How To Be An Agnostic
the responsibility of saying whether or not the Trinity is true:
logos demands a decision. Thus, when Christians confess belief
in a Triune God now, they do not take it as a reminder that God
should not be thought of in personal terms, because the personal
dimension to the human-divine relationship comes from human
beings, not God. Quite the opposite: God, it is said, must be per-
sonal to be relevant to me. So the Trinity is taken as describing
God in Godself: in practice, and refl ected in the writings of some
theologians, God is literally a Father, literally Son, literally Holy
Spirit. To do anything else would mean that the doctrine fails
according to the rules of logos, which in the modern age is to say
it fails, period. (This is also why theological apologists, like the
Archbishop of Canterbury, are forced to tell other monotheists
that, in spite of appearances, Christians are not polytheists.)
The pressure to drop myth and take up logos explains many
other features of modern Christianity too. It explains the extraor-
dinary success of evangelicalism. This is nothing if not religion
as fact and with direct personal applicability. In evangelicalism,
the individual must decide what they think about Jesus – who he
was – not as part of some lifelong engagement with a tradition, as
Christian writers of the past thought of it, but as a one-off assess-
ment of the evidence. As the TV evangelist demands, look at the
witness of the Bible: the rational person can only come to one of
three conclusions – either Jesus was mad, bad or who he said he
was! The thought that the Gospels of the New Testament might
have been written not to provide factual evidence but as the
struggles of four uncertain individuals, or groups of individuals,
continually working out who this fi gure called Jesus might be for
them, does not occur to this school of thought (or, if it does, it
is branded liberal nonsense). Indeed, that there are four Gospels
that in part do not agree should be a source of inspiration for
Christians, not a cause of obfuscatory embarrassment. The dis-
agreements remind the reader that the Bible points beyond the
words it contains. You are supposed to read between the lines.
Having delivered on the factual requirement for modern
belief, evangelicalism also delivers on the requirement of