The Divine Game of Hide and Seek: A British Struggle

​In the contemporary English landscape, believing in Jesus can often feel like carrying a wet umbrella through a windy storm - it is difficult, and somewhat burdensome or complicated, with passers-bys looking at you with a hint of pity for having it, and half the time you aren't even sure it is actually keeping you dry. 

We walk past crumbling stone cathedrals that have transitioned from spiritual hubs to picturesque backdrops for Instagram, embodying what the poet Matthew Arnold famously called the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. For a Christian living in England today, the struggle to believe is not merely a lack of evidence; it is the constant friction between an ancient Jewish carpenter and a hyper-rational, secularized Western identity.

​The first hurdle is the sheer audacity of the historical claim, a concept theologians refer to as the Scandal of Particularity. Christianity insists that the Creator of the universe did not just send a broad philosophical message but showed up in a specific, dusty, politically volatile corner of the Roman Empire. This historical grounding is both the faith’s strength and its greatest stumbling block. The Roman world viewed the early movement with a mix of bafflement and irritation with the historian Tacitus dismissing it as a "mischievous superstition," while Flavius Josephus recorded the execution of James, the brother of Jesus, hinting at the very real blood and grit behind the theology. For the modern Brit, the struggle lies in bridging the gap between our clinical, scientific reality and a world where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate felt pressured by a local religious dispute to crucify a man who claimed to be the Truth itself.

​This intellectual tug of war is often mistaken for a lack of faith, but as G.K. Chesterton humorously observed, "We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong." The struggle is frequently less about the first part and more about the second part. Jordan Peterson often points out that belief is not merely an intellectual "yes" to a set of abstract facts, but a commitment to a mode of being. Peterson’s suggestion that one should "act as if God exists" implies that the struggle is not about achieving 100% certainty (which is a mathematical impossibility in a fallen world), but about the courage to live out the moral structure Jesus demanded. In this sense, the struggle is the fuel of the engine. As Paul Tillich reminded us, doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an essential element of it. If there were no struggle, it would not be faith; it would just be a calculation.

​Furthermore, there is a uniquely British dimension to this struggle: our cultural obsession with being sensible. The Gospel is many things, but sensible in a polite, middle-class, non-confrontational way, it is not. Jesus’ statement in John 14:6 "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" feels dreadfully exclusionary at a modern dinner party. We struggle because the claims of Jesus require a total reorientation of the self. C.S. Lewis famously argued in his "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" trilemma that we cannot settle for Jesus as just a "great moral teacher." He did not leave that option open to us. To believe is to accept a King, and in a culture that prizes individual autonomy above all else, that surrender feels like a minor death.

​Ultimately, the struggle with believing in Jesus is the struggle of the man in Mark 9:24 who cried out, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" It is a paradoxical state of being where one foot is planted in the archaeological reality of the Roman cross and the other is slipping on the pavement of modern skepticism. To believe in Jesus in the secularized shadow of the West is an act of quiet, light-hearted rebellion. It is a decision to trust that the "Light of the World" has not been snuffed out by our cynicism, and that the struggle itself is simply the process of being pulled toward a shore we cannot yet see.

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