Snippet: Deconstructing Atheism?

snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Another snippet from the interview with Tom Holland, a celebrated historian (and atheist):

While it is of course perfectly true that atheists have morals, it doesn’t alter the fact that those morals are basically Christian. And that if you lack the theological, supernatural explanation for why these values should be held, where do you get them? And I think the intellectual history of the past few decades has basically been a kind of gathering attempt to try and explain Christian values and Christian teachings in ways that do not depend on Christianity being true. And I think it’s proven to be a struggle.”

The good thing, in my mind, about those attempts is that it’s another evidence of God’s common grace and the image of God in humanity. It makes for a better world.

But it’s probably not sustainable. In other words, with time, our secular ideologies will do what secular ideologies eventually do and lead to even greater and more unrestrained injustice by the powerful.

What can we do as Christians?

Tom Holland indirectly offers the answer in one of his most celebrated books—Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In the Roman world, a world of great and pervasive injustice, he demonstrates that Christianity shone by living out the gospel (and willingly dying for it).

I don’t believe taking and wielding power is the answer. But neither is the approach of many Christians who react to that response by “deconstructing” a biblical faith, an approach that often undermines the very values they use to criticize their faith tradition.

The interview can be heard on episode 45 of the “Undeceptions with John Dickson” podcast.

Photo by Marian Kroell on Unsplash