by Richard B. Keyes, Director of L’Abri MA
“I am perfectly content as a non-Christian. I do not believe in an afterlife and would never consider a religion so restrictive and exclusive as Christianity anyway.”
You are content as you are—fair enough. If contentment is what you are after, the Christian faith may not have much to say to you for a while. But lots of things that bring contentment are not true. Would you be willing to consider something if it disturbed your contentment, but might actually be true?
How do you know that there is no conscious existence after death? The main reason that people claim to not believe in an afterlife is that they think that the idea is a naive wish-fulfillment in the face of the fear of death.
But disbelief in an afterlife could have the same intellectual status. It could be the hopeful wish that there might be no accountability to anyone after we die, and the hope that there is no intrusive authority in our lives before that time.
Christian exclusiveness starts with the idea that the Gospel of Christ is true in a way that will exclude some other claims to truth. Is this so arrogant? Everybody in the world who has any religious or metaphysical convictions believes that the majority of people in the world are wrong about their religious and metaphysical convictions.
For example, you exclude my convictions. But that’s okay. We can talk about it much better knowing where we both stand—two absolutists having a civil discussion.
Text author: Richard B. Keyes, Director of L’Abri MA, a residential study center in Southborough, Massachusetts. L’Abri was founded in Switzerland by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer in 1955. Mr. Keyes is also and author and lecturer. Since 1997 he has served as an AIIA Resource Associate (worldviews). Above text provided by AIIA Institute.
