Experimental Christianity

A short meditation dating from early 1970s, delivered by Terence Roddy, a Cambridge-educated teacher of mathematics,
to the student body at a prominent British international school in Switzerland

There is little doubt that historians will point to our present time as one of spectacular technical and scientific advance. Anyway, we do. We tend to think of ourselves as somehow intellectually superior to past generations of mankind, that nothing before the nineteenth century has anything of importance to teach the twentieth. Most school students of history today would probably regard the study of the medieval period as a waste of time; as outworn and discredited, an age of faith, ignorant of science, unworthy of serious thinking. But I would like to consider this sort of claim in the light of twentieth-century attitudes to religion, notably that of atheism predominant now in Western thinking, and the religious controversies which atheism provokes, centering on the existence of God and the Christian religion.

The Middle Ages—an age of faith? Yes, perhaps. But if I were asked now why I believed in the existence of God, I should say, “because I lack faith—I lack the superabundant faith of the atheist.” I cannot rise to the the enormous demands which atheism makes on my credulity. I cannot bring myself to believe that a chance concatenation of causeless atomic particles bombinating in a vacuum over eons of time not only produced life, but self-conscience life and moreover conscience of goodness, truth, and beauty, outside time and space altogether and having no material relation to their material origins. I can’t believe in an event of probability zero – that is altogether too much. One lacks faith—that is one thing. And a second thing is this: if I were asked why I was so credulous as to believe in the life, resurrection, and divinity of Jesus, I should say, among other things, that I can’t lay myself open to the charge of being unscientific, and although I don’t think scientific method is the only approach to truth, nevertheless to turn one’s back on on the evidence is something I can’t do either. For Christianity is rooted in historical evidence, and evidence so strong that the events of ancient history as handed down to us by Thucydides pales in comparison. Yet, in the study of ancient history we tend to accept Thucydides and reject St. Mark. Furthermore, most of those interested in refuting Christian historical evidence prejudge the the issues in advance and doctor the evidence to fit their persuasions, while some reject it out of hand. It would be difficult to be less scientific than that. If phenomena of miracle and resurrection, the material presence of God 2,000 years ago in human lives, are foreign to the mental climate of our time, it seems a strange contradiction to employ unscientific means to promote so-called “scientific” ends.

But there is more to it than that. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Scientific evidence, after all, is tested in the laboratory. Christianity is a way of life, and as such it can only be vindicated as a way of life by making the commitment to its way of life. “If any man will come after Me, let him take up his cross and follow Me.” And that, alas, is something most of us find too difficult to do. As G. K. Chesterton said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” But if we’re not prepared to try it, at least let us refrain from running counter to our own scientific standards by passing verdicts on untested hypotheses and consider whether the wisdom of a remoter age has not still something of supreme value to pass on to the present.

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