The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence.

If you have known many wise, loving, kind, and insightful Christians over the years, and if you have seen churches that are devout in belief yet civic-minded and generous, you will find the intellectual case for Christianity much more plausible.

It may be true that the press takes too much pleasure in publicizing them, but it doesn’t create them.

This means that no matter who performs it, every act of goodness, wisdom, justice, and beauty is empowered by God. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill “graciously”—that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.

Intense Christians would therefore be intense moralists or, as they were called in Jesus’s time, Pharisees. Pharisaic people assume they are right with God because of their moral behavior and right doctrine.

They are fanatically zealous and courageous, but they are not fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, or understanding—as Christ was. Because they think of Christianity as a self-improvement program they emulate the Jesus of the whips in the temple, but not the Jesus who said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). What strikes us as overly fanatical is actually a failure to be fully committed to Christ and his gospel.

Extremism and fanaticism, which lead to injustice and oppression, are a constant danger within any body of religious believers. For Christians, however, the antidote is not to tone down and moderate their faith, but rather to grasp a fuller and truer faith in Christ.

In his famous discourse the people he criticizes pray, give to the poor, and seek to live according to the Bible, but they do so in order to get acclaim and power for themselves.

He continuously condemns in white-hot language their legalism, self-righteousness, bigotry, and love of wealth and power (“You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness…. You neglect justice and the love of God…You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them…. [You] devour widows’ houses and for a show make long prayers”—Luke 11:39-46; 20:47).

The tendency of religious people, however, is to use spiritual and ethical observance as a lever to gain power over others and over God, appeasing him through ritual and good works.

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others.

Christianity changed those honor-based cultures in which pride was valued rather than humility, dominance rather than service, courage rather than peaceableness, glory rather than modesty, loyalty to one’s own tribe rather than equal respect for all.

The Bible itself has taught us to expect the abuses of religion and it has also told us what to do about them.

The slave trade was so tremendously lucrative that there was enormous incentive within the church to justify it.

We need to move away from ghe idea that since something is producing finan ially tht God is blessing it. This is health and wealth gospel

Temperley says, “no one has succeeded in showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade…stood to gain in any tangible way…or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country.”

Slavery was abolished because it was wrong, and Christians were the leaders in saying so.

In his last letters from prison, Bonhoeffer reveals how his Christian faith gave him the resources to give up everything for the sake of others.

but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ….

When people have done injustice in the name of Christ they are not being true to the spirit of the one who himself died as a victim of injustice and who called for the forgiveness of his enemies.

He concludes that the most fundamental belief in American culture is that moral truth is relative to individual consciousness.

As an expert in the medieval age and how it gave way to modernity, Lewis knew that there had been very little magic in the Middle Ages, that the high noon of magic was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the very time that modern science was developing. The same cause, he contended, gave rise to them both.

For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men:

Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit reality, we now seek to control and shape reality to fit our desires.

We believe so deeply in our personal rights in this realm that the very idea of a divine Judgment Day seems impossible.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that Christianity is not the product of any one culture but is actually the transcultural truth of God. If that were the case we would expect that it would contradict and offend every human culture at some point, because human cultures are ever-changing and imperfect.

If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation.

If we are free to shape life and morals any way we choose without ultimate accountability, it can lead to violence.

He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as his water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, yet strongly implies that God never gave him and his family enough information about the afterlife. Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame-shifting, and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell.

There is increasing isolation, denial, delusion, and self-absorption.

As Romans 1:24 says, God “gave them up to…their desires.” All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself.

We must not make settled, final decisions about anyone’s spiritual state or fate.

But since they don’t believe in an afterlife, they don’t think the consequences of wrongdoing go on into eternity.

This is why vengence has to happen now!

And the Bible tells us that the God of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world to rights in the end.

The belief in a God of pure love—who accepts everyone and judges no one—is a powerful act of faith. Not only is there no evidence for it in the natural order, but there is almost no historical, religious textual support for it outside of Christianity.