Christians worship Jesus because they believe that through his crucifixion, he has suffered all the sin of humanity and forgiven Adam and Eve’s original sin. Through worshipping Jesus, Christians believe that they are put right with God through atonement and redeemed of their sin. Additionally, Christians worship God because they believe that he has established a new covenant and that through the fulfilment of this Christians are offered life after death through eternal salvation and resurrection. “He became what we are so we might become what he is.” 5 Christians worship God through kenosis and making themselves vulnerable to God because they believe that God should have a full reign of their lives and that if they make themselves weak to God, he will redeem humanity.
Christians also worship Jesus Christ because of the religious experience argument. This states that because so many Christians claim to have had an experience of God, be it a public experience or a private experience, there must be a God causing these experiences. This is shown in the life of Jesus who performed many miracles such as healing, bringing people back from the dead and the feeding of the five thousand in Matthew 14:13-21. Christians claim that religious experiences still occur today showing a personal God who interacts with the world he created.
Christians worship the final part of the trinitarian God because they believe the Holy Spirit was sent at Pentecost to sustain the Kingdom of God on earth. Christians believe that the church is guided by the Holy Spirit and that through pneumatology, Christians establish and promote the church advocating values such as agape, equality and human rights; 6 “There is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, for all are one in Jesus Christ.” Christians also worship the Holy Spirit whatever their vocation without fearing death because Christians do not believe death to be the end and they possess a belief in eternal life in Heaven.
Christians also worship God because they believe God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent and therefore merits worship. The attributes of God show that because his omnipotence, God, and therefore good, will eventually triumph over evil. Christians also worship God because they believe that because of God’s omnibenevolence he does not have plans to hurt Christians so they need not fear the plans he has for them. Christians also want to thank God for creating them to live under God’s law and to thank him for answered prayers and the promise of eternal life, they do this through worship.
- Explain how belief in the existence of God might affect the life and attitudes of a believer.
In Mark 12:30-31 Jesus states, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.” Therefore Christians believe that they should lead a life of agape towards their neighbour, using it as a verb rather than a concept; “How can you love God who you cannot see, if you do not love your neighbour who you can see? We should love God not only with words and talk but with our actions and our hearts.” 7 A Christian’s attitude would be one of grace and self-giving sometimes at a great cost to the individual to help establish the kingdom of God on Earth, to follow the example of Jesus and the disciples.
A Christian’s lifestyle would be one of prayer so that they can make themselves vulnerable through kenosis and be led by the Holy Spirit. During a Christian’s life of prayer, they will consider things such as justice, love and truth, which may provoke them to speak out against war and conflict such as the current imminent war with Iraq. Christians believe that they have a vocation, or calling, to speak out against wars if they do not fulfil the criteria of Just War. Examples of this are Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela protesting against apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela eventually went to prison for the cause. A Christian would follow the example of these great leaders and be prepared to possibly be a martyr for the sake of their God. Also, to follow the example of Desmond Tutu, a Christian would be forgiving because that was how Jesus lived his life and Christians try to mimic the life of Jesus in their own. Desmond Tutu chaired a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2001 after the apartheid had been abolished to try and reunite South Africa.
A Christian would also try to show a life of agape mimicking that of Jesus through their actions towards others, they would support the Salvation Army for example to show feelings of equality towards the homeless, a Christian might also support organisations such as L’Arche Communité which helps the mentally disabled. A Christian would also support Christian founded organisations such as The Hospice Movement founded by Dame Cicely Saunders to show an act of self-giving and an awareness of the sanctity of life and that it should not be prematurely terminated through euthanasia, because death is a process not an event and life is innocent. A Christian would not be racist and would follow the biblical teachings of the Parable of the Good Samaritan and Galatians 3:28. A Christian, especially a member of the Quaker movement founded by Lord Donald Soper, may be a pacifist, protesting against war and conflict because of the huge waste of innocent, sacred life that war provokes. Quakers believe that it insults to God’s creation of human beings in imago dei to kill for war; “We totally oppose all wars, all preparation for war, all use of weapons and coercion by force, and all military alliances: no end could ever justify such means. We equally and actively oppose all that leads to violence among people and nations, and violence to other species and to our planet. Refusal to fight with weapons is not surrender. We are not passive when threatened by the greedy, the cruel, the tyrant, the unjust. We will struggle to remove the causes of impasse and confrontation by every means of non-violent resistance available.” 8
Christians would also come together and worship as a community to share the values and truths of Christianity with one another. They would appreciate the importance of the Eucharist in spiritually fulfilling Christians and inspiring them to go out and serve the community again. A Christian lifestyle would also be one of finding an individual’s vocation from God and then fulfilling it accordingly. All Christians believe they have a vocation from God to evangelise and spread the Good News that sin is overcome and eternal salvation awaits if you believe.
- “God is dead” (Nietzsche)
Do you agree? Give reasons to support you answer and show that you have considered more than one point of view. You must refer to Christianity in your answer.
I disagree with the statement “God is dead” because I believe God is influential in today’s societies and clearly has an impact on the lives of Christians through religious experience and the Bible, I also believe that it is impossible for God to die because by definition God is incorporeal and immortal and therefore cannot die. However, to explore the implications of Nietzche’s statement “God is dead” fully, we must first explore what is meant by the statement itself. Nietzsche intended us not to interpret this in a literal sense but rather as a metaphor whereby the statement refers to the event of the death of Christianity and it’s moral code, society has now been secularised and there is now no need for God’s morals because they have been transposed by the law. Therefore, to argue in favour of this statement, one would say that God no longer has an influence on today’s world because the metaphysics of the Christian God have been overthrown by the current desire for empirical proof. Today’s societies are less convinced by faith and possibilities and only accept facts in most circumstances, David Hume promotes this view; “Commit [metaphysics] then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” 9 The societies of today look for empirical proof before they believe anything, and since God cannot be proved to a non-believer through the five senses, sight, taste, touch, sound and smell, it is understood that he does not exist. However I, as a Christian, might respond that God need not be proved through empiricism because God transcends humanity and therefore also transcends human methods of proof and therefore one should not look to human methods of proof to prove God, but simply to faith, however a Christian would also say, that God can be proved through some empirical methods because of the religious experience argument, which states that because miracles occurred in biblical times and apparently, still occur today, God must exist because these could not be explained any other way. Even some non-Christians believe that the Christian God can have an influence in the world and therefore is not dead; A. J. Ayer for example believes that God cannot be proved through verificationism but neither can he be disproved through falsificationism, but because he cannot actually be proved, God is meaningless. However Ayer knows that God does have an effect on the lives of modern Christians in shaping their values through the teachings presented in the Bible and so pronounces the Christian God to be non-cognitively meaningful. An atheist would say that God must be dead because even after the so-called decade of evangelism that took part in the 1990s, the numbers of regular churchgoers are falling, to just 7% being regular Christian worshippers in the UK.10 An atheist such as Professor Richard Dawkins would also argue against God as a moral being saying that God was absolutely immoral and how could Christians worship God because of his omnibenevolence, when he does not show this quality in the world, for example, the problem of innocent suffering in today’s world. The problem of evil is perhaps the biggest objection many atheists have to the Christian faith, they believe that God cannot be alive and working in today’s world because innocent people still die and suffer through both moral and natural evils. They believe that if the Christian God was truly omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient then evil should not occur because God would be able to stop evil, wanting to stop evil and would know that evil was occurring and so was in a position to stop it. However, a Christian would respond that because God does not want to impose himself upon humans, i.e. they must come to him in faith, so evil must exist so that human beings are able to doubt the existence of God. This is called the epistemic distance, or knowledge gap, created between human beings and God so there are no definite indicators of God’s existence. A Christian’s faith would not be diminished through the problem of evil because they believe that even though evil exists, they are promised in the Bible that good will eventually triumph over evil. Christians will also argue in favour of the existence of God because as Dostoyevsy implies in his book The Brothers Karamazov, through the character Ivan Karamazov “If God is dead, everything is permitted” 11 and in today’s society not everything is permitted because each human being is nurtured to have an inherent sense of right and wrong which is encouraged by government legislation which essentially follows the Bible’s Decalogue. Therefore, God as the author of human orals must not be dead. Personally, I believe that God is not dead and is still working in today’s secular world through the Bible and the sustenance of the Holy Spirit to Christians. I also believe that because we should not make God anthropomorphic as he transcends all earthly manifestations, it is both impossible for God to die and also equally impossible for God to be proven through human methods.
Footnotes
1. “begotten not created” O Come All Ye Faithful
words and tune (Adeste Fideles) John Francis Wade 1782
- Imago dei
The Bible Genesis 1:26
- “Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee.”
An adaptation of St. Augustine's Confessions (Book 1, Chapter 1 (Translated by J.G. Pilkington, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980.)
- “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these”
The Bible, Mark 12:30-31
- “He became what we are so we might become what he is”
Iranaeus 2nd Century
- “There is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, for all are one in Jesus Christ.”
The Bible Galatians 3:28
- “How can you love God who you cannot see, if you do not love your neighbour who you can see?”
The Bible 1 John 3:17-18
- “We totally oppose all wars, all preparation for war, all use of weapons and coercion by force, and all military alliances: no end could ever justify such means.
We equally and actively oppose all that leads to violence among people and nations, and violence to other species and to our planet. Refusal to fight with weapons is not surrender. We are not passive when threatened by the greedy, the cruel, the tyrant, the unjust. We will struggle to remove the causes of impasse and confrontation by every means of non-violent resistance available."
Public Statement of the Yearly Meeting Of Quakers 1987
- “Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principle of Morals, Oxford University Press, 1975, page 165
- “7% being regular Christian worshippers in the UK”
Andrew Wright, Dialogue 9, Types of Theism and Atheism, page 39
- “If God is dead, everything is permitted”
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1881. For more information on the misattribution of the above quote to Dostoyevsky, visit http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/cortesi1.html