The Tsunami and Faith - Part 2 (January 9, 2005)

I emailed to Tribune columnist Eric Zorn last week's Pastor's Page and he wrote back, "It seems to me that what you talk about is hope, which is fine." He wrote similarly to someone else who had sent him my page, saying that my perspective involved "the triumph of hope over experience and observation."

I appreciate Zorn responding at all (he must have gotten a thousand letters from dismayed Christians!), but I cannot accept his gracious attempt to characterize my position as a hopeful one. The fact is, I care nothing about hope in itself, and I positively despise a hope whose object is false. The only thing that matters is truth. If someone believes a falsehood, I'll try to persuade him to believe otherwise - and if I believe a falsehood, then by all means let him who knows the truth reason me out of the lie. But please let’s all dismiss the patronization that masquerades as grace, that says things like, "I am glad your faith gives you comfort and support." No, let's be grownups and face facts. To a Muslim I will say frankly, "Mohammed was a war criminal"; to a Mormon: "Joseph Smith was a fraud"; to certain charismatics: "Benny Hinn is a snake charmer"; to Buddhists: "There is no reincarnation"; and to atheists, "There is a God." I don’t care that someone can live his life happily (or even morally) by depending on convictions anchored in illusion. Truth reigns, and if your happy hope must lean on a lie, then screw it.

It is common today for people to find value in hope that is anchored in nothing. In his review of the film Virgin, for example, Roger Ebert writes, "Is it not possible that faith is its own reward, apart from any need for it to be connected with reality?" No, it isn't, Roger. What would such a faith mean for anyone who has actually had to suffer for it? Would the Sudanese boys who were burned alive for refusing to convert to Islam be content that, for them, "faith is its own reward?" The apostle Paul considered such thinking to be nonsense. He who experienced many beatings and imprisonments wrote, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" (1 Corinthians 15:19). If it were proven to Paul that there was no resurrection, he would not say, "Well, I found that my faith carried with it its own rewards," but rather, "What a pathetic moron I've been."

I believe in the resurrection, which for me is the main reason why the great tsunami, though troubling and tragic, does not disturb my belief in a benevolent God. There is a life after this one. In the resurrection, wrongs will be set right, justice will be perfectly rendered, and many of the last shall be first, and the first last. A poor man like Lazarus, having endured a miserable, tragic earthly life, may find himself basking in sweet delight for all eternity (Luke 16:19-25). The righteous will have no complaint, and the unrighteous will have no legitimate complaint.

For those who question the existence of a benevolent God (because the universe is so unfair!) I challenge them to think hard about a question that confounded former atheist C. S. Lewis: "Just where did you get this idea of 'unfair'?" In a remarkable passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis writes,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of "just" and "unjust"? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?...Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.

Lewis concluded (and I agree with him!) that the very concepts of fair and unfair, just and unjust, benevolent and cruel, have no meaning in a universe without God. Without God, you are just a complex configuration of atoms, and if that is what you are, then on precisely what grounds do you denounce other complex configurations of atoms (whether tsunamis or Hitlers) as "bad" or "wrong" or "cruel"?

Goodness exists, as does cruelty. Some day, good will triumph. That is not a mere hope, but a truth of awful and wonderful consequence, a truth that demands that we go to the side of goodness and remain there no matter what it costs us, and no matter how much we are tempted to depart from it.