How Can We Know?
Barnes, Fred
HOW CAN WE KNOW? AN ESSAY ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION A.N. Wilson/Atheneum/$ 10.95 Fred Barnes Given all the media jabber about a resurgence of religion and the revival of traditional values, you'd...
...It should be very easy to shrug and say that I have no intention of plunging my children into poverty or adopting the Simple Life...
...But when Wilson looks at people he knows, Christians and non-Christians, Christ's teaching takes on greater appeal...
...That comes when you actually insist on believing that Christ died, was resurrected, and is alive today...
...Wilson says he does not "find faith particularly easy...
...What's the hard part about being a Christian...
...Not that anyone minds if you attend church occasionally...
...And he admits coyness about "coming before the public" with a book on Christianity, not a novel...
...But at the same time we have been able to read the Bible with fresh eyes and to discover that if it is written by men with a much more limited knowledge of the world than our own, it nevertheless enshrines truths which are inescapably compelling to us, with our quite different minds and circumstances...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor at the New Republic...
...It is a great book and one that will be with us for a long time.or a long time...
...Well, Wilson is also a practicing Christian, and one who has worked through his doubts to achieve what I would call a mature faith...
...marriage, childbirth, or the death of a family member are the favorites here...
...And no one thinks it out of the ordinary if you turn to religious ritual and summon a priest at some crucial point in your life...
...Still, many in the public may share "the doubts and difficulties I have experienced," he writes...
...For it must entail the trust, and it might even lead on to a certainty, that Jesus is alive today...
...Why is it, the older one grows, the more topsy-turvy the wisdom of Christ appears...
...In such reveries, the Sermon on the Mount, with all its apparent reversal of common sense, seems luminously sane...
...I'm referring to C.S...
...And he is a witty, trenchant, and sometimes risque novelist...
...he tells us that the poor have-security, the mourners will be happy, the sexually deprived will be the most fulfilled...
...Nor do they have to rest their belief on the bits of evidence mustered by Christian apologists...
...Christopher Marlowe, after all, called himself a "high church unbeliever...
...What with death and gravity, how could someone rise from his tomb and soar to Heaven...
...Nor should they panic if some of the answers aren't all that reassuring...
...And there's guilt by association...
...Science, Biblical scholarship, the high-toned mutterings of various church leaders-if these don't put a dent in your commitment to Christianity, there are always the raised eyebrows of your friends to make you feel uncomfortable...
...But live a bit, and one discovers that this is not .necessarily the case at all...
...Besides, an affinity with Christian ritual puts you in impressive intellectual company...
...True, the textual crowd has found "that there are many things which our ancestors believed about the Bible which also happened to be false," Wilson writes...
...Indeed, many do, and his book will make overcoming these obstacles a good deal easier...
...The poor are blessed...
...But Christians aren't obliged to accept any particular version of the Resurrection, he adds...
...If you've heard of him at all, it's probably in connection with one of his more worldly roles...
...In light of this, I'm amazed that so many people, including myself, have been able in recent years to overcome their often profound doubts and accept Christ...
...A belief in the resurrection is not solely a matter of deciding whether one trusts the five hundred witnesses, or the stories in the Gospels...
...Wilson/Atheneum/$ 10.95 Fred Barnes Given all the media jabber about a resurgence of religion and the revival of traditional values, you'd think that being a Christian nowadays is as easy as tying your shoes...
...But what Wilson calls "the abiding power" of Christ's sermon comes when addressed not to others but to oneself...
...and yet the more it appears to be wisdom...
...The trouble, in other words, is when you are serious about your faith...
...Wilson's view is that Christians shouldn't slough off the tough questions-and he doesn't...
...For good reason, Wilson finds the Sermon on the Mount troubling...
...If the world is inverted, then the only way to see it clearly is upside down...
...He was literary editor of the Spectator, the English magazine, for a spell...
...It will "take more than a handful of textual critics, or analytic philosophers to demolish the experience of millions of men and women who, in all corners of the earth, and for nearly two thousand years, have been able to echo the excited words of the Apostle Andrew: 'We have discovered the Messiah.' " So don't buckle...
...But Christ's words do not go away as easily as that...
...It isn't...
...I think of promiscuous young women I know, their young faces already raddled with late nights, messy love affairs and too much dope and drink, and compare them with the radiant calm of some of the Christian women I know," he writes...
...I'm exaggerating, but the truth is that secular pressure against Christianity continues to mount unrelentingly...
...In place of Marlowe, you're identified with snake handlers, with those who believe that God does not hear the prayers of Jews, and with the folks who feel prayer makes medical treatment superfluous...
...Lewis, whose Mere Christianity is apologetics at its most brilliant, and Malcolm Muggeridge, who in Jesus Rediscovered argues persuasively for Christ over modern hedonism and the snares of the ego...
...He seems to be looking at life upside down...
...How has this happened...
...Not many of us have that, and even fewer can write about it as elegantly as he does in this slender volume (118 pages...
...Yet Wilson says he doesn't see "how one can be a Christian if one does not believe Christ rose from the dead, and that in an objective and absolute sense...
...Obviously, grace, spiritual hunger, and the undying appeal of Christ's message are at the root of it...
...Christmas is always a good time because churches are so nicely decorated then...
...When scholars say that the books of the New Testament were written by people without much knowledge and with an evangelical purpose in mind, that's no reason for anyone to jettison his faith, Wilson says...
...And now there is A.N...
...At first glance, Christ seems to have everything backward...
...Here I am, stuck in my mid-thirties with the responsibilities of earning a living and providing for a family," Wilson says...
...He has written a biography of Hilaire Belloc (reviewed in these pages last month by Franz M. Op-penheimer...
...It seems, by the wisdom of this world, as if he got everything the wrong way round...
...No way...
...Far more troubling than the Sermon on the Mount is the Resurrection...
...But several modern writers have also played a significant role in making Christianity attractive-necessary even-to educated, skeptical people who aren't normally drawn to something so out of fashion...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
