In Defense of Christ
By: Charles Bastille
Tags: New Age, Christmas, Jesus, Christ, Christianity

Christmas 2020 Musings

In Defense of Christ

Many New Agers claim to admire Christ’s teachings but deny his divine authority. However, a simple reading of two lines in the Gospel reveals the problems with that logic. In John 4:25–26 Jesus encounters a woman who says to him:

“I know that Messiah, he who is called Christ, is coming. When he comes, he will explain us all things.”

John 4:25

Jesus’s response? “I who speaks to you am he.”

Jesus Christ was, therefore, off his rocker crazy, with a messiah complex, or really was the Messiah, complete with that capital “M”.

The name “Christ” actually means “anointed one” and “messiah”[i].

Allowing himself to be referred this way during the entirety of his three-year ministry reflects upon either hopeless mental illness or the profound truth of his being the Son of God, just as he said he was.

Photo Credit:

Maja Ruszpel (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dzwoneczek/)

“Jesus”; https://flic.kr/p/izCYbf: Creative Commons copyright license (public domain)

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

C.S. Lewis referred to this superbly in his book Mere Christianity[ii]. He points out that we are either all in or all out on Christ as our savior. There is no in-between.

If you encounter someone in Times Square standing on a box preaching words that have strong appeal to your moral sensibilities, you may listen awhile. If the man or woman at your unitarian church does the same, it warms your heart.

But what happens when they claim to be Christ? What is your reaction?

If they seem sincere, you know that they have drifted into the world of the insane. We automatically discount anything he or she said as the rantings of a broken individual.

What, then, of Christ himself? Why should you believe he was also not insane?

That is your choice. Most of us are compelled to believe, not strictly on the basis of history, or on the strength of a 2,000-year legacy, or the multiple witnesses to supernatural events and healings, but on the still, small, and quiet voice of the Holy Spirit within us.

Your Choice

There is really no logic behind believing in a God who sends his son down to earth to be posted by nails to a cross after the mother of all floggings, who was born to a virgin, who raised the dead, who walked on water, who fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread, who spent 40 days and nights in the desert commiserating and arguing with the devil, who was a human leprosy-curing machine, who restored the sight of the blind, and who died and came back to life three days later.

The choice you have in Christ is one of the many beauties of free will. Christ doesn’t impose himself on you.

Aggressive evangelicals may try, but that’s another topic. Christ himself will not, although that is not to say that the Holy Spirit loses any tenacity in his attempts to reel you in.

This tenacity is not in conflict with either free will or the claim that Christ doesn’t impose himself upon you. The Holy Spirit’s attempts to bring salvation to you occur in the spiritual realm. Such nuance should bring glee to any self-respecting New Ager.

What is illogical, however, is the claim that Christ was a great moral teacher but that he was not divine.

How can you be a great moral teacher when you walk around promoting the lie that you are the Messiah?

Such a claim should automatically disqualify him from any moral teaching. There is no possibility here of acceptance when one claims a messianic calling and openly embraces the worship of others, as Christ did.

It’s irrational to say, “well, I admire what he said but I don’t accept that he’s God.”

Wait. You admire a man who claims to be God? But who isn’t? That makes no sense.

The weakness of that argument is especially glaring in light of Christ’s general humility when he went before those who sent him to die a painful, gory, hideous death on the cross, and refusing to escape Pontius Pilate’s sentencing by admitting he was king of the Jews.

He claimed, instead, a heavenly Kingdom, one apart from human flesh and existence to the Jewish high priests who had sent him to Pilate:

When day came, the assembly of the elders of the people gathered together, both chief priests and scribes. And they led him away to their council, and they said, “If you are the Christ, tell us.” But he said to them, “If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.”

Luke 22:66–69

In contrast, consider John the Baptist’s reaction when he was asked if he was the messiah:

And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.”

John 1:19-John 1:27

Dudes, John the Baptist said, I’m not even fit to untie his sandals. Whereas Jesus made no effort to correct a woman who proclaimed him to be the Messiah:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

John 11:25–27

Jesus didn’t respond by saying, “Woah hold on there. I ain’t no messiah. You be trippin’.”

Instead, he egged her on by saying that those who believe in him will never die. What would you add to the comments section if I said that about myself?

“Come with me if you want to live” might be a fun movie line by a terminating robot and his pals, but coming out of the mouth of anyone else just sounds nutty.

Come with me if you want to live

Not only did people in his day apparently not think Jesus was cuckoo, but they also flocked to him.

So there was something in his countenance that can never be fully appreciated 2,000 years later (correction: unless you walk with him daily).

You can get an idea of it, of course, by reading about the reverence people like Martha and the two Marys and his apostles had for him, but the fact that a man walked around claiming he was the Son of God would in itself not have been something that would have impressed people.

Those flocks of people following Jesus around made him different than the everyday run of the mill crazy man proclaiming himself to be a messiah:

This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

John 5:18

By the “Jews” this passage specifically refers to the temple leaders, who stoked antagonism towards Jesus because he threatened their power as the result of so many people being drawn to him.

A Mean Old God?

New Agers may think of the choice you’ve been given and its relationship to your chances at an eternal life as mean-spirited.

Why should a benevolent God, one who is supposed to be benign and full of love, show favor? Even more disturbing may be the Bible’s tendency to show that not only does God show favor, but that he tends to choose his herd, and leave out others:

Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”

Romans 10:20

This may seem harsh and even elitist. Does God choose people for his Kingdom? Let’s have a look at a few things Jesus said about this:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me — “

John 6:44–45

One theme you’ll notice throughout much of Jesus’s teachings is the very strong hint of quantum physics at play throughout much of what God does. This is easy for him because time has no existence in God’s universe:

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

John 6:60–65

If you have rejected Christ as your Savior in the face of such evidence as he offers, perhaps it is not he who has truly made the choice, but you.

How then, does one know if Christ has indeed chosen you?

Well, like many things relating to Radical Christianity, it’s all about quantum physics. If you choose him, he chose you. And if he chose you, you will choose him. And even more weirdly, according to the Bible, this happened long before you were born, before the universe began:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

Ephesians 1:3–4

This is called an election because God elected you to join him, but Paul seems to say that this election refers to a special group of devoted followers, not that heaven is limited to those God chose beforehand:

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Thessalonians 2:13–14

This is one of those contradictions in the Bible that is difficult to reconcile, because if time has no meaning to God, then what does first mean?

Does it mean there are tiers of people who are heaven-sent?

If so, we are guaranteed not to care. There is no envy in heaven. There are lots of riddles in the Bible. Don’t get bogged down in them. Reading scripture and praying is your only opportunity for finding answers.

Paul warns us about over-analyzing things in Romans 9:

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?

Romans 9:20–21

This is also an admonishment towards showing a bit of humility towards our maker.

Historical Jesus is a Real Thing

Historical evidence of Christ, some say, is scant.

That’s not true, and that really should be the end of the conversation.

The two Abrahamic religions that don’t acknowledge Christ as savior, Judaism and Islam, not only acknowledge his existence as a historical figure, they revere him as a prophet of God, ignoring, of course, the argument I covered earlier, that if he was a prophet, he was a deeply flawed one for claiming his own status as an omnipotent deity and the flesh and blood Son of God.

Part of the problem is that the existence of anyone in that ancient time is hard to prove[iii]:

“The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place,” says University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman, author of Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. “The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99% of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record.”

The Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus wrote about Christ in the book Antiquities of the Jews, in approximately 93 A.D.[iv]. The Roman historian Tacitus, also a Roman senator, described not only Jesus Christ but his execution by Pontius Pilate in a book written in approximately AD 116 called Annals (book 15, chapter 44)[v].

Some Jewish leaders in Christ’s time asserted that Jesus’s disciples perpetrated a hoax and removed Jesus’s body from his tomb. Quoting the book, A Global History of Christians[vi]:

Considering that disciples’ later zeal extended to the point of martyrdom, it is unlikely they would have died to defend something they knew was a hoax, misleading millions of others in the lie.

No assertion was made, according to the book’s authors, “that the tomb was not empty”.

There is considerably less historical evidence of Buddha and Mohammed than there is of Jesus Christ.[vii], [viii]

This says less about their authenticity than it does about the state of recorded history in ancient times, which bore no resemblance to our information-filled world.

Even when good historical records were maintained for various people and events, they were often “lost to antiquity”, meaning the records were destroyed somehow, either through war or natural acts of destruction[ix].

For example, the Old Testament frequently makes references like so:

Now the rest of the acts of Jehu and all that he did, and all his might, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?

2 Kings 10:34

Well, probably. But that book is long gone, lost to antiquity.

There are numerous verses in the Old Testament like this referring to kings of Judah and Israel. The authors didn’t bother describing their deeds because they assumed we could read them in what must have been a very large volume of work, which has perished.

There are numerous books on historical Jesus. Denying his existence as a historical figure belongs in the same bucket as flat earth theories and other similar symptoms of intellectual blindness.

The question isn’t “did he live”?

The question is did he die and then come back to life?

The answer is obviously central to whether we can live in Christ at all. The central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus died and was resurrected for our sins. If you can’t believe in that kind of magic, then a Christian life is not an option for you.

That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means that the Holy Spirit is rolling around in you feeling homeless. He won’t stop guiding your conscience, and he won’t stop loving you or tapping your shoulder when you’re about to sleep with one of your employees.

The Redemption of Sin

Christianity is the only major religion that accommodates sin by absolving its believers through simple belief in its god, without any specific rules to follow (Zoroastrianism accommodates sin by forgiving all of it, a form of universalism that some Christian sects also adhere to[x]).

And it’s kind of a big deal. But the good news for non-believers is that there are no real hoops to jump through.

The only requirement for eternal life and the forgiveness of your sins is that you acknowledge Christ as your Savior and confess your sins to him. That’s it. Easy peasy.

God is patient, so if you’ve been putting that off because of your doubts, he forgives you just as much as he forgave all of my personal nonsense.

You could be a career criminal who never believed in any god, and if on your death bed you confess to him and accept him as your Savior, he will say in response, “thank you, for I chose you long ago to join me in my Kingdom” just as he did when speaking to the thief on the cross next to him (reminder: Luke 23:39–43).

There is one catch. You must believe it in your heart.

Merely reciting the words won’t cut it, and since this is the same dude who confounds biologists with the intricacies of DNA and physicists with the wonders of quarks and bosons, believe me, he knows your heart.

What if you almost believe in him, and his resurrection, but can’t quite commit?

I think that “almost” will get you there eventually.

God can and will work with that. How?

My own personal experience has been through the reading of scripture, particularly the Gospels, where the words of Christ are offered to us with the least amount of human interpretation.

For me personally, the Old Testament was a tough sell early on. It reminded me more of Game of Thrones than the source of any potential spiritual enlightenment.

I consider the Old Testament advanced reading mostly for well-grounded Christians. That may reflect my own failings in faith, but it’s the experience I must testify to.

That kind of belief put me in the camp of “Almost” for a while, it seems. I had to keep studying scripture and praying to move forward in my belief. Rather than get frustrated with me, the Holy Spirit within me welcomed me and encouraged me.

There were moments in my early Bible reading where I’d encounter something in, for example, Joshua, and indignantly cry out, “that’s genocide!”

But as I kept reading the Old Testament, I discovered that its vast lineage of messianic prophecy through the truth of Isaiah and other prophets can be a majestic faith experience.

I discovered books like Ecclesiastes and Jeremiah. But if you’re a cynic with strong views about right and wrong, tread carefully, because some of the historical books of the Old Testament can be alarming to the uninitiated.

Keep in mind who gave you those notions of right and wrong in the first place.

God formed you through biology, but biology, nor any other dialect of science, which is a language of God, did not impart to you a sense of right and wrong any more than learning French will make you a good cook.

Science is just as cold as it seems. The feelings of morality you experience are given to you by the Holy Spirit. He is the one Source for that. There are no others.

God Talks to Us

This takes us back to the conundrum of good people who don’t make the heavenly cut.

I believe that if you are a good person, the Holy Spirit is strong in you. There will be no way to avoid that credit given to you.

That said, you deserve an opportunity to at least once in your life find a church, sit alone in a pew, kneel, and ask if maybe Christ will invite you into his heavenly Kingdom.

Once you do that, miracles happen.

Sometimes, admittedly, those miracles only happen internally, in the sense that our souls become miraculously nurtured, our worries dissipate, a new attitude descends.

Even if nothing happens immediately, following up such a powerful action with scripture reading will change your life and almost assuredly open the gates to eternal life.

Finding the Holy Spirit is the ultimate New Age experience.

It’s got magic, it’s supernatural, it involves channeling, it invokes guardian angels, it speaks directly to the abundance of the universe. Most of all, it involves a powerful being who speaks to us constantly throughout the day.

That still small voice within that does everything — from sensing danger for no discernable reason to giving you a heavy feeling when making a bad choice — is always with you.

We know God is speaking back to us when our conscience speaks back to us in a holy way. If it says something like, “you should have punched that guy,” clearly, that’s not Christ talking to you.

If the voice pushes you away from a forgiving heart, it is not the Holy Spirit speaking to you:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

1 John 4:1–6

Knowing when God is talking to us is not purely guesswork, although it can seem like it at times. By working through scripture and learning how he thinks, you’ll develop a sixth sense of recognition. The Holy Spirit only speaks to us in a Gospel-inspired tongue, and the only way to understand that is by reading the Gospel for yourself.

If you’re a rookie in Christianity, you can avoid rookie mistakes by asking yourself if the voices you “hear” seem to be inspired by love. “You can’t forgive your parents for this”, for example, is not inspired by love.

It is inspired by a form of self-protection. We can’t protect ourselves, only God can. Worse, it may be inspired by the devil (or ego, if you are into A Course in Miracles). The devil, or your ego, is the ultimate trickster, an entity that can infest your soul and trick you into thinking it has your best interests in mind when it spews out its nonsense to you.

When I refer to voices, I’m not referring to the kind of audible voices that will get your friends to recommend a shrink.

I’m referring to those maddening conversations we have with ourselves.

The Holy Spirit injects himself into these conversations, and we can discern when it does by checking in on whether the voices coming back to us seem to be inspired by love or something else.

If it is something else, it most likely is not the Holy Spirit speaking, and it’s best to move on.

Don’t Let People Ruin God for You

If you find yourself often inspired by voices of love, and yet cannot find Christ in your heart, then ask God why this is so.

Most likely there is a judgment you are making regarding Christianity that is not based on fact.

It is a fact that there have been terrible crimes committed in the name of Christianity. The Inquisition was a fact. The Salem Witch Trials and the Crusades both happened. Roman Catholic pedophilia is a fact. It is a fact that there is a crisis of judgementalism in the Christian fundamentalist community, and extreme dogma and doctrinism in various Christian sects and denominations.

It is not a fact, however, that Christ favored any of those things. It is a fact that he taught against these things and did so with a heavy hand.

Ironically, your impulses against Christian doctrines and priestly violations are given to you by the Holy Spirit as part of your moral center, but your judgementalism toward them is not, for Christ also taught us that there is only one judge and that he forgave all of those sins 2,000 years ago, and today only asks us to follow in as perfect a way as possible two commandments: Love God, and love each other:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:36–40

John 10:25–30 contains monumental words that speak both to the simplicity of Christ’s message and his status as God. He emphatically states that once a believer genuinely believes,

“no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand”

John 10:28

This is because a sinless life is not possible, and our failures to achieve that lofty goal are not blockades to his promise of eternal life.

“I and the Father are one” Jesus then says, giving absolute rest to the notion that Jesus Christ is a mere prophet or sage.

As I mentioned earlier, you cannot believe that Jesus was merely a wise teacher or prophet without accepting him in full as God himself.

Jesus was either God or a crazed charlatan.

Image public domain, U.S. Department of Justice

There is no middle ground possible. If you don’t accept him as your God, you can’t take the rest of his message any more seriously than you take the rantings of the Unabomber or other famous victims of mental illness.

I don’t personally believe in Hell, so a lack of belief doesn’t mean eternal damnation, at least not to me.

But we may cease to exist if, after we have died and we have been presented the final evidence, we shake our fist and flip the bird to the angels who present that evidence at the pearly gates.