Letter #1

I Won’t Believe Unless God Speaks to Me

Regarding your question about the friends who say they will not believe unless God speaks to them or reveals himself to them in a special way. First of all, I would ask them how do they know that he isn’t already doing so. This will probably surprise them. But this is the teaching of the Bible. Creation speaks of God every second of every hour, every day, throughout all ages. I’m sure you would have learned Psalm 19 as a child.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Here David poetically describes the truth that all of creation is a message from God about him addressed to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. This speech of God’s is able to cross any language barriers. It goes throughout all the earth. So God is doing amazing things and speaking amazing things every second. He is revealing himself every minute of the day through his creation. So the problem is not that God is not revealing himself…the problem lies somewhere else.

Think of it like this. Let’s say you visit someone who has a house right next to the motorway. Perhaps you have been living in the country all your life. When you visit this friend’s place, you will certainly notice the sounds of the cars whooshing past. You ask your friend how they manage to live with such noise. And what will their answer be? They don’t even notice it any more. In fact likely as not, they will find things extremely odd if they went to live in the country. Something would be missing, but they won’t be able to put their finger on it. It’s like this with God’s speech to us. The sun, the planets, the stars and the moon are all speaking to us. Actually speaking to us and telling us about God. But we have heard their voices our whole lives, and the background noise of their speech no longer signifies anything to us. Were they to stop (which is impossible, for all creation even the very stones must cry out testifying to God), we would suddenly realise that something has stopped. Something would be missing. So in one sense, our problem is that we are so used to God speaking that it has just become part of the background noise.  

But the problem is even deeper than this. For in our example, the person living next to the motorway can train herself to hear the sound of the cars passing if she concentrates. Our problem is our naturally rebellious hearts do not want to hear God. It’s a problem of our hardness of heart – our spiritual blindness and deafness. For example, Romans 1 teaches us that creation itself is sufficient to know God. Here is what Paul says in Romans 1:18-20.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

In other words, according to Paul, the knowledge of God is plain. So plain that God holds each one of us without excuse. We should be able to see his power and his divinity through his creation. But the rebellious human heart suppresses the truth. We bury it deep within us and any time this knowledge attempts to come to our consciousness in our natural rebellious state we push it back down again. The human heart does not want any reminders of God and his claims on us. 

This rebellious suppression of the truth is so bad, that it will reject even the most miraculous evidence of all. Take a look at the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. In this parable, the rich man ends up in torment, and he asks for the poor man Lazarus to be raised to life and tell his sinful brothers to repent so they can avoid his fate. In the parable, Jesus has Abraham tell the rich man that even if someone rises from the dead, they will not repent if they refuse to hear Moses and the Prophets. I think the point Jesus is making through this parable is that repentance comes not so much through seeing something miraculous and it changing you. Rather as Paul puts it, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17). Jesus’ point is even further underlined by the response to his own resurrection from the dead. This is a resurrection that was testified to by hundreds of people, including the apostles, all of whom (except for John) died gruesome deaths testifying to the risen king. (They were in the position to know whether the resurrection was a lie, but they died claiming it was true.) Even so, many of the Pharisees and religious leaders of the day carried on suppressing the truth even though they knew he had risen. Although the knew Jesus’ claims about rising from the dead (Matthew 27:62-64), when it actually happened, they tried to cover it up by paying the guards who had seen things to lie. (Matthew 28:11-14).

So in summary, God is speaking through his creation. He has spoken in his word which is powerful to change hearts. And he has spoken fully and finally through the Word, Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, we have the final and full revelation of God to us. As John puts it, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side; he has made him known.” (John 1:18). How can a God who has not a body like men reveal himself in the context of a world of suppressors of the truth? He becomes a man to make himself known. The incarnation is the great one-off miracle that reveals God to every human being.

Can miraculous events occur? Can God speak audibly? Can he come to us in visions? Of course. He’s God. Is this enough for a doubter to believe? No. God must change our hearts. Does God ordinarily work through visions and audible speech to draw people to himself? No. He usually uses ordinary means. It is his Word about Christ by his Spirit which breaks down our sinful rebellion and draws us to himself. 

Another question to ask these friends might be this one: Are you willing to bet your eternal soul that Jesus is not the king of the universe and requires you to repent and submit to him just because he doesn’t appear to you in the manner you want him to? Think about romantic relationships. Let’s say a guy wants to get to know a particular girl he is attracted to. He asks her out to watch drag racing with him. She’s not interested in drag racing and says no. Perhaps she suggests coffee instead. What would happen if the guy stubbornly says, “No, I want you to come to watch drag racing with me.” That’s just not going to happen. If he wants to get to know the girl, he must do it on her terms, not his own. God is there and he is not silent. He speaks, but we cannot demand that he reveals himself to us on our terms. He is God. He gets to dictate the terms of our relationship. If we refuse to accept this, we will never know him. 

Rationality and Belief

If the intellectual climate is such that, when a man comes to the crisis at which he must accept or reject Christ, his reason and imagination are not on the wrong side, then his conflict will be fought out under favourable conditions. Those who help to produce and spread such a climate are therefore doing useful work.

C.S. Lewis

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Austin Farrer

How The West Lost God

I have had my eye on this book for some time, and when a friend kindly gave me money to purchase a book, I snapped this up quick smart. The central thesis of the book is that just as religious decline leads to a decline in the family, so too, the decline in the two-parent nuclear family contributes to the decline of the church. Eberstadt describes family and faith as ’the invisible double helix of society – two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.’

In the first chapter, Eberstadt turns her attention to whether there has been a decline in Christianity in the West. There are some who argue this decline is itself an illusion. Although I didn’t need convincing of this fact, she argues fairly convincingly that there really has been a decline.

Eberstadt moves on to outline the conventional views regarding how the West lost God. The first view she investigates is that people stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion. She spends time reviewing this theory but dismisses it because the demands of Christianity do not make it some crutch that makes life easier.

The second view she deals with is that Science, the Enlightenment and rationalism caused secularization. This is an extremely widely held view, but it just doesn’t fit the evidence. Christianity does not wax and wane in the way this theory predicts it should. Interestingly, in this section of the book, she highlights some interesting research on education and faith. The Enlightenment theory teaches us to expect that the more educated and wealthy people are, the less likely they are to have faith in God. This is precisely the opposite of what we see in a number of cases, and ‘contrary to popular belief, literacy and money do not drive secularism.’

Next, she moves onto the theory that the two world wars caused secularization. This is the view of Peter Hitchens in “Rage Against God”. While admitting this theory is not totally wrong, she highlights the fact that nations with disproportionate burdens of wartime all experienced a decline – Switzerland along with Germany and Great Britain. Furthermore, she wonders why later generations have not returned to the faith since they have known nothing by postwar prosperity. The next theory she addresses is that material progress caused us to realise we didn’t need God any more. But this theory is contradicted by the fact that religion seems to increase as the social ladder is climbed as mentioned earlier. Furthermore, faith has existed with great wealth throughout the ages. Why should this change now?

It seems that the believers of the secularization theory assumed faith was on its way out. They didn’t believe religion could wax as well as wane. It clearly has and does, so a theory is needed that can take this into account. This leads Eberstadt to explore the circumstantial evidence for her theory in chapter 3. She points out that sociologists have assumed that secularization and human development impact negatively human fertility rates. But this is an assumption. Perhaps the relationship goes the other way.

She notes that married people with children are more likely to go to church and be religious than single people. But why is this? Does faith drive family, or does family drive faith? Again she points to a link between faith and fertility. Those who are religious tend to have more children than those who are not. Eberstadt argues that instead of this being a one way street with faith driving family, at least some of the time, family drives faith, and sometimes this makes better sense of the facts.

Next, in chapter 4, Eberstadt moves on to consider some snapshots in the demographic record. Here she shows that family decline accompanies religious decline. Secondly, she notes that the trends of industrialization and urbanization mesh nicely with the decline of the family and faith. Both of these trends led to family decline, which in turn caused people to reject faith. The third piece of data she points to is the clear link between the most irreligious parts of the West and those that have the smallest, weakest and fewest natural families. A final and most interesting piece of evidence she investigates is the link between ‘family boomlets’ and ‘religious boomlets’. One example she highlights is the post-war mini religious boom, which overlay the better known post-war baby boom.

In chapter 5, she demonstrates how her theory answers the problems that the current theories of secularization have been unable to answer. It answers the problem of ‘American exceptionalism’. Why is America so religious, despite being one of the most advanced nations on earth? In America, there are more families following the traditional model, more marriages, and more children per woman than there are in Europe. According to Eberstadt, it also explains the male/female religious gender gap. She speculates that perhaps ‘women who are mothers tend to be more religious because the act of participating in creation, i.e., birth, is more immediate for them than that of men. Perhaps that fact inclines women “to be more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves.” The family factor also helps explain why 1960s was a pivotal year in secularization. The birth control pill approval changed relations between the sexes – and thus altered the natural family. Extramarital sex became much easier, and that has had a seismic impact on family formation and strength.

The Church has not helped, and according to Eberstadt has participated in its own downfall by ignoring the family factor. Here she explores reformist efforts in the church which made divorce more acceptable and allowed contraception and homosexuality. She sees these efforts as undermining the very thing the church relies on – strong families.

Chapter 7 ties all that she has written together. She points out that the experience of the natural family drives some people to religion. In addition, the Christian story is itself told through the prism of the family – without family, it makes less sense. For instance, God himself is described as our Heavenly Father. But for those who have not had a dedicated and loving father, this makes little sense. Moreover, the Christian code ‘becomes a lightning rod for criticism’. None of us like to be told that the way we do things is wrong. In an age of non-traditional and anti-traditional families, more and more people will take offence at the Christian message and its teachings on the family.

The book concludes with two chapters on the future. The first is a case for pessimism. Here we see that fewer people are getting married and having children. Fewer of those who are having children sustain a two-parent home. This is bound to negatively impact the church. But in chapter 9, we are presented the case for optimism. In essence, great catastrophes often lead to religious revival. The situation of the Western world, might be the decline necessary for faith to rise from the ashes. Secure and wealthy societies have been able to bankroll the decline of the family, but this might not be able to go on indefinitely.