It’s been a long three weeks since my last post on this topic; a full month since I dove in. I expect that anyone still paying attention will have trouble connecting all of the dots. For that, I apologize. Life gets in the way and my attention has been drawn to other things, even other prompts to share in the meantime.

But, now it’s time to bring this to a close.

Essentially, this seven-part series is a response to the reasonable question of why Christians don’t appear to be any more “good” than anyone else and why, after 2000 years of such worldwide influence, does it appear that the world is not a better place for its existence.

I’ve spent a lot of time and space dissecting the question in order to arrive at some form of a coherent response. I am quite ready to admit that it will not prove entirely or even partially acceptable to some.

I hope it’s been clear that I am no defender of much that the Christian religion or many of its adherents have stood for. I also freely admit that I do not have all of the answers and if one who is “investigating” Christianity expects all of the answers, then he or she will be sadly disappointed.

There are many ways to “defend” Christianity aside from trying to answer the good questions raised at the beginning of this series. I’ll offer, instead, that the totality of my writing speaks to the nature of the faith and then I will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

I will conclude this series by addressing two things.

God and Man

One of the most common objections to Christianity is that if God is good and loving and all-powerful, how come he allows evil and bad stuff to happen? Furthermore, if Jesus came to earth to straighten us out and he taught really nice stuff, how come his followers don’t reflect this? Aren’t we just left with the conclusion that God and Jesus are either without power or they are, practically, irrelevant?

I suspect it’s some variant of this line of thinking that motivated the author’s questions I engaged a month ago. And, I accept that. This line of thinking is valid and, as I said in the beginning, it is incumbent upon Christians to be prepared to respond in some fashion.

The Bible is the most well known and published book in human history. While I thought I had some basic idea of its content and message awhile back, in hindsight I didn’t have a clue. In fact, it is highly complex, layered with a breadth and depth that is astonishing. It can be viewed in many ways but, in its essence, it is the story of God’s relationship with Man. And, that’s not an easy thing to define.

Each of us has to come to our own understanding of these things. People are very free to dismiss God as a fiction or to dismiss Jesus being divine or even having existed in the first place. People are free to disagree as to what “divine” is and what “good” is. People are free to believe that morality is purely a social construction and that it has no ultimate objective state. Or, people can believe that there is a supernatural objective truth upon which all things good are based. People can believe that God is perfect love and will forgive all things and everyone, eventually. People can believe that God is both loving and judging and that forgiveness is not necessarily the outcome for everyone. People can believe they know what’s best for God and people can believe that God knows what’s best for us. You can’t have it all ways.

The Christian view is that Man is fallen. This is a theological way of saying that we have rejected God as being in charge and are choosing to go our own way. Furthermore, the Christian view is that Jesus is God come to “dwell among us” as both fully human and fully God. The only such one in human history. The Christian view is that his life and message are to be believed fully. And, that the way for us to come back to God and to overcome our fallen nature is through him.

This is often very hard to accept by non-Christians. Which leads us to a dilemma.

If the above scenario is false, then Christianity is irrelevant. It will turn out to be either a huge scam or something only vaguely resembling the reality Christians believe in. If, on the other hand, it is true, then is the problem contained in the original set of questions the fault of Man or God?

For the longest time, many decades in fact, I determined that the problem was with God, if there was one. No more.

There is so much I do not know. For instance, I am aware that many people have given up on Christianity because of the deep flaws in character they witness on a regular basis. They say how could it be true if, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church allowed terrible instances of abuse to routinely occur? Or, how could Protestant pastors with large followings, who preach love, grace, and forgiveness every Sunday get away with the egregious sins they consistently rail against? Why is the Christian “religion” chock full of people and leaders who routinely violate the most basic principles of their faith? Furthermore, why does God just allow evil to invade every community and society? Ultimately, I do not fully know why there are so many people who profess to be Christians who do bad things, nor I do not fully know why God continues to allow evil to happen.

Having said that, I have some idea of each. To the former, it is hard to surrender the authority for our lives to another. It is hard to set aside many of the worldly things we value and look to in order that we may be valued. The greatest sin is said to be pride as in “Pride Goeth Before the Fall.” Pride is insidious. It is a cancer that, left unchecked, moves from the smallest little benign kind of thing to full blown malignancy. I’d argue that pride is one of the key elements in the grab for power. Pride, power, harshly judging others, and self-righteousness all go hand in hand. No one is immune to this. A self-professing Christian who succumbs to these temptations is one who has chosen to put self above God. The outcome is not good. Of course, this obvious problem can raise questions about why God lets this happen and why is it so hard for a Christian to follow the example of Jesus? There is a long answer but the short answer is that Christians are human like everyone and vulnerable to the same faults. This is where Keller was going earlier when talking about character. A truly gospel-believing Christian will humbly recognize his or her shortcomings and chart a course to be more like Jesus. A nominal Christian will use Jesus for his or her own purpose, hardly recognizing the consequence.

And, why does God allow evil to happen? Or, perhaps less dramatically, why does God allow suffering to occur? I have written about these things before. Just as we cannot fully know God, we cannot fully know the nature of evil and the role of suffering in our human existence. However, we do know some things, if we accept the Christian view. For starters, much of our suffering results in deeper maturity and helps us to live as a more loving and giving person. We become more compassionate and that can ripple out in significant ways. Using a piece of biblical imagery, our iron is refined in the fire as the dross (impurity) is sloughed off. By no means is this a complete answer to why evil is allowed to occur and why Christians have resorted to evil acts. But, in the context of God’s plan for humans, we have to look at the long view. C.S. Lewis shares the following conversation in his book, The Great Divorce, of which I’ve referred previously. This dialogue is between two characters regarding evil, heaven and hell.

Says the heavenly one: “That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, ‘Let me have this and I’ll take the consequences’, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven. The bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of things, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ Both speak truly.

Unless one is both familiar with and believes that Heaven is “for real” and that a person’s choices will determine the outcome, then this long view serves no purpose to help explain suffering and the reality of bad behavior. I am mindful that these brief explanations may only raise more questions than they answer and that’s ok. As always, I humbly invite others to provide their own conclusion about things, by which they make sense of the entire picture.

I said at the beginning of this post that I will conclude with two things. Here is the second.

Did God Make a Mistake?

While I’ve just touched upon this, I want to respond to the author’s final paragraph of questions that are basically charging God with setting up mankind’s failures. This is a common and rational charge, given the circumstances. The author gets at this with several statements. He says that if the good in mankind has not improved since the lifetime of Jesus and that if Christians cannot be shown to have a higher percentage of good people than non-Christians, then the situation is that only a fraction of people will “get it.” And, because it’s so difficult to “get it,” then God is not really on the side of good (my interpretation) and he’s more in line with someone who gets their jollies out of seeing others struggle in a long uphill battle, rarely ever arriving at salvation. To make it worse, if the whole thing is complicated, since “most people can’t deal with anything complex,” then the system is inherently flawed, set up to fail. God should then be judged by man as deficient or worse.

We can look at this in many ways. First, if after examining everything … and I mean everything about the nature of reality, including the fact of humans within that reality, one concludes there is no God, then that is that. I will not dive back in there because I’ve covered that ground extensively and nothing here promises to add anything special. If, after examining everything, one concludes that there is a God but he/it is the god worshipped by Hindus, Buddhists, Druids or whomever, then we are talking about an entirely different kettle of fish. Of course, people are welcome to believe in such gods. If, however, one concludes that there is a God and he/it is all powerful, loving, judging but gracious, and knows us completely, then we are left with only two conclusions.

The first conclusion is that God is actually not caring, disinterested, manipulative and purposefully set us up to fail. The deck was stacked inevitably and irretrievably against us. Always was and always will be. People don’t really have a chance. This whole thing is a mess. We don’t have the capacity to understand the mess, nor to live by God’s rules. Of course, this presents a problem which is, essentially, the fact this would negate any belief that God is loving, etc…

The second conclusion is that God did not make a mistake and knew exactly what he was doing.

This is where the rubber hits the road. If we can, for a moment, assume that God knows exactly what he is doing and he is all of the things that Jesus teaches us about him, then we are left with an interesting quandary. And, this quandary actually doesn’t stack the deck against those who the author claims may lack complex thinking. In fact, I’d argue that it, if anything, it is an obstacle to those who might be considered complex thinkers.

Perhaps soon I will write on how the Gospel is, simultaneously, both deeply complex and remarkably simple. This supposed paradox can and is regularly resolved but often not in the ways that some people might think. Oh, some will resort to the notion that simple people are led blindly to a false faith by the Machiavellis of the world. But, the God of the second conclusion has figured that one out quite nicely. The truth is available to all and it’s actually quite obtainable, as in “right in front of our face.” The key, of course, is that we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Diane did not arrive at her deep faith by investigating all of the possibilities, by analyzing all of the variables. Who can look at Diane and critique her for getting it wrong? C.S. Lewis did arrive at his faith by investigating all of the possibilities but even that was not quite enough. It took something else. I investigated most all of the possibilities but, like Lewis, it took something else. Billions of people, whether brilliant or uneducated, rich or poor, urban or rural, have arrived at the conclusion that the God of the Hebrew people, the God made known by Jesus, is actually the real deal.

No, believe these people, God did not get it wrong. With a nod to Chesterton, I did. And still do.

Yes, we can be angry with God. We can deeply lament. We can doubt and question. I am good with all of that. But, as I always say, in the end we always come to a choice. It was the last thing I remembered before everything changed.

Perhaps there has been something in these many pages that will cause one to pause and consider viewing things at least a bit differently. Perhaps not. God bless you all and thank you for listening.