Christianity

The billionaire Elon Musk has recently been invoking Christianity as he discusses core beliefs. Raised Anglican in South Africa, young Musk got an early taste of differing religious views attending a Jewish preschool. “I was just singing ‘Hava Nagila’ one day and `Jesus, I Love You’ the next,” he jokes.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

“The answer is the easy part,” Musk said during a public event. “The question is the hard part.”

Recent tweets have included: “Jesus taught love, kindness, and forgiveness. I used to think that turning the other cheek was weak & foolish, but I was the fool for not appreciating its profound wisdom.”

And: “While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise.”

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

In August 2019, Marnus Labuschagne was drafted into the Australian Cricket Team unexpectedly as the first-ever concussion substitute in the history of international test cricket, replacing the injured Steve Smith. Labuschagne soon showed that he was no stop-gap sportsman as he quickly established his batting skills in international cricket. To date, he has scored 3767 test runs from 42 matches at the exceptional average of 54.59, placing him at number 20 on the all-time test average rankings. At present, he is the number five batsman in test cricket.

In spite of the unprecedented success, Labuschagne has earned a reputation for being a man who takes faith in Christ and prayer seriously. He has a sticker of an eagle on his bat, to highlight his favorite Bible verse, Isaiah 40:31.

In an interview for Season 2 of the documentary “The Test,” Marnus said, "Everyone knows cricket is a major part of my life, but the value of me as a person isn't in cricket - it's in my faith. I grew up with Christianity going back to when I was a kid, laying in my bed, praying every night."

He is also quoted as saying, "When I pray, I don't pray to win, just that I could perform at my best, and that all the glory will go to God, for whatever happens … win or lose." He further adds, "In the big scheme of things, what you're worth ... isn't out there on the pitch; It's internal and in Christ … Cricket is always going to be up and down. If you have (Jesus Christ as) a constant in your life, it makes life a lot easier."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Testimony; Witness - Marnus Labuschagne has clearly built his life and career on the words of Jesus - "But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matt. 6:33).

Sociologist Robert Woodberry has identified a robust statistical correlation between “conversionary Protestant” missionary activity and the democratization of a country. His conclusion: Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in non-governmental associations.

This was not a popular finding. Even the head of Woodberry’s dissertation committee warned him of the inevitable backlash: “To suggest that the missionary movement had this strong, positive influence on liberal democratization, you couldn’t think of a more unbelievable and offensive story to tell a lot of secular academics.”

But after years of extensive research, Woodberry nevertheless concluded, “Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple—if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

While Jesus didn’t tell us to go into all the world and make people literate, rich, and democratic, Woodberry’s findings illustrate the overwhelmingly positive influence of missionaries.

In the book The Faith of Elvis, Billy Stanley, half-brother of Elvis, shares poignantly of the ups and downs of Elvis’ walk with the Jesus. On a more humorous side he shared this encounter between Elvis and Sammy Davis Jr.:

It was a kind of a funny thing, and also serious in a way, but one time in Las Vegas, he was talking to Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy noticed Elvis wearing both a Star of David and a cross necklace—two things that don’t normally go together because they represent two distinct religions: Judaism and Christianity.

Sammy said, “Elvis, isn’t that kind of a contradiction?”

Elvis looked at him and said, “I don’t want to miss heaven on a technicality.”

Some people think that the claim that human equality comes from Jesus is just biased. But when the British historian Tom Holland set out to write his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, he was not a Christian. He'd always been far more attracted by the Greek and Roman gods than by the crucified hero of Christianity. But through years of research, he concluded that he, agnostic as he was, held many specifically Christian beliefs. For example, his belief in universal human equality and the need to care for the poor and oppressed.

Holland writes:

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle—as the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche had contemptuously pointed out—lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

A study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity reveals the shift in the number of Protestants in major areas of the world:

61 million Protestants in North America

67 million Protestants in Latin America now has more than North America (Led by Brazil at 35 million)

99 million Protestants in Asia (now more than Europe, led by China at 26 million)

228 million Protestants in Africa and will contain half of all Protestants world-wide by 2040 (with Nigeria at 53 million, which is second only to the United States at 56 million)

MIT professor Rosalind Picard shares how she met the Author of all knowledge:

As early as grade school, when I was a straight-A student, I identified with being smart. And I believed smart people didn’t need religion. As a result, I declared myself an atheist and dismissed people who believed in God as uneducated.

In high school, I babysat to earn money. One of my favorite families was a young couple; both the husband (a doctor) and the wife were really sharp. One night, after paying me, they invited me to church. I was stunned—people this smart actually went to church? When Sunday morning came around, I told them I had a stomachache.

Eventually, the couple tried a different tack. They said, “Going to church is not what matters most. What matters is what you believe. Have you read the Bible?” The doctor suggested starting with Proverbs. To my surprise, Proverbs was full of wisdom. I had to pause while reading and think. I then read through the entire Bible. I felt this strange sense of being spoken to. I began wondering whether there really might be a God.

During my freshman year in college, I reconnected with a friend who was a straight-A student and a star on both the basketball court and football field. I had never known anyone so smart and athletic. He then he invited me to his church.

One Sunday, the pastor got my attention when he asked, “Who is Lord of your life?” I was intrigued: I was the captain of my ship, but was it possible that God would actually be willing to lead me? In the spirit of Pascal’s wager, I decided to run an experiment, believing I had much to gain but very little to lose.

After praying, “Jesus Christ, I ask you to be Lord of my life,” my world changed dramatically. It was as if a flat, black-and-white existence suddenly turned full-color and three-dimensional. I felt joy and freedom—but also a heightened sense of responsibility and challenge.

Today, I am a professor at the top university (MIT) in my field. I work closely with people whose lives are filled with medical struggles, people whose children are not healthy. I do not have adequate answers to explain all their suffering. But I know there is a God of unfathomable greatness and love who freely enters into relationship with all who confess their sins and call upon his name.

I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arrogant fool who snubbed the greatest Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all science, mathematics, art, and everything else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, having received the most undeserved grace.

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a Pew Research report explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated—the "nones"—have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the US will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population.

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive, revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty. Others will respond to this shift with sadness, alarm, or outright fear. If you believe that your religion communicates a necessary truth about God, the universe, humanity, the purpose of life, and how we should live it—well, then a precipitous decline in that religion is an inherently horrible thing with eternal implications for millions.

Many pastors challenge their hearers to meditate on Scripture. But a teenager in France took this idea in completely wrong direction.

An article in Live Science reports that 16-year-old Adrien Locatelli, a French high school student, transcribed parts of the Hebrew Book of Genesis and the Arabic-language Quran, into DNA and injected them into his body—one text into each thigh. DNA is just a long molecule that can store information. Mostly, it stores the information living things use to go about their business. But it can be used to store just about any kind of information that can be written down.

Locatelli explained, “I did this experiment for the symbol of peace between religions and science, I think that for a religious person it can be good to inject himself his religious text.”

Locatelli said he didn’t experience any significant health problems following the procedure, though he reported some “minor inflammation” around the injection site on his left thigh for a few days.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Love God’s Word. But the correct way to get the Bible deep within us is not through sequencing and injection but by reading and studying the Bible every day.

Writer/historian John Dickson writes about a social media post that annoyed his atheist friends. It was a portion of a 1929 interview of Albert Einstein by journalist George Viereck. What annoyed them was Einstein’s admiration for a historical figure found in the New Testament Gospels.

Veireck: To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?

Einstein: As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

Veireck: You accept the historical existence of Jesus?

Einstein: Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Thesus. Thesus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus.

Dickson writes,

I literally had folks suggesting Veireck’s interview itself was a fraud, even though – as I pointed out – it was published in one of 20th-century America’s most widely read magazines. I had to dig it out of the archives and post screenshots of the relevant pages of the interview before some would believe that Einstein said such a thing … Such is the power of preference to shape what we believe!

Atheist philosopher Luc Ferry, author of the best-selling book A Brief History of Thought, credits Christianity with creating the novel idea that all people have dignity. And for him it’s rooted in Christ's resurrection. Ferry writes, “The entire originality of the Christian message resides in good news of literal immortality--resurrection, in other words and not merely of souls but of individual human bodies.”

In 2016, Harvard professor Tyler J. VanderWeele and journalist John Siniff wrote a USA Today op-ed entitled “Religion May Be a Miracle Drug.” The piece begins, “If one could conceive of a single elixir to improve the physical and mental health of millions of Americans—at no personal cost—what value would our society place on it?”

The authors go on to outline the mental and physical health benefits that are correlated with regular religious participation. For most Americans, going to church reduced mortality rates by 20-30 percent over a fifteen-year period. Research suggests that those who regularly attend services are more optimistic, have lower rates of depression, are less likely to commit suicide, have a greater purpose in life, are less likely to divorce, and are more self-controlled.

In 2009, Marilyn Sewell, the retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Oregon, interviewed Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the time. Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity or hell or a literal resurrection. Hitchens was an atheist and didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Hitchens died of cancer in December 2011 but at the time of the interview he was riding a wave of popularity from his best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This interview is especially interesting because it’s between a very popular atheist and a liberal minister. At one point in the interview the liberal minister asked Hitchens if her Christianity was any different in his opinion:

Marilyn Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Preaching Angles: Although an atheist, Christopher Hitchens recognized that the resurrection, atonement, and other theological beliefs are necessary to conservative Christianity. Hitchens and Sewell also demonstrate a postmodern disbelief or denial of the resurrection.

In a Wall Street Journal article, George Weigel gives a combination history lesson and apologetic for the Resurrection:

There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection.” They encountered one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem.

As N.T. Wright … makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from the dead …. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly.

The article mentions some of the positive secular outcomes brought to the ancient world through Christianity:

• A new dignity given to woman in contrast to the classical culture.

• A self-denying healthcare provided to plague sufferers.

• A focus on family health and growth.

• A remarkable change in worship from the Sabbath to Sunday

• A willingness to embrace death as martyrs—because they knew that death did not have the final word in the human story.

• Living as if they knew the outcome of history itself.

Weigel suggests that it's only through, what he calls the Easter Effect, that these changes make sense. The social changes that followed Good Friday occur only if they actually believed in the resurrection of Jesus.

You can find the entire article available without subscription here.

Timothy Keller in his sermon: “Jesus Vindicated: The Resurrection Makes the Future Certain, Personal, and Unimaginable”:

We should be more sympathetic to our skeptical friends. The resurrection makes Christianity the most irritating religion on the face of the earth, and the reason is because how do people decide what they believe? They decide what they believe by reading it and saying I like it or I don't like it. Over the years I've had so many people say, "Well, I could never be a Christian." I say, "Why?" "Well, there are parts of the Bible I find offensive." I remember years ago it had to do with money. In my little church in Virginia, people were often offended by what the Bible said about money. Today in New York they are much more offended by what the Bible says about sex.

I usually say, "Let me ask you a question: Are you saying because there are parts of the Bible that you don't like, that Jesus Christ couldn't have been raised from the dead?" They say, "Well, no, I guess I'm not saying that." I said, "Well, every part of the Bible is important, but would you please put the ethical teaching aside for a minute, and here's the point: If Jesus was raised from the dead, you're going to have to deal with everything in the Bible. If Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, I don't know why you're vexing yourself over that. But the fact of the matter is Paul was more offended by Christianity than you. He was killing Christians, and we don't advise that. But when he realized Jesus had been raised, it didn't matter what offended him anymore. It didn't matter, because it was true." And we have to keep that in mind. The resurrection is a paradigm-shattering historical event.