“If Jesus is God, then why…?”

Religious and scientific quests both start at the same point: an act of faith.

In religion, it may be called revelation; in science, a hypothesis. A scientist senses intuitively that a certain proposition must be true, which inspires him to embark on arduous research at the end of which his hypothesis is either proved or disproved.

The research involves experiments (performed both by the scientist himself and his colleagues or predecessors) and an interpretation of their results, efforts both empirical and rational. That’s where a religious quest may differ, although it doesn’t have to.

St Augustine wrote: “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” St Anselm later expressed the same thought, confirming the appropriate sequence of the quest. Mutatis mutandis, a scientist will agree that he goes through roughly the same progression from an act of faith to ultimate understanding.

Looking specifically at Christianity, which seems appropriate today, the empirical evidence comes from the experience and testimony of numerous believers and eyewitnesses, such as the evangelists, and tangentially even non-believers, such as Tacitus, Pliny or Josephus.

And the science of rational interpretation is called theology, basically applying a philosophical apparatus to the word of God. Rational interpretation is essential for scientists, but not necessarily for believers, as history proves.

After all, how many of the billions of Christians have over the past two millennia ever opened a single theological treatise? An infinitesimally tiny proportion, I’d guess. This proves that even if a believer’s reason is excommunicated, he can still remain in communion with Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be excommunicated. If God gave us reason, it couldn’t have been just to enable us to calculate compounded interest, solve word puzzles or understand how protectionism hurts the economy. Human reason seeks to make everything, including God, intelligible.

The very definition of God precludes any possibility of complete intelligibility: a higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa. Yet, just as in science, any approximation to the ultimate truth is a step forward, advancing human knowledge to a higher plateau if not to the very summit.

Both theological and natural sciences pose questions and seek answers. In fact, Jacques Maritain described theology as “the science of first principles”, which purview makes it the overarching science, with fields like physics or biology merely its subsets.

Be that as it may, theology does answer questions, those asked by both believers and atheists. The latter tend to pose such enquiries in the hope of starting an argument they fully expect to win, and most of such squabbles begin with variations on my title above.

What they are implying is that, no matter how sound the theological argument is, they are going to dismiss it a priori. That’s a gross logical error on several levels.

An atheist is perfectly within his rights to say “I don’t believe in God, and nothing you say will change my mind” and leave it at that. I happen to disagree with that view, but I respect it as a faith in its own right.

Yet the moment an atheist says “If God exists…” or “If Jesus is God…”, he accepts that possibility for the sake of argument. This means he gatecrashes a different system of thought, accepting the terms on which that system is impeccably cogent.

If he then tries to keep one foot out and the other in, the resulting split is guaranteed to sprain his intellectual abductor muscle. Even an extremely intelligent atheist will then sound dumb.

The brightest illustration of this observation is David Hume who applied his intellectual gifts and literary brilliance to the perennial issue of reconciling God with the existence of evil. If God is merciful and good, Hume kept asking, then why does he allow suffering? If that’s beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he doesn’t know what’s going on, is he really omniscient?

Countering such questions is called theodicy, vindication of God. Its principal argument is based on free will, God’s gift enabling us to make our own free choice between good and evil.

We are free to help a blind man across the street or to push him under a speeding car, for example, just as God is free to punish us if we choose wrong and, one hopes, reward us if we choose right. And, though Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, we remain free to take that path or not.

If our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, that indeed God is love, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into marionettes, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Such arguments are irrefutable within the intellectual world our atheist has entered, and if he tries to refute them he’ll inevitably sound stupid, regardless of how brilliant he may be outside. That’s where he should stay, outside, thereby keeping his reputation for brilliance intact.

(I wrote a whole book about one such man, Leo Tolstoy, whose personality was voluminous enough to accommodate every known misapprehension of such subjects and also some uniquely his own.)

One such question always crops up on Good Friday. If Jesus was God, how come he didn’t exercise his divine power to save himself from an agonising and humiliating death?

Our hubristic modernity can’t fathom the possibility that someone may choose not to use his power under some circumstances. If something can be done, it must be done: such is the ubiquitous conviction. Yet the very notion of free will presupposes the possibility of self-restraint, choosing not to use some of the powers God possesses.

Such self-limitation of God is called ‘kenosis’ in theology, literally ‘self-emptying’. The term was first used in this context in St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, and it’s vital to grasping the meaning of Christ’s Passion.

Chalcedonian doctrine established the dual nature of Christ as fully God and fully man. The latter is consistent with kenosis: Jesus refused to use his divine power to solve every problem he encountered in his earthly life.

As God, he chose to sacrifice himself to redeem the sins of mankind. And as a man, he freely accepted the burden of humanity: he needed to eat and sleep, he could be tempted by Satan, he asked God the Father to stay the executioners’ hand, he suffered agonising pain on the Cross.

Such arguments won’t lead an atheist to Christ. But if a man asks probing questions not because he wants to proclaim his atheism, but because he genuinely wants to know, then the answers may help him in his quest for the truth. As Pascal said, “If you are looking for Me, you have already found Me.” And even Jensenists may be right.