Book Review: Has Christianity Failed You?

One of the major obstacles that I come against in defending the Christian worldview is simply a misunderstanding of the worldview. So many times people tell me that they reject Christianity based on one thing or another that Christianity teaches. In the vast majority of the cases people are rejecting something that is not Christian but they believe is Christian.

In "Has Christianity Failed You?" Ravi Zacharias tackles this exact issue. If emphasis could be added in a title, I would place it on "Christianity". He believes that it is not Christianity that has failed people, but what they think is Christianity. Ravi introduces his book by telling of an open forum on the topic of this book that he spoke. The audience was eager to hear what Ravi had to say about the apparent failures of Christianity, intellectually and emotionally. This book is his thoughts on the issue.

Filling in the Gaps

Many skeptics of theism accuse theists of "god-of-the-gaps" argumentation when it comes to providing evidence for God's existence. Many theists claim that naturalists are guilty of using a "naturalism-of-the-gaps" argumentation to explain away evidence for God's existence. Others prefer to remain agnostic and simply, "I don't know, one way or the other." Yet, still others will say, "No one can know."

I've noticed a pattern here (I'm sure I'm not the first, though). We all know that we are not omniscient- none of us knows everything. Which means that everyone has gaps in their knowledge, and we fill those gaps with something (there are no exceptions, as I am about to show). As mentioned in my previous posts "What is Faith?" and "Do You Rely on Authorities?" we tend to look to past experiences to determine what to put our trust in to fill those gaps.

Do You Have Enough Faith?

Regarding unanswered prayers, I've heard quite often in the Church that people don't have enough faith. There tends to be two different meanings to this statement. The first is that people are not trusting the evidence that they have that God is trustworthy when it comes to the unknown. The second is that people aren't trusting God to give them what they want.

I don't have a problem with the first; its the second that causes serious issues both inside and outside the Church. In the previous post (What is Faith?) I had mentioned the importance of knowing the nature of the person that we are looking to put trust in. If you don't have a proper understanding of that person's character, then any trust is likely to fail us. In the case of the second statement, if we believe that by placing faith in God we will be made healthy or rich, we are bound to have our faith in God shaken or even destroyed.