Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Faith Battleground
The Intellectual Battleground
Whether you are in and amongst it or whether you tend to take the more circuitous route around the outskirts, there is an Atheist vs. Christian battleground brought about largely by the present conflict between theistic evolutionists (like myself) and Young Earth Creationism/ Intelligent Design/Anti-science fideism, and others of a similar ilk. Although many atheists are happy to engage with non-extremist, science-friendly Christians, it is this unwisdom and unworldliness that has caused the Christian message to suffer the most, and explains why Christians are so in the minority in my place of birth, and also why the best-selling atheists have appealed to so many agnostics and half-hearted religious people. If Christians had been more adroit and competent in defending the faith, keeping it relevant, propagating a message of wisdom and truth, and avoided quarantining themselves from so many of the essential scientific and cultural endeavours Christianity would be in a much more healthy place. The YEC myth and anti-evolution biases have bedevilled our culture for too long now. They retard our progress, and manifest themselves as weaknesses; and just like all weaknesses, the atheists will be attracted to them like a shark is attracted to a blood soaked leg in the sea, or vultures are attracted to carrion.
Much of the YEC and anti-evolution movement was, and is, fuelled by a huge anti-intellectual, anti-institutional component in the American psyche, much of which emerged from the South's healing process after the Civil War – an intellectual rebellion against the more oppressive institutions of the North, and in many cases institutional knowledge itself. Much of the Christian fundamentalism we see nowadays was a reaction to modernism and the historical Biblical scholarship of the late 1800s, much of which included Biblical literalism. It is unfortunate that such reactionary and delusional movements have given ammunition to so many sceptics armed with guns, who are themselves living in their own fort of irrational naturalism – but I suppose the one positive thing to emerge from this is that the subject of faith and religious belief is high on everyone’s agendas again, and that, in my view, can only be good for Christians and, indeed, Christianity – the more open the discussions are, the better it is for our witnessing.
It’s hard to pin down exactly where all the falsity started, as most of the great post-first century Christian scholars seemed to have a sensible view about how the Bible should be interpreted. It was the Archbishop James Ussher who set the cat among the pigeons in 1650 by publishing his ‘Ussher chronology’, which dated the time of creation to be October 23 4004 BC. This certainly sounds ludicrous with today’s improved geological knowledge but in the 17th century people knew no better; in fact, even great minds and innovators such as Kepler, Newton and Lightfoot believed in a young earth. But as we came to know more, support for a young earth declined - most notably from the eighteenth century onwards with the much more fruitful scientific paradigm shifts and movement into the scientific revolution – with Abraham Werner and James Hutton emerging as two of the most established young earth debunkers.
It soon became clear to geologists, even in the eighteenth century, that the tremendous displacements and changes we were seeing on the earth did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that the incremental processes of uplift and erosion had caused them. Discovery after discovery showed that the earth needed to be billions of years old in order to allow time for such changes to occur, and as science has progressed, the many types of radiocarbon and radiometric dating, such as isotropic dating, potassium-argon dating, uranium-lead dating, and rubidium-strontium dating, to name but four, have confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt that we have reliable and independently verifiable scientific schemata that gives us accurate reading of things such as age of the earth and cosmos, decay rates, speed of light, randomness, our chemistry and biology, and all other data that fits nicely together for rationally minded people to form a coherent and consistent worldview.
A very influential (and harmful) book to emerge in the sixties was The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, who, with much pseudoscience and intellectual casuistry, argued for geological evidence for the flood and a young earth, and in the process tried to drown evolutionary theory deep in the water. It didn’t work as any scholar worth his name saw through it, and thus the YEC backlash occurred, and with them very influential conservative organisations in the US quarantined themselves from established and credible science in the form of creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis, The Institute for Creation Research, The Discovery Institute, and Hovind's Creation Science Evangelism Ministry – all of which propagate nonsense as they crassly distort the truth to make their ‘evidence’ support their positions. Much of this is achieved through the rather disingenuous method of ‘quote mining’, whereby they the isolate excerpts from academic texts that appear to support their claims (often by decontextualising them) while omitting the wider context and conclusions that rebut these claims.
Now, thankfully, most Christians saw sense and rejected the anti-science fideism, with the majority assenting to scientific endeavours, and seeing no conflict with the Bible and the findings of science. As I said, sadly it was the rise of fundamentalist Christianity at the start of the twentieth century that saw a revival of interest in many of these nonsensical myths, with only Intelligent Design emerging with any credibility in the present times (most notably with mathematician William Dembski whose contention is that the extraordinary diversity of life is statistically unlikely to have been produced by the same methods of evolution that Darwinists claim, and has the hand of deliberate design imprinted on its fabric). Although ID isn’t quite so blatantly discredited in the same way that YEC is, I personally doubt very much whether one really can scientifically detect the fingerprints of a conscious intentional designer in nature, as I do not think that God’s intentionality can be observed at that zoomed in level – plus I would have to raise issues with Dembski’s lack of scope for falsification in ID.
Of course as science has taken us to this very fruitful and propitious age, we now know for certain that the glass house of creationism has been shattered by unbiased evidence-based scientific enquiries, and that when the creationists are not making claims that have been repeatedly refuted in the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, anthropology, archaeology, and climatology – they attempt to deceive people with lies and evidential fabrications in the hope that their movements endure.
It ought to be said, it is with this type of intellectual dishonesty that I have a problem – I have nothing against Christians’ decisions to avoid science and concentrate on a more theological journey, only perhaps a slight sadness that they’re missing out on some of the incredible truths about nature. Equally, I am not offended by Christians who are plainly wrong about things like cosmology, geology, and biological evolution – I may think they’re mistaken but being mistaken is no reason to confer on them any feelings of affront or offence.
No, the people who we must speak up against are those who sully the name of Christianity with concealment and dishonesty for fear of being exposed as fraudsters – for they are one of the main reasons that this contemporary best-selling atheism by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris, has managed to get such a firm conceptual foothold on so many walls of discourse – most of their ammunition has been provided by the worst aspects of Christian thinking that seems so utterly incapable of engaging in a world where critical thinking and evidence-based rationale are cornerstones of learning, progression and truth.
Must we shoulder some of the blame?
I wonder whether we Christians fail to blame ourselves enough for this - it is so easy to transfer the blame to atheists and say they are not understanding the good news, or apply St Paul’s edict about the message of the cross being foolishness to those who do not know Christ, but I suspect it is easy to do this as it helps absolve ourselves of much of the reasonability for which we really ought to be accountable.
If a school decided to stop teaching grammar, the subsequent results would be evident; work would be completed with bad grammar. The same is true of Christianity; it is not surprising that we have an atheist or agnostic majority; we have not done enough to keep Christianity at the forefront of people’s minds. Some people believe the myth that because something appears out of date it must have lost it relevance, but this is a wholly insensible view where Christianity is concerned – after all, how could something that contains the ultimate truths of existence go out of date? If this dip is simply an alteration in taste and relevance, much like a fashion or trend goes out of date and then emerges again, we cannot hope to find out anything about ultimate truths by assessing the characteristic vogues of any particular time, to do so would be to miss the wider picture. It would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°.
When one looks at St Paul (formerly Saul), almost certainly the greatest ever Christian philosopher, theologian and psychologist for the human condition, it is sometime easy to forget just what sort of person he was before Christ took hold of Him on the road to Damascus. Where once he had relied on his own strengths and his passion for intelligent truth, on his epiphantic road to discovery he would see the light and come to rely on Christ. Despite Saul’s aggressive vigour our Lord saw something in him that he could use for greater purposes - he saw a vengeful chrysalis that had the potential to be an extraordinary Christian butterfly. Far from seeing the followers of Jesus as a rivalry to his Pharisaic precepts of legalism, willing to defend the communities that Christ’s tenet of undeserved grace threatened, he would go on to preach the greatest message of grace ever preached. In stark irony the educationalist, scholarly and lawful tenets, and intellectual scrutiny fostered by the Pharisees were not to be abolished by Jesus but supplemented with a new wisdom that conflates law and grace. In one man, the perceived rivalry, although self-inflicted, disappeared as Jesus asked Saul why he is persecuting the Lord Himself, and calls him to be a man of God Himself, and the new creation St Paul is born into Christ.
I wonder how many potential St Pauls have remained chrysalises because they never sought the wisdom, cognitive vitality and intellectual vigour to become Christian butterflies; for whatever else we can say about the persecutor Saul he had the requisite tenacity and intense longing for truth that meant he would fight for what he saw as veritable, and he was able to use his intellectual prowess and cognitive strength to discover an even grater truth by an unexpected encounter. And I think this is the type of impassioned curiosity that will makes us better men and women of God - after all, did not God Himself say that it is better to be at the extreme of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ rather than ‘lukewarm’ (Revelation 3:14-22) – for it seems to be the very essence of stultification that one would turn off one’s passion for growth and settle for a lukewarm existence that fails to strive for critical analysis, cognitive vitality, honest intellectual search, and acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.
But most importantly of all, lukewarm is synonymous with forgetting one’s first love – Christ Himself, who is the very vine from which all wisdom, intelligence and knowledge comes. Thus, given that God uses more than just the Bible to resource His creation, it is imperative that Christians are able to engage with the world, and that must naturally include the sciences, politics, different philosophies, psychology, and the many other tenets of existence with which so many Christians seem either incapable or unwilling to engage.
Most of us can happily remind people that those who tarnish the Christian faith with their anti-science, anti-intellectual, fideistic approach to life are and always have been in the minority, and do not reflect or represent the views of the majority of Christians. And with this age of increasing technology and greater potential for worldwide communication, this is starting to become apparent – even some of the most fervent anti-science brigade are starting to poke their heads above the parapet with slightly embarrassed expressions (as they did with Galileo too) and admit that they may have been hasty with some of their anti-science assertions, and that to admit that oranges are not the only fruit need not be a solecism against the Christian faith, far from it, in fact, the opposite is usually true.
We have seen in the worst Christian cases that when a seemingly unstoppable force such as the pursuit of knowledge in science comes into conflict with the seemingly immovable object of one’s views about the Bible and heresy – there are many biases that seem to pull one into paroxysms of dissent, but as I say, they do not reflect the majority of Christians who take their Bible as it is meant to be taken, not as a book of science, but as God’s word through which He reveals the character of Himself and His gift of salvation to His creation.
Wisdom is strength
In the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament we find every reason to suppose that God intended for us to passionately increase our knowledge of all things, for to do anything less would be to quarantine ourselves from the benefits of discovery and act as though this marvellous story that God displayed for us in nature was never meant to be enjoyed or utilised. The talk of ‘wisdom entering our hearts’ and ‘knowledge being pleasant to our souls’ means far more than simply living by the Bible as the only place to find God at work and closing our ears and eyes to what He is doing in the rest of creation - after all we are told that we cannot flee from His activity or escape His presence – He is sustaining creation, and there will be many elements of His wisdom and character to be found throughout nature.
The book of Proverbs leaves us with little doubt – ‘Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding’, for he will be the man who ‘loves his own soul’ and ‘cherishes understanding’. And I think one can tell quite quickly when they meet a man of God whether he is of this kind, or whether he is likely to prefer his feelings over facts and close his mind to things he perceives as being ‘atheistic’ or ‘materialistic’ or ‘naturalistic’. Sometimes one can’t blame him, in fact, there are times when quarantining himself from science might well help his faith or help him live a more focused and devotional life with as few distractions as possible. To this no one should have any objections, and most do not. But when a man chooses to focus on the devotional side of his life, yet with virtually no knowledge of science maintains that it is wrong or heretical or unchristian to accept an old earth or evolution or the big bang, then he must be reproved for his intellectual slovenliness; for he is probably doing more in harming the enquiring atheists’ causes than he realises.
Let us be people who are not afraid to speak out against this force that has done so much damage in contemporary times. It may be hard to go around putting out all the fires that the anti-science brigade have started, but we may begin by getting our own heads straight, and being clear about the sort of world we are living in, and the intellectual dishonesty that needs exposing if we are to take some of the ammunition away from atheists. Perhaps then we will be able to seize the opportunity and capitalise on the fact that discussions about faith are high on people’s agenda, and realise that we live in an age in which we have every opportunity to be the most influential Christian generation the world has ever seen.
Whether you are in and amongst it or whether you tend to take the more circuitous route around the outskirts, there is an Atheist vs. Christian battleground brought about largely by the present conflict between theistic evolutionists (like myself) and Young Earth Creationism/ Intelligent Design/Anti-science fideism, and others of a similar ilk. Although many atheists are happy to engage with non-extremist, science-friendly Christians, it is this unwisdom and unworldliness that has caused the Christian message to suffer the most, and explains why Christians are so in the minority in my place of birth, and also why the best-selling atheists have appealed to so many agnostics and half-hearted religious people. If Christians had been more adroit and competent in defending the faith, keeping it relevant, propagating a message of wisdom and truth, and avoided quarantining themselves from so many of the essential scientific and cultural endeavours Christianity would be in a much more healthy place. The YEC myth and anti-evolution biases have bedevilled our culture for too long now. They retard our progress, and manifest themselves as weaknesses; and just like all weaknesses, the atheists will be attracted to them like a shark is attracted to a blood soaked leg in the sea, or vultures are attracted to carrion.
Much of the YEC and anti-evolution movement was, and is, fuelled by a huge anti-intellectual, anti-institutional component in the American psyche, much of which emerged from the South's healing process after the Civil War – an intellectual rebellion against the more oppressive institutions of the North, and in many cases institutional knowledge itself. Much of the Christian fundamentalism we see nowadays was a reaction to modernism and the historical Biblical scholarship of the late 1800s, much of which included Biblical literalism. It is unfortunate that such reactionary and delusional movements have given ammunition to so many sceptics armed with guns, who are themselves living in their own fort of irrational naturalism – but I suppose the one positive thing to emerge from this is that the subject of faith and religious belief is high on everyone’s agendas again, and that, in my view, can only be good for Christians and, indeed, Christianity – the more open the discussions are, the better it is for our witnessing.
It’s hard to pin down exactly where all the falsity started, as most of the great post-first century Christian scholars seemed to have a sensible view about how the Bible should be interpreted. It was the Archbishop James Ussher who set the cat among the pigeons in 1650 by publishing his ‘Ussher chronology’, which dated the time of creation to be October 23 4004 BC. This certainly sounds ludicrous with today’s improved geological knowledge but in the 17th century people knew no better; in fact, even great minds and innovators such as Kepler, Newton and Lightfoot believed in a young earth. But as we came to know more, support for a young earth declined - most notably from the eighteenth century onwards with the much more fruitful scientific paradigm shifts and movement into the scientific revolution – with Abraham Werner and James Hutton emerging as two of the most established young earth debunkers.
It soon became clear to geologists, even in the eighteenth century, that the tremendous displacements and changes we were seeing on the earth did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that the incremental processes of uplift and erosion had caused them. Discovery after discovery showed that the earth needed to be billions of years old in order to allow time for such changes to occur, and as science has progressed, the many types of radiocarbon and radiometric dating, such as isotropic dating, potassium-argon dating, uranium-lead dating, and rubidium-strontium dating, to name but four, have confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt that we have reliable and independently verifiable scientific schemata that gives us accurate reading of things such as age of the earth and cosmos, decay rates, speed of light, randomness, our chemistry and biology, and all other data that fits nicely together for rationally minded people to form a coherent and consistent worldview.
A very influential (and harmful) book to emerge in the sixties was The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, who, with much pseudoscience and intellectual casuistry, argued for geological evidence for the flood and a young earth, and in the process tried to drown evolutionary theory deep in the water. It didn’t work as any scholar worth his name saw through it, and thus the YEC backlash occurred, and with them very influential conservative organisations in the US quarantined themselves from established and credible science in the form of creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis, The Institute for Creation Research, The Discovery Institute, and Hovind's Creation Science Evangelism Ministry – all of which propagate nonsense as they crassly distort the truth to make their ‘evidence’ support their positions. Much of this is achieved through the rather disingenuous method of ‘quote mining’, whereby they the isolate excerpts from academic texts that appear to support their claims (often by decontextualising them) while omitting the wider context and conclusions that rebut these claims.
Now, thankfully, most Christians saw sense and rejected the anti-science fideism, with the majority assenting to scientific endeavours, and seeing no conflict with the Bible and the findings of science. As I said, sadly it was the rise of fundamentalist Christianity at the start of the twentieth century that saw a revival of interest in many of these nonsensical myths, with only Intelligent Design emerging with any credibility in the present times (most notably with mathematician William Dembski whose contention is that the extraordinary diversity of life is statistically unlikely to have been produced by the same methods of evolution that Darwinists claim, and has the hand of deliberate design imprinted on its fabric). Although ID isn’t quite so blatantly discredited in the same way that YEC is, I personally doubt very much whether one really can scientifically detect the fingerprints of a conscious intentional designer in nature, as I do not think that God’s intentionality can be observed at that zoomed in level – plus I would have to raise issues with Dembski’s lack of scope for falsification in ID.
Of course as science has taken us to this very fruitful and propitious age, we now know for certain that the glass house of creationism has been shattered by unbiased evidence-based scientific enquiries, and that when the creationists are not making claims that have been repeatedly refuted in the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, anthropology, archaeology, and climatology – they attempt to deceive people with lies and evidential fabrications in the hope that their movements endure.
It ought to be said, it is with this type of intellectual dishonesty that I have a problem – I have nothing against Christians’ decisions to avoid science and concentrate on a more theological journey, only perhaps a slight sadness that they’re missing out on some of the incredible truths about nature. Equally, I am not offended by Christians who are plainly wrong about things like cosmology, geology, and biological evolution – I may think they’re mistaken but being mistaken is no reason to confer on them any feelings of affront or offence.
No, the people who we must speak up against are those who sully the name of Christianity with concealment and dishonesty for fear of being exposed as fraudsters – for they are one of the main reasons that this contemporary best-selling atheism by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris, has managed to get such a firm conceptual foothold on so many walls of discourse – most of their ammunition has been provided by the worst aspects of Christian thinking that seems so utterly incapable of engaging in a world where critical thinking and evidence-based rationale are cornerstones of learning, progression and truth.
Must we shoulder some of the blame?
I wonder whether we Christians fail to blame ourselves enough for this - it is so easy to transfer the blame to atheists and say they are not understanding the good news, or apply St Paul’s edict about the message of the cross being foolishness to those who do not know Christ, but I suspect it is easy to do this as it helps absolve ourselves of much of the reasonability for which we really ought to be accountable.
If a school decided to stop teaching grammar, the subsequent results would be evident; work would be completed with bad grammar. The same is true of Christianity; it is not surprising that we have an atheist or agnostic majority; we have not done enough to keep Christianity at the forefront of people’s minds. Some people believe the myth that because something appears out of date it must have lost it relevance, but this is a wholly insensible view where Christianity is concerned – after all, how could something that contains the ultimate truths of existence go out of date? If this dip is simply an alteration in taste and relevance, much like a fashion or trend goes out of date and then emerges again, we cannot hope to find out anything about ultimate truths by assessing the characteristic vogues of any particular time, to do so would be to miss the wider picture. It would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°.
When one looks at St Paul (formerly Saul), almost certainly the greatest ever Christian philosopher, theologian and psychologist for the human condition, it is sometime easy to forget just what sort of person he was before Christ took hold of Him on the road to Damascus. Where once he had relied on his own strengths and his passion for intelligent truth, on his epiphantic road to discovery he would see the light and come to rely on Christ. Despite Saul’s aggressive vigour our Lord saw something in him that he could use for greater purposes - he saw a vengeful chrysalis that had the potential to be an extraordinary Christian butterfly. Far from seeing the followers of Jesus as a rivalry to his Pharisaic precepts of legalism, willing to defend the communities that Christ’s tenet of undeserved grace threatened, he would go on to preach the greatest message of grace ever preached. In stark irony the educationalist, scholarly and lawful tenets, and intellectual scrutiny fostered by the Pharisees were not to be abolished by Jesus but supplemented with a new wisdom that conflates law and grace. In one man, the perceived rivalry, although self-inflicted, disappeared as Jesus asked Saul why he is persecuting the Lord Himself, and calls him to be a man of God Himself, and the new creation St Paul is born into Christ.
I wonder how many potential St Pauls have remained chrysalises because they never sought the wisdom, cognitive vitality and intellectual vigour to become Christian butterflies; for whatever else we can say about the persecutor Saul he had the requisite tenacity and intense longing for truth that meant he would fight for what he saw as veritable, and he was able to use his intellectual prowess and cognitive strength to discover an even grater truth by an unexpected encounter. And I think this is the type of impassioned curiosity that will makes us better men and women of God - after all, did not God Himself say that it is better to be at the extreme of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ rather than ‘lukewarm’ (Revelation 3:14-22) – for it seems to be the very essence of stultification that one would turn off one’s passion for growth and settle for a lukewarm existence that fails to strive for critical analysis, cognitive vitality, honest intellectual search, and acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.
But most importantly of all, lukewarm is synonymous with forgetting one’s first love – Christ Himself, who is the very vine from which all wisdom, intelligence and knowledge comes. Thus, given that God uses more than just the Bible to resource His creation, it is imperative that Christians are able to engage with the world, and that must naturally include the sciences, politics, different philosophies, psychology, and the many other tenets of existence with which so many Christians seem either incapable or unwilling to engage.
Most of us can happily remind people that those who tarnish the Christian faith with their anti-science, anti-intellectual, fideistic approach to life are and always have been in the minority, and do not reflect or represent the views of the majority of Christians. And with this age of increasing technology and greater potential for worldwide communication, this is starting to become apparent – even some of the most fervent anti-science brigade are starting to poke their heads above the parapet with slightly embarrassed expressions (as they did with Galileo too) and admit that they may have been hasty with some of their anti-science assertions, and that to admit that oranges are not the only fruit need not be a solecism against the Christian faith, far from it, in fact, the opposite is usually true.
We have seen in the worst Christian cases that when a seemingly unstoppable force such as the pursuit of knowledge in science comes into conflict with the seemingly immovable object of one’s views about the Bible and heresy – there are many biases that seem to pull one into paroxysms of dissent, but as I say, they do not reflect the majority of Christians who take their Bible as it is meant to be taken, not as a book of science, but as God’s word through which He reveals the character of Himself and His gift of salvation to His creation.
Wisdom is strength
In the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament we find every reason to suppose that God intended for us to passionately increase our knowledge of all things, for to do anything less would be to quarantine ourselves from the benefits of discovery and act as though this marvellous story that God displayed for us in nature was never meant to be enjoyed or utilised. The talk of ‘wisdom entering our hearts’ and ‘knowledge being pleasant to our souls’ means far more than simply living by the Bible as the only place to find God at work and closing our ears and eyes to what He is doing in the rest of creation - after all we are told that we cannot flee from His activity or escape His presence – He is sustaining creation, and there will be many elements of His wisdom and character to be found throughout nature.
The book of Proverbs leaves us with little doubt – ‘Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding’, for he will be the man who ‘loves his own soul’ and ‘cherishes understanding’. And I think one can tell quite quickly when they meet a man of God whether he is of this kind, or whether he is likely to prefer his feelings over facts and close his mind to things he perceives as being ‘atheistic’ or ‘materialistic’ or ‘naturalistic’. Sometimes one can’t blame him, in fact, there are times when quarantining himself from science might well help his faith or help him live a more focused and devotional life with as few distractions as possible. To this no one should have any objections, and most do not. But when a man chooses to focus on the devotional side of his life, yet with virtually no knowledge of science maintains that it is wrong or heretical or unchristian to accept an old earth or evolution or the big bang, then he must be reproved for his intellectual slovenliness; for he is probably doing more in harming the enquiring atheists’ causes than he realises.
Let us be people who are not afraid to speak out against this force that has done so much damage in contemporary times. It may be hard to go around putting out all the fires that the anti-science brigade have started, but we may begin by getting our own heads straight, and being clear about the sort of world we are living in, and the intellectual dishonesty that needs exposing if we are to take some of the ammunition away from atheists. Perhaps then we will be able to seize the opportunity and capitalise on the fact that discussions about faith are high on people’s agenda, and realise that we live in an age in which we have every opportunity to be the most influential Christian generation the world has ever seen.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
From Celebrity Riches to Moral Rags
The John Terry affair that has hit the headlines recently has led me to consider this 'rags to riches' story with the signpost reversed. I believe that when we zoom in on our present culture and what much of it is like in this country we can see an interesting and edifying truth about what people really are coveting these days. In John Terry, we see a man who supposedly has what thousands of aspiring young people have; fame, exquisite football skill, trophies, captain of his club and country (although probably not for much longer in the case of the latter), tens of thousands of pounds a week in wages, an attractive wife, beautiful children, and an expensive house in a very salubrious part of London. Yet his affair, betraying his family, letting down his friends and setting a bad example to his young and aspiring admirers exposes the reality of how little fame and fortune really means when one forgets about the fundamentally special things in life - honesty, decency, love, good moral values and, if I may be so bold, a Christian supporting strap.I watched John Terry score the winning goal at Burnley recently, and of course he could not bring himself even to smile let alone celebrate. Here is a man supposedly with everything who at the moment feels like he has nothing but shame and condemnation and unpopularity - and this just goes to show the sandy foundations on which the fame and fortune lifestyles are really built.
I have not intended here to castigate Mr. Terry - he is only human and we all make mistakes. I am no one's judge, and I can only hope that he is able to learn from this and come out of it a better person. I have only intended to show the limitations of fame and fortune by itself, and that one ought to be careful abut wishing for things purely as things to covet in themselves - they do not provide the riches that one supposes.
Being a Christian I believe those riches can only be found in Christ - at least the richest of all are only those lives who have become poor for His sake and lost what they have for what can be gained through Him. The news and affair of John Terry has not only served as a reminder of the futility of a fame and fortune without any greater aspirations, but that there are better things to be had if one starts with Jesus and makes Him Lord of one's life.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Looking For God In The Right Place
Where do you expect to find God except in the place He meant for you to find Him? Sceptics will scoff and say there’s a paucity of evidence, but if you want to find God, you must meet Him on His terms, and those terms are Jesus Christ - the fullness of god in man. Looking for God in your daily routines or in the other areas of life is a bit like looking for Charles Dickens in Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend or A Christmas Carol – of course he is present, even in those who would exile themselves from Him (they too are made in God’s image like the rest of us) - God’s creativity is there in nature, but He is not present in the same way that Miss Havisham or Daniel Quilp or John Harmon or Ebenezer Scrooge are all present in the aforementioned stories, nor is He running through them like water down a stream. To get to know the man behind the stories you would need to meet him in person, and that is what God invites us to do with Christ Jesus.
Jesus is the Creator of the universe, but since the ascension He is not related to the world in the same way that gravity is related to the planets or the electromagnetic spectrum is related to gamma rays and radio frequencies; He is related to nature as Dickens is related to his novels. Each of our own individual stories are, in a sense, related to the whole of nature, just as each character in, say, Oliver Twist (Oliver, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Rose Maylie, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Bumble, and so on) is related to the primacy of the story, and to the mind of Dickens himself. Thus demands to see God in nature as some object like a tree, or a snowfall, or a constellation as Ptolemy described them in his ‘Almagest’, or some mathematical formula, or even a person, are as insensible as expecting (or hoping) to see the person of Dickens in one of his stories.
Jesus is the Creator of the universe, but since the ascension He is not related to the world in the same way that gravity is related to the planets or the electromagnetic spectrum is related to gamma rays and radio frequencies; He is related to nature as Dickens is related to his novels. Each of our own individual stories are, in a sense, related to the whole of nature, just as each character in, say, Oliver Twist (Oliver, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Rose Maylie, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Bumble, and so on) is related to the primacy of the story, and to the mind of Dickens himself. Thus demands to see God in nature as some object like a tree, or a snowfall, or a constellation as Ptolemy described them in his ‘Almagest’, or some mathematical formula, or even a person, are as insensible as expecting (or hoping) to see the person of Dickens in one of his stories.
God is the creator, and just as Dickens is the mind behind the characters, so too is God the mind behind all the characters in creation – so in order to know Him one must meet Him on His terms, and His terms are Christ Jesus, and love and grace, and free salvation on the cross. God didn’t want to remain a mystery, that is why He became a man to die for every single human being, and it is through that death, resurrection, and through His word that one will get to know Him.
I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.
I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14:6
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Three
How Can Heaven Be Paradise If Some Of Our Loved Ones Are In Hell?
This may well be the hardest question in the whole of Christian apologetics, and I think there are bound to be aspects to this that we won’t yet understand (as one would expect). But I think what makes it hard is that it is asked with something vitally important overlooked – after all, nobody who really asks ever considers just how awesome and powerful God is, for in fact, those who usually ask are those who don’t believe in Him in the first place. I think that for the Christian who has experienced the supreme power and Omni-benevolence of God, this question isn’t so difficult. But this is only my opinion, I state with no authority, just as how I see the situation.
As I see things, Heaven would not be Heaven if it were conditioned by our previous earthly imaginations. If we are thinking about Heaven in the right way, there are two things which render this objection unpalatable. In the first place, and, I think, most importantly, God has a greater claim on each individual than we do – and if one thinks of Him not as a static outer-being but as a supreme personality, a vast mind with whom one can have a relationship, then clearly our loved ones are as created by Him as we are, and are therefore far more His than ours. In fact, you are far more God's than you are yours. Everything you have is both God's, and yours because of Him. In your Heavenly status you will be shown that that which was yours on earth now belongs fully to God. And wherever our loved ones end up - whether it is with our Creator or not, their real position in relation to us and Him will be closer to Him than to us In other words, the real relationship between ourselves and our loved ones will be reflected perfectly from Him; we will no longer see things through a mirror darkly, we will see with perfect clarity that our loved ones were God's gift to us on earth, and that, in our Heavenly position, any knowledge of their chosen separation, cannot, in any way, cross into the paradisical realm that we are experiencing with God.
Moreover, and this is not very often congenial to the modern minds, but I doubt whether everyone (including husbands and wives) will continue to know each other in Heaven as they do on earth – you won’t need to – it’ll all be about how awesome God is. In assessing this, we are really looking at a demarcation between love in an earthly sense and love in the eternal sense; for I suspect that any love on earth will have only a pale comparison to that in Heaven. I suppose in comparison, it would be like meeting in adult life the boy or girl you had a crush on in middle school; he or she would now be a total stranger, in your mind, divested of anything that resembled that schoolboy crush. What you’ve moved into far transcends anything once felt, and this must be infinitely truer with the heavenly existence.
And this may not be known by everyone in the earthly realm, but the supreme love of God must be in operation in areas of life that you or I cannot imagine. Central parts that make love truly special are the parts which make room for Christ to do His work; the parts where we are able to appreciate fully, the Christ in our beloved - and they are, by their very nature, the parts that are Him. I should imagine that we cannot see fully what we are loving, either through our beloved or through His presence inside us, until we get to Heaven; that is, in Heaven we shall know fully what we, at present, only know in part.
Moreover, I would also say that with the God we know in Christ (ever seen in the book of Revelation how stupendous His full glory will be?) Heaven will be so awesome (and beyond our current imagination) that our current perception of 'co-existence' will be swept away into something more magical than that which linear concepts currently elicit. So if a consistent answer is attempted one really ought to rephrase it not so much as ‘our’ loved ones in separation, but rather ‘God’s’ loved ones in separation. The very essence of Heaven must, as far as I can see, consist of a perfect harmonisation of our own spirit being and of God's presently indescribable perfection. In which case it will, I presume, be impossible to imagine any other existence outside of the perfect paradise that we are experiencing – yet also we would be in a state that experiences the full (and I mean FULL) nature of God’s awesomeness and therefore would have no reason to worry about the others He loves (which may have once been our earthly loved ones) who have chosen to be separated.
And just as a man cannot appreciate the true delights of literature or poetry until he has learned to read properly, how much more true that if one comes to know God he will realise the answers to the questions that bedevil him (pun intended)
I must say though, even though to be in God's presence will be so awesome that our earthly existence cannot really be recognisable, this does not mean trivialising our earthly existence, for in fact, earth is a wonderful taster and a glorious preparation for an even fuller knowledge of God if one chooses Him.
This may well be the hardest question in the whole of Christian apologetics, and I think there are bound to be aspects to this that we won’t yet understand (as one would expect). But I think what makes it hard is that it is asked with something vitally important overlooked – after all, nobody who really asks ever considers just how awesome and powerful God is, for in fact, those who usually ask are those who don’t believe in Him in the first place. I think that for the Christian who has experienced the supreme power and Omni-benevolence of God, this question isn’t so difficult. But this is only my opinion, I state with no authority, just as how I see the situation.
As I see things, Heaven would not be Heaven if it were conditioned by our previous earthly imaginations. If we are thinking about Heaven in the right way, there are two things which render this objection unpalatable. In the first place, and, I think, most importantly, God has a greater claim on each individual than we do – and if one thinks of Him not as a static outer-being but as a supreme personality, a vast mind with whom one can have a relationship, then clearly our loved ones are as created by Him as we are, and are therefore far more His than ours. In fact, you are far more God's than you are yours. Everything you have is both God's, and yours because of Him. In your Heavenly status you will be shown that that which was yours on earth now belongs fully to God. And wherever our loved ones end up - whether it is with our Creator or not, their real position in relation to us and Him will be closer to Him than to us In other words, the real relationship between ourselves and our loved ones will be reflected perfectly from Him; we will no longer see things through a mirror darkly, we will see with perfect clarity that our loved ones were God's gift to us on earth, and that, in our Heavenly position, any knowledge of their chosen separation, cannot, in any way, cross into the paradisical realm that we are experiencing with God.
Moreover, and this is not very often congenial to the modern minds, but I doubt whether everyone (including husbands and wives) will continue to know each other in Heaven as they do on earth – you won’t need to – it’ll all be about how awesome God is. In assessing this, we are really looking at a demarcation between love in an earthly sense and love in the eternal sense; for I suspect that any love on earth will have only a pale comparison to that in Heaven. I suppose in comparison, it would be like meeting in adult life the boy or girl you had a crush on in middle school; he or she would now be a total stranger, in your mind, divested of anything that resembled that schoolboy crush. What you’ve moved into far transcends anything once felt, and this must be infinitely truer with the heavenly existence.
And this may not be known by everyone in the earthly realm, but the supreme love of God must be in operation in areas of life that you or I cannot imagine. Central parts that make love truly special are the parts which make room for Christ to do His work; the parts where we are able to appreciate fully, the Christ in our beloved - and they are, by their very nature, the parts that are Him. I should imagine that we cannot see fully what we are loving, either through our beloved or through His presence inside us, until we get to Heaven; that is, in Heaven we shall know fully what we, at present, only know in part.
Moreover, I would also say that with the God we know in Christ (ever seen in the book of Revelation how stupendous His full glory will be?) Heaven will be so awesome (and beyond our current imagination) that our current perception of 'co-existence' will be swept away into something more magical than that which linear concepts currently elicit. So if a consistent answer is attempted one really ought to rephrase it not so much as ‘our’ loved ones in separation, but rather ‘God’s’ loved ones in separation. The very essence of Heaven must, as far as I can see, consist of a perfect harmonisation of our own spirit being and of God's presently indescribable perfection. In which case it will, I presume, be impossible to imagine any other existence outside of the perfect paradise that we are experiencing – yet also we would be in a state that experiences the full (and I mean FULL) nature of God’s awesomeness and therefore would have no reason to worry about the others He loves (which may have once been our earthly loved ones) who have chosen to be separated.
And just as a man cannot appreciate the true delights of literature or poetry until he has learned to read properly, how much more true that if one comes to know God he will realise the answers to the questions that bedevil him (pun intended)
I must say though, even though to be in God's presence will be so awesome that our earthly existence cannot really be recognisable, this does not mean trivialising our earthly existence, for in fact, earth is a wonderful taster and a glorious preparation for an even fuller knowledge of God if one chooses Him.
I believe that in our heart of hearts we have never wished for anything else. It may not always be tangible, but all the things that have ever subliminally affected your soul have been but indications of it - thwarted sightings, promises, expectations never quite reaching fruition, melodies that drift away just as you were beginning to enjoy them. But if the wind were ever to blow into the soul; if there ever came a sound that did not drift away but stayed in your presence, the delight itself, you would certainly know it. Without any reservations, you would excitedly proclaim, 'This is why God created me'. All the things that influence us on earth are merely things which God is using to preserve our soul. Both joy and tribulation are the tools He uses to fix us; for every moment of pain, disobedience, anxiety, laughter, pleasure, and love, He is making us into the creatures that He wants us to be.
Every day of your life a euphoric intangibility has been present within your own recesses; it has lingered just beyond the clutch of your awareness. And this is precisely what our creaturely position is in relation to God. We do not have to earn salvation; our eternal destiny is conditioned by our own attitude towards salvation; by our own efforts to know the One who created us. That is why our final judgement is going to be necessary; for only then will we be fully aware of our eternal destiny and how our decisions in life. Either Heaven will be ours - it will be ours in the sense that we knew all along that we had it - the faint sound will become a melody of paradise; or else, we will see that we never made the effort to know Him, and, similarly, we will know that the Heaven which should have been ours but was lost was never very far from us when we were on earth.
At present, you have experienced only the desire of it. Nothing you have ever witnessed has been anything more than an abstraction of Heaven - a thought or emotion that could connect you to the Spirit inside you. Even if you are a non-believer, you will know exactly what I am talking about; for this starved organism is calling you out of your earthly self. It is not like the feelings a man might have for his earthly beloved - you cannot try to keep it, you cannot try to treasure the feeling; for as soon as you try, it will be gone. Remember, the thing I am talking about is not an experience; it is a brief hint of the relationship between yourself and God.
Just as a city cannot be seen in its entirety unless viewed from above, the earthly desires which are most beneficial to us can only really be known when we know God. And here is another one of those paradoxes in Christianity; the freedom of questioning must continue to grow within the mind, but those who do not know what it is that they are questioning, will be those who plan their lives around transient moments, thus impeding the growth. There is something stifling about the idea of finality, because there is nothing more soul-destroying than being in a state of stagnancy and inertia. And I'm afraid, abstract intelligence will never be enough. For those who intellectually abstract their emotions for the pleasurable purposes of self-denial have really overlooked the true delights of the revelations that follow.
This is a little part of what Christ meant when He said that we must become like children; the instruction is twofold. Firstly we should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and secondly, we should enquire just as children enquire about the world they live in. Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3) - for they are the ones who have best co-ordinated the reliance and the enquiry.
That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Romans 10:9-10
Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Two - Talking Oneself Out Of Heaven
One of the feelings I’ve come across - a feeling which has been explored frequently, is the conviction of a man who says he rejects the Heavenly proposition because the thought of loved ones being in the bad place is too shocking a proposition to contemplate. To this I can only respond with the following: how on earth are we to know what another person’s relationship with God is like deep down? Consider yourself for a second, and then consider the person you think knows you best of all (call that person A). Now consider your own self-knowledge, your awareness of your real self and see how comparably meagre A’s knowledge of you really is. Your most personal and secretive thoughts, your inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, your proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams – who really knows the real you? Nobody but yourself and, of course God, who knows you infinitely better than you know yourself.
If there is on thing that is perfectly clear when contemplating God, it is that one must consider these things only in relation to how this truth affects the self, for you cannot possibly hope to know the truth of another person’s situation. An indignant man could reject God all the way because he can’t bear to think of spending eternity away from his loved ones, and yet never realise that they were going to be with God all along. In other words, he could stay away from the party He was invited to only to find that all those he cares about had accepted their invitations, but not in way that he could realise. The truth is, God's relationship with man (even those who we presume were unbelievers) is, I think, far more alive than our own imagination permits us to recognise. We all know that spark of hope that fires up in us the moment we think we’re onto some deep truth about ourselves and our own destiny – those fleeting moments that suggest this is only the prelude to a much more exciting eternal story, and that maybe, just maybe, there is part for us to play. And like I said, God is not some inert monument or static object out there – He is a personality (albeit a complex one) and if one wants to know Him and have revelation, He must be seen as He desires to be seen –and naturally that view of Him must be in accordance with our own personal journey and our own “..most personal and secretive thoughts, inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams” – not anybody else’s. You can only work out God in relation to your proximate distance from Him – there is no other way, for you have no real clue about what exactly (stress EXACTLY) is going on in someone’s else’s mind, and should not dismiss contemplation on these grounds.
If there is on thing that is perfectly clear when contemplating God, it is that one must consider these things only in relation to how this truth affects the self, for you cannot possibly hope to know the truth of another person’s situation. An indignant man could reject God all the way because he can’t bear to think of spending eternity away from his loved ones, and yet never realise that they were going to be with God all along. In other words, he could stay away from the party He was invited to only to find that all those he cares about had accepted their invitations, but not in way that he could realise. The truth is, God's relationship with man (even those who we presume were unbelievers) is, I think, far more alive than our own imagination permits us to recognise. We all know that spark of hope that fires up in us the moment we think we’re onto some deep truth about ourselves and our own destiny – those fleeting moments that suggest this is only the prelude to a much more exciting eternal story, and that maybe, just maybe, there is part for us to play. And like I said, God is not some inert monument or static object out there – He is a personality (albeit a complex one) and if one wants to know Him and have revelation, He must be seen as He desires to be seen –and naturally that view of Him must be in accordance with our own personal journey and our own “..most personal and secretive thoughts, inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams” – not anybody else’s. You can only work out God in relation to your proximate distance from Him – there is no other way, for you have no real clue about what exactly (stress EXACTLY) is going on in someone’s else’s mind, and should not dismiss contemplation on these grounds.
Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part One - The Real Truth Explored
The first two columns I ever published on my page on Network Norwich and Norfolk were about Heaven and Hell, and although my views haven’t changed very much, where they have altered slightly is more in the direction of a better hell than is so often perceived. Of course, I might be wrong, but this is the only way I reconcile it with an all-loving supremely benevolent God – the God we see in Jesus Christ. Couple that with the fact that those who preach the worst kinds of hell are mostly those with the most hellish personality and I can quite happily stick with my view. Moreover I think history clearly shows that the idea of this eternal torment with literal pain and flame-fuelled suffering occurred when pagan religions became mixed into Christian cultures, and clearly draining this swamp has proved pretty difficult, particularly when so many power hungry control freaks try to keep it in for their own horrible personal gain.
But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.
I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.
And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.
Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.
My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.
Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.
What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.
In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.
One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.
But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.
I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.
And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.
Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.
My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.
Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.
What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.
In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.
One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.
St Paul says that we will only be judged on what we know, not that which is unknown to us. There are many people who will live on earth and never hear or read one word about Christ, and the God we see in Christ will not condemn them because of that. But any who have heard the name Christ, know that their sins are wiped out, and therefore know that a second chance is already in their grasp. In that sense, those who object to hell usually look past their own personal obligation to accept the glorious thing which Christ did for them. A corporate objection is not going to be enough to wipe the slate clean, for if our Lord created Heaven in order that we might share in His glory, there must, I presume, also be an eternal place for those who have rejected Him – but I do not think God SENDS anyone to the bad place - I believe those who are there will have freely chosen to be there (see 1 Corinthians 15:22 in Christ ALL will be made alive if they so wish – see also the parable of the Wedding Banquet – all are invited but those that do not make it are the ones that choose to stay away).
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