The World-Conquering Fiction

The grand claim of the Christian religion is that it alone has the answer to the human ""plight,"" which is that all people are born into a state of ""lostness,"" and are estranged from God. If they die outside of God's grace and salvation, they will enter an eternal state of separation from God. The solution to this terrible plight is the saving death of Jesus. But does the Christian doctrine of salvation make sense? Curiously, most believers assert that faith isn't supposed to make sense in a human, rational way. It is God's revealed truth, the ""mystery of faith,"" and it can only be understood through faith. That response, however, has long ceased to be acceptable to most thinking people. The more the theologians explain their view of salvation, the deeper the hole of incomprehensibility they dig. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our perception of the ""truth"" that is shaking the foundations of our inherited religious traditions. John L. Bracht was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and is now retired and living in Canberra, Australia. He has served as the minister of both Presbyterian and Baptist churches but now considers himself a secular humanist. He has also been a high school teacher of history and English. A graduate of BYU-Hawaii, he has master's degrees from the University of Sydney and the Australian College of Theology.