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.

 

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leafs a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.(1)

One of my most cherished memories is of the New England landscape in the fall. The vibrant colors from dogwood, sassafras, sumac, red oak, and maples can only be described as the finest artist’s palette of paints—crimsons and scarlets, purples, oranges, and yellows splashed across the canvas. Making our pilgrimage each year to the local fair, the route transported my husband and me into that world of color, as the road would bend through picturesque towns and take us deeper and deeper into that fall canvas of color. Sadly, this beauty was transient. Fall rains and wind would come to fade and to muddle those colors. All that would remain were the dull browns melding and making their home in the dark soil that encompassed them.

Nothing gold can stay is the bittersweet reality Robert Frost calls to mind in his poem by the same name. The beauty of the yellow birch leaves, like the young flower of springtime fades and falls away. Frost laments all those moments of precious and profound beauty that are equally fleeting and transient. These experiences are the hardest hues to hold. Just like the fading vibrancy of the New England fall, our very lives and all we experience quickly pass before us in the blink of an eye.

The ephemeral nature of life is opined by artists and poets, philosophers, and clerics around the world. Many of the world’s great religious traditions address the ephemeral nature of life. Buddhism identifies, for example, how suffering arises as a result of trying to hold onto the impermanent and the fleeting.(2) In Tibetan Buddhism, specifically, mandalas made from colored sand are created and dismantled in a ritual that symbolizes the transitory nature of material life. Likewise in Hinduism, cremation became a vehicle for expressing the ephemerality of bodily life. The ancient Hebrew poets similarly filled their stanzas with the acknowledgement that life is fleeting, short, and temporary: “Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.”(3) And springing out of the Hebrew tradition, Christianity reiterates this theme: “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.”(4)

For many living in light of such realities today, the temptation is to try to hold onto whatever we think will anchor us to permanence. Or, it is to abandon ourselves to eating, drinking, and being merry because tomorrow we die. Is there another way?

Christians believe in a God who entered into the ephemeral and the temporal in the person of Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus affirmed the teaching of his own Hebraic tradition when he encouraged his listeners not to worry, but to trust the God who “arrays the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace.” Life is short, Jesus acknowledges, but the God who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field will care for us. So we do not have to cling onto our lives or the treasures of this earth. As one commentator notes, “Just prior to his teaching on worrying… Jesus warns his listeners against storing up ephemeral treasure on earth… A central theme of his ministry and enacted in his own life, is that the proper way to respond to the nature of reality is to give away one’s life rather than hold on to it, to open our hands and let things go rather than to close our fist around them….”(5)

In embracing all that is ephemeral about life, Jesus opens and offers his life for others. In fact, Jesus extends an ironic invitation to accept ephemerality and death in order to truly find life—and to find life eternal. Not as simply an escape from death, but the eternal life that comes from a relationship with God in the here and now. Jesus prays for those who would follow him, “that they may know you the only true God” for in doing so they would find eternal life.(6) The challenge Jesus sets before those who would follow is the challenge to “die” to holding on; it is to choose—in this life where nothing gold can stay—what makes for life eternal.

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

(1) Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Ed. Edward Connery Lathem, The Poetry of Robert Frost, (New York: Henry Holt Publishers, 1969), 222-223.

(2) The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Buddhism, Ed., Jack Miles (New York: Norton, 2015).

(3) Psalm 90:5-6.

(4) James 4:14.

(5) Iain Provan, The NIV Application Commentary Series: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books, 2001), 60.

(6) John 17:3.

 

There is something about an inbox that subtly (and not so subtly) conveys the notion that we are important. With three missed calls on the cell phone, 18 unread e-mails, and two messages on the answering machine, we are pelted with the enticing idea: “Someone needs me!” The immediate ring, buzz, or pop-up note proclaiming the arrival of these new messages is somehow complimentary, even as it demands our attention—”Check your mailbox now! Someone is looking for you!”

The language of technology seems to further our sense of importance by bidding us to claim and personalize these worlds. I am only one click away from “my documents,” “my calendar,” “my favorites,” “my music,” “my pictures,” and “my shopping cart.” Anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita calls it “MeWorld.” In a book that examines the ways in which the world of media shapes our lives, de Zengotita portrays the technologically advanced, media-saturated West as a world filled with millions of individual “flattered selves,” each living in its own insulated, personalized world.(1) He believes the narcissism that comes from living in MeWorld has been fashioned and is constantly being fed by media representations in all areas of our lives, from those private representations that purport us the star (selfies, twitter, Facebook) to the public advertisements, television, and magazines that ever address us personally.

Subtle as it may be, the most precarious part of flattered living is that we gradually lose sight of both life and self. Despite all of the overt declarations on my computer, this is not, in fact, “my world.” Though I am flattered by the attention of MeWorld, I am not the center of all existence. French philosopher Rene Descartes outlined one reason why: “Now, if I were independent of all other existence, and were myself the author of my being…I should have given myself all those perfections of which I have some idea, and I should thus be God.” In other words, if I were truly independent, if the world truly revolved around me, why should I find in myself any imperfection at all? Is it not then irrational to live as if I am the center of the world?

The Christian worldview takes this inquiry one step further. Namely, how do I cultivate an awareness that this is God’s world in a world that reminds me at every turn that it is mine? The counter-cultural admission that we are not our own nor walking alone is certainly a starting point. A poem called “The Avowal” by Denise Levertov speaks to such an awareness:

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

For the Christian, living both coherently and authentically involves an understanding of what truly undergirds us. Hence the fitting prayer of the hymnist: This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget.

When Jesus looked to the disciples on one of his last nights with them on earth, he covered their hearts with a similar notion: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going… I am the way and the truth and the life.”(2)

As I Christian, there is some relief in confessing that my world is surely the Lord’s and all that is in it. It is also my starting point, the place where I begin the journey toward home. We are not flattered on our way to this house, but transformed by the very one who prepares the way.

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

(1) Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 21.

(2) John 14:1-4, 6.

 

 

 

“The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason.”(1) Thus begins Augustine’s dissertation on the Trinity, written for those whose perverse love of reason prevents a heart of faith. Perhaps this is a warning for all of us who work so hard to logically make sense of something as ineffable and mysterious as the divine nature of God. Writing over a thousand years later, Leonardo Boff intoned a similar warning: “We should never forget that the New Testament never uses the expressions ‘trinity of persons’ and ‘unity of nature.’ To say God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit is revelation; to say that God is ‘one substance and three Persons’ is theology, a human endeavor to fit the revelation of God within the limitations of reason.”(2)

If reason is conscribed by logic, then at our best, we must speak of the Trinity in analogical terms. In other words, we look for analogies from our human experience, analogical images, pictures, or descriptions that offer an analogous explanation for that which is unexplainable. For Augustine, love best illustrated the nature of the Trinity. “Now when I, who am asking about this, love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love.”(3) From this analogy, Augustine argues that God’s nature is indeed relational and personal as it is expressed in a divine community of love. It cannot be said that God is love (1 John 4:8) if God is alone and monadic. Instead, love resides both in God’s nature as a personal being and in relationship to the beloved (Jesus Christ) by love (Holy Spirit).

While at best an analogy, Augustine’s definition communicates two key scriptural truths about God: God is both personal and relational in God’s very nature. God is not a distant being, removed from Creation, but God is personally involved in creation. Indeed, God is so personally involved that God even participated in our humanity through Jesus Christ. This is what the theological doctrine of the Incarnation communicates. As a personal God, therefore, God is relational. God is love, as the Epistle of John tells us, and that love is shared in the divine community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Indeed, through love God reaches out to the creation and calls it back into relationship through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ by the transformational work of the Holy Spirit.

While this analogy isn’t intended to answer all of our logical reasoning concerning the nature of God as Trinity, it does lead us to a vital application for the Christian life. We too, as image-bearers of God, do not reflect that image solely in our own persons by ourselves. Instead, to bear the image of God as personal, relational Trinity is to be in community with one another. Relationships, as they image God, are intended to reflect the divine community of love, redemptive and reflective of the very love of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, we might ask, as a redeemed community of love, how ought we to reflect the reality of the Trinity in our world? How might we draw others into redeemed community and away from loneliness, isolation, and self-destruction?

To understand the Trinity is not simply to analyze it logically “through a crude and perverse love of reason.” Rather, to understand the Trinity is to live in the light of its implications for human communities. Far more than a logical construct of a paradoxical nature, the Trinity is to be the way in which we image God in this world through the community of believers—and not as isolated individuals. We are to call others into that community enfolded in the life of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—love, lover, and beloved in divine community.

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

(1) St. Augustine, “On the Trinity,” Basic Writings of St. Augustine, Volume 2, Ed. Whitney J. Oates (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 687.

(2) Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 156.

(3) St. Augustine, “On the Trinity,” Basic Writings of St. Augustine, Volume 2, Ed. Whitney J. Oates (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 790.

 

A friend of mine describes coming to terms as a little girl with the sad thought that she would never be God’s favorite. Knowing that God had so many children, knowing that good fathers love equally, she knew her hope of being the favorite was never going to pan out.

When I first heard her say this, I smiled at the idea of a little girl worrying so seriously about God’s fairness and how it affected her. God is much more often accused of being un-fair. But the more I thought about my friend’s disappointment, the more I think this is exactly the difficulty most of us have with God—although most of us will never admit it. The unguarded sincerity of a child voices what we do not: If we are being honest, no one really wants to be seen as equal to all others.

The desire to be someone’s favorite, to the best at something, to exceed the expectations of those around us, or to be known for being better than most—at anything—has been fostered within us since birth. New mothers happily report when their toddlers are in the highest percentile in motor, social, or language skills. A child delights in winning the spelling bee; employees strive to get ahead, to be noticed, to be superior. At every turn, we are as horrified by equality as we are at mediocrity. Even if the desires remain unvoiced, we want to be the best at something. We long to be someone’s—anyone’s—favorite.

For souls in tune with this quality, there is one story Jesus tells that probably disturbs us more than others. In this parable, Jesus describes a landowner who went out in the morning and hired workers for his vineyard. All agreed upon a wage of a denarius, they were sent to the vineyard, and the work began. A few hours later, the master went out and hired more laborers for his vineyard. A few hours after this, again a few hours later, and yet again after this, he hired some more. When evening came, the owner of the vineyard called the workers forward to collect their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first. Jesus explains, “The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day’” (Matthew 20:9-12).

Equality in this story is nothing short of offensive. Those who have worked harder and longer want only to be recognized, favored for their work, commended for their superiority over the others. But the landowner only responds with words that further offend: “‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’” (vv. 13-15).

In this difficult parable, Jesus gives us a clear look at our definitions of injustice, our sense of superiority, and our hatred of God’s fairness when it fails to favor us. When generosity is showered on someone else, when equality shatters our sense of being on top, God’s goodness often elicits not goodness, but envy, hostility, disappointment, and anger. But the master reminds his disgruntled workers that he did exactly what was promised. It was only when they compared themselves to the others that they began to feel slighted.

Jesus proclaims the coming of a kingdom that turns this world as we know it on its head and requires a complete reframing of perspective. God’s grace is not meant to be a source of disappointment nor is God’s kingdom meant to be a hierarchy of skill and favoritism. On the contrary, God reminds us that greatness comes in ways that shock and disorient our many rules and systems. For God’s grace bestowed at any hour is generous and confrontational, the power of the Cross is scandalous and underserved, the love of the Father always boldly given and lavished. Receiving the generosity of the master, we are united with the Son in whom God is well-pleased. In his economy, we are made heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ himself. And there is no greater favoritism.

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

 

Hans Christian Andersen tells of the emperor who loved new clothes. This emperor so admired modeling his new robes that he spent all of his time in his dressing room. In fact, he had little concern for anything else in his kingdom.

One day two swindlers came to town announcing they were weavers of the finest clothes imaginable. Their royal colors and fabrics, they claimed, were exceptionally stunning. In fact, they were of such quality that they were only visible to the finest few! Those who were unfit for their office or were hopelessly stupid would not be able to see them at all.

The emperor was immediately taken by this description and provided the weavers with large amounts of money. He wanted to know those who were unfit for their posts; he also wanted to see the foolish and the clever within his empire. Yet when the emperor went to try on the garments, he was most distraught to realize that it was he who saw nothing at all. But the king would not admit his stupidity or incompetence; he would not let anyone think him a fool. He announced that the cloth was very beautiful, and all the courtiers rapidly agreed. In a great procession the next day, everyone spoke in admiration of the emperor’s new clothes. They loved the detail! The colors were beautiful! The garments were like no other, they said. But then from the back of the crowd a child spoke up, observing what the rest would not: The emperor was wearing nothing.

Imagine finding out that the one thing you have desperately attempted to keep veiled in secrecy was not actually veiled at all. The thought bears the unsettling sense of finding yourself unclothed before a crowded room. Would you feel foolish? Would you run and hide? Or would you insist the veil was still there? Andersen ends with a glimpse into the mind of the king: “[The words of the child] made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right. But he thought to himself regardless, ‘Now I must bear up to the end.’” Idols are not easy to own up to; how much more so, when what we idolize is not really there in the first place.

I believe, however, that there might be another response—besides denial or shame—to the startling realization that we stand unveiled before family, friends, or maybe even God. We can find ourselves enveloped in gratitude, clothed by meekness. The masks we were so certain were necessary, the act we put on to appease the crowd, the lies we told to protect ourselves were maybe not quite as necessary as we thought. Could you take off the costume you thought you were wearing if you realized you were only wearing it for yourself?

Perhaps Paul’s instruction to “put off falsehood” is sometimes a call to “put off” what is not even there. The call of Christ is no different. He calls us unto himself and requires that we give him everything, but asks that we come without costume or pretense. We must come as much ready to be honest with ourselves as with him. In the journey of the Christian pilgrim, we walk with Christ toward the cross through crowds of sheep following blindly, and like the disciples on the road to Emmaus our eyes are opened to our own blind and deceived ways. It is as if Jesus himself is a mirror and we are inspecting our new clothes. But he will take from our shoulders our robes of self-importance and false security. He will tear from our grasp our garments of self-pity and shame. Then he will clothe us with garments of salvation and array us in robes of righteousness, and he will show us that we have been made new.

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

 

In his book River Out of a Eden, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins explains, “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.”(1) In a similar vein, Dawkins praises the humorous rejoinder of Douglas Adams to arguments that claim an apparent order and purpose in the universe. Writes Dawkins, “To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow preordained for us because we are so well suited to live in it, [Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.”(2) Their claim is clear: Humanity has adapted to a blind and indifferent universe like water to the shape of its container. It is perhaps a claim that at times lingers suggestively in desolate places of life and mind.

Ernest Gordon may, too, have at one time agreed. An officer of the British army during the Second World War, he was captured by the Japanese while at sea. At the age of 24, he was sent to work in the prison camp that would be constructing the Burma-Siam railroad.

For every mile of track, 393 men are said to have died. Wearing nothing but loincloths, they worked for hours in scorching temperatures, chopping their way through tangled jungles. Those who paused out of exhaustion were beaten to death by guards. Treated like animals, the prisoners became themselves like beasts trying to survive. Adapting to their harsh captivity, theft was as rampant as disease among them. Gordon himself eventually became so weak from illness that he was removed from the common camp and placed in the Death House. He describes his purposeless existence in that cruel and indifferent setting: “I was a prisoner of war, lying among the dead, waiting for the bodies to be carried away so that I might have more room.”(3)

Each night the Japanese guards would count the work tools before anyone was permitted to return to camp. One evening, when a shovel was found to be missing, a guard shouted relentlessly that the guilty man must present himself. When no one responded, he ordered callously, “All die! All die!” At this, a young man stepped forward, confessing to the theft, and was immediately killed before them.

The railroad prison camp by the River Kwai was a place where many could have observed in horror that “the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no God watching over those in dire need of hope.” Like water conforming to the shape of its container, the captured men became like men fighting to survive, void of right and wrong, void of reverence for life, void of all meaning. Yet, amidst the stagnant waters of hatred and bitterness, something was astir.

After the incident with the shovel, upon returning to the camp, one of the guards discovered a mistake in their counting. There had never been a missing shovel. The young man that stepped forward was innocent; he had sacrificed his life to preserve the lives of his fellow inmates. After this incident, attitudes among the camp began to change dramatically. Instead of men in a detached game of survival of the fittest, they began to look out for each other. One of the men remembered the words of Scripture: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Gordon, who once lay forgotten for dead, was slowly nursed back to health by fellow prisoners. Fully recovered, he eventually became a makeshift chaplain of the camp. When the prison was liberated in 1945–three years after his capture–Gordon entered seminary to become a minister of the message of Jesus Christ. “Faith thrives where there is no hope but God,” he later testified. How contrary to the words of Richard Dawkins.

The transformation in the men of the prison was so thoroughly unlike the world they were forced to live in that one could argue it was more like a waterfall defying gravity and moving upstream than a puddle naturally fitting into the crevice that holds it. The sacrifice of one innocent man can reverse the flow of history. Perhaps the kingdom of God is indeed among us, a spring of living water in a dry and weary land.

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

(1) Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.

(2) As printed in The Guardian, May 14, 2001.

(3) Ernest Gordon, To End All Wars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1963).