Michael J. Langford is professor emeritus of philosophy and bioethics at Memorial University of Newfoundland and author of the new book The Tradition of Liberal Theology.

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As a professional philosopher who is also a practicing Christian, I have frequently engaged in one-to-one discussions on issues concerning religion with those of other faiths or of none. Sometimes these have been with other philosophers, sometimes not, but in either case, one of the things that concerns me is the discovery that so many common objections to Christian faith are based on misunderstandings or caricatures.

I don’t mean to imply that this is always so. I have sometimes talked with people who hold profoundly different views — including atheistic ones — which I can fully respect, even though I don’t agree with them. In fact, one of the themes in my new book is that from a strictly “rational” perspective, it is possible for different people, especially given their different life experiences, to believe different things. Although many people hold “irrational” beliefs, usually because they have not done the hard work of seriously considering the arguments for and against different positions, others hold coherent beliefs of different kinds that cannot be strictly proved or disproved, but which are what might be called “viable options.” Being a Christian is not only a matter of holding that the fundamental beliefs at the heart of the Christian religion are — in a broad sense — rationally possible; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a matter of making the existential choice to be a disciple of Jesus.

In arguing that fundamental Christian belief is a “rational option,” there are two areas of debate, in particular, where I have found that misunderstandings abound. One of these concerns what we mean by “omnipotence.” In my book, I emphasize the way in which Aquinas carefully distances this notion from one in which God can do literally anything. This, needless to say, has huge implications for how we approach the very real problem of suffering. The second is the way in which Christianity is thought to be firmly tied to the belief that all people, even as babies, are born with an “original guilt” which can justify their condemnation by God. In my book I show not only that this belief is unbiblical (especially in the light of Jeremiah 31), but that the Greek Orthodox tradition has always rejected it, holding that although we are indeed born with a certain moral weakness (perhaps the consequence of our evolutionary past), we are not guilty until at some point we cooperate with evil. It is possible, in a sense, to refer to a kind of “original sin” — when the universality of this weakness is realized — but we should never refer to “original guilt.” In my book I seek to show that original guilt, although accepted by some Christians, is neither rational nor biblical.

One of the themes that helps to support this overall position is the need to distinguish the “irrational” (where there is manifest prejudice or bad argument) from both the “rational” (where we look for things such as evidence and consistency) and the “non-rational.” For example, religious experience, in itself, is neither rational nor irrational; rather — like falling in love — it is non-rational, a kind of fact or datum on which we can reflect. Falling in love may sometimes lead one to act “irrationally,” but it is not in itself irrational.

Religion at its best, I argue, is a mixture of the non-rational (referring to certain fundamental experiences, including those of the impact of Jesus) and the rational, as we seek to make some kind of sense of these experiences in the way we order our lives and understand the world.

Click to order Michael J. Langford’s The Tradition of Liberal Theology.