Bono and Jesus (Love Rescue Me)

Love rescue me
Come forth and speak to me
Raise me up and don't let me fall
No man is my enemy
My own hands imprison me
Love rescue me
Many strangers have I met
On the road to my regret
Many lost who seek to find themselves in me
They ask me to reveal
The very thoughts they would conceal
Love rescue me
 And the sun in the sky
Makes a shadow of you and I
Stretching out as the sun sinks in the sea
I'm here without a name
In the palace of my shame
I said love rescue me

So what is this love that Bono sings about?

The following exchange between Bono and [music journalist] Michka Assayas took place just days after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, an act of terrorism that left 191 dead and more than 1,800 wounded. The two men were discussing how terrorism is often carried out in the name of religion when Bono turned the conversation to Christianity.

Bono: My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don't let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that's my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now that's not so easy.

Assayas: What about the God of the Old Testament? He wasn't so "peace and love"?

Bono: There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is. I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable. But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you're a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross. [Later on in the conversation]

Assayas: I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono: Yes, I think that's normal. It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma… I really believe we've moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn't make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I'd be interested to hear that.

Bono: That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Assayas: The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono: But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there's a mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let's face it, you're not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point. It should keep us humbled… It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.

Assayas: That's a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it's close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world's great thinkers. But Son of God, isn't that far-fetched?

Bono: No, it's not far-fetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. He doesn't let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I'm not saying I'm a teacher, don't call me teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying: "I'm the Messiah." I'm saying: "I am God incarnate." And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You're a bit eccentric. We've had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don't mention the "M" word! Because, you know, we're gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you're expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he's gonna keep saying this. So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we've been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had "King of the Jews" on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I'm not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that's far-fetched.

Lost in translation

At the 5:30 mark -

CNN host: Jay, you're a wealthy, single guy yet you still live at home with your mum. How come? Doesn't the bachelor life appeal to you? Having your own space?

Jay Chou: I don't think I'll move out. My parents divorced when I was a kid, and I've made up my mind that even if I get married someday, I'll still live with my mum so that I can take care of her and keep her company. I've been having this thought for many years. No matter what happens in the future, I'll live with my mum.

CNN host: [Laughs] You're kidding!

Jay Chou: Yeah, perhaps there are some cultural differences between Chinese and Western people. The Western kids grow up to break away from their families, to become totally independent and make their own lives, but I think Chinese people are very different. We value our roots a lot. No matter how much money you make outside, you still have to go home because we have this duty, this responsibility to take care of our parents. This is the difference I see, at least, from what I know.


I found this part of the interview particularly fascinating. I had a similar conversation with my British friends when I told them that I would live with my parents when I returned to Singapore. In the Western context, living with one's parents post-university comes close to an admission of personal failure - you do so because you cannot make it on your own. It's also seen as a compromise of personal freedom and individuality, signifying a prolonged adolescence and an inability to fully assume the responsibilities of real adulthood. It’s also seen as a failure of parenting, the failure of parents to equip their children to be independent adults. A recent example would be Matthew McConaughey's character in Failure to Launch. The title says it all. As a single man living at home with his parents, he is like a rocket that has failed to launch. In fact, his parents are so desperate to get rid of him that they hire Sarah Jessica Parker's character, a "professional motivator", specifically to achieve just that.

Almost the exact opposite is true in the Asian context. Asian graduates tend to live with their parents until they get married. In fact, parents are often dismayed when their unmarried adult children express a desire to live on their own (if they work in the same city where their parents live). Parents like to be able to provide and care for their children as long as possible, even when they are grown. Family unity is more important than individual liberty, and generally, the most "acceptable" reason for moving out of your parents' home is to start a family of your own.

Instead of individual independence, in the Asian context, being a responsible adult includes caring for your elderly parents. The Confucian ideal of "filial piety", a respect for parents and ancestors, is one of the most important virtues in Chinese culture. The point of view that Jay Chou expresses in this interview is not considered strange, but admirable. Though not all families would choose the same living arrangements, many adult children choose to live near their elderly parents so as to better care for them. There are also attendant benefits for these adult children, such as free child care for grandchildren, which elderly parents/grandparents are more than happy to provide in most instances. This happily symbiotic relationship is openly encouraged by the Singapore government through generous public housing subsidies.

This is not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other. Each culture tends to be built around a dominant cultural narrative and the potential ill-effects are not hard to see. Excessive individualism can lead to an overly atomised society in which people only care about their own selfish interests, to the detriment of the greater good. Casual viewing of any Chinese TV series based on a large family would sufficiently inform the viewer of the potential pitfalls of exalting the family above all else. These shows are generally peopled by overbearing patriarchs, unreasonable mothers-in-laws and beleaguered adult children.

Different cultures hold up different versions of the good life and so very often, people are driven into the ground chasing after it. Tim Keller points out that the Bible says that all cultures are fallen (because all people are fallen), and that all cultures oppress. Every single culture, puts in front of men and women certain objects and says, "If you don't have them, you're nothing. If you don't have them, you have no worth, no significance. Your existence isn't justified."

Traditional societies tend to make the family unit and the clan into an absolute, ultimate thing. This can lead to honor killings, the treatment of women as chattel, and violence toward gay people. Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty and profit.

In Ezekiel 14:3, God says about the elders of Israel, "These men have set up their idols in their hearts." ... God was saying that the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.


In Romans 1:21-25 St Paul shows that idolatry is not only one sin among many, but what is fundamentally wrong with the human heart:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him... They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. (Romans 1:21, 25)

Paul goes on to make a long list of sins that create misery and evil in the world, but they all find their roots in this soil, the inexorable human drive for "god-making." In other words, idolatry is always the reason we ever do anything wrong. No one grasped this better than Martin Luther. In his Larger Catechism (1528) and also his Treatise on Good Works he wrote that the Ten Commandments begin with a commandment against idolatry. Why does this come first in the order? Because, he argued, the fundamental motivation behind law-breaking is idolatry. We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one. Why do we ever fail to love or keep promises or live unselfishly? Of course, the general answer is "because we are weak and sinful", but the specific answer in any actual circumstance is that there is something you feel you must have to be happy, that is more important to your heart than God himself. We would not lie unless first we had made something — human approval, reputation, power over others, financial advantage — more important and valuable to our hearts than the grace and favor of God. The secret to change is always to identify and dismantle the basic idols of the heart.

Tim Keller in Counterfeit Gods,
and How to Find Your Rival Gods

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God ... one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.

Simone Weil

Good Friday

A well-written review of Tim Keller's new book. Very timely too.


Reasons for Good Friday
By Michael Gerson

In a flood of bestsellers by skeptics and atheists charging a nonexistent God with crimes against humanity, Timothy Keller stands out as an effective counterpoint and a defender of the faith. His new book, "The Reason for God," makes a tight, accessible case for reasoned religious belief. And his national tour of college campuses has drawn overflowing crowds. "This isn't because I'm well known," Keller told me, "but because of the topic."

But Keller is likely to be better known in short order. His 5,000-strong Manhattan congregation is a model of outreach to 20- and 30-something artists and professionals. Keller's church symbolizes an emerging urban evangelicalism -- at a recent service, he recalls, a Republican speechwriter sat near a songwriter for Madonna. Many of Keller's parishioners are deeply skeptical of the religious right, untroubled by evolution and begin their complex spiritual journeys with serious doubts.

Keller explains that members of this rising generation are not so much relativists as they are philosophically rootless. "They have a deep morality, but they have no idea why." And they generally share some objections to religious belief: that traditional faith is exclusive and intolerant and that the existence of suffering is inconsistent with the existence of a loving God.

A centerpiece argument of Keller's response might be called the myth of secular neutrality. "Skeptics argue that they have the intellectual high ground," he says, "but they are really making assumptions as well." An absolute doubt -- claiming that all truth is culturally conditioned -- can work only if it exempts itself from doubt and assumes the cultural superiority of rationalism. Raging against evil and suffering in the world assumes a moral standard of good and evil that naturalism cannot provide. Keller argues that the main criticisms of religion require "blind faith" of their own, and he urges people to begin by doubting their doubts.

But while Keller argues that all worldviews contain assumptions of faith, reason is not futile. It may not provide proof, but it does provide clues. The fundamental regularities of the universe that improbably favor life; the artistic beauty that reaches beyond materialism; the sense of love and duty that seems so much more than evolutionary instinct -- Keller argues that only theism explains our lived experience and deepest desires. "God is the only thing that makes sense of what we love."

At the center of his book is an interesting case study: human rights. Some skeptics argue that the universe is an empty, impersonal void -- that life has no meaning or value beyond its material makeup -- and yet they try to maintain the importance of human dignity as if still living in a world of meaning and justice. "If morality is relative," Keller asks, "why isn't social justice as well?" Why isn't the rule of the strong -- the clear teaching of nature -- just as valid as a belief in the rights of the weak? A materialist, Keller argues, can only respond with sentiment.

The final part of Keller's book will be the most difficult for many readers to accept. He contends that the God of space and time is somehow uniquely found in Jesus of Nazareth. The earliest Christians knew this was a "scandal" often interpreted by others as blasphemy. Sophisticated, first-century Greeks and Romans were no more likely to believe in risen corpses than we are today.

Yet Keller argues for the reliability of the New Testament accounts. And he makes the case that the Christian message has an advantage: It is more than an intellectual theory. In his book, Keller quotes Simone Weil, the French mystic and social activist, who made a practice of repeating Christian poetry during her migraines: "It was during one of these recitations that . . . Christ himself came down and took possession of me. In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God."

Good Friday calls attention to a final argument as to why the God of the philosophers, however useful, may not be enough. In the end, the problem of human suffering cannot be minimized or explained away -- but in the Christian story, that suffering has been shared. Perhaps, in our own darkness, we need the imprisoned God, the scarred God, the shamed God, the despairing God.

The poet Jane Kenyon grasped at this mystery of Good Friday:

The God of curved space, the dry

God, is not going to help us, but the son

whose blood spattered

the hem of his mother's robe.

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:4-6

Christmas Greetings: East Timor PM to Osama

East Timor's Prime Minister, Jose Ramos-Horta, sent a message of peace and goodwill via the BBC to Osama bin Laden. Ramos-Horta won a Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to the Indonesian occupation of his tiny homeland, which won its independence in 1999 in a U.N.-sponsored ballot. Listen to his message here.

ON this occasion when we are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, my words, words of peace, are sent to my brother somewhere in the mountains, in the caves, of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden. Yes, I consider you to be a brother.

We share some common beliefs, beliefs that come from God the Almighty, that teach us about love and compassion. Yes, there are some differences between yourself, my brother Osama bin Laden, and myself. The differences are that while you seem to have a profound resentment towards those who have done centuries of harm to Muslims, and today to Palestinians - I do understand those grievances - and yet I fail to understand why you carry this resentment, this anger, on to attacking innocent civilians, and that includes also Arabs and Muslims who do not share your vision of Islam.

I come from a small country, East Timor, that was invaded by the largest Muslim country in the world. I lost brothers and sisters, yet I do not hate one single Muslim, I do not hate one single Indonesian. That's the only difference between you and me, my brother Osama bin Laden. I beg you to rethink and extend your love, your solidarity, your friendship, the same ones you feel about Palestinians, extend to the rest of the world, extend to Europeans, to Christians. You will then win them over that way, more than through hatred and violence. I thank you, may God Almighty and Merciful, bless us all.


If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

Hermann Hesse

C. S. Lewis writing just after the second world war.

EVERYONE says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. "That sort of talk makes them sick," they say. And half of you already want to ask me, "I wonder how'd you feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?"

So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you ... what I could do--I can do precious little--I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us." There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?

It is going to be hard enough, anyway, but I think there are two things we can do to make it easier. When you start mathematics you do not begin with calculus; you begin with simple addition. In the same way, if we really want (but all depends on really wanting) to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo. One might start with forgiving one's husband or wife, or parents or children, or the nearest N.C.O., for something they have done or said in the last week. That will probably keep us busy for the moment. And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself!

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently "Love your neighbor" does not mean "feel fond of him" or "find him attractive." I ought to have seen that before, because of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can at look some of the things I have done with loathing and horror. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this is a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

From The Joyful Christian

Everything sad is going to come untrue

Somewhat belatedly, I came across this short sermon that Tim Keller gave at the 9-11 Service of Peace and Rememberance for Victims' Families this year in New York. Slightly more than a year ago, on the 11th of September, I went on a sunset cruise around Manhattan (one in a series of activities organised by Columbia for incoming international grad students). The cruise had been specifically arranged for this date because every year they commerate the day with the Tribute in Light. From where the twin towers used to stand, two towering beams of light shine, in turns a piercing blue and a ghostly white, illuminating the velvety night sky.

I guess that nothing makes us doubt God as much as suffering, in our own lives and in the world around us, and so this is a rather apt follow-up to the previous post.

This transcript is provided by Michael Keller at kellered.blogspot.com


SERVICE OF REMEMBRANCE AND PEACE
FOR 9-11 VICTIMS’ FAMILIES
Ground Zero/St Paul’s Chapel
Tim Keller
Sep 10, 2006

As a minister, of course, I’ve spent countless hours with people who are struggling and wrestling with the biggest question - the WHY question in the face of relentless tragedies and injustices. And like all ministers or any spiritual guides of any sort, I scramble to try to say something to respond and I always come away feeling inadequate and that’s not going to be any different today. But we can’t shrink from the task of responding to that question. Because the very best way to honor the memories of the ones we’ve lost and love is to live confident, productive lives. And the only way to do that is to actually be able to face that question. We have to have the strength to face a world filled with constant devastation and loss. So where do we get that strength? How do we deal with that question? I would like to propose that, though we won’t get all of what we need, we may get some of what we need 3 ways: by recognizing the problem for what it is, and then by grasping both an empowering hint from the past and an empowering hope from the future.

First, we have to recognize that the problem of tragedy, injustice and suffering is a problem for everyone no matter what their beliefs are. Now, if you believe in God and for the first time experience or see horrendous evil, you rightly believe that that is a problem for your belief in God, and you’re right – and you say, “How could a good and powerful God allow something like this to happen?”

But it’s a mistake (though a very understandable mistake) to think that if you abandon your belief in God it somehow is going to make the problem easier to handle. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail says that if there was no higher divine Law, there would be no way to tell if a particular human law was unjust or not. So think. If there is no God or higher divine Law and the material universe is all there is, then violence is perfectly natural—the strong eating the weak! And yet somehow, we still feel this isn’t the way things ought to be. Why not? Now I’m not going to get philosophical at a time like this. I’m just trying to make the point that the problem of injustice and suffering is a problem for belief in God but it is also a problem for disbelief in God---for any set of beliefs. So abandoning belief in God does not really help in the face of it. OK, then what will?

Second, I believe we need to grasp an empowering hint from the past. Now at this point, I’d like to freely acknowledge that every faith - and we are an interfaith gathering today – every faith has great resources for dealing with suffering and injustice in the world. But as a Christian minister I know my own faith’s resources the best, so let me simply share with you what I’ve got. When people ask the big question, “Why would God allow this or that to happen?” There are almost always two answers. The one answer is: Don’t question God! He has reasons beyond your finite little mind. And therefore, just accept everything. Don’t question. The other answer is: I don’t know what God’s up to – I have no idea at all about why these things are happening. There’s no way to make any sense of it at all. Now I’d like to respectfully suggest the first of these answers is too hard and the second is too weak. The second is too weak because, though of course we don’t have the full answer, we do have an idea, an incredibly powerful idea.

One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God identifies with the suffering. There are all these great texts that say things like this: If you oppress the poor, you oppress to me. I am a husband to the widow. I am father to the fatherless. I think the texts are saying God binds up his heart so closely with suffering people that he interprets any move against them as a move against him. This is powerful stuff! But Christianity says he goes even beyond that. Christians believe that in Jesus, God’s son, divinity became vulnerable to and involved in - suffering and death! He didn’t come as a general or emperor. He came as a carpenter. He was born in a manger, no room in the inn.

But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack. And so you see what this means? John Stott puts it this way. John Stott wrote: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

And lastly, we have to grasp an empowering hope for the future. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and even more explicitly in the Christian Scriptures we have the promise of resurrection. In Daniel 12:2-3 we read: Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake….[They]… will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and…like the stars for ever and ever. And in John 11 we hear Jesus say: I am the resurrection and the life! Now this is what the claim is: That God is not preparing for us merely some ethereal, abstract spiritual existence that is just a kind of compensation for the life we lost. Resurrection means the restoration to us of the life we lost. New heavens and new earth means this body, this world! Our bodies, our homes, our loved ones—restored, returned, perfected and beautified! Given back to us!

In the year after 9-11 I was diagnosed with cancer, and I was treated successfully. But during that whole time I read about the future resurrection and that was my real medicine. In the last book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee wakes up, thinking everything is lost and discovering instead that all his friends were around him, he cries out: "Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?"

The answer is YES. And the answer of the Bible is YES. If the resurrection is true, then the answer is yes. Everything sad is going TO COME UNTRUE.

Oh, I know many of you are saying, “I wish I could believe that.” And guess what? This idea is so potent that you can go forward with that. To even want the resurrection, to love the idea of the resurrection, long for the promise of the resurrection even though you are unsure of it, is strengthening. I John 3:2-3. Beloved, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope purify themselves as he is pure.” Even to have a hope in this is purifying.

Listen to how Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”

That is strong and that last sentence is particularly strong…but if the resurrection is true, it’s absolutely right. Amen.

The Da Vinci Code

The most hilarious movie-cum-book-review, ever.


The New Yorker
HEAVEN CAN WAIT
by ANTHONY LANE
"The Da Vinci Code."
2006-05-29


The story of “The Da Vinci Code” goes like this. A dead Frenchman is found laid out on the floor of the Louvre. His final act was to carve a number of bloody markings into his own flesh, indicating, to the expert eye, that he was preparing to roll in fresh herbs and sear himself in olive oil for three minutes on each side. This, however, is not the conclusion reached by Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a professor of symbology at Harvard, who happens to be in Paris. Questioned by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), the investigating policeman at the scene, Langdon starts rabbiting about pentacles and pagans and God knows what. But what does God know, exactly? And can He keep His mouth shut?

Help arrives in the shape of Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a police cryptographer. She turns out to be the granddaughter of the deceased, and a dab hand at reversing down Paris streets in a car the size of a pissoir. This is useful, since she and Langdon are soon on the run, convinced that Fache is about to nail the professor on a murder charge—the blaming of Americans, on any pretext, being a much loved Gallic sport. Our hero, needing somebody to trust, does the same dumb thing that every fleeing innocent has done since Robert Donat in “The Thirty-nine Steps.” He and Sophie visit a cheery old duffer in the countryside and spill every possible bean. In this case, the duffer is Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), who lectures them on the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. We get a flashback to the council in question, and I must say that, though I have recited the Nicene Creed throughout my adult life, I never realized that it was originally formulated in the middle of a Beastie Boys concert.

Fache is not the only hunter on Langdon’s scent. There is also Silas (Paul Bettany), a cowled albino monk whose hobbies include self-flagellation, multiple homicide, and irregular Latin verbs. He works for Opus Dei, the Catholic organization so intensely secretive that its American headquarters are tucked away in a seventeen-story building on Lexington Avenue. Silas answers to Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), who in turn answers to his cell phone, his Creator, and not much else. Between them, they track Langdon and Sophie to England, where a new villain, hitherto suspected by nobody except the audience, is prevented from shooting his quarry because, unusual for London, there is a gaggle of nuns in the way—God’s Work if ever I saw it, although I wouldn’t say so to a member of Opus Dei.

The task of the Bishop and his hit man is to thwart the unveiling of what Teabing modestly calls “the greatest secret in modern history,” so powerful that, “if revealed, it would devastate the very foundations of Christianity.” Later, realizing that this sounds a little meek and mild, he stretches it to “the greatest coverup in human history.” As a rule, you should beware of any movie in which characters utter lines of dialogue whose proper place is on the advertising poster. (Just imagine Sigourney Weaver, halfway through “Alien,” turning to John Hurt and explaining, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”) There is a nasty sense in “The Da Vinci Code” that, not unlike Langdon, we are being bullied into taking its pronouncements at face value. Such nagging has a double effect. First, any chance to enjoy the proceedings as hokum—as a whip-cracking quest along the lines of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”—is rapidly stifled and stilled. Second, one’s natural reaction to arm-twisters of any description is to wriggle free, turn around, and kick them in the pentacles. So here goes.

There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” With that one word, “renowned,” Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.” What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,” one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

Should we mind that forty million readers—or, to use the technical term, “lemmings”—have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text? I am aware of the argument that, if a tale has enough grip, one can for a while forget, if not forgive, the crumbling coarseness of the style; otherwise, why would I still read “The Day of the Jackal” once a year? With “The Da Vinci Code,” there can be no such excuse. Even as you clear away the rubble of the prose, what shows through is the folly of the central conceit, and, worse still, the pride that the author seems to take in his theological presumption. How timid—how undefended in their powers of reason—must people be in order to yield to such preening? Are they reading “The Da Vinci Code” because everybody on the subway is doing the same, and, if so, why, when they reach their stop, do they not realize their mistake and leave it on the seat, to be gathered up by the next sucker? Despite repeated attempts, I have never managed to crawl past page 100. As I sat down to watch “The Da Vinci Code,” therefore, I was in the lonely, if enviable, position of not actually knowing what happens.

Stumbling out from the final credits, tugging nervously at my goatee, I was none the wiser. The film is directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman, the master wordsmith who brought us “Batman & Robin.” I assumed that such an achievement would result in Goldsman’s being legally banned from any of the verbal professions, but, no, here he is yet again. As far as I am qualified to judge, the film remains unswervingly loyal to the book, displaying an obedience that Silas could not hope to match. I welcome this fidelity, because it allows us to propose a syllogism. The movie is baloney; the movie is an accurate representation of the book; therefore, the book is also baloney, although it takes even longer to consume. Movie history is awash, of course, with fine pictures that have been made from daft or unreadable books; indeed, you are statistically more likely to squeeze a decent movie out of a potboiler than you are out of a novel of high repute. The trouble with Howard’s film is that it is far too dense and talkative to function efficiently as a thriller, while also being too credulous and childish to bear more than a second’s scrutiny as an exploration of religious history or spiritual strife. There is plenty going on here, from gunfights to masked orgiastic rituals and mini-scenes of knights besieging Jerusalem, yet the outcome feels at once ponderous and vacant, like a damp and deconsecrated Victorian church.

This is grim news for Tom Hanks, who has served Howard gamely in the past. How does the genial mermaid-lover of “Splash,” or the jockish team player of “Apollo 13,” feel about being stranded in this humorless grind? Apart from Paul Bettany, who finds a leached and pale-eyed terror in his avenging angel, the other players seem bereft. Molina, so violently vulnerable in “Spider-Man 2,” is given no room to breathe, and, as for Audrey Tautou, it is surely no coincidence that Howard sought out and hired almost the only young French actress who emits not a hint of sexual radiation. “The Da Vinci Code” may ask us to believe that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, that she bore him a child, and that the Catholic Church has spent two thousand years not merely concealing this but enforcing its distaste for the feminine (and thus for all bodily delight), but did the movie have to be quite so pallid and prudish about breaking the news? Whose side is it on, anyway?

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, except at Columbia Pictures, where the power lunches won’t even be half-started. The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith. Meanwhile, art historians can sleep easy once more, while fans of the book, which has finally been exposed for the pompous fraud that it is, will be shaken from their trance. In fact, the sole beneficiaries of the entire fiasco will be members of Opus Dei, some of whom practice mortification of the flesh. From now on, such penance will be simple—no lashings, no spiked cuff around the thigh. Just the price of a movie ticket, and two and a half hours of pain.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/060529crci_cinema

Ravi Zacharias on the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ

On the second night Dr Zacharias spoke about Jesus' claims as the only way to God in a pluralistic world. He is, of course, very well-equipped to discuss this subject. Having been born into the Brahman caste in Delhi, the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, he grew up surrounded by Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. It was at the age of 17, on the bed of suicide, searching for meaning, searching for the answers to life's basic questions, that he came to Christ.

He talked about how there were four fundamental questions in life: origin, meaning, morality and destiny. How did I come into being? What brings life meaning? How do I know right from wrong? Where am I headed after I die? We have all asked ourselves these questions, he said, but only Jesus Christ gives us all the answers. He gave us several reasons why.

Firstly, Jesus gave a very accurate description of our malady. He told us that none of us escape this condition, and that we will end up tumbling down the slippery slope if we continue to deny it. We all fall short of God's standards, not primarily in our actions, but in our very intents and motives. The heart is desperately wicked.

He told us a very funny story about two brothers.

Two brothers were notoriously immoral. They were synonymous with the vice that had overtaken their city. When one of them suddenly died, the surviving brother asked the local pastor to perform the funeral service. He offered him an enormous sum of money if, in his eulogy, he would refer to his deceased brother as a saint. After much pondering, the pastor agreed. As the service came to an end, the pastor (in the thick of his description of the departed individual) said, “The man we have come to bury was a thief. In fact, he deserves every vile description the mind can muster. He was depraved, immoral, lewd, hateful, and the scum of the earth. But compared to his brother, he was a saint!”

The pastor may not have received the promised gift, but he certainly got across a vital point! We set up an arbitrary hierarchy of vices, and then exonerate ourselves by how far we are from the bottom.

From A Slice of Infinity: The Sin Standard

The trouble is, we are all saints compared to somebody else. But the truth is we are all as equally wretched in our hearts. And if we do not understand this, there is no way to stop the human heart. He spoke of an encounter with an aid worker from on an airplane. She told him chillingly that she had just rescued an 18 month old baby girl from the hands of a man fuelled by snake blood and hard liquor, intent on sexually abusing her. Never in her life had she seen such a thing. Can anyone say that that is not evil? Not just the actions of that man, but also the people that offered her to him. In the history of humanity, there are some things that have transpired, things that we have done to each other, that are just pure evil. There are really no other words to describe it. The unchecked human heart can justify anything. It was G. K. Chesterton who said that, When a Man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything.


Secondly, Jesus provides uniquely for our malady. Dr Zacharias said that Christianity is not an ethical system calling us to a more moral life. Christianity is about becoming a self that the self itself, could not produce. The depravity of man is the condition of his heart - the moral life cannot fix this. He talked about how he was asked to speak at the United Nations Annual Prayer breakfast about absolutes in a relativistic world. He was asked not to specifically mention religion - he reached a compromise with the organisers that would allow him to speak about his personal beliefs in the last five minutes of the speech. He spoke about the absolutes of evil, how it exists, justice, how we all seek it, love, how relationships of love are of fundamental importance to us and forgiveness, how we all need it sometimes. Twenty minutes had passed and the audience was in full agreement with him. In the last five minutes he shared with them how he believed that it is only on the cross of Christ that all these absolutes converge. We see the harsh reality of sin, borne entirely by Jesus on the cross. On the cross, Jesus did not just suffer physical torment - he suffered infinite separation and alienation from the Father whom he had known and loved for all eternity. Death. God the Son went through hell on our behalves, that we may never have to bear it, if we repent and acknowledge him as the Lord of our lives. This speaks of God's justice, in that sin is punished, but it speaks also powerfully of his love, in that he bore it in himself. And in all this, we have every hope of forgiveness.

He told a very moving story about his encounter with Sheikh Talal Sider in Palestine, a Hamas sheikh. He spoke about how killing innocents is wrong, but now suicide bombing had become the only way that they could fight. He had lost several of his children to the conflict.

Dr Zacharias asked him if he remembered the story of Abraham or Ibrahim, who walked up a mountain, not too far from where they sitting, 5000 years ago. He was following God's orders, to sacrifice his son. As the axe is about to fall on the child, what does the Lord say?

"Stop, I will provide," replied the Sheikh.

Dr Zacharias told him, that on another hill, also not too far from here, God did not stop the axe from falling on his own Son. Until we receive the Son that God has paid with, he told the Sheikh, we will be paying with our sons and daughters in battlefields all over the world. When they wrong you, you want to wrong them. It goes on and on. But when insult and violence was hurled upon Christ, sin didn’t bounce back. Sin stopped.

The Sheikh was silent.

As Dr Zacharias stood to leave, the Sheikh reached out and embraced him tightly. "I hope I see you again," he said.


Thirdly, all philosophy has been about the search for unity in diversity.

In 585 B.C., a man named Thales correctly predicted a solar eclipse. It was Thales' love for ordered knowledge that gave birth to philosophy, but Thales fervently sought the answer to another question. He knew the world was made of an infinite variety of things — plants, animals, clouds. What, he wondered, was the one basic element that pulled it all together? Thales thought that element must be water, but his students went on to expand the underlying reality to four elements—earth, air, water, and fire. Since then the quest for the philosopher has been to find unity in diversity.

This very search has made inroads into our cultures. For example, the word quintessence literally means "the fifth essence." Every American coin reads E Pluribus Unum—out of the many, one. Out of our diversity, unity. And the very word university means to find unity in diversity.

How did diversity come about, and how do we locate or identify the unity?

When you think about it, diversity is on every side. We speak to others. We love others. There is an I-You relationship with which we live. May I suggest that only in the Christian faith can these diversities be explained. There is unity and diversity in life because there is unity and diversity in the first cause of our being — the Triune God. Before the creation of man, personhood, love, and communication existed in the one Triune God — what we call the Holy Trinity.

The Trinity gives us a key to understanding unity in diversity, for there is an implicit difference in the persons within the Godhead that does not negate equality of essence. We too have a unity of essential humanity, originally made in the image of the Triune God. Jesus spoke of how we recover that which was lost.

From A Slice of Infinity: Thales, Unity, and Diversity

We long for this unity in diversity within, between passion and reason, rationality and desire, between body, mind and soul. There is no other concept in the world as diverse and unified as the Trinity. God from the beginning is a being in relationship. Made in His image, our hearts hunger for relationship, and all other relationships are secondary until we find relationship with Christ himself.

William Temple, the renowned archbishop of Canterbury, defined worship as quickening the conscience by the holiness of God, feeding the mind with the truth of God, purging the imagination by the beauty of God, opening the heart to the love of God, and devoting the will to the purpose of God.

We were made to live lives of worship, for all things come together in Christ.

Ravi Zacharias on the Problem of Evil

As part of Holy Week (or Jesus Week, or Passion Week), Ravi Zacharias came to speak at Columbia. I attended his first talk where he addressed the problem of evil - this was meant to be an extension of the discussion that was started at the Veritas Forum. I've heard of Ravi Zacharias but I've never really heard him speak (I believe he has a weekly radio programme) or read any of his books. He spoke at the Roone Arledge Auditorium. The place was packed, and with good reason. He's a very charismatic and very brilliant speaker. I think we all walked out of that auditorium knowing God just that much better.

His first response to the question of 'Why does evil exist?' and 'How can there be a good God if evil exists?', was to point out that the questioner needed a philosophical and existential basis on which to justify the very question. He spoke about how the problem of evil is not merely a problem, but a mystery. Quoting Gabriel Marcel, "A mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity". In other words, when one is faced with questions where there is no objective standpoint which one can adopt to answer such questions, we have a "genuine" mystery. The subject is involved in, and a part of, that about which he is asking. A mystery is thus "a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem".

He told a very funny story about attending a lecture at Cambridge where Stephen Hawking discussed the question "Am I determined or am I free?" After lengthy and brilliant analysis that weighed arguments on both sides of the question, Hawking concluded with, "So are we determined? Yes. But since we do not know what is determined, we might as well not be."

There is no neutral standpoint in answering this question; no worldview proposes an answer without also smuggling in life's essential purpose. Additionally, how does one really raise the problem of evil in an amoral world? The question would make no sense. A purely materialistic understanding of reality would have to admit that at the bottom, the idea that we are equal is a blatant lie. The logical conclusion of naturalism would be what Nietzsche rightly concluded. It is only the under-dog, he says, that believes in equality. It is only the groveling and inefficient mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling. "'There are no higher men,' says the crowd in the market place. 'We are all equal; man is man; in the presence of God we are all equal!' In the presence of God, indeed! But I tell you that God is dead!" so thunders Zarathustra. For Nietzsche, the superman seeks to elevate himself to the heights of power by trampling upon the masses. "Disregard your neighbors! Man is something to be surpassed! Surpass yourself at the expense of your neighbor," says Zarathustra.

Dr Zacharias pointed out that materialism does not give us the resources to say that racism is wrong. If this world is all there is and it all ends with the burning up of the sun, right and wrong are just purely constructed categories that have no independent truth. Objective moral values must exist if we are of essential worth. And we are of essential worth only if we are created by a being of essential worth, and not the random result of natural accident.

How many times does Jesus question his questioners? Dr Zacharias asked. Some of the Herodians and the Pharisees, trying to trick Jesus, asked him, "Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" But as Luke records for us, He saw through their duplicity and said to them, "Show me a denarius. Whose portrait and inscription are on it?"
"Caesar's," they replied.
He said to them, "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

Dr Zacharias pointed out that Jesus could have asked them another question. “Whose image do you bear?”


He argued that objective moral values only exist if God exists. Because objective moral values do exist, God exists. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once said, “if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind.

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that 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. As that unhappy poet A E Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless
Nature
Will neither know nor care.

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”


Dr Zacharias went on to share a very funny story that he’s also written about here:

Some time ago I was speaking at a university in England, when a rather exasperated person in the audience made his attack upon God.

“There cannot possibly be a God,” he said, “with all the evil and suffering that exists in the world!”

I asked, “When you say there is such a thing as evil, are you not assuming that there is such a thing as good?”

“Of course,” he retorted.

“But when you assume there is such a thing as good, are you not also assuming that there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to distinguish between good and evil?”

“I suppose so,” came the hesitant and much softer reply.

“If, then, there is a moral law,” I said, “you must also posit a moral law giver. But that is who you are trying to disprove and not prove. If there is no transcendent moral law giver, there is no absolute moral law. If there is no moral law, there really is no good. If there is no good there is no evil. I am not sure what your question is!”

There was silence and then he said, “What, then, am I asking you?”

He was visibly jolted that at the heart of his question lay an assumption that contradicted his own conclusion.

You see friends, the skeptic not only has to give an answer to his or her own question, but also has to justify the question itself. And even as the laughter subsided I reminded him that his question was indeed reasonable, but that his question justified my assumption that this was a moral universe. For if God is not the author of life, neither good nor bad are meaningful terms.

This seems to constantly elude the critic who thinks that by raising the question of evil, a trap has been sprung to destroy theism. When in fact, the very raising of the question ensnares the skeptic who raised the question. A hidden assumption comes into the open. Moreover, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, the moment we acknowledge something as being “better”, we are committing ourselves to an objective point of reference.

The disorienting reality to those who raise the problem of evil is that the Christian can be consistent when he or she talks about the problem of evil, while the skeptic is hard-pressed to respond to the question of good in an amoral universe. In short, the problem of evil is not solved by doing away with the existence of God; the problem of evil and suffering must be resolved while keeping God in the picture.

From A Slice of Infinity: The Polemic Shot in the Foot

Dr Zacharias said that ultimately, we must ask ourselves this question: If the evil around me bothers me that much, does the evil within me bother me, then? And it must, he said. For that evil within, only Christ has the answer.

"Creed" by Steve Turner

This poem was introduced to me by a very wise man from Oxford.

We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin.
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don't hurt anyone,
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before during
and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy's OK
We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything's getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated.
You can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there's something in horoscopes,
UFO's and bent spoons;
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha
Mohammed and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher although we think
his good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same,
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of
creation sin heaven hell God and salvation.

We believe that after death comes The Nothing
because when you ask the dead what happens
they say Nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied,
then it's compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson.
What's selected is average.
What's average is normal.
What's normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between
warfare and bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors
and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good.
It's only his behaviour that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth
that is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust. History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds.

Nicholas Wolterstorff on Suffering and Love

To continue the discussion on suffering - beautiful words from Nicholas Wolterstorff.

CRIES OF THE OPPRESSED

... Slowly I began to see that the Bible is a book about justice; but what a strange and haunting form of justice! Not our familiar modern Western justice of no one invading one's right to determine one's life as one will. Rather the justice of the widow, the orphan, and the alien. A society is just when all the little ones, all the defenseless ones, all the unprotected ones, have been brought back into community. Biblical justice is the shepherd leaving the corral to look for the hundredth one and then throwing a feast when the one is found.

LAMENT FOR A SON

This was all before. I now live after: after the death of our son, Eric. My life has been divided into before and after.

He loved the mountains, loved them passionately. They lured and beckoned him irresistably. Born on a snowy night in New Haven, he died twenty-five years later on a snowy slope in the Kaisergebirger, Austria.

Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap. My son is gone. The ache of loss sinks down and down, deep beyond all telling. How deep do souls go?

The suffering of the world has worked its way deeper inside me. I never knew that sorrow could be like this. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric's death. To live without the answer is precarious. It's hard to keep one's footing. I can only, with Job, endure in the fact of this deepest and most painful of mysteries. I believe in God the Father almightly, maker of heaven and earth and resurrecter of Jesus Christ. I also believe that my son's life was cut off in its prime. I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. My wound is an unanswered question. Lament and trust are in tension, like wood and string in bow.

To love is to run the risk of suffering. Or rather, in our world, to love is to suffer; there is no escaping it. Augustine knew it well, so Augustine recommended playing it safe, loving only what could neither die nor change on one - God and the soul. My whole tradition had taught me to love the world, to love the world as a gift, to love God through and in the world - wife, children, art, plants, learning. It had set me up for suffering. But it didn't tell me this: it didn't tell me that the invitation to love is the invitation to suffering. It let me find that out for myself, when it happened. Possibly it's best that way.

I haven't anything to say beyond what I've already said in Lament for a Son. There's a lot of silence in the book; no word too much, I hope. In the face of death we must not chatter. And when I spoke, I found myself moving often on the edges of language, trying to find images for what only images could say. The book is extremely particular; I do not speak about death, only about Eric's death. That's all I could do. But I have discovered, from what readers have told me, that in its particularity lies universality.

I see now, looking back, that in writing it I was struggling to own my grief. The modern Western practice is to disown one's grief: to get over it, to put it behind one, to get on with life, to put it out of mind, to ensure that it will not become part of one's identity. My struggle was to own it, to make it part of my identity: if you want to know who I am, you must know that I am one whose son died. But then to own it redemptively. It takes a long time to learn how to own one's suffering redemptively; one never finishes learning.

Though there are strands in the Reformed tradition for which sovereignty is God's principal attribute, I don't think I ever thought of God much in terms of sovereignty. God was majesty for me, indescribable majesty. And graciousness, goodness; God is the one who blesses, blessing calling for gratitude. To be human is to be the point in the cosmos where God's goodness is meant to find its answer in gratitude: John Calvin told me that.

Now everything was different. Who is this God looming over me? Majesty? I see no majesty. Grace? Can this be grace? I see nothing at all; dark clouds hide the face of God. Slowly the clouds lift. What I saw then was tears, a weeping God, suffering over my suffering. I had not realized that if God loves this world, God suffers; I had thoughtlessly supposed that God loved without suffering. I knew that divine love was the key. But I had not realized that the love that is the key is suffering love.

... It moved me deeply to discover one day that John Calvin alone among the classical theologians had written of the suffering of God. Whenever he wrote of it, it was, so far as I could discover, in the same context: that of a discussion of injustice. To wreak injustice on one of one's fellow human beings, said Calvin, is to wound and injure God; he said that the cry of those who suffer injustice is the cry of God.

And sometimes when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be. So I shall struggle to live with the reality of Christ's rising and death's dying. In my living, my son's dying will not be the last word.

Taken from 'The Grace that Shaped My Life', from the book Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians, edited by Kelly Monroe.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, a former president of the American Philosophical Association, has a joint appointment as a professor in the philosophy and religion departments, and the Divinity School, at Yale University.

The True Story

One of the other very striking things that Dr Ramachandra said on Thursday night, was that we should make use of our university years to establish firm, intellectual foundations for our faith. He noted that we ourselves might be the biggest stumbling block to thoughtful inquirers about the faith, with our superficial theology and our shallow understanding. I found this quite sobering.

Looking back, I see how the Lord has led me on this wonderful journey. I started out standing at the crossroads of faith and philosophy. I had always considered myself a Christian, but in my three years at Oxford I was steeped in secular philosophy, which left me rather confused for the first two years. In my third year I started, for the very first time in my life really, to fully grasp the truth of the gospel, emotionally and intellectually. I left Oxford convinced about Jesus, and convinced about the inadequacy of secular philosophy to bring about real, positive change, but I was not quite sure about what Jesus had to say to secular philosophy. In my six months or so in New York, God has been giving me some great answers.

I’m finding that my semesters have come to have certain themes to them. Last semester my philosophy classes covered the nature of justice, as well as secular liberalism and identity. This tied in very well with the Vision Campaign sermons at church which touched upon the nature of competing truth claims and the transformative power of the gospel. (See Liberalism, the Gospel and the Truth: Part One, Part Two). This semester, I’ve been taking courses in human rights, globalization, civil liberties and terrorism, and another course in modern philosophy. The focus is now more on the “practical” side of justice with a more global perspective. The Veritas Forum came along at just the right time – the speakers who came were all actively on the front lines of human rights and global justice, and it was fascinating to hear what they had to share. This semester, my human rights course in particular, has provided me with much food for thought.

We recently read one of Richard Rorty’s lectures, Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality (On Human Rights: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993). Rorty is a prominent atheist and a self-described “neo-pragmatist”. His philosophy is anti-metaphysical: he believes that the traditional philosophical pursuit of ultimate, objective, foundational knowledge (especially regarding the existence of God), is misguided and ineffective. In this article, he argues for a pragmatic approach in establishing the basis of a human rights culture.

He cites a report about the atrocities in Bosnia, commenting that Serbian murderers and rapists not think of themselves as violating human rights, for they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but Muslims. They are not being inhuman, but rather are discriminating between the true humans and the pseudo-humans. As Clifford Geertz puts it, “Men’s most importunate claims to humanity are cast in the accents of group pride.” By default, we tend to think of our humanity is a tribalistic and ethnocentric way – we think in terms of “them” and “us”.

He notes that outside the circle of post-Enlightenment European culture, most people are simply unable to understand why membership in a biological species automatically qualifies a person of another culture, one of the “others”, as a member of our moral community. On Thursday, Dr Ramachandra also similarly argued that the moral equality and dignity of all is not a concept that is innate to most cultures at all. India and China had extremely hierarchical, class-based societies, and most cultures are inherently tribalistic. Any culture that respects universal human rights, regardless of ethnic boundaries, have all, historically, been influenced by Judeo-Christian thought. The philosophy of the Enlightenment is deeply steeped in Judeo-Christian tradition. For example, Kant’s account of the respect due to rational agents tells us that you should extend the respect you feel for people like yourself to all “featherless bipeds”. Rorty goes on to say “This is an excellent suggestion, a good formula for secularizing the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man.” (See The Veritas Forum at Columbia – A slight diversion: Secular Humanism as a Christian Heresy).

He points out that “most people – especially people relatively untouched by the European Enlightenment – simply do not think of themselves as, first and foremost, a human being. Instead, they think of themselves as a certain good sort of human being – a sort defined by explicit opposition to a particularly bad sort.” Ironically, this is also true of the very Western intellectuals who have been touched by the European Enlightenment. Rorty says “I quite agree that [our Western human rights culture] is morally superior…” and “We Eurocentric intellectuals like to suggest that we, the paradigm humans, have overcome this primitive parochialism by using that paradigmatic human faculty, reason.”

But Rorty has a problem with the appeal to reason to justify human rights. Kant, following Plato, emphasised rationality as essential to being human. Plato believed that the best way to deal with immoral people was to demonstrate to them that they had an interest of which they were unaware, an interest in being rational, in acquiring self-knowledge. Plato saddled us with a distinction between the true and false self. That distinction was, by the time of Kant, transmuted into a distinction between categorical, rigid, moral obligation and flexible, empirically determinable self-interest. Kant claims that sentimentality has nothing to do with morality, that there is something distinctively and transculturally human called “the sense of moral obligation” which has nothing to do with love, friendship, trust or social solidarity.

Rorty thinks that appealing to common rationality as the basis for respecting human rights does not work. It does not do much good to get tribalistic, ethnocentric people to read Kant, and agree that one should not treat rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense – the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral community. For most white people, until very recently, most Black people did not so count. For the Nazis, Jews did not so count. For the Serbs, Muslims did not so count. He says, “Even if we do think that all human beings are rational, we tend to equate “human beings” with “member of our tribe”, we have always thought of human beings in terms of paradigm members of the species. We have contrasted us, the real humans, with rudimentary, or perverted, or deformed examples of humanity.”

Rorty’s solution is to give up rationality for sentimentality. He follows Hume in believing that “corrected sympathy, not law-discerning reason, is the fundamental moral capacity.” He cites contemporary philosopher Annette Baier, who would like us to get rid of both the Platonic idea that we have a true self, and the Kantian idea that it is rational to be moral. Instead, she advocates a Humean “progress of sentiments”, which consists in an increasing ability to see the similarities between ourselves and people very unlike us as outweighing the differences. Rorty calls this “sentimental education” and he describes it as manipulating the sentiments of future generations by telling them long, sad, sentimental stories which typically begin “Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,” or “Because she might become your daughter-in-law,” or “Because her mother would grieve for her.” It is novelists and stories that best capture our imagination and engage us morally, and Rorty believes that this is the best catalyst for change.

Reading this article it occurred to me, that the only way in which a story could both capture our sentiments and grip our reason, and really change our lives, is if it were about us, all of us, (and not just some distant, almost hypothetical "other"), and if it were true.

I think that Rorty’s dichotomy between sentimentality and rationality is a false one. It was the great C. S. Lewis who understood so very clearly that we have both the heart that yearns for God and the mind that seeks to know him. Lewis himself grew up loving the Greek and Norse mythology of old, but it was only after his conversion that he started to see in them glimpses of eternal truth.

Colin Duriez writes that it was J. R. R. Tolkien who helped him to see this, during a long night's talk in September of 1931. Tolkien argued that the Gospels have a satisfying imaginative as well as intellectual appeal, demanding a response from the whole person. He accused Lewis of an imaginative failure in not accepting their reality. What Tolkien did was help Lewis see how the two sides, reason and imagination, could be integrated. During the two men's night conversation on the Addison Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College, Tolkien showed Lewis how the two sides could be reconciled in the Gospel narratives. The Gospels had all the qualities of great human storytelling. But they portrayed a true event—God the storyteller entered his own story, in the flesh, and brought a joyous conclusion from a tragic situation. Suddenly Lewis could see that the nourishment he had always received from great myths and fantasy stories was a taste of that greatest, truest story—of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Lewis himself later argued in "Myth Became Fact," that “[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome.”

I was reminded of my favourite Tocqueville quote where he says, in a draft for the 1840 Preface to Democracy in America, 'Not a man in the world has ever found... the central point at which all the rays of general truth (which come together only in God) or even all the rays of particular truth meet. Men grasp fragments of truth, but never truth itself.'


Plato was right. We do have a true self.

(Charles Williams, Lewis' fellow Inkling, wrote about how the lover's romantic vision of the beloved was not confused, but illuminated. The lover sees through the beloved's flaws to the image of God. It is this truest and deepest self of the person - the person as created and potentially redeemed by God - that Williams called that person's "eternal identity.")

Kant was right. It is rational to be moral.

Hume was also right. Sentimentality matters to morality.

But they have only grasped fragments of the truth, which seem to contradict each other.


Tocqueville was right.

It is only in God, where all the rays of general and particular truth meet.


Postscript: Amazing. Just got back from church. Tonight, there was this guy who shared his experience of doing mission work, helping street boys, in Mexico City. He started out talking about how he came to faith. He was raised in a nice, secular family. He loved history and science and he only read nonfiction, because he thought that fiction was just a bunch of made-up stories with no real point to them. This is what he thought about religion for the longest time. But when he found himself confronted with the truth of Jesus Christ, he came to see that this was not just another story. It was, as C. S. Lewis said, a myth that was true. And that just totally changed his life.

Natural Disasters

I went to the Inter Varsity Fellowship meeting tonight - Dr Vinoth Ramachandra, the Sri Lankan theologian who spoke at the Veritas Forum, was back to answer more questions. We got to discuss suffering in greater depth. A girl in the audience asked him, why did God allow innocent people to suffer, especially in cases of natural disaster, where there was no human agency involved?

Dr Ramachandra spoke about how natural disasters were not "evil" in and of themselves - they were simply natural phenomena that God used to bring about ecological diversity. We all marvel at the beauty of the Himalayas, but if there had been no earthquakes, they would not have existed. What is "evil" about natural disasters is the unnecessary loss of life. Why did so many people die in the tsunami? Japan gets earthquakes and tsunamis far more frequently, but people do not die. The people in South Asia died of poverty and corruption. There was no early warning system. There were no preventative measures in place. Most of them had no means to escape. The mangrove swamps and coral reefs, nature's defense, had been destroyed by bad development throughout the years.

In New Orleans, it was also the poor who died in the hurricane. The New York Times has recently reported that House Republicans are going to issue "a blistering report ...that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina."

But you can still ask, why did God allow it to happen? Maybe we were responsible it, but God is all-powerful, why did he have to let the innocent people suffer? Dr Ramachandra pointed out that we sometimes assume that suffering must be punishment, and that only evil people "deserve" to suffer. But at the centre of our faith is an innocent man, the most innocent man who ever lived, the Son of God, who was crucified on our behalves. God does not watch our suffering from afar; he has entered our suffering and is counted amongst the most tragic of victims. And God did not only suffer on the cross. Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets speak of God's anguish: he suffers with a broken and spoilt creation, he suffers the pain of our rejection. In books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea, the image that comes up again and again is that of God, the faithful husband, and Israel, the faithless bride (in some instances Israel is even accused of "prostitution"). The language is vivid and graphic. God's anger reflects his passionate love for his people, for it is always the ones we love most who hurt us most deeply.

It was extremely poignant listening to Dr Ramachandra discuss the tsunami; Sri Lanka was one of the countries that was the hardest hit. Dr Ramachandra is deeply involved with working with the poor, those who were most devastated by the tsunami, helping them rebuild their lives. He spoke of having to comfort a friend who lost all five members of her family. But at no point did he turn around and blame God. He said that we often blamed God for our mistakes.

Free will gives us the occasion to reject God and choose evil, but it's a mystery why we do in fact choose to do that. Dr Ramachandra spoke about the absurdity of sin: Why do we choose to deny and reject our good and loving God? It makes no sense at all. (See The Veritas Forum at Columbia - A slight diversion: Reflections on the absurdity of sin) When we do indeed make this absurd choice, we find that everything breaks down. If the most important thing in our lives is family, tribe or nation, or wealth, power and acclaim, then we cannot love all groups of people and all persons. We might even harm others in order to further our own interests. But if God is our ultimate joy, we learn to want what he wants, and to love the way that he loves - sacrificially and indiscriminately.

God's answer to irrational rebellion, is not a theological explanation, but the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He bore the weight of the world's evil, the consequences of our sin, triumphing over it on the cross.

The essence of sin is "playing God... acting as if you, and your pleasure, were the end to which all things, God included, must be made to function as a means" (J. I. Packer). You can only explain what is reasonable, but the essence of sin is absurd. Further more, the fact that we, finite beings, cannot fathom the entirety of our Infinite Creator's plan, does not disprove his existence. (See Knowing Enough and The greatest thing you'll ever learn...)

Earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis are amoral natural phenomena.

It seems that it is we who are the natural disasters.

The Veritas Forum at Columbia

What is a Veritas Forum?

Veritas Forums are university events that engage students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life.

We invite people with differing worldviews, religions, and ideas to participate, ask questions, and join discussions in order to explore true life together, and we encourage participants to bring friends who are engaged in the exploration of life’s hardest questions.

From: www.veritas.org

“What is the biggest problem among today’s students?” Billy Graham recalled asking former Harvard president Derek Bok. The president answered, “Emptiness.” Started up by a group of Harvard students (hence Veritas, which is their school motto) in 1992, in response to the culture of fragmented scholars experiencing this “emptiness” within their own community, Veritas has taken root in more than over 50 campuses across America.

Exactly a week ago at Columbia, we had our annual Veritas forum –
“Exploring True Life. Responding to Suffering.”
This was my first Veritas Forum, ever, and I have just been so blessed by it. It was truly a privilege to grapple with some of life’s toughest questions in the company of very many distinguished speakers, alongside people of differing worldviews. I think that it is in engaging each other in respectful, meaningful conversation, that we all come to understand more of what is indeed, true life.


People Suffer – Who Cares?
A Secular Humanist and Christian Dialogue

The first session on Monday saw Professor Philip Kitcher, the Columbia University John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, in conversation with Dr. Vinoth Ramachandra, a theologian from Sri Lanka who has worked for decades among the destitute of his war-torn island.

Dr. Ramachandra started out by sharing some of his experiences with suffering – experiences that most of us are fortunate enough not to encounter daily, if at all. He spoke of comforting a friend who had lost her whole family to the tsunami, sitting by a four-year old child and watching him die of a disease that doesn’t exist in the West anymore, dealing with violence and tragedy on a daily basis, and watching his aged father slide further and further into dementia. I could feel my heart sink further with every illustration of the suffering that he has encountered. There is so much pain in this world, and yet for the most part, we are blissfully blind to it all.

Dr. Ramachandra was trained as a nuclear engineer in London, but he gave up a comfortable academic career to return to Sri Lanka. He spoke about how he has been passionate about the physical sciences ever since he was a boy. But, if science is the total truth, and all existence is a bizarre accident with no meaning, striving for justice is meaningless, because all people, good and evil, will suffer the same fate in the burning up of the sun, and in the end no one will be around to remember anything.

Nietzsche saw that all talk of human dignity and equality, upon which notions of justice are based, was a legacy of Judeo-Christian thought. We care, because God cares. Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross to cover our sins, tells us that God’s power is found in the mess that we’ve made of the world. God is a God who is not immune to suffering – God himself is to be numbered among the victims and not the oppressors. Human sin – the senseless attempt to live as if we were God and rejecting His rightful rule over our lives – is the prime evil. Dr. Ramachandra argued that the Bible does not even attempt to explain the origin of evil, for you can only explain the reasonable. Our turning against God, who loved us into existence and sustains us moment to moment, is absolutely irrational and absurd. It is because of our alienation from God that evil exists. Evil is irrational and unjustified. It is not be understood, but fought.

We live in the tension between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Jesus’ rising from the dead is the vindication and renewal of the created order, the redemption of all history, and God’s concrete promise that he will make all things new. We now live between the time where God suffered for us on earth and the eventual dawning of a new day. Remembering what God has done for us, and holding fast to His promises, we share in His indignation against injustice, and we turn from self-pity and apathy to action.


The problem of evil

Philip Kitcher responded by raising the age-old “problem of evil”. If God is good, why does He allow evil? Is it because He cannot prevent it? Then He is not all-powerful. Is it because He does not want to prevent it? Then He is not all good. This problem of theodicy has been discussed by countless philosophers far more distinguished than I throughout the centuries – there is not enough space (on this page and in my mind) to survey all that thought now, and I certainly do not profess to have the definitive answer.

However, I attended a debate at the Oxford Union sometime last year, between William Lane Craig and A. C. Grayling, about this very same topic. See Knowing Enough and The greatest thing you'll ever learn...

The gist of the response was that we are made in the image of God, so we have been given free will. The essence of sin is that we choose to reject God. We also considered the limits of human knowledge, especially with respect to finite minds trying to fathom the infinite.

I know that we do not know everything, but I think that we know enough. Now, I also think that if we could fathom God completely, he would surely cease to be God and become more a product of our imagination.

Prof. Kitcher then posed the question – if God is omnipotent, why did could he not create free-willed beings who always chose correctly? But of course, omnipotence does not mean enabling logical contradictions, and choice is not choice if you only ever choose the same thing. Also, I’ve read more recently, and very intriguingly, that free choice is absolutely necessary for true, genuine love. God made us such that we can experience the deepest joy, which is to have a relationship with him – to love him and to be loved by him. If we had no real choice, then there would be no genuine relationship of love. God gave us the ability to choose to truly love him, in the very same way that he chose, at infinite cost to himself, to love us.

Prof. Kitcher described morality as a great, ongoing, work-in-progress of which religion is only a part – none of the thinkers have told us the final story yet. Morality comes from the deep altruism within us, and we can also find primitive similar impulses in animals. We should combine all the best of human thought so that we can refine all the altruistic impulses within us.

One of the participants raised a very interesting question in response to this claim during the Q & A section. He pointed out that if we see morality as an ongoing project, of which we are the ultimate creators and ultimate judges, how will we know if we have improved from where we were before? It seems to me that we do in fact need absolute standards in order to judge “progress”.


The problem of the intrinsic lovability

Prof. Kitcher also argued that we should love people because they are intrinsically lovable and worthy – it is appalling to think that you can only love someone because they bear the image of God. We should do the best we can without any myths and stories and intractable logical problems about a good God who allows evil.

The moderator pointed out that Christians didn't see a distinction between loving people for who they are and loving them because they are made in the image of God. A large part of who they are is that they are made in the image of God. Dr. Ramachandra asked Prof. Kitcher what were his grounds for claiming that people were intrinsically lovable. He pointed out that in the history of Western thought, concepts of intrinsic dignity and inherent worth were only introduced with the arrival of Christianity. Until early Christianity took hold in the Greco-Roman world, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle advocated hierarchical societies made up of individuals of different intrinsic worth (some people were born to be slaves, while others were born to rule). The equality and dignity of all is not a natural assumption everywhere – India still has remnants of the caste system which relegates a certain class of people as a “sub-species”.

Prof. Kitcher insisted on the notion of intrinsic lovability as a free-standing claim with no need for cumbersome metaphysics, but Dr. Ramachandra pointed out that you would still, in the end, have to go back to the “metaphysics” and the foundational claims because how else would you convince people with a totally different worldview to contribute scarce resources to “intrinsically unequal” beings? Prof. Kitcher said that we could convince them by showing them the potential these people have to contribute towards society if they were just given the chance. Dr. Ramachandra said that he now seemed to be valuing people instrumentally, based on what they can give to society. But what about the elderly or the disabled?

Prof. Kitcher insisted on things being intrinsically valuable even though they were transient – it’s not only some kind of transcendental source that can give value. He didn’t really elaborate this particular claim, and I personally think that it is quite problematic. Without an external, objective, transcendental source that confers value, we humans would be the ultimate judges of value, and that would simply allow for far too much cultural and moral relativity – you still would not be able to convince, for example, certain high-caste members in India that the untouchables are equally worthy of love and respect as they are. Everyone would simply appeal to their own judgment and culture and tradition, and who is to say that I am more “right” than you are?


Secular Liberalism as a Christian heresy

Dr. Ramachandra pointed out that it is easy for Prof. Kitcher to assume the universal acceptability of the notion of the intrinsic worth of every human being, because he is very much shaped by Western liberal thought, which, in and of itself, owes a lot of its beginnings to the teachings of Christianity. Dr. Ramachandra said that John Gray (Professor of European Thought at the LSE), who is no Christian, pointed out that secular humanism was nothing more than a Christian heresy. The Guardian reviewer of John Gray’s book, Heresies, writes: Gray evinces a Swiftian contempt for our latter-day lay priestlings, direct heirs of the 18th-century philosophes who proclaimed a new paganism but were in fact neo-Christians, "missionaries of a new gospel more fantastical than anything in the creed they imagined they had abandoned". All the Enlightenment did was to promote religion by other means, and its belief in progress was only the Christian message "emptied of transcendence and mystery". One of the heresies promulgated by Gray is that many of those who today continue to hold to religious faith are far more profound in their thinking, and certainly better educated, than most of their liberal-humanist opponents.

books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1295980,00.html

In my reading, I’ve also come across a fantastic quote by Clifford Orwin, discussing the thought of one of the leading secular liberals of our time: “Richard Rorty, the leading postmodern liberal theorist, …concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” he describes secular liberals like himself as “freeloading atheists.” They continue to rely on the Judeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern… For Rorty, God is dead but secularized Christian morality continues.”


A slight diversion: A discussion of John Rawls and limits of Liberalism

The widely acclaimed John Rawls, who with the publication of his book A Theory of Justice was proclaimed the modern saviour of liberalism, seemed to have been sensitive to this problem of fundamental justification. In his book on human rights, The Law of Peoples, published almost 30 years after he wrote A Theory of Justice, Rawls envisions a global world order in which he interestingly does not advocate any sort of “global liberalism”. He makes allowances to tolerate what he calls “decent hierarchical societies” based on a shorter, more basic list of human rights (as opposed to the more comprehensive doctrine of liberal constitutional democracy that he proposes in A Theory of Justice). I think that it is extremely telling that Rawls saw the difficulty of promoting worldwide liberalism in the face of very divergent fundamental worldviews. (How would one convince any of the Islamic states of the superiority of the Western liberal model?) There were many who thought that towards the end of his life Rawls must have lost it – they saw The Law of Peoples as a cop-out – but I think that he was being very prescient and very realistic about the limitations of his theory.

Rawls’ theory of justice has been described as a reworking of Kant without the metaphysics. He wants to build a theory based on an overlapping consensus about the good, without having to delve too far into cumbersome metaphysics or anything of the sort. But of course built into the very foundations of his theory are countless liberal assumptions. His hypothetical mechanism of the ‘original position’, which is used to generate the basic principles of justice, is sometimes thought of as a “neutral” mechanism.

The rational calculators in the original position are behind a “veil of ignorance” – they do not know their gender, intelligence, position in society, religion etc, and they are asked to choose basic principles upon which society will operate. In deriving his basic principles of equal respect and of fair equality of opportunity from this hypothetical construct, Rawls seems to want to procede from socio-economic facts about the human condition to principles of justice. G. A. Cohen (Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, Oxford University), argues in a forthcoming book, that Rawls here confuses the principles of justice with optimal rules of social regulation. The fact that people are different in their abilities and beliefs and desires, makes it socially optimal that we construct a society that allows for different kinds of flourishing, but he argues that the fact of diversity in and of itself does not justify the principle of equality. After all, there have been many regimes and ideologies that recognised the fact of diversity but chose instead to brutally suppress it. The reason why any fact supports any principle is explained by a further, ultimate, fact-insensitive principle. (G. A. Cohen argues for this in his article, Facts and Principles). So the reason why the fact of diversity would lead us to support the principle of equality must be grounded upon a more ultimate principle like the value of human dignity and autonomy – two very “liberal” and very loaded claims.

I think Rawls realised that ultimate principles about the value of human autonomy were not accepted by all peoples – certain societies have a more “associationist” account of flourishing which sees people assigned specific roles in society (based on gender, class etc). The different, ultimate claims about the kind of value that human life has cannot be adjudicated by recourse to fact, and are extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to reconcile. I am inclined to think that it is with these considerations in mind that Rawls wrote The Law of Peoples, in which he advocated tolerance of decent, though illiberal, societies.


Conclusion

I think that Prof. Kitcher speaks hastily when he denies the great influence that Christianity has had on the development of secular humanism, and when he argues that claims about the intrinsic lovability and worth of all human beings are “free-standing”, and in no need of further justification. It is perhaps the privilege of we who have grown up in liberal Western societies (I use this term somewhat loosely…) to simply accept the equal dignity of all as brute fact, but we must never deceive ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world naturally sees things the way that we do, or that they can be easily convinced of our views without any discussion of more fundamental claims about “cumbersome metaphysics”, or perhaps even, a discussion about God.


Publishing the Cries of the Oppressed
On the Front Lines of Human Rights Journalism

Nicholas Kristof on Darfur

Almost as if to prove Dr. Ramachandra right, the next night we had two very distinguished human rights journalists speak to us about the horrors of genocide. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement, spoke about the absolutely horrific genocide in Darfur, in western Sudan. Mr. Kristof was one of the first journalists to raise the alarm bell about the genocide in Darfur, and he is currently collecting pledges to send Bill O’Reilly, a major news network anchor, to Darfur. It’s partly a joke, but it’s also about naming and shaming the major broadcasters in an effort to get them to take their cameras and news crews into places like Darfur.

Mr. Kristof spoke of his own visits to the country, speaking to the displaced peoples and hearing countless stories of violent brutality and unspeakable horror. The government, in cahoots with the militia, are systematically wiping out the non-Arab African tribes. Rough estimates tell of 300,000 people having been systematically killed off, and 2 to 3 million people being displaced. Those who are alive all tell similar harrowing tales of assault, rape and slaughter. Mr. Kristof said that it was clear that the Sudanese government made the calculation that the death of a few hundred thousand in rural Sudan would not warrant the “trouble” of international intervention – so far they have been proved chillingly correct.

Check out: www.savedarfur.com

Mr. Kristof’s description of the situation in Sudan proves how heartbreakingly true it is, as Dr. Ramachandra argued, that beliefs about the intrinsic human worth and inviolability are not “natural” to all people.


Benedict Rogers on Burma and East Timor

Christian Solidarity Worldwide: www.csw.org.uk

Benedict Rogers, a freelance journalist and human rights activist spoke of the persecution of Burma’s ethnic minorities, which he says is basically genocide. He spoke of Burma as one of the most under-reported countries in the world, even though it is known to be one of the worst violaters of human rights. He said that all the people he spoke to there all say the same thing – ‘Thank God you’re here! We thought we had been forgotten’, and, ‘Please tell the world about us, please do not forget us.’

Mr. Rogers professed that he had become quite the Bob Dylan fan, citing his lyrics from Blowin' in the Wind:

How many ears must one man have
before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take till he knows
that too many people have died?
How many years can some people exist
before they’re allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head,
pretending he just doesn’t see?

He showed us photographs of people that had been used as human minesweepers, children who’d been kidnapped and forced to be child soldiers, villages burned to the ground, a child’s drawing of what he had seen – men being shot, women being raped, babies being crushed to death in rice pounders.

During a public speech a few years ago, a senior Burmese general spoke of the regime's desire to eliminate all opposition. "In 10 years, all Karen will be dead," he threatened. "If you want to see a Karen, you will have to go to a museum in Rangoon."

Another Burma Army commander, speaking after he had led an attack on a village—slaughtering people and urinating on the head of a villager—summed up the spirit of the SPDC: "I do not respect any religion. My religion is the trigger of my gun."

From Burma’s Almost Forgotten by Benedict Rogers
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/003/7.52.html

That the West has come to embrace a system of belief that upholds the equality and dignity of all, without a necessary belief in God, seems to me to be a fortuitous culmination of historical forces, of which Christianity is a very important one (perhaps even the most important). Other cultures that have taken a different historical trajectory have not necessarily come to the same conclusions about human dignity and worth. It was Nietzsche who saw that the only logical consequence of the “death of God” and of the subsequent death of the morality that is rooted in the transcendental objectivity of God is that “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!”

And this power can be used towards unspeakable ends.

Benedict Rogers also spoke movingly of the faith of those whom he had encountered – an unwavering faith that God is still with them, an unwavering faith that God will deliver them. Ending on a more positive note, Mr. Rogers spoke of East Timor. He was there the night the nation was formed. The account that he shared is very similar to what he writes here: It was midnight on May 20, 2002. The flag had just been raised, the national anthem sung, and the world’s newest nation was born. I turned to the man next to me, a priest who was the first from his country to be exiled. His name was Rev. Francisco Maria Fernandes, and he’d lived in exile for a quarter of a century. Had he ever believed he’d live to see the day when his country would be free? “Yes, I did,” he smiled. “All around the world, during our struggle, people asked me: ‘Why do you carry on? You are fighting a losing battle. The world will never help you; the oppressors will never let you go. Why don’t you just give up?’ But we had one thing those people did not know about. We trusted God. This was a victory of faith.”
www.crisismagazine.com/september2004/rogers.htm


Who Will Solve the Problem of Poverty? Bono, Bill Gates, You?
A Conversation with Jeffrey Sachs, Larry Reed and Vinoth Ramachandra

On the last night of the forum, we moved from theological and philosophical ideas, and issues about reporting atrocities and making them known, to discussing the widespread suffering caused by extreme poverty, and what we can do about it.


Larry Reed

www.opportunity.org

Larry Reed of Opportunity International Network, a global microfinancing coalition that provides affordable loans to the poor, spoke about how his faith had moved him to make a career out of poverty relief. He spoke about how we need to see the poor as part of the solution – not simply as the problem. He spoke touchingly about the people that Opportunity International worked with in the Third World, how all they needed was a little bit of help to get going. He also spoke about how Jesus has a radical concern for the poor, and how that when we serve others, especially the poor, we fulfill our purpose and we touch the very heart of God.


Jeffrey Sachs
www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu

Next up was the “star” of the evening – Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute, Director of the UN Millenium Project, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, and good friend of Bono and the Make Poverty History celebrity crew. He talked about extreme poverty in Africa. He said that Africa needs, firstly, better agricultural technology, which does not involve advanced machinery, but simply high yield seed varieties, fertilizers and better water management. Secondly, better disease control – 2 to 3 million a year die of malaria and other diseases that have virtually been eliminated in the West. Thirdly, increased connectivity in terms of everything from roads to internet access is also vital to economic progress.

He spoke forcefully about how we do in fact have the resources and the ability to fight poverty effectively, if only we can get our act together and do something about it. He showed us pictures from his numerous trips to Africa. And the one that will haunt me for a long time to come was a picture of toddlers lying in rows on colourful blankets in a spartan room. In close-up pictures of individual toddlers, you could see their eyes half-open and rolled back in a feverish stupor – these rows of children were all in malarial comatose. They were waiting to die.


A slight diversion: Reflections on the absurdity of sin

Professor Sachs looked like a man who was heavily burdened with all the cares of the world. There was a distinct tone of incredulity, of disbelief, in his voice when he spoke about how achievable and how affordable poverty relief is, and yet, time and time again, the rich just turn their backs on the poor. We turn our backs on each other. Children die of malaria, day after day after day, he said, and it just goes on and on and on. Henry Shue, when arguing for subsistence rights in his book Basic Rights, cites Coleridge saying that the poor will merely "die so slowly that none call it murder."

We can do something about it, but we don’t. These are our fellow human beings, but we just don’t care enough. What is wrong with us? It was at this point that I began to understand a little bit more of what Dr. Ramachandra meant by the absurdity of sin. In our self-absorption, in seeking to rule our own lives, our way, we turn away from God, and we turn our backs on each other. If we take selfishness as a brute fact of the human condition, then we are certainly not “irrational” in the means that we employ to achieve our selfish ends – no, we are perfectly rational in that. But what I think Dr. Ramachandra means here, is that if there is a God who created us and who loves us with an everlasting love, and if he created us all as his children through the redemptive work of Christ, then certainly, there is something intrinsically absurd about our sinful selfishness. It is utterly absurd for us to reject his love and to neglect, even actively harm, each other.


Vinoth Ramachandra

Dr. Ramachandra spoke last. He said he fully endorsed what Prof. Sachs had said. He started by talking about how we could understand the rights of the poor. In the 13th century, before any global human rights movement, Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that in cases of need, all things are common property – need alone constitutes the poor man’s right. When the poor steal from the rich it is not theft, for God gave the world to us all. In fact, I am committing theft so long as I refuse to share with my needy neighbour, for the right to life trumps the right to personal property. The poor claiming their rightful entitlement is not simply benevolent generosity or enlightened self-interest on our parts, it is a matter of justice.

He talked about how most of the economic flows in the world are from poor to rich – debt repayment, agricultural tariffs, MNC profits, corrupt politicians squirreling money away to first world tax havens, the brain drain of educated professionals etc. He argued that justice for the poor must be seen in the wider context of shalom, the concept of full human flourishing described in the Bible. Shalom characterises a right relationship with God, with all of creation, with others and with ourselves. Poverty must be understood as a lack of resources overall, for grave economic inequality undermines social solidarity. We cannot separate discussions of poverty from social inequality and domination. A relational approach to poverty would focus, not just on the ends, but also on the means of economic improvement – there is a need to dismantle the relations of domination and exploitation that currently exist in the global economic system.

Perhaps, just perhaps, said Dr. Ramachandra, we need the poor far more than they need us.

We need them to show us our irrationality, our wastefulness, our emptiness, our greed, and our idolatry.

Maybe, just maybe, we are the ones that are in need of human development.