He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
Surely He has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed Him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was pierced for our transgressions;
He was crushed for our iniquities;
upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with His wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on Him
the iniquity of us all.
- Isaiah 53:3-6
Recently, while working on a project, I searched online for Peter Kreeft, a Christian philosopher I’d come across a while back. He’s really a pretty impressive figure, still teaching at eighty-seven with some 80-odd books to his credit– his latest being a four-volume set of books on the history of philosophy and philosophers in the west. Before being impressed that I would read such a work, let me confess that they are sort of “philosophy for non-philosophers” books, a tiny step above ‘philosophy for dummies.’ The set reviews 100 significant philosophers whose ideas shaped and continue to shape western civilization. You, too, can learn about almost any western philosopher since Socrates in under ten pages.
What caught my attention, however, was not the link for which I was looking. As so often is the case, the search produced other interesting results, a couple of which were links to discussions about how wrong Kreeft was and is. One such discussion dealt with a statement from Kreeft’s 2017 book entitled The Problem of Evil. Kreeft wrote, “Take away all sin and selfishness and you would have heaven on earth.” The problem of evil is never resolved in a single statement, but the funny thing was the question ‘Does anyone have a good argument against this [statement]’ reply. (sic) In other words, I don’t like what he says, and I need a reason why.
The answer is revealing in what the responder thinks about God, answering in this way:
False.
You will still have hurricanes, fires and earthquakes, you will still have flash eating bacteria, you will still have famine, and disease.
Why did God create AIDS? Why did God create cholera? Volcanoes? Rabid Wolves? Floods?
None of this is explained away by "sin and selfishness."
The argument falls apart from there.
This is how many non-Christians perceive the Christian God. We should ask ourselves how much we have contributed to this perspective or perhaps are even inclined to hold the same view? I am not here interested in debating non-Christians, but in challenging us about what we believe and say to one another and others when faced with terrible suffering or great evil. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ, we should see and understand all life and creation from God’s point of view as revealed in His Son. What did God do, and what is God doing now? God’s answer is our answer.
The answer above exposes the deep division in worldviews between people who believe in a Creator and people who do not. Popular culture has jettisoned God in all things, though I suspect there are a good deal more people who believe in God than do not, at least in some form or fashion. That said, the more society absorbs the implied atheistic and naturalistic worldview, the more we need to be able to explain and defend Christian faith and belief. Likewise, the more entrenched are the “flat earth” views of a purely physical materialist worldview, the greater is the difference between popular opinion and Christian belief. The relevant point to make, however, is that irrespective of what any of us believes, only one thing is true. We were nobler creatures when we sought truth than when we forfeited the pursuit of truth for selfish lives of our own manufacturing.
To deny the presence and activity of spiritual beings means we cannot truly understand the nature of the reality in which we live. The worldview that closed the door to transcendence cannot begin to understand the nature of creation and the created order, much less how God Himself acts. In the response above, the writer doesn’t believe God exists, and therefore, is making a conclusive argument with only a fraction of the knowledge necessary for understanding, meaning he can’t possibly reach an accurate or sufficient conclusion.
For example, for millennia, philosophers argued – and everyone believed – that the universe was eternal, having always existed and continually existing without end. In contrast, devout Jews and Christians held that God created the universe and all that is in it. If the universe was created, then it had a beginning and thus, potentially an end, which Christians also claimed was true. This contradicted what every knowledgeable and trained philosopher knew, but Christians held to that belief in spite of ridicule and the dismissal in their various generations and cultures. Less than a century ago, 1927 to be precise, the first hypothesis about an explosive beginning of the universe came from the French astronomer Georges Lemaître. His theory was followed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble who observed the expansion of the universe and confirmed the theory of an original primordial explosion. Thousands of years after Genesis recorded that “God created…”, scientists discovered Something had caused the universe to come into existence. We are wise to remember that human knowledge pales before what God has revealed to us. Whatever we think we know is miniscule by comparison to all that is. As Christians, we need to be intentional about thinking and living within the transcendent reality that permeates our physical world.
When Kreeft writes that ‘a world without sin and selfishness would be heaven on earth’, he is talking about sin in a manner that is far more than a list of dos and don’ts. He is talking about the corrupted condition of all that exists. Too often we are guilty of addressing sin as a condition for treatment. But in truth, sin is more a plague than a pimple. The whole of creation, whether we are speaking of the death of children, the latest war over land and religion, or the hurricanes and fires that destroy people and homes, is corrupted by sin. God’s original creation is not what is. What is, is a contaminated facsimile of what God created, just as are human beings – we ourselves – a distorted reflection of God’s intent.
The God of philosophers and speculation is not the same God Who has made Himself known in Jesus Christ. Kreeft was not writing about some theoretical or nebulous idea of an external entity. He was writing about human beings in reference to a specific God, the One Who created, Who saves, and Who redeems for eternal life – specific eternal actions in human history that reveal an immeasurable and perfect love. The events of God’s salvation frame the difference in how Christians view the world from how the world views itself. Christ did this for all, even for mockers and skeptics.
Annually, we celebrate our Lord’s Resurrection, but we seldom look beyond it to the Ascension. When was the last time you celebrated the Ascension in worship? Jesus’ human Body “rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.” Do we not confess that belief in our churches? In His ascension, He took His Body somewhere, to a place we cannot see or measure or quantify. The place where Jesus went, the place He is preparing for His disciples, is a place we cannot attain by our own efforts or design. What we can know is that Christ Jesus has opened the gates to it for us, and there is where suffering, sorrow, death, and evil cease to exist. In contrast, here is where suffering, grief, disease, and sin are propelled by evil for the sole purpose of destruction.
The centerpiece – the hinge, if you will – of our hope is the Cross of Jesus Christ. The brokenness of creation, the sin of human beings, the death and destruction of evil, were borne by the God-Man as He endured gross dishonor, injustice, and persecution leading to crucifixion. There, on the Cross, all that is wrong, all that is flawed and broken, all that is cruel and wicked were blamed on God in fact, and He took that punishment – accepting death itself – to open the gates of the way to life.
The human mind that grasps only human wisdom is of necessity childish. The life a person must live without our Savior is staggeringly difficult – or it is inescapably shallow – because there are no limits on sin and evil in causing pain and suffering. Choosing disbelief in God does not change the existence of God or the nature of what God created. Thus, we see the pursuit of inane and the self-destructive, the enslavement of individuals by forces of which they are not even aware. For all of these, our Lord has compassion and the relentless desire to save.
God did not create earthquakes and famines, nor did He create volcanoes or rabid wolves. God created a perfectly orchestrated and integrated universe – a universe in which Jesus Christ even now lives and reigns, where disease, death, and evil will be swallowed up in life and light and perfect good. We call that the Kingdom of God because we do not have sufficient words to express that reality, especially when we experience it personally. We do not even have sufficient imagination to grasp all that is, where Christ is King already. What we can do is choose to draw life from that greater and overarching reality beyond the world we see and to embody it in our own.
Kreeft’s statement is not false, and his argument does not fall apart. Instead, Kreeft knows of an existence that expands far beyond the contemporary mind. More and more, we will be asked to weigh the knowledge of the world against the Author of all that exists. Obsession with a purely material world and refusal to acknowledge the Creator are what Satan wants us to believe. We are not involved in a culture war. We are engaged in the ongoing battle between good and evil described throughout Scripture.
The war has been won, and if we want to push back the dark arrogance of our time, we will not do so in arguments. As our Lord defeated evil through love and humility, in self-sacrifice and injustice, so also should be prepared to love humbly and to give freely for the salvation of anyone we meet. Our Father is still at work in our world, and if we join Him, we join as children who love as He first loved us, as sinners who know that He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, and chastised so we might have peace. We are the sheep who have also gone astray. He brought us safely to sheepfold not so we might argue with those outside, but that we might invite them in in His name.
If indeed we could take away all sin and selfishness, we would have heaven on earth. One day, that exact thing is going to come to pass, and it’s going to come to pass because our God is good in ways we cannot measure and loves inexhaustibly and perfectly. We make the best decision when we do not doubt that He is the God Who is sovereign over all, even those who blame Him for evil.
God knew what He was getting into when He created us. The least we can do is acknowledge the mess we are and let Him bring us out into the light of Jesus to be cleaned up to live fully.
In Christ –
Rev. Elizabeth Moreau
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