Men Without Chests

Modern Christianity seems to have lost something, even as we have gained something else. My dad remarked a couple days ago that we tend to think we're in a wrestling match, when we're really in a beauty pageant. Recently, Christianity—especially Protestantism, in my experience—has put great emphasis on proving Christianity through logic, showing how it is necessary that God exist and even that he be three persons in one God, how it was necessary that Christ come to die to save us from our sins, etc. (Don't get me wrong; this isn't new. I first started seriously thinking about this while reading Aquinas and the other Scholastics from ~800 years ago. But it seems to be getting more prevalent recently.) We go into debates with leading atheists and prove them wrong and ourselves right. And then we wonder why not everyone is turning to Christianity.

I'd like to suggest that not everyone is turning to Christianity because, as my dad said, we're actually in a beauty pageant. People may be completely convinced of the strict rational truth of the Christian faith, but we aren't presenting it in such a way that they'll want to believe in it. We have forgotten that people are whole people, not just brains. As C. S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, about a different subject at the time but in a way which is very applicable here, many modern Christians have become "men without chests." And, unfortunately, I would have to say with him that "it is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so." We have lost our hearts for the sake of our heads.

Atheism, on the other hand, is, I am convinced, logically inconsistent. There are many holes in it; but the way it is presented, people want to believe in it, at least in opposition to Christianity. We have done such a bad job of making Christianity attractive that people don't want to believe in it even when it makes more "sense" than anything else out there. In fact, we have almost made it deliberately unattractive. Christianity has ended up like a warehouse or a parking structure: perfectly functional, very useful, doing what we need it to do, but so ugly that no one would ever want to live there. Atheism, on the other hand, is like a building that is beautiful but horribly unsafe, that will ultimately kill us if we live in it, but which is so much better than the other alternative that we can't imagine choosing anything else.

We need a third option. The ancient Church, I think, was both beautiful AND stable/functional. Imagine a cathedral. Those are some of the strongest buildings built. Picture the soaring arches and spires that somehow manage to hang suspended there because of the great foundation and support. And yet they are beautiful; immeasurably, incredibly, wonderfully beautiful. How if the Church were still like that today? We might see people flocking to us from every side, because not only is our faith true and good, it is also beautiful.

I think some Christians are starting to realize this now, for which I am glad. Churches are promoting the arts again, which has hardly been done in a big way since before the Reformation. Perhaps we are finally remembering what Plato, Pascal, Chesterton, Lewis, and others knew: that we are whole souls, body, heart, and mind coming together into one person, and that we cannot leave one behind for the sake of another.

And that's something else to remember: The logic we've discovered, the knowledge we have pursued, are not bad things in themselves. It is right to desire to know God, for when we love others, we want to know them better; and so we ought to strive to know God, as far as our feeble faculties will allow us to. But we must remember not to forget the beauty which God has placed around us and within us, for that is another way that we may know him. As Romans 1 says, God has made himself known to us through his handiwork; not only through the order of the world, but also through its beauty. We are whole people, whole souls. Let us not forget that. Rather, let us strive to pursue all that is good, all that is true, and all that is beautiful. And then, perhaps, people will see Christianity for what it truly is, and see God for who he truly is.