The Case for God

This weekday evening series saw fourof the most distinguished and engaging theologians of our time explore the reality of belief and the nature of Christianity, taking us away from the caricatures set up by debate and putting the case for God in our lives. Each evening included time for questions from the audience.

All the public conversations took place in St Paul’s Cathedral from 6.30-8pm, were free and unticketed.

Coleridge said that the best argument for Christianity is that "it fits the human heart".

In Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense, Francis Spufford, the acclaimed historian and science writer, has written a witty, sharp-tongued personal defence of Christian belief, a remarkable account of what believing in God is actually like and a defence of Christian emotions - of their intelligibility and grown-up dignity.
He says: "What goes on inside believers is mysterious. It appears to be a kind of anxious resistance to reality, but the funny thing is that to me it’s exactly the other way around. In my experience, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things and demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion".

"Religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness".

Karen Armstrong is one of our most provocative and original thinkers on the nature of religion and its role in the contemporary world. Having spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s, she left the order and has since written numerous bestselling books including The Spiral Staircase, her memoir of her subsequent spiritual awakening.

She will argue that religion is practical, that it teaches us to discover new capabilities of mind and heart, and that its truths can only be acquired by action: "You cannot learn to dance, paint or cook by perusing texts or recipes, but if you persevere you find that you can achieve something that seemed initially impossible. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible, or sing with unearthly beauty".

"Christian history reminds us of something of incalculable wonder and inexpressible beauty, the knowledge of which can haunt, delight, torment and transfigure us."

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher who has taught at numerous North American universities. His book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies won the 2011 Michael Ramsay prize for theology. Rowan Williams said: "it shows how the most treasured principles and values of compassionate humanism are rooted in Christian doctrine. It will challenge and inspire readers, inside and outside the church".

David Hart says that the church has forgotten too much of its radical history, and that we must again find Christianity’s continuingly revolutionary nature in order to transform our present and future.

"Jesus’ words made their impression because they were embedded in a life that was striking, reaching out to strangers, afraid of nobody. He spoke with authority, and his authority was surely his manifest freedom and joy".

Timothy Radcliffe is a Dominican Friar and one of the best-loved spiritual teachers of our times. He has taught theology at Oxford University, been involved in ministry to people with AIDS, travelled and taught widely in Asia, Africa and Latin America and published numerous best-selling books about Christianity and the spiritual life.

He says: "It is not our faith that we must laboriously make our way to God, as the distant goal of our striving. Our faith is that God has sought us out and found us. God is already present in the lives of all human beings, even if unnamed and unrecognised. And as Christians we believe that this presence of God among us takes the form of freedom, happiness and love.”

Calling on his own lifetime’s experience of faith and working with people struggling with their lives and the church, he will reflect on what difference being a Christian has made to his life and can make to ours.

"It’s time for a new quest, launched by new questions – a quest for new ways to believe and new ways to live and serve faithfully in the way of Jesus: a quest for a new kind of Christian faith".

Brian McLaren is a writer, speaker, activist, and public theologian. He left a university teaching career to help form Cedar Ridge Community Church, an innovative, nondenominational church to which he was Pastor for 20 years, and now is a leading figure in the Emerging Church movement in America.

He says it’s time for us to ask questions as radical as the ones Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg and which exploded into the Reformation: it’s time for "questions, conversations and friendships that have the power to weaken old, rigid paradigms and to help us imagine new and better possibilities, questions full of the wind of the Spirit of God and a powerful summons to faith, hope and love".

In this talk he’ll ask some of the questions we need in order to explore new ways to be Christians – about God, the Bible, sex, politics and ourselves.