Welcoming President Macron is one thing. Speaking his language is something else. We English are cheerfully indolent when it comes to other languages.
Put it this way. ‘Do you speak French?’ That’s one question. ‘What is the French for Sunday?’ is another. And it is the second that invites a specific answer. ‘Do you believe in God?’ is one question. ‘Do you believe that God raised Jesus from the dead?’ is another. And again, it is the second question that cuts the mustard.
I believe in God. Does that make me a Christian? Unhappily no. There’s a bit more to it than that. (After all, James says the devils also believe and tremble.) It’s not uncommon to find people believing in God – the God, that is, as they understand him to be. All over the world people have this kind of belief. They think of a God who is remote, aloof, inaccessible.
We can sharpen up our ideas by asking whether this is a step on the way before it is possible to become a Christian. Do we believe God is an observer looking down on his world but taking no part in its activities? Is he maybe a benign well-wisher who would like to help us if he could? If our answer is yes, then we can say, ‘I am a deist.’
Many pioneers of the Enlightenment would have been glad to join that company. So would many founding fathers of the USA. We cannot ignore the fact that deism, or calculated opaqueness, is in effect a politically palatable formula that can satisfy a broad range of religious people and agnostics without giving offence to anybody. To be a deist is to acknowledge a deity whom we can conveniently forget.
How about then the suggestion of regarding deism as a halfway house to full-blown Christian belief? This is a tempting proposition and it is difficult to avoid the impression that such a halfway house is well occupied at the present time. People may well wish to nod to a Creator and incur few obligations. It’s a good deal.
But will it satisfy us? An unavoidable question crops up. If God exists, is it not probable that he has made himself known? That probability obliges us to take seriously the holy texts of Christianity, Islam or Hinduism. For most of us in the UK that will mean turning to what the prophets, evangelists and apostles have contributed (in an English translation, of course) to our understanding. In short, we have to open the Bible and scrutinise the revelation of God as we find it there.
By the way, we cannot but notice that the French word for Sunday slots more happily into a Christian vocabulary than our word. After all, we are not sun-worshippers.
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