Alister McGrath, “Why God Won’t Go Away”

As always, I find Alister McGrath’s insights quite refreshing.  In this presentation he speaks on New Atheism, defining its stance, sharing the questions it poses, as well as sharing what Christianity really is and how it interfaces with New Atheism.

Reading Tolstoi’s Where Love Is, There God Is Also

In his short story Where Love Is, There God Is Also, Tolstoi gives us a glimpse of the struggling Christian groping for some meaning and guidance through the challenging moments of life.  Martin Avdeitch is an aged cobbler who had lost both his wife and young son, and in inconsolable grief and disappointment had drifted away from God.  In his agony of existence Martin loses meaning in his life.  “His life seemed so empty that more than once he prayed for death and reproached the Almighty for taking away his only beloved son instead of himself, the old man.  At last he ceased altogether to go to church” (129).  Martin is the Christian in many of us who experience the senselessness of evil and become weary, with no perceived recourse.  All that passes through our thoughts are the basic existential questions whose answers seem to have lost meaning and life.  For all Christians such moments seem the utter end to a spiritual life.

Then one day Martin receives a visit from an old pilgrim who listens to him as he unburdens his soul.  Through his open and desparate heart he asks this pilgrim questions and receives answers that he is willing to put into practice.  This is the beginning of a process that leads Martin to experience a paradigm shift.  In the course of the conversation he is encouraged to immerse himself in the word of God and starts regularly reading the book of Luke.  Through this immersion he is visited by God in the likeness of one of his customers, a poorly dressed mother and child, and lastly by an old woman and young boy.  It is in this transformative experience that we find an applicable model.  There is the open and desparate soul willing to try God, then the open and desparate soul actually trying God, and then the breakthrough when God is recognized to have involved Himself in our lives.

It is through this simple parable that profound themes of struggle, despair, joy, hope, and surrender are illustrated in a process of growth.  As C.S. Lewis wrote in a correspondance with a Mrs. L: “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”  This daily reaching out to God in spiritual despair or joy is part of our imperceptible growth.

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Lewis, C.S. (1964). Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Tolstoy, Leo. (1910). Master and Man. London: Dent; New York: Dutton.

C. S. Lewis on Right and Wrong

“Everyone has heard people quarreling.  Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say.  They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”–”That’s my seat, I was there first”–”Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”–”Why should you shove in first?”–”Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”–”Come on, you promised.”  People say things like this every day, educated as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

“Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him.  He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about.  And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.”  Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.  He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off from keeping his promise.  It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play, or decent behavior, or morality, or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.  And they have.  If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word.  Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong.  And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

“Now this law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.  Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature,” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry.  But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature.  The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law–with this great difference, that a body could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.”

–Lewis, C.S. (1977). The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings. New York: Scribner.

Inspiration for Personal Quality

We talk about having an aha experience, or getting a bright idea.  Often these experienced moments lead us to problem-solving, getting beyond a stuck point, or creating something original.  Inspiration, as I am addressing it here, “…has the power of moving the intellect or emotions.”  It rises above the bright idea or aha experience.  For one, inspiration is something that doesn’t happen as often.  Second, this inspiration is something we can know to look for as opposed to being surprised by, only.  For example, an aha experience can take place while working on a term paper.  Writer’s block sets in and the process of the paper ceases.  A couple of hours later an idea strikes, seemingly out of the blue, and progress on the paper resumes.  A wonderful experience indeed!

In inspiration for personal quality, we look for those places or experiences that tap our souls and overwhelm us profoundly with a desire to improve our personhood.  From it we experience an urge to live a balanced, constructive, and moral life.  Such experiences are closely associated with some form of aesthetic order that overwhelmingly surrounds us, pulling us into the experience instead of observing it disconnectedly.  In this we are surrounded by order — order in sound and music, order in color and design, and order within the written word.  For me, choral music performed in the sanctity of a cathedral is highly inspiring.  In nature, the mountains as well the landscapes of England and Scotland provide inspiration.  In the written word, it is the writings of C.S. Lewis, the Bible, and Alister McGrath and that provide the rare but valued inspiration and motivation to assess the quality of myself and my life.

Such rare moments do not mean that frequent introspection or personal improvement do not take place.  On the contrary.  However, the inspiration for personal quality is not as common for most, especially when inspiration is of such high quality.  Sadly, it is so easy to get caught-up in the daily grind that we can easily forget to search out such inspiration, though we may feel we are lacking.  In fact, it is easy to settle for less than what we really know exists out there.  Inspiration fills that craving for something deeper and more fulfilling that can lead us to a happier existence.  The choral music performed in a cathedral that I mentioned earlier is an example of inspiration as a vignette of mature existence.  By mature existence I mean the good quality of music and good quality/uplifting surroundings are congruent with the result of experiencing a good quality inspiration that will not only motivate one to proactively change for the future, but already improve personal quality at that very moment.  Each person can find inspiration that is meaningful for them — one that does not have standards set by mainstream secularism and society.  Inspiration for a quality of life moves us to find God and experience Him.  Here are two examples that cannot replace the experience, but nonetheless gives an idea of what I’ve been talking about here:

 

Alister McGrath on The Quest for Beauty

Alister McGrath is one of my favorite Christian writers.  In this short video clip he speaks on the quest for beauty, where beauty is not the goal but rather as the pointer to God.  Next week, I will post an entry entitled Inspiration for Personal Quality.  This clip precedes that entry as a sort of introduction to what I’d like to share.

The Corrs’ Silver Strand

The Corrs are a musical family and this is my favorite song of theirs.  It’s a beautiful and haunting yet comforting song.  Perfect for listening to while undwinding with a book and mug of tea after a busy day.

Armand M. Nicholi’s The Question of God — Part II

Last week’s posting focused on C.S. Lewis’ and Freud’s attitudes towards human existence, and their worldviews on whether or not God exists.  In the epilogue of Nicholi’s The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, are two key thoughts that I would like to focus on.  The first point addresses ignoring the evidence of not just God’s existence but also His involvement in human lives.  Nicholi observes that Freud and Lewis focused a great portion of their lives on the question of God’s existence.  They recognized the overwhelming significance the question has on our identity, purpose, and destiny.  Nicholi says: “Yet Freud, and Lewis before his transition, also avoided confronting the evidence.  We find this easy to do.  We keep ourselves distracted.  We rationalize.  We tell ourselves we will consider such weighty (and anxiety-provoking) subjects when we are older–when time demands will not be as great.  At the moment, we have more pressing needs.  As with Lewis before his transition, we really don’t want to know–we nurture a ‘willful blindness’ and a ‘deep-seated hatred of authority.’  We find repugnant the notion of  ‘a transcendental Interferer.’  We feel toward our lives as both Freud and Lewis felt toward theirs: ‘This is my business, and mine only’” (242-243).

For Christians, the struggle of surrender touches very closely to human nature’s drive to act in one’s own interest.  The value of freedom and in some cultures a strong desire for rights, has created a paradigm of intolerance towards subjection beyond what is absolutely necessary (i.e. the necessity of hierarchy in work).  Additionally, there is the very strong influence of the scientific method which has had a trickle-down effect.  In one way this is good as it provides a uniformity and soundness in approaching science.  In another way it is problematic once it seeks to fit the metaphysical into a formula.  Less noticeable is the scientific method on society’s mass consciousness.  This way of thinking is barely noticeable and yet profoundly influential in human behavior and attitudes.  It directs reasoning and how people will process perception of information through the rigeurs of scientific objectivity.  This of course will create a bias towards one’s understanding of not only God, but on His motive towards relating to His creation, and the response His creation gives Him.

The second point of interest deals with the perception that some non-Christians and atheists have towards God or the concept of God.  Whether non-Christian or theist, there is often an expectation placed on Christians and Christian leaders to live a certain way.  When that expectation is not met, it is easy to attack and/or use such evidences as proof against the reliability of Christianity and evidence against the existence of God.  Nevertheless, Nicholi says: “We must also be careful not to conceptualize or judge God by the faulty actions of his fallible creatures, whether those in the Bible, or televangelists who go to jail, or priests who molest children.  All fall short.  Jesus of Nazareth was gentle and forgiving to the woman at the well who sought forgiveness, but severe with the religious leaders who failed to live what they professed.  Our tendency to distort and create our own God, sometimes a God not of love but of hate, may explain why, over the centuries, people have committed, and continue to commit, ungodly acts–even acts of terrorism–in the name of God.  This tendency to create our own God gives us insight into why the first commandment is: ‘You shall have no other gods before me’” (243-244).

Again, Christians find themselves living in a world with easy tendencies–tendencies that appeal to ease of living a lifestyle most commonly at odds with the one Christ calls them to make an effort to live.  Whatever worldview one holds, this book seeks to prompt each reader to ask intelligent questions and find the answers, all with an open mind to personal growth and change.   The lives of Lewis and Freud speak for themselves.