If God Does Not Exist

16 03 2012

I live in Spain, where one in every three people between 18 and 29 years old don’t believe in the existence of God. Many other countries share a similar statistic. You might be an atheist yourself or, if not, surely know someone who is. Possibly we all would agree that some questions serve as arguments against the existence of God for many, if not most, atheists. Some of these questions are: if God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world? If God exists, why doesn’t he speak to humanity more clearly or tangibly? If God exists, why hasn’t anyone been able to prove his existence? And so on.

These are undoubtedly questions that need to be addressed, but that is not my intention in this article. Actually what I want to do is ask more questions, but from another perspective. Let me invite you to briefly look at the other side of the coin and consider four questions in relation to the existence of God.

First, if God does not exist, how can we have any sense of justice in the world? I believe we all agree that trafficking human beings is wrong and providing food for those who are hungry, for instance, is right. But on which basis do we classify something as right or wrong? Who established these moral standards that we all know exist apart from our own opinions? As C. S. Lewis expressed: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”[1]

Secondly, if God does not exist then how was everything created from nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? We might have different opinions on the origins of the universe and its age, but we all agree it’s not eternal and therefore there was a moment it came into existence. But how could it have come into existence if there was absolutely nothing before? Matter and energy do not originate from nothing; everything in the universe has a cause outside of itself. Have you ever taken your imagination back to that moment and honestly pondered on the Cause behind every cause?  Francis Collins, renowned scientist and leader of the Human Genome Project, has written: “And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that that had to be outside of nature.”[2]

Thirdly, if God does not exist, how come human beings exist? The chances of a universe such as ours to be created randomly are virtually non-existent. Dr Collins writes: “When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants: the gravitational constant, (…) nuclear force, etc. that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a billion, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. (…) There would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people.”[3] Stephen Hawking interestingly expresses: “it would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.” [4]

And in fourth place, if God does not exist, how come millions upon millions of people have attested to a personal relationship with him throughout human history? People all over the world, from all sorts of social, intellectual and cultural background believe and live by their faith in a real and personal God. They affirm to be reached by his love, touched by his grace, convicted by his holiness and directed by his words. Their lives have been visibly changed and their relationship to others clearly improved after what they describe to be an encounter with Jesus. Have you considered the possibility that these millions and millions of people might be speaking the truth? Have you ever taken some time to sincerely listen to one of these people’s experiences?

As stated before, I have no pretension to convince anyone of God’s existence through the four questions above. My intention is to invite you to a frank and honest reflection as you try to look at your view about God from another perspective. May I invite you to sincerely reflect on your perception of the most important subject any of us could ever consider? May I invite you to search for more? May I invite you to be honestly open?

Hélder Favarin

[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.  Let me open a parenthesis and suggest two books that present the Christian case respectfully, logically and solidly: “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller and “Mere Christianity”, by C.S. Lewis.

[2] Ref. – Interview of Francis Collians at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/07/collins/index2.html …Ref. in “The Reason for God,” T. Keller, Dutton, 2008

[3] Ibid.

[4] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 127


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Do scientists believe in God?

14 03 2012

One of the common arguments against belief in God is that the majority of scientists in the world do not believe in a higher power. If they don’t believe in a deity then why do we? If scientists are smart, and they don’t believe in God, why do we?

A few years ago, though, a significant major Pew Study revealed that most American scientists (51%) believe in some form of higher power deity. While this percentage is far lower than most average Americans, the study does note some very interesting data points. For instance, this exact study was done with the same questions back in a 1914 survey as well as in 1996. While American culture has become less influenced by Judeo-Christian values, surprisingly American scientists answered almost the same way as their 1914 counterparts. In other words, in the academic scientific world, there has not been an increasing secular drive among America’s scientific community. This is important to highlight because all that has increased in recent years then is the rhetoric of those who would like to create a wedge among the scientific and theistic communities.

However, the Pew Research Poll shows a trend that younger scientists are actually more likely to believe in God than their older brethren. This shows that increasingly the younger generation is able to fuse a belief in the scientific physical world with a transcendent metaphysical worldview. In general, we are watching this movement worldwide where a new emphasis on the “spiritual” is not necessarily at odds with “physical” world.

So instead of increasing secularization within the American scientific community, we are seeing, at the very least a remarkable stabilization of opinion towards God, and perhaps even an increase in compatibility between theistic and scientific communities.

How can this be? Simply put, the scientific world studies and tests the physical world and therefore does a great job of telling us “what is.” What science cannot do is tell us “what ought to be.” The reason for this is that the moment you move from “what is” to “what ought to be” you have moved from “fact” to “value.” This is not a slight on science, just the limitation of observation. The famous philosopher legal scholar Stanley Fish has a great article about this. He says, “While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it.” The reason for this is that the world of “ought” is filled with values, assumptions, presuppositions, and, frankly, opinion.

The spiritual world can be defined a lot of different ways, but at the very least it is the realm where we find values and the reasons for what ought things to look like. It strives to give meaning and purpose, all out of assumptions and presuppositions. It is because of this divide that perhaps we are seeing a new coexisting synergy between science and faith that will likely increase in the coming years

Michael Keller


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Grow Up?

2 03 2012

When our kids were in kindergarten, one of the moms from their class approached me on the playground one day for some “religious” advice about how to deal with what was for her son, the traumatic discovery that everybody dies (this discovery came via the film Charlotte’s Web). I fumbled and mumbled my way through some explanation of how we try to teach our kids that God is ultimately going to reclaim and redeem the world of our present experience, validating all that is good and true, and that the Christian conviction is that death is not the end.

My response may or may not have been adequate, but the playground conversation got me thinking about children’s need to make sense of the world and the problem of death.  It reminded of some of the questions that arose when our kids encountered death for the first time. One of their preschool friends was tragically killed in a traffic accident a few years ago, and I remember being surprised by their bewilderment—even outrage—that such a thing as death should occur.

Since then, I’ve wondered about what (if anything) this intuitive child-like sense of the lack of fit between death and the world says about us as human beings. It seems to me that there are, broadly speaking, two approaches one can take to the problem of death and what, if anything, this might say about us and the world.  For me, two books illustrate these approaches well.

The first is articulated by the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his best-seller The God Delusion.  For Dawkins, religious belief in general, and certainly any belief that there is a reality beyond death, is a “mind-virus” which involuntarily infects people through the cultural transmission of “memes.”  Dawkins admits that children seem to be hard-wired to be, if not religious, then at least inclined toward a form of dualism which accepts the existence of non-physical entities and realities, however these beliefs do not point to anything real about the world; rather, they indicate that such beliefs must have provided some adaptive value in our distant evolutionary past. Dawkins is clear that the beliefs that seem to come naturally to children—tooth fairies, Santa Claus, flying spaghetti monsters, heaven, God—represent a stage in human development to be grown out of.

Another perspective on what the natural inclinations of children might point to is set forth in Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought. Neiman, a moral philosopher who directs the Einstein Forum in Postdam, Germany, takes a position quite different from Dawkins. For her, the questions that come naturally to children are more plausibly interpreted as pointing to real existential problems and needs. Neiman argues that the “childish” desire that every question—including the question of what comes after death—ought to have a sufficient answer is at the heart of reason itself:

Children display it more often than adults because they have been disappointed less often. They will continue to ask questions even after hearing the impatient answer—because that’s the way the world is. Most children remain adamant. But why is the world like that, exactly? The only answer that will truly satisfy is this one: Because it’s the best one. We stop asking when everything is as it should be… In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.

There is obviously a striking contrast between the views represented by Dawkins and Neiman regarding the significance of children’s intuitions. The former sees childish tendencies as something to be outgrown (although, interestingly, mainly those that tend towards belief in God or religion—Dawkins obviously wishes to encourage children to ask questions, just not to arrive at the “wrong” conclusions). The latter sees the “childish” demand that the world conform to intuitive senses of justice, meaning, and goodness as being at the very heart of reason itself, and providing the impetus that drives philosophy:

But the child may also be a figure of promise. She approaches the world in wonder as well as in fear. Her innocence can be a source of strength… The urge to greet every answer with another question is one we find in children not because it’s childish but because it’s natural.

When I think of a little boy’s virtual outrage that there should be such a thing as death (in Charlotte’s Web or anywhere else), and our own kids’ reaction to the death of their friend (Why? But we’ll see him again, right?), I think we ought to at least entertain the possibility that these questions and concerns might actually make contact with what is real and true about the world, and reflect some element of what they were created to be. Perhaps there are some questions and some possibilities that we are not meant to outgrow.

Ryan Dueck


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Madonna, World Peace, and Religious Pluralism

15 02 2012

World Peace was center stage during Madonna’s halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl. For our Wondering Fair readers uninterested in American culture or sports, I will spare you the details of the well-choreographed and highly entertaining spectacle. This essay focuses less on the glitz and glamour of the Super Bowl than on the possibility of world peace in an age of religious pluralism. 2011 as we know was a year rife with protests, so is world peace in the way Madonna envisions possible? Can we all learn to “coexist,” as the trendy bumper stickers encourage us to do? Madonna’s halftime performance seems to suggest that we can achieve global shalom, but it’s hard to imagine such a world when our current economic, political, and religious differences are so severe.

On the religious front, one proposal to help establish world peace is to adopt a position called religious pluralism. Promulgated by academic theologians like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and John Hick, religious pluralism is the idea that all religions are essentially equal paths up the same divine mountain. Each simply recognizes Truth in a different way, though all roads lead to God. In Hick’s own words, “pluralism is the view that the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate from within the major variant cultural ways of being human….”[1] Here, in his desire to remain religiously neutral, Hick substitutes the word “Real” for God, a term which has a clear Abrahamic bias. The benefits of religious pluralism, it is thought, are that people may stop trying to convert or coerce others into their way of thinking and thereby live together in harmony.

Despite good intentions, there are several problems with religious pluralism. First, it is methodologically flawed. In an attempt to find what is common to all faiths, the pluralist is forced to ignore seriously important elements of each religion. The things that make religions unique—such as the Trinity for Christians or the prophecy of Muhammad for Muslims—are routinely trivialized and viewed as unnecessary additions. To suggest that Christians or Muslims willingly give up their core doctrines in favor of a far more ambiguous pluralist picture of the divine seems ill-conceived.

Second, pluralism is morally problematic. If the Real does not reveal Itself to people in history, then the religious practices of faithful Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are based on misunderstandings. Since the Real hides Itself from everyone (except for Hick and other pluralists!) and remains fundamentally mysterious to us, we are in the dark morally and cannot live in a way that pleases the Real. This deep agnosticism which runs through religious pluralism makes it especially difficult to discern right from wrong.

Third, pluralism is logically impossible. As many scholars have pointed out, the idea that all religions are true in their own way flies in the face of common sense.[2] All religions make exclusive truth-claims and prioritize their understanding of reality over against others. Religious pluralism, with its nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Real, is no different. Ironically, the desire to create a universal religion for everyone only leads to the denial of all other truth-claims made by religious believers. How can Hinduism, with its claim to 330 million gods, be just as true as Theravada Buddhism, which has zero gods, or Judaism, which has only one?

Finally, from a Christian perspective, religious pluralism fails to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. To be sure, this is unproblematic for persons of other faiths, but for Christians who want to be true to their historic beliefs, Jesus must be seen not merely as one manifestation of an unknown higher deity we call the Real. Rather, Jesus made known his identity in history by walking among people and saying things like, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” and “I and the Father are one.”[3] His exclusive truth-claims, as we know, not only caused consternation and led to his crucifixion, but they were and continue to be fundamental to the Christian story. Despite its lack of Super Bowl glitz and glamour, it is this story, I would argue, that promises to end all protests and ultimately usher in real world peace.

Paul McClure

[1] John Hick, “Religious Pluralism.” Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Ed by Michael Peterson, William Hasker, et al. (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 565.

[2] For more resources, see Harold Netland’s Encountering Religious Pluralism, Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, Vinoth Ramachandra’s Faiths in Conflict, John Stackhouse’s No Other Gods Before Me, and Ravi Zacharias’ Jesus Among Other Gods.

[3] Italics added. John 14:6, 10:30 (NIV)

*Thanks also to Professor Ivan Satyavrata for his helpful lecture on religious pluralism.


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The Grand, Multi-Color Story

30 01 2012

“Why is mythology everywhere the same?”  This may sound like a simplistic judgment – there are so many myths across history, from the Hindu Vedas to the Nordic tales and the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. But the person who raises the question is Joseph Campbell, a Columbia University expert in comparative mythology and, according to Campbell, no matter which folk traditions are surveyed, from the peoples of Congo to the legends of the Eskimos, “it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find…” [1]

Campbell’s major book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, plots these common themes in the universal figure of the hero, whose adventures follows similar steps even in the most varied cultural settings: he receives a call to adventure, and after initial reluctance, he crosses the threshold to his journey. Here he faces numerous trials and meets forms of gods or goddesses, who mentor him and help he understand his mission, until he returns to reality with a message to proclaim or a mission to fulfill, and saves the community from its perils. (When George Lucas crafted the story for Star Wars and its hero Luke Skywalker, he leaned heavily on Campbell’s reconstructed hero’s journey).

So why is mythology everywhere the same? To explain our common stories, Campbell uses the theories of psychoanalysis, especially the views of Carl Jung, to explain the common source of our kaleidoscopic but similar myths and stories. Myths are reflections of our social mind, of archetypal urges deep beneath our psyches. In Campbell’s words, “They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.”[2]

Ok, these stories originate in our minds… but the question still begs itself: why? Why does the human mind keep producing these stories? Why are myths everywhere, and why are they so similar? What do these archetypes point to?

I believe a person’s journey will illuminate us here. C. S. Lewis was another expert in comparative mythology, and as he started to read the New Testament as an atheist, he was at once startled at how different and yet how similar the Gospels were to ancient myths. At first he was struck by how unlike they were to the metaphysical and fantastic shapes of myths: they smelled like real events, taking place in a specific place and a specific time, not like the pre-time, allegorical epochs of myths. “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that none of them is like this [the New Testament record].”[3]

Yet even as Lewis noted that the Gospels smelled like real history, he could not miss the common themes it shared with the great myths. Especially, he could not miss the central plot of “the Dying and Reviving God” common to so many folk traditions. Lewis’ initial reaction was dismiss the story of Jesus as another myth, but as the historicity of the Gospels bogged him, he was further disturbed by a comment he once heard. “The real clue had been put in my hand by that hard-boiled Atheist when he said, ‘Rum thing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happened once’.”[4]

I agree. That hard-boiled atheist is just right. How else would you explain variations of same stories cropping up again and again everywhere? They must be reflections, fragments of the Great Story the human psyche captures and different peoples emphasize differently. They are echoes, daydreams that emerge in fantastic forms from the unconscious, but which articulate the central themes of the human drama – our ideals, perils and longings for our Savior –, packaged with the infinite creativity of the human genius and its multiform cultural riches.

For an expert in mythology like Lewis, the multitude of human myths were not contradictions, but preparations for the true story. They were early echoes of God’s thunderous arrival on the planet in the person of Jesus Christ. “In my mind,” wrote Lewis, “the perplexing multiplicity of ‘religions’ began to sort itself out… The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, ‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’” And as Lewis surveyed the ages, and found a historical event that culminated all the best of human aspirations and longings, his conclusion could not have been different. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this… Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.” [5]

So why are myths so similar? Because they resemble the history of the universe, the drama of our creation, fall, and God coming to rescue us. They sprout little curious buds, small insinuations in delicate poetry, that came to full bloom when eternity entered time, when God became man, and the grandiosity of the myths met the ordinariness of history, and the Dying and Reviving God really did die on a cross in a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem in the first century, and revived on the early hours of the following Sunday. The grand plot of myth took place in history, and our stories cannot help but echo the universe’s defining moment.

René Breuel

[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008), 1-2.

[2] Ibid., 330, 2.

[3]  C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”, in Christian Reflections (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), 155.

[4]  C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (New York: Hancourt, 1955), 235.

[5]  Ibid.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Liberating Freedom

9 01 2012

Hey, gotta’ solution: why choose? To anyone surveying our current cultural scene, and its splintered breadth of options political, artistic, religious and social, an easy attitude rises from the pack: why choose a worldview to commit to – and all those hurdles called dedication and loyalty and sacrifice – when we can choose nothing, and live free of care? In societies as complex and fragmented as ours, it is a lot of work to survey every point of view out there. Why bother then? Why should I commit to a faith that will reduce my personal freedom, by telling me to live a certain way, and reduce my intellectual autonomy, by telling me to believe certain things?

Freedom from constraints. Sounds like a simple concept, right? Avoid serious commitments, and soar like an eagle, detached from the frenzied discussion below. This commitment-phobia is something many young folks today are committed to (!), according to leading sociologists. In a major survey of young adults today, for example, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith describes this as one of the major tenets of young lifestyles:

Numerous dimensions of the  culture of emerging adulthood – uncertainty about purpose, delaying settling down, the individual as authority, amorphous relationships, strategic management of risk, the tentativeness of cohabitation, aversion to moral judgments, reluctance to commit to social and political involvements and investments – reflect and reinforce their interest in maintaining as many live and promising options as is feasible. [i]

Yet, if I may beg to differ, I don’t think this kind of absolute freedom exists, or can ever exist. It is a myth. Every lifestyle will bind us and every conviction will restrain us, no exception. If one chooses to live his sexuality openly, for example, and change sexual partners as often as he pleases, he will enjoy the freedom to choose a new girl when the current one is not as appealing. But this very act will also constrain his freedom: this person will close itself to the pleasures of being committed to someone, and all the trust, serenity and shared memories of a lifelong relationship. In a similar way, someone may want to maximize her intellectual autonomy and believe that all truth is relative. But then her freedom will be restricted, because she won’t be able to believe in an infinite number of specific truths – be it evolution, Jesus’ resurrection, or karma – and won’t believe in something with all her heart.

Any choice, personal or intellectual, binds us. And not to choose binds us too, without giving us any real benefit. Absolute freedom is a myth; it does not exist. We will never be free from everything. The fish cannot swim outside of the water, or he dies. But inside the ocean, obeying the parameters he was created for, he is free to swim everywhere.

But what if we framed personal freedom differently? What if the question were, instead, not freedom from something, but freedom for something? What can truly capture my heart? What can I live for? What is the true life I can commit to? What is the most compelling worldview I can believe in?

And here comes the twist. Paradoxically, if we find the best choice, and believe the real truth, and really commit to it, we will find the freedom for which we were created. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” said Jesus.[ii] We will be free for life. Truth will bind us and therefore free us evermore. We will be free to be the persons we were created to be.

What do you live for then?

René Breuel

[i]     Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 80.

[ii]    John 8:32


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Faith and Reason

21 12 2011

Imagine you’re sitting around the dinner table over the holidays and someone in your family says, “Why do you spend all this time studying religion? Religion is all about faith, and reason is all about facts.” How would you respond? Would you agree?

The idea that faith and reason don’t mix well has been around at least since the Enlightenment. Today, many people continue to hold on to this idea, either seeing the two as entirely incompatible or emphasizing one to the neglect of the other. Faith, it seems, involves the heart, our emotions, and believing things without sufficient evidence, whereas reason involves our head, pure rationality, and believing cold, hard facts.

Despite these assumptions, I’d argue that faith and reason can have a much more harmonious relationship than is generally thought. Even though faith often has religious connotations, it is not exclusively a religious term. People act on faith all the time during the course of their daily lives. If they didn’t, think of all the bewildering, paralyzing questions one would have to ask before doing anything. How do I know that the food I’m about to eat is not poisoned? Should I have it tested it in a lab first? And how do I know someone won’t rob me while I’m sleeping? Should I stay awake all night and keep watch over my things just in case? In all these cases, some degree of faith must be enacted to achieve the desired end of eating or sleeping, and such actions are perfectly justified every day around the world for many, many people.

For Christians through the centuries, faith and reason have worked in much the same way. Take Justin Martyr, for example.  Born around 100 AD, Justin was a first-rate philosopher who was mostly unimpressed by his Stoic, Aristotelian, and Pythagorean colleagues. Martyr converted to Christianity because he felt that its reasons had more explanatory power than any of its rivals and then set out to show that faith made the most sense.[1] In the Catholic tradition, one need look no further than St. Thomas Aquinas, whose massive Summa Theologica set out to demonstrate in a systematic fashion the compatibility of faith and reason. In our own time, take a look at the works of Notre Dame’s preeminent analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Oxford’s former scientist-theologian Alister McGrath, or Wondering Fair’s very own John Stackhouse.

What you’ll find, I suspect, is that these thinkers and many Christians like them see reason and faith as copartners in the search for Truth. Faith is not pitted against knowledge; it is a condition for it. By acting faithfully we learn more about the reality we experience, and in the process let us make sure we have good reasons for acting in faith. And so, as the prophet Isaiah wrote long ago, “Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord.”[2]

Paul McClure

[1] Hill, Jonathan. The History of Christian Thought (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2003), 16-23.

[2] Isaiah 1:18


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Last Words Approaching the Afterlife

14 12 2011

“What do you think happens when you die?”

“That’s a strange question!” your average university student might reply. “When you die, you die. The plug’s pulled out, and the lights go out, that’s it: the eternal void. If there was something more, we would have discovered it by now. There would be proof, right?”[1]

Discussion over. And with that she heads back to party. But of course! For if death really is the end, then as the apostle Paul said, “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”

Well, what of the afterlife? The future looks fuzzy at best—extinction, reincarnation, Valhalla, harp concerts in the sky … who knows? But in a world where death is more certain than taxes, do we have the courage to face up to ‘strange questions’ that define human life?

As I see it, most people respond in one of three ways to the afterlife: we ignore it, we deplore it, or we explore it. Which are you?

Maybe you ignore the afterlife. Your theme song is “Forever young”. Like Edward from the Twilight saga, you’re blessed with immortality. Or is it ‘amortality’? As sociologist Catherine Mayer dubs them, ‘Amortals’ “seek to arrive at the best time of their lives, and then linger there indefinitely, with the help of vitamins, plastic surgery, Botox, gym workouts, and of course Viagra.[2] (Think Australian cricketing legend Shane Warne, sporting Liz Hurley as his latest trophy. He’s tight like a tiger, but the clock is ticking.)

Even for Amortals, death is hard to ignore. Every second roughly two people around the world die—that’s 150,000 per day, 55 million per year. And contrary to popular opinion, they don’t disappear, pass away, fall asleep, or retire. They die. It’s not someone else’s problem. I will die. You will die. We could party hard and desperately grasp onto what life is left, but our last words may be tragic like whiskey merchant Jack Daniels. As he died from a blood infection, all he could say was “One last drink, please.”

Well, maybe you deplore the afterlife. Who knows what lies beyond? Heaven is a distraction, so make the most of now. Death is as natural as birth, so just accept it. As the Epicureans had engraved on their tombstones, N.F.F.N.S.N.C. (non fui, fui, non sum, non curo): “I wasn’t, I was, I am not, I don’t care.”[3]

Like Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Jobs battled with cancer even back at his Stanford University Commencement address of 2005. Equivalent to an epitaph, he remarked:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything just falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

When he died this October at the age of 56, everyone spoke of his success and legacy. His accomplishments were admirable.

But let’s get real. Apple will continue on with or without his vision. Jobs won’t be there to appreciate it, and within a couple of generations his name will be a footnote in a design textbook. I have to agree with Woody Allen, who quipped, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment.”

When death knocks on our door, all our ‘immortality projects’ are meaningless. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “All our strivings under the sun are but chasing the wind—utter vanity.”

Okay, I recognize this is depressing, especially during the festive season! But it is a virtue to number our days aright—to face life as it really is. So you can ignore the afterlife, or deplore the afterlife. But can I suggest a third option. Will you explore the afterlife?

What if? What if there is an afterlife? It falls short of mathematical proof, but there are rumours of transcendence that have defined entire cultures across history, from the ancient Egyptians embalming the dead to African Americans singing gospel tunes around an open casket. They could be right or wrong, but the question of the afterlife is anything but irrelevant.

Philosophers and luminaries across history have spoken about hope in the face of death. But only one pointed to himself as the source of this hope. Jesus of Nazareth claimed “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25). His last words came with confidence from a crucifix: “It is finished.”

What is finished? Apparently death as we know it. This wasn’t resigned acceptance. Jesus saw his death as mission accomplished.

Well, do we believe this? Should we believe this? It’s hard to know what ‘proof’ would satisfy a sceptic.[4] As I mused with one such university student, we’d only discover what lay beyond our last words if someone were to truly die and come back to tell the tale.

“True” she laughed, “if only, hey!”

If only.

Dave Benson

[1] Dialogue adapted from director Clint Eastwood’s movie, “Hereafter” (2010).

[2] Simon Smart, “Living like tomorrow never ends”, 15 October 2011, Sydney Morning Herald.

[3] N.T. Wright, “Jesus’ Resurrection and Christian Origins,” http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Jesus_Resurrection.htm.

[4] To further explore this topic of “Afterlife: Christian hope in the face of death”, see here or watch the full length talk here.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, Tough Questions

How Much Redemption?

7 12 2011

Let me start with a confession: I’m an unapologetic cat-lover. For several years two Norwegian forest cats (Sam and Luna) were part of our family. We deeply enjoyed their company, but this enjoyment always existed under something of a shadow: both had genetic heart conditions that led eventually to their premature death.

In the time since then, living without feline companionship, I’ve found myself reflecting on their “personhood,” if I may use this term. There are plenty of (in)famous accounts of animals that are reductive; among these Descartes suggested that they couldn’t feel pain. In contrast, I found that Sam and Luna each had unique personalities:  one cat was a morning “person,” the other wasn’t. They could be cheerful or cranky. They enjoyed play and humor and when we lost Luna, Sam visibly grieved her absence for his remaining months. Far from the machines that Descartes imagined animals to be, these two displayed an astonishing range of uniqueness.

I was recently reminded of a sermon by John Wesley when he reflects on the place of animals in the kingdom to come:

The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigour, strength, and swiftness which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed. They will be restored, not only to that measure of understanding which they had in paradise, but to a degree of it as much higher than that, as the understanding of an elephant is beyond that of a worm. And whatever affections they had in the garden of God, will be restored with vast increase; being exalted and refined in a manner which we ourselves are not now able to comprehend.[1]

Wesley isn’t alone in his conviction that God’s redemptive activity includes not only humans, but also a broad range of what he first created – George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis suggest similar things – and his sermon doesn’t arise out of mere sentimentality. John Wesley was, as Thomas Jay Oord puts it, “a theologian deeply interested in science,” who “kept abreast of the scientific developments of his day by reading the works of leading scientists and philosophers.” [2] Having beheld the intricate interrelation of all the various creatures in God’s creation, a new creation that consisted only of humans seemed unnecessary and nonsensical to Wesley; it would not account both the witness of the created order and that of Christian scripture. As Denis Edwards observes, there are a number of passages in the bible which include non-human creatures in the final state, including Revelation 5:13-14, which contains “a remarkable vision of all the creatures of Earth united in a great song of praise of the lamb, the symbol of the crucified and risen Christ.” [3]

I realise that my suggestion here opens up a huge variety of challenging questions. What about people who are allergic to cats, and who imagine heaven without them? Where would God possibly fit all the insects that have come and gone since the creation of the earth? Yet I think that the kingdom to come is better regarded as an object of hope and wonder than one which we can anticipate in too-concrete ways. I for one, look with hope not only to meet my grandpa again, but also to an expansive vision of the new creation, filled with lions, lambs and bugs alike.

Jeremy Kidwell

[1]  John Wesley, reflecting on Romans 8:19-22 and Isaiah 11:6 in his sermon, “The General Deliverence” – read the rest here: http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/60/)

[2] Thomas Jay Oord, Divine Grace and Emerging Creation, p. ix.

[3] Denis Edwards, Creaturely Theology, 81. Other instances include 1 Cor. 8:6, Rom 8:18-25, Col 1:15-20, Eph 1:9-23, Heb 1:2-3, 2 Peter 3:13, John 1:1-4, and Rev 21:1-22:13.


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Categories : Tough Questions

Nanna’s Rainbows in the Tears

16 11 2011

There is no guarantee how suffering will shape a soul.  As C.S. Lewis, the imaginative author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, once noted,

I am not convinced that suffering has any natural tendency to produce such evils [as] anger and cynicism.  … I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers.

One such “great sufferer” must certainly be Nell Hodgson.  Across a lifetime of adventures, she had faced loss of loved ones, a near-death experience while giving birth, and three bouts of cancer, not to mention numerous rounds of chemotherapy.  Yet as a child, I knew none of this.  Nell—or ‘Nanna’ as I knew her—was to me an imaginative storyteller … a living, breathing “Wardrobe” offering a gateway to my own Narnia.

Gnarled GumtreeRecently I was jogging through Noosa National Park with a Canadian friend, pointing out the great diversity and character in the surrounding trees.  In place of uniform stands of pines were paperbarks and gnarled gumtrees.  Nanna quickly came to mind.  Trees like these were features in many of her paintings, and her poems.  Nanna loved nature.  She used to tell tales of fairies in the garden, replete with intricate details of what each would wear and how they would move.  The banksia bush had a larger-than-life personality in her imagination.  At the least opportune time—like when picking me up from a friend’s place—Nanna would quietly slip out of the conversation, leaving us all wondering where she’d gone.  After looking around, we would find Nanna on her knees, crawling through the garden bed.  She was scraping off bits of bark from the base of a gumtree—“It’s for my bark paintings,” she explained.  For Nanna, this was normal.

Yet as an adult, I wonder how to integrate the playful person I knew with this scarred woman who suffered so much.  Many others would become bitter given her lot.  Yet Nell had an insatiable appetite for life.  Her life resembled the gnarled yet glorious gumtrees she immortalised.  Perhaps in the title to her final collection of poems we can find the answer: Rainbows in the Tears.  For when love looks through tears of pain, a vision of hope will emerge.

Storm RainbowOf all the books that Nell had read, it’s no secret that her favourite was the Bible.  In this “book of books” we find a recurring theme growing to a climax in the person of Christ, like the lapping of waves on a beach as they reach toward full tide.  It is the pattern of grace, fall, and new grace.

This book begins with God’s grace as He paints a paradise and plants humanity in the midst.  Yet our forebears overreached and fell, weeping as Eden became a wasteland.  Yet God extended new grace, covering our shame in love and pointing to the day when all our sad stories will come untrue.

Or take Noah.  Noah was the only righteous man among peers as people took pride in enacting every evil desire.  So God judged the world in a flood, preserving Noah, his family, and a good deal of biodiversity in that floating safe haven.  Grace had given way to fall.  What would new grace look like?  In Genesis 8-9 we read of the ark settling on Mount Ararat, this strange parade evacuating the vessel to see a land decimated by (super-) natural disaster.  As they recalled what was, I’m sure that tears must have flooded their eyes.  Yet precisely at this moment of despair, in the wake of immense suffering brought about by broken humanity, God gives us a sign.  Whenever storm clouds gather, look up, for there you will see the rainbow—that even if life falls apart and flood waters rise, yet my new grace will preserve this beautiful creation in loving covenant.  The rainbow is what love looks like when it refracts through this planet’s collective tears.

Nell was known as a woman of faith.  But this was not “faith in faith” or some subjective impulse to trust beyond reason.  Not at all.  Instead, my Nanna trusted in the one true GoRainbows in the Tearsd, who was able to take the worst suffering, and the greatest injustice, and turn it into new grace and hope for all humanity.  At the Bible’s climax we see God Himself in the person of Jesus, left high and dry as He opened His arms to embrace a world gone awry.  Love is cruciform.  And love is passionate, where passion literally means to “suffer with.”  So Nanna had faith in the God with scars.  When Nanna looked through tear stained eyes at the resurrected Christ, she knew all her sad stories would one day come untrue.  And the result was art fuelled by hope.

This is how ‘imaginative Nanna’ and ‘suffering Nell’ fit together as one.  Suffering can be redemptive: there are rainbows in the tears.  In my playful grandmother I’ve seen the vitality of a passionate God.  God has suffered much.  And yet He is ever young, always crawling through the garden beds of this world alive with wonder.  May we meet Him there?


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

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