Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

Charles Taylor explains why modern people are far more likely to lose their faith over suffering than those in times past. He says it is because, culturally, our belief and confidence in the powers of our own intellect have changed. Ancient people did not assume that the human mind had enough wisdom to sit in judgment on how an infinite God was disposing of things. It is only in modern times that we get “the certainty that we have all the elements we need to carry out a trial of God.”24 Only when this background belief in the sufficiency of our own reason shifted did the presence of evil in the world seem to be an argument against the existence of God.

When secular people create their meanings, however, it must be around something located inside the material world. You might be living for your family or for a political cause or for career accomplishments. To have a meaningful life, therefore, life must go well. But when suffering disrupts this, it has the power to destroy your very meaning. The secular approach to meaning can leave you radically vulnerable to the realities of how life goes in this world.

The Leiber-Stoller song echoes the experience of Village Voice columnist Cynthia Heimel, who saw friends go from anonymity to Hollywood stardom only to find, to their horror, they were no more fulfilled and happy than before, and the experience actually deepened their emptiness, turning them “howling and insufferable.” She surmises that “if God really wants to play a rotten practical joke on us, he grants our deepest wish and then giggles merrily as we begin to realize we want to kill ourselves.”17 Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright, helps us understand what happened to Heimel’s friends. “If you take away the life-illusion from an average man, you take away his happiness as well.”18 Within Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, a life illusion is the belief that some object or condition will finally bring you the satisfaction for which you long. But this is an illusion. At some point reality will destroy it, and nothing destroys it like actually achieving your dreams.

British author Francis Spufford writes that for a time we can live in denial of our active tendency to “break stuff—‘stuff’ here including promises, relationships we care about, our own well-being, and other people’s.” But the day comes when “you’re lying in the bath and you notice you are thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you thought you always wanted, and yet, you realize you got there by a long series of choices.”22 So we hate ourselves.

All things are precious, because all are beautiful, but what is more beautiful than He? Strong they are, but what is stronger than He? . . . If you seek for anything better, you will do wrong to Him and harm to yourself, by preferring to Him that which He made, when he would willingly give Himself to you.36 You harm yourself when you love anything more than God.

painting that we think is an original by an admired artist gives less pleasure when we find out it is not. A chair may be comfortable, but if it is our mother’s favorite chair from her sitting room, it will give us even more pleasure. To use theological language, “we enjoy things most when we experience them as a sacrament—as carriers of the presence of another.”43 Some have charged that religion drains ordinary life of its joy by devaluing it in deference to “higher,” more spiritual interests. This is not true—at least, it is not the case with Christianity, the faith that I know by far the best.

Keep in mind that outside of salt and a couple of minerals, everything we eat has died so that we may live. If you are eating bread, not only did the grain die, but the bread has to be broken into pieces. If the bread stays whole, you starve and you fall apart. If the bread is broken into pieces and you take it in, then you live. When Jesus Christ says, “I am the bread of life. . . broken for you,” (John 6:35; Luke 22:19) he is saying: “I am God become breakable, killable, vulnerable. I die that you might live. I am broken so you can be whole.”

Françoise Sagan’s claim was not wrong that when she was in love, she wasn’t free. When you love someone, you lose control because you want so much to please the other person. His or her displeasure is unbearable, it is punishing, and it makes you a kind of slave. But what Sagan doesn’t admit is that, even if you are not in a love relationship with a person, you have to live for some thing. Or, to connect to the last two chapters, everyone looks to some thing for their meaning in life and whatever that is becomes their supreme love. They may be living for their career, or a political cause, or a particular circle of friends and colleagues, or their family. And whatever is the object of your meaning and satisfaction ultimately controls you. You are never your own master, never actually free in the contemporary definition. Something else is always mastering you. Modern people are simply in denial about this.

Now, for example, you pursue your career not to get a self and achieve self-worth. You do it to serve God and the common good. Your work is still part of your identity, as are your family, your nationality, and so on. But they are all relieved of the terrible burden of being the ultimate source of your self and value.

The longer you are alive the more you sense that the things you are losing, at least within the walls of this world, will never come back to you. Sometimes they are opportunities that you have missed. There are beloved places that have literally been torn down, wonderful groupings and relationships that have unraveled and can never be restored. As time goes on, you realize the irretrievability of it all, a constant kind of death in the midst of life.

Most religious systems teach an afterlife, but ordinarily it is conditioned on your living a morally good and religiously observant life. Christianity, as we have seen, on the contrary offers salvation as a gift. It does not belong to the good people but to the people who will admit that they are not good enough and that they need a savior.

beings] need God because their precarious and contingent lives can find final significance only in His almighty and eternal purposes, and because their fragmentary selves must find their ultimate center only in His transcendent love. If the meaning of men’s lives is centered solely in their own achievements, these too are vulnerable to the twists and turns of history, and their lives will always teeter on the abyss of pointlessness and inertia. And if men’s ultimate loyalty is centered in themselves, then the effect of their lives on others around them will be destructive of that community on which we all depend. Only in God is there an ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from which nothing on heaven and earth can separate us.21