5 Reasons People Give Up on Christianity and 5 Replies

Earlier this month, a friend sent me a link to a news article reporting on a presentation by Prof. Scott McKnight, a New Testament theologian at North Park University, Chicago. McKnight revealed the trend of numerous people leaving the Christian faith. This is something I’ve noticed amongst friends and acquaintances when I visited South Africa earlier this year as well. McKnight proposes five reasons why former Christians gave up on Christianity.

(1)

The first, he says, is the rigid doctrine of Biblical infallibility / inerrancy. When Christians actually start to read the Bible for themselves, instead of sitting back and waiting for their pastors and priests to do their reading and thinking for them, they are disillusioned when they find contradictions in the Bible. This shakes their faith and they abandon Christianity. I wrote a post on this called “Who Wrote the Bible?” on my blog, showing that there are in fact errors (contradictions) in the Bible, but that this does not lessen the inspirational quality of the Bible. Inspiration is not spirit-possession. When God inspired the Bible writers, God did not possess them like a spirit possesses a medium and literally “write through them”; nor did God always dictate. Rather, God inspired them with thoughts and they transformed these thoughts into words, using their own cultural paradigms, their own words, their own understanding. As one writer puts it: “The Bible is written by inspired men, but it is not God’s mode of thought and expression. God, as a writer, is not represented. Men will often say such an expression is not like God. But God has not put Himself in words, in logic, in rhetoric, on trial in the Bible. The writers of the Bible were God’s penmen, not His pen.” Also, the Bible is not a handbook with principles clearly spelled out in bulleted points. Instead, it is a compilation of case studies. It is our responsibility to identify the principles in these case studies. One preacher I recently listened to explained it in similar terms: “The Bible is not a codebook; it’s a casebook.”

For my post on “Who Wrote the Bible?” you can go here.

(2)

The second reason McKnight believes so many people are leaving Christianity is because of the clash between faith and science. This is a sad turn of events, and not as clear cut as people would like us to believe. The pioneers of modern science saw no such dichotomy between faith and science. Isaac Newton, for instance, felt no need to give up his faith while pursuing scientific truth. There need be no “clash” between faith and science. Science, I believe, is the discovery of the marvel of God’s creation. I like how the little book Steps to Christ put it: “Nature and revelation alike testify of God’s love”; “Nature speaks to our senses without ceasing”; “The poet and naturalist have many things to say about nature, but it is the Christian who enjoys the beauty of the earth with the highest appreciation, because he recognizes his Father’s handiwork and perceives His love in flower and shrub and tree. No one can fully appreciate the significance of hill and vale, river and sea, who does not look upon them as an expression of God’s love to man.” While science and faith have areas of overlap, there are also areas where each is wholly in a sphere of its own. For instance, there is a limit to what science can say about God, in the same way there is a limit to what the art critic can say about the artist. While it is true that the artwork reveals somewhat of the artist, it only reveals a fraction. Science’s study of creation only reveals a fraction of the Creator.

(3)

McKnight’s third point for why so many people are leaving Christianity is the example of Christians; and he specifically refers to the sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in the USA. I think there are two points that need to be made here. Firstly, the Christianity itself teaches (or should I rather say, the Bible teaches) that the Church will become utterly corrupt. The Bible’s critique of the latter day church is much worse than ours. She is called Babylon: “fallen”, “the habitation of devils” and “foul spirits”, the “Mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth” (Revelation 18:2, 17:5). The Church’s degradation should in fact strengthen our faith in the validity of the Christian religion; while at the same time it should make us highly critical of the institutions (the “Church”). We are warned, thus, to think for ourselves, to be weary of the Church – even to “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4). One need not be in a mainstream church to be a Christian. However, the Bible is clear that we ought to be part of a community of faith; there is thus room for “church”, but let’s be careful not to deify the church. The “church” is not the Christian goal – Jesus Christ is the goal.

This brings me to the second point I’d like to make here: The Church has never been intended to be the “example” for what a Christian is supposed to be. After all, the Church is a hospital for sick people (sick with sin) – it is not a little heaven-on-earth. The only example, the only true pattern for Christianity is the Christ, Jesus. No fallible man is to be our model, no fallible Christian our guide. Christ alone is the example for the Christian life. The moment you take your eyes of Jesus and start criticising the church, make sure that you make a clear distinction. The “Church”, is not the essence of Christianity.

(4)

The fourth point why many people are leaving the Christian faith is the (unbiblical idea) of Hell where God keeps souls alive so that He can torture them for ceaseless millennia for the sins they committed during their relatively short lives. This is, I believe, a sick doctrine rooted in pagan traditions and an honest and true study of Scripture shows that it is not Biblical.

I’ve written about this and related topics on my blog as well:

“The Shaky Pillars of Hell”

“I Don’t Have a Soul, I Am a Soul”

“Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop”

“The Hell of Heaven”


“The Comfort of Sleeping the Sleep of Death”

(5)

McKnight’s final point for why so many people are leaving the Church is the terrifying “God of the Bible”. According to McKnight the age old Question of Evil, is a prime reason for abandonment of faith. The dilemma goes something like this: If God is all-powerful, He cannot be Good, for the world would not have been so full of Evil. And if He is Good, He cannot be all-powerful, for then He would have done something about the Evil.

This argument is flawed, because God’s Goodness (or rather God’s Love) is not properly understood. The Bible is clear that God’s greatest priority is Love. In fact, the Bible says “…God is Love…” (1 John 4:16). For Love to exist there must be Freedom of Choice. For this very reason the Evil in this world should not be surprising. As I wrote in a previous update letter: “A requirement for Love is the freedom of choice. Forced love is an oxymoron. Bribed love is not love, it’s prostitution. Coerced love is not love, it’s molestation. Forced love is not love, it’s rape.” This is the reason why Evil can exist and at the same time God can be both Good and All-powerful, because Love so important that God refuses to take away people’s freedom of choice. If God did, then Love could not exist. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay – people are using their free choice, not to love, but to hurt, to pursue their own selfish desires.

I’ve written about God and this topic to some degree on my blog as well:

“God”

“Life and Death in a Nutshell”

“Christ vs. Church”

“Why I’ll Never Be a Pantheist Again”

“A Freewill Dilemma”

Another point I ought to make here, specifically with people reading the Bible and particularly their abhorrence of the God of the Old Testament, is that Christians have a reference for understanding Scripture. Jesus Christ is our example of who God is, and what God is like. “God having spoken in many parts and in many ways formerly to the fathers in the prophets, at the end of these days has spoken to us in the person of the Son…” (Heb. 1:1,2a). There is a hierarchy of the revelation of God’s character – while the prophets in the Old Testament revealed some of it, it was the Son who has “the express image” of God (Heb 1:3), who said “if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father” (Joh. 14:9), that showed us what God is really like. We understand therefore the Old Testament revelation of God filtered through the example of Jesus’ character.