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One of the unique things about Christianity is that it is the only truly worldwide religion. Over 90 percent of Muslims live in a band from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and Northern Africa. Over 95 percent of all Hindus are in India and immediate environs. Some 88 percent of Buddhists are in East Asia. However, about 25 percent of Christians live in Europe, 25 percent in Central and South America, 22 percent in Africa, 15 percent (and growing fast) in Asia, and 12 percent in North America.29 Professor Richard Bauckham writes: “Almost certainly Christianity exhibits more cultural diversity
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People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred [as secularism does] or their clamor for an invincible Savior, and so they beat their sacred drums for him. … Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.31
If you believe in Jesus’s message, you believe in a truth, but not a truth that leads to exclusion. Many voices argue that it is exclusionary to claim that you have the truth, but as we have seen, that view itself sets up a dichotomy with you as the heroically tolerant and others as villainously or pathetically bigoted. You cannot avoid truth claims and binaries. The real issue is, then, which kind of truth—and which kind of identity that the truth produces—leads you to embrace people who are deeply different from you?
Here Barnes follows in the footsteps of thinkers such as Epicurus, who reasoned that there are only two possible situations to be in with regard to death. Either you are alive and death is elsewhere, or death has come upon you, and you are not here to know it.
death?28
But the reality is that the great majority of people fear death quite a lot despite knowing all these biological realities.
Philosopher Peter Kreeft recounts the story of a seven-year-old boy whose cousin died at the age of three. He asked his mother, “Where is my cousin now?” She did not believe in God or the afterlife, and so she could not with integrity talk to him about heaven. Instead she followed the modern secular narrative. “Your cousin has gone back to the earth,” she said, “from which we all come. Death is a natural part of the cycle of life. And so when you see the earth put forth new flowers next spring, you can know that it is your cousin’s life that is fertilizing those flowers.” How did the little
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Dylan Thomas is far closer to the hearts of most when he counsels us to “not go gentle” into the night of death, that we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”37
To insist that death is nothing to be frightened of is simply another illusion muffling the obscenity of death. We live in denial of it, but like all repressed facts, it keeps disturbing us, haunting us, and quietly (or not so quietly) draining our hope.
Carl Jung says bluntly: Death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality: there is no sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death. There no longer exists any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges have been smashed at one blow.39
The death-is-natural approach assumes that after death there is nothing—no existence or consciousness. But that cannot be proven, and to be certain of it requires a leap of faith.
Rousseau agrees: “He who pretends to face death without fear is a liar.”43
A man who was dying of cancer once quoted T. S. Eliot to me: “Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death, / We fear, we fear.”44 I asked him what he thought was beyond death. He answered that he had no idea, but he couldn’t understand how his secular friends could be so completely sure that there was simple nonexistence. “It’s crazy,” he continued. “They mock people for betting their lives on the existence of God by sheer faith, but then they bet the ranch that afterwards there will be nothing, no judgment, nada. How can they be sure of that?” There was a pause and I said, “So
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It is the punishment for turning away from God.
Contradicts what you just said about it not coming from God!
So Hamlet was wrong. There is one traveler who has returned from death, the undiscovered country.
Updike observed that many believe the desire for the afterlife is selfish. He counters that the yearning that Christianity fulfills “is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world. … It is not for some other world but for this world.”66
one Christian preacher from Sri Lanka, when asked, “Don’t you think salvation comes through other faiths too?” answers, “What salvation are you talking about?” Not this one! No other religion even claims to hold out hope for the salvation of this world along with our souls and bodies.67
the Resurrection as merely a symbol that “things will get better eventually” will let you down, but if we believe in the Resurrection as a historical fact, then real justice will be done on the earth someday. All wrongs will be made right.
Middle-class people can get excited about philosophy and ethical principles, but not the masses, not the people who are really stuck in the darkness of this world.
And how can we be sure that faith in Christ will usher us into this future? One ground of our assurance is the Resurrection of Christ himself, the historical evidence for which is formidable, as demonstrated by scholars such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, N. T. Wright, and others.
Another ground of our hope is the foretaste of the future we get now, as we receive intoxicating if fleeting experiences of God’s love through prayer. “And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
However, neither Wilson nor Dostoyevsky is claiming that atheists are less good and moral than believers, and to read them that way is to miss the force of the challenge. Dostoyevsky does not say that without God there can be no moral feelings or moral behavior. He says that without God there can be no moral obligation, that everything is “permitted,” allowed.
However, there is virtually no one who truly believes that, who thinks that there are no moral facts.
Really?
“The claim to issue the norms we live by on our own authority” has never happened before in history across a whole society.11
For example, Mari Ruti, a professor at the University of Toronto, writes: “Although I believe that values are socially constructed rather than God given … I do not believe that gender inequality is any more defensible than racial inequality, despite repeated efforts to pass it off as culture-specific ‘custom’ rather than an instance of injustice.”12 Notice that first she says what she must say as a modern, secular person, namely, that all moral values are socially constructed by human beings, not grounded in God. But then she hears some say that therefore they do not have to listen to her call
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Again, this leaves modern, secular people in the position of insisting that other people’s morals are constructed yet acting toward others as if theirs are not. 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.
“almost always those who think and talk [of morals as relative] are living comfortable, privileged lives. … Imagine you were being tortured: would you be tempted by any of these views?”24
Anscombe concluded, strikingly, that modern people should stop using the word “ought” altogether because there is now no way to justify it.
Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and others sought to provide justification for objective moral claims.
No. They didn't. Not all of them.
Thirty percent, Smith found, are marked by “strong moral relativism,” the claim that there are no definite rights and wrongs that are true for everyone.39
Mackie ends up by recognizing the need for morality if society is to work.
He also concedes that morality motivates only if we believe, wrongly, that objective moral facts exist, which he calls the “error theory of morality.”
The second approach that secular thinkers take is to simply see moral obligation as a “brute fact.” One evening after one of our church’s meetings for sceptics, a man approached me and said, “I’m an atheist, but I’m no relativist—not at all. Murder, racism, exploiting the poor, lying and cheating, these are all wrong, anytime, anywhere, regardless of who is doing them.” I asked him why, if there was no God, he thought that. “I see a tree and I know it’s a tree. It’s just there, and that doesn’t prove there’s a God. I see good and evil and I know them too. They are just there, and that doesn’t
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Intuitionism
David Bentley Hart goes so far as to argue, “It is certainly not the case that one needs to believe in God in any explicit way in order to be good; but it is certainly is the case … that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”
For every one person I’ve met who turned away from faith because of reasoning and an apparent lack of evidence, there are many more who have left because of church people who are proud, self-righteous, and imperious. There is no excuse at all for this, and therefore Christians should be very quick to listen to these objections.
while secular people struggle with the problems that come with relativism, religious people wrestle with moralism.
One of the most obvious cases in point is the African slave trade and the abolition of slavery. Christians led the way to abolish slavery, for Christian motives and moral reasons. And yet the creators and defenders of the trade were also Christians, who had theologians and Bible scholars to support the practice with sacred proof texts.
Today we have plenty of attestation to abuses of women and children in many countries dominated by religion and also within religious institutions in our own Western societies. Yet sociological studies also reveal that in almost any city or community in the United States the amount of charitable giving, volunteer hours, and nonprofit service to needy groups generated by churches and religious bodies could never be replaced by government services without a massive increase in taxes.
One study by a University of Pennsylvania professor selected eleven churches and one synagogue and showed that the average economic worth of each to its Philadelp...
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Most evangelicals are not, of course, following such a harrowing path, and it’s also true that there are plenty of secular doctors doing heroic work. … But I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns, or priests.4
The question is, however, why do people have such rights? The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not answer the question but simply lists them.6
Is it sufficient to say that “human rights simply exist, they are there, and we don’t know why”? That is the secular approach, as the UN declaration attests. Most would say that human rights are simply obvious. But there are growing problems with that approach.
There are not growing problems, there are just problems.
Western secularists insist that their view of human rights is simply obvious to any rational person, but non-Western cultures respond that they are “far from self-evident.”
If human rights and equality exist “just because we say so,” then activists are not able to persuade, only to coerce. They can force cultures to adopt Western, individualistic ideas of rights and equality by using money, political power, or even military force. But, the charge goes, all this is just the latest stage in the West’s inveterate bent to domination and colonialism.
The idea that “we should not bring moral or religious convictions to bear on public discussions about justice” is frankly impossible. Sandel writes: “Whether we’re arguing about financial bailouts … surrogate motherhood or same-sex marriage, affirmative action or … CEO pay … questions of justice are bound up with competing notions of honor and virtue, pride and recognition.”14 Alasdair MacIntyre’s book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has a title that summarizes Sandel’s thesis. There is no simple, single way to reason or to understand justice. Our rationality and understanding of justice
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See second footnote
Rawls’s hopes of a new social unity based on keeping our religious and moral views private must be dashed. And, of course, they have been dashed. This approach has been used for a generation and has not worked. Our culture is split and fractured by warring factions with fundamentally different visions of justice and social good. The appeal to human rights strictly on the basis of “reasonable self-interest” is uncompelling.16
Excellent footnote
As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, postmodernism is just as prone to divide the world into a binary of “white hats”—those promoting plurality, multiple, local, changeable micronarratives—and “black hats”—those espousing universal values, absolutes, and metanarratives.
if it is true that claims of truth are just ways to get power, then claims of there-is-no-truth-only-power are also nothing but ways to get power.
If there is no truth, on what basis can the weak say to the strong that what they are doing is wrong?
“postmodern relativism offers no cogent resistance” to the narrative of fulfillment through “consumer lifestyle choices,” which only shores up the market and capitalism, the very thing postmodernists originally wanted not to do.
