On the other hand, Peter Kreeft's Christianity for Modern Pagans, a study of Pascal's Pensees, changed my life and made me understand my humanity in the context of Christianity more than any book I've ever read.
Rod Dreher's How Dante Will Save Your Life is another profound book that makes the case for the Christian faith.
So I'm dealing with two issues.
One, is faith, or not, the result of cherry picking Bible passages to create whatever God one wants to create?
Two, how can I have faith and trust in the God of Eternal Damnation? Dale Allison cannot, as he states in his amazing book Night Comes. How will Jesus help me overcome my hell problem? Should I write a story about a guy who goes into a priest's office and spills his beans, as it were?
You’re not interested in Buddhism, too calm and detached for your tastes. You're reminded of those pretentious new agers yo'd bump into when you were working in Berkeley.
You like Taoism, for all its wisdom, insight, and grasp of life’s paradoxes, but it’s too esoteric and enigmatic to be useful to you. Confucianism is rich with wisdom, but it’s hardly a religion, just a compendium of platitudes.
Hinduism has way too many gods to the point that it’s chaotic and confusing.
So that brings us to the Big Three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. You’re half Jewish on your mother’s side, so that looks like a good prospect, but you’re impatient and don’t feel like waiting any longer for a messiah. And in spite of your love of bagels, your ability to pronounce even rudimentary Hebrew words is painful and grating on the ears.
Then there’s the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam. For whatever reason, you don’t fear the Muslim Hell, which is a surprise, because you do fear the Christian Hell.
You are a very fearful person in general. Why you fear one Hell and not the other is something we’ll need to explore later, but for now, based on your fear of the Christian Hell, let’s look at what’s on the table. If the part of you that wants Hell Insurance, that is to be saved from Hell “just in case Christianity is true,” as you like to say, then you can be a hardcore orthodox Christian. Being orthodox, you will believe in the doctrine of eternal hell as a just doctrine authored by a just, all-loving God. You won’t question why so many people, including your family members, will spend eternity in Hell. Your piety and devotion to your God won’t allow such doubts or questions, which are really disguised accusations against your Maker. As an orthodox Christian, you will know and joyously accept that millions of souls--billions perhaps--will suffer torment for eternity. All the while you will never question God’s eternal, unconditional love.
If that’s too hard to take, as it is for Dale C. Allison, Robert Cornwall, and other Christ-loving people, you can be a soft Christian who emphasizes God’s unconditional love and you can back pedal on the hell issue. At worst, in the soft Christian scenario, hell is self-induced, the result of rejecting God, that is of choosing sin and your idols before God. In your soft Christian scenario, you can be vague on hell, you can not talk about hell at all, or you can erase hell altogether by being a universalist who believes that all eventually get saved. You will accept that your orthodox Christian friends and colleagues won't consider you Christian at all. You'll be judged a blasphemer, a false prophet, and a heretic doomed to suffer eternity in hell. Some soft Christians will fight back and call the orthodox Christians false prophets who suck the love out of God with their demonic, hateful interpretation of Him. Scriptures will be read on both sides and the battle will rage on with no end in sight.
If you want to avoid this kerfuffle, you can become an atheist. You can decide that the great atheists writers are correct, that religion creates more problems than it solves, that the gods they worship are too human and reflect too many egregious human flaws to be believed. As an atheist, you will believe that you can live a more rich, abundant life under the atheistic philosophy.
Or if you've been touched by some divine experience or two in your life that makes atheism impossible and you'd like to hedge your bets, you can be an agnostic humanist who’s tortured by too many “unresolved questions.” But if there is a Judgment Day you'll hope that God will understand that while you weren't a true believer, at least you were "sincere" in your doubting ways.
If you find yourself running in circles, chasing your tail, as it were, regarding all this religious business, you can pursue the Epicurean life of materialism and hedonism and be indifferent to the above concerns.
But let’s be honest, you’re in too deep to really be indifferent, you're too invested in your religious torment to back out now. Am I correct? Okay then. Let us proceed.
One of the deepest, intelligent books I've ever read, Dale Allison's Night Comes, is reviewed by Robert Cornwall. In Night Comes, Allison writes about the Japanese converts whose lives were ironed by sadness at the thought that their dead relatives were wailing in eternal hell. They were inconsolable. The missionaries told the new converts there was no hope for their dead relatives. This is the joy the missionaries sent forth into the world, the "good news." And here lies my hate, not just at this supposed spreading of "joy" but my own wimpiness that makes me fear it.
I need to write a thematic summary of Allison's book, especially the problems posed by the doctrine of eternal hell.
Writer Morgan Guyton has a book, How Jesus Saves the World from Us, which also tackles the doctrine of eternal hell and our need to come to God based on love and not fear. I'm about a third done with the book. Guyton aims to paint the Christian God as loving and not the grouchy middle school gym teacher (an analogy he uses), but he seems very selective, cherry-picking passages to come up with a loving God, and avoiding Jesus' hell statements to do the same.
Here lies my problem with Christianity. The Orthodox Christians like Peter Kreeft and Rod Dreher seem more honest. They give you full-throttle hell doctrine, which seems like a more accurate interpretation of the Bible.
Liberal Christians like Morgan Guyton side step or back pedal hell, but seem more like cherry pickers.
Then an atheist and former Christian Dan Barker emphasizes the worst qualities you could attribute to God from a reading of the Old and New Testaments and this results in his atheism.
Since the beginning of time, there has been an ongoing debate about morality. Religious people say you need God because God gives us morals. No God, no morals. On the other hand, atheists say you don’t need God for morality for two reasons. Reason one, virtue is its own reward. As you mature and become wiser, you realize that being good makes you happy. This is natural maturity and requires no God. The second reason the atheist says you need no God for morality is evolution.
As societies evolve, they learn that cooperation is an effective adaptation and cooperation requires moral behavior. Therefore, morality evolves as societies evolve. This evolution, atheists claim, is evidence that God is not required for morality.
My maternal grandfather is a good example of the moral atheist. He was nice, compassionate, considerate, civil, and he lived in accordance with his principles. He was also a devout socialist and he remained devoted to his ideology to his final breath.
I broke his heart because in spite of his best efforts I never drank his socialist Kool-Aid. I never believed that people were good enough, Christian enough, to be true socialists. Ironically, I thought the Christian view of man was more realistic: We’re too greedy and too selfish to live in a sharing, socialist society. The only way we could become socialists, as I saw it, wasn’t through atheism but by converting to Christianity to the point that we lost our desires for the material things of this world, and I always doubted that such a mass conversion could really take place.
Do I believe morality can exist without a belief in God and possibility of God’s punishment? Part of me does because I’ve seen I’ve seen atheists who are moral and appear to live full, loving lives, but then there’s me. I don’t know about you, but I’m hard-wired to be selfish, self-involved and self-indulgent. Selfishness is my default setting. Selfishness and morality don’t mix. Selfish people tend to be afflicted with addictions. I stand guilty as charged.
But I do have a conscience. I’m not a sociopath. I don’t steal, and I try to avoid hurting others in my pursuit of my wants, but is that morality? I doubt it. My guess is that most people are like me. We avoid hurting others, we don’t steal, but at the end of the day we’re selfish. The world evolves around ME. For people like us, I wonder if we need to fear God. Because without a fear of God’s punishment and the pestilential self-destructiveness and self-induced hell of our own selfish nature, we’ll go down a rabbit hole of addiction and debauchery.
In other words, perhaps most of us are so entrenched in our selfishness that we need a fear of God to unshackle ourselves from our extreme self-centered existence. On the other hand, fearing God and God’s hell can be an impossible pill to swallow with hell’s implication of unrelenting cruelty and sadism.
But here’s the problem: If you convinced me there is no hell, could I be a good person, a less selfish person or would I fall back on my selfish default setting? Would my Id, my Inner Narcissist, my Inner Addict take over Jeff McMahon and devour me as I lie on the rock and watch my addictions eat me alive like the Prometheus watching the eagle eat his liver? Without a fear of God and without a fear of my own self-destructive selfishness would I be like a little kid who’s always pushing the boundaries to see what he can get away with until he burns his house down? I fear that without religion my default setting is selfishness. And I’m also depressed that I’m so selfish I need a motivation like fear to become virtuous. What does that say about my maturity level? I’m not saying religion, with its fear of God and threat of hell, guarantees that we’ll be good people.
My wife went to a Christian college and one of her friends pointed at some guy who had ascended student government, and my wife’s friend said, “See that guy. Before he found the Lord, he was a jackass, and how he’s a raging Christian, and he’s still a jackass.”
Then there’s my student from Vietnam, a nursing student and a self-proclaimed atheist, who told me she hated Christianity because her four brothers and sisters were all rich Christians who ignored their mother when she had cancer back in Vietnam. Only my student, the atheist of the 5 siblings, returned to care for her mother till her mother died of cancer. Could I be as moral as my atheist student? I doubt it. I’m too immature. I’m so selfish I need fear to motivate me toward the good. That depresses the hell out of me, but I’d rather be depressed and know the truth than delude myself.
Study Questions for Michel Houellebecq's Submission
Essay Assignment
Writea persuasive essay that addresses the contention that the novel Submission is a convincing condemnation of Western democracy's vacuous consumerism, entropy (moral decline), acedia (spiritual apathy as a result of lacking purpose and meaning), smug self-satisfaction, hedonism, and moral relativism that is ripe for the taking by a alternative entity that provides moral absolutism, strong family values, and a strong sense of belonging.
One. On the novel’s first page the narrator confesses he is said, full of ennui, hopelessness, and superficial ambition. What is the person of such a character for the novel?
Being “hypnotized by the desire for money” leads to a gradual moral dissolution, isolation, and emptiness.
People run on the hedonic treadmill, searching for more and more, and hitting a wall of numbness. The narrator’s state is the state of French society.
The highest religion in France, according to the narrator, is the “primitive desire for consumer goods.”
In addition to money, the narrator’s fellow college graduates are “hypnotized by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that hey believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanized as they are by their worship of fleeing icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, movie stars, and models.”
Does this type of naval-gazing consumerism lead to the death of a society? The author poses this question.
Two. How is literature, the written form, superior to all other forms of art?
The narrator says, “But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirt from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.” (5)
Literature is therefore the narrator’s friend. The narrator is lonely, alienated, anxious, and yet in literature he finds connection with other souls.
Of all the souls, the narrator Francois feels most connected to the novelist J.K. Huysmans, a pessimistic satirical writer who was obsessed with the dichotomy between hedonistic moral decay and religious righteousness. Huysmans is alienated from all the smug, self-satisfied hedonists that surround him, and his alienation is something that Francois identifies with (7).
Three. What does Francois think of his Literature study?
For the most part, it is worthless and futile; however, there is a benefit: “literature has always carried positive connotations in a world of luxury goods.” In other words, having a way with words enhances one’s pretentiousness and affections, qualities used to BS consumers with material goods. Nothing in society is valued for its authenticity or spiritual quality. It must be an “asset” in the service of making money.
His talent appears to be grooming him for a tenured professor job, which he sees as “boring and predictable,” thus making him feel closer to his idol Huysmans.
Francois has no passion to teach, no passion to do anything. He just has nothing better to do with his talents.
Worse, he doesn’t like the students, especially young people. (An aside, I don’t identify with the narrator. I like a lot of my students, especially the ones who teach me new things and keep me humble).
Four. What speaks to Francois’ disconnection from the human race?
He is a misanthrope, meaning he doesn’t like people. His disconnection compels him to find false connection through illicit, short-term relationships, casual sex, and hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure beyond everything else), which invariably leads to brain-numbing depression and moral dissolution (disintegration).
His relationships are endless cycles of futility: boring, perfunctory (soulless) predictable, and mediocre. His lack of soul, of being “emotionally unavailable,” to use modern parlance, resulted in the women breaking up with him. They would lie to him saying they had “met someone” (10). Francois sees that society’s script tell us that in our youth we have these passion-filled interludes, but then we mature and we settle down.
However, Francois never matures. He remains an emotional adolescent repeating one superficial, immature relationship after another.
As a result, Francois suffers from ennui (boredom with life) and acedia (spiritual lethargy from having no purpose in life). To use Francois’ language, he suffers from “lassitude” (weakness and fatigue).
When Francois meets former girlfriends, he notices that they have “succeeded” with their careers but are unhappy, lonely, and alcoholic. Their sad existence and absence of youthful beauty make them undesirable to him.
These women, like Francois, abandon dreams of starting a family and instead focus on their careers. They become “cougars,” preying on younger men for their hedonistic entertainment and diversion (12).
Moreover, Francois admits that he and his former girlfriends have a connection because they are both disillusioned about the pursuit of happiness and “the good life.” Such a life does not exist. All they can do is find diversions, materialism, and pleasure-seeking to fill their damaged souls.
Francois’ disconnection to the human race can also be attributed to his lack of morals. He has no morality to speak of. He has affairs with his students, which mentions as if there was no scandal to it.
His colleagues at the university, too, have no morality. For example, Steve is having a salacious affair with his boss to climb the academic ladder (18). Not surprisingly, all Steve talks about are his promotions because he has nothing but ambition to define himself with. Steve is really not “a man of the left,” that is a Left Wing Liberal. Rather, Steve goes whichever way the wind blows. In other words, he follows the money with no moral compass (18).
He objectifies women and insults them in his mind as if it were the natural thing to do.
He numbs his brain on internet porn (14-15).
With nothing to live for, Francois wants to disappear inside his addictions.
Your decision to embrace Christianity, or not, depends on what you believe Christianity is. And that means what you believe God is. Pascal's God is largely different than the fundamentalist God Dan Barker once worshipped then rejected. Barker wrote a book about the God he rejected as he focuses on biblical atrocities not often discussed in places of worship.
If Barker is wrong, then it's because he is offering a Straw Man, a false notion of God.
If we reject God based on Barker's portrayal of God, what then? Do we succumb to "narcissistic indifference" (phrase I take from Dale Allison's Night Comes) and concupiscence?
Do we need fear of punishment, God's punishment and our own self-induced hell, to stay faithful?
Another related point is that of trust.
Can we really trust the God Barker portrays? Can we trust the God of spiteful, superfluous, everlasting punishment? We can bow down to such a God out of fear, but that is not trust.
In Night Comes, Dale Allison explores the possibility that hell is rehabilitative. That is a God Allison and others, including myself, are more inclined to trust.
We read that the search for knowledge must begin with humility, not pride. During our search, we find that we are wretched or unhappy because we have deviated from the likeness of our Maker.
Non-believers will take man’s wretchedness and misuse it to “prove” God does not exist. Pascal’s paradoxical view of man incorporates our wretchedness and our greatness or goodness when we’re connected to God and have a pure heart.
Our Fall from God’s grace as a result of our sin makes us wretched but long to be whole again, to be with our Maker (61). We are the “disinherited prince.” We are nagged by unhappiness. Therefore, Pascal writes, “All men complain” (61).
We are miserable because Kreeft writes we have been “dethroned” (61).
“G.K. Chesterton says that no one can love his own soul too much or hate his own self too much.” See page 62.
Two. Opposite of Theism Is Not Atheism But Idolatry
Self-fulfillment, eternal youth, worshipping the Earth, or “Gaia,” accumulating followers or some other social media metric are forms of idolatry (50). I’m reminded of David Brooks’ The Road to Character. We make achievement for personal success and ambition higher than eulogy virtues. It is said that Brooks may be converting to Catholicism.
Kreeft adds that the Industrial Tech Revolution taught us to idolize machines and gadgets. The Sexual Revolution made us worship the flesh (53). We worship Progress even as we lose our souls.
Kreeft writes, “We are all addicts to something.” Then he quotes George Macdonald who writes, “A man is a slave to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.” See page 64.
Three. Bland Philosophies
Pascal condemns bland philosophies that deny man’s contradiction of woefulness and greatness. Man can be “bland and comfortable,” as Kreeft writes, a sort of Nietzschean Last Man or mindless consumer (64).
This soulless passionless soul becomes Western Civilization, the one excoriated in Michel Houellebecq’s novels Submission and Platform.
Four. Our Primal Sin
Kreeft writes, “The primal, original sin was (and is) pride, that is, playing God, willing ourselves as our own ends, trying to find our happiness and fulfillment in ourselves . . .” We seek psychology, humanism, science, naturalism, etc. (70).
Five. Vain Man Is a Façade
Referring to vanity, Kreeft speaks of “pettiness, thinness, shallowness, hollowness, insubstantiality. This is the condition of man without God, that is, of the modern pagan.”
This emptiness is our hell. Quoting Gabriel Marcel, Kreeft shows us that the war isn’t so much good vs. evil but fullness vs. emptiness (73).
Behind the playboy and his “lifestyle,” we see that “nobody is there.” He is all façade. I’m reminded of the playboy at the beach circa 1978 who got stung by a bee and wouldn’t show his pain.
I think of how I was exposed as a fraud, a great bullshitter who was nothing behind his curtain.
Hollowness, according to Kreeft, is damnation (79). Our hollowness makes us so desperate we want to impress people so their high opinion of us will contradict our knowledge of the truth: that we are empty inside.
I think of people who get married to hide their hollowness, to suggest some substance that doesn’t exist. The denial of their hollowness is a denial that they are languishing in hell.
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
This is my favorite Pensee (79).
And here’s another Pensee about man’s fraud that Kreeft points out on page 151:
“Man is therefore nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart.”
Our fraud and self-delusion damns us, as Kreeft writes:
“Deliberate self-delusion may even be ‘unforgivable sin’, for once we shut our souls to the light, we shut them to God, for God is light.”
Six. The Core of Sin
“The essence of sin is selfishness,” ‘me first’, self-love or pride. (147).
Kreeft warns us to not confuse self-love, or pride, with self-respect:
“As Chesterton puts it, ‘a man cannot think too little of his self, or too much of his soul.’ Chrsitianity tells us to be soulish but not selfish; modernity tells us to be selfish but not soulish.”
Kreeft asserts that Christianity calls out our disease, Original Sin, and says there’s a cure; therefore, Christianity is an optimistic religion (148). Sin: “I want what I want when I want it” (148).
Concupiscence
This wanting everything now is called the sin of concupiscence, which is innate and feels natural. Kreeft calls concupiscence “the innate and universal habit of selfishness, the demand to gratify all our desires for pleasure.” This pleasure seeking becomes an ingrained habit (161).
Seven. Why We Both Love and Fear God
Kreeft: “We need God because he is our Father, and we fear him because we have made ourselves his enemies through sin” (156). We’d rather concupiscence be our companion, not God.
Eight. Difference Between Christianity and Buddhism
Christianity and Buddhism are similar in that both say we are afflicted with sin and wretchedness from desiring the wrong things and these desires lead to suffering and misery. But in Christianity this sin is an offense to a Personal God, not so in Buddhism.
Christianity offers agape as the alternative to selfish love. Buddhism does not but rather “impersonal compassion” and seeks “a kind of spiritual euthanasia: cure the disease by killing the patient” (163).
Christianity offers a cure for sin: a pure heart through God’s love. As Kreeft writes, “David prays: ‘Create in me a clean heart’, and uses the word ‘bara’ for ‘create’. It is something only God can do. The verb is never used with any other subject except God” (164).
Nine. We Seek Diversion from the Bone-Chilling Terror of Death
Kreeft writes, “We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it” (168).
I’m reminded of Viktor Frankl’s words about the “existential vacuum,” but Frankl talks about how the vacuum is filled with meaning, not God.
Kreeft speaks to the technological age saving us time, but how we make ourselves more busy and more miserable. I’m thinking of Facebook misery.
We can not sit and be quiet because this terrifies us. As Pascal writes, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
Ten. The Lunacy, Folly, and Self-Destruction of Pursuing Holy Grails
Pascal writes, “He must have excitement, he must deluded himself into imagining that he would be happy to win what he would not want as a gift if it meant giving up gambling. He must create some target for his passions and then arouse his desire, anger, fear, for this object he has created, just like children taking fright at a face they have daubed themselves.”
Holy Grails are diversions from death. They are figments of our imagination. They are chimeras.
Eleven. People of Importance and High Rank Hide Their Misery with Subservient Employees
Pascal writes: “However sad a man may be, if you can persuade him to take up some diversion he will be happy while it lasts, and however happy a man may be, if he lacks diversion and has no absorbing passion or entertainment to keep boredom away, he will soon be depressed and unhappy. Without diversion there is no joy; with diversion there is no sadness. That is what constitutes the happiness of persons of rank, for they have a number of people to divert them and the ability to keep themselves in this state.”
Think of all the miserable celebrities and pseudo celebrities with their throng of “personal assistants” and “life coaches.”
Twelve. Acedia, the Sin of Sloth
Boredom can become a spiritual disease. Kreeft writes: “The closet thing to it in the Middle Ages is anomie, or acedia, the deadly sin of sloth, spiritual turpitude, lack of care and passion and joy in the face of spiritual good, indifference to our eternal destiny. It is ‘deadly’, or ‘mortal’: it kills souls” (187).
In modern times, man has become indifferent to the soul.
Thirteen. The Opposite of Love Is not Hate. It Is Indifference
Kreeft writes: “The first and greatest commandment is to love (seek) God with all our heart (passion). Indifference is the opposite. Indifference is the opposite. Indifference is farther from the love of God than hatred of God is. You can love and hate the same person at the same time, but you cannot love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time.”
Diverting ourselves is one of the ways we remain indifferent to God.
Hell and Bland People
Kreeft writes: “Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who simply never gave a damn” (196).
Fourteen. Pascal’s Compassion for Struggling Agnostics
Pascal writes: “I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business.”
Sometimes I worry that “religion” will be boring, but I do often fight for answers. At the same time, I’m sure I’m guilty of using doubt as an excuse to lapse into concupiscence.
Fifteen. Pascal Is Perplexed by the Atheist’s Happiness
Pascal writes: “Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?”
On one hand, the atheist, by saying we don’t have an eternal soul, is comforting us with a worldview absent of hell. On the other hand, there isn’t the connection with the Maker. Rod Dreher writes about Monsignor Carlos Sanchez who struggled with his faith while talking to intellectuals, “brilliant minds.” Once at mass as he was receiving communion, he had a vision of a life-sized Christ who said, “I have always loved you.” We read: “In an instant, twenty years of unbelief evaporated.” Dreher’s reaction to this: “But I wanted the peace that old man had more than I wanted to pursue my own desires. I wanted light. I wanted clarity. I resolved to become a Catholic.”
Perhaps that is what is sad about atheism. There is no such divine love, divine comfort, and divine transcendence.
But such experience demands response, action. As Flannery O’Connor says, “Christianity is not a comfortable electric blanket.”
Sixteen. The Damned Are the Wimps of the World
Kreeft writes: “Great saints have often been made out of great sinners (Mary Magdalen, Paul, Augustine, Francis, Ignatius), but not one was ever made out of a wimp” (203).
My great, wimpy fear in life is that I’m a wimp and therefore unworthy of the greatness I see in life.
Seventeen. The Danger of Letting Others Decide Your Fate: You Die Alone
Pascal warns of giving up on belief on the grounds that so many people, smart people with informed opinions, have so many contrary opinions that there’s nothing to do but be a doubter. By doing this, you’re letting others decide your fate. Kreeft writes it is foolish to put your salvation in the control of other people. This is your eternal soul we’re talking about (204).
Pascal writes: “It is absurd of us to rely on the company of our fellows, as wretched and helpless as we are; they will not help us; we shall die alone. We must act then as if we were alone.”
You can look at A.N. Wilson and Tom Bissell and other lapsed Christians and say they’re not Christians. Why should I be? But imagine if they come back to Christ and you don’t? Where does that leave you?
Kreeft writes, “death is the one thing society can’t do for you . . .” You’re on your own (206).
Eighteen. “Happy Atheists Deserve Scorn”
When I read Kreeft’s statement above (210) I think of the “happy atheist song”: The Swedish sister team First Aid kit has a song called “Hard Believer,” about their spiritual connection with God or religion and they are “happy atheists” who don’t need Bibles or biblical morality.”
I have to confess I like the song. It reminds me of an orientation I had before I knew about hell and the whole Christian cosmology. I was “natural man” perhaps. Perhaps I was damned. But I can’t lie. I miss those days. Perhaps my love of that past, the nostalgia for it, will turn me into a pillar of salt.
But I cannot lie. I must be honest here. If God can cure me, then so be it. I pray for truth and strength.
Nineteen. The Hidden Christ Speaks to His Truth and Delivers Us from Our Enemies
The Christ came as a lowly servant and by serving he baffled people awaiting a glorious figure. Christ taught us that he who serves the most and lowers himself the most makes himself higher. Kreeft writes: “Christ does not deliberately and delightedly hide from the wicked or blind them. He can’t help it, just as the sun can’t help shining. Too bad the bat’s eyes can’t take it. He blinds sinners simply by being what he is” (247).
We need to be delivered from our enemies and our enemies come under the name of concupiscence. Take our fill of concupiscence and we will perish (258).
Twenty. We Don’t Take Everything Literally in the Bible
Kreeft points out that the Genesis story is figurative as is the Book of Revelation. These accounts “are described in symbols” (261).
I imagine a slippery slope where some will say, wishfully perhaps, “Then Hell is just a symbol or a metaphor. No one really goes there.” Metaphor or not, Hell terrifies me.
Twenty-One. Christianity Is Not About Self-Fulfillment and Goes Against the World
As Viktor Frankl says we must take up our cross and serve others, Christianity goes against the grain of consumer society and preaches self-sacrifice and self-abnegation.
Pascal writes: “No other religion has proposed that we should hate ourselves. No other religion therefore can please those who hate themselves and seek a being who is really worthy of love. And if they had never [before] heard of the religion of a humiliated God, they would at once embrace it.”
Twenty-Two. Two Essential Truths of Christianity
Pascal writes: “Christianity is strange; It bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God. Without such a counterweight his exaltation would make him horribly vain or his abasement horribly abject.”
In another passage, Pascal writes: “Knowing god without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.”
Kreeft observes that Christianity blames man for killing God and “Man is to be married to God, united to God, to share in God’s own life . . . “ (279)
When I think of our wretched state, I think of those days of reckoning we have when we’re exposed for who we really our and our hearts beat rapidly in terror. We’re like feral animals exposed. There is a piercing terror that possesses us. We are unhinged. We are exposed to the light. Is there any wonder we loathe ourselves and seek the safety of a moral life?
Twenty-Four. Seeking God without Christ Is an Abomination
Pascal writes: “All those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go or come to devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity.”
Again, I’m reminded of that song I like, “Hard Believer,” an atheist anthem by the Swedish sisters First Aid Kit.
Twenty-Five. God Is Not Made In Our Image
Another reason God remains hidden to many. His manifestation doesn’t fit our expectations. As Kreeft writes: “But the Christian God is hardly made in our image. Who wants to be a God who suffers Hell on a Cross for man’s sin?” (286)
Twenty-Six. Christianity Is Unlike Any Other Religion
Kreeft writes: “Christianity is like no other religion. Instead of the founder pointing to the religion, the religion points to the founder. Buddha said: ‘Look not to me, look to my dharma (doctrine)’; Christ said: ‘Come unto me. . . . I am the way, the truth, and the life.’” See page 287.
Twenty-Seven. Giving Up Sinful Pleasures Can Help You Gain Faith
If you’re plagued by a certain sin, stopping the sin can help you win your faith.
Pascal writes: “’I should soon have given up a life of pleasure,’ they say, ‘if I had faith.’ But I tell you: ‘You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure. Now it is up to you to begin.”
Kreeft explains that addictions blind us from the truth (307).
Twenty-Eight. Conversion Means Joining the Church
Kreeft writes: “Therefore, conversion means conversion to the Church, to the Body of Christ . . .” He says we must repent “our separate existence outside his Body, ‘being useless to the body’.” See page 321.
Twenty-Nine. Pascal Experienced the “Fire” of Christ
Pascal felt the presence of Christ like a “fire,” and he put the memory of this experience on paper and sewed it in his jacket.
Thirty. Perhaps We Whine About Our Old Existence Because There Was No Spiritual War Inside Us
Christ brings strife in our soul. We must war against concupiscence. Maybe this is what I miss about being “natural man” before I turned seventeen and feared Hell and learned about Christ.
Pascal writes: “The cruelest war that God can wage on men in this life is to leave them without the war he came to bring. ‘I came not to send peace but a sword,’ he said. . . . “Before his coming the world lived in a false peace.” See page 332.
Kreeft adds that, “The pains of piety are like the withdrawal symptoms when an addict goes clean and sober” (332).
In one of the deepest books I've ever read, Dale Allison's Night Comes, Allison chronicles some American Christian missionaries who convert several people in Japan. These new converts are wonderfully devout, but they are now afflicted with an undying sadness, told so painfully in Allison's book, over their fretting their deceased family members who they believe are languishing for eternity in hell.
These new converts have found salvation, perhaps, but their hearts are now broken.
It is this problem of trying to be whole in salvation with Jesus and having a broken heart over the matter of eternal hell that continues to plague me.
I'm going to have to go back and reread Allison's masterpiece.
Even though I struggle with the hell doctrine to the point that I can't be called saved, I see myself as fitting the Christian picture of humanity: broken, sinful, self-destructive, morally bankrupt, narcissistic, vain, solipsistic, turning away from life, prone to addictive behavior, sullen, petulant, prideful, self-pitying, a sort of Gollum living in a self-imposed hell. I am the broken man who is receptive to the need to return to his Maker.
However, I don't know if everyone fits this picture. The two Swedish sisters who call themselves First Aid Kit have written a sort of atheist anthem, "Hard Believer," in which they are not broken. They are connected to life and they love life. They have an appetite for life. They have not been degraded by a God who tortures people forever in hell.
Thinking of this divide, I wonder how much religion breaks us and then gives us the solution. I wonder if everyone is as wretched as Pascal says we are. His observations were generally true, but there are people who are well put together, connected to their family and friends, live in the moment, and seem to live life fully without religion.
However, in my heart I believe a lot of us, with religion or not, do break ourselves.
