First, the question:
Why did you choose Christianity? Why choose a religion at all? Isn't religion just a cop-out? How can the Christian God be thought of as "good"?
Vulnerable Christians in our current intellectual climate often hear these.
First, and most directly: I didn't choose Christianity; Christianity persuaded me. Nor did I choose it as "a religion". I don't believe it's helpful to see Christianity as "a religion". It was only recently that people began to see Christianity as "a religion" anyway. "Religions" in this culture are more like the pagan religions of the Roman Empire than the Christian faith that refused to take its place among them as one option among others.
Christians see everything in the context of the ascended, reigning Christ. Jesus didn't come to save individuals, but to save the entire world out of love for the Father. The problem with "religions" is that they're worried about the significance and end of their particular lord (see 1 Corinthians 8). Religion is thus that which "has final authority for a believer or a society" (Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret). So what do communities of different authorities mean according to Christ's reign?
- Good: All things are already related to Jesus as their alpha and omega and his glory.
- Evil: Humanity sinfully uses God's gifts as means of independence (what the New Testament calls "self-righteousness").
- Atonement: God exposes and meets sin in the story of the Cross as God's judgment of self-righteousness and offer of Christ's righteousness.
- Salvation: Jesus brings all the world's treasures into obedience to the Father (John 16.12-15).
- The Church: No more than the sign of that promise's fulfillment in God's world.
- Mission: The Church is brought into "kenotic dialogues" with others through Jesus.
God's mission through Israel, Jesus, and Church is to gather together all things in Christ (Ephesians 1.10).
So, I'm not even very happy with the term "Christianity". It makes the Christian life sound like a set of ideas I hold in my head. Christianity is a life, not a feeling or a set of ideas. It's a commitment in response to God's prior commitment.
Is it a cop-out (also popularly known as "a crutch")? It was only with people like Marx and Freud that people started talking that way too. In what sense would the apostolic faith even be a cop-out? Because it led people to leave normal lives and become martyrs? Because it set them at odds with old loyalties, made them the Roman Empire's enemies, and sent them into the unfamiliar company of a whole different community? What kind of cop-out or crutch is that?
The historic Christian life doesn't make much sense as a coping strategy. It is rather the opposite: A different life with a whole different shape, rather than a perspectival adjustment or behavioral adaptation one makes to a life that remains essentially unchanged. The crowds and followers and rich young man who drew back are the cop-outs. The onlookers who purposefully distorted what they saw in Jesus to avoid grappling with the presence of the Kingdom are the cop-outs. They didn't want to pay the cost of discipleship.
Christianity is profoundly helpful, of course, but not as a cop-out or a crutch. It's a life of accountability and a way of healing, because it acknowledges and addresses the sicknesses that plague both the world as a whole and the relationships and persons that make it up.
How can God be thought of as good? By definition, that's how. Usually we Christians run the logic in the opposite direction: The creation is good because God invested it with his goodness.
But even when we run in your direction, we see a different picture than "a God who cannot be thought of as good". God as described in the story of Israel, Jesus, and the Church -- God as revealed, as self-disclosed -- is good beyond even the wildest human dreams of goodness. Why? Because the God revealed in the life of Jesus is not only truly just in the way he treats others, but truly merciful both to those who suffer injustice and to the enemies who perpetuate injustice. He forgives the very ones who violently reject him, while dissuading them of the habits that caused the violence in the first place. And the Father exalts this Son, giving him all authority to bring the world to justice through a reign of mercy and forgiveness.
Jesus is the victim who treats those of us who victimize him with grace and forgiveness.
And in so doing, Jesus remakes the world into what is "the good".
Now, a couple of questions for you, dear inquirer?
1. Why does our culture frame the apostolic faith as "a religion" and make it a matter of personal choice among alternatives when that is demonstrably what the first Christians refused to do in the pluralistic cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Roman Empire? Could it be that we feel like we have power over it that way? When I read the Book of Acts, I find none of the kinds of preaching that often prevail among Christians themselves.
Why does such a culture get away with making everything a choice but its own assumptions? Why am I the one who has to constantly insist that "choice" is the last word I'd use about being Christian?
2. Why is everything that refuses to conform to those cultural assumptions considered a cop-out? Could it be the other way around? Could pigeonholing a life of obedience to the Kingdom as "a religion" be the real cop-out in our society? How can a culture that forces "God" and everyone else to justify himself as "good" according to its own unquestioned convictions avoid succumbing to narcissism and unchecked moral arrogance? How could such a culture be anything but confused about any moral act or any moral authority, including the Bible or any other Christian authority? Isn't that precisely the sort of confusion we actually see in our post-Christian cultures?
You see, in the end the world's interrogator is not modern liberalism but the Son at the Father's right hand. He's got the scars and the pulse to prove it.
Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is one of the most important books written that deal with answers to your questions. It's worth the reading.