All of us worship something. As the summer approaches, this becomes particularly evident as the oldest pagan God of them all – the sun god – rears his head and people rush to his temple.

Of course, even the most superficial analysis will reveal that what people are actually worshipping when they fry themselves in the sun of Malea and Faliraki in the summer – or in the tanning beds throughout the year in the case of especially devoted worshippers – is not so much the sun God as the gods of beauty and self. We are so desperate for adulation, so devoted to the pursuit of beauty, that we are prepared to serve the sun god in order to obtain the ‘golden’ blessing he offers.

The Bible calls such gods “idols”. Tim Keller has a very helpful explanation of how you can tell if you are worshipping an idol (as opposed to the God of the Bible): if the worship becomes mutually destructive, then the God you are serving is no true God but an idol that has enslaved you.

Reading an article about tanning in the Telegraph provided me with a poignant illustration of this mutually assured destruction and also helped me in the process to understand just how strong this idolatrous love of self is. In the words of Song of Songs 8:6, “…for love is as strong as death.”

The article (http://bit.ly/telegraph-tanning) speaks about girls who are addicted to tanning and were asked about what it would take for them to give up tanning beds, or at least reduce the number of hours they spend. The survey found that cancer was not as effective a deterrent as the risk of premature ageing.

There could not be a clearer example in modern culture of love being stronger than death. These girls would literally risk death for the sake of their God. The characteristic of worshipping an idol – a false God – is that the more devoted you are, the more your destruction is assured, usually by your own hand.

Idolatrous worship is an absolute guarantee of destruction

There is, however, a God, the worship of whom does not lead to mutually assured destruction. Devotion to him is a guarantee of safety; it is a relationship of mutually assured cultivation and blessing. He is a God whose slavery brings freedom, whose mastery brings redemption and whose death brings life. All those who trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus understand Song of Songs 8:6… but in a very different way to the modern worshippers of the sun God, Ra. They understand that love is as strong as death because it was love that prompted God the Father to send his Son to die in place of people who had rejected him. The sun God punishes those who worship him; the God of the Bible saves those who have rebelled against him.

We would be most naïve simply to assume that only young girls who go to tanning salons are enslaved to modern idols; all of us worship something. The question is not whether you believe in God… but what kind of God do you serve.

Why did Clegg have to backtrack on his rhetoric of ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants? Because it was so offensive to ordinary people. No one welcomes the idea of people being accepted despite breaking the law; it is patently unfair. When challenged publicly on this policy, Clegg naturally realised this and backpedalled ferociously. The current Lib Dem policy on immigration states that it is not an amnesty, but rather an ‘earned route to citizenship’.

Isn’t this precisely the offense of the gospel? The gospel speaks of GRACE. What is grace? It is essentially an amnesty; it is people being accepted despite being law-breakers. This is the highest offense to those who consider themselves ‘law-abiding’ citizens of the world. It is offensive on two levels:

1) It is unfair for God to accept law-breakers without punishing them
2) It is unfair for God to accept law-breakers when ‘the rest of us’ have been following the law all along

What we propose instead is that religion shouldn’t be based on grace, but rather on works – in other words, an earned route to citizenship of heaven. Talk to the average person in the street and you will find that the vast majority believe (even if God is nothing more than a hypothesis to them still) that God, if he exists, should accept people on the basis of works and not grace.

When it comes to God, therefore, the average person is like Nick Clegg. We want to avoid the offense of the cross – the offense of God’s amnesty through Christ’s sacrifice – and instead we want to focus on what man can do to earn his own citizenship. This seems more civilized, more acceptable to the law-abiding man.

Yet what we do not realise is that we are all illegal immigrants.

None of us are law-abiding at heart, obeying least of all God’s command to love him with all our heart, mind, strength and soul.

As Romans 3:10 reminds us, “There is no-one righteous, not even one.” If God really did treat us according to our works rather than according to an amnesty, then no one would be granted citizenship at all.

It is those who feel smug about their chances of earning their citizenship – or at least those who prefer this option – who do not understand that they are one of the very same ‘illegals’ that they themselves look down on and call for God to punish. What they – and we – desperately need is this offer of an amnesty, extended by God to us, where we can be accepted despite our legal status as law-breakers.

I cannot tell you who to vote for in this election, but I can ask you to consider the most important election of them all – the election by a loving God of undeserving rebels (us). His vote entailed sacrifice – in death and blood – as his own Son went to the Cross to pay for our amnesty… so that justice could be done and we could be accepted.

Of course I cannot agree with Wilde’s conclusions, that no external source could be the basis for the authority of the individual, “But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating.” These words point (as put perfectly by Imogen Black) “to an existentialist crisis, a man coming to realise that he has nothing but his own perceptions for truth who has made a god of himself.” Yet at the same time, despite this relativising of truth, which the Christian worldview cannot abide, I’m not sure that Wilde’s preferred vision of religion was so far removed from the kind of religion that Christ actually produced. Today I came upon this gem:

When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. (De Profundis, letter written in 1905)

If we unpack this statement, it proves to be quite revealing. Let us examine each statement in turn and compare it to the religion imagined by Jesus

1. Wilde: “I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless”
   
   Christianity: The basic prerequisite of a Christian is not someone who has accomplished something great by believing but someone who has failed to trust in God their whole life and has only come to Jesus when they realised how ‘faithless’ they really are. In Christianity, since faith is a gift given only to those who have realised just how faithless they really are, the phrase “confraternity of the faithless” is basically – and uniquely – describing true Christianity. In fact, to call Christans ‘the faithful’ is a complete misnomer; they are not the faithful, they are the faithless who have received the faith of Christ as a free gift. There is no other religious system (and in Wilde’s mind, all frameworks are religious systems, including the secular one) that resembles Wilde’s suggestion here apart from Christianity. Modern secularism is hardly a ‘confraternity’; it is rather a selection of individuals who are united less by their system than by other factors.
2. Wilde: “on an altar, on which no taper burned”
   
   Christianity: This is where it really starts to get interesting. The reason why Christianity does/should not have altars (of course this is in line with my personal unease at the presence of ‘altars’ in most Anglican/Orthodox/Catholic churches) is because the fire has already been spent. On the cross, Jesus passed through the fire of God’s judgement so that those who turn to him would not have to. The sacrifice has been offered on the altar that is the cross of Calvary. What this means is that – in stark contrast to every other religion, both secular and non, Christianity is the only religion where its followers are not in the business of the daily grind of justification. The altar and the sacrifice upon it denotes just this grind, where people are constantly engaged in the struggle to justify their existence, their actions, their place in this world. When Christ passed through that fire, he made it possible for his followers to have ‘an altar on which no taper is burned’
3. Wilde:: “a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling”
   
   Christianity: Jesus is called the great High Priest in the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. This great High Priest, before going to the cross, states, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”. Then, on the cross, he uttered a fateful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” This, more than any other, was the cry of “a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling.” On the cross, Jesus suffered the utter desolation of his soul, so that peace everlasting could come into the hearts of those who trust in him. On the cross, he gave up his peace and perfect relationship with God the Father, so that it might be given to mankind as a free gift by faith. This is the religion Christ created, a religion whose great high priest became a man in whose heart peace had no dwelling.
4. Wilde:: “might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine”
   
   Christianity: The only reason that a Christian believer has to celebrate is through the cursing of Christ, in his body, on the cross. Christ’s body – the bread he speaks of – was the most ‘unblessed bread’ in all of history, so that those who trust in him would be able to celebrate in the new creation with the blessed bodies that he won for them through the cursing of his own. The resurrection is confirmation that this was done in the power of God and that the power that warred against the body had been defeated. Similarly, the chalice of wine (symbolising God’s judgement) is empty because Jesus drank it all on the cross – every last drop. The Christian is able to celebrate because the wine he or she drinks speaks of life when it should speak of death. We deserved to drink this chalice, but Christ drank it instead; that is why the chalice is ‘in remembrance’ and always pointing to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; not our own offering to God, but that which he offered in our place.

The Wildian ‘ritual of agnosticism’, born out of the general existential crisis common to all humanity, at the final analysis is simply a yearning for the kind of religion that only Jesus Christ provides.

In the end, we see that Oscar Wilde’s desired “alternative religion for the faithless” is actually describing the Christian faith. Perhaps he realised this before he died, perhaps not. The question is: do you?

Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it seems that the only conclusion I can come to is that the premise of the film is not actually very inventive. Ironic.

So what is the premise? Gervais makes no attempt to hide the fact that the film is based on one main idea: that the stories behind religion in general and the Christian faith in particular are little more than ‘invented’ fairytales. The conclusion is that even though the reality of this world amounts to nothing more than the bare facts of science, people actually need made up stories (aka. ‘lies’) to give them hope, meaning, excitement, purpose and expectation. (Another subtext was that fat guys need this kind of world, that goes beyond the bare facts of science, or else they would have no hope of getting beautiful women – but I guess that was just part of Gervais’ brilliantly self-deprecating humour!).

In the context of the film, the ‘fairytale’ that Gervais’ character makes up which signals the advent of lying is basically a religious system concerning a place in the sky ruled by a man in the sky who can provide a hope beyond death. This is what the people buy into with the result that it creates excitement, gives him power and initially leads to a more pleasant atmosphere, although this eventually breaks down (the implication being that belief in God is not actually beneficial for society or human flourishing).

Ultimately the thing that disturbed me most about the premise of the film was not so much the thinly veiled dig at Christianity; that is not really a novelty anymore. Neither was it the fact that Gervais has typically misrepresented most of the essential facts of Christianity; ideas such as God creating the world already full of evil and suffering and Christianity as a system of works-based salvation are completely alien to the Bible yet this too was to be expected from an atheist lobby that knows only how to caricature and misrepresent Christianity…

The message that disturbed me most was rather the one which emerged out of Gervais’ own secular framework. It was the message that promoted a ‘correct’ picture of reality where there are no (ultimate) happy endings and neither is there any real and ultimate justice, as in these ‘fairy stories’. In order to comfort his dying mother, Gervais’ character invents heaven, giving her the hope of a future, a purpose for her existence and a happy ending. Even though he ‘knows’ that there is no such thing as heaven and that her death will swallow up any meaning her life ever had, he retreats to the use of made up fairytales to help her in her final hour.

There are three problems here for the secularist:

1. First of all, the surgical removal of future hope and ultimate purpose leaves the secularist with only one philosophical system to provide meaning: existentialism (whether this be hedonistic or nihilistic). Such a self-limiting worldview, while not necessarily wrong, is problematic
2. Secondly, this scenario, rather than undermining Christianity, only ends up lending credence to the plausibility of the Christian narrative. For whether they like it or not, secularism is a historical novelty and flies in the face of human experience. This world is a world of fairytale and myth… human culture has always been built on myth-based narratives. And, just so this word, ‘myth’ is not misunderstood here, anyone who has studied literature will tell you that fairytale and myth do not necessarily mean ‘unfactual stories’ but rather they are the depiction of certain realities that transcend what we see before our eyes, but that we can nonetheless sense. In other words, just as science has revealed to us that our eyes often deceive us as to the reality of the physical world (optical illusion, etc), so literature speaks of a similar dimension that is accessible to us on some level, yet not visible. Out of this dimension, every culture and society in human history has produced beautiful and fantastical myths and fairytales and all speak of ultimate happiness and ultimate justice – things which require an ultimate benefactor and an ultimate judge, basically a relationship with an ultimate being. Gervais may have written off this dimension completely, but he finds himself in the position of a numerical minority and a historical novelty. While we are not agreed as to who or what this ultimate being exactly is, humanity in general has always agreed that his hand at work in our world – and indeed in our very minds and hearts – is evident. Now one option is to shrug off this historical witness and just claim that all people before the Enlightenment were needy and ignorant. Despite the historical arrogance of such a position, it is an increasingly difficult one to hold as more people are realising that the only people denying any kind of reality beyond the bare facts of science are essentially fundamentalists and have thrown out decent scholarship in favour of diatribe and ‘religious’ rhetoric. Just note how many reviews of “The God Delusion” by secularists themselves have been dismissive and/or disparaging…
3. Thirdly, while the secularist may claim to have heard this many times before, it by no means lessens the force of this point: such a narrative as portrayal as the ‘correct version of reality’ in the film is simply not existentially satisfying. The biggest criticism (and a fair one at that) that is levelled against Christianity is that of hypocrisy – why do people who speak of love so often fail to be unloving… Behind this question is a fundamental existential concern – why should I follow something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t provide eternal love and unconditional value and ultimate meaning in my life? So why should a similar charge not be levelled at the ‘atheist paradise’? If a world needs to be built on lies in order for it to work, then why should I take it seriously? The fact of the matter is that Gervais’ atheist paradise is based on the idea that people need to be trained to see beyond the bare facts of science – this entails lying. Isn’t this exactly what Christianity teaches? Except that in the case of the Christian message, the solution is not a lie but the truth…

The fundamentalist secular gospel – that there are no ultimate happy endings – might be coherent with the facts of science. But Gervais, in pointing us to a reality beyond the bare facts of science only ends up reinforcing the plausibility of the Christian narrative.

So how does the plausibility of the Christian narrative lead to faith in the Christian God?? And I will close with this.

C.S.Lewis put it best when he wrote that in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “myth became fact”… All the myths and fairytales of human history could only ever have been seen as dim shadows and uncertain estimations of the nature and workings of the ultimate being who must be both benevolent and just. Yet in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the expectations of these myths were finally realised. The cross sees the ultimate dispensation of justice as well as the ultimate bestowal of love. Each person who trusts in this God is guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ that their relationship with the ‘man in the sky’ is assured. How? Because the ‘man in the sky’ became a man of flesh and died to redeem us and the world.

The film ends up being not very inventive at all, since the dreary, unimaginative world of bare facts is put forward as the real one and the world of myth, meaning and purpose as the false one.

The neo-secular orthodoxy today has a mantra. It goes something like this (and I’ll put it into a scene so you can picture it better). This is something I was actually viewing on YouTube yesterday. We are in a chat-show setting. Richard Dawkins has been invited as the guest of honour but there are also representatives from all the different social groups and categories. At one point, the rather tactless charismatic, pentecostal prophetess turns around to the gay-rights activist next to her and tells him politely but firmly and in no uncertain terms that his ‘lifestyle choice’ is wrong and that he certainly had a mother. Immediately (and here is the mantra), before he even considers what his response to this will be, he replies with the following words:

“I would defend Betty’s right to hold those views…”

This caveat is inserted every time an advocate of philosophical naturalism or secularism encounters someone they disagree with. I have no doubt that both the ideas and the person of Betty King were deeply objectionable – and even hateful – to Peter Tatchell since, from his point of view, they would have sounded ‘intolerably’ intolerant and bigoted. But because the greatest value for him is tolerance, he must not show his disdain and certainly not act out any of his hostility to her and her ideas.

This mantra is the best way to couch contempt in cordiality.

And he most certainly was cordial; to his credit, whatever Peter was really thinking and feeling at that moment did not come out.

But that is only as far as it goes – and this is the problem. Since there is no mechanism – and certainly no motivation – within the secular system to transform disdain into anything else, all the feelings of disdain, frustration and anger are suppressed and stifled. You have heard of repressed sexuality – well the God of secular tolerance is producing a monster of repressed disdain and anger that is potentially far more destructive. I guess the vented rage of Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest is a testimony to this (certainly Hitchens’ take is that he is fed up with having to be polite to Islamists who want to kill his values and probably him too). So the secularist is left with a great need to ‘beautify’ the disdain he or she automatically feels when they encounter objectionable views. Tolerance, after all, must be upheld in some way.

Viewed purely in human, materialist terms, secularism fails abysmally at providing any solution to inter-personal and social disharmony and hostility; it can only cover it up and keep it at bay.

Since the source and god of secular morality is man himself, there is also no hope for finding a way around this impasse. The natural impulses of man do not lead him to such counter-intuitive acts as loving his enemy and sacrificing himself (even his life) for his persecutor. Just to preempt at this point a common – and valid – objection, I would agree that the attitude and behaviour of many – if not most – evangelical Christians towards practising homosexuals historically has been clumsy and inappropriate at best and evil at worst. And this, sadly, continues to a large degree to this day. But Christians though they may be… this – most assuredly – is not the attitude of Christ. I’m sure most Christians would tell you that they are a work in progress as God works in them to change them by his power…. and any conscientious Christian I know would certainly reel in horror at being shown the reality of their behaviour in many areas – attitude towards gays being just one of these. I would want to argue, however, that intolerance towards gay people from Christians has less to do with their Christian convictions and more to do with the prevailing culture (Christians tend to be a few years behind always – they haven’t really noticed that everyone else has stopped persecuting gays). This is no excuse but I’m not trying to excuse them; rather, to direct you towards the real reason for their inappropriate and wrong behaviour, which has nothing to do with Christ and his message (the gospel).

The fact that the homosexual act itself is not part of God’s plan for creation has been used by too many Christians to excuse them of the even greater sin of failing to love their neighbour as themselves when they act in a bigoted way towards gay people.

And so we get to the heart of the issue. The reason Dr. Keller’s words are so important for us to take seriously is because they reveal the inability of the secular system to provide a solution. They do this by providing a contrast. The gospel DOES HAVE the power to produce people who genuinely do not disdain those they disagree with. Christians who persecute gays are not behaving as Christians. The model of the gospel of Jesus transforms you – counter-intuitively and inexplicably – into someone who genuinely has a change of heart and attitude towards those whose views you find reprehensible and whose acts you find to be dissolute.

The ultimate example of this, of course, is Jesus himself…

…he was someone who not only preached it but practised it, even as he prayed for the forgiveness of the Roman soldiers nailing him to a cross. This was not just some minor disagreement – it was the complete humiliation and sadistic degradation of another human being, and yet not only did Jesus not curse the people attacking him, he did not even open his mouth. Funnily enough, this was how God’s special chosen servant was described around 800 years before Jesus was born – “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” (Isaiah 53v7, The Bible). And just to say, it was certainly not for lack of power that Jesus did not resist – his resurrection put to rest that issue.

The reason he did not speak is because his sacrifice was transforming ‘disdain’ into deliverance and devotion.

It is impossible for a secularist to transform disdain into anything that is essentially different – that is genuinely conciliatory; there is nothing in their system that has the power to do this. But the death of Jesus does have this power. It tells me that my disdain for God himself – and for my fellow human beings along with it – is now on the cross with Jesus, so I am free to love genuinely and show mercy bountifully, as it has been shown to me.

I am no better than you. I was probably worse and in many/most ways still am. But I am forgiven. And this frees me to love even the person I would naturally despise and loathe. The power of Christianity gets in your face most of all (in the most gentle and intimate, albeit startling, way) when you see it bringing two people together who should be enemies and the only explanation is ‘the cross of Jesus’. Is this good news (the gospel) really worthy of rejection? Is there anything else in the world that has the power to do this? Ponder these words.