Why Christianity makes sense? By Deacon Daniel
In the name of the father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. One God. Amen.
I am Deacon Daniel, from the Coptic Diocese of London, and I believe that Christianity makes sense. It makes sense to me, it makes sense to Christians around the world, and it can make sense to you. It is a faith based on asking questions and seeking answers. It is a faith with two-thousand years of being challenged with questions and having to seek and find those answers. It is a faith that doesn’t hide away or shy away from challenges but accepts them, and through faith and reason gives its answers.
In order to understand why I can say, so outrightly, that Christianity makes sense, you have to first understand two things about me. And that is who I am and where I come from. To understand who I am, as I have introduced myself already, I am Deacon Daniel and I serve in the Coptic Diocese of London. But that is not all there is in my quest for knowledge for my questioning of my faith. As well as serving as a Deacon in the Church, I work as a Philosophy and religion teacher, which means that asking questions about my faith and being challenged with these questions is a part of my daily life, and it is something I enjoy being involved in.
For me, as with Christians everywhere, the ability to face questions and to seek answers is a vital and important part of our faith. It is something that’s sets us apart as we don’t just say, “because God says it,” but we investigate further why God says it and we investigate how we can bring that into our lives.
The second thing you need to know about me is that I wasn’t born into the Church. I obviously wasn’t born a Deacon but I also wasn’t born an Orthodox Christian, in fact I wasn’t born with any faith at all. I was born into a family where God and Christ played no role in our lives, where we didn’t pray and seek guidance, where we didn’t ask God for help, where we didn’t read Scripture. I was born into a family where ‘being’ a Christian was something other people did, and what some people were called regardless of whether they went to Church.
So an understanding of these things was something I had to develop as I grew up. Form my youngest memories I understood that people were praying, I sometimes offered to join in, but I didn’t know why.
So, as with many people who seek answers, as with many of you watching this, I was someone who had to ask questions and someone who had to seek answers. My passion for this grew to such a massive and important part of my life that I decided to study religion at university. As I have mentioned, I loved Philosophy and loved asking questions, so I decided to make this my job and I went to university to study religion.
Now, I wasn’t studying this as someone who believed it but I was studying it as someone would study science or someone would study politics, asking “what are they doing?” and investigating, and looking at these kind of questions to do with people. But, the more that I learnt about it the more I started questioning myself and the more that I started asking, “how does it do that?” Instead of asking, “why are people praying,?” I began to ask, “how does prayer help?” Instead of asking, “why do they believe that jesus died for the sins of mankind?” I asked, “why did Jesus de for the sins of mankind?” Instead of asking, “why do they believe that God exists,” I began to ask the ultimate question, “Does God exist?” And the only answers I found were dead ends. The answers where I said that, “they’re just primitive”, “they’re just old fashioned,” “they just follow these old religions,” That’s not an answer. The answers that told me, “Science has everything, “Science can answer it.” That wasn’t an answer.
For me the biggest challenge to my faith was when I look at the Church itself. when I look at Christianity itself and I see that the apostles willingly and knowingly went to their death for what they witnessed in Jesus Christ, their witness that Jesus died on the cross and resurrected and ascended into Heaven. Now this really challenged my mind why would someone die for something if they didn’t wholeheartedly and completely believe it, if they didn’t know it to be true. Now as someone who doubted these, as somebody who said these aren’t true, my mind couldn’t understand this. So I had to start questioning, maybe this is true. I went from waking up every day and saying it’s not true to waking up every day and saying ‘I need to find out if it is true.’
And for me the biggest challenge was from how is it justified? The history of the Church, the beliefs of the Church, and how Christianity has faced these drew me to investigate it, so I started looking into religions around the world. The question of “is there one God or is there many Gods?” Now, this may seem like a strange question but imagine you are someone who has never heard of religion, you are someone who has never questioned religion. You would have to wonder, “is there one all powerful God, or are there many all powerful Gods?” Having many all powerful Gods makes no sense, so to me surely there should be one.
If there were many Gods, who would I pray to? If I pray to one am I going to miss out on something else? Am I going to pray for a good harvest and have a flood because I didn’t pray to another God. But I decided, if God is all loving then he is surely one God. The same way, if I was to argue about whether one God or many gods made the world, surely if God is all powerful there is only one God.
So this led me to that dreaded question. There are three major religions that worship one God. All of them come from what we call the ‘Abrahamic faiths’ the God of Abraham. Now to me this question came, was it “which of these religions is true?” Now this took me a bit of a challenge, this took me a long time to question. But when I look back, the answer was before me, the answer was simple the whole time.
Judaism, the oldest of these religion has a long vast history but tells people you can’t convert. If you are not born with God’s love you are not chosen by God. To me, this is not an all loving God. Islam teaches that God does love you, that he does welcome you, but you cannot question. To me that naturally, as someone who likes to question, someone who likes to get involved in these big questions, this doesn’t make sense. So I was brought full circle to Christianity. But this wasn’t the end of my adventure, this wasn’t the end of my quest. I now realised that this was the religion that made sense but I needed to answer my questions.
And this is where the Orthodox Church, with its two-thousand years of answering these questions came in. This is where the Orthodox Church’s history, its Apostolic Faith, came in. You see, unlike other Churches the Orthodox Church has history. It didn’t start four hundred years ago, it didn’t start one thousand years ago, it began with the Apostles. It began with the very people who travelled with Jesus, who learned directly with Jesus. They didn’t learn about Jesus they learnt from him. Now if I was interested in anything, if I was asking questions about anything in history or in philosophy or even in science, I would go back to the original. If I wanted to know about the Roman empire, I wouldn’t read a book by someone who lives now I would want to read the original books. The Roman books themselves, and see what they have got to say for themselves. The same in Christianity. If I want to understand what Christianity was like for the very first Christians I want to read their work, and by studying and reading their work I found the Orthodox Church.
This is the same religion that they follow, this is the same practices that they follow, these are the same beliefs that they follow. And this was an amazing discovery for me. I discovered that the first century Church is still around today. But that still wasn’t good enough. In my mind, yes, Christianity seems to be the correct religion, and Orthodox Christianity seems to be the Church that remains with that, but this didn’t solve the question of whether it was real. And for this, I need to dig a bit further.
So I started read the writings of these first century through fifth century Church fathers, who I actually keep today; St Athanasius, St Basil, St Cyril. And I discovered that all of my questions about Christianity had been answered by these very same people one thousand five hundred years ago. And you can imagine my surprise at finding this, that he faith that I am seeking has been answered, the question of whether God exists has been justified, the question of who Jesus was has been answered.
So this, to me, is why I believe that Christianity makes sense. Why I believe that the orthodox Church makes sense. Because if you are seeking to find Christianity in its truest form, it’s been there the whole time. And if you are seeking and have been challenged with questions, it has answered these questions in the past. And as we look at the answers, as we look at how Christianity has answered these questions,
I hope and pray with all my heart that you will come out understand that Christianity makes sense.
