Snippet

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

26 December 2024

3 min read

My Boxing Day anti-climax

What if the most wonderful time has come and gone, and not much has changed?

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A grump cat wears a red Christmas hat, sitting amongst Christmas decorations.

Amin Alizadeh on Unsplash.

Can I begin by sharing an embarrassing secret?

Every year I find Christmas… a disappointment.

This is because it turns out that I’m still basically a 10-year-old, and I still, in the core of my being, believe that the presents under the tree are going to be the key to the lasting happiness I seek.

And, not only that, but I am also convinced that somehow all the candles, and the nostalgia, and the Christmas specials of Call the Midwife, will add up to some glorious, mulled wine inspired transcendence.

Now I know all this is nonsense.

I know that low expectations are the key to enjoying family holidays; that the presents are tokens of love, and sometimes obligation, which aren’t supposed to complete me.

And yet, on Boxing Day there is always this sensation of anti-climax.

The presents have been opened, and the people I love have done their best, and sometimes given me truly creative and thoughtful presents, but none of them are the specific thing I secretly craved.

And the carols were stunning, and candlelight does make everything and everyone beautiful, and I cried at Call the Midwife, but I’m still me, with all my ambivalence and endless need and childish self-regard.

The most wonderful time of the year has come and gone, and not much has changed.

Which gets me thinking about that first Christmas, and how anti-climactic, in some ways, that was too.

Christians believe that the birth of this particular baby in that particular stable, was a key turning point in all history, as God entered the world in human form, coming to rescue his people and restore humanity.

But in the short term, how much actually changed?

Mary and Joseph still faced the overwhelming task of keeping a new-born alive, in a stable far from home.

The shepherds and the wise men seem to have wondered back to their respective lives, and are never heard from again.

And evil still rages unchecked. The story doesn’t make it into many Nativity plays (strangely enough) but the next episode in the narrative is truly horrific – Herod, the paranoid ruler massacring all the babies in Bethlehem in a futile attempt to eliminate the new-born king.

The light shineth in darkness, as we hear in the stunning final reading of Carol services, but the darkness comprehended it not.

Christmas came and went, and the world kept turning.

Christian faith always has to contend with this reality – that not much may change. And so for me there is actually hope in the recognition that the bible includes quite a lot of reality – quite a lot of disappointment, and non-transformation, and outright evil – in its telling of the entrance of God into the world.

And yet, and yet. I also believe that that baby, that birth, that Christmas, really did sow concrete seeds of change into the midst of the darkness and disappointment.

The darkness may not have comprehended the light, but neither could it overcome it.

And somehow, the light shines still, even amidst the piles of wrapping paper and washing up and reminders of human failure that fill our post-Christmas days.

Happy boxing day!

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Column

Atheism

Creed

18 August 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 3: the secret about truth I learned at seminary

In the third of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper recalls learning a crucial lesson about her knowledge and her truth claims.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

An unfocused views down on to stacks of books in an old library.

Jana Kowalewicz on Unsplash.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen and Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

For the first 20 years of my life, I thought religion was for stupid and weak people. I carried a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in my purse. I studied science as a way to defeat religion.

But one day, while titrating an iron solution in a laboratory, a sudden realization crashed over me. I remember just staring at the orange solution simmering in the beaker, thinking, “oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”

The realization was that I had dismissed religion as stupid without ever engaging it. I had never even asked religious people what they thought! I had done all this while priding myself on open-mindedness.

This struck me as deeply hypocritical. I had always thought that one of the hallmarks of a good argument was being able to defend the ideas of your enemies. I wasn’t even close.

So, I printed 500 pages from the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science. I sat down with a cup of tea. And after reading just two pages, I set the stack of paper back down on the desk and thumped my head down on top of them.

Oh no.

The theologians had a point!

To seminary

Twelve months later, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor of my new room in Theology House. Theology House was the residence of the most earnest students training to be pastors at the Boston University School of Theology.

I was an atheist, but the seminary administrators gave me the benefit of the doubt when I told them I wanted to be as immersed in the world of faith as possible. We had house-dinner planned for that night, and school was to begin Monday. I couldn’t wait. I was going to get a master’s degree in theology as an atheist.

I spent the next two years proving my old self wrong. It was delightful. Every day was a new opportunity to unearth another bias I didn’t know I had, or to discover another philosophical approach I hadn’t known existed. It was occasionally difficult to let go of certain cherished ideas, but it was more than worth it. The intellectual richness of faith blew my mind over and over.

About six months into my studies, I ran into a secular friend I used to sit around and bash religion with.

“So, what have you learned at seminary?” he asked me, grimacing. I told him the simple but life-changing truth: Christianity is intellectually rigorous. It’s reasonable. It can even be beautiful.

“Did you become a believer?” he asked. “No,” I said, shrugging. “But I’m beginning understand why other people do.”

Why do we believe what we believe?

The most important question I ended up asking at seminary was about the nature of belief itself. I needed to understand: how could my roommates and I all work so hard to be reasonable, but still believe such different things?

Rationality, I learned, is always contextual. All of us would like to think that what we believe—what seems to us the obvious, “rational” conclusion—is the truth. But it’s not. There are eight billion people on this planet and every single one of us thinks we are right about everything.

Each conclusion each of us draws comes from deploying our best possible reasoning to the model of reality that lives in our heads. These models are always under revision; they are the result of the model of one minute ago plus whatever happened in that minute. This process stretches all the way back to before birth, since exposure to different sounds and nutrients in the womb impacted how we began making sense of the world. Then we were born into contexts that came pre-laden with various metaphysical presuppositions, attitudes, and values. Throughout life we did and continue to do our best to reason within these models and to steer their development.

This “best reasoning” is never pure intellect. There is no such thing as reason unbiased by feeling. It is now an accepted scientific fact that thought and feeling are always intertwined.

Indeed, rationality itself may be best thought of as a feeling. The philosopher William James says we deem things true when they give us the “sentiment of rationality”—that is, a feeling of satisfaction or harmony that occurs when an idea fits well with our current model of reality. This doesn’t mean reason and reasonableness don’t exist; it means that, contrary to the popular myth that quality thinking is free of emotion, emotional awareness is a key element of it.

My friends and I were all reasonable while believing different things because we each made sincere effort to improve our reasoning as thought-feelers born into different models of reality. None of us could claim with 100 per cent certainty that we were correct. What we could do was welcome new insights into ourselves, one another, and the world that would help us keep developing our models in the direction of truth.

The path to truth

By the time I graduated from seminary, I hadn’t changed my mind on God. I remained a firm atheist.

But I had learned a crucial lesson: my knowledge and truth claims were far from perfect. If I wanted to say true things or to keep getting closer to the truth—which I very much did, my loyalty to truth still my highest value—I needed to do two things:

First, I needed to keep untangling my own personal history, thoughts, and feelings. Only through self-awareness could I unpack my own biases, hone my capacities to reason amidst emotion, and discern the elements of my worldview worth keeping or leaving behind.

Second, I needed to keep engaging people who were different from me. Only through exposure to new ideas could I expand or develop my own.

Today, my model of reality includes something I thought it never would: God. But this change took twelve years of the most careful, self-aware, humble, prudent, and open-minded quest for truth I could manage.

I’m not done revising the model, and I won’t ever be. God will almost surely remain a part of it, but I’m open to the possibility He will not. I’ll keep learning about myself; I’ll keep learning about others; I’ll keep steering my model as responsibly as I am able.

The ultimate truth of things beats at the heart of all our eight billion different perspectives; the best any of us can do is keep working to beat in harmony with it.