Under Thirty Page CAN I BE A CHRISTIAN ?-II
By DR. EDWYN BEVAN
[The writer of last week's article on this page took as text a passage from an article which Dr. Edwyn Bevan contributed to " The Spectator " a few weeks ago. Dr. Bevan has been asked to reply] ALTHOUGH I can make no pretence of being "under thirty," being, if the truth must be told, over sixty-eight, the Editor has invited me to comment on the article published in last week's Spectator, because the writer began by taking a sentence from an article of mine to illustrate the t nr2asonable- ness, as it seemed to her, of Christian belief. The first thing that strikes me is how odd it is that anyone should find in my statement anything to startle or surprise. You may think it an illusion from which a large number of people suffer, that the living Christ is continually through His Spirit in contact with the minds of men, but that this, as a matter of fact, has been the belief of the Christian community for over 1900 years is so much a matter of common knowledge that one would expect any statement of the fact to excite no more surprise than the statement that Hindus believe in reincarna- tion or Mohammedans in the infallibility of the Koran. Perhaps what really surprised the writer was not so much my referring to the existence of the belief, as a plain fact of the existing world, as my implying that I myself shared the belief. But why should this surprise ? There are lots of people wiser and more learned than I am who share it, and one would have thought that any who has lived in present-day Europe, even for thirty years, would have grown accustomed to this, too, as a fact of the world, even if they think it a fact which a • more reasonable world would have got rid of.
When the writer calls the belief " meaningless," that seems to me a misuse of language, because by this term she appears to convey only that she does not believe it herself, and does not see how it can be proved by scientific expel i nent. But " meaningless " and " untrue " and " not demonstrable " have different connotations, and it is a pity that we should not keep different terms for different things. I do not share the Hindu belief in reincarnation or the Mohammedan belief in the infallibility of the Koran ; but I should think it in- correct to call either belief meaningless. And this is not merely a verbal quibble, because by confounding these terms you may deceive yourself, and perhaps others, as to the real state of the case. If a proposition is meaningless, you need make no further enquiry whether it is demonstrable or true ; you dispose of it straight away, and therefore by calling an affirmation meaningless which is not meaningless you can save yourself the trouble of considering the grounds on which it is believed or denied.
An undeniable fact of the world is that the belief which the writer calls meaningless is still held, now in the twentieth century; by many people who, judged by any objective test, stand as high as any members of the community for grasp of philosophical thought or knowledge of Natural Science, of anthropology, of history, of literature, or for competence practical men of affairs. It is also true that the belief is rejected by many other people who stand equally high in those respects. This shows that no degree of eminence in modern learning and intellectual ability can ensure either that a man accepts or that he rejects the Christian faith. There must be some ground for its acceptance or rejection which cannot be put in a demonstrative argument such that every well-informed 'person must recognise its co- gency. One is struck sometimes by the extent to which different sets of people carry on their thinking in different compart- ments, like a number of different conversations going on in different rooms. When some one strays from One room into another and intervenes in the middle of a conversation his observations are often inapposite because he has not heard what was said before he came into the room. On the subject of the philosophical implications of the Christian faith or of religion generally an immense deal of discourse and argument has been carried on during the last hundred years by thinkers of various degrees of ability : I should judge that the writer of the article had never had occasion to follow the discussions which have gone on about questions on- which she has started afresh in her individual thinking. " To be asked," she says,-" to believe a mystery, to take something on faith, to accept the unverifiable seems to me nothing less than an insult." She has evidently no knowledge how many questions involved here have been -the subject of long debate, or in what way Christian thinkers have presented the grounds of belief.
The pre-supposition of her argument is that we must believe nothing which cannot be demonstrated as a physical fact can be by the methods of Natural Science. But it has been repeatedly shown that this pre-supposition is incom- patible with the conditions of human life. There is such a thing, for instance, as a " moral certainty " : a man does not believe in the innocence of a friend, accused of some misdeed, because .his friend's innocence has been proved by ocular demonstration. If we were merely spectators of the universe, to confine our belief to what was scientifically demonstrable might be possible ; but we are also, by our actions, makers of new reality, and, as agents, we must, whether we like it or not, whether we are Christians or atheists or agnostics, act on suppositions which cannot be proved by the methods of science. A Christian who believes that behind phenomena is a personal (or supra-personal) Power that loves men and cares for spiritual values, chooses to live by a hypothesis he cannot prove (though he may have a moral certainty), but equally an agnostic who chooses to live by the hypothesis that behind phenomena is only a blank runs the risk of being mistaken and of being confronted by God in the end. All action is a venture beyond what can be scientifically demons- trated.
What leads any individual to accept as true one hypothesis about the Ground of the Universe rather than another is rarely, if ever, an argument which can be stated in five minutes. It is rather acquaintance with different views of the universe as wholes, as held by actual people he knows : a conviction springs up in him, which he cannot completely explain : " That must be the truth." Thus all that I could suggest to anyone who wanted to know the ground of the Christian faith is that they should acquaint themselves with the way in which those who are both Christians and competent thinkers interpret the universe. To make a beginning I might suggest a consideration of Professor A. E. Taylor's chapter in Essays Catholic and Critical (S.P.C.K.), or the chapter he contributes to the recent volume called The Recall to Religion (Eyre and Spottiswoode). But someone may say : " I am thoroUghly acquainted with -What Christian thinkers of all schools, Anglican, Roman, Presbyterian, &c., have said, and the conviction that Christianity is true has never sprung up in me. If you_ say it is just a matter of Divine Grace whether a man gets the con- viction or not,. how unfair of God to leaveso many people without. it ! " My answer to that would be that, it Christianity is true, then anyone who is loyal in action to the highest values, as he sees them, is to that extent responding in faith, even if he- is an atheist in belief, to what has been revealed to him of the Divine, and such response will, sooner or later, beyond this life if not here, pass into the Vision of God.
Previous page
