A Better Humanism: Part 2 - A Better Story
By Joshua Chatraw
By Joshua Chatraw
Our culture’s aspirations for justice and human rights include the obligation to respect all people—even those you find personally appalling—and as Christian Smith puts it, to “identify and empathize with the needs and sufferings of every person, even those on the other side of the earth whose cultures are alien to ours.”[1] These humanistic ideals require that we make sacrifices to our welfare for the sake of others—and “others” includes those we don’t know, those who don’t impact our lives, those who are very different from us, and even those who are antagonistic toward us and our values. This is a high bar, and it is apparent that secular narratives provide neither the grounding, motivation, nor hope to maintain such idealistic moral aspirations (see Part 1 of this series).
A better grounding.According to Christianity, we have a sense of right and wrong because there is a God whose moral law stands above that of individual people or cultures. The pursuit of justice resonates with us because God created us in his image and desires that we seek his righteousness as a way of representing his very nature to the world. When God entered the world as a human in the person of Jesus Christ, the universal ethic he taught—which commands that we love all people, even our enemies—was shocking in the ancient world. But this makes sense in the Christian framework in which self-giving love is the very center of eternal reality.
A better motivation. It was not, however, simply Jesus’ teaching that was revolutionary. Jesus’ followers also stood out because Jesus provided them with compelling motivation to serve others selflessly. God’s very being not only provides an unchanging standard of justice, but also because of his love for his creation, God made it possible for all people to be forgiven and to be set free from their own acts of injustice. God himself entered the world as a man, a completely innocent victim, to endure our suffering so that he could declare us innocent. He did this while knowing it would lead him to absorb the violence of this world and take on himself the judgment we deserve. What moves Christians to give themselves for others is the reality that Christ has given himself for us—while we were still enemies. In his mercy, he has freed us from our own self-absorption so we may reach out to love the world. He taught us that sacrificing our self-centeredness to serve others, even those who regard us as enemies, is actually the way to be most fully human, to become the “true you.”
A better hope.Jesus’ resurrection and ascension point us to his return, when he will usher in a new world and right all wrongs. In the end, justice will be fully and perfectly satisfied. Yet through his death and resurrection, he offers now to all who would humbly turn to him the opportunity to be on the right side of justice. Only by his sacrifice do our sacrifices have meaning—and through Christ they do have meaning. Our strivings for peace and our efforts to restore dignity and worth to our sisters and brothers will have tangible, eternal significance. Even in the darkest of times, then, when the dam collapses and the flood overwhelms, the Christian story provides an enduring vision of hope that truly upholds a long-suffering pursuit of justice.
And it is this living hope that keeps us telling the better story of Christ in the midst of our present-day calamities, just as it did long ago for Augustine. In another sermon, preached in the wake of his own experience of seismic cultural shifts, we see how Augustine’s ministry was fueled by this anticipatory happiness, “When, therefore, death shall be swallowed up in victory, these things will not be there, there they shall be peace—peace full and eternal. We shall be in a kind of city. Brethren, when I speak of that City, and especially when scandals grow great here, I cannot just bring myself to stop.”[2] Such hope brings with it a gritty joy that just can’t stop telling the true story of justice and peace humans are still longing for.
Notes
[1] Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 24.
[2] Cited in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, New Edition with Epilogue (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 311.
* This essay is adapted from Joshua’s book Telling a Better Story: How To Talk About God in a Skeptical Age (Zondervan, 2020).
— Joshua Chatraw is the director of the Center for Public Christianity and theologian-in-residence at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Some of his books include Telling a Better Story, Apologetics at the Cross (co-authored with Mark Allen), and The History of Apologetics (co-edited with Alister McGrath and Benjamin Forrest).
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