The Clash of Hope and History

Most of us are incorrigible optimists. And I don’t just mean the happy, bubbly people who could see the bright side of a sewer trench. Most of us, no matter our temperament, have a sense that the world will ultimately be good. We may not have all our future plans clearly mapped out, and we may be in the midst of struggles right now, but the majority of us have an inarticulate but certain sense that in the future the world is somehow going to be made right. In a word, we hope.

But hope is a curious thing in this world so filled with seemingly hopeless tragedies. We suffer directly as we or our family members grapple with pain and terminal disease. We witness the immense suffering of others in seeing them lose children to deranged school shooters or (for tens of millions in the third world) to poverty and starvation. Even if it were possible to prevent every crime and provide all with food and medical care, we would still eventually grow feeble and die, and that doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of all right. And yet we still have it in the back our minds that everything will be all right? So where does hope come from?

It’s as if we live amidst the constant clash of two worlds: The world of hopeful desire on the inside of us and the world of hopeless facts on the outside. The question is, which of these two worlds is the real world? Thoroughly cynical people, who, interestingly, usually still try to live as if there’s a future to hope for, accuse Christians of being childish and willfully ignorant. They say we live in a dream--that there’s no real difference between our belief in Heaven and a child’s belief in the Easter Bunny. Neither are grounded in objective facts. We’re said to be “escapists” who retreat to our inner fantasies about God and Heaven because we don’t have the good sense and fortitude to face the world as it truly is.

And it’s at just this point that confetti explodes over Christians. The resurrection of Jesus was precisely the moment when the world of hope entered into the world of history: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15)

At Easter, and all through the year, we want to proclaim to all the stiff-lipped “sensible” people who base everything they believe on the hard facts of history that Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is one of those hard facts! We thank God that Jesus physically rose from the dead, and in doing so he has "destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel" (2 Timothy 1:10). In the words of John Mark Mcmillan, he “laid Death in his grave.”

It really happened. Hope and history are one!

More Than Many Know About St. Patrick

My Good friend Dick Cleary has a most excellent blog site called Viewpoints (click here). A couple of years ago he posted a very insightful piece on St. Patricks Day, which I wanted to repost on Kalon Christian today. I'll bet there are few people who know the real significance of Patrick's impact on the world. 

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Atheists Are Not Honest

A few minutes ago a friend emailed me a link to a horrific news story about a murder-suicide. A 43-year-old college professor murdered his 39-year-old wife, called 911 to report it, and while the dispatcher was still on the line, the man went into his basement and fatally shot himself in the chest. The couple had two school-aged children:

The news of this tragedy was all the more disturbing to me because it all happened on the same road I lived on for three years prior to last summer. Nine months ago, my family and I lived only a couple of miles from where this heinous event has taken place. 

This kind of news (which is so disgustingly frequent) always calls attention to one blazingly conspicuous fact: atheists are not honest. The idea that God does not exist has waxed and waned in popularity over the past three hundred years or so. And through the last decade, there has been a wave of prolific writers whose consistent complaint against belief in God and the willful naivety that makes belief possible have put new wheels on the atheist bandwagon. They’ve come to be called the “New Atheists,” though there’s not much new in what they have to say. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, among several others, have gained quite a following writing and speaking about the absurdity of religious belief. They deride anyone who believes in God and his moral authority as asinine, superstitious, and willfully ignorant. As Dawkins laments, religious believers in the modern, scientifically enlightened world must be either stupid or wicked. 

But the problem with such luminaries is that they cannot stomach the conclusions of their own ideas. As C.S. Lewis says, they don’t remember their philosophy outside school. As bad as I believe most atheists to be, I don’t believe they are fully bad, at least not yet. I would bet that the vast majority of those who identify as atheists would read about this tragedy and respond by saying something like, “What a shame” or “How tragic” or “That’s just wrong.” And like the noonday sun on a shard of mirror, their wretched inconsistency comes to light.  

If there is no God and no moral accountability beyond the grave, if we truly cease to exist after our last breath, and if all of reality is made up only of physical elements, then morality itself is an illusion. We don't watch mixed chemicals react in a vat and say, “That’s just wrong!” And yet, if the New Atheists are right, all of life is simply the product of a series of extremely complex, though mindless, chemical reactions. If this is so, words like shame and tragedy, wrong and right, good and evil, have no meaning. Morality is, at best, a social convention like shaking hands or wearing neck ties. It’s taught and expected but has no real meaning in and of itself. There are many who are working hard to convince themselves and others of this, but they still instinctively realize (despite their philosophy) that tragedies really are tragic. Thus atheists are not honest. But as long as their are atheists we should hope they remain dishonest; we would not call an honest atheist honest. We would call him a sociopath.