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Christianity somewhat conveniently offers an unbelievable narrative that, if true, literally changes everything. Which raises the question: Is it possible that Christianity is simply wishful thinking — a framework generated by humans who were (and still are) looking to place their hope in a future that’s better than their reality?

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  One of the most powerful arguments against the Christian faith is that it is a form of escapism. Rather than dealing with the real world as it is, human beings fabricated the idea of God to help them deal with their problems. Some of the strongest critics of Christianity — like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud — have suggested that God did not create human beings in his image; rather we human beings created God in our image. So is Christianity a crutch for the weak and a form of escape?

  Karl Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Like a drug, religion causes people to forget their current pain and suffering, and it inhibits their desire to seek real change in this life by filling them with false hopes for better things to come in the next life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that God is dead, and Christianity is simply an attempt by the weak to control the strong. It teaches you to be humble, loving, and kind, and to put the needs of others ahead of yourself. But that is just an attempt to keep people in a servile position. According to Nietzsche, if God is dead, then so are Christian morals. And therefore, the only way to live an authentic life is to dare to believe in a world where there is no God and there are no rules.

  Sigmund Freud, for his part, argued that God is a projection of our desires. We imagine a super-hero version of ourselves and project that image on to God. God is nothing more than an illusion based on an infantile need for a father-figure to help us cope with our feelings of guilt, fear, and inadequacy.

  Are these so-called “masters of suspicion” right when it comes to the Christian faith? They might be … if it weren’t for the resurrection of Jesus. I have previously addressed questions like “Did the resurrection really happen?” and “Why does the resurrection matter?” But now I want to consider the implications of the resurrection in light of these critiques.

  The Bible presents God as the Creator of all things who made the world as a gift of his grace — full of beauty, truth, goodness, and love. The cardinal problem is that God’s good world has gone wrong as a result of human error and rebellion. But God promised that one day he would eradicate all sin, evil, injustice, suffering, and death and renew the whole world.

  The consistent message of the New Testament is that Jesus died a brutal death on a Roman cross in order to bear the sins of humanity, and then God raised Jesus to new life with a new physical body. All four Gospels emphasize that the resurrection took place on the first day of the week — a sign that the resurrection of Jesus is the first day of the new creation. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus is only the beginning. God has promised to do for us at the end of history what he did for Jesus in the middle of history. That means God’s goal is not to remove us from this world but rather to renew this world. If that’s true, then we are called to anticipate God’s future world through our actions now.

  Here’s the problem. Sometimes people say Christians are too heavenly-minded to be any earthly good. But the resurrection leads us to see that, in fact, the opposite is true. Consider this.

  Marx called Christianity an opiate and argued that the only way to achieve real change in the world is by getting rid of religion and overthrowing society by force. But the Polish poet and diplomat Czeslaw Milosz turned that argument on its head. Milosz witnessed the horrors of Marxism firsthand, and he once said the true opium of the people is the “belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that for all our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

  If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then Marx was wrong. Christianity is not a delusional drug that prevents people from seeking to make the world a better place. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, if you study history, you learn that those Christians who thought the most about the future world are precisely those who did the most for this one.

  If Jesus has been raised, then Nietzsche was wrong. Christianity isn’t for cowards. It takes real courage and strength to resist your own selfish impulses and to love other people more than your own ego.

  If Jesus has been raised, then Freud was wrong. Christianity isn’t a projection of our desires, writ large on a cosmic screen. The resurrection shows that our longing for forgiveness, love, and a world made new lies at the very heart of the universe.

  No, Christianity is not escapist. On the contrary, the true escape from reality may be the belief that this world is all there is.