A popular game goes from endlessly engaging to pointless with one small change, and that same flaw is at the core of the Christian worldview.

Consider the game of chess. The modern version is substantially different from the original, which mimicked the components of an army. If we evolve the modern game a little more, it may help us find Jesus, so let’s do that and invent Superchess. If you’re familiar with modern chess, you’ll find much that’s the same. For example, the board is the same eight-by-eight grid of squares. Pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, and the king and queen move in the conventional manner.

The big change is the object of the game. No longer is it to checkmate the opposing king. With Superchess, you win when you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

That’s a pretty bad game, but why? It’s because the motivations within the game—capturing your opponent’s pieces while defending against their attempts to do the same, controlling territory, attacking the enemy king, and so on—have nothing to do with the object of the game. It’s like a game of football where the two teams struggle mightily to score the most points . . . and then the winner is decided by a coin flip at the end.

Let’s expand on this Superchess idea. Take it to encompass all human experience, and we have the Game of Christianity. This is ordinary reality filtered through a Christian worldview, and it’s far more complicated than any board game. In this game, there are good things such as love, friendship, possessions, accomplishments, experiences, and personal victories. We also find bad things such as illness, death, sorrow, financial difficulties, regret, and personal defeats. Players try to maximize the good things and minimize the bad.

We humans are immersed in this sea of complexity with strong motivations pulling us in conflicting directions. We seek out and share advice for how to balance these motivations—how to leave the world better than we found it, who to model ourselves after, and what a life well lived looks like, for example. The correct path through a problem or even through life itself is often not obvious. And yet, the rules of the Game of Christianity make clear that, in the big picture, none of that matters. You win the game when you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

Having the object so disconnected from the motivations in the game is terrible game design. The realities of life are essential—you ignore them at your peril—and yet they are meaningless diversions from the actual goal. But this is the Christian worldview. It dismisses the importance of the only reality we know exists and confidently points to a vague supernatural reality for which there is no evidence.

Continue to chapter 45.

Image source: Peter Kambey via Pexels

Notes

Finding Jesus Through Board Games: The inspiration for this topic came from the Atheist Experience TV show “Argument from Game Design,” episode 616, August 2, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzYfCVAzG2Q.