Posted on 07/12/2022 1:06:05 PM PDT by Heartlander
When his atheist friends asked W. H. Auden why he jettisoned his atheism for Christianity, he said: “I believe in Jesus because he fulfills none of my dreams.”
Let that sink in for a moment.
Enter most any church today and you’ll be told the exact opposite. At the very least, the message given is that Christ will remove the hardships you have in life, and in some cases, the line delivered is that Jesus wants you rich and in perfect health from top to bottom.
Sounds pretty dreamy to me.
After all, didn’t Christ say: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest … For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt. 11:28,30). And didn’t John write, “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health” (3 John 1:2)?
Yes, they did. But maybe what Jesus meant was relief from the Law plus all the extra weight the religious leaders added to it, plus freedom from sin and its consequences. And maybe John’s words reflect a common greeting of the day for things generally going well, which is what the Greek term used for “prosper” literally means.
That being the case, let’s return to Auden’s statement about believing in Jesus because He isn’t a dreamboat. What’s that about?
Luckily, he gives us a little more clarity with his follow up statement: “He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.” What Auden means is simply this: Jesus is the God you can’t make up.
Not a copycat
There was a time when historically illiterate people asserted that Jesus was an invention of the ancient world. For example, in their book The Jesus Mysteries, authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy wrote, “Why should we consider the stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and the other pagan mystery saviors as fables, yet come across essentially the same story told in a Jewish context and believe it to be the biography of a carpenter from Bethlehem?”
Well, let’s first start with a statement from one of the best 20th century scholars on the subject, Dr. Bruce Metzger: “Today no competent scholar denies the historicity of Jesus.”
Next, it’s good to remember that Freke and Gandy’s inspiration came from now discredited writers such as the controversial figure Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) who put forward a series of widely-disputed works nearly 200 years ago arguing that Jesus never lived. His work was picked up by Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906) who followed Bauer’s extreme skepticism about the historical Jesus and went so far as to claim that Jesus never existed and was not the founder of Christianity. After Bauer and Katlhoff came James Frazer who wrote a work entitled “The Golden Bough” where he argued the theory of widespread worship of dying and rising fertility gods in various places.
However, as always happens when questionable theories meet a brutal gang of facts, their assertions have been thoroughly rejected by modern historical scholarship.
Finally, the New Testament also puts such false claims to rest with its narratives. The Bible tells us that the people of Jesus’ day didn’t think He was the same-old-same-old type of false Greek and Roman gods.
Instead we read: “‘He [Paul] seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,’— because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears; so we want to know what these things mean’”(Acts 17:18-20, emphasis mine).
This is why C. S. Lewis, who was a literature professor at Oxford and Cambridge, said: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [Gospel] text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage … or else, some unknown writer … without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic narrative two thousand years ahead of when it happened. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.”
No, Jesus was something entirely new. And that “newness” is more than most people can bear, both back then and today.
A Jesus with hard edges
When asked how Jesus differed from Buddha, Confucius, and Muhammad Auden said, “None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him’.”
What Auden is articulating is the same thing spoken of by Aristotle. Hundreds of years before Christ, Aristotle was asked what would happen if a perfect man was introduced to a society. He responded by saying the man would be killed because his beauty and goodness would painfully highlight the imperfections of everyone else.
This is the Jesus of the Bible — One with hard edges. His sinlessness eventually evoked explicit hatred or silent disgust with the vast majority of those around Him, which is why He warned, “Blessed is he who does not take offense at Me” (Matt. 11:6).
Moreover, He doesn’t seem as welcoming as some would have you believe, at least not in the extreme liberal sense. He calls us evil (Matt. 7:11), says we aren’t worthy of Him if we don’t hate everyone else by comparison (Luke 14:26), and tells those opposing Him they’re headed for Hell (Matt. 23:33).
No wonder Scripture states, “He was despised, and we did not esteem Him” (Is. 53:3) and why Auden says that our fallen hearts cry out for His crucifixion.
So, I ask you — does this sound like a God you’d make up? Hardly. As R. C. Sproul said, no one invents a God like this because He’s far too traumatizing: “For there is nothing in the universe more terrifying, more threatening to a person’s sense of security and well-being than the holiness of God … Left to ourselves, none of us would invent the God of the Bible, the being who is a threat to our sense of security more primal and more fundamental than any act of nature.”
This is why W. H. Auden believed in Jesus and said He is the opposite of what his fallen dreams could conjure up. Instead, He’s the God who is so contrary to what we’d want on our own, He has to be real.
Not sure what churches this clown has visited, but his line about “most” churches and what they teach is a fabrication.
Our Gospel of the Grace of Christ is the ONLY doctrine among all creeds, faiths, and religions in the world that offers righteousness as a gift from God.
All others require some kind of works to be righteous and worthy of their god’s acceptance. Not Christianity. In Christianity, Christ is God’s acceptance FOR US.
Thank you Jesus.
–C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
I've always liked that C.S. Lewis quote. Kinda blows a lot of modern relativists right out of the water.
I've never seen this quote before but it makes perfect sense.
One thing for sure. The moment after we close our eyes in this life they will remain closed forever in eternal sleep or we will wake up to God’s judgement.
Jesus does not arouse any sides of my being to cry "Crucify Him."
Rather, I can only shake my head and think, "Poor, deluded soul!"
Regards,
Not in my church.
📌✔
Then my response would be the same.
Almost all of the churches I have attended, and I have attended a lot, do not promote that kind of Gospel.
And I am very particular when it comes to the “quality” of what is preached.
So, and he, must be either the worst pickers of churches to attend, or are purposely, for some reason, gravitating to these type of churches.
Don’t get me wrong, its not that I am arguing that they don’t exist, but it is a flat out lie that “most” churches are teaching this type of fallacious Gospel.
As Jethro Tull has in his song on the great “Aqualung” album:
So I asked this God a question
and by way of firm reply,
He said I’m not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays
So to my old headmaster (and to anyone who cares):
before I’m through I’d like to say my prayers
I don’t believe you:
you had the whole damn thing all wrong
He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ-79fwassg
Good article. Thanks for posting.
As for the complaint about “most” churches preaching the “health and wealth” gospel, this is a classic example of making a mountain out of a mole hill. There is no doubt that some churches DO preach this. Whether it is “most” vs. “some” is not the point. To focus on this is to ignore the point of the article.
Side note and personal opinion: In my view the “health and wealth” doctrine is extraordinarily damaging. In essence it is luring in people with the hope of earthly reward. In other words, bribing people to “believe”. For the many who do not become healthy and wealthy, what next?
On this we agree.
Too often, the preachers are focused on tickling the ears of the users instead of pleasing God by preaching an unadulterated Gospel of Repentance and Faith.
There is no 80%, 90%, or even 95% Christian.
You either commit your whole life and will to God, or you can’t be saved and be called a Christian.
It is very black and white, no gray areas.
” ...it is appointed for all men once to die and after that the judgement...” Hebrews 9:27. Nobody just sleeps forever.
The fact that the New Testament tells us about Jesus isn't proof of his existence.
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