Great explanation of this belief system. A deist is a person who believes that God designed and created the world and governs it through natural laws that are inherent in everything**___** The main understanding is that life comes from God and we are to use it as God intends, as illustrated in Jesus’ parables.
That was really interesting. I haven’t heard of specifically Christian deism before.
The issue I have with Christian Deism is that I wonder why they even bother continuing to include a god in their belief system. It seems like the whole point is that the world operates as if god didn’t exist. Why keep him in the picture at all? He doesn’t affect anything. Interacting with the world “through humans” is indistinguishable from not interacting with the world at all (by every metric except who gets credit for helping the people in need).
It just feels to me like the nicotine patch of religions; one of the last steps involved in weaning oneself off of theism altogether. They can still claim the societal benefits and privilege of saying they’re Christian (and not feel like a dirty liar while they do it) without actually interfacing with a theistic philosophy.
I think it’s nice and noble to try to be logical and rational in one’s theology(this is something I try to do, I think God doesn’t want us to turn our brains off when we think about theology), but why call it Christian Deism if you reject the core tenant of the Christian faith. CS Lewis discussed this in Mere Christianity, one: Jesus was either divine or was a lunatic, as he claimed to be the Son of God and he forgave peoples transgressions against others as if he were the victim. two: Christianity is worthless if all it is is “good advice to live by” or something robbed of its divinity. What in morals does Christianity bring that isn’t already established? The value is Jesus.
That said I think, in regards to the nicotine patch theory, what you say makes sense. I think there’s a certain comfort in our personal religious traditions, and it’s hard to let go to the traditions we aren’t comfortable with anymore. It leads to baby-steps from start to end, wherever that may be. Personally, I grew up in a protestant denomination, moved away from my home church. Finding a new church is hard, balancing my personal beliefs and trying to find churches that are neutral or accepting of those, while finding a place that doesn’t feel too foreign in terms of atmosphere and tradition(size, practices, etc differ a ton between denominations and even congregations). I can see why someone facing doubt in their faith might come into Christian Deism, in that it’s a smooth transition from the title and identity of Christian and the rationalist views of more skeptical theological positions like Deism.
I agree with everything you’ve said. I just have to be “that guy” over something real quick.
Jesus was either divine or was a lunatic
Lewis’s Trilemma of “liar, lunatic, or lord” has always bugged me. There are so many other options that Lewis intentionally ignored. Jesus never said he was God, to start with, so there are a variety of other possibilities in the “lord” column that are significantly less prestigious, such as prophet or teacher.
Further, the existence of Jesus as a historical figure at all is simply not subject to the same standards of rigor we subject other historical figures from other religions to (for example, Sun Tzu either didn’t exist at the time he was supposed to have existed, or he didn’t write the book he was supposed to have written). “Legend” is, however remote, a viable fourth option.
In addition, there was almost certainly more than one person with the very common name Jeshua going around preaching fringe beliefs that didn’t entirely line up with contemporary mainstream Judaism. Like how there are almost certainly a lot of journalists named Robert in New York City, but they’re not all Robert Evans, and it would be very easy, 200 years from now, for a future Tacitus to claim all the acts of all the journalists named Robert, Bob, Bobby, and Rob were performed by Robert Evans. Therefore, “conglomeration” (of multiple different religious leaders) is also entirely possible (and would explain why the timelines of the gospels don’t line up, and why there are three different versions of Jesus’s last words across the four gospels).
Finally, it’s entirely possible that the people recording Jesus’s acts and words were genuinely mistaken about some or all of what they wrote about. The oldest gospels were written down roughly just before or just after 70AD (although I found a lot of non-scholarly religious figures claiming much earlier dates, the evidence they present for this is scant and often self-referential). That’s almost or more than 40 years after he died, and as far as I know, none of the names attributed to the gospel writers are accurate (Matthew, Luke, and Mark, last time I checked, are all believed to have been written anonymously and named after Jesus’s disciples later). So our earliest accounts of Jesus come from people who may not even have ever met the man, and if they had, given the life expectancy of the era, they would have had to be quite young (a charitable estimate would allow them to be in their early 20s). We’re relying on a combination of 40-year-old memories, most likely of events from the authors’ childhoods, and oral tradition. Considering we have modern people, with internet access, who believe bonsai kittens were a real thing and Al Gore claimed he invented the internet, and those things originated only twenty years ago, it’s not absurd to suggest that writers in a more primitive society dealing with twice as much temporal distance could make mistakes, misinterpretations, or record downright falsehoods told to them by bad-faith actors.
