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December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
Belief in a final judgment gives us enough hope so that we will neither resort to violence to bring in justice nor give in and collaborate with injustice.69
promises much more than justice,
Tolkien says there are a number of “primordial human desires” that modernity has not been able to extinguish.
to live long enough to realize our artistic and creative dreams,
love without parting,
see the final triumph of good...
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Tolkien believed that these stories resonate because they bear witness to an underlying reality.
they describe the world as it ought to be and
Tolkien makes a full disclosure of his belief that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”
It is the story to which all the other joy-bringing, spell-casting, heart-shaping old stories only point. Why? This is the one story that satisfies all these longings yet is historically true.
in the Gospel we get far more than a glimpse. The death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ actually happened. “Because this story is supreme; and it is true, [a]rt is verified.”
We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings (think angels), and we will see evil defeated forever.
salvation as a gift.
Christians do not approach death uncertain whether they will be found worthy of eternal life. They believe in Jesus, who alone has a record worthy of eternal life, and they are secure in him.
One ground of our assurance is the Resurrection of Christ himself,
the foretaste of the future we get now, as we receive intoxicating if fleeting experiences of God’s love through prayer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able to call the death of a Christian “the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”
There is a joy that sorrow can only enrich and deepen until it completely gives way to it. This is hope indeed.
with any conversion or reconversion, it came with the cumulative weight of both existential and rational evidence.
had primarily to do with the problem modern secularism has with the establishment of a moral compass.
strength of moral character he saw i...
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He saw Christianity’s “palpable and remarkable power to transform human life.”3
the force of reason. “Materialist atheism is . . . totally irrational,”
could not account for the significance of love, beauty in...
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who famously wrote: “Without God and the future life . . . everything is permitted, one can do anything.”
the New Testament teaches on the one hand that all persons, regardless of belief, are created by God with a moral conscience (Romans 2:14–15). On the other hand, the same text tells them that all people, including believers, are flawed sinners (Romans 3:9–12).
it is wrong to declare or imply that you can’t be good without God.
while there can be moral feelings and convictions without God, it doesn’t appear that there can be moral obligation—objective, moral “facts” that exist whether you feel them or not.
Morality is, therefore, a significant rational difficulty for the secular viewpoint.
it is only fair to admit that morality is also a problem for believers, although in a much different way.
have used it to be harsh and exclusive toward others, or downright abusive.
It could be claimed that secular Western society is one of the most moral cultures in history. Compared with the past, every human life is more highly valued today.
demand for universal benevolence is added the demand for universal justice.
Yet if today we ask, “Why should we live in these ways? Why should we support equality and guard rights and sacrifice to help the poor?” our cultural institutions can give no answer.
“The claim to issue the norms we live by on our own authority” has never happened before in history across a whole society.11
led to a kind of intellectual schizophrenia.
In essence, Ruti is saying: “Your moral values are just socially constructed, but mine are not, and so are true for everyone.”
This self-justifying, self-contradictory stance is pervasive in our secular culture today.
the “extraordinary inarticulacy . . . of m...
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Today there is no way to justify or even to have a conversation about a moral claim with someone who disagrees.
This schizophrenia
It is now pervasive, especially in the day-to-day lives of younger adults.
Most are relativistic, not believing in abiding moral absolutes.15 And yet they have many very strong moral convictions, which they insist others should honor.
In theory we are relativists, but in practice and interaction with those who disagree with us we are absolutists. This schizophrenia is a major source of the increasing polarization we see in our culture.
she could never offer any answer at all when her students asked, “Why?”
Where can we turn in a secular society to find shared moral sources we can agree on? Can we look to the social sciences? No, we can’t.
two main theories put forward by social scientists to explain morality without recourse to religion.
those who believe that our moral convictions are the product of evolution.
the more influential theory of “cultural relativism and social constructionism.”
We concluded that all [moral] laws are ultimately arbitrary. They are the product of power, not reason, be it human or divine.”20
