Christianity's present task

Michael did a debate recently on the topic, "Is Christianity based on a lie?" That's fine for a debate with an atheist, but I think Christianity has a much more important question to answer for itself: Is Christianity based on an assumption?

Is Christianity an absolute truth? Or is it a merely possible or probable truth? Does Christianity enjoy some sort of universal warrant? Or might reasonable people conclude that Jesus did not rise from the dead?

Those who once take on board the critical spirit of the Enlightenment find themselves unable to grant a universal warrant or an absoluteness of truth to any system. This has led to the breakthrough meta-religion of Pluralism, a pragmatic arrangement by which people may disagree without killing each other. Pluralism is the clutch between different ideologies, and it is a welcome development—if implemented minimally.

But Pluralism and the Enlightenment greatly challenge faith, and they are strongly heretical for most of traditional Christianity. That's because Christians who meet this challenge usually end up like John Shelby Spong, a bishop in The Episcopal Church, who says things like this:

[T]he ancient presuppositions on which traditional Christianity rested have been all but destroyed by the expanding knowledge available in the Western world. The churches of the West have had to wrestle with the Enlightenment [...]. The fact is that Christians in the Third World have yet to be introduced to these insights--but they will be, sooner or later. When that happens, their literal, magical, fundamentalist religious system will also come tumbling down.

Understandably, this scares the daylights out of pre-critical Christianity. Spong is right that the Enlightenment is a challenge to faith, and that the Third World has not yet fully met this challenge. However, we need not change Christianity so violently as Spong; we can survive the transition to Pluralism through some process like the following:

1. Think of descriptions of reality as separate from reality itself.
2. Admit that descriptions of reality can never quite match up to reality itself.
3. Admit, therefore, the non-existence of a "universal warrant"—an unassailable human certainty deriving from a perfect description of reality.
   
4. Identify Christianity as a description of reality and therefore subject to the above.
5. Find a way to maintain religious conviction without universal warrant.

This plan lets us keep the content of our doctrines in tact, but the catch is that we now must treat doctrines as probabilities instead of certainties. And the real trick is in the final step, maintaining conviction without certainty. The answer lies somewhere in the fact that conviction comes from experience, and we have a measure of choice in what we experience.

We have to make this transition before we can talk about mission and evangelism in the West. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.