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November 24, 2021 - March 21, 2022
What does this mean? This parallel growth in the number of both devout believers and devout secularists is why both groups in our society feel besieged. This siege mentality has only increased in the last decade. There is less airing of views, and fewer opportunities for people on both sides to lay out their arguments and intuitions in order to make their beliefs as cogent as possible to the other side. Instead there is a conviction that since “we have reason on our side” and “they just have closed their eyes to the truth,” therefore all we need to do is denounce and mock the opposing view.
Polarization between Christians and unbelievers
The people most passionate about social justice were moral relativists, while the morally upright didn’t seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world.
A dilemma
The Biblical view of things is resurrection—not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.
Resurrection
In ancient times it was understood that there was a transcendent moral order outside the self, built in to the fabric of the universe. If you violated that metaphysical order there were consequences just as severe as if you violated physical reality by placing your hand in a fire. The path of wisdom was to learn to live in conformity with this unyielding reality.
Moral order
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings about the consequences of seeking power and control rather than wisdom and glad enjoyment of the “givenness” of God’s creation.
The theme of "The Lord of the Rings"
The Bible says that God’s wrath flows from his love and delight in his creation. He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying its peace and integrity.
God's anger and love
Today’s outspoken believer may be tomorrow’s apostate, and today’s outspoken unbeliever may be tomorrow’s convert. We must not make settled, final decisions about anyone’s spiritual state or fate.
Only God knows a man's fate
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker wrote that the Gnostic gospels were so late that they “…no more challenge the basis of the Church’s faith than the discovery of a document from the nineteenth century written in Ohio and defending King George would be a challenge to the basis of American democracy.”
The Gnostic gospels
Think of the implication of the very term “regressive.” To reject the Bible as regressive is to assume that you have now arrived at the ultimate historic moment, from which all that is regressive and progressive can be discerned. That belief is surely as narrow and exclusive as the views in the Bible you regard as offensive.
Temporal elitism
What is Christianity? For our purposes, I’ll define Christianity as the body of believers who assent to these great ecumenical creeds. They believe that the triune God created the world, that humanity has fallen into sin and evil, that God has returned to rescue us in Jesus Christ, that in his death and resurrection Jesus accomplished our salvation for us so we can be received by grace, that he established the church, his people, as the vehicle through which he continues his mission of rescue, reconciliation, and salvation, and that at the end of time Jesus will return to renew the heavens and
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What is Christianity?
When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play.
God the playwright
Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omniscience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—makes the most sense of the world. I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles and look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see.
The Christian worldview
When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.—that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people.
The cosmic welcome mat
There have been many scholars in the last decades who have argued that modern science arose in its most sustained form out of Christian civilization because of its belief in a all-powerful, personal God who created and sustains an orderly universe.11 As a proof for the existence of God, the regularity of nature is escapable. You can always say, “We don’t know why things are as they are.” As a clue for God, however, it is helpful.
Modern science began from a Christian worldview
Doesn’t the unfulfillable longing evoked by beauty qualify as an innate desire? We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship, or success can satisfy. We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn’t that at least a clue that this “something” that we want exists?15 This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate human desire, and that makes it a major clue that God is there.
Our longing for love, joy, and beauty
It seems that evolutionary theorists have to do one of two things. They could backtrack and admit that we can trust what our minds tell us about things, including God. If we find arguments or clues to God’s existence that seem compelling to us, well, maybe he’s really there. Or else they could go forward and admit that we can’t trust our minds about anything. What is not fair is to do what so many evolutionary scientists are doing now. They are applying the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God but not to what our minds are telling us about evolutionary science
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A dilemma
If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is “moral” and another “immoral” but only “I like this.” If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law?
The secular view of morality
We can’t know that nature is broken in some way unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature by which we can judge right and wrong. That means there would have to be heaven or God or some kind of divine order outside of nature in order to make that judgment.
There is no basis for morality from a secular viewpoint
We can pick up the Biblical account of things and see if it explains our moral sense any better than a secular view. If the world was made by a God of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are wrong. If the world is fallen, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see.
The Biblical worldview as pertains to human rights
Everybody has to live for something. Whatever that something is becomes “Lord of your life,” whether you think of it that way or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.
Only Jesus can totally satisfy your deep inner longings
Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but he also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration. Paul’s letter was to a church, and therefore it was a public document, written to be read aloud. Paul was inviting anyone who doubted that Jesus had appeared to people after his death to go and talk to the eyewitnesses if they wished. It was a bold challenge and one that could easily be taken up, since during the pax Romana travel around the Mediterranean was safe and easy. Paul could not
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The resurrection and the eyewitnesses
However, if God is triune, then loving relationships in community are the “great fountain…at the center of reality.” When people say, “God is love,” I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in the Christian conception, God really has love as his essence. If he was just one person he couldn’t have been loving for all eternity.
The Trinitarian view of love
Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity.
A personal God is the source of love
Yes he does ask us to obey him unconditionally, to glorify, praise, and center our lives around him. But now, I hope, you finally see why he does that. He wants our joy! He has infinite happiness not through self-centeredness, but through self-giving, other-centered love. And the only way we, who have been created in his image, can have this same joy, is if we center our entire lives around him instead of ourselves.
Our ultimate joy is to love the Triune God
