Note on terminology: For the purposes of this exercise, I use “Christianity” as defined in the introductory post here.
One of the gravest missteps of popular Christianity has been that somewhere along the way, it started to be marketed mostly as a death insurance policy.
Pray the sinner’s prayer and pronto, you’re gonna live forever.
With that free barcode, you’re guaranteed to be scanned the right way at the pearly gates, as Dallas Willard puts it in The Divine Conspiracy.
I wonder how many people would do sports regularly if all it did was healthy?
Imagine that. Suddenly it’s just a healthy thing to do, like eating broccoli or flossing or washing your hands after you pee. It doesn’t do much else.
It doesn’t give you the happy hormones rush.
It doesn’t stave off depression.
It doesn’t relieve stress.
It doesn’t help with the pain.
It doesn’t help with anxiety.
It doesn’t give you a better physique.
It doesn’t take you out of your head.
You don’t feel any better after doing it. In fact, you don’t feel much difference whether you do it or not.
It’s just, you know, healthy in the long run. Just in case.
Of course, this example is a bit theoretical. Doing sports is healthy precisely because it does all these things mentioned above—as well as others that we don’t necessarily feel in the moment, like keeping the heart in shape.
But I think you get what I’m trying to say. One of the reasons I still do Christianity is because I see it genuinely improves the quality of my life and relationships. Not in some far-off abstract kind of way. The difference is tangible. Measurable.
There is, I guess, the added benefit of the afterlife—or so they say. But truth be told, I don’t dwell on that aspect too much. Maybe even not at all.
The real benefit is the here and now. Real joy. Real growth. Real gratitude. Real depth of feeling. Real reasons to get up in the morning, take a shower, engage in something beautiful.
It blows my mind to think that believers in the Old Testament didn’t have a clear notion of the afterlife.
Back then—hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ—the common belief was that all the dead ended up in the same place known as Sheol.
It was a land of shadows, and English translations frequently render it simply as “the grave.”
“There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going,” says the Preacher in one of my favorite Bible passages, Ecclesiastes 9.
Sheol was a state of vegetation, at best, or non-being. The idea of an eternal reward and the afterlife as we now know it only developed in the intertestamental period, meaning the four hundred years that divide the Old and New Testament writings. (That’s the Protestant canon. The Catholic and the Orthodox have done it a bit differently.)
This period is often called “the time of silence” because prophets ceased to speak.
But the Jewish culture didn’t fall silent. All sorts of writings flourished, among them the genre of the apocalyptic. These works were written in Greek, so understandably, they couldn’t make it into the Hebrew Bible canon later on.
However, it was within that period and specifically in the genre of the apocalyptic that many ideas developed that Christianity later adopted wholesale from Judaism—among others, the notion of eternal punishment and reward, the final judgment, the resurrection of the body, the registers of sins and good deeds, and, of course, the afterlife.
When you enter the world of the New Testament, a lot of these beliefs are already implicit. That’s why it’s easy to kind of blink and miss the intermediate stage—to assume that they have always been there.
(I’m not that smart to come to this conclusion myself. I took it from a renowned scholar and an expert on the apocalyptic, Richard Bauckham, specifically from the articles collected in The Jewish world around the New Testament.)
This doesn’t mean that there was no hope in the Old Testament for some existence after death, alongside God. But the contents of this hope were vague.
Interestingly, this hope for continued life had much more to do with how believers conceived of their God’s character and less with specific teaching.
God, they reasoned, was the source of all life—life itself. Whoever threw in their lot with that life-giving God could not be swallowed by death forever. (This is Bauckham again leading the way.)
But this was speculation. The doctrine came later. Much later.
In this context, the question to ask (ourselves) is this: If there is/were no eternal reward, why still believe?
If we took the afterlife off the table, what remains of the Christian “good news”?
What remains of our belief?
Paul writes if there is no resurrection, our faith is shot, basically. What do you think?
Is this the mystery of the Old Testament faith? Those believers knew so little in terms of doctrine. Yet they fought so hard for their relationship with the Sacred.
The Hebrew idiom amplifies this immediacy: My kidneys exult. My bones are terrified. My teeth grind on gravel. My mouth is full of laughter.
Their struggle was metabolic, visceral. When Jeremiah writes, “The Lord is my portion, I will wait on Him,” he’s a man who has survived the end of his world.
The city he loved is in ruins. The people he preached to have scattered. He has been proven right in his prophecies—what a terrible, terrible feeling.
This song is all he has.
“He has walled me in so I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy.”
And, “You came near when I called on you. You said, ‘Do not fear!’”
Have you heard that one about how Christianity makes life easy?
For a long time, I didn’t believe anyone would use this argument. I thought it was one of those strawmen arguments the imaginary atheist says in church sermons.
(Like, you know, the one about atheists hating God—you can’t hate what you don’t believe in, so I guess you do believe in God, haha!)
But then I heard it a bunch of times in real life in a few different versions, so I guess this is a legitimate opinion.
Christianity is a crutch.
Christianity is for weaklings.
I wish I could believe like you do, I know my life would be much easier.
This kind of reasoning is a byproduct of conceiving of belief as a static, passive quality. I wrote about it before. I will repeat it here, just from a slightly different angle.
This is is a bit like saying that doing sports makes life easier.
Well, does it?
In a way, sure, it does. Thanks to regular practice, I live my life pretty much pain-free despite scoliosis, a long frame, and a job that’s largely sedentary. I feel better now pushing my 40s than I did in my early 20s.
The obvious catch is that doing sports does not come easy.
To reap the benefits of the practice, you have to work out regularly or at least consistently.
True, there is an element of habit to it. But your body, your needs, and your life’s routine and rhythm will keep on changing.
There might be a few times in your life when it feels like you’ve found your groove. Most of the time, though, you’re always losing some habits and developing new ones.
Then there’s the time it takes—it’s not like remembering to pop a pill. You have to plan for it.
You have to build it into your week.
You have to buy the gear.
You have to troubleshoot at times with a physiotherapist if you overtrain.
You have to learn the mechanics of your body, so you know how to move safely and not get hurt.
You have to understand your limits, so you know where you need to go easy and where you can push for better results.
Sometimes, if you need outside motivation, you need to pay for a class, a gym membership, or a coach.
Does it sound hard?
It is.
It’s also worth it.
You could probably make an argument that if I was really strong and really mature, I would be able to accept the pain of my condition and, as Bertrand Russell proposes in A free man’s worship, build my life on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”
But why would I?
For me, the comfort or the benefit that Christianity offers lies mainly in the fact that practicing it prepares me for the effort of life.
When I think of passages like the Sermon on the Mount, for example, this is the kind of bodybuilding that is attractive to me.
Not only because it’s beautiful (although I am a firm believer in the aesthetics of good.)
Not only because it “helps you when you’re down” (I think this one is a bit of a myth.)
The many benefits of Christianity for dealing with life’s hardships have already been explored to no end. I’ve often heard this unbelievably unkind comment from amateur apologists, “Sure you don’t feel like you need God now, when life is easy! Wait till you hit the hard times!” (By the way, take a look at this phrase need God. Because why else would we be drawn to the Sacred if not out of need, right?)
But as I wrote before, the questions that lead people to and away from God are frequently the same questions.
For every person who comes to God in times of trouble, there’s another who becomes disillusioned.
I think the comfort of Christianity in times of hardship lies, again, in the general fitness the Christian ethics foster over time: the muscle of gratitude, the lightness (litheness?), the creativity. Nothing more, nothing less.
What I’m much more interested in is what happens when it is us who are in the position to inflict hardship on another.
Now, this is where we need some serious muscle. And these challenges, these windows of opportunity we are faced with all the time.
How do you fight with someone you know is in a weaker position than you?
How do you speak of someone who has hurt you?
Do you ghost, or do you talk to the person you’re in conflict with or don’t want to see again?
How do you behave in success?
How do you behave in failure?
How do you behave when you’ve been wronged?
How do you behave around those perceived as successful people?
How do you behave around those perceived as failures?
How are you in your dealings with strangers? Not the ones who are like you. The ones who are entirely unlike you.
With these questions, you can see why I like the fitness metaphor. Integrity is not going through the motions.
If I speak of someone a certain way, it’s because I think of them this way, and I think of them this way because that’s the way I view people and the world in general.
In other words, I can’t fake fitness. I can cheat on achievements, or I can pretend for someone else to see and admire me.
But there’s only one way to get fit for real, and that’s by starting at the heart.
If I understand I am loved—deeply, unconditionally, and eternally—if I wrap myself in this love as in a warm, bright cloak of many colors that was gifted to me by my Father, then it will be that much easier to have mercy, be kind, love generously and without holding back. Not only in my dealings with others. Also in that primary, most enduring relationship of my life—the one I build with myself.
If I have lived through repentance—time and time again—then it will be that much easier to ask for help, admit shortcomings, identify areas for growth.
If I learn to come to the ultimate Other just as I am—hair undone, makeup removed, status erased—then it will be that much easier to be honest and authentic in my interactions with other people.
If I inhabit the story of the good Samaritan, I will find a near one (=neighbor) in the most unlikely places—and I will never walk alone.
These attitudes take time to develop.
Some people learn them at home.
Some people acquire them in therapy.
Some people develop them on their own, through years of trial, error, and self-reflection.
But these life skills are also available within the framework of Christianity, where you build a lifelong relationship with a patient, loving Other.
And just like with many other abilities in life, a certain depth of experience can only be achieved over time.
The system can’t be hacked. You need the simple practice.
No fancy contortions, says Micah. All you need is do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).
That’s the second reason I find myself still doing Christianity—with excitement and anticipation.