Is There A God?

Is there a God?

Yes, there is a God. But how do I know that? Why do I believe that? The vast majority of humanity has always believed in some kind of deity or deities. But the vast majority has been wrong about a lot of things. A few hundred years ago the majority believed that the sun, moon and stars revolved around the earth, and they were wrong. Truth is never decided by majority vote. And there has always been a persistent minority that has denied the existence of God, and sometimes those who belong to this group ask believers like me to justify our faith, and tell them why they should believe in God.

For some believers - not all, but some - it puts us in an awkward spot. Not because we find it difficult to believe in God, but because we find it impossible not to. I will give you a light-hearted analogy. There is a scene in the film Liar, Liar where a lawyer finds out cannot lie, and this threatens to ruin him professionally. So he tries really hard to tell the simplest lie possible. He holds up a blue pen and tries to say, “This pen is red.” Hilarity ensues when he cannot do it. His mouth won’t utter the words, and his hand won’t write the sentence. In fact his own hand attacks him and writes the word “blue” on his forehead.

It is kind of like that for me. I am unable to disbelieve the existence of God no matter how hard I try. Now I will say something that may disturb some of you. There are times when I feel like I would like to be an atheist, but I can’t, I literally can’t – I cannot deny what I know to be true.

And when I read the Bible, it seems to me that it is written by people who share this perspective. The writers of the Bible never try to prove God’s existence either to themselves or to others. Even when there are terrible challenges in their lives to the point of turning their world upside down, they fit those challenges into patterns of thought that include God. For example, when Naomi loses her husband and her two sons and she returns to Israel as a widowed, childless poverty-stricken refugee, she does not say, “I guess there’s no God after all,” but rather, “God has afflicted me. God has made my life bitter.” When Job loses everything, he does not wonder why he ever believed in God in the first place. Instead, he wonders why God is treating him that way. He questions God, and he may be tempted to curse God, but he never seems inclined to disbelieve in God.

The Bible’s perspective is reflected in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” And in Romans 1 the apostle Paul maintains that the eternal power and divine nature of God are discernible from the created order. And Paul does not present this as a conclusion that you might arrive at if you assume some doubtful things. Rather, he presents it self-evident – an obvious truth that people suppress by wickedness.

For someone like me who regards the existence of God as self-evident, there can admittedly be some disconnect with individuals who say, “I just don’t see what you see; I don’t feel what you feel.” So here’s what I can do for the sake of the skeptic who really wants to engage me on the question of God’s existence. First of all, I would tell that person frankly that he or she would be better served not by listening to me, but by reading and listening to people who once shared his or her perspective. I refer to former atheists like scholars C. S. Lewis and Jay Budziszewski, and on the more popular level, journalist Lee Strobel and criminologist J. Warner Wallace. These are thoughtful individuals who traveled the road from disbelief to belief in God, and they are a thousand times better equipped than I to make the case to a genuine skeptic. And I’ll go one step further. I believe there Is value in reading the works of those who made the opposite journey, from theism to atheism. Which is why I have no problem telling a genuine seeker to go ahead and read Charles Templeton, Bart Ehrman and Dan Everett, to cite a few. Go ahead and weigh in the balance of your mind the thought journeys of those came to believe in God as opposed to those who came to disbelieve in him. And then in addition to that, I would say that you would be very well served to learn biographical details of these individuals’ lives – details which seldom appear in their defenses of or attacks upon theistic faith. I will leave that deeply suggestive hint hanging in the air.

The next thing that I can do for the skeptic is to say this. I have found that if I begin with the assumption that there is a God, and then I think as hard as I can and draw out implications and logical consequences of that belief, I often arrive at mystery. That is, I come to certain things that I cannot fully explain, questions that I cannot answer, things about which I can speculate and say, “Maybe it’s like this, I’m not sure.” One such mystery is, “Why is there suffering?” We will look at that next week.

On the other hand, If I begin with the assumption that there is no God, and I think as hard as I can, then in several areas I arrive at something that is not mysterious but contradictory and nonsensical. I arrive not at something about which I have further questions and doubts, but at things which I know to be false. I land on garbage which I could not will myself to believe no matter how hard I tried and no matter how advantageous it would be for me to adopt.

I will outline for you 4 areas in which I find this to be the case. In all 4 areas I am breaking no new ground, but merely trying to express in a crude and abbreviated way thoughts that have been covered in greater and more compelling detail by souls worthier and minds more capable than my own.

Argument number 1 is from cosmology. The fundamental question of existence is why is there something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist - why is there a universe, or, as the case may be, a multiverse?

There have always been two answers. Either God made it, or it just exists. I don’t find alternatives to those two views worth considering. Under either view – “God made it” or “It’s just there” - something somehow has to be uncaused. That is, something, somewhere has no explanation for its origin or coming into being. He, she, or it is the ground at which we start. This truth is what makes atheist Richard Dawkins’ question, “If God made everything, who made God?” so jaw-droppingly stupid that it makes you wonder if that man has ever read a book or thought deeply about anything. I know that is a pejorative charge, but I stand by it. The old, old question “If God made everything who made God?” presupposes a God who can be made. And traditional monotheists have never believed in a made God. In fact, we have a word for made gods – they’re called idols. We don’t worship idols. The God of traditional theism is by definition unmade, eternal – he simply always has been. Traditional atheism has countered, “No, the universe is what is unmade, eternal, it simply always has been.” It’s a standoff. Theists cannot reasonably ask atheists, “Who made your eternal universe?” And atheists cannot reasonably ask theists, “Who made your eternal God?”

But the standard atheistic view of an eternal uncreated universe hit a snag about 90 years ago when astronomer Edwin Hubble proved to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced observers that the universe is expanding. Further work traced that expansion backward in time to a single point, infinitesimally small, 13.8 billion years ago, when all of the sudden, bang! We had a universe. It was no longer possible to claim that the universe that we live in is eternal – that it has just always been here. No, that is not the case. It definitely had a beginning.

That discovery was a profound blow to the theory that the universe, being eternal – like the God of the theists - required no explanation. Then further advances in physics and cosmology made the problem worse. Because bit by bit it was learned that certain universal constants have exactly the values they would require in order for stars to form and galaxies to exist – that is, in order for there to be a universe as we understand it. These constants include things like the expansion rate of the universe immediately following the Big bang. The mass of the electron. The mass of the proton. The speed of light. The strength of gravity. The strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces. Planck’s Constant. Crucially, none of these universal constants arise by the laws of physics – they are what they happen to be and conceivably could be otherwise. They have been compared by theists and atheists alike to settings on a dial that have to be zeroed in on exactly the right number for each of those 25 or so constants in order for atoms to cohere or for galaxies to form.

In 2012 physicist Brian Green gave a TED talk that you can watch on YouTube. In it he refers to just one of these physical constants, the amount of dark energy in the universe. There is a dramatic moment when he clicks a button and the number for the amount of dark energy appears on the screen expressed in what he calls the relevant units. That number is 122 zeroes followed by 138. And Greene, who is an atheist, talks about the problem of explaining that number. The problem is that if it’s a tiny bit bigger, then the universe expands too fast for stars to form. If it’s a tiny bit smaller, gravity collapses the Big Bang back on itself – and once again, stars don’t form. To put the problem crudely, “Who set the dial at zero zero zero (pretend I’ve just said 122 zeroes) 138?” And while you’re at it, answer that same question for the two dozen or so other dials that have the same issue. The dial for gravity, for example. This is not like picking a number between 1 and a 100 and happening to get it right. It’s a lot finer than that. The precision has been illustrated this way. Imagine a ruler the length of the observable universe. (Long ruler!). It is divided into one-inch segments. The gravity dial for our universe is set at one particular point, let’s say out by the Andromeda galaxy or something. Move that dial one inch in either direction and life as we know it would be impossible.

So atheist cosmology took a very hard hit in the 20th century when not only was our universe proven to be non-eternal, but it was also shown to be very very very finely calibrated to produce the matter and energy that we perceive. Some astrophysicists, unable to deny the implications, became believers, like Allan Sandage, who labored away at the task of determining the age of the universe. He became a Christian around the age of 56.

I believe it is fair to say that all astrophysicists, whether they were believers or not, were aware of the challenge to atheism presented by the evident fine-tuning of the universe. Astronomer Fred Hoyle, for example, famously said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics as well as with chemistry and biology.” More recently physicist Neil Turok has said, revealingly, “I would say the whole goal of theoretical physics has been to see how much we can understand without invoking someone twiddling the dials.”

So is atheism dead in the water among the physicists and cosmologists who are aware of the mind-boggling improbability of the fine-tuning of our non-eternal universe? No, not by a long shot. There is now one and only one refuge in which a non-theistic understanding of our universe survives. And it is in the theoretical construct of a multiverse. The theory of cosmic inflation proposed by Alan Guth of MIT coupled with string theory allows for the possibility, theoretically, of a practically infinite number of universes emerging, according to the common analogy, like bubbles in a bathtub. We happen to live in one of those bubble universes, but there are countless others. And yes, in those other universes you will indeed have different values for gravity and the mass of electron, etc. But those universes for the most part don’t amount to anything because stars don’t form in them, or maybe even atoms don’t form in them. But the bubble universe which by chance had all the right constants is the one where we find ourselves.

Is there evidence for a multiverse? No, there is not. The evidence for a multiverse is zero, zilch, nada, nothing. If you don’t believe me, for God’s sake look it up. The empirical motivation for belief in a mulitverse is non-existent. Its sole motivating force comes from a need to account for the fine-tuning of the universal constants without recourse to a supernatural super-intellect. That is the evidence – the mere fact that mind-based fine-tuning is philosophically unacceptable.

Now let me surprise you. If you were to ask me which view of reality is likely to be true, the universe or the multiverse, my money is on the multiverse. It’s a speculation, I know, but I come to it not means of scientific evidence, for which there is none, but by means of a fanciful extension of the classic ontological argument for the existence of God. I won’t go into the ontological argument. But in it, God is defined or imagined as “a being greater than which none can be conceived.” Let’s go with that assumption. Can I imagine a greatest possible being? Yes, I suppose I can. Which being seems greater, one that creates a universe or one that creates an infinite number of universes? I’d go with the second option. That seems to be a bigger God. If upon getting to heaven I’m able to ask God, “How many universes did you make?” and he says, “Just one,” I think I’ll be a bit surprised. “Really, just one?” “Yes, just one.” “Oh ok, well, that’s your call, obviously.”

Here’s my point. Nothing for me crucially depends on whether there’s a universe or a multiverse. But for atheist physicists - like Brian Greene, Alan Guth, Lawrence Strauss, Leonard Susskind - they must believe in a multiverse, not because of any evidence (which remains nonexistent), but because it gives them the only possible hope they have to account for this universe’s origin and fine-tuning while maintaining their prior faith commitment to philosophical materialism.

Then there’s the kicker. For me, even this escape hatch for atheism in the form of multiverse theory does not fulfill its promise to provide room for materialism. Because instead of believing in an impossibly fine-tuned-though-random universe, you must believe in something arguably more amazing: an eternal universe generator spitting out universes of varying physical constants till it gets a useful one. That’s a complex machine. To me all that does is push the problem back. Cambridge Physicist John Polkinghorne put it mildly when he said, “I don’t say that the atheists are stupid. I think that theism provides a better explanation.”

Argument number 2. The existence of rationality.

Let me approach this argument this way. Suppose I am having a debate with an atheist. What is happening in that debate? It would seem that we are both giving reasons for our beliefs and trying to persuade the other that our thinking is valid and the other’s invalid. We are saying that our perception is the one that matches reality and that the other’s does not. Perhaps we try to prove the other’s premises invalid. Or perhaps we say, “No, the premises are fine, but your conclusion C does not follow from premises A and B.” In other words, we are thinking and expressing thoughts.

Now let us suppose that atheism is true. In atheism, what is a thought? Think as hard as you can about what a thought has to be in atheism. In atheism all you have are matter and energy interacting with one another. In atheism, all thoughts are biochemical reactions. That is all that they can ever be. When I was a kid we would build volcanoes. You would get some sand or mud, shape it like a volcano with a depression at the top into which you would put some baking soda. Then you pour vinegar on top of that, and it would bubble up over the sides like lava. There was a chemical reaction whose evidence was the bubbling over. What happens in a chemical reaction is that electrons jump from the orbital of one atomic nucleus onto the nucleus of another atom. Or perhaps two atoms share an electron that formerly belonged to just one of them. And that’s it. That’s chemistry in a nutshell.

What causes electrons, en masse, to jump into new orbitals? Does Truth do it? Does it happen by rational inference? No. What causes them to jump is other physical causes – the proximity of other electrons, perhaps, or collision with a photon, or maybe a cosmic ray (a speeding atom fragment) bumps into it. In atheism, every thought you have ever had - including the thoughts you’re thinking now - whether you are Christian, atheist, brilliant, foolish, doesn’t matter – every thought you have had or will have, is completely determined by electrons in your brain moving to new orbitals in response to physical causes all of which are exactly as predetermined as the chemical reaction that takes place when you drop vinegar onto baking soda. The chemical reactions in your brain are more complex than our sandbox volcano projects, but they are every bit as physically determined.

And you thought you were rational. You thought you were thinking. You thought you were evaluating truth claims. Well ha! the joke’s on you. Because, in atheism, all your thinking has been done for you by electrons bandied about by forces you can’t control.

And it is here where I run into one of those snags where I would be forced to believe garbage if I were atheist. If there is no rationality, then why should I trust the rational inferences of an atheist? By his own admission, he’s not rational, he’s just bubbling forth words that are predetermined by the chemical reactions in his brain. To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards (the singer, not the theologian): “He can’t even run his own brain; I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

I know that rationality is true. Therefore atheism can’t be. If you would like to explore this theme further, please, please, please read the first six chapters of C. S. Lewis's book Miracles.

Argument number 3 is cut from the same cloth as argument number 2, and so I will not pursue it in as great a detail. It is the argument from morality: the real existence of good and evil. We all know that there is such a thing as morality – good and bad, right and wrong. But there simply isn’t any way for atheism to ground righteousness or righteous indignation in anything substantial. Because at the end of the day all you have in atheism is matter in motion. Stuff bouncing off of stuff. And no amount of stuff bouncing off of stuff can produce moral obligation or moral depravity.

Joy Davidman describing her former outlook as an atheist wrote, "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." She eventually figured out that that doesn’t work. Once you have convinced yourself that matter and energy are all that really exist, it is hard to articulate why you find anyone else’s behavior objectionable. How can a collection of atoms bouncing off each other ever be wrong? And if you yourself are a collection of atoms bouncing off each other, what gives you the right judge another bag of atoms? But every day without exception, on the news and on my Facebook feed, I see atheists expressing strong moral outrage against a variety of offenses, such as the exploitation of women, the rough treatment of immigrants or sexual minorities, the easy access to guns and the violence that results, the hypocrisy of depraved church leaders – and on and on and on. I have no objection at all to such expressions of moral indignation. I encourage them. I just want atheists to think deeply in their souls (yes, souls) about the justification for such anger. How can you, being just a complex configuration of matter and energy, find morally repulsive another complex configuration of matter and energy?

Jay Budziszewski in his essay “Escape From Nihilism” wrote this:

I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that's sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself well, if you are like I was, maybe you can imagine what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God's law is "written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness." The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can't not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one's will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his control?

Jay Budziszewski came to understand that right and wrong are not subjective illusions magically dreamed up walking bags of complex seawater known as human beings. "Right" or "good" is that which aligns with the character of God our Creator. "Wrong" or "bad" is that which rebels against him.

4th argument, to conclude: We all know that we need someone to thank. I guess I would call this the argument from universal gratitude.

Years ago someone wrote this to an advice columnist: "We are an atheist family, but having grown up with a prayer before each meal, I started to miss the ritual, especially once we had kids. It felt as if there was something missing, and I wanted to commence the meal with something, so now we do 'thankfuls.' Everyone (including children) states something for which they are thankful. This custom is very well received and enjoyed by all types of guests, and seems to satisfy the need to begin a meal giving 'thanks.'"

I agree with that atheist that there is a need to give thanks. That need can be suppressed, though it will take some effort. It can be denied completely, and leave a hole. Or it can even be indulged, laughably and illogically, by an atheist who gives thanks while simultaneously denying that there is anyone out there to thank. At this atheist family table it amuses me to imagine a small child furrowing his brow and asking, “Daddy, who are thanking?” “Shhh! Ixnay on odGay. Eat your kale.”

We must thank. There is a reason why we delight to do so. To neglect thanks is to refuse our invitation to the dance.

Charles Colson was an atheist/agnostic who back in the late 60s and early 70s was special counsel to President Richard Nixon. In 1966, seven years before he became a Christian, he took his sons out on a sailboat he had just bought. In his book Born Again he recounted something unusual that happened that day. Here is what he wrote:

As [my son] realized that he was controlling the boat, the most marvelous look came over his cherubic face, the joy of new discovery in his eyes, the thrill of feeling the wind's power in his hands. I found myself in that one unforgettable moment quietly talking to God. I could even recall the precise words: "Thank You, God, for giving me this son, for giving us this one wonderful moment. Just looking now into this boy's eyes fulfills my life. Whatever happens in the future, even if I die tomorrow, my life is complete and full. Thank You." Afterwards, I had been startled when I realized that I had spoken to God, since my mind did not assent to His existence as a Person. It had been a spontaneous expression of gratitude that simply bypassed the mind and took for granted what reason had never shown me.

Years later reason showed him the ground for a gratitude that in one shining moment he found he could not repress.

Give thanks, give thanks, give thanks. You know that you should, and you know that it would be in your own best interests to do so. Do not stifle the instinct for gratitude that a good God has place within your heart.

Romans 1:21 says concerning evildoers: “although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him”. That is, they went as far as to repress the thanks that would spring forth spontaneously from them and complete the delight that God intended for them. The result of such suppression is given in the rest of the verse, which says, “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Let us pray.

Creator God, it seems an impertinence to discuss evidence for your existence while every moment we draw breath with lungs you created and try to think worthy thoughts with brain cells you constructed. Thank you for making us and supplying us with everything needful to remain in everlasting fellowship with you. Deliver us from wrongdoing, twisted thinking, and the ingratitude and contempt for you that would render our minds futile and our heats eternally foolish and dark. Save us for our good and your great glory.

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.