Today
I bring you a selection from Tim Keller's best-selling
book "The Reason For God - Belief in an Age of Skepticism."
If you have not read it, you have missed out on some very wise
and convincing arguments for the Christian faith. Many people have what
we could call their "pat objections" for why they
reject the Christian faith. "There can't be just one true
religion." "How could a good God allow suffering."
"Science has disproved Christianity." "How could a
loving God send people to hell?"
Our particular "thought" for today addresses the objection voiced by people who say, "I can't believe in Christianity because I believe in a God of love." Enjoy.
I
believe in a God of Love
"During
my college years and my early twenties, I, like so many others, questioned the
Christian faith I was raised in. There were subjective reasons for my doubts.
Christianity just didn't seem real to me experientially. I had not developed a
prayer life and had never experienced God personally. There were also
intellectual problems I was having with Christianity, all of which I address
elsewhere in this book. There was one, however, I will talk about here. I
was troubled by those Christians who stressed hellfire and damnation. Like so
many of my generation I believed that if there was a core to all religions, it
was a loving God. I wanted to believe in a God of love who accepted people
regardless of their beliefs and practices. So I began to take courses in
the other major religions of the world -- Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam,
Confucianism, and Judaism. I have profited to this day from those
studies. However, my explorations in other faiths proved me wrong on this
particular point about the centrality of a loving God.
I
found no other religious text outside the Bible that said God created the world
out of love and delight. Most ancient pagan religions believed the world was
created through struggles and violent battles between opposing gods and
supernatural forces. I turned to look more closely at Buddhism, the religion I
liked the best at the time. However, despite its great emphasis on selflessness
and detached service to others, Buddhism did not believe in a personal God at
all, and love is the action of a person.
Later
on, after I become a minister, I was a speaker and panelist for several years
in a monthly discussion program in Philadelphia between a Christian church and
a mosque. Each month a speaker from the church and a speaker from the mosque
would give a Biblical and Qu'ranic perspective on the topic. When we covered
the topic of God's love, it was striking how different our conceptions were. I
was told repeatedly by Muslim speakers that God was indeed loving in the sense
of being merciful and kind to us. But when Christians spoke of the Lord as our
Spouse, of knowing God intimately and personally, and of having powerful
effusions of his love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, our Muslim
friends balked. They told us that it was disrespectful, in their view, to speak
of anyone knowing God personally.
Today
many of the skeptics I talk to say, as I once did, they can't believe in the
God of the Bible who punishes and judges people, because they "believe in
a God of Love." I now ask, what makes them think God is love?
Can they look at life in the world today and say, "This proves that the
God of the world is a God of love?" Can they look at history and
say, "This all shows that the God of history is a God of love?"
Can they look at the religious texts of the world and conclude that God is a
God of love? By no means is that the dominant, ruling attribute of God as
understood in any of the major faiths. I must conclude that the source of the
idea that God is Love is the Bible itself. And the Bible tells us that the God
of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world right in
the end.
The
belief in a God of pure love -- who accepts and judges no one -- is a powerful
act of faith. Not only is there no evidence for it in the natural order,
but there is almost no historical, religious textual support for it outside of
Christianity. The more one looks at it, the less justified [this
objection] appears."
Though
many today will say, "all religions basically teach the same
thing," all it takes is actually reading their religious texts to
see that this is not so, as Keller, who has read them testifies. In fact,
when it comes to the issue of love, the Bible separates itself even further from
the others by not only speaking of the love of God frequently,
but even going as far as to declare that "God IS love" (I
John 4:16). God is not just loving, He is love. In this regard as
well, no other religion comes close.
What
many in western society today fail to see (disconnected as we are becoming from
our past) is that our culture was influenced for two millennia by Christian
thought and practice. And, therefore, scores of the virtues that have
come to be the rallying cry of our secular society, are not virtues our secular
culture developed on it's own, but virtues our culture borrowed (or stole) from
Christianity, washed of their rooting in Christianity, and tried to claim as
their own.
It's
what could (or should) be called, cultural plagiarism -- with no credit given
to the original author of those virtues. Or as one friend put it, our
culture has borrowed "lumber" it removed from the structural
framework of the house called Christianity, but washed of all it's Christian
moorings and meaning, and then made to fit a secularized ideal. Other
cultures stress honor and shame, compliance and conformity, obedience and
punishment. But in a culture influenced for many centuries by the
teachings of Jesus Christ, and the redemption that came to us through the
sacrifice of Himself for those who didn't deserve it; a culture influenced by
the truth that love is the greatest of all gifts (I Corinthians 13), and that
God himself is love (as His disciples alone declared), it is quite impossible
for love not to be seen the queen of virtues.
In
the Bonds of Christian Affection, Pastor Jeff
