7. With Larger Eyes Than Ours
WITH LARGER EYES THAN OURS
The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.
—G. K. Chesterton
A lecture I attended by Dr. Stephen Hawking was entitled “Determinism: Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate?” Anyone who has read Dr. Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time has seen him pictured on the back cover in a wheelchair. Unfortunately, Dr. Hawking is a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his dreadful confinement, virtually all of his capable activity is now in his mind. All physical capacities have been eroded. I mention this only to raise the question: How does one with no voice deliver a lecture?
The process itself is fascinating. Placed before him in his wheelchair that day was an apparatus that represents the genius of modern-day technology. The hardware and software facilitate his word selection and sentence formations, which are then rendered audible through a speech synthesizer. The speech synthesizer was developed by one of California’s prestigious schools, prompting a humorous introduction by Dr. Hawking, as he apologized to his English audience for his American accent.
Even more amazing is that Dr. Hawking is able to manage this entire process by the motion of one finger, which is restricted to a minuscule movement of one millimeter. Should this finger ultimately be immobile to even that extent, there is a secondary capacity, through the sending of an infrared beam into the eye. Blinking the eye would interrupt the beam, and signal the selection process. Aided by this equipment, either with the blink of an eye or the movement of a finger, one of the world’s most noted scientists could transfer thought into audible speech. All of his content would be of no use without this masterpiece of a machine to give him vocal capacities, while his body and muscle functions are inoperative.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the afternoon was to watch this process and listen to this phenomenal thinker discussing whether we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free. I had to wonder if any person could have left that crowded lecture hall wondering whether this incredible piece of equipment used by Dr. Hawking was designed or had randomly come about! It had taken humanity at its finest to design something with such capability.
1. In the Beginning—GOD
Nobody in his right mind would ever believe that a dictionary developed because of an explosion in a printing press. Every designed product in the human experience points to a designer. The argument is literally and figuratively as old as the hills. That is why it does not matter how loudly the intellectual community shouts “Chance!” They have not been able to conquer the dreadful void of determinism and end up giving designed arguments to argue against design. Science is unconvincing when trying to establish how personality can come from non-personality. It does not know how to cope with the diversity of effect if there is a unity of the first cause. Human sexuality is not satisfactorily or sensibly explained by mindless evolution. The intricacies and fulfillment of human affections make randomness a senseless argument.
The argument from design is the very approach God used with Job. Job had become weary of his pain and sought a just answer for it. The constant implication of Job’s questioning was that he already “knew” so much and needed to “know” why he, an innocent man, was suffering. As the story unfolded, Job threw a flurry of questions at his philosopher friends, who valiantly tried to answer him. But they could not have been more off the mark. God then broke his silence, challenging Job’s very assumptions and reminding him that there was an awful lot Job did not know but had just accepted and believed by inference. Notice the beauty and detail with which God appeals to Job on the intricacies of this universe. God, in effect, said, “All right, Job. Since you only accept that which you comprehensively understand, let me toss a few questions your way.”
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm.
He said:
Who is it that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you will answer me.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone . . .
Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt”? . . .
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you? . . .
What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places? . . .
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no man lives,
a desert with no one in it,
to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?
Can you loose the cords of Orion?
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth? . . .
Who endowed the heart with wisdom
or gave understanding to the mind?
Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food? . . .
Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
Let him who accuses God answer him!
Job 38:1–40:2
In sixty-four questions God presented Job with the great mysteries of this tightly-knit universe, at once intelligible and mysterious. For Job, the splendor was now too great to miss. The designer who had designed this world could also bring design out of Job’s suffering. He was now willing to see the purpose for all of life through the eyes of God.
When we of lesser sight see with 20/20 vision, our understanding is completely changed, as the following story shows.
While traveling to Chicago by train, I sat behind a man and his young son. The boy seemed intrigued by the passing scenery and described to his father everything that he saw. He talked about some children at play in a school yard.
He mentioned the rocks in a small stream and described the sunlight’s reflection on the water. When we stopped for a freight train to cross our track, the boy tried to guess what each car might be hauling. As we neared the city he expressed excitement over the waves of Lake Michigan and told about the many boats in dry dock. At the end of the trip I leaned forward and said to the father, “How refreshing to enjoy the world through the eyes of a child!” He smiled and replied, “Yes, it is. Especially if it’s the only way you can see it.” He was blind.
The atheist misses this glimpse through larger eyes than his own. Such a person is confronted in life with a universe that is intelligible and mysterious. But, in the despotism of his naturalistic worldview, such a person attempts to remove the mystery and only succeeds in decimating the intelligence. The atheist’s prejudice against miracles robs him of the miraculous nature of the world itself. By denying the possibility of a miracle, he does not really solve the dilemma of origins, for a slow miracle ought to be just as incredible as a swift one.[1]
The story is told of a man who was fishing. Every time he caught a large fish he threw it away, and each time he caught a small one he kept it. An exasperated onlooker, watching this strange process of selection, asked him what, in reason’s name, he was doing. The man just blinked and said, “I only have an eight-inch frying pan, and so the larger ones won’t fit!”
This story is only a humorous version of the old Greek legend of the innkeeper who had a bed of very restrictive size. Whenever he had a guest who was too tall, he just sawed off the extending limbs.
Any event that strains the naturalist’s ability to explain is resized to fit one’s own prejudice. Hence, the naturalist prefers to conclude that bacteria, shuttled in by a guided missile, began life in this world.
In Psalm 19, David reminds us that the splendor of the universe is the handiwork and expression of God:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice
goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
The apostle Paul expressed this same theme to confirm that in creation, as well as within the human mind, God’s eternal power is manifested (Rom. 1:20). God has spoken from without and from within, but human beings, determined on their self-indulgent paths, repress the truth and miss the imprint of God.
The tragedy of the atheist is really twofold. Not only do his efforts fail to yield the consummate knowledge that he chases, but also, in his insatiable appetite to know, he intrudes into areas that ultimately deny him a sense of awe and the thrill of contentment.
Breaking the Hold of Determinism
The Christian approaches knowledge from a drastically different point of view. The Christian sees human beings as created by God in a very unique situation from which to relate to the world. The best description of this is “semitranscendence.” One retains this both in relation to oneself and to the world. Only a divine Creator could explain this capacity that is necessary, if one’s postulations about oneself and one’s world are to be trusted. The late Colin Gunton, one of the most significant voices in British theology, explained this very important vantage point:
We stand neither God-like over the material world, as the rationalism of the Enlightenment has encouraged us to think, nor at the mercy of something utterly different and incomprehensible, as some forms of existentialist reaction to rationalism may suggest. We can know the world, though not infallibly, nor with an aim at a kind of omniscience, because we are both part of it and able to transcend it through our personal powers of perception, imagination and reason. . . . Man is not God—not omnipotent or omniscient—but part of that which is created. On the other hand, there is a transcendence of the other creatures: made in the “image and likeness of God,” to rule the earth not after the paradigm of modern technocracy, but as a gardener over his garden, and always under God.[2]
Michael Polanyi, philosopher of science, in his landmark work Personal Knowledge, sustained the same idea of semitranscendence. He pointed out how the openness of the world to our personal knowing points to the reality of God. The Christian is, therefore, free from determinism on the one hand and total transcendence on the other. The atheist is trapped by either one or the other.
Someone has said, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.” It might be added, “If you want to hear him laugh even louder, tell him what you know.” In the light of that, Robert Jastrow’s astute observation in his book God and the Astronomers may well have identified the last laugh. Dealing with the question of the book of Genesis and science, Jastrow, a scientist with extraordinary credentials and a one-time director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said:
The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. . . .
This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always believed the word of the Bible. But we scientists did not expect to find evidence for an abrupt beginning because we have had, until recently, such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. . . .
At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.[3]
For the Christian, the acknowledgment of God as the Creator of life brings to bear one very significant life-transforming truth. The Bible makes it specific that God, in his love, created us. Thus, it is not life that precedes love, but love that precedes life. It is the love of God that gave us life in creation, just as it is the love of a mother that enables a child to live in procreation. Any attempt to thwart the love of God thwarts his design and brings discord in life because it rejects the very motivation in the creation of life.
One can readily see how the failure to implement the role of love has resulted in modern society becoming the most abortive of life in all of history. The opposite of love is selfishness, and the rights of the one bearing the baby have now eradicated the love needed to give life. From “live and let live,” we have moved to “live and let die.” Love is creation’s first law, and if love has preceded life, then for life to succeed, it must live within the boundaries of this love.
The second major affirmation of theism, which is powerfully sustained in the human experience, is the intrinsically moral nature of the universe. If love is creation’s first law, it is consistent within that framework to delineate love’s boundaries—this is the moral law. A failure to understand the nature of love has resulted in our inability to appreciate a moral framework. We find ourselves bewildered by love’s entailments and we wallow in the muddy waters of sensual indulgence. A foundational fallacy about love doubly jeopardizes one’s experience, for in squandering the purity of love, one also forfeits true liberty. In its stead, one grasps at poor substitutes that leave one enslaved by insatiable cravings. In resisting the legitimate terms of endearment, one is left encrusted by a hardening layer that morality cannot penetrate. He or she has spurned true love, and in doing so has banished from one’s experience virtues indispensable to survival.
G. K. Chesterton vividly expressed this:
They have invented a new phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.[4]
Chesterton identified well the necessary assumptions in any honorable relationship: virtue, trust, and commitment. Without these, no human intercourse of any value is possible. But somehow, in our day, we have come to the conclusion that unaided reason can fashion a moral law. This has clearly proven to be wrong, and we are the hapless inhabitants of cities that are self-destructing and homes that are breaking apart in epidemic proportions. In the name of freedom, we have been handcuffed by fear and immoral enslavements. We must deal with this or die.
So pivotal is the nature of morality to life itself that the Bible equates life with moral uprightness and death with the absence of moral sensitivity. It is for this reason that the first recorded communication between God and man following creation was on the nature of good and evil. How far we have strayed from God’s original pattern is seen in our present-day delegitimatization of morality. Our educators have convinced themselves that the unexamined life can be virtuous, and our teachers are under strict injunctions to shun moral instruction.
The Painful Malady
Studying this moral confusion from any moment in history, particularly in societies where freedom is procured, it is not difficult to sense the points of tension. To understand where these tensions are felt most is essential because such knowledge will direct us toward an understanding of the problem. Once that is grasped, the clear perspective of the Christian faith can be seen.
The atheist feels the sharp edges of moral demands on at least three points. The first, and foremost, is the arena of law. Nobody senses the moral struggle we are facing more than the lawmakers of the land, whether they be atheists or theists. They find themselves unavoidably playing God in a society that wants everything, but with no moral obligation to anyone, except as one’s own conscience dictates. The dilemma is not too difficult to enunciate; it is the solution that seems forever elusive. People find themselves in society as individuals having necessarily to live in harmony with other individuals. There rises inexorably the agonizing conflict between individual rights and societal responsibility. A person thus approaches the problem nervously, like the proverbial donkey between two stacks of hay. However, such a person is afraid to diminish either, as it would violate the rules. Thus, the individual arrives at a well-worded principle that is thought to dispel the problem:
The love of liberty, liberty for all without distinction of class, creed, or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.[5]
These two principles—that is, of individual liberty and the good of the whole—undergird much of contemporary jurisprudence. But no sooner do we state the principles than the contradiction becomes evident. The absolute freedom of the individual cannot be guarded in the maze of society’s collective interests. There is clearly liberty with distinction, and liberty ends up being redefined, depending upon the court in session.
Notice, moreover, that even before the problem of the contradictions is the moral assumption that freedom and fairness are morally necessary. Forgotten here is that natural selection must involve natural rejection—and who is going to be rejected. From whence have all these platitudes and truisms, that are so noble and tolerant, suddenly emerged? It is one thing to picture Lady Justice blindfolded with a balance in her hand; it is quite another to prove why it is important for the balance to be fair. The atheist has a gnawing feeling all along that the blindfold may protect the adjudicator from the tyranny of the eye, but he or she cannot escape the moral assumptions in the mind. The first point of tension, then, is the freedom of the individual versus society.
A second point of tension is over how the spheres of private life and public life overlap. The atheist believes that one’s moral beliefs are a private matter and ought not to impinge upon one’s public behavior or surface in one’s public pronouncements. Morality is a dirty word in public, and immorality has no damning effect if it is kept private.
The atheist has convinced himself that private practices and public behavior are so morally unrelated that the individual can easily draw lines and cross borders without any dirt sticking to one’s feet. Morality has become quarantined, and the watchdog of civil libertarianism has its security guards well-placed to make sure that you do leave home without it. While this position is fraught with insoluble problems, let me underscore just two.
Is not the very assumption that there can be a disjunction between my public and private life a moral presupposition? Further, this is the precise route of self-destruction that prompted Aristotle to raise the question, “Is democratic behavior behavior democracies like, or behavior that will preserve a democracy?”
Torn between the tension of individual freedom vis-à-vis societal responsibility and the tension of the private practice vis-à-vis public office, naturalism is dragged to the third dilemma. This is the unending pursuit of a unifying theory of ethics. E. L. Mascall, in his book The Importance of Being Human, worded the dilemma this way:
Living like a gorilla is a very good thing to do if you are a gorilla, and living like an angel is a very good thing to do if you are an angel. And neither of these tasks is very difficult for the being in question. If, however, you are a human being you can achieve true happiness only by living as a human being, and that is a much more difficult task.
Ah! But there is the rub. “If, however, you are a human being you can achieve true happiness only living as a human being. . . .” But, with atheistic presuppositions we do not know what a human being is. How, then, may we know what is good for us? Thinking atoms discussing morality is absurd. Thus, all types of solutions ranging from Immanuel Kant’s capacity of unaided reason to Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics collide in blatant contradictions. The extremes of position are well stated by Fletcher himself in a quote from Cicero in de Legibus:
Only a madman could maintain that the distinction between the honorable and the dishonorable, between virtue and vice, is a matter of opinion, not of nature. [Fletcher commented], This is nevertheless, precisely and exactly what situation ethics maintains.[6]
What was lunacy to Cicero has become the sanest principle for Fletcher. Trying to balance virtue and vice has rocked our civilization so that we have become like a drunken man, reeling from one wall to the other, knocking himself senseless with every hit. The naturalist’s ethic is not objective. Words such as reality, human being, freedom, and justice are not value-free. Ethics is reduced to sheer prescriptivism, or existential preference. Where the naturalistic worldview is assumed, it admits to an unknown starting point for life, and therefore, for morality as well.
A Definitive Diagnosis
The Christian answer is a strong counterperspective to naturalism—and rightly so, for it challenges human beings in their claim to absolute autonomy. As G. K. Chesterton observed, “We do not want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.”
The atheist makes two very serious mistakes in his starting point for moral discussion: first, what morality is, and second, what purpose morality serves. He asserts that he can, by the power of unaided reason, arrive at the nature of morality and at a satisfactory moral law. So natural is the capacity of the mind, says Kant in his Groundwork on Ethics, that a person can turn away from a direct encounter with Christ, and, independent of Christ’s influence, be able to reason through to the right conclusions. In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch has a perfect response to this Kantian belief:
How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Groundwork, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lovely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The “raison d’etre” of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational, and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal . . . his alienation is without cure . . . It is not such a long step from Kant to Nietzsche to existentialism, and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it . . . In fact, Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.[7]
To be precise, this man is not post-scientific or incarnated for the first time in Milton’s work. In fact, we meet him in the Garden of Eden, where he arrogated to himself the godlike characteristic of defining good and evil, and doing so apart from God. This reality is at the heart of the Christian argument for morality. It asserts not only the inevitable sense of alienation within any belief that places man as the measure of all things; it also defines what it means to be immoral. The word is “pride,” “hubris”—an autonomy that wills its independence from God. Knowledge and education in the hands of one who claims no higher accountability or authority than one’s own individuality is power in the hands of a fool. The English poet Alexander Pope said:
Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the mind;
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,—
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.[8]
The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was only half right when he said, during his voyage to England and Ireland:
The French want no one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The French man constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The English man lowers his beneath him with satisfaction. On either side it is pride, but understood in a different way.[9]
The problem is not with the French or the English. It is with all mankind. None of us likes authority. It all began in the first days of creation, when the first man and woman refused to allow God to be God, and wanted to be as God themselves. Thus, sin entered the world through the rejection of God and the choice for autonomy and self-will. Men and women became the authors of their own moral law, and murder showed itself in the first family, followed by the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The fall was a fact, and is a fact. All of the vociferous arguments from Huxley and others will never quench the fire of rebellion that rages in the heart of humanity. Malcolm Muggeridge has astutely observed that the depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of all dogmas, but the most empirically verifiable. Humankind has denied God, and in that vertical rebellion begins our lostness. Society is not jeopardized as much as individuals themselves.
The Real Victim
I would like to draw two basic conclusions from this. The first is that every act of wrong, public or private, does victimize. It victimizes the one performing it and reshapes the person. Prime Minister Konoye of Japan, one of those guilty of the horrific Japanese war crimes committed during the Second World War, left by his deathbed a copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, having carefully underlined the words, “Terrible as what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.”[10]
I remember one occasion when a businessman, looking back on his life, shared with me his memories of a life morally mangled. He said, “It started with my imagination that reinforced certain wrong desires. Then, having made repeated choices that were clearly wrong, in betrayal after betrayal I convinced myself that what I had indulged in I needed. The more I convinced myself that I needed it, I soon redefined who I was as a person. Now, as I look at what I have become, I can no longer live with myself. I hate who I am. I am emotionally running, but I do not know where to go.”
Knowing who we are and what we need is the starting point of what we will become. Until we understand what the Bible means by sin, our moral definitions will never find solutions. Words and platitudes in themselves have no power to change. Let us never forget that the men who sat enthralled before the strains of Wagner’s music were the same men who built the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. The problem is not the absence of education or culture; it is the presence of sin.
The playwright Bernard Shaw (known popularly as the author of Pygmalion) said:
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed over it “Cease to do evil, learn to do well”: but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it. It should have been addressed to the self-righteous free spectator in the street, and should have run, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”[11]
This is precisely the biblical starting point for moral rectitude: the recognition that the heart of every person is sinful, and that this predicament is spiritual, as revealed in his determination to absolute autonomy.
The second conclusion that I want to draw from our rebellion toward God is that people constantly fail to understand what sin is. They mock and attack the idea of sin as a hangover from prescientific beliefs. At the most, they recognize it in war crimes, or in social injustices, but somehow fail to interpret it in their own lives, personally. The most definitive illustration of the failure to understand the personalization process is in the idea contained within the following story, humorous in its detail, but painfully real in spiritual terms.
It is the story of two brothers who were rather notoriously immoral. They were synonymous with the vice that had overtaken their city. When one of them very suddenly died, the surviving brother went to the local pastor and asked him to perform the burial service. He offered him an enormous sum of money if, in his eulogy, he would refer to his deceased brother as a saint. After much pondering, the pastor agreed. As the funeral service came to an end, the pastor (in the thick of his description of the departed individual) said, “The man we have come to bury was a thief. In fact, he deserves every vile description the mind can muster. He was depraved, immoral, profligate, lewd, obscene, hateful, vicious, licentious, and the scum of the earth. But compared to his brother, he was a saint!”
The pastor may not have received the promised gift, but he certainly got across a vital point. The most deceptive aspect of our sinfulness is the pervasive tendency to self-justification by comparison to some other person. An arbitrary hierarchy of vices is set up, and we exonerate ourselves by how far up the scale we are from the bottom. Those who recognize the nature of sin understand that what renders someone a sinner is not the scale of human wickedness but the very nature and character of God. It is God’s purity that we stand before, not a fluctuating moral code that varies from one society to another. When sin is understood, a moral discussion can begin—for each one of us stands accountable before God. An accountability that high makes the moral law of any land secondary to the moral law of God. Honesty and virtue are embraced because our motivation is to honor God and not merely to appear right before others.
A certain professor understood this well when he asked the members of his class to sit one seat apart during the examination in order to avoid all appearances of evil, “as the Good Book says.” “What if we don’t believe in the Good Book?” asked one student. “Then you put two seats between!”
An outstanding example of a higher accountability is shown to us in the life of the Old Testament patriarch Joseph. You may recall that when Potiphar’s wife repeatedly tried to seduce him he answered, “I cannot do this for it would violate the trust of your husband, and break the law of God” (see Gen. 39:8–10). Joseph protected himself well, for just in case the answer was forthcoming that it would not bother the husband, there was still the law of God. Joseph saw morality through God’s eyes.
Steve Turner, an English journalist, contrasted this view of morality with that of the naturalist. He said:
[Poety not included because of rights restrictions.]
Conversely, upholding the moral law as an expression of one’s love, in response to the love of God, is the sound of the Christian worshipping his or her Maker. The moral law, then, is not seen as an imposition upon the Christian from without; rather, it is a commitment born out of gratitude to the God whose love one has experienced. This relationship, undergirded and motivated by love in recognition of who God is, forms the foundation of right and wrong.
Healing from Within
Now we can understand what purpose morality serves in the Christian’s life. One’s moral behavior in society is an outworking of a spiritual recognition of who God is and of how one stands in God’s sight. Social ethics, therefore, is always secondary to personal piety and flows from it.
The atheist starts from social ethics and is never able to anchor morality or its purpose. That starting point is in complete contradiction to the biblical understanding because when man is spiritually dislodged, his reason is estranged from the source of light and he is led into a delirium of vanity. Impiety is the precursor of immorality. To hark back to the earlier analogy by C. S. Lewis, the Christian defines why the ships are in the sea in the first place, which helps him determine how to keep them from bumping into each other. This primary and secondary role, always in that order, is underscored by Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society:
Pure religious idealism does not concern itself with the social problem. It does not give itself the illusion that material and mundane advantages can be gained by the refusal to assert your claims to them. . . . Jesus did not counsel his disciples to forgive seventy times seven in order that they might convert their enemies, or make them more favorably disposed. He counseled it as an effort to approximate complete moral perfection, the perfection of God. He did not ask his followers to go the second mile in the hope that those who had impressed them into service would relent and give them freedom. He did not say that the enemy ought to be loved so that he would cease to be an enemy. He did not dwell upon the consequences of these moral actions, because he viewed them from an inner and transcendent perspective [italics mine] . . . The paradox of the moral life consists in this: that the highest mutuality is achieved where mutual advantages are not consciously sought as the fruit of love. For love is purest where it desires no returns for itself; and it is most potent where it is purest. Complete mutuality, with its advantages to each party to the relationship, is therefore most perfectly realized where it is not intended, but love is poured out without seeking returns. That is how the madness of religious morality, with its trans-social ideal, becomes the wisdom which achieves wholesome social consequences. For the same reason, a purely prudential morality must be satisfied with something less than the best.[12]
Although social consequences are not considered the primary purpose of morality, it would be shortsighted to deny the beneficial consequences that come from a biblical morality. Spiritual power may be different to brute power, but it certainly has its own way of conquering. To wit, the well-known social critic Dennis Prager, debating the Oxford atheistic philosopher Jonathan Glover, raised this thorny question:
“If you, Professor Glover, were stranded at the midnight hour in a desolate Los Angeles street and if, as you stepped out of your car with fear and trembling, you were suddenly to hear the weight of pounding footsteps behind you, and you saw ten burly young men who had just stepped out of a dwelling coming toward you, would it or would it not make a difference to you to know that they were coming from a Bible study?”[13]
Amidst hilarious laughter in the auditorium, Glover conceded that it would make a difference. Of course it makes a difference, because there is a logical connection.
3. The Intimations of Meaning
The question, then, arises how a spiritually estranged individual finds meaning in life by recognizing a loving Creator and a moral law. That question troubles the minds of honest skeptics because they long for the answer. Scores of books have been written on the subject of meaning. But often the academic world is seemingly unable to come to grips with reality without making it pedantic and bookish. The dry and sterile approach of obscure academic language can lose the simplicity and sublimity of life’s most precious indicators. For life’s realities also appear in nonacademic garb that is often recognized by the illiterate person while eluding the scholar. This is so because the clues do not always come through the pen of the latest inventive genius; conversely, often from the most simple experiences we learn the most significant truths.
A Precious Indicator
I received a powerful clue to this in my own life years ago when my daughter was less than a year old. I had been traveling for several weeks and had just returned home. As I stepped into the kitchen, I saw my little girl standing in her walker at the other end of the room, and she fastened her gaze upon me with singular attention. In all her childlike shyness she showed the longing within her own heart but was unsure of what move to make. Suddenly, she burst forth in my direction, stumbling over her own feet, and shot her arms into the air to be picked up. I lifted her out of her walker, and she wrapped her arms around me and nestled her head on my shoulder, where she stayed almost motionless for several minutes.
In those few moments, the sense of fulfillment in my being transcended any response that could be described in words, yet the feeling is well understood by parents—educated or otherwise. I did not need the erudition or cynicism of Bertrand Russell to enjoy it or repudiate it.
A warmth within the breast could melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d “I have felt.”[14]
In the case of my child, of course, the warmth within my breast was not born of wrath, but a sense of belonging, and of love’s commitment. It was the touch of reality felt in my spirit.
Herein is a significant indicator for seekers of meaning—it is found in relationships. This extraordinary need and expression of humankind is reinforced again and again. An examination of life’s varied situations brings us back repeatedly to the underlying craving for a relationship of love and integrity. On a few occasions I have had the privilege of visiting a prison and speaking to those who were behind bars for a variety of crimes. Repeatedly, I have heard it said unblushingly, “Please give my mom a call (or wife, brother, or sister) and tell her I miss her.” On more than one occasion, when I visited a military hospital in war-torn countries or prisons within that context, the message was the same: “Tell my family I love them.”
This is not proving a point from the overcharged moments of life; it is descriptive of life itself. Lee Iacocca’s words in his book Talking Straight are very poignant:
As I start the twilight years of my life, I still try to look back and figure out what it was all about. I’m still not sure what is meant by good fortune and success. I know fame and power are for the birds. But then life suddenly comes into focus. And, ah, there stand my kids. I love them.[15]
The thrill of relationships brings all of life into a focused expression. Human beings can relate to the material world and to the world of knowledge and machines only up to a point. If we do not rise above that, every association in our lives is reduced to that level and becomes an object for our own purposes. An inversion of the worst order then takes place. In God’s economy, we are meant to love people and use things, but naturalism reverses the order.
Leo Tolstoy revealed in My Confession that the blatant blunder of his own life was the love of writing and of human acclaim, which robbed him of the treasured relationships that bring meaning.
If relationships bring meaning to life, then the ultimate mockery of life is the reality that all relationships are either ruptured by sin or severed by death. Each of us longs for a relationship that cannot be victimized by sin or destroyed by death. That relationship can only be found with God. Once that relationship is established, it serves as a blueprint for all other relationships, bringing the strength of genuine love and shunning the cancer of selfishness.
A Unified Purpose
Let us probe a little deeper. It is not sufficient to deal with the concept of meaning in only one context. Let me attempt, then, to unwrap the package of that concept in Christian terms. There are at least three areas in which meaning in life for the Christian brings cohesiveness and keeps life from becoming fragmented. These are the individual and oneself, the individual with one’s community, and the individual with history. When these areas are understood and kept in balance, internally, externally, and in relation to time, then all of life becomes meaningful.
Let us consider the first area of internal integration—the individual and oneself. The Christian does not capitulate to one faculty exclusively. He or she does not see a human life as all brain or all emotion. Rather, one sees oneself endowed with the image of God and an integration of different capacities. This means that one’s individuality, when lived out within the moral boundaries of a loving relationship with God, brings a total fulfillment through a diversity of expressions, converging in the purpose of one’s creation. The rational, the aesthetic, the emotional, the pragmatic—all work together for good. The examined life truly becomes worth living. One’s conscience responds to the holiness of God; one’s mind is nurtured and nourished by the truth of God; one’s imagination is enlarged and purified by the beauty of God; one’s heart, or impulses, responds to the love of God; one’s will surrenders to the purpose of God.
For this very reason Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). The whole point of this challenge is to die to one’s own self-centered pursuits and to build one’s entire life with God’s honor as the primary motivation.
Does this mean a stifling of the individual? Absolutely not. This is precisely what C. S. Lewis meant when he used the expression, “His compulsion our freedom.” An incisive definition of such freedom comes to us from the pen of Rudolph Bultmann, professor of New Testament at Marburg University from 1921–1951:
Genuine freedom is not subjective arbitrariness, but freedom from the motivation of the moment. . . . Freedom is obedience to a law of which the validity is recognized and accepted, which man recognizes as the law of his own being.[16]
The atheist, recognizing no law of his own being other than survival, finds himself a constant slave of the moment. One may then walk down a slippery slope into further bondage and self-defacement, finally to become a number, imprisoned by the self-gratifying desires of others.
Every demand of Bultmann’s definition of freedom is met by the Christian belief. A Christian is not a slave to momentary values that are selectively applied, but obedient to a law, the validity of which he recognizes as the law of one’s own being. He is rescued from both pragmatism and alienation—the former being shortsighted and the latter leading to despair. Life is viewed not just in its constituent and isolated parts, but in its cohesive and purposive whole. The internal cohesion that God brings makes for psychological well-being. Contrary to Sigmund Freud, true spirituality, properly understood, is not an obsession or escape; rather, it rescues us from obsessions that do not satisfy and which, in turn, force us to escape via drugs or otherwise.[17]
The Christian perspective bridges the gap between theory and practice. A total submission of life to a higher law is brought to bear upon every decision. The mind-set is not impulsive or reactionary, but acts according to a purpose affirmed in advance. The Christian’s enjoyment of this God-given freedom brings both unity and continuity. One cannot compartmentalize one’s private and public lives without destroying purpose. One cannot do in private what vitiates the very purpose of one’s life. The Christian’s freedom is not in the liberty to do what one wants, but in finding the strength in God to do what one should.
Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Jesus was saying exactly the opposite of what the Christian life has often been portrayed to be. By his detractors, Christ is seen as the robber of human endeavor and the roadblock to our fanciful flights of pleasure, an expectation that Francis Thompson struggled with in “The Hound of Heaven”:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. . . .
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)[18]
But true liberation, contrary to the expectations of many, is found by surrender to him. Unfortunately for Thompson, before he saw the contrariness of his fear, his life had been marred and robbed by opium. Even so, he clearly concluded that it was in Christ that life’s ultimate problem of unity and diversity could be solved. He himself had to be unified within, and he could not do this apart from Christ.
So liberating is this internal work of Christ that it can only be described as a new birth. The songwriter said:
[Lyrics not included because of rights restrictions.][19]
This transformation of vision, bordering on mystery, is the work of Christ within the heart of human beings. This is the spiritual birth Christ talks about that opens one’s eyes to see this world as God sees it and to understand oneself for the first time. The work of Christ in regenerating the human heart brings the beginning of meaning and understanding. Unless a person starts here, he or she is lost.
[Poety not included because of rights restrictions.][20]
Malcolm Muggeridge expressed this glorious triumph of surrender when he realized what had happened within him. Here is a man, who as a peripatetic journalist, had covered the globe. He had rubbed shoulders with the newsmakers of the day but concluded that all news is old news happening to new people. The best news for him was the good news of the gospel, with the new birth for an old heart that had lost so much in the most energetic years of his life. In his book Jesus Rediscovered (which someone has said would be more aptly titled Muggeridge Rediscovered), he said:
I may, I suppose, regard myself as a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets; that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Internal Revenue Service. That’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame, even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions. That’s pleasure. It might happen once in awhile that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time—that’s fulfillment. Yet, I say to you,—and beg you to believe me,—multiply these tiny triumphs by millions, add them all together, and they are nothing,—less than nothing, a positive impediment—measured against one drop of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.[21]
Christ brings meaning by harnessing us in our innermost being, and rescues us from being fragmented within. Thomas Merton summed up a volume of theology in one statement: “Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself; he is not at peace with himself, because he is not at peace with God.”[22]
The second way Christ brings meaning is by retaining the worth of the individual without losing the value of the community at large. The tension of individual freedom vis-à-vis societal good is countered by a different vantage point. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s love for the world is portrayed, but the application is individual. He does not spend his love in the generalities of a mass appeal but rather in the particularities of each individual.
History reminds us of a politician who had taken up the cause of a minority group. So engrossed had he become in defending the rights of this victimized segment of society that every endeavor he made was to that end. From slogans, to speeches, to laws, this passion had enveloped his life. One day, shortly before he was to deliver a pivotal speech on the subject, a teenager from the minority group came to ask for a moment of his time. Instead of responding to this specific request, he looked at his assistant and said, “Tell that man that since I have taken up his cause I have no time left for the individual.” The assistant paused and said, “That is incredible, Sir! Even God has not reached that stage, yet.”
In the demands of life upon us we often find ourselves devalued or diminished, if not completely effaced, in the face of mass society. The yearning for value, and the wish to keep life personally important so that it is not drowned in a sea of causes, is accomplished by God alone.
It is this very balance that is seen time and time again in the life of Jesus. He had compassion on the masses: he was concerned for the crowd that had no food; he was incensed at the religious exploitation of people at the hands of the temple demagogues; and he wept over a city that brought anguish to his prophetic soul, for he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. And to the same city to which he had said, “Oh Jerusalem! How often would I have gathered you,” he demonstrated the value of every individual. He did not miss the cry of the beggar, the halting plea of the lame person, and the emptiness of the rich man or the educated Pharisee. He told the parable of the shepherd who left the ninety-nine sheep to look for the one who had wandered away and was lost. The parables of the lost coin and the lost son underscore that he came to seek and save those which are lost—and that all have sinned and fallen short of the standard of God.
My son once played Tee Ball. The boys were so small, and their headgear so big, that in order to see anything their heads were constantly tilted in an apparent examination of the sky. In short, nothing fit because they were so diminutive. Thankfully, the ball was set on a tee so that they could contort their bodies into a posture from which they could get a glimpse of the motionless ball. With the number of options they were given, every player, sooner or later, connected. And I noticed something. Every time my son hit that ball and arrived safely on base, the first thing he did was to look in my direction to see if I was watching. Yes, they all played to the crowd. And yes, it was a team effort. But amid the sounds of the spectators and the backslapping of the teammates, there was always the need for, “Did you see me do that, Dad?”
One’s most personal need cannot be lost and traded in the abstraction of a faceless and nameless crowd. For the Christian, meaning comes in upholding the value of the individual, who is not subsumed under the category of “people.” At the same time, society is not made indeterminate, so as to make individual needs exclusive of society’s. God’s process for bringing about change in society has always been through the hearts of men and women; bringing about change from within, rather than making short-term gains by mere legislation from without. A Christian in society is like salt to water—society can never absorb one without being changed itself.
From an internal coalescing of the diversities within each individual, to the distinctive value of the individual in society, the Christian message breathes meaning into life.
A Transcending Motivation
This brings me to the vital role of the individual as he or she relates to time in general and to history in particular. The Christian faith stands in a unique position here, as it addresses the flow of history through the heartbeat of individual lives. To understand this, we must try to comprehend the way this relationship is viewed in contrary philosophies.
From the Christian perspective we see the finger of God in all of history, and Christ as its central figure. The Christian explains history through the eternal eyes of Christ.
By contrast, the traditionalist lives for the past; the existentialist lives for the now; and the futurist or utopianist lives for the future.
Notice the words of Jesus Christ as he broke bread with the disciples, “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup [emphasis on the present], you proclaim the Lord’s death [a look to the past], until he comes [the anticipation of the future]” (1 Cor. 11:26). For the Christian, the present stands on the shoulders of the past in anticipation of the future, fusing every moment with significance. Everything matters—even a million years from now. There is nothing that escapes the sharp knife-edge of importance and reality.
The life of the Scotsman Eric Liddell, who was a devout Christian and a superb athlete, was featured in contradistinction to Harold Abrams in the film Chariots of Fire. Abrams, we recall, underscored his emptiness by finding even winning to be anticlimactic. Liddell’s life, and his striving for excellence, was an expression of his love for God—everything mattered because his life was committed to Christ. The lines in the film that capture this best are uttered by Liddell to his sister: “Jenny, God has made me for a purpose—for China; but he has also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
Liddell won the 400 meters gold medal in the 1924 Olympics and later became a missionary to China, where he died. His enjoyment of God in every endeavor and service for Christ was a strong reminder that nothing for the Christian is essentially secular. It can only be secularized by leaving God out of it or by engaging in that from which God, by his nature, must be excluded.
4. Destined for Life
The lines are now clearly drawn. The naturalist has no intelligent cause to look to, no moral law to point to, no essential meaning to cling to, and finally, no hope to look forward to for one’s destiny.
For the Christian, the resurrection of Christ from the dead is the tour de force of one’s apologetic and guarantees one’s destiny. The resurrection is the linchpin of one’s argument as he or she defends the Christian faith. It addresses the most painful of all of life’s struggles—the agony of death, which cuts us all down and taunts any hankering we have for omniscience.
So vital to the nerve and sinew of the Gospel narrative is the issue of life after death that the cumulative force of Christ’s early life and teaching is suddenly forgotten by his disciples, who are left in a state of deep puzzlement after the crucifixion. After his death the disciples, who had abandoned everything and followed him, hovered between a sense of despondency and a sense of betrayal.
They had placed all their hopes and ambitions in the claims of Jesus that he was the Son of God and would fulfill all their messianic expectations. Now the dream had been shattered. The summation of all their responses began with the words, “We had hoped. . . .”
It was the encounter with the risen Christ that finally transformed the band of disciples.
No longer hiding behind closed doors in the grip of intellectual ridicule, they became the most influential people of their time—until even Rome, with all her pompous power, was conquered by the Christian message. Every endeavor to obliterate this message, through threat of persecution to the force of extermination, failed.
As Chesterton said, “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who knows the way out of the grave.”
With the message of Christ, anchored in his resurrection, the words of twentieth-century historian Will Durant are justified: “Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”[23]
The Only Hope
Without question, it was the conquered grave that gave the message its impetus. The man who best exemplified this radical change was Saul of Tarsus, known to the world as the apostle Paul. This young man was a Hebrew by birth, who had studied at the feet of Gamaliel. He was a citizen of Rome, the central city of the great empire to which all roads led, the center of pagan culture. He was raised in the Greek city of Tarsus, whose university eclipsed even that of Athens. His background could not have been better suited to speak to the world. The Hebrews gave the world its moral categories; the Greeks its philosophical categories; and the Romans its legal categories. With prerogatives of birth and privileges of learning, young Saul was the immovable object that could not be dislodged, except by the irresistible force—the person of Jesus Christ. That occurred in the spectacular postresurrection encounter on the Damascus road.
So dramatic and persuasive was this confrontation, that it became, for Paul, the most incontestable authentication of who Jesus was. He was repeatedly brought before questioning authorities, because they knew of the potency of a firsthand testimony from a man such as this. Before the Sanhedrin, he began his defense with the words, “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. I stand on trial because of my hope in the resurrection of the dead. . . .” Before King Agrippa and Festus he concluded his witness by saying, “What I am saying is true and reasonable. The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.” In front of a vast crowd, in the meeting of the Areopagus in Athens, he climaxed his apologetic for the Christian faith with the fact of the resurrection.
It all seems so simplistic, does it not? A group of gullible, prescientific men, succumbing to the illusions and deceptions of their day. Yet, every piece of evidence mustered, including the prophesies that long preceded the event itself and the unexplainable change in the courage and confidence of the early believers, supported by the empirical evidence, argues powerfully for the truth of it all. The Jewish and Roman authorities needed to do only one thing to have smothered this belief and rendered it a farce. All they needed to do was to produce the body of Christ—but they could not. Paul himself granted that, had the resurrection not taken place, Christians were of all men to be most pitied.[24]
Paul was too much of a thinker to construct his life on an uncertain foundation of credulity. He shunned all deductions that were established on false premises. Yet, this persecutor of the early church, who had called for the death penalty for those “seduced” by the Christian message, found himself a trailblazer for the cause of Christ.
It was the knowledge and conviction that Christ had truly broken the chains of death and conquered the grave that gave Paul his hope. It impelled him from within and became the compelling and enduring feature of his proclamation. He feared no man or power because he knew him, whom to know is life eternal. Paul stood in a unique position to the other disciples. They all knew Jesus in the chronological sequence of his birth, life, death, and resurrection. Paul encountered him in the logical sequence of his resurrection, death, life, and birth. Through the keyhole of the resurrection, he argued backwards in time; for through it he saw the authentication of Christ’s message, the explanation of his death, the meaning of his life, and the prophetic fulfillment of his birth. These coalesced to make Christ the centerpiece of history. God indeed had spoken and the authenticity of his message was demonstrated with his power over death.
The whole landscape of life now lay before Paul, interpreted through the eyes of the risen Christ. The empirically verifiable fact of the resurrection became the peg on which he hung his whole destiny. It is, and has been, the resurrection that has brought hope to the hearts and minds of people across the centuries.
Dr. Billy Graham told of an occasion when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was in conversation with him. Mr. Adenauer asked Dr. Graham, “Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead?” When Dr. Graham immediately answered that indeed he did, there was a long silence from the Chancellor, and then he said, “Outside of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I know of no other hope for mankind.”
That is an extraordinary and yet most meaningful statement, made by one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century. It is highly significant because it spoke volumes, coming from a man who had to pick up the ruins after Hitler had left the world mangled.
The Paradigm Shift
C. S. Lewis, addressing this same theme in an allegorical form that appeals to all ages, effectively captures this powerful truth in his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lion, Aslan, is a symbol of Christ in his majestic, yet gentle power. The Witch represents the Devil. Young Edmund has sold out to the Witch through the enticement of the Turkish delight she offered him. His yielding to this allurement would entail the betrayal of Aslan and his brother and sisters. Implicit in the choice was the grasping of autonomy and a deliberate abandonment of the will and counsel of Aslan. Unknown to Edmund, the penalty exacted for this treacherous act is his own death, as encoded within the laws of the “deep magic.” Because of his unquenchable love for Edmund, now mingled with grief, Aslan has offered to die in his place and bear the full force of his penalty. The Witch is ecstatic, for the destruction of Aslan is what she had really sought. Only then could she rule Narnia, unhindered by Aslan’s influence. Aslan is placed, battered and bound, on the ceremonial Stone Table. The children are dismayed as they witness his humiliation and death, and the silence that ensues is punctuated by the sobs of their disappointment and grief.
Yet suddenly, there is the unmistakable sound of the cracking of the Stone Table; and as the bewildered children hasten back to the scene, they are greeted by Aslan, triumphant over his death. Unable to comprehend the immensity of this event, the children yearn for an explanation.
“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge only goes back to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”[25]
C. S. Lewis, who was a master of imagery, captured profound biblical truths in this simple story. He provided a glimpse of life’s realities from the vantage point of the author of life, whom death could not contain. The cracking of the Table and Death working backwards are symbolic and figurative expressions of the actual redefinitions of life itself. Kierkegaard expressed the same idea when he spoke of defining life backwards and living it forwards: starting from his destiny and redefining the journey. This destiny that we can know helps us alter our whole direction in life. It makes sense, for every journey must begin by knowing the destiny. The poem quoted earlier, “Seven Are We,” has an interesting history. Wordsworth said that in writing that poem, with the help of Coleridge, he started by writing the last verse first. This is truly instructive for life itself, for if one does not know where he is going, is it any wonder that he does not know that he is lost?
This is the ultimate paradigm shift; life does not end at the grave. Now, through the eyes of him who conquered death, there is hope for humankind, and all of life’s essentials are redefined. G. K. Chesterton captured this idea so well in his poem on the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Putting words into the mouth of this one who had just emerged from the tomb, he said:
[Poety not included because of rights restrictions.][26]
Jesus Christ continually contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive, and compels us to radically redefine what we mean by life. He encounters us the way he encountered the disciples on Easter Sunday. They were the ones marked out for death. Those who survived him were really the “dead.” He the “dead” one was really the living.[27]
Job’s question, “If a man die, shall he live again?” is resoundingly answered. Our destiny is explained, and the way we view life must be altered.
The Truth Comes Home
When my own mother passed away, the one thought in my mind was the word, “Gone.” The more I pondered it, the more it sounded forth—“Gone, gone, gone.” As I came to grips with the promise of Christ, made to those who have made that commitment to him as their Lord and Savior, I felt the thought completed. Jesus said to Martha by the grave of her brother Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Elsewhere he said to the disciples, “Because I live, you also will live.” My mother had not just gone, she had gone home to be with her Lord. She had served him with her heart and mind. There is an eternal difference between being “gone” and having “gone home.”
This is the hope of which the Christian lyricist Don Wyrtzen wrote:
[Lyrics not included because of rights restrictions.][28]
This song only echoes what Paul had said in his letter to the Corinthians:
Behold, I [show] you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory.” O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?
1 Corinthians 15:51–55 KJV
In recognizing the power of Christ over the grave, we are able to see, in this tightly-knit universe in which we live, a wonderful design, morality, meaning, and hope.
The Final Analysis
I have attempted to sustain the major assertions of the Christian in a threefold approach. (Appendix 1 goes into detail on the nature and necessity of this.) The composite nature of human beings and the cohesive nature of truth demand such criteria. Applying this to the resurrection, we have seen the empirically verifiable argument presented by the disciples; C. S. Lewis beautifully capturing the nobility of the imagination in illustrating this truth in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and the power of these truths being applied in the death of a loved one. The argument, the illustration, and the application bring wisdom to the mind, hope for the heart, and guidance in life.
By contrast, this same approach in carefully scrutinizing atheism shows the weakness of its defense and the immensity of its loss—even greater than Nietzsche imagined. I have sought to touch on just four areas of loss—the leaps of ignorance into primal causation; the loss of morality; the absence of meaning; and the death of hope. These result in a fragmentation, giving rise to answers that cannot be consistent when explaining our origin, condition, salvation, and destiny.
But that is not all that is lost for the atheist. One other aspect must be stated: if the atheist is wrong, there is no recovery of that which he has lost. This was precisely Pascal’s wager:
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.[29]
Pascal’s argument should never be offered as a proof for God’s existence or as a reason for belief in him. This was never Pascal’s intention. Such an argument would be flawed by using experience as a starting point and could end up holding a fragile faith tied to an even more fragile reason. This wager is not to be dismissed as a fatalistic plunge, taken when reason has caved in. Rather, as Pascal argued, he attempted to meet only one challenge of atheism, and that is the test of existential self-fulfillment. Atheism, therefore, could not justifiably argue against his experience, if experience were all that mattered. In fact, Pascal said that he had more than mere self-fulfillment. He had everything the Christian faith promised to him, including the climactic hope beyond the grave. Should, however, death be the end, he did not sense any loss, for contentment in life was still his. That is all he was saying.
The atheist, on the other hand, having rejected God, flutters between pleasurable options, with inner peace forever eluding him. If, after death, he should find out that there is a God, his loss has been irreparable; for not only did contentment and peace elude him in this life, but death has opened the door to an ultimate and eternal lostness. All judgments bring with them a margin of error. But no judgment ought to carry with it the potential for so irretrievable a loss that every possible gain is unworthy of merit. The atheist makes precisely such a hazardous judgment. It is an all-or-nothing gamble of self, thrust into the slot machine of life. It is a faith beyond the scope of reason.
The atheist risks everything for the present and the future, on the basis of a belief that we are uncaused by any intelligent being. We just happen to be here. That one is willing to live and die in that belief is a very high price to pay for conjecture.
5. The Privilege or Peril of Choice
The difference and the choice become crystal clear: either a person yields his heart and will to the rulership of God or he chooses to retain complete autonomy, irrespective of the consequences. God has revealed himself in this world and in his Word. We see within ourselves a battlefield: there is that within us that tugs toward autonomy and manifests our depravity and that within us that points us to God, in whose image we were made. Each must choose, for to live with the contradiction tears one apart. The words of Pascal are graphic:
What a chimera then is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of the truth; cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.[30]
In choosing between one’s options, a person’s essential dignity and ultimate destiny are at stake. In the atheist’s case, he pursues a self-indulgent glory, which ends up in shame. The Christian, recognizing his shame before God, is spiritually transformed to see the glory for which each of us was created. Herein is the point at which every atheist has to face up to with unadulterated honesty: It is only as one recognizes the poverty of one’s spirit that one finds the joyful surprise of a life enriched by God a thousandfold.
An unforgettable illustration is found in the burial of Empress Zita, the last Hapsburg Empress. Thousands fell in line behind the catafalque, drawn by six black horses. The procession came to a stop at the Capuchin Church, and there, a long-observed tradition was enacted. As a member of the funeral party knocked on the closed door of the church, a voice from within asked, “Who goes there?”
The titles were read aloud: “Queen of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia. Queen of Jerusalem, Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Krakow.”
“I do not know her,” came the response from within the church.
A second knock, and the question of “Who goes there?” brought forth the response, “Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary.”
Again the reply, “I do not know her.”
When the inevitable question was put the third time, the answer was simply, “Zita, a sinning mortal.” “Come in,” came the welcoming voice, as the doors were slowly opened.
The atheist’s biggest struggle comes here. A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God. God invites each one to come to him, the Author of life, and receive his salvation offered through Jesus Christ. Jesus himself reminds us that it will profit a man nothing if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. But to the one who trusts in him, he offers life in all its fullness. Jesus said:
Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? . . . See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom, and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Matthew 6:25, 28–33
Our primary pursuit should be God himself, and all secondary and tertiary pursuits fall into place. It is not accidental that the last paragraph of the last book of the Bible is punctuated with the word come. That is God’s invitation. “ ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Rev. 22:17).
Questions for Study and Discussion