Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter

by Timothy J. Keller

Yuval Harari believes that people turned to God for hope in the past because of an inability to understand or control the natural environment. But religion addressed something much deeper than that. The human dilemma from time immemorial has not only been about how to control nature “out there” but—the far more difficult challenge—how to control nature “in here,” that is, the many enigmas and problems of human nature itself. We hunger for meaning and purpose. We find that things that we thought would bring us satisfaction do not. We are shocked at the evil things other human beings—and we ourselves—are capable of doing. What can we do about us? As Sullivan indicates, controlling external nature is not enough, and there is plenty of evidence in a year of the COVID-19 pandemic that we are far from having done even that.