Does Life Have A Purpose?

Does life have a purpose?

We all assume it does. We may be wrong in that assumption, but nonetheless we go about our lives assuming that they have purpose, meaning, and rationale. We act as though we knew there is a good reason why we exist. I believe this is true even of those who explicitly deny that life has a purpose.

The simplest way to reveal the universal assumption of purposeful life is to point out that we all believe that murder is wrong. Everyone in every culture thinks that it is a sin to murder. Except for psychopaths – and even they tend to put up a fuss when you murder them. Now when I say “murder” I am not referring to euthanasia, mercy-killing, abortion, capital punishment, self-defense or warfare. For the sake of argument, let us put those aside and limit ourselves to clear cases of cold-blooded murder. If life is truly pointless, what’s wrong with taking it? Why punish murderers? Whether we admit it or not, we know that life is not pointless. There is a reason for it. There is a purpose to it. That is why you can’t just take it from somebody.

A second indication that we all regard life as purposeful is more subtle. I will summarize it this way. Even those who hold with great conviction that life has no intrinsic purpose inevitably strive to make up a purpose for it, as though they know in their hearts that they have a created a vacuum that has to be filled; they have opened a gap that was not there before that somehow must be closed.

This striving to create meaning in a meaningless world, or purpose in a purposeless existence, is the cornerstone of a philosophy known as existentialism. When I was young, I was force-fed existentialist literature till I had it coming out my ears. Here is one way to summarize existentialist thought: “Life has no purpose. Therefore, you must create your own purpose.” I will give you an example of this kind of reasoning from the late Harvard professor of Paleontology Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote:

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.

It seems to me that in that quote – and there are countless like it – Stephen Jay Gould has teed it up for us. He has constructed an argument that cries out for a response like the following: "Wait a minute. If life is an accident, if it just happens to be here, and there is no higher purpose governing it – no 'higher answer,' just a crazy bouncing of the lottery balls of history in the quantum fields of chance – and it could have turned out differently, but it didn’t, and here we are - and if we cannot discover the meaning of life because it is not there waiting for us to discover it, then, I ask, why construct an answer ourselves? Gould says we have to do it. He says, “We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.”

I cannot for the life of me understand why then we need to construct any answer at all. Much less, as Gould says, construct it from “our own wisdom and ethical sense.” Where did that “wisdom and ethical sense” come from? Gould would have no answer to that, except to repeat, “Well, it comes from...where everything else comes from! It comes from a certain kind of fish fin. And an asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs by sheer luck and enabled small mammals to survive, one of which became us. And then for millions of generations, the strong ate the weak.” If that is where my ethical sense comes from, then I suppose it must be ok for the strong to eat the weak. It must be ok for the powerful to oppress the inept and unfit to the point of devouring them. If the weak have no intrinsic purpose, because nothing has intrinsic purpose, then there is nothing to prevent me from declaring that their purpose is to provide me with calories, metaphorical or otherwise.

We all know that life has purpose – ready-made, intrinsic purpose that must not be violated for the sake of the pleasure and well-being of the strong. That truth is so deeply settled in us that if our philosophy denies that life comes pre-installed with a purpose, we rush to supply one ourselves in no time flat. We do this, it seems to me, without batting an eye, without pausing to reflect why we feel so moved to supply that missing purpose. It is like a man amputating one of his legs and then immediately getting himself a set of crutches or building a prosthetic replacement leg. If you ask him why he is doing that, he gives you a puzzled look and says, “Well I still have to get from point A to point B don’t I?” To which I would say, “Yes. I think that is what your now-severed leg was there for in the first place.”

I believe that the thing that really causes people to question whether they have a purpose in life is not their philosophy - which can be shockingly, even comically malleable and inconsistent - but rather, their experience. By experience I simply mean circumstances that hit them in the face and that cannot be eluded or batted away with self-contradicting rationalizations.

One of the experiences that causes people to question purpose is the loss of everything they thought they were living for. This happens to many poor, unfortunate souls. They suffer a tragedy that completely turns their life upside down, and they ask why they exist. The prototypical example in the Bible is Job. Job is presented to us as a man who had everything: wealth, family, good health, and a sterling reputation. Moreover, his good fortunate somehow did not corrupt him – we are told he was good, honorable, and generous. And then everything he had or worked for vanished. A series of tragedies wiped out his finances. His 10 children were killed in a tornado. He developed painful blisters all over his body. And his friends turned on him. They said, “You must have deserved it – you must be hiding something from us. It’s a good thing you got knocked off your pedestal.” And part of Job’s response to the loss of everything including his reputation was to say, “Why was I born? What is the point of my existence?”

He even expressed the wish to go back in time to the moment of his birth and erase it so that he could be non-existent. He said, “Why didn’t I die at birth? Why couldn’t I have been stillborn?” Then he generalized from his experience and applied it to all miserable people: “Why is light given to those in misery?” he asked. “Why is life given to the bitter of soul?”

Bitter circumstances have always prompted people to ask if their life has a purpose, and if so, what in the world it could be. I believe that horrible circumstances, such as those that Job experienced, are one way in which it is revealed to us not that we have no purpose but that our true purpose was something higher and grander than we ever imagined. We were right in assuming along with everybody else that we had a purpose, but we were wrong in assuming that that purpose could be exhaustively fulfilled in making money, having a good family, and living a long time in health and good cheer with friends who honored us and enjoyed our company. That won’t do it. The unexamined conviction that that must be the sum total of our purpose is unmasked as an illusion when tragedy strikes and takes it all away. Now where’s your purpose? Do you have a purpose that can withstand tragedy?

Interestingly enough, lesser purposes are also unmasked as an illusion when the opposite happens, and we get everything we ever wanted. You find this theme in the book of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon had all the resources that a man of that era could possibly wish for. He was so ridiculously rich that according to 1 Kings 10:21, all his drinking cups were made of gold. None of his utensils were silver, because silver was thought to be of little value in his day.

Having everything at his disposal and leisure time galore, Solomon went on a fulfillment quest. He decided, I’m just going to have fun. I will fill myself with pleasure every day. He wrote, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.” He gathered a harem of a thousand women. He said “I acquired male and female singers” – so he had live entertainment on demand. Naturally he turned to alcohol. He wrote, “I tried cheering my heart with wine.” He indulged a life of wine women and song, and figured that had to work. Who needs to worry about a purpose if you’re just happy all the time?

But he hated it, and concluded, “Laughter is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?”

At some point he knew he needed something meatier than pleasure, so he pursued a life of the mind. He wrote, “I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,..I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens… I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’” And it turned out that didn’t work either. He concluded, “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” And as for his big pile of books he said, “The making of many books is endless, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

At one point he decided to pursue great projects. It is as though he figured, “I can’t just focus inward - the indulgence of my body with pleasure or the enrichment of my mind with knowledge. Let me focus outward.” He wrote, “I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.”

Did that do it for him? No. He concluded, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

Solomon’s feeling of disillusionment despite having and accomplishing everything he ever wanted has been experienced by countless individuals whom most of us would envy. A famous example is New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. He is rich, good-looking, married to supermodel Gisele Bunchen, has won the Super Bowl 5 times, and is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback, indeed the greatest football player of all time. After his third Super Bowl victory he sat down for an interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. In a revealing moment Brady said, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think that there is something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is – I have reached my goal, my dream, my life is…[his voice trails off]. Me, I think, God, it’s got to be more than this.” Kroft asked him, “What’s the answer?” And Brady said, “I wish I knew. I wish I knew.”

He’s not alone. Comedian and actor Jim Carey hit that same wall. In reflecting on his success, Carey said, “It looks great when you’ve got a cool car and you’ve got good nice clothes and you’ve done something that people admire, but it can never fulfill you, you can never be happy. You know what I mean? It’s not where happiness comes from… I think everybody should get rich and famous and get everything they dreamed so they can see that’s not the answer.”

It is striking to me that whether you are Job with nothing or Solomon, Tom Brady or Jim Carrey with everything, you can wind up in the exact same place with the same line of thought, the same conclusion, and ask the same set of questions. “What am I doing here? Why do I exist? What’s my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? Why do my all efforts to create a purpose come to naught when I see them dashed to smithereens or fulfilled beyond my wildest hopes?”

I believe, and the Christian faith teaches, that you cannot create your own purpose. It will never work. But you can discover what your true purpose is. That is, the purpose that is already there can be revealed to you, taught to you, and you can act upon it and live your life in accordance with it. The difference between creating your own purpose and discovering what your intrinsic purpose is might be helpfully illustrated with reference to the Greek notion of logos.

The concept of the logos in Greek philosophy predates Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. It goes back at least as far as Heraclitus in the 6th century BC. The word logos in Greek can simply mean “word.” It’s the word for “word.” Or more deeply, “the message” or “the communication,” what something or someone is trying to convey. The root word logos survives in our words biology, sociology, meteorology, etc. Biology, for example, is the word about or the study of living things. What are living things, what function do they fill, what purpose do they serve? – that’s “bio-logos” or biology.

In Greek thought, in order to appreciate, comprehend or use anything rightly, you needed to understand its particular logos, or as we might say, its rationale, its proper place, where it fits – or, crudely, its operating manual. Tim Keller has used the example of a space heater which I will borrow and expand upon.

What is a space heater? It is an electronic contraption, maybe the size of a breadbox, and you plug it in to heat up the space around it if your central heating is inadequate.

Now suppose you come across a space heater and you don’t know or care what its true logos is – there is no operating manual for it - but you are going to create a purpose for it. Now you have a nail that you want to drive into a 2-by-4 plank. Could you use a space heater to accomplish that? Well you could try. It would be pretty awkward to pick up the space heater and bring it down on the head of a nail. It might kind of work. But you’re more likely to bend the nail or miss it or damage the space heater, and you will be frustrated over the inadequate completion of the task. Your frustration is a signal that you have missed the logos of the space heater. Or suppose that you want to reach up to get something on a high shelf. Could you step on the space heater for that? That might work, if you’re light enough and the space heater is sturdy enough – but again, you could very well damage the space heater if you stand on it, or worse, fall and hurt yourself. Now suppose that you have a rough idea that a space heater is not a hammer, it’s not a step-stool – it is used for heating. So your bathwater is too cold, and you plug in your space heater and bring it in with you to the bathtub. Now you’ve just electrocuted yourself.

It each case, with the nail, the high shelf, and the cold bath, the results are unsatisfactory at best and lethal at worst because you have not acted in accordance with the space heater’s logos. You don’t create a purpose for the space heater – it already has one, which is to heat space. That’s its rationale, that is what it was designed for.

Now we are ready to frame our opening question this way. Do human beings come equipped with a logos, a place where we fit, a usefulness toward some end that is real rather than illusory, a true purpose that can be fulfilled rather than a make-believe temporary fix that we invent for ourselves and that always seems to get unmasked as unsatisfactory and Not Quite Right?

We do have a purpose, and it is to glorify God.

In saying that our purpose is to glorify God I am not saying anything new. This is not an earth-shattering innovation, though it may appear as such to someone who is hearing it for the first time. All I am doing is affirming as true what Christianity and indeed theistic faith has always maintained at its fundamental core. Your purpose is to glorify God. And that includes everything about you. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” The first question of the Westminster Confession of Faith is, “What is the chief end of humanity?” Or as we might say, “Why are we here? What is our purpose?” And the answer given, correctly, is, “Our chief purpose is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”

Lest there be any misunderstanding, it would be good to specify what we mean and don’t mean by “glorify” God. “Glory” in its most basic sense refers to shining, bright light shining. For example, in the Christmas account of Luke 2 we have the words, “The glory of the Lord shown round about them.” That is, the shepherds beheld something very bright.

When we glorify God, does that mean that we brighten him, that we shine a light on him to make him more luminescent than he already is? No. That would not be possible. God is already infinitely glorious. We cannot add to his glory or take away from it. An example of this principle may be found in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. First he declared his purpose: "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field.” But then he corrected himself and said, “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” That is, according to Lincoln, the field at Gettysburg was already as hallowed as it could ever be, and no words of his sprinkled on top of that could ever increase or decrease its glory.

But Lincoln could and did acknowledge the consecration, recognize the glory, and speak and act and conduct himself in accordance with it.

With regard to the inherent glory of God, we cannot increase it, but we can reflect it. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it, but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.” Likewise, we cannot decrease God’s glory. Lewis wrote, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls his cell.”

If by word, deed and conviction you refuse to glorify God, you will be like a mirror that buries itself in the mud and says, truthfully enough, “I don’t see the light of God’s glory.” But that will only be because you have buried your purpose along with your soul. Your purpose in life – whether you know it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, whether you fulfill it or not – your purpose in life is to reflect God’s glory back to him and toward all creation. You are a mirror designed to reflect the glory of God. That is your logos. By refusing to do that, you become – to draw from the other image I mentioned - like a space heater that never gets plugged in or that is put to some use alien to its nature. It will then be a matter of God’s severe mercy that you become frustrated in seeking to fulfill as ultimate any purpose other than the one for which you were made.

You were made to glorify God. Let me pile on the good news here. Glorifying God is something you can do at any moment, whether your dreams are fulfilled or they’ve all gone bust. Jesus said to his disciples in John 15:8: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” Please understand that “fruit” does not mean success. It means – as defined for us in Galatians 5:22-23 - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. That’s the fruit of the Spirit that glorifies God.

If you settle it in your mind that your one true purpose is to glorify God, and if it is not merely an acknowledgement of your lips but a truth known deeply in your bones, then you will be ready for every setback and disappointment that might otherwise cause you to question the point of your existence, and you also will be shielded against the deception that says that the fulfillment of lesser purposes will be sufficient for you.

The glad acknowledgment of one’s purpose to be that of glorifying of God is so all-encompassing that it includes not only all of life but even death. Even our death cannot elude the logos of glorifying God. When Jesus told Peter in John 21:18 that Peter himself would eventually be crucified, John says in the next verse that Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.

So, today, for me, as far as I can tell, it seems to me that the best angle at which I can hold up my mirror to reflect the glory of God will involve finishing this sermon, maybe answering a question or two, eating some lunch, and going home and taking a nap, delighting in God for the pleasure that gives me. Tomorrow I am to glorify God by working in a chemical production plant with diligence and goodwill and a contented spirit. And some day, perhaps soon, I am to glorify God by receiving the diagnosis of terminal cancer or some such lethal ailment with the words, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And, “See with what peace a Christian can die.”

On September 8, 2017, Jim Carrey made a surprise appearance at New York Fashion Week, and he gave a two-minute interview to E! News anchor Catt Sadler. You can watch it on YouTube. Carrey discoursed on the meaninglessness of Fashion Week and then on the meaninglessness of everything. He concluded with the words, “We don’t matter. We don’t matter. There’s the good news.”

That’s not good news. But more important than being bad news, it is false. There is good news, and it is real, and it involves the deepest truth of your existence. You do matter. You matter because God has designed you with the greatest purpose that any created entity can possible have, which is to glorify him.

Let us pray. Father in heaven, thank you for making us, and infusing us with a purpose greater than which none can be conceived for any created thing, which is to glorify you. Teach us to reflect your glory with courage, grace, goodwill, perseverance, and everlasting joy.

Women Preachers and Willow Creek

Tomorrow my friend Scott Polender gets to preach at Bethany Chapel in Wheaton on a text that includes these verses: “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

That is an explosive passage, and I have been praying for Scott as he prepares his sermon. I don’t know what he is going to say. I do know that he will take these verses seriously – he won’t joke about them or skip over them or apologize for them – and he will thoughtfully integrate them with the rest of the verses in the context and with the Bible’s message as a whole. For that I thank God.

I believe it is possible for sober-minded Christians to arrive at different conclusions about these words from St. Paul. To paint with broad strokes, some will say, “These words are consistent with other Bible passages that promote male leadership in the home and in the church, and they are grounded in creation order. Therefore, women shouldn’t preach or hold the office of elder.” Others will say, “St. Paul also says to greet one another with a holy kiss [Four times! Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26]. And Jesus commanded his disciples to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). We recognize these commandments to be culture-bound practices that do not apply to us directly today, and the same should go for what Paul says about women teaching and leading.”

I think that there are fair arguments on both sides. Here I will go no further than that. By “fair arguments” I do not mean “equally valid,” or, “there’s just no way to decide between them,” or, “they’re both wrong and I alone understand the true synthesis.” I only mean that a cordial, reasoned, and even passionate discussion can take place between Christians who differ on this matter without either side denouncing the other or evicting their opponent from the room. I have no more to say about the specifics of that debate.

But I do have something to say concerning responses to this issue that I find foolish, cowardly, uncharitable, or downright dangerous.

Foolish: “St. Paul was a misogynist, right?”

The charge of misogyny against Paul can really only be brought by someone who has not read enough of him to have earned the right to give an opinion worth hearing in public discussion. Two questions should be asked of anyone who would accuse Paul of misogyny: (1) Have you read all 13 of his extant letters? (2) Were you awake when you read them? A little digging into the Pauline corpus will reveal texts so stunningly respectful of women that one could scarcely believe a first century Jewish Pharisee wrote them apart from divine inspiration: “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28); “the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Most impressively, Paul insists that a husband must love his wife enough to submit to death by torture for her sake (Ephesians 5:25). Let me be clear. Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Hybels are all misogynists. St. Paul wasn’t.

Cowardly: Just ignore the problematic Scriptures.

I think this is the majority position in evangelical churches today. There are countless churches where you could attend every Sunday for a decade or more and never once hear a sermon that included an exposition of the passage in 1 Timothy 2 that I will hear tomorrow. The preachers at these churches don’t want to offend people, and so they avoid hard texts. The most common way of skirting difficult passages is to preach sermon series with names like “Elevate” or “Guardrails” and then cherry-pick Scriptures that are amenable to whatever point the preacher wants to make. Now I will say something blunt and adversarial. Pastors who shun hard verses should resign from the ministry and pursue other callings. Don’t go to their churches. You don’t want a sniveling coward as your shepherd. Go to a church where the preacher goes verse by verse through books of the Bible, thoughtfully acknowledges Scriptural authority, and sometimes says things you don’t like.

Uncharitable: Impugn the motives of those who disagree with you.

This temptation is so natural and so universal that it must be consciously resisted. (Hang it all, some might say I fell into it myself in the paragraph above when I accused preachers of cowardice for never expounding 1 Timothy 2. “Hey, lighten up - maybe some of those preachers just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And maybe they will before they die of old age." Hm. Possibly.)

It is a special duty to do one’s best to refrain from assigning foul motives in an issue so fraught with passion and likely to trigger outrage. Ask yourself, “Did I come by at least some of my opinions honestly? Maybe my opponent did too.”

Downright Dangerous: Grant indulgences to powerful people who agree with you.

The number of women who have accused former Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels of sexually inappropriate conduct has climbed to ten. He has denied all allegations. So at this point it is a he said/she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said. He’s guilty.

In reading the testimonies of the women staff members that Bill hit on, I noticed that a particularly painful element of the harassment was the fact that he had been so "pro-women." They acknowledged that he provided them with valuable mentorship, that he had opened doors of ministry that had been closed to them in more conservative churches, that he busted the glass ceilings and empowered them in ways that previous generations of women had never known. He was an evangelical feminist trailblazer! How could he, of all people, first exploit, and then discard and slander, the very women who had been his valued partners in ministry?

Among the thousands of lessons to be learned in combing through the wreckage of Willow Creek Church is this: please be on your guard against people who agree with you and are in a position of power to give you what you want. By satisfying your thirst, they can tempt you to hold back from calling them out quickly for their crimes. It’s a common pattern. Harvey Weinstein gives a budding starlet what she craves – a movie role - and in the aftermath his own lawyer lamely points out, “Weinstein didn’t invent the casting couch.” Donald Trump gives some evangelicals what they want – say, conservative judges and tax reform – and some of them go and make donkeys of themselves by never noticing that the man is a son of hell.

Some people who disagree with you have good hearts, and some people who agree with you - and can even do you a lot of favors - have bad ones.

"Can You Prove That God Is Compassionate?"

Yesterday a friend asked me an intriguing question. He wrote, “If an unbeliever asked you to prove from your own life that God is compassionate and gracious, what would you say?” He clarified that he was not talking about spiritual salvation. That is precisely what an unbeliever would doubt or disbelieve. The kind of evidence my friend was looking for would come not from the pages of Scripture but from personal experience. Is it possible, looking no further than the scope of one’s life, to find reasons for believing in the compassionate nature of God?

I think that a certain kind of answer might be quickly exposed as problematic. For example, suppose I say, “Here’s how I know God is gracious. Nine years ago, in my loneliness and wearied despair, God brought to me a woman whose sweetness of disposition no fantasy could contrive, and she agreed to marry me, and I became the most happily married man I have ever known.” But another could answer, “Very well for you. In my case, my wife treated me with ever-increasing rude contempt until she abandoned me to pursue lovers. Where was your compassionate God then?” Or suppose I say, “About 15 years ago, I thought I would lose my son, because his depressions were so severe that they led to suicide attempts and repeated hospital stays. But God mercifully adjusted the chemicals in his brain, and now he is a married, productive father of two who has not slit his wrists in more than a decade.” Another answers, “Yes. Well. My son cussed me out and took his life.”

It is hard to imagine any blessing, any joyous reception of God’s grace, to which some understandably embittered soul might not respond, “But I experienced the opposite! If your good fortune demonstrates God’s kindness, doesn’t my bad fortune demonstrate his cruelty? Your circumstantial evidence gets you nowhere, because I can always summon counterexamples. Is it not better to say that God is capricious, distributing good luck and bad in approximately equal loads, and the only reason you think he is good is because you conveniently ignore his nastiness? Or maybe God is beyond good and evil, and our notions of ‘compassion’ and ‘cruelty’ are really just human constructs that we project onto a God who transcends morality. Or maybe there is no God, and our delights and our tragedies are random events that we try to infuse with meaning by attributing them to the kindness of a good God or the discipline of an angry one. But all three hypotheses – a capricious God, a morally transcendent God, or no God at all – fit the facts better than your “God-is-kind-because-one-time-he-did-this-terrific-thing-for-me.”

To be clear, I do believe in God, and I even believe that things like my happy marriage and my son’s psychological restoration are signs of his grace. But these are not events upon which I would base any argument if trying to reason with a skeptic. If I were a skeptic myself, I think that such reasonings would fall flat because of the counterstrikes I have mentioned above.

But there is still an argument from experience which my internal skeptic has never been able to answer. And it concerns the fact that there indeed exists such a thing as compassion. Compassion is real, undeniable; we have all felt it and witnessed it, and even, at some point, delighted in it with joy inexpressible. If you are of a certain turn of mind, that joy is never more than five minutes from you. You can experience it now by going to YouTube and watching the viral video of 50 moms lip-synching and signing “A Thousand Years” with their Down Syndrome children. When I saw that video the other day I wept, like everybody else, and I told my wife about it, and she said she had seen it already, but she watched it again, and wept again. Maybe some of the moms in that video shed tears of grief when they learned that their babies would have certain limitations. But they had their babies anyway, and loved them, and they go on loving them – and now their manifestations of sweet compassion provoke in us not tears of sorrow but tears of delight.

Contemplate that delight. Give it a good, honest philosophical rumination from as objective a standpoint as your subjective mind can attain. Where does your appreciation for compassionate grace come from? What set of circumstances characterize the universe (or multiverse) as you understand it such that there wells up within you a joy beyond words when you see compassion incarnated in a mom doting on her struggling child?

It seems to me that all the non-God hypotheses fail to account for this phenomenon. They require too much faith, and insist that we accept not merely paradoxical mystery but flat-out contradiction and nonsense.

Suppose God is there but doesn’t care. He does not delight in compassion, nor is he the author of it. All he did was make us and our habitat (who knows why?) and set us adrift in the cosmos to go do our thing. How in the world then, as offspring of this non-moral God, did we manage to invent goodness? How did the stream rise higher than its source? I cannot for the life of me believe that we ourselves crafted mercy from scratch - perhaps in the hope that we could some day present it to God and tell him how much it would please us if he got on board with it. But God would only do that if he thought mercy were a good thing, and how could he think anything was “good” if he himself were beyond good and evil? To think something good you must first have some kind of goodness yourself! I do not see how something like compassion could ever “arise” from a non-compassionate originating force. But I can perceive how it might descend to lower plains from an Original that is goodness itself.

The same sort of thinking applies to the hopeless task of accounting for compassion in a universe that has no Maker whatsoever. In a Godless universe, all acts of compassion (along with all concepts, thoughts and events of any kind) are reducible to matter and energy, which in turn are reducible to – what, exactly? A fluctuating quantum field that randomly generates bubble universes? Something like that, I suppose. Author and poet Joy Davidman outlined the creed she once held as an atheist in these terms: "Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only."

It is indeed possible to see the compassion of Down Syndrome moms and our responsive tears as electrochemical responses grounded in nothing but a series of cause-and-effect events that go all the way back to the Big Bang, and that, given the way atoms necessarily respond to forces acting upon them, could never have been otherwise. Of course, exactly the same would be true of the actions of a murderer-rapist and of the revulsion and rage that characterize our response to him. Compassion and mercy and cruelty and malice all stand on precisely equal grounds in a cosmos without God, and there is simply no reason to say that one set of actions is “better” than any other.

It cannot be said too often that Friedrich Nietzsche understood this point with bracing clarity. As Tim Keller likes to point out, Nietzsche has never been answered. (Here I candidly admit that I am in part relying on Keller’s authority. He has read a lot more philosophy than I.)

So I make my appeal to what I think is the right instinct in all of us, an instinct that keeps bubbling up and that can only be resisted by a deliberate act of the will and convenient forgetfulness. Compassion is a real thing, and it is good, and there is a reason why it delights us that is not ultimately the same as the reason for the existence of things like malice and oppression. The simple truth is that compassion is an attribute of our Maker, and we delight in it because he does.

Once you have come to accept (whether by faith, revelation, or deduction) that God exists and that he is compassionate, then I think you are able to relish the significance of a story like that of Lisa and the rainbows.

On Mother’s Day 2001, Lisa’s husband suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of her. Russell Krausfeldt was just 40 years old, a good man much beloved by all who knew him. Their children were 14, 11 and 5. For many months afterward, Lisa would not wear makeup, because it ran when she cried, and she never knew when she would burst out in tears.

As you can imagine, Mother’s Days in succeeding years were very difficult for her. But a consoling sign came to her on Mother’s Day 2002. She saw a rainbow in the sky that day, and it pleased her, and she received it as a gentle indicator of God’s ongoing love in the midst of her trial. But God wasn’t done. The next year, again on Mother’s Day, she saw another rainbow. Then the year after that, the same maternal holiday arrived with a third consecutive rainbow – each one refracting to a widow’s eyes the light of God’s grace.

Lisa told me that by the fourth year she was a bit stronger and did not “need” the rainbow as she did on previous Mother’s Days. (Of course she looked for one anyway, but contented herself when they ceased appearing). Move ahead to 2009, when I met and courted her so quickly that poor Lisa got stuck with the task of informing friends and family that in a few weeks she would be marrying a guy none of them had heard of. Naturally they had questions and doubts. When she called Russell’s mother with the news of her sudden engagement, she found that she needed to defend the wisdom of her decision. “Are you really sure you want to marry this man?” In the course of this difficult conversation, Lisa happened to turn around and look out the window. There was a rainbow.

I know what that meant. God, in an act of gracious compassion, gave to one of his daughters the sight of four rainbows: three to comfort her in the loss of a good husband, and then an extra to encourage her in the acceptance of a serviceable one.

The Sin That Jesus Never Mentioned

It is a practice condemned in both the Old and New Testaments, and a whole city was once destroyed largely because of it. But Jesus himself never said it was sinful. In fact, as far as we can tell, he never said a word about it. Why is that?

I am referring to the sin of idolatry, the worship of images made from wood, stone, metal or clay. There are hundreds of passages in the Old Testament condemning idolatry - most notably, perhaps, Exodus 20:4-5, the 2nd of the 10 commandments: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” But despite warnings from the prophets, Israel and Judah succumbed to idol worship repeatedly over hundreds of years until judgment fell in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. For the connection between idolatry and Jerusalem’s fall see Ezekiel 5:8-9: “Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again,’” and 2 Chronicles 24:18: “They abandoned the temple of the LORD, the God of their ancestors, and worshiped Asherah poles and idols. Because of their guilt, God’s anger came on Judah and Jerusalem.”

More than 600 years later, the apostles of Jesus likewise condemned idolatry and warned Christians to flee from it. See for example 1 Corinthians 10:14: “Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry”; 1 Peter 4:3: “For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry”; 1 John 5:21: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

But Jesus, insofar as we have record of his teachings, avoided the topic of idol worship. He did so even when the discussion provided a natural spot to mention it. In Mark 7:21-22, for example, Jesus listed a dozen sins in rapid succession – “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly” – but left out idolatry. And in the encounter with the rich young ruler, Jesus said, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother’” (Mark 10:19). Again, idolatry could have been mentioned but wasn’t. By way of contrast, when St. Paul enumerated vices that keep people out of God’s kingdom, he put idol worship back on the list (see 1 Corinthians 6:9; Galatians 5:19).

So why the silence on Jesus’ part? Any answer is speculative of course because no Bible text reads, “Here’s why Jesus never mentioned idolatry.” But it seems that a satisfying answer lies pretty close at hand. Jesus didn’t condemn idolatry because he didn’t have to. His fellow Jews had already taken care of it, and by the first century AD had expunged idolatry from their midst with righteous zeal. After the return from exile in Babylon some 500 years earlier you don’t see idolatry among the Jews. The Babylonian Captivity seems to have cured them of it - at least in terms of its visible and publically tolerated manifestations. Gentiles worshiped idols, but Jews didn’t. And in the course of his public ministry, Jesus dealt almost exclusively with Jews. His Gentile encounters can be numbered on one hand.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that the Jews of Jesus’ day never committed spiritual idolatry of the sort that St. Paul condemned when he equated idolatry with greed in Ephesians 5:5 and Colossians 3:5. Of course they were greedy, and so are we: we all commit that kind of idolatry and need God’s grace to overcome it. I’m referring only to graven images that people consciously worship. Nor am I saying that there did not exist, in Jesus’ day, Jews with idolatrous orientations who longed to visit pagan temples or who sneaked surreptitious prayers to statues they kept hidden under their floorboards. It would be impossible to say that the sin was nonexistent. What I am saying is that the cultural climate among the Jews was so hostile to idolatry that the practice could not easily be found among them. If Yitzhak nudged Rueben and whispered, “Psst! Rueben! Want to join me tonight as I sacrifice a chicken to my image of Molech?” then Rueben would have outed him on the spot and gathered a crowd of zealots to stone him to death. It wasn’t safe to worship idols among the Jews.

In his culture it would have been pointless for Jesus to condemn idolatry. And not just pointless, but, I would suggest, cowardly. A peculiar temptation of moral crusaders is to rage against those sins that the people in their audience are already raging against. We, the corrupt audience, love to hear other people’s sins condemned, and are very pleased when our own sins go unchallenged. If Jesus had condemned idolatry, who in his audience could possibly have objected? Who would have been convicted of sin and moved to repent? Everyone would have nodded and said, “Amen.” A Jewish coalition as diverse as publicans, prostitutes, priests and Pharisees would have praised Jesus for ripping those Gentile polytheistic perverts. Even Herod Antipas, butcher of prophets, would have applauded such a sermon and put up a link to it on CountenanceScroll.

But Jesus didn’t go after safe sins. He targeted sins that people in his audience actually committed. This, coupled with his outrageous claims to divinity, tended to divide them into two camps: those who fell at his feet in humble repentance and those who said, “Kill the bastard.”

Years later, when the gospel of Jesus went out into the Gentile world, idolatry again became a live issue. The apostles, not being fools, did not scratch their heads and say, “Well, Jesus never mentioned idolatry, so maybe it’s not so bad after all.” They attacked idolatry just like their Old Testament counterparts. In Acts 17:16 St. Paul was deeply grieved to find the city of Athens full of idols, and went on to preach an anti-idol message of the sort that would have been superfluous coming from the mouth of Jesus. Writing to another Idol-filled city, Rome, St. Paul again excoriated the practice in unambiguous terms (see Romans 1:21-25).

Two conclusions follow.

First, we who walk in the footsteps of Jesus and claim to speak in his name must take care lest we find ourselves condemning only those sins that our culture is already attacking. That is a good strategy for becoming popular, but it dishonors God. Question your call as a minister if the only sins against which you raise a prophetic voice are the obvious, egregious things that everybody already hates and that no rational person defends – things like sex trafficking, racism, or being Donald Trump. And may God have mercy on your soul if you go silent about some evil practice right at the time that society has deemed it good. Cowards have no place in Christian proclamation.

Second, see for what it is the argument that seeks to justify some behavior on the ground that Jesus never mentioned it. That argument is as dumb as a box of socks.

Nonreligious People And The Concept Of Sin

In a recent panel discussion Rev. Tim Keller was analyzing challenges in communicating the gospel to “post-Christian non-Christian” culture. One problem, Keller said, is that “There is no anxiety about sin in particular. They have no concept of sin. Even to get across the concept of sin is something that is really difficult. You go to China, Africa, almost any other place, there is some concept - but not here.”

Keller’s point requires a qualification that I believe he himself would quickly acknowledge. I think today’s nonreligious people have a robust concept of sin. It is just a matter of where they locate it.

Every day my Facebook feed is filled with expressions of anxiety about sin and angry denunciations of it. Curiously, most of these comments seem to come from “Nones” – that is, atheists, agnostics, nonreligious, non church-going people, fans of late-night satiric news and comedy. Their sensitivity to sin is finely calibrated, and sometimes they are so anxious about it that they lose sleep at night. They research sin, identify it, reveal previously undisclosed evidences of it, and urge all good people everywhere to resist it. Many are so passionately opposed to sin that they are not ashamed to shed tears over it in public. Just watch Jimmy Kimmel.

The rub, of course, is that it is someone else’s sin, not their own. One detects little introspection, just (to coin a term) extrospection. Typically the sins being denounced are those of Donald Trump, or Congress, or the foul unthinking hordes who put them in power. When they decry Trump’s treatment of immigrants or a Congressman’s resistance to gun laws, they do not use the words “sin,” “sinner” or “sinful,” but these are clearly the categories they have in mind. The energies they bring to bear on their pleas are moral in nature. I have never heard them advocate for their positions on the basis of freely acknowledged partisanship or personal taste.

What I mean is this. If I’m a Cubs fan and you root for the White Sox, we may find each other’s loyalties puzzling but never (if we’re grownups) morally loathsome. If you liked the film “Arrival” and I thought it was terrible, we may have a discussion – even a heated one – about the film’s merits and demerits. But neither of us would try to call the other to repentance for the sin of disliking a worthy film or celebrating a bad one. We would just acknowledge that our tastes differ, and charitably keep to ourselves the concluding thought, “Of course, my taste is more refined than yours.”

But the zeal of Nones that I daily witness is moral zeal, righteous indignation. Trump is to be resisted not because his hair is ridiculous but because his actions are bad. And “bad” does not mean “displeasing to me personally, but of course you might have a different view and who am I to judge that?” but rather, “objectively evil.” Sinful. Worthy of reprobation and demanding active resistance.

Two thoughts come to mind as I contemplate these waves of moral indignation on the part of people whose worldview is nonreligious, philosophically materialistic, and sometimes even contemptuous of that “Sky Fairy” faith that simple folk in flyover states cling to.

First, I encourage the indignation. Sin, unhappily, exists, and it is better to acknowledge its presence and hate it and fight it than to sigh and say, “Well, some people think this and some people think that, and there is no independent righteous standard to judge between them. There can be no such standard, because we are, after all, complex bags of walking seawater who arrived at this point through a process of natural selection pruning the output of random mutation. No Moral Spirit constructed us or expects us to behave in a certain way. We are here because the strong ate the weak. Millions of generations of flexible organisms disassembled the proteins of less suitable ones and incorporated them for private use. Even in my individual creation, the brilliant Super Sperm that became me outraced 180 million rivals and then chemically excluded them with marvelous genocidal efficiency. Like it or not, I am Genghis Khan, and Nietzsche explained how it all works. There is no right and wrong. There is only strong and weak. Alive or dead.”

Deeply felt moral outrage tends to give the lie to philosophical materialism, because many find it hard to hold compatible a belief in sin with a belief that matter and energy are all that exist. These dual beliefs speed in opposite directions, and the intellectual strain involved in trying to encompass them both has led many thinkers to jettison their atheism. If there is a Law, there must be a Lawgiver. If there is no Law, if you and I are just competing (and sometimes cooperating) bags of seawater, then why in the world should I let you tell me what to do? And don’t tell me that it is ultimately in my own best interests. I’ll determine what is in my own best interests, thank you. And besides, your moralizing is always telling me to do what is not in my own interests simply because it is the “good and right thing to do.” We’re back at that again. There is no escaping the categories of goodness and badness, holiness and sin. Expressions of moral indignation remind us of this truth. Hooray indignation.

Second, Keller’s point about the secular mindset lacking a concept of sin strikes me as pretty well-taken as long as we are referring to one’s own sin. I agree: people who do not view themselves as sinful will be very hard to reach with the gospel of Jesus. It won’t be relevant for them. Of course, this is an old story. Jesus himself had a devil of a time trying to convert people who focused on other people’s sins but never their own. In the Bible such people go by the cover term “Pharisee”. A Pharisee hates everybody else’s sin but never sees it in himself. He hungers and thirsts for righteousness – other people’s righteousness. He’s already got it. If only everybody else were as good and reasonable as he, then everything would be fine.

These people are almost hopeless. Jesus had better luck with Simon Peter, who said to him, “Depart from me Lord; I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8) than he did with his namesake Simon the Pharisee, who thought, “Depart from her; she’s a sinful woman.” (free paraphrase of Luke 7:39-40). The mindset of a person who is perpetually pleased with himself yet just as perpetually offended by others is reflected in a parable Jesus told about a Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14. This Pharisee lamented other people’s sins, while a nearby penitent tax collector lamented his own. The tax collector was forgiven and (presumably) became a better man.

Though Pharisees ancient and modern can be very hard to reach, they do have this one thing in their favor. They know that sin exists, and they hate it. On the whole, I suppose it is better to have strong feelings about other people’s sins than to have no feelings about sin at all. Better a Pharisee than a Nietzschean psychopath. With a self-righteous Pharisee, one can at least hope, and I will certainly pray, that the finger of accusation can be taught to point in the opposite direction.

Alister McGrath Was Wrong About The Date Of C. S. Lewis’ Conversion To Theism

C. S. Lewis came to believe in God late in the spring of 1929. In Surprised By Joy he wrote, “In the Trinity Term of 1929 [April 28 to June 22] I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”

Alister McGrath in C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet claims that Lewis got the date of his own conversion wrong, that it actually happened a year later. McGrath bases this claim on inferences from Lewis' correspondence with friends and family. "At no point in Lewis' writings of 1929 did I discern any signs of the dramatic developments that he describes as having taken place in his inner life that year...Even allowing for Lewis' reluctance to self-disclosure, his writings of this period do not point to any kind of conversion experience in 1929." McGrath also finds it significant that apparently Lewis did not begin attending college chapel services until October of 1930. "If Lewis really was converted during the Trinity Term of 1929, why did he wait over a year before starting to attend college chapel? It makes little sense.” McGrath concludes, "Lewis's conversion is best understood as having taken place in the Trinity Term of 1930, not 1929. In 1930, Trinity Term fell between 27 April and 21 June."

McGrath’s revision of the date is not compelling. First, there is really no puzzle about Lewis taking more than a year to start attending chapel. For a man who disliked religious ritual as much as Lewis, it is understandable that it would take him a while to learn to drag himself out of bed to make it to an 8 AM chapel service. The amazing thing is that he went at all, because at that point in his spiritual development he wasn't a Christian but a merely a theist.

What is truly puzzling is McGrath's claim that Lewis' private letters in 1929 "do not point to any kind of conversion experience." This is simply false. Below I have compiled a list of quotes from Lewis' letters all taken from before the time frame in which McGrath thinks Lewis converted from atheism to theism – April to June of 1929. The letters are in reverse chronological order. My few comments are in italics.

Lewis to Hamilton Jenkin, March 21, 1930:

On my side there are changes perhaps bigger: you will be surprised to hear that my outlook is now definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, tho’ it may turn out that way in the end. I can’t express the change better than by saying that whereas once I would have said, 'Shall I adopt Christianity', I now wait to see whether it will adopt me: i.e. I now know there is another Party in the affair – that I’m playing poker, not Patience, as I once supposed.

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, January 30, 1930:

The old doctrine is quite true you know – that one must attribute everything to the grace of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to be. My self-satisfaction cannot be hidden from God, whether I express it to you or not: rather the little bit of self-satisfaction which I (probably wrongly) believe myself to be fighting against, is probably merely a drop in the bottomless ocean of vanity and self-approval which the Great Eye (or Great I) sees in me.

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, January 26, 1930:

[On daily reading George MacDonald’s devotional book, Diary of an Old Soul:

I shall soon have finished it and must look round for another book. Luckily the world is full of books of that general type: that is another of the beauties of coming, I won't say, to religion but to an attempt at religion – one finds oneself on the main road with all humanity, and can compare notes with an endless succession of previous travelers. It is emphatically coming home: as Chaucer says 'Returneth home from worldly vanitee.'

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, January 13, 1930:

In spite of all my recent changes of view, I am still inclined to think that you can only get what you call 'Christ' out of the Gospels by picking and choosing, and slurring over a good deal.

If Lewis is still an atheist, what would "my recent changes of view" refer to? He seems to be saying that though now he believes in God, he is not ready to embrace Christianity because he cannot reconcile that faith tradition with all of what he reads concerning Jesus in the Gospels.

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, January 3, 1930:

By now I hope you have my long letter and are well advanced with your long reply. You shall have another gripping instalment, D.V., in the course of the next ten days.

I am willing to stand corrected if anyone finds a counter-example, but I believe that the above is the first occurrence in Lewis of the abbreviation "D. V.", (Latin Deo Volente - "God willing"). It may reflect mere social custom, (as when a non religious person says “God bless you” when you sneeze), but I suspect that the ever-precise (and newly-theistic) Lewis actually meant it: "If God so wills, I’ll write you some more.”

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, December 21, 1929:

I should like to know, too, in general, what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in the old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly...

Bacon says "The whole world cannot fill, much less distend the mind of man."(By the way, that is the answer to those who argue that the universe cannot be spiritual because it is so vast and inhuman and alarming. On the contrary, nothing less would do for us. At our best, we can stand it, and could not stand anything smaller or snugger. Anything less than the terrifyingly big would, at some moments, be cramping and 'homely' in the bad sense – as one speaks of a 'homely' face. You can't have elbow room for things like men except in endless time and space and staggering multiplicity.)

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, October 17, 1929:

It is very hard to keep one's feet in this sea of engagements and very bad for me spiritually.

Would an atheist care about what was bad for him spiritually?

Lewis to Arthur Greeves, October 6, 10, 17

These letters seem to show that Lewis was trying to maintain a devotional life.

I have not yet started meditation again. The difficulty is to find a suitable time.

I am slowly reading a book that we have known about, but not known, for many a long day – MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul. How I would have scorned it once! I strongly advise you to try it.

Dropped in on [John] Christie for half an hour and was in bed by 11:15 after reading my daily verse from The Diary of an Old Soul.

(Resumption)

Part of me feels bad for McGrath, because he worked very hard on his biography of Lewis, and he said in an interview with Aaron Cline Hanbury, "I think my proposal for a redating of Lewis’ conversion from 1929 to 1930 may be the most important aspect of the book." If I wrote a book and treasured one part of it as "the most important aspect", I'd be a bit put out if someone proved me wrong, and I'd probably go to bed that night in total chagrin muttering to myself, "Oh shucks. Darnit. Darnit." But C. S. Lewis had his conversion date right in the first place, and McGrath's revision cannot be allowed to stand.

Should A Pastor Drive A BMW?

Jesus drives a forklift at my job at the chemical plant. (Not Messiah Jesus - Hispanic Jesus. Pronounced "Hey SOOS"). He is a good soul who tries to watch his language around me because, as he puts it, “I was taught to RESPECT my elders.” He was explaining to me the other day why he doesn’t go to church. “Why should I go and listen to some guy who lives in a mansion and drives a fancy car and he’s still telling me I should put a lot more of my money in the offering plate?”

It seemed to me that Jesus’ mental image of a pastor was strongly shaped by the sons of hell and servants of Mammon that preach on TV. But I had a pretty good card to play in response. “Jesus, look at me,” I said, as I stood before him in my shellac-stained industrial uniform. “You know I’m a pastor. Does it look to you like I’m in it for the money? That I’m living a much-too-luxurious lifestyle?” Thankfully he granted the point, and acknowledged that it was possible to go to a church where the pastor wasn’t some low-life money-grubbing bastard.

Just a few days after that an associate pastor told me that she was going to buy a new car, and some friends advised her to get a used BMW. Same price as a modest new car, they explained, but really a better value. “I can’t do that,” she said. “As a pastor I can’t be seen driving a BMW.” She was right, and I commended her restraint and self-awareness on the matter. A parishioner might see her driving that and not know that she got it used. Back at work the next week I put the following scenario to a couple friends. “Let’s say you go to church this Sunday. As you pull into a parking space, you see that the car pulling in next to you is a BMW. Out steps the pastor who will be preaching that morning. Is that a problem for you?” In the ensuing discussion they made it clear that yes, it would be. Among other things, “How could a pastor tell me to be humble and give generously when he’s cruising around in a luxury car?”

I can already hear the chorus of boos from many of my spiritually corrupted ministerial colleagues. “Why should I care about what the poor rabble think of my spending habits and profligate self-indulgence?” they ask. But to ask such a question is to answer it – at least for a sincere servant of God who lives his life in the shadow of the cross. We do care about what others think. We must. We’re trying to reach them for Christ. We must pay all kinds of personal sacrifices in order to remove hindrances to the gospel. The Apostle Paul, a happy meat-eater like myself, once said that he would become a life-long vegetarian if that’s what it took to keep people from sin (I Corinthians 8:13). I confess my spiritual immaturity, that I would find it terribly hard to forgo hamburgers forever for Jesus’ sake. But to drive a Toyota Corolla rather than a Jaguar even if I could afford one? Come on, that should be a snap.

It is just possible that some minister would respond to this attempt at moral persuasion with, “No. I will enjoy nice things. As for anyone who wrestles with tithing from a meager paycheck to support the lifestyle I think I’m entitled to, well, nuts to him. I don’t care how he perceives me.”

Really? Tell that to Jesus. Either one.