. And when I run I feel his pleasure.’

Story

The message in the bottle

Once upon a time there was an island where everyone seemed very content. Indeed apart from a little fishing, no-one ever left the island or even thought of doing so. The school system was basically fine, people had jobs, and they’d developed their political and community life to a pretty high standard. In particular they prided themselves on their language; they reckoned they knew how to communicate.

Nevertheless, just under the surface was something it was hard to put your finger on. A faint but pervasive dis-ease, a sense that something was missing, just out of reach. It was like a snatch of a forgotten melody, a scent of roses, a song in the night. Occasionally there was a crack in the smooth surface of life on the island and an unnamed frustration shot through and disturbed the peace. But it was quickly covered over.

One day, down on the beach, a green bottle was discovered with a piece of paper inside. An islander picked it up and read the piece of paper. ‘Help is coming,’ it said. Strange. He’d never heard that kind of language before. No-one ever needed any help on this lovely island. Nevertheless he was intrigued; it touched some level of awareness in him, but he had no name for it. He buried the message in the sand and threw the bottle away.

A few weeks later the man was walking on the beach