A Personal Letter to A Christian-Turned-Atheist Friend
About 12 years ago I engaged in some lengthy dialogue with a fellow graduate student who had abandoned his Christian faith upon reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Below is one of the emails I sent to “Oleg” (not his real name).
Dear “Oleg”
Please allow me to begin by first expressing my profoundest sorrow over the terrible experiences you have been through. I cannot possibly understand the hurt and anguish these things have caused you. I can only say how sorry I am that this has happened to you and that I hope that in spite of it all, you are able to clearly distinguish between the wickedness of the persons that took advantage of you and the goodness of the God they so poorly represented in your case. My heart truly ached within me when I read your email. I know these words of mine may not mean that much, and certainly they can’t erase your personal history or the present feelings that history may yet arouse within you, but please know that I truly and deeply hurt for you because of this.
I also want to apologize for taking so long to send a response to your last two emails. Despite the passage of so much time, I still, regrettably, have no elaborate treatise to offer you in defense of my position. I have no knock-down argument to give to you. And truthfully, my suspicion is that given the rather lofty standard of evidence you have raised for justifiable belief in God (namely, a theophany), there is not much I can say that you will likely find especially compelling. Nevertheless, I will try.
For the most part, everything I have written below is little more than my own feeble attempt to cobble together some common-sense critical reflections to a few of the objections you have raised concerning the Christian faith, particularly the more noticeable presuppositions that seem to underlie those objections. But before I make that attempt, I cannot help but feel the need to first try and disabuse you of the notion that whereas you are maintaining an open-minded respect for ideas, I am somehow refusing to join your “mutual search for truth” because I allegedly presume to “already have all the answers.” Undoubtedly, on certain matters I have come to a position that I whole-heartedly accept as the truth. I don’t try to hide that fact; and to do so would be profoundly dishonest of me. To consider oneself to have come to conclusions about certain weighty matters, however, is nowhere near equivalent to the far more extravagant claim that “one thereby has all the answers.” From the simple fact that I have personally come to the firm conviction that it is reasonable to affirm as objectively true that God exists, Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible is the word of God, etc., I do not from that infer that I have nothing left to learn. The expression I find to most accurately capture my own disposition toward truth is one with which you are well acquainted: “faith seeking understanding.” When I came to faith in Jesus Christ eighteen years ago, I thereby settled some very critical and fundamental issues in my life and my worldview. But I also at that time began a life-long quest to better understand God, the world, and myself. So I really have to take issue with your insinuation concerning my alleged closed-mindedness. Indeed, a brief review of some of your own remarks, interestingly enough, is quite revealing in that there are a substantial number of issues on which you have likewise come to what from all appearances seem to be terminal positions. For instance, just to name a few, you have boldly asserted the following:
1. The Bible is a product of enlightened human thought rather than divine revelation
2. Death makes life valuable in a way that immortality cannot
3. Church history testifies to the Bible’s inherent inconsistency on most theological matters
4. If the Bible had been clear, there would be no real controversy about its interpretation
5. It is naïve to assume that the Bible speaks with one voice on all theological matters
6. The classic arguments for God’s existence are just as pretentious and inclusive as the arguments against God’s existence
7. We cannot know for sure whether any sort of a god or especially a theistic god exists
8. All our philosophical assertions in the end are flawed
9. We can know that the bible is contradictory and unreliable without any measure of faith whatsoever
10. Christianity amounts to blind faith that defies science and rationality
11. There is no immortality
12. Faith is a delusion
13. The Old Testament is entirely devoid of any concept of immortality
All of these you have put forth not merely as matters for open consideration, but rather as conclusions in themselves. And while it is certainly within your epistemic rights to hold to these premises, and even granting that logically speaking some of them could even be found in the end to be true, I think their rather ubiquitous presence, interwoven as they are throughout your deliverances, renders dubious any claim you may have to being more open-minded than I, even granting the tenuous assumption that “open-mindedness” is really the unimpeachable virtue so often supposed.
Furthermore, I must point out that none of these apparently terminal positions seem consistent with your self-proclaimed conversion to agnosticism: these things you seem to know. These do not sound like the musings of an agnostic who has transitioned to “more of a seeker’s position,” but more like the conclusions of one who is “in the know” about a great number of speculative issues. I maintain, thus, that any real hindrance to genuine dialogue between us comes not from one side or the other candidly admitting their presuppositions and commitments, but rather when one party doesn’t play by the very rules that it tries to impose on the other. Even if you are “just searching for truth,” aren’t you in reality trying to convince me to adopt the same agnostic attitude toward reality? In my view, you seem to hold to an unexamined presupposition that “I am searching for truth” is morally and intellectually superior to “I have found the truth.” Perhaps a brief examination of this is in order.
By exalting “the search for truth” over “the discovery of truth,” are you not somehow implying that agnosticism is therefore the truth? Furthermore, do you not consider that the conclusions you seemed to have already arrived at constitute truth that you have found? If not, why represent them as such? Moreover, what is “the search for truth” all about, if not the hope that one actually will make a discovery that one can know to be the truth? I can think of nothing wrong with one coming to conclusions or claiming to know the truth about a matter, even if that claim eventually turns out to be mistaken. Conclusions and truth claims are, after all, unavoidable. As you are well aware, even the denial of truth claims (“There is no truth”) is itself a truth claim (“It is true that there is no truth.”) Consequently, you and I should converse on those open and honest terms and not some pretense about one of us being an open-minded seeker and the other a closed-minded dogmatist.
Moreover, you have registered the complaint – twice now I believe – that I am pressuring you emotionally by virtue of my “word choices.” It may well be the case that you perceive my word choices to be emotionally manipulative, but I can assure you that I do not elect to use them as such. I have no interest in emotionally pressuring you; more precisely I am seeking to intellectually pressure you. The more I do the former, the less likely I am to succeed in the latter. Thus, you can see, I have no motive for the use of emotional manipulation. And to the extent that you may find the responses I give below to read more like a textbook than a personal letter (excepting, of course, the ubiquitous references to “you” and “I”), I hope you will grant the benefit of the doubt that I have written this way for the exact reason that I wish as far as possible to avoid emotionalism.
I have taken so long to reply to you not because I am lazy or indifferent, but because I have sought to choose carefully measured words and arguments so as to (hopefully) avoid unnecessary offense while at the same time dealing honestly with what I view as the most pertinent issues. Besides, if I was so inclined, I think I could actually register a quite similar complaint about vocabulary against you. Shall we take a moment to consider some of the word choices with which you have described the Christian faith that I have openly acknowledged to be the most significant part of who I am? So far, by your account, as a consequence of my Christian beliefs, I am “naïve,” “deluded,” heir and defender of a “tradition that came about only as a result of repression, bloodshed, and political maneuvering,” “philosophically flawed,” “theologically contradictory,” and one who embraces “a God who unjustly punishes people against their will in hell.” It should not be too difficult for you to see how I could easily take offense at these and claim that you are “emotionally pressuring me” by your word choices.
Consequently, I fail to fully appreciate your exhortations for me to exercise restraint in my choice of words when, in fact, you yourself have not refrained from incendiary speech when describing the belief system to which I hold. Neither of us, I suppose, has Vulcan in his blood. Unlike Mr. Spock of Star Trek lore, there is really no way for human beings to entirely divorce intellectual debate from emotional involvement. Both of us, in my judgment, have carefully avoided ostensibly offensive arguments in a debate that so easily lends itself to blatant ad hominem attacks. I am grateful, nevertheless, that you still at least give me the benefit of the doubt as to my intentions. I can only reply that neither do I think you intend to offend me when you mock my Christian faith. The reality is that neither of us is assaulting each other personally but are rather both attacking ideas that happen to form a substantial part of who we are as persons. Sometimes that may seem to manifest itself in the form of emotional pressure, but I think it can also be explained as just a natural element of argumentation due simply to the fact that our mind and emotions are integrated in one soul.
Now I would like to briefly consider in no particular order a few of the more interesting and challenging points you have raised in your previous two emails.
First, you have offered the argument that if the Bible is truly the word of God, it follows that it would therefore be easy to understand and we would have no major disagreements about its content and interpretation. This seems to be an argument that perspicuity is a necessary condition for something to be considered true, or in the case of the Bible, divinely inspired. But to be honest, I frankly do not understand this claim or the principle that apparently gives birth to it: “wherever there is disagreement about the nature of a claim, that claim is therefore false.” Suppose that I disagreed with the premise that “disagreement among interpreters about a claim is evidence that the claim is not true.” Since by virtue of my disagreement an interpretation foreign to the original claim would thus be introduced, would the presence of such a variant now serve to invalidate your original claim, namely, that where a claim fails to garner universal support the ruling axiom should be that the claim is thereby to be considered false? As patently ridiculous as that may sound, it is precisely the conclusion I would have to come to if I were to remain true to the principle that underlies at least one of your explicit objections to accepting the Bible as the word of God. As a result, I think your argument simply makes no sense. In reality, even great clarity of communication among the most mundane things very often results in variant interpretive positions. As you know, most biblical interpreters readily acknowledge the arduous nature of careful interpretation. The good ones, however, do not conclude from that sober admission the non sequitor that therefore the Bible is not the word of God. Your argument assumes that the fault lay not with the interpreters but ultimately with the source material.
I wonder if you would apply a similar type of hermeneutic should you come across a diversity of opinion among scientists struggling to interpret the workings of the natural world. For instance, though I have no proof of this, I would guess that some scientists have grave reservations about the recent disenfranchisement of Pluto as a member of our solar system. Would you consider the disagreement that these scientists have with the carefully considered opinions of other scientists about what rightly constitutes the nature of a planet to be grounds for labeling as hopelessly naïve anyone who persists in the conviction that one position or the other could possibly be objectively true? I readily admit the silliness and oversimplification of the analogy, but I think the fundamental point it makes about the relationship between objective truth and subjective interpretation is still valid. Your argument also fails to appreciate the many teachings in the Bible that are in fact clear. Historically, even fervent unbelievers have openly acknowledged the great clarity of much of the Bible’s teachings. Mark Twain, as one example, memorably remarked one time that it was not the obscure things of the Bible that bothered him, but precisely those things he did plainly understand. The truth is that there are numerous theological propositions in Scripture concerning which there is and has been wide interpretative agreement across confessional, cultural, and even chronological boundaries. Of course, it does not follow from such that those interpretations are true, but it does help explain why there is such a thing as a recognizable theological tradition acknowledged by Christians and non-Christians alike. In fact, if not for the broad consensus of biblical interpretation that there is, it would be rather absurd for agnostics, atheists, and skeptics to condemn any so-called “biblical tradition,” or “biblical teaching,” or “biblical doctrine.” Yet, they do so, almost as a matter of vocation. In sum, neither agnosticism nor relativism follows from the fact that there is disagreement in interpreting truth claims, including those made in Scripture.
Second, underlying some of your arguments are propositions which, I think you will agree, are built upon self-defeating premises and which, incidentally, are philosophical in nature, the very discipline you wished for us to eschew. For instance, take the previous point about variant interpretations. You yourself seem quite certain that the Bible contains numerous and egregious contradictions, especially as you claim, concerning the nature of God. You seem especially confident about what in your view is the Bible’s morally abhorrent teaching about hell. One longs to know how the assurance of such a clear and concise interpretation comes so easily to you, but remains stubbornly elusive for others yet consigned to the dim glass of human fallibility. If the teaching of the Bible is as obfuscated as you claim, then how can you be so sure that your interpretation is the correct one? And if the Bible is not, in fact, obfuscated but clear enough for you to make such authoritative interpretations, then you should discard your argument that its alleged obscurity is proof that it is not divinely inspired. On the other hand, if you maintain the obscurity premise, then you cannot at the same time claim to hold the one and only interpretation of its various theological propositions, namely, your particular conclusion that those propositions stand in logical contradiction to one another.
Consider your personal interpretation that the Bible contradicts itself on the nature of God. Is it even possible, in your view, that he who finds theological harmony is right, and not he who finds contradiction? If you insist in the end that harmonization is a logical impossibility, then as a minimal consequence you cannot legitimately maintain such a notion with recourse to your obscurity premise. In the long run, I think it better to admit that one’s personal inability to detect consistency and coherence does not thereby amount to an unassailable conclusion that no such consistency and coherence is to be found. At the very least, I think a posture of humility is becoming of us simply upon considering the fact that counted among some of the greatest scholars of the last two thousand years – scholars of every conceivable discipline – are thousands upon thousands who have indeed discerned and argued for the basic theological unity of the Bible.
My third point is related to the previous one concerning self-referential incoherence. You counsel that you and I should “bypass all the big philosophical issues that we will never resolve.” Upon closer review, however, it becomes quite clear you seem to have resolved at least one of the very biggest philosophical quandaries when you default to agnosticism. But can you provide any principled reasons why I or anyone else should join you in assuming that agnosticism is an invincible first principle that once invoked suddenly eclipses all further philosophical investigation by its mere presence? I believe the exact statement you made was that “all of our philosophical assertions in the end are flawed.” But isn’t agnosticism one such philosophical assertion? Why does it get a pass? How does it escape the fatal flaws attributable to every other school of thought? On what basis does agnosticism gain such a privileged epistemic status? Incidentally, it only seems fair to point out that any answer to such inquiries cannot be given with reference to agnostic principles, for by such you could only respond, “I don’t know why agnosticism is the default position,” which, of course, is hardly a definitive answer. So where then do you derive the principles that establish agnosticism as the one and only legitimate epistemology for he who would be a genuine seeker of truth?
In reality, to say as the agnostic does that “we cannot know the truth about God” is itself a truth claim about God. It is akin to saying that “I definitively know that God is such a Being about whom nothing definitive can be known.” In other words, the agnostic claims to do what he says cannot be done. So he’s either a magician, or self-referentially incoherent. Or, perhaps, despite its loftier aspirations, agnosticism is just plain-old Orwellian doublethink, that is, the presumed power to simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind, and accept both of them. Logically speaking, it seems to me that agnostic assertions are ultimately no less absurd than if one were to express in English that one is unable to express anything in English. The self-defeating nature of the agnosticism you have openly confessed as your default epistemology, consequently, is precisely the reason why at this point I find it senseless to play tug-o-war with Bible verses. One cannot interpret without a governing philosophical basis. The only question is whether that basis is rationally defensible and correspondent to reality. My gut feeling is that agnosticism is neither.
Fourth, you take issue with my claim that atheism is an ethically impoverished worldview. In your rebuttal, you cite such contrary evidence as your own personal passion for life, that life itself is great and wonderful, your personal desire to make the world a better place, have kids who have happy lives, etc. Leaving aside for now the logical inconsistency between your apparent certainty over the finality of physical death (“I accept my mortality” is how you put it) and your admission that God’s existence is still an open question, I must join you in acknowledging that all of these pursuits are without a doubt commendable things that most people want or at least should want. Let me challenge you, however, to produce even one contribution that atheism itself makes to the formation of such a beneficent worldview, bearing in mind that any such contribution must at the same time be consistent with the nihilism, materialism and raw determinism which a thoroughgoing atheism necessarily entails.
In my view, every element of the philanthropic life you describe is ultimately attributable to values and realities smuggled in from a theistic worldview. It is not the absence of Christianity that enables such existential fulfillment and sacrificial service, but the genuine practice of it. Put simply, your passion for life is noteworthy and will no doubt bring you and those fortunate enough to be around you much reward, but it is also in sharp conflict with the worldview to which you wish it to be anchored. In fact, your view of the good life clearly seems to entail some sort of teleology regarding human beings. You seem to have an “end” in mind as to what constitutes a life well-lived. But, as you know, atheism dispenses with all such “final causes.” And as I have mentioned previously, there is simply no moral force to be found within atheism. There can be no universal moral “oughtness” in a truly atheistic universe. There is absolutely no reason consistent with atheistic principles why I should adopt a similar ethic as you and not instead launch a promising career as a serial killer or carefully tweak the craft of torturing babies for fun.
Even if society pooh-poohed such abhorrent interests, why should I care? I’ll soon die just like the rest, at which point we will all once more be equals. That may sound a bit harsh, but I intended it so: that’s a fair description of moral life in a godless world devoid of an ultimate Judge of right and wrong. A world where physical death is the end of all is a world where Adolf Hitler is the moral equivalent to Mother Teresa. Is that really the moral universe you wish to embrace? Or, more to the point, does that even remotely resemble the moral universe we both actually do inhabit? If you disagree with my description of morality in an atheistic universe, can you please tell me with reference to such a universe what ultimate standard you can employ to say with any conviction that Mother Teresa is morally better than Adolf Hitler? Bear in mind, I’m not offering any of this as an argument for theism per se, but only as a response to what I see as a grave inconsistency between the moral goals and desires you have expressed and the atheistic worldview you have offered as a possible ground for those desires.
Fifth, you have reiterated your claim that only a personal appearance by God Himself would constitute for you reasonable evidence to believe in His existence. Allow me to cash out this rather extraordinary state of affairs just a bit. Not only would God have to “appear in the sky,” as you say, but moreover He would have to also make sure you were looking up in the sky at the very moment of His appearance and were entirely undistracted in your thought process (what if you were thinking about an upcoming test or pending travel plans or some such thing and failed to see the significance of the moment?).
And how do you know He hasn’t been appearing to you periodically all along and you’ve just barely missed Him each time because, owing to a streak of personal misfortune, you always happen to look away at precisely the wrong moment? The truth of it is, when all is said and done, the scenario you would have to embrace in order for this peculiar evidential standard to work would be nothing less than complete theistic determinism or raw divine force. It would not be too unlike being held at gunpoint by Jesus when He says, “Follow Me.” The rather obvious irony in such a case is that even if God did consent to provide such incontestable evidence (known to most as coercion) along with the necessary epistemological context for that evidence to have indubitably compelling force – the effect of which would be to render unbelief literally impossible – then He would at the same time necessarily be taking away the very thing that you hold most dear: your freedom to reject Him. If the evidence for God’s existence was absolutely compelling as you admittedly require, then you would have no real choice to disbelieve; if you could still disbelieve, then by definition the evidence was not compelling. It doesn’t really sound to me like you’re looking for reasonable evidence, but rather for a beatific vision. Most people would like to have one of those, but probably not at the cost of giving up their freedom to reject Him.
Also, I consider this particular standard of evidence for God’s existence to be inconsistent with your agnosticism. You seem to somehow know that God is not identical to the moon, or the sun, or one of the stars, or the big tree in front of the student center, or the world as a whole. That is, you seem to know that God is such a Being whose nature precludes a priori any possibility that He could be a part of nature, i.e., things that have already “appeared” to you. You seem to know that God is invisible, i.e., immaterial, and by virtue of that particular attribute He would have to somehow manifest Himself physically in order to meet the empirical standard of evidence you have demanded. But how is it that you know these things unless, in truth, agnosticism concerning the nature of God is for you just thinly veiled philosophical subterfuge? Of course, you could answer that this is the way the Bible reveals God – as immaterial and invisible. But, you will admit, the Bible also uses various metaphors to describe God in which He has wings, arms, feet, eyes, etc. So not only would you have to once again explain how your clear understanding of the Bible’s revelation of God does not conflict with your axiom that the Bible is hopelessly obfuscated, you would also have to adopt some sort of metaphysical position concerning the nature of God in order to adjudicate between verses that seem in conflict, i.e., those that teach that God is spirit and those that describe Him with material qualities. How would you know that God could not possibly be an immaterial Being who happened to have physical wings unless you know that such would be a contradiction? But any definitive metaphysical position concerning the nature of God is impossible given agnostic premises, except of course, the rather tiresome one that “we agnostics know that God is a Being with a nature of which nothing can be known.
But let’s forget the Bible for a moment and just reason together. I feel safe in assuming that you do not demand that the wind become visible before you will believe in its existence. I don’t suppose that you’ve ever seen the wind; I would guess that you’ve only seen or felt its effects. Why is it then that God’s invisibility, despite visible effects (i.e., the universe) which can be rationally accredited to Him as their Cause, counts as a sufficient reason to not believe in Him but the wind’s similar invisibility offers no such stumbling block to believing in it? Is it possible that an unexamined presupposition of materialism or scientism is serving behind the scene as the self-appointed arbiter between the two? We have scientific instruments to measure the effects of wind, but none to measure the effects of God; therefore, the former is a deliverance of knowledge while the latter is a deliverance of faith (read: “delusion”). Is that it? I know this is not an argument that you have explicitly made; I’m just using it to somehow try and locate the root issue that inspires your insistence that God make a personal appearance before you will believe that He exists. Finally, just as an aside, I’m not sure how I could ever adequately respond to the rhetorical question you raised concerning whether my standard of evidence for belief in God is too low. By your account, any piece of evidence less compelling than a full-blown theophany would in reality constitute little more than just one part of what would amount to a rather large, but nevertheless single class of things that together represent insufficient epistemic support for justifiable faith in God. The bar of rationality being that high, I stand guilty as charged: I must concede my gullibility for foolishly believing on less than such incontestable grounds.
Sixth, I guess I’m not entirely clear on what you mean by “faith is a delusion.” If you mean the specific contents of Christian faith objectively considered, then I understand your point even while strongly disagreeing with you. By this, seemingly, you would mean that it is a delusion to believe in a triune God, the resurrection of Christ, the immortality of the soul, etc. Even this, of course, could be considered truly delusional only if one could demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that God does not in fact exist. For if God does exist, then it is at least possible that He does indeed exist eternally as one substance yet three persons, that He did in fact raise His Son from the dead, and there is in fact life beyond the grave, etc. I seem to recall you admitting, however, that arguments against God’s existence are just as pretentious as arguments for God’s existence, so this line of reasoning does not seem for you to be an available option for proving your “faith is a delusion” hypothesis. It would, unquestionably, be delusional to believe in a reality that had no possibility of being true, such as one in which there are square circles or married bachelors. But however adversarial one’s attitude may be toward the idea of faith in God, it hardly seems rational for such an antagonist to assume that faith in such a theistic reality bears cognitive resemblance to a belief in, say, four-sided triangles. But something like that is what would be required to maintain the assertion that Christian faith is delusional.
On the other hand, if you mean instead that faith as a human action subjectively considered is itself a delusion, then I am confused about your actual position because you admitted some time ago that “some faith is required in any worldview.” Despite the fact that you admit that it may be three years before you have a final replacement for your previously-discarded worldview, you still today have something resembling a worldview, however fragmentary and internally inconsistent it may yet be. Thus, faith is required for you as well, as it will always be, even after you have removed the fragments and cleared up the inconsistencies, which I am confident you will at last do. I would not suspect that you would be so bold as to consider everything that you currently embrace to be a matter of pure reason and raw empirical evidence. For instance, your claim that “death makes life valuable in a way that immortality cannot.” I would not guess that you consider that to be a matter of pure reason such that only the entirely irrational person could deny it. Surely, you admit that an element of faith helps inform that personal creed. Granting that, is there even the remotest possibility that you might be deluded therein, owing to the fact that “faith is a delusion”? Or consider your contention that “belief in God as well as belief in the non-existence of God in the end requires faith.” Do you really mean to assert that both the theist and the atheist are deluded, at least to the extent that both rely upon some degree of faith? Other than once again begging the question in favor of agnosticism, I’m not sure what this premise accomplishes for your overall position. I contend that inasmuch as there is no empirical evidence you could possibly marshal in support of the claim that “faith is a delusion,” and insofar as the claim certainly does not seem to be true by mere definition, it remains that the assertion “faith is a delusion” is itself a delusion, owing to the fact that it can be maintained only on the strength of sheer fideism. So we’re left with this: “The statement ‘faith is a delusion’ is itself a delusion since the statement itself is based entirely upon faith.” In the end, I hope that you mean something more substantive than that, but I’m not clear at this point just what that would be.
Seventh and finally, though I realize this is a difficult topic that easily lends itself at times to crude emotionalism, I cannot help but take issue with your caricature of the doctrine of hell. You initially state your view as “God will place me in hell to be tortured eternally against my will . . . .” But just two sentences later, you are in hell as a result of your ownwill (“I will rather join those . . .”). Your second view, I believe, is actually closer to the truth. I would say it this way: God is responsible for the means of eternal judgment, yet you alone would be responsible for His exercise of it on you personally. No one will be condemned to hell except for the fact that that is where they want to be – away from the presence of God. Moreover, I can’t help but think that your analogy to human rights is terribly misleading. As I understand it, the biblical view of hell bears little resemblance to the sort of unconscionable torture at the hands of a sadistic deity perpetrated against unwilling and innocent victims that you have envisioned. Admittedly, hell is the ultimate expression of divine judgment, but such is not even remotely akin to some such twisted form of torture anymore than is the rather sensible quarantine of a murderer or rapist or embezzler from society at large.
Also, an important element missing from your caricature of hell is the aspect of personal torment that will result from the anguish of ceaselessly experiencing the irreversible outcome of one’s freewill decision to refuse the gracious overtures of a loving Savior. Sadly, in some ways hell is actually the ultimate, albeit tragic fulfillment of human rights. Every morally accountable person who persists to the end in his God-given right to refuse divine grace retains for all eternity the absolute right to do so without ever being forced to recant. At least that’s my view of it. Moreover, what support do you have, either biblical or other, for your scenario in which everyone else who is in hell with you is there innocently and unwillingly whereas you alone, joining them in a noble display of solidarity, have descended there purely as a matter of heroic decision? And what about these allegedly innocent victims of unjust divine retribution? Will Hitler be one of those innocent and unwilling victims of omnipotent sadism with whom you will join in forever defying the holiness of God? What about Pol Pot? Jack the Ripper? What about Richard Dawkins? Does the intractable atheist, even the morally upright one, want to be in heaven along with a myriad of saints and angels eternally worshipping the God he willingly refused, assuming there is such a place and such a Being?
In truth, those whose final destiny is hell will terminate there ultimately because they loved their sin and persevered in their desire to be free from the presence of God in spite of the open invitation of the gospel. God does not force people against their will to love him (that would be a contradiction, as you know), nor will He force people against their will to worship Him for all eternity in heaven. God lovingly and graciously persuades; he does not force and compel. Just as a brief mental exercise, consider yourself for a moment there in the hell you have sketched, the one in which you have willingly and sacrificially joined your fellow (presumably innocent) sinners. Suddenly and without warning, God reaches down and drags you against your will out of hell and forces you into heaven – away from people you love and together with people you may not. Would you consider such a forceful act to be the loving thing for God to do? After all, wouldn’t He be dragging you off to a better place? Or, rather, should He leave you in hell, seeing how you remain there willingly, freely, and in the company of like-minded impenitents? What would be the greater expression of love, to drag you kicking and screaming into a heaven you have no desire to inhabit, or allow you the continued freedom of experiencing the fullness of the final outcome of that which you willed all along? You claim, rather extraordinarily I might add, to embody a higher standard of love than the Almighty. But I wonder what your allegedly greater love would look like given the aforementioned scenario. I think C. S. Lewis nailed it when he said that in the end, there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who say to God, “Your will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Your will be done.”
You have expressed a desire that our debate stay focused on the Bible, but you may have to turn to someone more eager to engage you in a Bible verse tug-o-war, someone who will do so without first insisting on an honest attempt to clear away the clutter of some of our more obvious and fundamental philosophical disagreements. My own feeling is that in the end you will inevitably find that even should you someday succeed in your quest to prove to yourself and others that the Bible is hopelessly contradictory, and perforce, not a revelation from God, you simply will not be able to do so apart from at least some basic, sober philosophical reflection upon your most basic epistemological assumptions. Thus far you have offered a mixed bouquet of unbelief informed by such philosophies as an antisupernaturalistic interpretation of the Bible, an atheistic existentialist ethic of the good life, and an agnostic presupposition as a default epistemology. Given the eclecticism and, in my view, the grave inconsistencies of your present worldview, I cannot help but think that it will serve you better in the long run to abandon at last your unsustainable conviction that all philosophy is ultimately flawed and, instead, pursue a closer examination of the presuppositions which seem to presently animate your rather unflattering view of Christianity.
In reality, not all philosophy is flawed; only bad philosophy. And good philosophy is the antidote, not an altogether abandonment of philosophy. One cannot avoid philosophy; and alas, as I hope I have shown, you yourself have not succeeded in evading it. And because I am persuaded that it is precisely these inconsistent and unexamined philosophical principles that are largely responsible for your low view of the Bible and of faith in Jesus Christ as the risen Son of God, I therefore maintain that before we traverse the subject of biblical theology, we must first come to reasonably common ground on some basic philosophical questions, particularly, as I have tried to point out, those regarding the nature and knowability of truth.
In the meantime, you’ll permit me a more personal note. Even if you have found nothing worthy of serious consideration in anything that I have written, I nevertheless want to urge you, particularly during this Easter season, to diligently reconsider whether there is more than just simple delusion – to use your own description – in the fact that you continue via song to petition Christ “to reign in you.” I don’t wish to probe, but perhaps there is something in you that still longs for that very relationship to become existential reality. I don’t know – I’m just wondering aloud. Perhaps there is still something within you that realizes that you simply cannot live the life that you long for out of the pool of your own resources. I don’t presume to know, but maybe there is a part of you that still acknowledges that it is no mere delusion that Jesus Christ is in fact the only one who, in His own Person, can bring the true, the good, and the beautiful to the sinner who humbly calls upon His Name. I want to encourage you that while Christian faith is still faith, it is no mere delusion. At one point in my life, my belief system was not altogether different from the one you have shared with me. But just as you say it was not some elaborate atheistic argument that shook your Christian faith, neither was it some sophisticated apologetics system that initially established mine.
Quite simply, what established my faith in Jesus Christ once for all was none other than the radical transformation that took place in my soul by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ when, on April 30, 1989, I first called upon Him in spirit and in truth. From that landmark day in my life on forward, though my faith has been, as promised, often tested by intense trials of fire including periods of troubling doubt, the cry of my heart has steadfastly remained this: Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. It is for that reason above any others I might offer you that I can say with all confidence that you can trust God and you can trust His word. He will by no means turn away the one who cries out to Him. A broken and contrite heart He will not despise. As it is written: “Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, and whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”