Famous atheist A.N. Wilson has decided to become a Christian once more. See here and here. Extraordinary. And he always was an annoyingly good writer...
Here's some highlights:
Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.
See, that's one for the martyrs...
... the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”
On Easter:
Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts together, for it addresses the whole person.
In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it.
Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ.
5 comments:
It's absolutely fascinating that he says,
But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person.He seems to have been drawn back by questions like suffering and death, when we often hear about people deserting their Christian faith for similar reasons.
It's captivating the way he casts his 'slip' back into Christianity as a mirror image of another's turn to atheism.
What's particularly interesting to me at the moment is that, as he quotes Coleridge thus…
“Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain those last words.”… he's talking about a nexus of faith and reason, or some sort of connection. Is it the lack of intellectual satisfaction in materialism that drove him back to Christ? Surely not that alone.
Certainly he emphasises the historical veracity of the Easter story, and considers it fundamental to true belief in Christ, but for Wilson, it's much more than what 'makes sense' or 'is historically reliable'.
It's about the self-evident truth of the Easter message, isn't it? Bruce Marshall called this the "unrestricted epistemic primacy" of the gospel narratives. That is, they don't depend on anything, but only testify to their own authenticity and authority. And more than that, the way we know them, trust them, doesn't and can't depend on anything else.
Praise God that it's not up to us to work him out, or work out what's true.
N.B. the Daily Snail link kept crashing my fairly old iMac's browsers (both Firefox and Safari.)
AN WIlson used to be an atheist, and wrote in the Daily Mail about his faith :=
''Of course, only hard evidence will satisfy the secularists, but over time and after repeated readings of the story, I've been convinced without it.''
Of course, he would want hard evidence that he got his money from the Daily Mail for writing the article.
But Wilson reserves his love of hard evidence for things which are really important, like getting paid for his article.
He doesn't need hard evidence for his faith, only for his bank balance.
Have you read Wilson's bio of Betjeman (published 2006)?
In it he claims that Betjeman was a greater apologist for Anglicanism than C S Lewis. At first I thought: nonsense. But then I thought: OK, Betjeman a better apologist for Anglicanism as a denomination, Lewis for Christianity as such.
What do you reckon?
there is one thing and one thing that all denominations must learn. they must learn how to respect and focus on God rather than bickering over nothing
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