Why I'm Not a Christian Anymore

My journey away from traditionalist Christianity

My Story

I was raised an Orthodox Christian and up until recently was a devout member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. My Dad is an Orthodox Priest and my Mum was the choir director as his parish. As far back as I can remember, I attended church every Sunday, served at the altar, or sung in the choir.

For most of my childhood I took the existence of God and the truth of Christianity for granted. I even remember at the age of 12, debating the rest of my class in an R.E lesson on the existence of God. Despite my lack of sophisticated arguments at that age, I defended myself well against my classmates, and the teacher. Funnily enough, this was a Catholic school, so, jokes on them I guess.

By the age of 15 I decided that church was boring and religion was useless. Influenced by the new atheist movement, and struggling with mental health problems, I entered what one might call an “edgy atheist rebellious phase”. Philosophically, the main driver for me at this point was the problem of evil. I struggled to reconcile the existence of a loving God with the suffering of myself and those around me.

Of course, as a young man, I figured I had all the answers and that my reasons for being an atheist were not just sound, but insurmountable. This was until I met someone who became one of my closest friends, and remains so until this day. He was the first person to seriously question my underlying assumptions and showed me a way to move forward from the gridlock I found myself in.

In my early 20s, I slowly found myself back to faith in God, and back in the Orthodox Church, and that is where I have been for the past 6 years. I tried my best to be a serious practising Christian, and forced myself to submit to the teachings of the Church I believed Jesus had founded. The more I learnt about and practised Christianity however, the more problems I found.

I began to be plagued by certain issues that despite my best efforts and years of struggle, I could not overcome. I even had a previous Substack blog (which I regrettably deleted impulsively) in which these issues took centre stage as I attempted to explain my hangups away from a faithful Orthodox perspective. Ultimately, I failed, and my faith dwindled.

I have had some time to mourn the death of my former faith and heal from the shame and guilt related to leaving it. I have started this new blog to explore the realm of philosophical and religious ideas free from the chains of Christian dogma (please subscribe if you wish to join me on that journey). The first point of order then, is to elucidate these problems that finally defeated me. So, here we go.

Some Context: First Principles

To understand why the below issues are of such import, it behoves me to explain my underlying assumptions that were shaping my theological and philosophical worldview. My first principles were as follows;

1. The classical theist God exists.¹

2. God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.

3. Anything Jesus explicitly taught, or implicitly affirmed, is true.

4. Jesus affirmed the authority of scripture and founded a Church to continue His ministry.

5. The Church Jesus founded is the Eastern Orthodox Church and all of its definitive teachings are true.

All of these principles are interwoven and are inferences from the previous principles. This essentially forms a house of cards and so if any one principle is disproved, the following principles fall with it and the previous principles become somewhat doubtful. This is a matter of logical consistency.

Of course, I could’ve abandoned traditional Christianity and picked a different Church, but that never seemed like a tenable option. I believed, and still believe, that the Orthodox Church is the most faithful to the vision of the Nicene Christianity.² Thus, if I no longer identified as Orthodox, I could no longer be a Christian.

Ethical Issues

The first struggles I started to have were with some of the ethical teachings of traditional Christianity. I have always leaned progressive both ethically and politically, and so embracing an inherently conservative religious tradition was always going to be a challenge. When I first came back to the Church, I didn’t realise how much of my ethical worldview would have to change. If I did, I may have never returned in the first place.

The more I learned, the more I realised that Orthodox Christianity has never shaken off ethical beliefs from the ancient and medieval world. It isn’t that there is nothing of value in traditional Christian ethics, but much of it is outdated and problematic. For the sake of brevity I will simply list some examples;

• The condemnation of homosexual “activity” and the refusal to admit persons of the same gender to the sacrament of marriage.

• The exclusion and discrimination of transgender people due to essentialist gender metaphysics and denial of modern science.

• The subjugation of women and their exclusion from the Priesthood.

• The idea that any expression of sexuality must be a) within the bounds of marriage, b) heterosexual, c) without the use of contraception,³ d) and limited to penetrative vaginal sex.

• The wars purportedly commanded by God in the Bible and throughout church history.

• The general support of slavery in the Bible and by nearly every Christian up until the enlightenment.⁴

Now, I admit that why one thinks these concepts are outdated will depend on one’s meta-ethics. Attempting to defend my own current meta-ethics is beyond the scope of this article, but for now I will only say that the ethical principles I have outlined above are only defensible under a “divine command theory” of meta-ethics. If one rejects divine revelation, both in general and in the claimed particulars, there is no reason to accept any of the above.

Eternal Hell

“My conscience forbids assent to a picture of reality that I regard as morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked.” (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation - David Bentley Hart)

David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, has become endlessly controversial for being one of the chief spokespersons for Christian universalism in modern times.⁵ For those not in the know, universalism is the rejection of an eternal hell and the affirmation that ultimately, everyone will attain salvation somehow or another. There are various theological explications on how this might happen, but that’s not so important for now.

I have quoted from David Bentley Hart above because I agree with him. I have come to believe that any form of Christianity that includes an eternal hell is unconscionable. After all, eschatology is a big deal in Christianity and Jesus speaks about it more than anyone else in the Bible. Unlike Hart however, I have concluded that a rejection of an eternal hell is tantamount to a rejection of Christianity itself. A story that has a happy ending for all is simply a different story to the one Christianity is telling.

If we look at the issue a priori, it seems unlikely that a loving God would create a reality that allowed for the possibility of eternal suffering. God could’ve created reality however He wished, and so if the fact that He created this kind of reality, and not some other better kind, requires some sort of justification. This insight is what the problem of evil is picking up on. Why would an all-loving God create a world in which suffering is so ubiquitous? I think there are good answers to that question (some of which we may explore in future articles), but the question “why does eternal suffering exist?” is an even deeper challenge to classical theism.

Most theodicies to the problem of evil rely on suffering being some sort of necessary condition of or instrument in service of, a greater good (e.g. free will, bliss in heaven, theosis, etc). The only one of these defences that works for an eternal hell is that of free will. The argument goes that the existence of free will logically entails some sort of possibility that any given person can ultimately and irrevocably reject God, and in doing so, choose for themselves, eternal suffering. Hell therefore isn’t an externally imposed punishment, but the natural consequence of tearing oneself away from God. As C.S Lewis famously put it:

“The gates of hell are locked from the inside.” (The Great Divorce)

Putting aside what I see as I false distinction between something being externally imposed by God and the natural result of something within God’s creation; the free will defence has many problems.

The problem begins with how one defines free will. There are two competing visions of free will within the Christian tradition. One we can call “classical free will”, and the other “libertarian free will”. Classical free will is such named because it is the more common notion of free will held by Christians up until recent times. The assumption behind it is that mankind is teleologically destined for union with God, and one’s will is ordered in that direction. Freedom therefore is simply defined is that which is in accordance with God’s will and human nature. Sin then, represents a failure to act freely, in the same way an alcoholic’s decision to have a drink isn’t actually an entirely free choice. Freedom proper, in this account, is freedom from sin.

Libertarian free will posits that one is free as long as there is no determinism involved in our choices. With this assumption, a choice to sin is equally free as a choice not to. This is the kind of free will required to defend an eternal hell. If this is not the case, then God is holding us accountable for choices we made which were not completely free. This seems to me not merely unjust, but is a failure on God’s part (which is of course logically incoherent). Of course, one could bite the bullet, and defend the idea that people deserve punishment for things that weren’t their fault. Indeed, Aristotle believed that being ugly was a vice! This however is a place that few would dare to tread.

If one rejects classical free will, and instead wishes to embrace libertarian free will, one will run into many issues. Namely, is God still free even though He cannot sin? By definition, God cannot be evil, so if He is determined to be good, is He therefore without free will? Are people in heaven free is they cannot sin?⁶ If they can, what kind of heaven is it? If they can’t, are those in hell more free than those in heaven? We can see here that however one conceives of free will, it causes fundamental problems for the traditional Christian worldview.

But even if one could resolve the issue I have outlined above, I simply have moral qualms with a God that would ordain any form of eternal suffering. It is suffering without purpose. Without a greater end. Suffering becomes an end in itself. This seems to create tension with a God who is love itself (1 John 4:16).

It seems to me then that the only version of Christianity that is coherent and tolerable, is a universalist one. So why is that such a problem? Well, no matter what kind of Christian you are, if you want to be a universalist, you have the bear the weight of the witness of the Bible and the 2000 year old Christian tradition, which is firmly in favour of eternal hell. Even more damning, is the condemnation of Origen⁷ and universalism at the 5th Ecumenical Council.⁸ Being universalist, and being a Christian, just doesn’t work.

The Problem of Divine Hiddenness

So far some of you may still be thinking that I could have embraced a liberal progressive form of Christianity, but my biggest and most personal issue casts doubt on theism itself. The problem of divine hiddenness, and the related problem of religious disagreement, seem to me to be the most potent and lethal objections to classical theism, and by extension, Christianity.

One of my most read articles from my previous blog, and the one I’m most proud of, was the one I wrote on the philosophical problem of divine hiddenness. Unfortunately, there was so much I had failed to address in my argumentation, and my tone was overly confident and dismissive. I may have been speaking to myself more than any potential atheists reading.

There are various formulations of the problem of divine hiddenness. Maybe the most popular one in modern times is J.L Schellenberg’s argument from non-resistant non-belief. It goes something like this;

• Premise 1: There are people who are capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe.

• Premise 2: If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there are no such people.

• Conclusion: Therefore, there is no such God.

Something I did note in my previous article is that Schellenberg is basing his understanding of God in a philosophical tradition called theistic personalism. This understanding of God is different from the classical theist position in notable ways. Without diving into the differences, we can nonetheless glean something very important from Schellenberg’s argument, which is that non-resistant non-belief should not occur if God exists. We can thus edit the argument slightly to be as follows;

• Premise 1: If classical theism is true, non-resistant non-belief does not occur.

• Premise 2: Non-resistant non-belief does occur.

• Conclusion: Therefore, classical theism is not true.

For me, Schellenberg’s argument represents the bare minimum. If God is able, He is obligated to reveal Himself to every human being such that they could be held morally responsible for refusing to enter into relationship with Him. For me, this isn’t so much a matter of intellectual assent to the proposition “God exists”, for this is useless on its own. Its a matter of life’s purpose.

If the entire purpose of the human being is to seek union with God, becoming more and more like Him and, sharing in His eternal life, why would He refuse anyone this opportunity? If there is some reason that God can’t reveal Himself (e.g. human sinfulness or some other ontological issue), then He has no business holding us accountable for failing to believe in Him or follow His commandments. The problem gets worse the more you think about ways God could reveal Himself. Let’s list a few;

1. What if God audibly responded every time you spoke to Him in prayer?

2. What if Jesus appeared to every person when required, just like He did St Paul?

3. What if Jesus settled theological debates instead of relying to sinful humans to figure it out?

4. What if it was abundantly clear which religion is true, and which form of Christianity is true, instead of relying on fallen human reasoning and vague events from ancient history?⁹

5. What if, every Sunday, at every Church in the world, the Eucharist actually transformed into meat and blood?¹⁰

These are just a handful of examples but we could keep going. The point is that we have just accepted that a theist reality is essentially indistinguishable from an atheist one. Maybe God has good reason for this to be the case, but if He does, He could at least make that obvious. Otherwise, we are all left guessing.

Conclusion

I am open to returning to Christianity. I am open to being wrong. I am generally just open at the moment. Open to new and exciting ideas that I would’ve deemed wrong, heretical, or even demonic. I hope this blog will document this exploration through the world of philosophy, theology, spirituality, religion, politics, culture, and everything in between. Join me, as I journey through reality!

[EDIT: I am a Christian again (of sorts)! Please see here for more details]

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1. As opposed to theistic personalism, pantheism, polytheism, deism, etc.

2. The Council of Nicaea 325 was the first of many imperially lead gatherings of Bishops that established what we now recognise as Christian “orthodoxy”.

3. I’m aware that many Orthodox Churches allow the use of contraception, but my understanding that this was always a pastoral condescension and not the ideal.

4. I believe the only Church Father to ever preach against slavery was St Gregory of Nyssa.

5. I haven’t actually read his book about universalism yet but I hope to soon. I may do a review of it in the future.

6. This touches on the Orthodox soteriological theory of theosis, but for the sake of those less familiar with Orthodox theology, I decided not to delve into that.

7. Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 253) was an early Church Father who had some controversial ideas, but who nonetheless was deeply influential on the early development of Christian theology.

8. An Ecumenical Council is a council of Bishops called to represent the whole church.

9. I have come to think that if Christianity were true, everyone would be a Christian, because it would be undeniable. There would just be good Christians and bad ones.

10. Maybe you find this image somewhat gross, but if this is so, what does this say about the Eucharist in the first place?