The Altar of Science

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 8

“As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.” – Richard Dawkins

“Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They begin with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.” – G.K. Chesterton

I find plenty to disagree with when reading the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens when it comes to their content. But there is also much that I disagree with in how their disagreeable content is expressed. It may seem trivial, but how an argument is presented is, in some respects, equal in importance with the validity of the argument—and in the case of these heretics (Dawkins in particular), his method does much to undermine the very points he is making.

Take, for example, Dawkins’ writings on science. What I mean by that, of course, is take almost everything he has written. Dawkins writes about science in the same way he writes about himself and all of mankind—with a purposeful, but insincere, subjectivity. Of course, he would say. Subjectivity is the one thing required of the scientist! He doesn’t realize that, while the scientific method may thrive on subjectivity, understanding human nature absolutely does not.

Dawkins seems to insist on keeping his explanations of every human decision, every human thought, every human quirk, firmly at arm’s length. He feels a desperate need to rationalize absolutely everything by way of natural selection—every action or thought a human could have can be rationalized as a self-evident quirk of genetics. When a poet describes happiness they might do so by employing the metaphor of a sunny day or the return of a long-lost love; when Richard Dawkins describes happiness he does so as a mixture of proteins that release dopamine into the brain so as to prolong the survival of the species by way of... and from the first word he demonstrates only that he has really never understood the meaning of happiness.

Science, to the heretics, too quickly ceases to be a method by which one looks at the world and instead becomes just as much a religion as the faith they deride. When Dawkins writes that, “...a widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts...is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect...” he is absolutely right (and this is something religions should seriously consider), but at the same time he does not seem to understand that he has not merely pulled religion down from its place above criticism, he has replaced it with his own altar of science! God forbid that any of us should second guess a scientific study!

I do try to avoid criticizing a healthy pursuit of science (because I have ventured down this road myself and found great joy here), but I cannot help but criticize the scientists for their utter failure to understand the very things they are so desperately trying to comprehend. An astronomer can become so lost in his telescope that he has forgotten to lie in a field at night and simply stare into the heavens; a biologist can become so lost in his microscope that he has forgotten that the cells he is studying actually make up a creature. Scientists have a tendency to sacrifice their own humanity for the sake of their discoveries. Men like Dawkins have become, for lack of a better (or more fitting) analogy—the extreme Calvinists of humanism. Just as Calvinism in its most extreme form rids humanity of both free will and, in effect, personal responsibility, so also is Dawkins quick ascribe an evolutionary explanation for every decision made by man, removing responsibility from all of us for our actions. Every action is biological; every decision is made with the intent of spreading our DNA, to ensure the survival of our genes.

My opposition to Dawkins in terms of science is not limited, however, to the cold, aloof tone it forces him to take when talking about things that are living and awesome—it has also become clear to me that I ought to no longer give him the benefit of the doubt when he is prattling on about how science frees us from religion, because whenever it proves convenient to do so, he seems willing to neglect the very scientific method he worships! So rigidly and worshipfully does Richard Dawkins view science—so low does he prostrate himself before that particular altar—that he has forgotten (or consciously abandons) one of the core principles of the scientific method. Specifically, he neglects to acknowledge that facts are notoriously difficult to come by, and that the very word—fact—is not a word to toy around with.

Dawkins claims that, “Creationists simply don’t realize that evolution is a fact!” No, they don’t, but neither does the honest evolutionist. Time and again Dawkins refers to the “fact” of evolution, deriding the weak-minded zealots who refuse to believe. Surely Richard Dawkins—a man steeped in science throughout his adult life—is intelligent enough to know that there is something very significant and very special about calling something a “fact.” Richard Feynman—an atheist himself, and one of the greatest, most beloved scientists of the 21^st century—loved to boast about how close his theories were to being facts, but consistently stressed the difficulty of facts: “You can see, of course, that...we can attempt to disprove any definite theory. If we have a definite theory, a real guess, from which we can conveniently compute consequences which can be compared with experiment, then in principle we can get rid of any thoery. There is always the possibility of proving any definite theory wrong; but notice that we can never prove it right. Suppose you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong.”

Human evolution is theory, not fact. We could literally watch a species evolve into another before our eyes and it still would not prove that this is how life came to be as it is. I realize that this sounds like nit-picking; like I am quarrelling over a simple matter of syntax or vocabulary, but it really is much more than that. It is indicative of an arrogant form of scientism that simply cannot be taken as gospel. It is evidence of a man so singularly focused on attacking something that he has forgotten the very laws he claims to live by. This is a common danger—our desire to destroy others getting in the way of positive affirmations of our beliefs—that we all must continually guard against. It is especially evident in political disagreements, where we are so quick to point out inconsistency and hypocrisy on the other side that we neglect to notice our own. Dawkins betrays the certainty of his own beliefs by being disingenuous about them.

One need only read the words of the most God-hating scientists to discover the fact that they seem to have universally missed something in their understandings of the universe. Perhaps their views are self-consistent, as an earthworm may be consistent in saying that the whole world is made of nothing but dirt, but they are incomplete. They consistently neglect a great portion of the man-beast they are so desperately trying to explain. It is terribly difficult, after all, to explain a thing that you have never properly understood. One could imagine trying to explain a camel without mentioning his hump or an elephant without mentioning his trunk. The explanation may be accurate and consistent, but few would defend it as complete, or even valuable.

The purely scientific view of man, quite simply, does not understand man. It may have an explanation as to why he has hands, but not why he should choose to use his hands to produce works of art rather than hunt or forage. It tells us why we have hair on our heads, but not why we should choose to shave our heads in solidarity with an illness or to join a monastary... it doesn’t—it simply can’t—tell us these things because it is likely to cause madness, like describing a rainbow to a man born blind.

Real hope cannot be found in science. This is not real evidence for God, of course, but nevertheless one should at the very least stop and consider what sort of hope or meaning they are looking for. If hope is the same thing as increased knowledge, then science may hold some very limited hope—but it is a hope that will fail the very moment one looks out into the abyss and recognizes just how little has actually become known by science. It is like the man who spends his life attempting to comprehend eternity, only to grow old and realize that he is no closer than he was when he began. As Chesterton said, “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

Real hope is found in embracing the eternal rather than trying to comprehend it. It is found in first understanding creation and then studying it; with much of science it is, tragically, the other way around.

The Glory of Man

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 7

“Probably the most daunting task that we face, as partly rational animals with adrenal glands that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too small, is the contemplation of our own relative weight in the scheme of things. Our place in the cosmos is so unimaginably small that we cannot, with our miserly endowment of cranial matter, contemplate it for too long.” – Christopher Hitchens

“Of course, it could be argued that humans are more capable of, for example, suffering than other species. This could well be true, and we might legitimately give humans special status by virtue of it. But evolutionary continuity shows that there is no absolute distinction. Absolutist moral discrimination is devastatingly undermined by the fact of evolution.” – Richard Dawkins

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” asks King David in Psalm 8, “...and the son of man that you care for him?” These are questions that man has wrestled with for exactly as long as he’s existed as man. Where are we, as human beings, to be placed among the vast panoply of living creatures? Furthermore, who are we to even ask such questions as these?

It never ceases to surprise me that these sorts of questions can still incite such bitter disagreement; they are questions that prove almost endlessly divisive with certain audiences, and how they are answered reveals a great deal about a person’s preconceptions and prejudices.

I, for one, believe very strongly in the intrinsic glory of mankind. I believe, and not only because the Bible says so, that human beings hold a unique place, both among the creatures of the Earth, and in the universe at large. Man is the nothing less than the height of all creation; the apex of all that is and all that ever will be outside of heaven.

A small part of me can see why some would find this statement controversial (and, strangely, politically incorrect), but the rest of me understands that it is nothing more than the most natural belief in the world. It is a belief often (derisively) associated with faith, but it really is the very opposite of a statement taken on faith—it is the only conclusion backed up by tangible evidence. It is a thing that an innocent child, born into the world and not in any way predisposed to believe or not to believe in either science or religion, would automatically assume. An innocent could only look at the world and see the vast gulf between man and animal and it would take no measure of faith at all to assume that there was something unique about man. They would gaze into the heavens and they would find no evidence to suggest that the ground on which they stood was anything but the most remarkable place in the universe.

What requires faith is to take the opposite stance. The heretics go to great lengths to remind their readers that they (both author and reader alike) are nothing special; they are mere mammals communicating with other mammals. That they have evolved something like speech is nothing to be boastful about; it is simply what nature has accomplished. That they are able to sit in their studies behind their computer monitors and ponder the truth of their own existence is nothing at all to be boastful about. It is no different than a dolphin whistling a tune into the vast sea—well, different in degree, maybe, but certainly not in kind.

If ever one wants to truly rile a humanist, one need only tell them that there is something somehow important about their humanity. Christopher Hitchens calls it an “obvious” atrocity that the theist should believe in Himself as privileged among creation. He thinks it ignorant that we should believe there to be anything special about our planet. But why should anyone be so sensitive to humans being pleased by their humanity? Why should anyone treat it as if it were some great sin (if that word is appropriate) to believe in human uniqueness?

And this goes doubly so for those who believe that it is somehow in bad taste to indulge in a little “cosmic anthropocentrism”. Even at the risk of offending the undiscovered “other” beings on other worlds, perhaps in other galaxies (or other universes?), I have no problem stating emphatically that man is unique among the creatures just as the earth is unique among the planets. Man is unique among the creatures of the earth because he alone has stepped beyond reason and created art and mythology; the earth is unique among the planets because it has man (and cedar forests and rolling, lavender covered hills and a few other things that we have not yet found elsewhere).

Hitchens demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of history than when he says that, “We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.” The truth is not nearly as dramatic as historians like to believe: Galileo did nothing more profound than provide evidence to confirm the existing theory that the earth revolved around the sun (something that would certainly have been determined within a few years even without him). Any impact beyond this is mere extrapolation by scientists and philosophers with agendas other than discovering truth.

The case of Galileo does present an interesting dilemma for the Christian, of course, and it really ought to be briefly dealt with, once and for all: The church (for reasons I have trouble fully understanding) once had a difficult time accepting the revelation that the Earth might revolve around another body. They thought it somehow harmful to the faith to discover that we were not a stationary body around which the universe rotated. This led, of course, to the famous Galileo incident, which the heretics bring up time and again, as if it somehow encompasses the absolute worst moment of the church’s history. Reading a humanist account of the “persecution” of Galileo (which consisted of a comfortable house arrest and a less-than-forceful denouncement) leads one to almost believe that the Crusades and Inquisition were summer picnics in comparison. Kill as many heretics as you want, but don’t touch the scientists. Nevertheless, it is worth admitting that the church was clearly in the wrong in the case of Galileo, but only because it is indicative of a greater problem: the church has long focused on things that really don’t matter. We should have had far more important things to think about than what some Italian astronomer was saying about the solar system, but we got bogged down by it and are still reeling from the effects today.

How could it possibly have hurt the church to learn that the sun is at the geographic center of our solar system? What do we lose when the Earth moves out of the center and we are made smaller and (seemingly) more insignificant in relation to the size of the universe?

Nothing at all is lost. In fact, much truth can be gained by this understanding. The church ought to have been wise enough to see the benefit of what Galileo was demonstrating: that we, the glory of God’s creation, are but atoms in relation to the universe. But we do not need to be great or geographically centered, for when we are made less, God is made more (John the Baptist was on to something with his beautiful statement, “He must increase and I must decrease”). The size of the universe makes it all the more remarkable that He should care anything at all for us.

So, on the cosmic level, we may not be at the center of things, but we remain unique and privileged. Telescope after telescope continue to be built to scan the heavens for planets outside of our solar system, and scores have been found already, the result being that we remain unique. Dead planet after dead planet is discovered and catalogued; we land rovers on dead planets in our own solar system that may have once been covered in water, and yet we remain unique, for water is not the thing that makes the earth unique. Man is.

I’ve heard countless accusations of “human arrogance” or “anthropocentrism”—but the reality is that there are really few things more beautiful than anthropocentrism. There are few things more comforting than the knowledge that we, the highest of creation (to say otherwise requires a particularly blind sort of faith) hold a special place in the universe. The sun may not revolve around the Earth, but there is nothing on the sun, nor on any other planet in our solar system, that has ever taken the time to understand this. Like it or not, we are the center of the solar system, and we are the center of the known universe.

How is the Christian to respond to this? To many, anthropocentrism is akin to pride, and that is what must be guarded against. The most perfect response comes, as it often does, in the Psalms, reflecting, not the small, human-centered universe that the heretic believes was taught by the early church, but a vast, awesome place:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

You have put all things under his feet,

All sheep and oxen,

And also the beasts of the field,

The birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,

Whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord,

How majestic is your name in all the earth!

What is this but a perfect statement of a perfect paradox: the glory and the humility of man? Our true place in the universe can only ever be understood in our relationship with God; and because I believe in this, I have no problem reaffirming that science alone cannot capture the awe and splendor of creation. And that’s a pity.

The Evolution of Fallen Man

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 6

“The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don’t present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time...I say all this just to demonstrate the formidable power of the brain’s simulation software. It is well capable of constructing ‘visions’ and ‘visitations’ of the most utmost veridical power. To simulate a ghost or an angel or a Virgin Mary would be child’s play to software of this sophistication.” – Richard Dawkins

“Religion is not provided to us by revelation, it doesn't come from the heavens, it doesn't come from the beyond, it doesn't come from the divine. It's man-made. And it shows. It shows very well - that religion is created, invented, imposed by a species half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee.” – Christopher Hitchens

First, I should mention a source of agreement I have with both Hitchens and Dawkins: we share at least one foundational premise when discussing humanity. We can all agree that humanity falls short of perfection, and that any human claiming otherwise has not thought to look at the world around him before making his claim. I, like the world I live on, am far from perfect; I sometimes mistakenly believe things that are lies, I sometimes tell lies myself, I am selfish, proud, angry, arrogant, etc. The one thing that allows me to live with these truths is the knowledge that everyone else is in the same boat.

Now, the difference (which is of immeasurably greater consequence than the agreement): I see these imperfections as a consequence of sin, while the heretics as genetic malformations brought on by incomplete evolutionary processes. Furthermore, they tend to believe the very idea of sin to be depraved (“What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?”-Dawkins), while I would only go so far as to say that their evolutionary answer to be fundamentally wrong-headed.

I understand that these authors believe the evolutionary imperfections of man have led to all of the great evils of the world (in my last post I gave an example of Hitchens relating wars with the fact that we have not yet “evolved” into fully rational beings), and that religion is a mere symptom of our mind’s ability to play tricks on us (as Dawkins implies in the quote at the beginning of this post). That much is easy enough to understand, but it leads me to a bit of an impasse: I have reason to say that man is imperfect because I am aware of a standard of perfection. God. I am aware that I am fallen because I am aware of the heights to which I am called. The other side is not afforded such perspective. The heretic, though blessed with a common grace he may never understand, is aware that there is something wrong, yet he cannot possibly define it, as he believes in nothing that can be used in comparison. He thinks war and murder are wrong because he knows in his heart that life is valuable, but he cannot offer a convincing argument as to why. He believes we just need to evolve further, but evolve into what? Into Nietzsche’s “Übermensch”? A genetically pure, physically perfect superman? I know it is in bad taste to do so, but how can one avoid making comparisons here with Naziism when one speaks of the evolution of man? After all, would humanity really sit idly by and allow itself to progress naturally when we have the means to help nature along? Hitchens even comes dangerously close to a wholesale endorsement of Eugenics: “Sad though (abortion) is, it is probably less miserable an outcome than the vast number of deformed or idiot children who would otherwise have been born, or stillborn, or whose brief lives would have been a torment to themselves and others.” I have tried hard (and done a good job, I think) of keeping civil in my discourse so far, but how can one not be driven to anger at such a sentiment? It is a statement of pure evil. Evil in the truest, most objective sense of the word. And yet, that is how the heretic believes that the human species might one day evolve itself free from sin.

To put it bluntly: The facts show otherwise. History has capably demonstrated that we cannot simply “evolve” into perfection (not that such a being, to the heretics, can objectively exist). Even if we were to systematically abort all of the potentially weaker members of our species (something that I am not sure is not already happening to some extent), survival of the fittest will never successfully weed out the things that make us human, either for better or for worse. It will never rid us of our pride or selfishness just as it will never rid us of our love or our need to worship. We simply cannot transform ourselves into anything either more or less than human.

At least the heretics admit that we are not perfect; that our minds play tricks on us; that reason and logic cannot always be trusted.

...and yet, they seem perfectly willing to do just that.

Both Hitchens and Dawkins demonstrate an exceptional willingness to believe in their own exceptional logic, while simultaneously admitting that mankind has been “hoodwinked” for thousands of years and tricked into believing in religions. They do not seem to understand that they are, as we all are, looking at the world and seeing only those things that support what they hope to be true. It does not mean that their words are all lies (though they are not immune to lying, as I could easily point out); it means that they are selective and they apply the reasoning that best confirms previously-held beliefs. This is the fundamental undercurrent of all human thought that ever was or ever will be (including my own)—and it really ought to be stated aloud every now and then. None of us are free of bias; no author of an historical work can fully remove himself from his text; no debater can avoid making the evidence support him.

It is easy for the undiscerning reader to be puzzled by reviews of Biblical history by historians claiming to be either impartial or merely skeptical. We place far too much weight in the words of those who declare themselves experts, who comb the scriptures for any apparent anachronism; who scour the linguist anomalies of the authors, seeking some slight oddity to which they can grab hold. It is easy to forget that when we are reading commentaries and criticism we are only reading the words of men just as error-prone and biased as we are, and they need to be accepted as such.

It is even easier, perhaps, to accept the word of the scientist, who is merely trying to pull back the veil of nature—what could be more objective than that? But the truth is very different. Science is not immune from bias; in fact, one could argue that science is more blatantly prone to bias than most professions, as a great portion of modern science lies in interpretation rather than empiricism, and a great majority of scientists believe that one of their tasks is to throw God (and believers in God) for a loop.

My point is simply this: Both Hitchens and Dawkins spend a tremendous amount of time and effort in assuring their readers that much of religion can be reduced to “trickery” of the brain, and yet both men admittedly worship at the altar (a phrase chosen particularly because both men would find it distasteful) of human reason, a thing (as I previously explained) that is very nearly a myth itself.

Now, what are we to do with these imperfections if we cannot simply breed it out of our species? What are we to do with sin if we cannot simply make ourselves into better people? The short answer is that we can do nothing at all, which makes it all the more fortunate that there is a God who can. Humanity is at its best when it is seeking after the God of the Bible (note that I did not write, “when it is seeking after religion”—the difference is crucial); sin is at its least when we are attempting to imitate Christ. The point of Christianity, no matter what the heretics might claim (over and over and over) is not to belittle us by pointing continually to our sin, but to free us of sin. The book of Romans states very explicitly that we were once slaves to sin but now we are free. We are already free; we do not have to wait to advance to our next evolutionary state; we do not have to wait until the universities learn how to better indoctrinate us or the government learns how to better control us. If we are in Christ we are free from sin.

That is my point.

The Disdain for What Was

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 4

One thing I have never understood—that I freely admit to never having understood—is the vehemence with which the heretics denounce beliefs about nature that do not conform to their own. When I say this I am not referring to their opposition to their contemporaries, like myself, who disagree (they have every right to disagree vehemently with me). Rather, I mean their strange reverence for the shifting of historical paradigms and the consistent change of perspective brought about by nothing more complex than the passage of time.

The heretics—at least, some heretics—simply cannot bring themselves to believe that anyone could have been ignorant enough to ever have believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system (or the universe), or that matter was made up of anything but atoms. They stand on their high-horses and ridicule anyone who came before them, not merely as the products of a less-enlightened age—but as malicious contributors to the stunting of knowledge.

I am referring, of course, to the concept commonly called “chronological snobbery,” as made famous by C.S. Lewis, who rightly considered it one of the hallmarks of the heretic. There is a decided inability to empathize with our predecessors in thought or deed; a decided lack of understanding of the movement of history and how things have really played out.

I made special note before to say that this particular trap only ensnared some heretics. I am focusing here specifically on Christopher Hitchens, who is an offender to the point that some of his more clear-minded acolytes really ought to have pointed out how petty he had begun to sound. On the other hand, at least in this area, I can give some credit to Richard Dawkins, who at various points actually acknowledges his separation from the past. For example, when mentioning Lord Kelvin’s theory that the earth could not be billions of years old or else the sun would have spent all of its fuel, Dawkins notes, “Kelvin obviously could not be expected to know about nuclear energy.” Of course he couldn’t.

Likewise, when discussing the “changing moral Zeitgeist,” Dawkins makes an astute observation: “The American invasion of Iraq is widely condemned for its civilian casualties, yet those casualty figures are orders of magnitude lower than comparable numbers for the Second World War. There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War.” While I am certain that I disagree with the argument Dawkins is ultimately making, he raises an interesting point: we cannot ultimately comment on history through the lens of the twenty-first century.

Now, consider those relatively magnanimous comments compared with just a few of the cringe-worthy denunciations of Hitchens:

“The early fathers of faith (they made very sure that there would be no mothers) were living in a time of abysmal ignorance and fear.”

“Aquinas...was convinced that the fully formed nucleus (not that he would have known the word as we do) of a human being was contained inside each individual sperm.”

“Augustine was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus: he was guiltily convinced that god cared about his trivial theft from some unimportant pear trees, and quite persuaded—by an analogous solipsism—that the sun revolved around the earth.”

The last seems to me to be the most egregious. Disagreeing (even vehemently disagreeing) with Augustine’s theology is one thing—a thing that wouldn’t bother me in the least—but what sort of snob does it take to criticize a man for saying that sun revolved around the earth in a time when everyone said that the sun revolved around the earth? And what possible reason could Hitchens have for being so upset that Augustine felt guilty for stealing fruit? Hitchens, like many of his scientific colleagues, also frequently derides ancient scientists for refusing to believe in atomism, even though it was proposed by Democritus in the fifth century, B.C., ignoring the fact that no one believed it because there was no evidence for it.     

There is the assumption (and Hitchens was not alone in believing it) that to believe such things as geocentrism (the idea that the sun revolves around the earth rather than the other way around) or to fail to believe in atomism could only have been a product of ignorance brought about by dogma—but the truth is exactly the opposite: I would be far more inclined to ridicule any foolish pre-Galilean astronomer deluded enough to believe in anything but geocentrism, or any pre-Newtonian naive enough to put any amount of faith into atomism. The humanist makes a great deal out of common sense, and from the perspective of man before the invention of the telescope there was no reason, apart from pure love of dissent, to believe in anything but that the Earth was at the center. The early astronomers were not being willfully ignorant in their beliefs; they were being observant, which, I understand, is something generally applauded in science.

Would any of us be foolish enough to ridicule the darkness of Dickensian London because they had not yet mastered the incandescent light? Do we think, as we read Great Expectations, that someone really ought to have just flipped a switch and so do away with that dreaded gloom? Should we mock them for thinking that they had achieved anything at all with their primitive gas lamps when there are such greater sources of light to be discovered? There is a pitiful perception that time has made humanity wiser, more intelligent, and less prone to being duped, when the truth is that we simply know more. We have no greater capacity for knowledge—we simply have a greater (and often contradictory) body of knowledge through which to sift.

It did not take two thousand years for science to reach its present state because it was stifled by dogma or because it was persecuted by the church. In fact, apart from isolated incidents that are given more than their due weight, science really has not been persecuted by the church. So few are the actual occurrences, in fact, that Hitchens had to stoop to making one up: “Atomism was viciously persecuted throughout Christian Europe for many centuries, on the not unreasonable ground that it offered a far better explanation of the natural world than did religion.” Suffice it to say, this didn’t happen at all. Atomism was never persecuted. No, science was not held back by religion, it was held back by the fact that it took people a while to figure things out.

Though it may be common among the heretics, Hitchens’ snobbery seems especially egregious, as he seems to imply that, in a similar situation, he would surely have easily seen through the “ruse” of superstition. Had he been born centuries earlier he would have been the exception; the revolutionary able to see the world as it truly was. But he would not have. If he really believes at all in reason he would have looked into the sky and come to the conclusion that the earth was at the center of things. He would have looked at the material world and decided that it could not possibly have been made of atoms. He would be the same ignorant fool that he derides.

Suffice it to say, I can’t help but think that this chronological snobbery plays a large role in preventing people from believing in God. There is a strange sense, and I have written about it several times before, that we, as human beings, have become something unique; that we are somehow different from all who came before us. There is a sense that we have the right to mock our primitive ancestors and their primitive beliefs because we have come to know and understand so much. Suffice it to say that there is no real evidence to support these conclusions. The truth, if one cares to really look at it, is humbling. We may know a few more facts about the world, we may have unlocked a few more of the universe’s gears and pulleys, but in fact we have gotten nowhere. We think that we have understood enough to supplant God in the minds of the people, relegating Him to a “God in the gaps” but in truth we have only just begun to realize how big those gaps truly are, and just how big a God would be needed to fill them. We believe that we are inching our way closer and closer to the eternal, but the fact is that our advancements might come in leaps and bounds and yet the eternal will remain the eternal.  

If the situation demands anything it is precisely the reverse of chronological snobbery. We ought to be humbled by a history that shows humanity leaping every hurdle to obtain knowledge and understanding; to shine the light of understanding into the darkness. It must be disheartening to the humanist that the majority of his fellow humans have not yet accepted the glory of self-worship. It must seem strange to the devoted secularist that the world remains religious despite the tremendous achievements of science. The fact is that reason is not all it’s made out to be. Faith is on the rise, and no appeals to science or reason have stemmed the tide; and almost certainly the petty arguments of a few heretics don’t seem to be doing much either.

Man Seeks God

The Literature of the Heretics, pt. 3

This might be considered a bit of a sidebar in relation to this present series, which has focused on my rebuttals regarding two very specific books by two very specific heretics: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I do have every intention of getting back to those books, but I want to use this one post to address another work that I have just read, by another heretic I have learned to pity.

The book is Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine, and the heretic is a talented writer (but terrible theologian) named Eric Weiner. Weiner is, for all intents and purposes, an agnostic, which may seem odd, considering I have already labeled him a heretic. I stand by the label; however, as I believe that this particular brand of agnosticism may amount to one of the most powerful, dangerous, and prevalent forms of heresy.

Reading the book wasn’t my idea. I was far more focused on the literature of the “true” heretics—the well known God-haters, who have provided me no lack of material. But the book presented itself before me in the form of a Christmas gift from my grandmother this year, and I couldn’t help but read it when she gave me her reason for the purchase: “I thought you might like to argue with it,” she said. Who can deny that this is one of the most perfect reasons a grandmother has ever thought to give her grandchild anything—a devout Christian grandmother gives her devout Christian grandchild a book, not for edification or entertainment, but that he might have the glorious challenge of argument. If only all 86 year old women were as enlightened.

So I read it, happily seeking the aforementioned argument, but I admit that from the very beginning I was disappointed. I found in the pages of this book, much to the dismay of the inveterate iconoclast within, that there is nothing here to argue with; nothing tangible enough to fight. Even thinking of taking up arms against the whimsical search for religion in this book is as futile as taking a sword to the body of a ghost; no matter how perfect or true the strikes, one is really only ever swinging at the air.

For the record, the book is the account of a young agnostic who, faced with a medical emergency, is confronted with the question, “Have you found your god yet?” The question intrigues him and inspires him to travel the globe, investigating the pros and cons of some of the world’s most popular and intriguing religions. Every priest, rabbi, shaman and monk is given fair treatment; every faith is treated as equally valuable; every religion seems to have an even weight of pros and cons. In the end (at the risk of ruining it), the conclusion is just as non-committal as the search: “So, instead of looking for my God, I must invent Him. Not exactly invent. Construct. Assemble. His foundation is Jewish, but His support beams are Buddhist. He has the heart of Sufism, the simplicity of Taoism, the generosity of the Franciscans, the hedonistic streak of the Raelians...” and so on. Hopefully you get the picture.

This is, roughly, the content of the book. How does one possibly argue with something so lacking in any real value or weight? Or, a better question, where do I even start? So it is not the content of this book that I am addressing, but the lack thereof; it is not the theology (or even lack of theology) that I find concerning, but the overall sense that theology does not matter. It is not that the author did not find truth; it is that he treated truth as if it does not matter. As far as I’m concerned, it is not orthodoxy or heterodoxy that proves the state of society, but the question of whether or not society understands that things such as orthodoxy and heterodoxy so much as exist in the first place. Chesterton once said that “there are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.”

What I mean is simply this: what could be more important than the question of God? And why would anyone embark on such an absurd quest as to find “his” god—as if there is some unique deity awaiting him in the heavenly realms, a specially tailored, perhaps genetically altered, cosmic being perfectly suited to his tastes and proclivities. One cannot help but understand the sad truth of this question: though the title of the book may bear the name God, complete with capital “G”, the book only ever sets its sights on the small “g” gods. The author is concerned, not with truth, but with perception. Not with theology, but with personal fulfillment.

The question the author faces is one I hope no one in my audience can relate to. “Have you found your god?” What a difference a word makes! Who would have thought that the inclusion of a little pronoun like “your” could turn a  question of eternal importance into a question of abysmal impotence. A non-question, really. It can turn the most important question in the universe into a question that could almost have no less impact. (The purist, it might be noted, will take the argument a step further, reminding us that, even without the “your” it is an improper question, as it is God who does the finding, but I’m not prepared to entertain those hopeless theologians here)

Suffice it to say, to find one’s own “god” is not to find God. To suggest that one may search the panoply of the gods of the religions of the world in order to find the one deity fitting one’s personal hopes and expectations is to neuter the very concept of deity beyond all recognition. In fact, could there be a more powerful rejection of God then to believe that one could fold him up and carry him around in the neat little box of our expectations? Why would anyone even want to seek such a weak creature?

But this is precisely what happens here. The author strives to create a perfectly-balanced presentation of a number of different faiths, showing mostly sympathetic images of the various “gods” sought by men all over the world, each chapter ending with the same indecisive shrug—a quick “this isn’t quite what I was looking for”, and a “let’s try another one.” It goes without saying that the search is doomed from the start.

So what have I brought out of all of this?

First: I will gladly say that I would rather read Dawkins or Hitchens any day of the week, for those men may be classic heretics, but at least there is some conviction in their heresy. At least they aren’t wandering the globe in a vain, self-centered search for the “-ism” that best matches their personalities. At least they give me something to argue against.

Second: My own faith is reaffirmed, as I am reminded that my hope is placed in the “Word made flesh”, who came to us in Grace and in Truth. I find my spiritual comfort in Christianity’s grace—it’s devotion to a perfect love that is unconditional and unending—and I find my intellectual comfort in Christianity’s truth—it’s assertion that the one who has found the Word has found the truth; a truth that is absolute and unchanging; a truth that frees one from the pursuit of religion and sets him on the path toward true freedom.

The Corruption of Modern Man

Reflections on the Tower of Babel, pt. 2

“And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.” Gen. 11:6-9

Why would an almighty God fear the works of His lowly creation? Could he really think so highly of men—the same He had, only a few generations earlier, nearly destroyed by way of flood—as to believe that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”? What sort of men were these Babelites? 

What sort of minds did we possess before our languages were confused?

Remarkably, I believe that those were one and the same as the men who build our towers today; who get themselves elected to public office; who clog the laboratories and lecture halls of the world’s most prestigious institutions. We are one and the same, and as I wrote before, our towers are one and the same, even if they look a bit different. Man has realized that there are no foreseeable limits to what he might accomplish with his hands, but the struggle for societal achievement—the striving after an earthly utopia—remains beyond our reach, the one thing we continue striving toward year after year.

Few are unfamiliar with the saying “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Of those familiar with this maxim, surely fewer still would disagree in sentiment if not in absolute fact. What the Christian knows—and what makes him a radically different animal from many of the other religions of the world—is that this maxim, and likewise God’s admonition at Babel, are not intended as outward judgments, but rather inward convictions. The warnings against man’s haughtiness and self-righteousness are not only true of and applicable to “the other guy,” but to ourselves. The warning against the corrupting force of power is not a thing to be held true only when speaking of someone else; it is a clear and accurate statement about the heart of every man, and no amount of biological or sociological evolution will ever render it antiquated. It is indeed to be applied toward all men, but toward our own hearts with far more fervor.

The truth of this is also, I might add, a thing that some Christians tragically have yet to learn. The Christian ought never to think that the world will be made perfect and righteous if only Christians are put in charge. He ought never to think that the leaders of the church will prove any less corruptible. He ought never to assume that he himself is above the tendency to create something that might supersede his own need for God.

We alternate between ecstasy and agony as our selected political leaders rise and fall, as if we truly believe that an election might be a means of transforming our nation at last into that place we have oft dreamed of—the place of universal peace and universal justice, of equality for all, of love between all, of hope by all.

Malcolm Muggeridge offers hope when our utopias fail: “After all, no more terrible disaster could befall us than that one or other of the twentieth century’s nightmare utopias should come to pass: that men should veritably prove capable of constructing one or other of their kingdoms of heaven on earth, with abundance ever broadening down from gross national product to gross national product; with motorways reaching from pole to pole; with eros released to beget a regulation two offspring, like a well-behaved child at a party eating just two cakes; with all our genes counted and arranged to produce only beauty queens and Mensa IQs, the divergents thrown away with the hospital waste; with the media providing Muzak and Newsak around the clock to delight and inform us; with the appropriate drugs and medicaments available to cure all actual and potential ills.”

The list of potential Towers we have built, even in the past century, is staggering. It is somehow simultaneously extraordinary and cause for great shame. The 20’s saw the vast and unprecedented growth in America turn almost at once, as with the turning of a knob, into a Great Depression. The Third Reich arose, seeking to cleanse the world of those they presumed unclean, and instead only succeeded in murdering their countrymen and cleansing Germany of all wealth and power, while at the same stroke robbing Europe of its security, and robbing humanity of faith in itself. The Soviet Union followed the utopia-making playbook, step by step, and destroyed itself in the Gulags and the food lines. China sought to cure itself of overpopulation by murdering its female children while America, not even saddled with overpopulation, has taken to murdering its own children for reasons that have yet to be fully discovered or understood.

It is a stark reality: a perfect society, a utopia, of almost half of our nation today would include the law whose fourth decade is being commemorated this very week—a law that has succeeded only in littering our hospitals with the stillborn corpses of the unwanted “growths” so mercifully cut out of our women. That in the name of justice! That in the name of creating for ourselves a world to be proud of!

I can only pray that God is as merciful toward us as he was to those ancient tower-builders; I pray that He looks at the things we build, the things that we hope will make us into our own gods; and casts them down, destroying the things themselves and casting us into confusion. I can only pray that He extends as much grace toward those who twist their own consciences in order to excuse mass infanticide as He did when He cried, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” on the occasion of the greatest injustice of them all!

God, we pray that you have mercy on us as we make every effort to undo the immense act of mercy that was the confusion of Babel. May we continue to be scattered, hopeless in and of ourselves, unblinded by the fog of human achievement and personal glory, and hopelessly reliant on You alone—the One who alone can free us eternally from ourselves and give us hope for the future.

Amen.

Becoming as Gods in the Twenty-First Century

Reflections on the Tower of Babel, pt. 1

“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves…” Gen. 11:1-4

There is far more to Babel than the confusion of languages. The story ought to exist as far more than an historical footnote. Like so much of the first parts of Genesis, here we find the foundations of the great drama played out by men on the earth. Genesis is not the story of others—it is our own story.

Yes, plenty has changed since that fateful moment in ancient Samaria—one could point to an extensive list of the things that would be unrecognizable about the world to an ancient Babelite architect unfortunate enough to be suddenly transported into the modern world. But the one thing that might surprise the time-traveling architect more than the airplanes and nuclear warheads—provided he is an architect who knows how to think about things—is the extraordinary, miraculous, fact that almost everything else has stayed exactly the same. Even the ancient man was surely something of an evolutionist, believing that time and progress are interchangeable; that the cruelty of man will fade as he learns to live with himself; that sin will cancel itself out; that as man learns he will be able to cure disease and cheat death. The dreams of the Modern Man remain the same, but the dreams are no longer based on reason, for history has proven otherwise.

Our clothes and our technology might have changed in the many years since Babel, but the men and women who fill these clothes and use the technology are precisely the people who built the pyramids; the people who wrote the Iliad and the Republic; the people who thought that it was a good idea to build a tower to the heavens.

What has changed least of all, perhaps, is man’s unflappable belief that by carrying himself higher he will necessarily be bringing himself closer to God—not in terms of physical closeness, but in terms of likeness. Or, to put it in a way more fitting for our more “enlightened” age: we are not seeking to be like God, but we are seeking some other sort of transcendence. Something not of this earth. Gravity, not sin, has become our greatest curse. Churches (not the least of the offenders) are built with their magnificent steeples pointing skyward, ostensibly with the intention of pointing one’s gaze toward the heavens in order to be reminded of the One who is worshipped within, but in reality isn’t it true that even churches have long tried to achieve something of profound and surpassing architectural and altitudinal stature?

Man accomplishes great things, but most things that we would call great are only great inasmuch as they glorify man. The innovation of manned flight, remember, was not invented by those who dreamed of transcontinental travel or even scientific research—it was merely to lift man higher into the heavens. We saw the birds in the sky and we were jealous and sought what we did not have. And so with carrying men to space. And so with children climbing and swinging from jungle gyms and tree limbs.

Babel was not a singular instance. It was not an isolated occurrence. Even if the construction of a tower was not a sin in itself, it was at the very least a sign and symbol of something deep and irreducible within the heart of man—something that makes man curse himself for being so bound to this earth; for to the heart of man even the earth is not enough. What we have been given is never enough, and man, in his infinite wisdom and power, may one day transcend what is in order to achieve what might be.

And what have we found in our journey? We have carried ourselves to unimaginable heights, to the point, even, to the blackness of space, where the scourge of gravity cannot be found, where man is free to float and flit effortlessly, drawn toward no surface and being driven in no direction.

The emptiness beyond this world is a perfect metaphor for the idolatry of man. We refused to be controlled any longer by the forces of our planet so we carried ourselves beyond them and found a place where we are at last in control of our own fate—we are modern-day Israelites, forsaking the glories of a blazing, fiery God for things of wood and metal that we could carry with us in whatever we chose to do. But what has this idolatry brought us? Nothing short of death. We have found that we do not belong in space; we must take unprecedented precaution, spend incalculable resources, all in the name of merely keeping ourselves alive. We have escaped the curse of gravity and found that it was none other than gravity that allowed us to live in the first place. If that does not effortlessly bring one back to the idea of God, then one is not trying hard enough.

The same must be said, it seems, for man’s newest Tower of Babel—and one that seems very much opposed to this entire idea. I’m referring to man’s even more expensive and engaging efforts to dig mighty holes in the earth for the sake of discovering, not what is great and infinite, but what is greatly infinitesimal. Our instruments are buried deeply in hopes that the answers we once sought from the heavens will be found more clearly beneath the earth. White-coated tinkerers have descended into the deepest pits, perforating the surface of the Earth in order to build mighty tubes with mighty magnets; they have bored mighty holes and filled them with mighty instruments—the most exquisite electronics ever imagined and brightest minds ever produced by the universities filling vast, dark sloughs. And all in the name of discovering “god”. They have gone so far as to give His name to the things they seek, for they truly believe, in their all-too-human arrogance, that they have been granted the gift of building an experiment that will carry them into the heavens and introduce them to God.

Whether we carry ourselves upward to flee from the Earth or bury ourselves in hope of discovering the secrets of the heavens, we are all seeking the same thing: to transcend our own humanity. Within us all is a need for something more; a deep, innate uneasiness and stir-craziness that assures us that there must be something more, and that the purpose of man is to seek these things. And it is true. We have both the need for something more and the desire to discover that thing. What too many in this world fail to realize is that this is how it has always been, and that there is a far easier answer.

We have known the answer since long before Babel, we just have a tendency to forget. 

Christmas and the Gospel

The story of the Gospel begins at the incarnation. Well, really, it begins thousands of years earlier, in the first chapters of Genesis, where the Gospel is promised, ushering in a long period of expectation. But the story of how God actually reached His hand into human history and brought about the salvation of His people really does begin in the manger, when God Himself became man and dwelt at last among us.

This was the moment that, as Paul described, Christ, though one in the same as God, willingly made Himself nothing. He made Himself man. In fact, He made himself into something less than man—He made Himself a slave to all men. He was not born in a home—he was born in a stable. He did not lie on blankets; he lay on a bed of straw. He did not descend to the world, he descended below the world, to a place meant for animals. He did not die as a leader, He died as a common criminal.

Here, while lying on a manger and worshipped as both God and King only by his family and some shepherds, God began his work. The beginnings were humble and unassuming, and, though one might expect the story to turn here into an underdog tale of a scrappy insurgency into the world, in fact the rest of the story does not stray far—a carpenter like His father, an itinerant teacher who happened to have a message bold and new enough to attract a few followers even before the first of the miracles. The rest of the story came and went like a whirlwind: miracles, confrontations with religious aristocracy, crowds, parables, death, resurrection. Three years of ministry followed by two thousand years (and counting) of wonder and further expectation.

Whether or not we choose to believe it at all, the child in the manger proves the pivot on which the axis of history continues to turn. It continues to be more influential than any war or ruler; it is more dramatic than the rising or falling of any great empire. It stands as the event. The foundation of the Gospel of salvation. Neither the most confused skeptic nor the most hardened humanist can deny with any honesty the influence of the event on the history of the world.

But what is this Gospel that began at the incarnation?

It is something that ought to be desired by man. The word itself scream that it is “good news,” and it really ought to be taken that way. Any expression of the Gospel that does not coincide with this fact, but which turns the Gospel into a mournful or condemning one, is nothing less than a false gospel. The Gospel is not a law, it is not a list of rules, it is nothing less than a promise of salvation.

Still, far too often the “good” is neglected in our expression of the Good News, and the Gospel is taken to be something rather to be ashamed of or to be hid from. We think that the imperfections of the world are things that somehow offer evidence against the Gospel, and we turn meek and mild, thinking that in boldness we might come up against questions we cannot answer. We forget that the long, often sordid history of the Christian faith, though indeed embarrassing at times, is a history that confirms rather than contradicts the message of the Gospel—the same Gospel that began on Christmas Day. The winding road of the church only fortifies what the Bible says of the followers of Christ, who three times fell asleep on the night of the arrest of their master and fought amongst themselves about which of them were the greatest. The peculiar shortcomings of the Disciples, culminating in the threefold denial by Peter, amount to perhaps the perfect cross section of the Christian church as it has existed throughout history. As Christians we continue (so it seems) in a perpetual state of either sleep or denial regarding our faith. We are either apathetic or actively antagonistic toward our creator, and I cannot say which is worse.

The shortcomings of Christians, while regrettable, do nothing to diminish the truth of the Gospel. The Bible is in no way silent about the more embarrassing tendencies of the Christian, just as it is painfully candid about the shortcomings of the Jews. The New Testament does not tell the story of a new, perfect movement, destined to take the world by a storm of righteousness. Though Christmas really did mean the birth of the King, and it really did mean the beginning of a Kingdom, the fullness of the Kingdom and the true reign of the King are yet to be experienced in their fullness. The movement that started on Christmas day is now as it was then—a great, even momentous, struggle; we strive to spread the message of the Kingdom despite facing opposition both from within and without. It is an imperfect movement (though based on perfect principles) that, if we are going to be reasonable, really should have died a young, ignoble death long ago.

Christianity really should never have survived past that first Christmas. The name of Jesus Christ really shouldn’t have outlasted the furniture made by His hands. The religious movement He began really ought to have died with Him. And yet, even in those first years and decades the Christ movement was already proclaiming victory. Christianity, even at the moment when it should have been in the throes of death, declared itself to be a force capable of overwhelming the Earth. The conquering nature of the faith was promised long before there were any signs that such a thing was even possible.

Consider this: Right up until the ministry of Christ and the writing of the New Testament, when God finally announced that the message of his salvation was to be taken to the ends of the Earth—the moment he declared that this formerly localized religion was destined to completely overwhelm civilization—this was an unheard of conceit. The very notion of evangelism in the name of religion was practically unheard of. Religions had, until then, been driven by cultural forces—the culture and the people had created the religion rather than the other way around. It was as true in the Mediterranean world, where the gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt all bore an uncanny likeness to the cultures that bore them, as it was in the East, where Hinduism, Buddhism and the like seem almost inevitable. Before Christ, the only culture ever founded upon religion was that of the Jews, and still, these were a people who seemed to do everything they could to shake off the shackles of God and make Him conform to what they found more comfortable—and to their own demise.

The Jews wanted desperately to be like every other Kingdom—the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians—who were not bound by religion. The people of these other cultures created gods for themselves that strengthened them. There was nothing challenging or burdensome about their manmade gods. We all recognize the truth that the God of Israel can be difficult to follow; He asks hard things from us and often offers no explanations. Who would dare create such a God? And who could possibly convince others to follow such a God, especially when it requires so much? We can see, in retrospect, that following God, though difficult, truly was the best for the people of Israel—for when they turned from Him it only meant disaster—but it is hard, almost impossible to understand this in the moment.

Still, even for the Israelites there was the sense that God belonged to them alone—that He was a God that had confined Himself to a single people. It is even more astonishing, in light of this, that the New Testament should be so presumptuous as to declare that the Gospel would overrun the world. And bear in mind, this claim is being made at the very time that Paul is writing to some of the earliest churches, who should have been quick to believe, being so inundated with first-hand witnesses of Christ, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you,” or from John: “I know of your works, you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” Who, in light of these letters, in light of the turmoil of the canon debates and the rise of apostasy and Gnosticism and false gospels, could have been confident that such a church could ultimately not just survive, but soar? The early church was many things, but destined to overcome the world it was not.

Indeed, the church could not possibly have succeeded had it been built upon the shoulders of a homely religious leader like Paul or a lowly fisherman who could not hold his tongue like Peter. It could not have been built upon anything other than an absolute, concrete truth. It could not have stood on any shoulders but that of a true King—albeit one born under the lowliest of circumstances. It almost seems that it could not possibly have happened any other way.

The Bible ends with a dramatic prophesy of absolute hope—the revealing of the true, perfect Kingdom over which the Christ Child will reign—but that very same prophesy candidly acknowledges that the church will face tremendous hardships and make many mistakes before this comes about. The Bible ends with what seems to me to be this assurance: If the gospel is anything less than the truth—if the child born on Christmas is anything less than God Himself—rest assured, it will be sent through the fire. It will be purged until only the truth, if there is any truth to be found, will remain. The fires of history have shown that the weaknesses of the faith come in the form of the followers rather than the founder of Christianity. The Bible has withstood the tests of the skeptics, Christ has easily withstood His harshest critics, even when the Christian has failed. There is hope in this.

The history of humanity has always been—indeed, continues to be—a history of waiting for God to come. He came first to the garden and brought both condemnation and hope; He came in the incarnation and brought salvation; He promises to come again to bring the fulfillment of every promise. He came to the garden and Adam hid in his shame. He came to Bethlehem and the King tried to kill him, eventually succeeding. He will come in the end to rescue His people and to conquer and crush His enemies beneath his feet.

The season of Advent represents this time of waiting. It is a time when we ought to reflect upon not just what we are waiting for or who we are waiting for, but how we go about it. How are our lives reflecting our deep anticipation and hope? What roles are we choosing to play in the history of our faith?

If we truly believe the truth of the Gospel that claims itself capable of overtaking the world, why are we so hesitant to take part in this unstoppable force?