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The Evolution of Christianity

I have heard many attacks against Christianity. Some good, some bad. Some have been completely accepted by academia, such as the removal of miracles from the realm of possibility by David Hume. Other attacks are shallow and without thought, like Christopher Hitchens mocking the birthplace of Christ, as if such a detail is relevant when determining if Jesus was God incarnate. Yet, of all of the attacks waged against Christianity in this neo-Darwinistic, post-enlightened age in which we interpret the cosmos around us, the attackers fail to see that if they are right, if Christianity was just the latest in the evolution of religion and if there is no God, then that means Christianity is the greatest achievement of evolution, the summit of human thought—and it is just a fairytale.

The Greatest Fairytale Ever Told.

Humans have never before thought more highly of themselves. The apex, a height to which there is no higher. Somewhere along our evolutionary track birthed the pinnacle of self-worth. Stronger than the euphoria of any drug, more powerful than the sting of death, somewhere a belief (perhaps better termed, a delusion) formed unlike any other. A small unique group of people looked around at all the other religions with their pomp and their incessant chanting and their grotesque sacrifices and their never ending struggle to keep the gods happy and thought, let's make the best conceivable religion.

These people had a big idea. A great big idea. They were going to invent a god that would be above all the other gods. In fact, they were going to claim that their god created all the other gods, the good ones and the bad ones. And while on the topic of creation, these people would claim that their god was responsible for that too. As in everything in existence, he created all of it. While that sounds amazing and was sure to infuriate all the other religions that isn't even the best thing about their new god.

Their new god would love them and love them for who they are and where they are. This love was so great that they had no need for all the pomp and incessant chanting and grotesque sacrifices and the never ending struggle to just keep the gods happy. No more! Their god would never require such debilitating obstacles. Oh no, literally the opposite in fact. Their god was going to leave his pomp, surrounded by continual cries of “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD God Almighty!”

Yes, their god was going to leave his throne, which is in heaven, obviously, not like some of the pathetic gods that inhabit remote islands or some dark underworld. No, their god was going to leave heaven, the greatest place imaginable, and come to earth to dwell with them, his people. The other religions must have lost their minds with jealousy.

These upstarts would have their god living with them?! But wait, not only does he live with them, but he lives with them for the sole purpose so that he may die for them! Fundamentally, this seems logically flawed, but wait, their god is beyond super awesome. He is three, yet one.

The other religions stood jaw-dropped by the audacity, but these people didn't care. Their new god could do anything. Well, almost anything. He can do absolutely anything as long as it's good. Their god literally would be incapable of being wrong. His sole limitation would be being wrong, even at the slightest level. He would be all about love and forgiveness. He would be a suffering servant for his people who he would lovingly refer to as children. Imagine the fury these other religions must have felt.

Every religion from the beginning of time exists because we all fundamentally know something is wrong. We see it on the news, we feel it when a friend does not respond quick enough to a text. None of us, no matter how staunch an atheist we may be, needs to be convinced that something is terribly wrong. Dads missing birthdays, moms caring more for their phones than their children-who desperately just want attention. That pain, like a warning siren bellowing to all, screams in our hearts that something is wildly wrong.

And these people's delusion went to the highest of possible highs, and they fabricated the most audacious fairytale imaginable. Listen to how one of their religious text reads:

He [their god] who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 1

Another of their religious texts reads like this:

So must the Son of Man [their god] be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 2

One glimpse at this impossibly good news, and it is no wonder why the other religions of the world hated this upstart group and their god and desperately tried their best to eliminate it from the earth. But the exact people that worshiped all of those gods with their impossible standards slowly began to see in this new religion exactly what they had been yearning for with all their heart. They saw in this new god exactly what they longed for from their gods. History tells the rest; within 300 years the known world had abandoned their gods for God.

But there is an obvious reason why they left their gods. What did their new God demand of them? Another of their religious texts tells us:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. 3

It is clear by now that this is not only the greatest religion ever invented. It is the pinnacle of man's achievements. Even if a mere delusion, what could top it? Everything in our life is subject to decay and corruption, but the hope of an eternal, transcendent, yet personal and loving God is the ultimate. Not even immortality can rival this. Many of us struggle to get out of bed in the morning. The sheer thought of immortality in this world leads directly to the despair of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, but the immortality promised by God, oh, it is the literal foundation of hope. Listen to what their God tells them right before he dies for them.

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may be also. 4

It is the greatest of fairytales ever conceived, and for a brief period in our history, it was all true. Modern fairytales are but a small reflection of this, the greatest of fairytales that recounts the incredible lengths to which the Creator God was willing to pursue us, his damsels in distress. And who is the shining knight on a rescue mission? It is none other than God himself. Just days after defeating sin and death and being raised to life by the Father, Jesus leaves his small band of followers with these words:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. 5

As their story goes, their shining knight tasked them with one mission. Go and tell the world about this, the greatest story imaginable. Tell them that I love them, and I laid down my life for them so that they could come to me. Spend your life being a knight in shining armor rescuing those in distress.

Thus, it was aptly termed in Greek the euangelion, translated to English as the gospel, the "good news."

. . .

Fortunately for us, we have been rescued from such a delusion. Secular scholars now tell us that when Christianity began, it was just the latest in the evolution of religion. Thankfully, man finally learned enough about himself and the world around him to realize that gods don't exist. Our ignorant ancestors simply made them up to scare enemies, encourage the production of rain and explain the unexplainable. But stop and look at the cost of this "enlightenment."

For nearly two thousand years an idea swept across Europe. The idea that no matter your ethnicity or your language or your color or your status, the God of the entire universe called you to be joint heirs with his Son. No matter how low a person may have been in this strictly materialistic world, that lowly person believed deep down he would one day walk streets of gold.

Be it just a delusion, why would we ever want to evolve from infinite self-worth to simply cosmic chance, blind genetic mutation, and natural selection? My friends, this is not evolution, this is de-evolution, and it is at the heart of a collapsing Western world. What does a hopeful world hold onto when it has convinced itself there is nothing but a continual expulsion of energy that will one day exhaust itself and die? This is not a flippant need for a daddy in the sky. This is a real question. When one of the secular world's most prominent and prestigious proponent claims that "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,"6 where is the hope?

Of equal importance, prior to science revealing to us the ignorance of religion, why had Christianity been so brutally attacked everywhere it spread throughout the world? What in the message "Love your neighbor as yourself" 7 warrants violence or poses a threat? “Love your neighbor as your self” should be the motto of every city in the world, but instead it has faced fierce opposition from day one and the materialists cannot answer why. It is only Christianity itself that can answer this question.

The answer is that everything that it claims is true. Most especially its spiritual war. A true cosmic good versus evil, the likes to which George Lucas could not fathom. The onslaught of persecution started the moment God told an Ur of the Chaldeans to " Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. " 8 God had revealed his chosen bloodline and he demanded that it stay pure for from it he would send his Son as a ransom for many. The attacks levied at the Hebrews for the next millennia would be relentless until finally the Chosen One arrived and conquered sin and death for all eternity. The ultimate battle between good and evil. The spiritual war raged up to Christ's death; and while the resurrection signified the war had been won, the powers of darkness relentlessly still battle to this day to bring as many of us to the grave with them as they can.

Today Christ followers are not burned at the stake or fed to lions as entertainment, no we are much too sophisticated for that. Today, we merely laugh at the folly of our ignorant ancestors while we feed the never-ending God size hole in our hearts with likes and re-tweets, drugs and therapists, the car we drive, the school we attend, anything, anything to build an identity on which we can hold on to because we innately cannot accept Dawkins' "blind, pitiless indifference."

And how could we accept this indifference? We were fearfully and wonderfully made. 9 The Creator of Creation breathed his breath into us and gave us life. The narrative that convinces anyone of us that we are mere time plus chance is at direct odds with the promise that we were all created in the image of a loving and holy God who knows no length to which he is willing to go to pursue us, his children.

Know that the LORD, he is God!
        It is he who made us, and we are his;
        we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
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FOOTNOTES
  1. Philippians 2:6-8
  2. John 3:15-17
  3. Ephesians 2:4-10
  4. John 14:2-3
  5. Matthew 28:18-29
  6. Dawkins, Richard, River Out of Eden. New York City: Basic Books, 1996.
  7. Mark 12:31
  8. Genesis 12:1
  9. Psalm 139:14
  10. Psalm 100:3