In the upcoming entries I plan
to discuss some of these “nuggets of wisdom” I found in William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious
System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes. But first it might be helpful to know the
purpose of this essay.
“The main object which he has in
view is, not to convince the Sceptic, or to answer the arguments of persons who
avowedly oppose the fundamental doctrines of our Religion; but to point out he
scanty and erroneous system of the bulk of those who belong to the class of
orthodox Christians, and to contrast their defective scheme with a
representation of what the author apprehends to be real Christianity.”
The point of this book was for
Wilberforce to expose the shallow religious façade that had become so prevalent
in Britain at the time. Times have changed drastically since then, and while I
can’t speak to the state of British religious views personally, from my
observations in America we’ve drifted even farther from Christianity in its truest sense.
The underlying problem Wilberforce
identifies is the idea of “hereditary religion” rather than a personal
understanding of God’s word and a one-on-one relationship with Jesus Christ:
“When such is the hereditary
religion handed down from generation to generation, it cannot surprise us to
observe young men of sense and spirit beginning to doubt altogether of the trust
of the system in which they have been brought up, and ready to abandon a station
which they are unable to defend.”
This is like the Biblical
parable of the Sower: A man goes out to sow seeds on various types of soil, one
of which is rocky (as in, a shallow layer of soil over bedrock). In this environment
the seeds shoot up quickly into plants, but then are quickly withered by the
sun because they have no root system.
“Their opinions on these subjects
are not formed from the perusal of the word of God. The Bible lies on the shelf
unopened and they would be wholly ignorant of its contents, except for what
they hear occasionally at church, or for the faint traces which their memories
may still retain of the lessons of their earliest infancy.”
This remains true today. People
think that they should instinctively be able to figure life out without any
help or guidance. Even spiritual people seem to be under the impression that merely
desiring spiritual satisfaction will allow them to achieve it without any
effort or further investigation. As a result there are lots of misconceptions
about Christianity floating around, such as the belief that one of the Ten
Commandments if “God helps those who help themselves” (which isn’t in the Bible
at all!).
Because people have not read the
“source material” of the Bible, they really have skewed, inaccurate, or at
least incomplete ideas about what Christianity is. And this causes problems when
trying to have a spiritual conversation with anyone, because it’s possible to
talk to someone who thinks they’re a Christian and eventually discover they
have no true understanding of the religion they claim to be a part of. It
complicates talking to non-Christians as well, because any Christian trying to
have a frank discussion with an Atheist will first have to spend several hours attempting
to refute the Atheist’s prior assumptions…and since misconceptions tend to
stick in our minds, it’s quite possible the Christian’s attempts at refutation
will be in vain.
William Wilberforce was not trying
to discuss the problem of apologetics, however, but rather the problem of
insincerity. Christianity had become too compartmentalized, too tamed, to
watered-down by society, so that it was easy enough for someone to say they
were a Christian, go to church every Sunday, and then live the rest of the week
as they liked:
“We hear them therefore with
apparent indifference; we repeat them almost as it were by rote, assuming by
turns the language of the deepest humiliation and of the warmest thankfulness, with
a calm unaltered composure; and when the service of the day is ended, they are
dismissed altogether from our thoughts, till on the return another Sunday, a
fresh attendance on public worship gives occasion for the renewed expressions
of our periodical gratitude.”
The purpose of this book,
therefore, was to exhort people to come to their senses, to really start living
in a way that reflected what they claimed
to believe:
“The title of Christian is a
reproach to us, if we estrange ourselves from Him after whom we are denominated….
It is not a “talisman or an amulet to be worn on the arm, as an external badge merely
and symbol of our profession, and to preserve us from evil by some mysterious
and unintelligible potency; but it is to be engraven deeply on the heart, there
written by the finger of God himself in everlasting characters.”
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