“Do not be afraid,” my instructor encouraged me as my horse continued to back up getting closer and closer to the edge of the trail. The “edge” once crossed would certainly mean that horse and rider would tumble down an eight foot embankment. “Do not be afraid” sounded silly and naïve to me as my horse continued to ignore my increasingly anxious prodding with my arms and legs. “Watch out; beware; don’t ever ride a horse” would have sounded more apropos given these circumstances. I was afraid, terrified even, as my horse backed right over the edge.

Fear is an entirely appropriate and indeed necessary emotion when facing danger. Proper fear ignites the “fight or flight” response in the animal world. And for human beings, we too experience a “fight or flight” response to danger or harm to life. But our response is much deeper than simply the instinct to survive. Author Scott Bader-Saye argues: “We fear evil because it threatens the things we love—family, friends, community, peace, and life itself. The only sure way to avoid fear, then, is to love less or not at all. If we loved nothing, we would have no fear, but this would hardly be considered a good thing.”(1) We feel fear as we are afraid of losing that which we love.

Interestingly enough, more than any other command in the Christian bible, Christians are commanded to “fear not,” and to “not be afraid.”(2) In fact, the admonition to not be afraid is offered up 366 times (one for every day of the year and for Leap Year). And just like my instructor, who uttered those words right in the middle of my horsemanship crisis, so too, the writers of Scripture record these words in the midst of a crisis, or just prior to lives being turned upside down. In the birth narratives of both John the Baptist and Jesus, for example, Zacharias and Mary are told “do not be afraid” even though they are being visited by an angelic being, not a likely or typical visitor. Furthermore, Mary is unmarried, just a young girl. Surely, she must have feared the repercussions of an unplanned pregnancy, including the possibility of her betrothed, Joseph, rejecting her. In the very midst of their worst fears, these and other biblical figures are told not to be afraid.

For many living in today’s world, do not be afraid evokes images of ostriches with their heads in the sand as the world collapses around them. In the wake of the bombings, natural disasters, or personal crises and the mayhem that follows, uttering these words sounds just as naïve and perplexing as my instructor’s words to me right as my horse backed off the eight-foot embankment. We have many, many reasons to feel afraid largely because we feel we have so much to lose. Do not be afraid echoes in our heads, whether or not we claim the Christian faith, and we wonder how to live courageously in a world filled with jagged edges and steep embankments that would seek to claim all that is near and dear to us.

While there are no explicit references to hope in the teaching of Jesus, he too encouraged his followers to “not be anxious” but to trust in the God who could be trusted even in the face of our anxieties. Hope, contrary to what many of us might believe, is not the absence of fear but often arises in the midst of fear. It is both that which anchors us in the midst of the storm, and that which compels us to move forward—however ploddingly—towards goals, others, and the God whom the apostle Paul names the “God of hope” in his letter to the Romans. We hold on to hope, just as I held on while my horse slid backwards with me on her back, down the embankment that seemed without bottom, down to what I feared would end her life and my life. It is a desperate clinging to the God who is mysterious, and of whom we do not have control. There is a mystery in hope because we do not know how God will intervene.

I lived to tell about my horse-riding adventure without even a broken bone—not my own bones, or the bones of my horse. I couldn’t see the wide trail below me that would hold me, and would offer sure footing for my wayward steed. Our lives are often this way; we are often afraid because we cannot see where we will land. In the midst of broken bodies, maimed or decimated limbs, and in the loss of life itself fear can blind, disorient, and dismantle all that was normal before. But hope longs to hold us and to ground us in the midst of our fears. Hope is like a broad place, a wide trail underneath us. And though we know of those who fell and were not caught, though we all know that eventually life will end for all whom we love and hold dear, though we often fear a world destroying itself, the God of hope is at work raising the dead to life: Do not be afraid.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 39-40.

(2) Lloyd Ogilvie cited in John Ortberg, If You Want To Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 118.

 

The last few years have been a time when many familiar things, many things we take for granted, have not only been shown to be fragile but have collapsed or disappeared. Great companies now come and go with a disturbing frequency and things seem to change at an ever-increasing rate. Whether this is real or perceived, the shrinking of space and the acceleration of time are issues felt by many, and they are regular social phenomena.

People generally do not like much change too fast. Yet old boundaries disappear; older values are doubted, questioned, or rejected. Familiar ways get moved or change. Our desire for stability, for security, for some degree of permanence is incessantly pressured by a culture addicted to novelty and the new for newness’ sake. We experience what a friend of mine calls “cultural vaporization.” As water evaporates with a pot of boiling water left on sustained heat, so the many cultural dimensions subjected to constant pressure or deconstruction, they too, evaporate.

The world of the present may not always feel like a human-friendly habitat. Often driven by visions of progress, beliefs in the efficacy of education, freedom, and technology as the means of liberation, the 20th and early 21st centuries appear to have reached the limits or limitations of our created systems. They are not all bad, but they are by definition, limited, a fact that many seem unable or unwilling to admit. Present responses are often important and necessary correctives to the grand strategies of the past, the arrogant sense of mastery, and the delusions fostered by unrealistic views of humanity and our potential, but do they possess the substance that makes for a sufficient response to the deepest issues?

Who and what are we? What is reality? What is the really real and who says so? If there is a transcendent God, if there is a Son who draws near, who has a purpose, a will, and a way for life and creation, then God’s will and way are central to how things operate and how they might operate at their best. The management of life and the path of wise living in Christian terms is called stewardship, and it’s based on a view of economics which implies following Christ as the way and truth and life.

The vision that humanity has built, particularly since the late 18th century unto the present, has been filled with great promises but less than thrilling outcomes. No one denies or devalues all the real and meaningful benefits in science, health, education, and technology, but they are insufficient in themselves to qualify as ultimate goods or sufficient explanations of the good. Their failures and limits are all too apparent.

Yet amidst uncertainty, cultural vaporization, and constant change, there is the promise of the one who said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” When it seems like all that is solid is melting into air, Francis Schaeffer would remind us that God is there and God is not silent, for Christ has come. Our hopes can anchor onto this one who never changes and offers eternal rest, whose kingdom is eternal, unshakable, and secure. This is indeed a hope that brings new life.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

They told me to give it three weeks. “Your eyes and your brain are getting reacquainted again,” he said. “Your eyesight will fluctuate for the next few days.” But less than a week after eye surgery, I was tired of fluctuating. At times my vision was so crisp that it was almost too much for me—like I was somehow seeing more than I should. But this clarity came and went; I was sometimes far-sighted, sometimes near-sighted, sometimes neither very well. Perfect sight was not as immediate as I anticipated.

My experience of Christ is not so far from this. Fittingly, I was given the charge of retelling my story—my journey to faith and sight—the same week I was having trouble seeing. The reflective task of peering into my life, looking at patterns and history with the hope of illumination seemed ironic as I squinted to see my computer screen. But it served as a helpful metaphor. My vision of Christ has been far from immediate. It has been much closer to a fluctuating timeline of beholding and squinting, seeing, not-seeing, and straining to see. My experience has been something more like the blind man’s from Bethsaida. “Do you see anything?” Jesus asked after placing his hands on his eyes. The man looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around” (Mark 8:23-24). Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. “Then his eyes were opened; his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly” (8:25).

For those of us who want to relate to Jesus as the God of immediacy, two-staged miracles are cumbersome. I don’t want fluctuating vision. I am leery of winding roads and long journeys. I want to live knowing that he is the one who makes all things new—now. And he is. But Christ also makes us ready to handle it. God is working that we might be able to stand in the very midst of the one who makes all things new—and apparently we are not always ready.

Seeing apparently takes time and patience. Though undoubtedly, we are slow learners, all too often satisfied with walking trees. “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” It is another vision question Jesus placed before many he encountered. The blind man knew enough not to settle with people looking like evergreens. What he saw with his own eyes was something he fortunately knew was less than eyes could see. Though partial sight was itself a miracle, the one who touched him—and he himself—had in mind something more.

How interesting, then, that Jesus’s two-staged miracle takes place following an exchange with the Pharisees who were looking for a miraculous sign that Jesus wasn’t giving, as well as an exchange with the disciples who were in the presence of light itself and yet somehow kept failing to see. Mark seems to be telling us that seeing takes time, that learning to see is a process, but also, that Christ is ever-patient with those who do not see! In our best attempts to consider God, wrote Augustine, we are essentially asking the everlasting Light to “lighten our darkness.” Perhaps the miracle of sight is less like a light switch and more like a series of lights God strings together until we can finally see.

Vision, not unlike redemption, wholeness, or revelation, is at times a process by which Christ must dazzle gradually. Other times we may find ourselves moved nearly to blindness as we encounter more than we have eyes yet to see. But God is always at work in the process, even when all we might be seeing are walking tress. Yet, “do you see anything?” Jesus asks as often we need him, while holding near the well-lit miracle that one day we shall see him face to face.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

 

Some time ago I found myself speaking at a church in Shrewsbury, the birth place of Charles Darwin. At the end of the message a visitor came up to me. “I have a question that no one has been able to answer to my satisfaction,” he said. “What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”

Some questions take you by surprise, and this was certainly not what I was expecting. I began to explain what was happening on the cross and as I came to explain that Jesus had actually taken sin for us and become a curse for us in order to win our pardon, the man broke down into tears.

“Would you like for me to pray with you so that you might receive Christ and follow him?” I enquired.

“Of course,” came his immediate reply.

It was a joy to pray with him, and as I left I couldn’t help but remember that it is the Holy Spirit “who convicts as to sin, righteousness, and judgment.” I am sure that many people had given a proper answer to him before, but that day was the day when the veil was lifted from his eyes.

Whenever we think about sharing the gospel, two issues immediately present themselves. The first has to do with content: What is it that needs to be said? The second has to do with communication: How will I say it? Sometimes we also talk about motivation: Why should I say anything at all? The last question becomes increasingly relevant as more and more Christians fear that evangelism is not worth losing one’s friends. All of these issues are important. All of them must be addressed. For the words of the Great Commission are clear: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”(1)

However, there is one part of sharing the gospel that we rarely hear about. The command to go and make disciples was given to us by a person, by Christ himself. The gospel was not given to us based on our ability to share it. In fact, the Great Commission is sandwiched between two such reminders. Before Jesus tells us to go, he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (28:18). And then after he tells us to go he powerfully reminds us, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). Thus, communicating the gospel is first about remembering the authority, power, and presence of the one who calls us to speak.

Not long ago I was across the globe speaking to almost 5,000 people, most of whom were not interested in what I had to say. This was because I had been asked to give a talk to one audience, but I was presented with a completely different context. About half of the audience was made up of children under twelve, which I was not at all expecting. The audience was completely disengaged with me. Twice I stopped the meeting to pray and ask for silence. I have never before felt so inadequate. In the end, I abandoned the message, read a large passage of Scripture, offered a call to repentance, and then closed in prayer. I came down from the podium wanting to hide my embarrassment. My head hung in defeat. But as I looked up, I found myself lost in a sea of over 1000 faces—young and old—many of whom were in tears as they came to pray at the altar.

If the gospel is about God, this shouldn’t surprise us. God is the one who calls and convicts; God is the one who pardons and makes all things new.

Maybe the questions we often ask about evangelism call for a shift in focus. Communicating the gospel as we go about our lives is a command that we have been given. But it is a command given by the one who longs most that the world will hear. It is God who speaks, God who convicts, and God who makes disciples of broken lives. Our gospel has come to us not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit, and with deep conviction. Thus, we do well to ask: Who is it we dare and yet long to speak of? How are we describing this God who is like no other? And most significantly, who are we relying on to do so?

Michael Ramsden is international director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in the United Kingdom.

 

Early in his ministry, according to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus preached a very public sermon. This sermon, unlike any other, has not only been a great treasure of literature, but also stands as the foundation of Jesus’s teaching ministry. The introductory illustration of this famous sermon given on a mountainside is a collection of sayings by Jesus about who is blessed in the kingdom of God. They are called the “Beatitudes.”

These beatitudes spoken by Jesus have been widely admired across religious, political, and social realms. Persons as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Gandhi, and the rock musician, Sting, have all quoted these sayings of Jesus. Indeed, Dallas Willard notes, “[A]long with the Ten Commandments, the twenty-third psalm, and the Lord’s prayer…[the Beatitudes] are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration.”(1)

 

The exact nature of this religious insight and moral inspiration has been the subject of numerous biblical commentaries and writings. Biblical commentator, Craig Keener notes that there are more than 36 discrete views about the sermon’s message.(2) Perhaps the difficulties in interpretation lie with the implications of the Beatitudes themselves. As one author notes, the Beatitudes are “a statement of the world turned upside down, where those who mourn are comforted rather than abandoned or merely pitied, where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are satisfied, not ignored or shouted down, where the meek inherit the earth rather than being ground into dust.”(3) In other words, much is at stake.  A world “turned upside down” serves as inspiration to some and bad news for others. Indeed, Luke’s account of the sermon adds a series of four-fold “woes” for those who have contributed to mourning, humiliation, and injustice (Luke 6:17-26).

 

The first beatitude of Jesus is on the “poor in spirit.” I’ve often wondered what it means to be poor in spirit and certainly wondered if being a follower of Jesus included depression or a perpetual frown. The poor in spirit, according to various commentators, include the dispossessed and abandoned ones. In Jesus’s society, these were the persons without hope in this world, the forgotten ones who were left behind. In every way, these were the ones who recognized that they had nothing to offer God in terms of the spiritual requirements of their religious traditions. They were the spiritually destitute. In the ancient world, poverty was often viewed as a spiritual curse whereas riches and prosperity were seen as divine blessing. Poverty and calamity were understood as the results of wrong behavior, as we see in the story of Job. Job’s friends assumed he had done something wrong to bring on his suffering.

And that is why this declaration by Jesus that the poor are blessed and the kingdom of God belongs to them would have shocked its first hearers.

And yet, extending the reach of the kingdom of God to the poor in spirit was part of the messianic mission as foretold by the prophets. Jesus himself understood this, and during a visit to his home synagogue in Nazareth, he read from the scroll of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Indeed, Matthew’s gospel gives us a concrete picture of this mission of Jesus in his healing of those who were poor in spirit because of various illnesses. Just before Jesus gave his public sermon, he proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom in word and deed by healing “every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). These were the crowds who followed him up the mountain where he began to teach. Looking around at those who just received a tangible expression of the kingdom of God coming among them, Jesus proclaimed that these ones—these spiritually destitute ones—were blessed.

The power of the blessings of Jesus is that they are given at the beginning of his sermon, and they are given to those who have done nothing to deserve them. As Fred Craddock notes, “If the blessings were only for the deserving, very likely they would be stated at the end of the sermon, probably prefaced with the conditional clause, ‘If you have done all these things.’”(4) On the contrary, God blesses because God’s grace knows no bounds. For by grace we are saved through faith and not of ourselves…it is the gift of God. There is no one beyond God’s reach, no one who is beyond hope. In the kingdom of God, even the spiritually destitute can come and find their place.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 98.

(2) Craig S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 160.

(3) Mary Hinkle Shore, “It’s the Indicatives, Stupid!” in Pilgrim Preaching: Readings for Preachers and Others, November 1, 2003, http://www.pilgrimpreaching.org.

(4) Fred Craddock, “Hearing God’s Blessing,” The Christian Century, January 24, 1990, 74.

 

In an interview with Mars Hill Review producer Ken Myers, historian John Lukacs spoke of what surprised him most when he first arrived in America to teach at the university. He noticed in the students he taught a total lack of curiosity—and he claims it has only grown worse in passing years. Anything we learn, says Lukacs, is compelled by the curiosity which first caused us to pursue it, to follow a topic where it leads, and in so doing, find out how very little we know.(1) This principle is highlighted in the French 16th century term for an intellectual historian. Such a scholar was called a “curieux,” notes Lukacs. That is, one who is curious.

Sometimes I wonder if curiosity has been replaced by a fascination with the current scandal, gossip, or mystery plastered about the media. Television ratings remind us that there is always something fantastic about a new revelation, a long-lost document, or some controversial new evidence. We are quickly pulled in by the promise of a scandal. We are easily taken with a good mystery. And we are compelled to be up on the latest public frenzy. But I’m afraid such fascination shows not an attitude of curiosity towards knowledge, but an attitude of passivity that eagerly waits to consume the next new thing.

It is not surprising then to watch whatever latest media revelation become a public fascination. Such was the case with James Cameron’s documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” as he claimed there was new evidence that a tomb in Jerusalem held the remains of Jesus, his wife, and their son. “It doesn’t get bigger than this,” Cameron said at the press release. “We’ve done our homework; we’ve made the case; and now it’s time for the debate to begin.”(2) The foundations of Christianity were hardly devastated, as some of the headlines promised. But the heads of the masses were indeed turned, if only for a moment. Before the premiere of the documentary, the film’s companion book jumped to the top five best selling books online. The coming and going of May 21, 2011 and Harold Camping’s failed prediction of the end of the world presently held a similar attention. Searches related to his false predictions were top trends on both Google and Twitter for weeks. Not surprising, many used the story as further reason to laugh off religion in general.(3)

When it comes to faith, the novelty of “evidence” that promises to hold our curiosity seems to capture the minds of many. But it is almost always a fleeting fascination based on fantastic speculation, intellectual biases, and poor scholarship. In this sense, neither Cameron nor Camping have produced anything new at all. The end of the world has had no shortage of predictors, despite the fact that even Jesus himself claimed not to know the hour. And of new evidence against belief, there is always a new story. New Testament professor Ben Witherington articulates the state of our culture as it pertains to the latest “findings” that promise to undermine Christianity: “We are a Jesus-haunted culture that is so historically illiterate that anything can now pass for knowledge of Jesus.”(4) And as such, we are easily excited.

But curiosity is bigger than the latest scandal. The claims of Christ will continue to be buried in new doubt and evidence, and Christ will continue to rise above the tombs that claim to hold him. Whether or not you believe this, it is admirable to want an honest investigation, a curious pursuit of history, knowledge, and truth.

The shadows of mystery and suspense are indeed captivating, and the latest findings and failings offer a ready labyrinth to explore. But here we are not meant to reside. The mysteries of Christ and the decisive events of history are best explored not with a love of the newest speculation but with a mind and heart for true mystery. Christ has come into the world; we need not look to the latest scandal to find ourselves standing in awe.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Mars Hill Audio Journal, Issue 75.

(2) “Jesus Tomb Found, says Film-maker,” BBC News, February 26, 2007.

(3) Darrell Dawsey, “The Atheist Perspective: Laughing off the ‘Rapture’ when we should be laughing off religion,” MLive.com, May 23, 2011.

(4) Ben Witherington, “Tomb of the (Still) Unknown Ancients,” Opinion Journal, March 2, 2007.

 

In publishing his godless Bible for those with no faith, A. C. Grayling may have expected a mixed reception. The ‘religious Bible’ (as he calls the Christian original) often sparks controversy, so one might have assumed that his would prompt a powerful reaction.(1)

But although eyebrows were certainly raised, support given, and criticism leveled, I couldn’t help feeling that there is something a little flat about it all. Perhaps it was because we were in the midst of celebrating the 400-year anniversary of the King James translation of the Bible with its majestic impact on the English language, that one struggled to muster any strong reaction to this book. One of the repeated observations made about Grayling’s moral guide for atheists is that it just doesn’t seem to be as good or interesting as the original.

Jeannette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, had this to say:

“I do not believe in a sky god but the religious impulse in us is more than primitive superstition. We are meaning-seeking creatures and materialism plus good works and good behaviour does not seem to be enough to provide meaning. We shall have to go on asking questions but I would rather that philosophers like Grayling asked them without the formula of answers. As for the Bible, it remains a remarkable book and I am going to go on reading it.”

Perhaps it has something to do with what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on Grayling’s part: the Bible is not merely a book containing moral guidance, as he seems to think it is. While Christians would say that it does contain the moral law of God and shows us how to live our lives, the actual text of the Bible is much more besides.

It is the history of a people and a grand narrative of redemption for all people. At its heart, it is the story of a relationship, and not a collection of platitudes. As the New Testament opens with God coming in human form, we encounter Jesus walking the earth, not simply to restate a moral code, but to offer us peace with God through himself. It’s about a personal God to encounter, not a set of propositions to understand or laws to follow. This is drama with a capital D.

The Bible also contains narrative history, at its most fascinating with well-preserved accounts recording personal perspectives on historical events. Whether it be a prophet like Jeremiah, writing in the 7th century BC, or the gospel writer Mark in the 1st century AD, this is compelling writing whatever our religious convictions. Who could not notice the honesty and detail of Mark’s turn of phrase when he recounts that “Jesus was in the stern sleeping on a cushion, the disciples woke him and said to him ‘Teacher don’t you care if we drown?’” (Mark 4:38). As history alone the Bible is compelling.

In as much as Grayling’s ‘Good Book’ cobbles together some of the finest moral teaching from our history, it will surely be useful to some. But from an atheist perspective is this really a legitimate task? Without God what is morality other than personal perspective or social contract? Do we need Grayling’s personal perspective any more than our own? And is he really in a position to tell us what a socially agreed set of morals should be? Great atheists of the past, like Bertrand Russell, rejected religious moral values arguing against overarching morality—do they really want Grayling to reconstruct one? “I don’t think there is a line in the whole thing that hasn’t been modified or touched by me,” he says. While his own confidence in his wisdom is clearly abundant, will others feel the same way? Readers might also note that from the 21st century, his is the only voice to make the cut and be included in the work.

In calling his worthy tome The Good Book, Grayling, perhaps unwittingly, references the story about a rich young ruler found in the Gospel of Mark. The man approaches Jesus and addresses him as “Good teacher.” “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.” Jesus preempts centuries of philosophical debate about the nature of morality and locates goodness as an absolute in the being of God. We are challenged to question: “Without God, what is goodness?” As the debate over his book continues it will be intriguing to find out how Grayling knows his godless Bible to be a benchmark of “goodness.”

In the meantime, no doubt the Bible will continue to top best-seller lists, and engage audiences spanning all ages, backgrounds, and cultures. I for one will keep reading it.

Amy Orr-Ewing is EMEA Director for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and Director of Programmes for the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA).

(1) Originally printed in Pulse Magazine, Issue 8, Summer 2011, 10-11.

 

It is a question I ask when I find myself in a defeated place of miscommunication, when I see two parties completely misunderstanding one another, or when I am studying Greek: Is language really worth the trouble? Of course, even in a defeated place, most of us recognize the irony of the question itself. To voice the trouble of communication is still to utilize the form of communication. But if it is difficult to imagine a world without the presence of language, it is altogether sobering to imagine a world without its benefits and joys—a conversation with a friend, the power of the written word, the importance of banter, reasoning, and debate.

Though many religions recognize the power of words, I believe it is inherently Christian to recognize the weight of language. The first chapter of the Gospel of John echoes the first pages in all of Scripture—namely, that out of silence the universe was brought to order, for in the beginning was the Word. The Greek word logos means not only “word” but “reason,” hastening the notion that there is not only meaning at the heart of all things but there is one who speaks and bestows this meaning. The Christian worldview interprets all of life and time through this medium. We live within a story of words, reason, and meaning in which there is an author telling us what it means to be human, what it means to be here.

The presence of language among us, therefore, is itself a subtle apologetic. That is to say, we speak because there is one who first spoke. There is meaning and order among us because in the beginning was the Word. Author Steve Talbott fluently articulates the significance of a speaking world:

“The intimate relation between the meaning of our words and the meaning we find in the world may be so obvious as to seem almost trivial, yet its implications are so profound as to have mostly escaped the notice of working scientists. If we took the fact of the world’s speech seriously—the world speaks!—there would be none of the usual talk about a mechanistic and deterministic science, about a cold, soulless universe, or about an unavoidable conflict between science and the spirit.”(2)

The evidence of a speaking world is a wonder the scientist cannot explain away with mechanistic words. But what if language is the gift of a speaking, personal God to a creation holding God’s image? The world speaks and God listens. Will we, in turn, stop and take notice of the one who spoke first?

In July of 2004, the people of Ranonga, a small, remote island in the Solomon Islands, read the words of Christ for the first time in their own language. The arrival of the New Testament in Lungga, the local language, followed more than twenty years of fundraising efforts by the local people. When the finished copies were finally made available and the people held before them the written words of Christ, a local pastor declared: “Today God has arrived in Ranonga. God has arrived in our own culture and is speaking to us in our own language.”(3)

Into a world of souls, some listening, many preoccupied, Jesus embodies a word for all: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.”(4) To recognize a voice and a face speaking in a language we understand is so much more than acknowledging a string of inanimate, recognizable words or cold information. We recognize a person beyond the sounds, image and meaning within the language, an invitation in the face that speaks. How much more so this is true of the voice that first spoke into the silence and called creation forth by name.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) This piece by Stephen Watson, entitled <i>Creation</i>, was installed at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in June 2014. It was inspired by imagery of the DNA molecule and a rose window, and is comprised of cayenne, curry, mint, onion, paprika, and rosemary. For further information: http://stephenwatson.squarespace.com/

(2) Steve Talbott, “The Language of Nature” The New Atlantis, Number 15, Winter 2007, 41-76.

(3) “God Arrived,” Bible Society, 2004.

(4) Revelation 3:20.

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Is Anything “Wrong”?

Posted by Tanya Walker on September 25, 2015 – RZIM – Just Thinking.

We live in a generation rife with contradictions in its understanding of moral values. On the one hand, we are witnessing the confused blurring of lines between good and evil, and a desecrating of boundaries that were intended to keep us from harm. On the other, there is widespread dogmatism and an indignant moral outrage at the real or imagined offenses of others.

The prophetic voice of the church is desperately needed in this mix of confusion and contradiction. Questions about the very concept of moral absolutes have never been more important. Do moral absolutes—unchanging moral values that are independent of humankind and are discovered rather than constructed by us—even exist? What is the reference point for the content of our moral values? And how are they to be grounded?

God and Morality

You may have heard Christian voices making this argument, but you might be surprised to learn that an impressive array of atheist academics concur that if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist, because there is no way of ultimately grounding them.

The theist goes on to note that belief in the existence of objective moral values is one of the most deeply ingrained, intuitive beliefs of the human race. As such, it gives us good reason to believe in God:

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

Objective moral values do exist.

Therefore God exists.

The atheist insists that there is no God, and therefore has to force the issue on morality:

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

God does not exist.

Therefore objective moral values do not exist.

This final conclusion is at odds with what appears to be a self-evident moral sense, and thus has warranted further explanation from the atheist camp. The narrative offered goes something like this: human beings—and in fact our whole universe—are the product of matter, time and chance, together with the processes of evolution, which are geared towards the survival of the fittest. We have what appears to be a very deeply ingrained sense of an objective right and wrong, as though it has been hard-wired into our systems.

In a sense it has been hard-wired: it is an illusion (atheists argue) brought about by our genes, because it enhances our chance of survival. So there is no issue or contradiction within atheism with regards to our sense of moral absolutes—the sense of these absolutes is an evolutionary illusion.

There are significant problems with this line of reasoning, and I will raise two. Firstly, the broader systemic problem. The atheist tells us that selfish genes, fighting for survival through the processes of evolution, have brought about what we refer to as human beings. The entirety of the human framework, controlled by our genes, is geared towards the aims of that evolutionary process, namely survival, and not (ultimately) towards understandings of truth and reality.1It, therefore, becomes possible to argue that however much we may think and feel that there is an objective morality, and however much it appears to us to be self-evidently the case that there are some things that are genuinely evil and others that are good, this is just an illusion brought about by genes that ultimately have no regard for truth but only for that which is convenient in the aim of survival.

If this is in fact the case, the atheist has a much bigger problem than the explaining of morality at hand. Our very reasoning (our minds) can no longer be trusted, because we can only assume that our minds, controlled by our genes, are not geared towards truth but towards whatever might aid our survival. In fact, the atheist philosopher John Gray concedes exactly that when he writes, “The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.”2 It is a staggering claim.

Our colleague John Lennox responds to Gray with a serious rebuttal:

But what about Gray’s own mind…one must suppose, according to Gray, that his writing this sentence [“The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth”] serves evolutionary success. Well, it certainly would appear to serve the success of evolutionary theory, if it were true. But then Gray has undermined the very concept of truth, and so has removed all reason for us to take him seriously. Logical incoherence reigns once more.3

Again, there is a significant systemic problem in the atheist explanation of morality being just an illusion of our genes. All rationality becomes undependable in that framework.

Leaving aside this issue, secondly, we hit another, more immediate problem. The claim that morality is an evolutionary construct geared towards the survival of the fittest doesn’t seem to be borne out intuitively by the kinds of things that morality seems to demand of us, in contrast to the kinds of things that would seem to ensure the survival of the fittest. Greg Koukl writes: “Consider two cavemen in neighboring villages. One kills the other in cold blood. We’re being asked to believe he feels guilt, because he realizes such an act ultimately undermines his own survival status…. In the rest of the animal kingdom, killing the opposition seems to secure just the opposite.”4

It’s a little tongue in cheek, but the point remains. It is not necessarily clear how caring for the weak, the vulnerable, the sick, the dying or the elderly helps the survival of the selfish gene. One might expect self-sacrifice in such a system to be considered morally good only if weaker persons sacrifice themselves for stronger individuals. And yet it is a person like Mother Teresa who captures the public imagination in setting for us an incredible standard of moral living. We applaud the courage and the character of those who lay their lives down for the weakest among us. There is a significant gap between what we actually find honorable, valiant, good, kind, righteous, and pure, and what we’re being told is the impetus for that belief.

This kind of forced reasoning—the idea that there is no God, and therefore the need to fudge the lines on objective morality—has raised some important questions and a backlash from within the atheist camp itself. Peter Cave, the humanist philosopher, writes, “Whatever skeptical arguments may be brought against our belief that killing the innocent is wrong, we are more certain that the killing is morally wrong, than that the argument is sound.”5 It is a telling insight.

Religious Atheism

We have, as a result, a growing field of “religious atheism” as it’s been dubbed by some: atheists who have wanted to hold on to an objective morality but deny the need for its grounding in God. Sam Harris has been the most prominent voice in this field at the popular level. In 2010, he published the book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values and in it he says that we do not need God, as the world of science can give us the grounding and the context in which we encounter moral truth. Harris writes, “We simply must stand somewhere. I am arguing that, in the moral sphere, it is safe to begin with the premise that it is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone.”6

With that statement taken as a given, he goes on, throughout the book, to bring various definitions of what the opposite of that misery (what he calls “human well-being”) would look like, and to suggest ways in which neuroscience might, in the future, provide us with ways of measuring that well-being. If science achieves such a feat, Harris argues, we would be able to say (with objectivity) whether one culture or another—or one set of ideas or another—enhanced or diminished human wellbeing and was therefore “true” or “false” with regard to moral values. In other words, we would encounter moral truth grounded in science, as opposed to God.

Can you see the problem? Harris starts by assuming that moral truths exist, and even outlining that they can be boiled down to the idea of well-being. He hasn’t used science to get him there. It is not science that underpins the foundations of Harris’s theory. These are just his starting assertions, his intuitions. It is only after positing those two assumptions that he then goes on to bring a kind of pseudoscience in to measure his own construction of morality. (I am calling it a “pseudoscience” because, by his own admission, the field of neuroscience is not yet capable of doing what Harris says would need to be done, even within his own construct). This kind of logical leap is representative of the field and it fails to achieve its objective. Moral absolutes remain impossible to ground in a godless universe.

To be clear, it is important to note that we are not arguing that you need a belief in God in order to lead a moral life. It is quite obviously the case that there are many people who do not believe in God but who lead exemplary lives, just as there are, unfortunately, many who profess to believe in God whose lives leave questions unanswered. Similarly, we are not arguing that a belief in God is necessary in order to recognize objective moral values or to know and to formulate a system of ethics. In fact, if the Christian worldview is to be taken, it provides us with reasons for believing that by very nature of being human each of us would have something of the moral law imprinted on us regardless of the status of our relationship with God. The Bible tells us that we are made in “the image of God”—hence we are moral beings—and given consciences that speak to the moral law within (see Romans 2:14-15). Whether we acknowledge its source or don’t acknowledge God, that God-given faculty is not incapacitated. The question at hand is a more foundational one: the question of whether we can coherently ground absolute moral values in a world without God.

I think the vast majority of people in this universe believe it to be the case that torturing babies is not just frowned upon as a societal norm, or a personal preference, but that it is in reality objectively wrong. Or again, that rape and genocide are not just matters of preference or cultural norms but are objectively wrong. That even if, for example, Hitler had won the Second World War, and had succeeded in exterminating all of the Jews, conquering the whole world, and indoctrinating everyone to believe in his ideology, that the Holocaust would still be wrong. You cannot coherently ground that view without reference to God—but this is where it becomes essential to clarify which God we are talking about.

The Person at the Center of the Story

It would be a mistake to think that you can posit any God you like and still account for our understanding of the moral law. Everything hinges on the character of the creator at the center of the story. In the Islamic worldview, you have a God whose nature is not essentially good and who defines morality by his commands. Many philosophers grappling with the theistic answer to the question of an absolute morality have unknowingly assumed an Islamic perspective and raised some important and significant challenges to it.

If good is defined simply by whatever God commands, then morality is arbitrary—God could command us to kill everyone who disagrees with us, and we would have to consider that, by definition, to be good. If we push back and say, “God commands things because they are good,” then there must be some objective standard outside of God by which He measures good and evil, and, if there is such a thing, then we don’t need God in the first place—why not go to the standard directly ourselves?

The Christian reality is profoundly different. God Himself is the plumb line. “HOLY HOLY HOLY is the Lord God Almighty”7 is the wonderful, ringing affirmation of Scripture. The Bible presents to us the God who “is light” and in whom there is “no darkness at all.”8 The God who “does not change like shifting shadows.” The God who keeps his promises. The God who is faithful. The God who does not lie. The God who is truth. The God who hates injustice. The God who judges justly. The God who is righteous. The God who cares for the weak, the destitute, the widow, and the fatherless. The God who is kind. The God who is gentle. The God who is love.

The moral law is not grounded in the commands of God but rather in the character of God. This is why the command of God in Scripture is not simply to “be holy according to my commands.” No; the reality is far more profound: “Be holy as I am holy.”9 It is a unique command. No other God either makes or sustains the claim to absolute holiness.

When Christians make the claim that there is such a thing as an objective moral standard, we are saying that there is a God whose character provides that standard and whose commands flow entirely in keeping with that character. I think David saw this when he was writing in the Psalms, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.”10 The moral law is a glimpse into the glory of God himself.

What About the Personal Questions?

There is, of course, much more that could be written as we consider the conceptual questions raised by moral absolutes. What about the personal questions?

A couple of years ago, I found it interesting that while doing a mission at a university in the UK that had few professing Christians on campus, the vast majority of students filling out our surveys said that they struggled with guilt. The truth is that we can think about moral values as abstract concepts for hours, and it has no impact, but it takes one second’s worth of a bad decision to make a lifetime’s worth of regret.

We have gotten so good at convincing ourselves that we are relatively good that we never seem to stop and think: “Well, what about the bad parts then? Does anything happen to them? Do they need to be accounted for?” One of the most famous letters written to a newspaper was by G.K. Chesterton. The Times had run an article entitled “What’s wrong with the world?” to which Chesterton had written the following reply:

Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours, G.K. Chesterton.

This is no glib reply. In two little words, Chesterton points us to the profound reality that we are, each and every one of us, broken, and in desperate need of forgiveness. Isaiah writes these solemn words: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”11 We all stand on the same ground before the cross. We all carry guilt. We are in need of forgiveness. And we long for justice.

The atheist tells us that there will be no judgment, no day of reckoning, and that the only justice we can hope for is whatever can be meted out by our law courts in this life. You are left with cases like Jimmy Savile: a legend in his own lifetime, enjoying public praise and adoration, huge wealth, being awarded an OBE and being knighted, and then dying a hero. There is nowhere to go with the horror of the broken lives that we are only now discovering have been left behind in his wake. No justice.

Richard Dawkins writes in his book River out of Eden, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”12

It is hard to believe that he could be serious. The world is still reeling from the shock of the images of decapitated heads of children and adults paraded like trophies. Are we really to believe that this was ultimately neither good nor bad? I couldn’t disagree more with Dawkins.

Immanuel Kant famously wrote in Critique of Practical Reason, “Two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe…the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” He was right to be awed by it.

There is the persistence of a plumb line—a standard that is independent of us that simply will not go away—and we all know we have transgressed it. No explanation outside of the Judeo-Christian worldview will account for the existence of that standard, the guilt that is very real, the need for forgiveness, and the longing for justice.

Look again at the Cross: the justice of God, the judgment of God, the mercy of God, the love of God, the holiness of God, and the forgiveness of God are all in the person of Christ. God himself embodies the good, overcomes evil, and makes a way for us.

The existence of objective moral values not only gives us a compelling reason to believe in God but points us to some of our most profound needs and draws us to the God who deals with our guilt, offers us forgiveness, and ensures justice.

Tanya Walker is a member of the RZIM Zacharias Trust speaking team in the UK.

________________________

1 Although, of course, connecting with truth and reality aids our survival in many instances, this is not necessarily always the case. The considerations of truth and reality remain distinct from the considerations of survival.

2 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: London, 2007), 26.

3 John Lennox, Gunning For God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target (Lion Hudson: Oxford, 2011), 108.

4 See Greg Koukl, “Did Morals Evolve?” online at http://www.bethinking.org/morality/did-morals-evolve.

5 Peter Cave, Humanism (Oneworld Publications: Oxford, 2009), 146.

6 Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press: New York, 2010), 39.

7 See Rev. 4:8.

8 See 1 John 1:5. For references for the subsequent descriptions of God in this paragraph, see James 1:17; Josh. 23:14 and 2 Cor. 1:20; Deut. 7:9; Num. 23:19; John 14:6; Isa. 61:8; 1 Pet. 2:23; Rom. 3; Psa. 10:14 and 68:5; Tit. 3:4; Isa. 40:11; and 1 John 4:8.

9 Lev. 19:2.

10Psa. 119:18.

11 Isa. 53:6.

12 Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books: New York, 1996), 155.

 

I confess that I have never been a student especially enticed by the subject of history. Whether studying the history of the Peloponnesian War or the history of Jell-O, I associate the work with tedious memorization and an endless anthology of static dates and detail. But this stance toward history, coupled with our cultural obsession with the present moment, is a force to be reckoned with and an outlook I have come to recognize as dangerous. It is a thought to let go, lest it produce a sense of forgetfulness about who I am and from where I have come.

Richard Weaver is one among many who have warned about the dangers of presentism, the cultural fixation with the current moment and snobbery toward the past. More than fifty years ago, Weaver warned of the discombobulating effects of living with an appetite for the present alone:

“Recurring to Plato’s observation that a philosopher must have a good memory, let us inquire whether the continuous dissemination, of news by the media under discussion does not produce the provincial in time. The constant stream of sensation, eulogized as lively propagation of what the public wants to hear, discourages the pulling-together of events from past time into a whole for contemplation.”(1)

Ravi Zacharias at a site commemorating the Armenian Genocide. Photo by Ben May.

In fact, Weaver contends that carelessness about history is a type of amnesia, producing a mindset that is both aimless and confused. For how can we understand the current cultural moment without at least some understanding of the moments that have preceded it? History is not a static bundle of dates and details anymore than our own lives are static bundles of the same. On the contrary, history is the vital form in which we both take account of our past and fathom the present before us.

This point was driven home for me in a church history class full of future pastors. We were studying the fourth century, which was privy to a great influx of believers who left their communities behind and fled to the desert in search of solitude. To a group of people called and passionate about the church as a community, the great lengths some of these pilgrims went to live solitary lives was hard for some to understand. Words like “abandonment” and “responsibility” readily crept into our conversations.

But imperative to understanding this flight of believers (and arguably to understanding a part of our own story) is recognizing that this history did not come to pass in a vacuum. Up until the fourth century, the church had been under fierce persecution. Torture and martyrdom were prevalent; believers were recurrently in danger and often met in secrecy. When Christianity was suddenly made legal in 313, the church found itself in the midst of an entirely different set of challenges. People were now coming to Christianity in droves, and for the first time in the life of the church, nominal belief and careless faith was a fearful reality. In this historical context, pursuit of the desert life was an expression of faith in response to faithless times. For the dynamically committed Christian, the desert was viewed as a way to not only secure and live out one’s convictions, but to preserve the faith of Christianity itself.

Yet our chronological snobbery left us unable to fathom not only the motives of those who chose to live their lives in caves of prayer and solitude, but the possibility that God might continue to set apart remnants who stand in the midst of time “7like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass, which do not depend upon people or wait for any mortal.”(1) Refusing to be historians, we miss the significant gift and resource of the past on present imaginations.

For the follower of Christ, history is all the more a sense of hallowed ground, for it is ground where God has walked and faith is kept. We believe that history resides in the able hands of the one who made time. We believe that who we are today has everything to do with events we have not seen ourselves; we are people with a past that locates us in the very story we live today. And so we live as a people called both to remember and to be ready, for we look to the author of the entire story, who was and is and is to come.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 111.

(2) Micah 5:7.