Test of Time
An essay on why Christianity has lasted and possible origins of the faith


I was having a discussion with a Christian friend of mine the other day. I grew up as a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and attended private church schools all the way through college. I’ll have to admit that I was playing a little bit unfair. My friend was a new believer and had not had time to explain away all the contradictions and seeming contradictions within the bible and between the bible and her own religion.

This is a skill that develops over time. For instance, a person who believes that you are saved by faith alone and not works will cling to the promises in Romans, explain away the works oriented faith gospel in James, and figure out a way to throw all the laws in the old testament out. All types of Christianity do this to a certain extent in order to tailor the bible to their religion. This explains why so many different Christian religions all claim to be following the same bible.

As I mentioned earlier, I was being a little bit unfair and playing the devil’s advocate. I was questioning her about why, if she believed in the bible, she wasn’t adhering to some of the requirements in Leviticus. Of course as a new Christian, she didn’t realize that she was required to seclude herself during her menstrual period, had to offer a burnt sacrifice at the temple and wait seven days afterward before she could resume normal sexual relations with her husband. I went on for a while asking her things of that sort and to her credit (I suppose) she was able to explain away many of these dilemmas.

She became a little frustrated, however, and posed a question to me. “If Christianity is wrong, why has it been around for so long? Why do so many intelligent people believe it? Why, when the bible has been studied for millenniums by the top intellectual Christians and atheists alike, has it not been disproved?”

She asked a fair question. If Christianity is false, how has it withstood the test of time. There are several fallacies of logic assumed in the question, however. For instance, there is the assumption that intelligent people cannot believe something that is wrong for long periods of time. I will use a particularly obvious example. For millenniums it was believed that the world was flat. Smart people believed this. The Christian church proclaimed disinters of this idea to be heretics. Guess what, the world is round. This is also a good example of how Christianity alters its interpretation of scripture when faced with irrefutable facts.

I’ll continue on that tangent for a second. My own church, the Seventh-day Adventists, early in their history “figured out” that Jesus would return in 1843. When he did not, they recalculated and became certain that they had forgotten to add one year in the original calculation. The “real” date was 1844. When he did not come in 1844, they sat down and decided that 1844 must not have really been the date of his return but that it must have been the date that something else important happened. They created a theological idea that in 1844 Jesus entered the “heavenly sanctuary” and that the “investigative judgement” had begun. There is no need to go into detail about what the above theological ideas are, the important thing to notice is that whenever their interpretation of scripture was disproved they revised it to incorporate the irrefutable reality. The last time they were a little smarter, however, instead of continuing to move the date forward until they had lost all credibility, they changed the event into one that could not be disproved. Oops! I am getting ahead of myself.

This brings me to the last part of her question. Why hasn’t Christianity been disproved? People have been trying to disprove it for at least a thousand years. Why haven’t they been successful? Plain and simple, Christianity can not be disproved.

This can mean one of two things: Christianity is correct or simply that it is impossible to gather the evidence needed to disprove it. This uncovers the final fallacy in her argument that if you cannot disprove something, it must be true. If this were the case, we would have to believe in all sorts of things. We would have to believe that Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists are all correct. After all, they all believe in realities that can not be seen. This poses a problem because, speaking from the viewpoint I am familiar with, Adventists believe that Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and Catholics, to name a few, are all wrong.

Therefore, the belief that if you can’t disprove it, it must be true creates a paradox. There are too many mutually exclusive beliefs that can not be disproved. You always get hit with the tail of the argument, which states if the reason that you can’t disprove it is because you can’t observe it, then you can’t prove it either. And herein lies the beauty of Christianity. The fact that it can’t be proven or disproved doesn’t deter its believers.

Think about the basic premise of most Christian religions. You make a decision or have a conviction that is valuable to your unseen, unseeable creator because it is based on faith, not what is observable. In order to allow you to make this decision of faith purely, he chooses not to reveal himself to you except through ambiguous signs that are open to interpretation. The final outcome of your decision is not observable until later either. Some believe that when you die your spirit goes to heaven or to hell. Others believe that at some unknown time in the future god will raise the dead and they will receive their reward or punishment. Either way, the outcome is not observable at present and will only become observable after it is too late.

I will not be so bold as to suggest that this is what happened but think about it. If some people got together and tried to design a myth that would stand the test of time, they could not have created a better one than Christianity. It is based on an argument that can not be refuted and there is a tremendous motivation for people to believe it.

In a college psychology class, I learned about a psychologist, I think it was Jung, who suggested that the belief in religion was motivated and perpetuated by people’s inability to deal with their own mortality. What better motivation can there be to believe in the idea that, if you are a good person, you will go to a happy place and live forever. As a further motivating factor for those who aren’t so easily swayed or respond better to negative reinforcement, if you reject the idea, you will go to a very scary place and will be tortured for eternity.

If you look a little deeper into the requirements you must meet in order to go to the happy place, you can catch a glimpse of what might have been the motivation of the creators.

The very basis of Christianity is the teaching that we are not good enough. We are sinful unworthy people who do not deserve to live. It is only through taking on someone else’s goodness that we are able to obtain our eternal reward.

We are told as Christians to emulate the life of Christ. Jesus was a commoner who never aspired to get any glory for himself. Whenever people would praise him, he would give the credit to his father in heaven. He was incredibly humble. While bible stories place him performing all sorts of wondrous acts, he never took any credit and never performed them for personal gain.

This is evidenced by the story of when Satan came to Jesus while he was fasting and tempted him to turn the stones into bread. He tempted him to throw himself off the temple to bring glory to his powers. Jesus was not swayed and did not use his power to promote his self-interest. This story has been translated into the idea that making wishes for yourself will always end in calamity.

Take for example the popular television shows that one might not think are influenced by Christian philosophy: Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, and even Superman. All these shows are about people who have incredible supernatural powers and yet are required only to use these powers for the good of others. If they use their powers for self-interest all hell breaks loose. Everyone knows that when you find a Genie, the only wish that does not turn sour is the wish that grants the Genie his freedom.

Not only does Christianity teach us that it is wrong to wish for a better life, it teaches us that in order to please our creator we should freely give what we have no matter how poor we are. It is more blessed to give than to receive. This can be illustrated numerous times in scripture. A good example of this is the parable that Jesus told praising the poor woman who gave her last coin as an offering to God.

This scripture also teaches us that we should not draw attention to the fact that we are making sacrifices. We should always be humble and if someone praises us, we should redirect the praise to God, its rightful owner. A rich man was giving his offering at the same time as the poor woman and he was making a big deal about how much he was giving. The end conclusion that Jesus drew was that the man should not have drawn any attention to his act of giving, did not deserve any praise and should have given a larger percentage of what he owned.

A key teaching of Christianity is that you should love your neighbor as yourself. The “Golden Rule” is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is the aspect of Christianity that I call good citizenship. Mr. Spock from Star Trek believed that the good of the many outweighed the good of the few or the one. Christianity takes this one step further and says that the good of any other person outweighs the good of the Christian. This aspect of Christianity would create a smoothly operating society. If every person in the society were acting with everyone else’s best interest ahead of their own, the society would be better for everyone. Strangely, this is the aspect that people have the hardest time complying with.

Communism is based on a similar principle. Communism believes that individuality is the enemy of society. That instead of a person working toward personal gain, each person should work for the gain of society as a whole. This is great on paper. It is nonexistent in action. Strange that communist countries have uniformly rejected Christianity. Possibly if they were to endorse it they would not be so short lived. That is the beauty of Capitalism. The system depends on people’s desire to promote their own well being.

Another key teaching of Christianity is the belief in nonviolence. A Christian is taught that if a man hits one cheek, you should turn and let him hit the other. If a man wants your coat, you should give him your shirt too. The truly devout Christian will allow himself to be killed without even putting up a fight. The early martyrs are good examples of this. Inherent in Christian philosophy is the belief that when you are wronged, it is better not to stand up for yourself.

Even the glaring examples of violence by Christians do not contradict this. The only time that Christianity condones violence is during Holy Wars. If another group of people stands in the way of the goals of the people of Christ it is okay to kill them. If someone stands in the way of your personal goals, it is not even okay to resist.

Jesus respected those in authority. When asked should a Christian pay tax, he pointed to the face of Caesar on the coin and said give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Christianity does not condone revolution. Revolution is inherently self-serving and therefore a sin. Even if you are unhappy with the way your rulers are behaving, the good Christian must grin and bear it.

The crowning achievement by the framers of Christianity, however, would have been the way a person who follows these rules is rewarded. They are taught to believe that if the life of a good Christian is not rewarding that it is okay. Many Christian hymns come to mind. One in particular:

When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrow like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, though hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.


You will receive your reward in heaven. The harder your life is, the more sacrifices you make on this earth, the less credit you take for yourself the greater your reward will be after you die. No one could dream up a better scam! (I’m not saying that it is. I am merely saying that if someone were trying, they could not create a better one.)

This idea is supported in popular Christian fiction. The classic story, Pilgrims Progress, is about a pilgrim who suffers through life carrying his “burden” of Christianity. This is referencing the command of Jesus that his followers “Take up their cross” and follow him. It also bears reference to Paul’s metaphor that he had “fought a good fight, run a good race.” Throughout the story, he is tempted to go astray or to cast off his burden. At the end of his journey of hardship and suffering he is rewarded. In this story, the journey is metaphorical of the life of a Christian. Your suffering continues throughout your journey or your earthly life. The Christian faith is even referred to as a burden. At the end of your journey and only at the end, do you reap the rewards for your life of hardship.

Think about this. We have already determined that there is no way of disproving Christianity. People are motivated to believe it because it alleviates the intrinsic fear of death. Christianity works as a good method of crowd control by curbing the people’s destructive tendencies toward self-advancement and violence. It makes people content to live their mundane lives without striving for more. It actually gives people a motivation to give their property away. The best part, however, is that it perpetuates itself. With ideas such as Communism, which promote similar behaviors, people soon realize that they are not getting the promised rewards and often throw the idea out. Christians believe that they will receive their reward after they are dead. Christianity even teaches that the worse your life is now, the better it will be for you when you are dead. Therefore, people will enthusiastically pursue the goals of Christianity for countless generations, believing that they will receive a reward that they can not see and can not prove exists, after their race on earth is done.

A smart group of people could easily figure out a way to turn this faith to their advantage. Constantinian did. He became the spokesperson for the “if you can’t beat em, join em” philosophy. How do you think the early Christian church became the Roman Catholic Church? Constantinian, the emperor of Rome, came to the conclusion that he would never be able to defeat the Christians, therefore he converted and in the process declared himself the leader of the Christian church.

I am certain that Christianity has been used for political gain a million times. How do we know that the very first “Christians” didn’t invent Christianity? Maybe so, maybe not. I dare you to prove otherwise.