By: MARGARET BROWN
Margaret Brown is one of The Resident’s longest standing contributors and has lived in the Algarve for more than 20 years. As well as Point of View, she also writes Country Matters twice a month.
WITH SCIENTIFIC and psychiatric information available at the click of a mouse and professional language replaced with easily understood mini-bites, people with time to spare are able to find almost anything about everything.
The technological age leaves little to the imagination and the more we learn, the less we are prepared to take on faith. Trust in a supreme being is the root of all monotheistic religions including Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Best expressed by Paul in his Epistle to the Hebrews as “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. Muhammad as revealed in the Talmud, the Old Testament Hebrew God, and Christ of the Gospels is each accepted as truth by those who follow any one of these disciplines.
The writings in the New Testament offer copious historical and circumstantial witness about the life of Christ which, if presented in a Court of Law, might well result in a verdict of ‘case proven’. Yet it seems that until a newly departed soul returns from the heavenly realm offering incontrovertible proof of its existence, more and more people will live only for the present day.
While Churches in the developed world are closing for lack of use, in the Global South – Africa, Asia and Latin America – both Islam and Christianity are flourishing as never before.
A guest speaker to the Carnegie Council, Philip Jenkins on October 11, 2006, spoke on ‘The New Faces of Christianity’, based on his book of the same title. He suggests that the passion and speed with which the Bible has become accepted is because many who can neither read nor write hear it through word of mouth. As it says in the New Testament ‘He who has ears let him hear’ not ‘let him read’. Even today in these undeveloped places, word of mouth remains paramount.
Another point he made was that while people of the developed world find it hard to relate to the savagery of the Old and New Testaments, in the Global south there are many Nomads, there is polygamy, there is prophesying and blood sacrifice. The shedding of blood to atone for personal sin still practiced in the tribal backwoods helps these new Christians to relate to the sacrificial death of Jesus. Their slavery, poverty and an absence of hope brings the Testaments right up to date.
