Posts tagged #C.S. Lewis

The Root of Our Desires

By Brian Lowther

Today, I finish my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first four installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, The Desire for Creativity, and The Desire for Love. As I noted in those four posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil. 

I’ve hinted in my three previous entries about the deeper motivations behind the desires for power, creativity and love. Namely:  

Power

“If I am powerful, people will respect me. If they respect me, I can respect myself. That’s at the root of the desire for power. The deeper motivation is self-respect.

Creativity

“If I create or achieve something worthwhile, people will ascribe worth to me. If others ascribe worth to me, then I can ascribe worth to myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for creativity. The deeper motivation is self-worth. 

Love

“If others love me, that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love.

Dignity

Self-respect, self-worth and self-love can be summed up nicely with the word dignity. To me, the desire for dignity is at the root of these three desires. In fact, I think dignity is perhaps the most crucial of all our God-given desires. Two reasons for this come to mind. 

First, people voluntarily choose to live without all of the desires I’ve explored and can still lead very meaningful, happy lives.

  1. Survival: people lay down their lives for the love of country or family. The sense of honor and sacrifice they experience gives theirs lives and deaths great purpose.
  2. Pleasure: People forego worldly pleasures, and accept ascetic conditions in view of a worthwhile goal or belief.
  3. Power: Many ministry workers choose a life that has no hope of power, wealth, or status.
  4. Creativity: People take meaningless, non-creative jobs if they feel they are contributing to a cause they believe in.
  5. Love: Monks and nuns go without the love of a spouse, virtuosos and world-class athletes have few true friends [1], and scientists leave family to travel to the Arctic Circle or outer space for the sake of new discoveries.

People can live happily for long durations, even entire lifetimes with one or more of these desires going unfulfilled. However, people can’t live happily without dignity. You may have heard the World War II story of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp who were forced to move rubble from a bombed-out factory to a nearby field. The next day, they were forced to move the same rubble back to the factory. The next day, back to the field, day after day until they had no dignity left. They lost their will to live and began to provoke the guards to shoot them. [2]

Second, dignity may be the only desire we can pursue without fear of pursuing it too far. All of the other desires come with a dark side.

  1. Survival: Pursued too far, this desire can lead to a kill-or-be-killed attitude.
  2. Pleasure: Pursued too far, and one becomes a thrill seeker, living a life of debauchery and immoral self-indulgence.
  3. Power: Pursued too far and this desire can lead to tyrannical, power-hungry, greedy behavior or anxiety and insecurity because power, wealth and influence can be lost or taken away, and wisdom can be discredited.
  4. Creativity: Pursued too far, and this desire leads to work-a-holism or a reclusive life, holed up in some attic finishing your masterpiece.
  5. Love: Pursued too far and this desire leads to neediness, which can lead to loneliness and despair, a “nobody loves me” attitude. “A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing,” [3] just watch almost any current reality TV show.

However, my hunch is that dignity has no dark side. One cannot pursue dignity too far because dignity is simply seeing ourselves the way God sees us. No delusions of grandeur, no competitiveness, no self-loathing, just humble, realistic self-acceptance. I’m struck by the verse, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) He loves us, respects us, and ascribes infinite worth to us just as we are, despite all of our sniffles and hang-ups and pettiness.

This hints at what it means to glorify God: to display his love by receiving it, reflecting it back to him, and refracting it like prisms to ourselves, to our neighbors (Mark 12:31), and to all creation.

Why Did God Give Us this Desire for Dignity?

This concept comes close to the ancient Greeks’ fourth term for love: agape. 

Agape (divine love - the love of God for man and of man for God)

C. S. Lewis used agape to describe what he believed was the highest level of love known to humanity. [4] The term agape has always been used by Christians to refer to the self-sacrificing love of God for humanity. When 1 John 4:8 says "God is love," the Greek word is agape. 

In the cosmic war motif, agape is many things.

  1. Agape is how we can hear and understand the voice of the general.
  2. Agape is the antidote to the poison of the enemy, which is lies about the character of God.
  3. Agape is different than philia; it is beyond philia. Philia is giving your life for your friends. Agape is giving your life for your enemies. This is how Jesus fought and overcame Satan. By loving his enemies, doing good to those who hated him, blessing those who cursed him, praying for those who mistreated him. (Luke 6:27-28). This is what defeats the enemy. The idea of love as a weapon, self-sacrifice as a weapon is counterintuitive, isn’t it? Martin Luther King understood this principle well, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” [5]

The marvelous thing about agape and dignity is that they won’t allow us to live meaningless lives. They won’t allow us to tolerate disease, torture, rape, social exclusion, slavery, humiliation, objectification, or dehumanization. These things aren’t from God. We’re supposed to rail against them. Even people who don’t know God seem to know this instinctively. God wants us to rebel against the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). We were made for proactive resistance against systemic evil. We were made, in short, for freedom.

Former slave, Elizabeth Freeman once wrote, “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman—I would.” [6] 

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Brian Lowther and filed under Blog, Fourth 30 and tagged brian lowther pleasure Power creativity survival love warfare worldview self-worth self respect self love dignity agape C.S. Lewis freedom martin luther king.

Why Did God Give Us a Desire for Love?

By Brian Lowther

Today I continue my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first three installments here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure, The Desire for Power, and The Desire for Creativity. As I noted in those three posts, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil.

Love

Beyond survival, pleasure, power, and creativity I have a deep desire to be loved. In my experience, there is no greater feeling than the engulfing bliss of first love. Romance and fireworks, queasy stomachs and strong sensual passion, it is all absolutely dynamite. I’d go back in a heartbeat to when my wife and I fell in love. Not to change anything, but to relive the intensity of those sublime feelings.

These feelings are undoubtedly good, something I would wish for everyone. But, ultimately they’re just feelings. And, “no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all…But…ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.” [1] In the best cases, being “in love” matures into a second kind of love, that of deliberate commitment and companionship. This is at the core of what many of us desire: a lasting and happy marriage, where infatuation has faded some but a deeper, quieter devotion has replaced it.

The result of either type of love is often children. And, while children are demanding and often infuriating, I never seem to tire of the pitter-patter of small feet, the funny ways they understand the world, or the joy of their affection after a wearisome day.

Not all of us desire marriage or family, but we all desire meaningful friendships. Friendships are the only form of love that everyone can have: i.e., not everyone has a spouse or a child or even parents.  

Why Did God Give Us this Desire to be Loved?

The ancient Greeks gave humanity something very important when they defined human love with the words: eros (romantic love), storge (family love), and philia (companionship love). [2] I think God gave us the desire for human love for reasons that coincide with these Greek words. 

Eros (romantic love)

If we’re talking in strictly military terms, God may have wanted human beings to fill and replenish the earth (Genesis 1:28) because logically, the bigger army usually wins the battle. Eros is perhaps the most expedient way to ensure that humans would “be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28).

Storge (family love)

Parental nurture is in some ways, equivalent to bootcamp. It is preparation for battle. Storge protects us as children, shields us from horror and life-threatening situations, trains us until we’re mature enough to fight for and defend others and ourselves. Not every young person has this protection or training of course, because some children are orphans, or suffer child abuse. But it seems that God’s ideal was and is for us to be protected for a time from battle until we are sufficiently prepared.

Also, God must have foreseen that humanity would learn about him and his enemy in a very gradual way, a progressive arc of revelation through the centuries. Thus, he would have to instill a desire for storge (i.e., respect for elders) as a way to pass down that knowledge from one generation to the next, alleviating the need to start from scratch with every successive generation. 

Philia (companionship love) 

Philia in my mind is very closely related to camaraderie, which is a common word; but it has a very specific meaning in the military. It refers to something much deeper than mere friendship and denotes a strong, shared team spirit, a harmony of purpose and companionship. A close French term is “Esprit De Corps,” which indicates the capacity of a group's members to maintain will power and belief in an institution or goal, especially in the face of opposition or hardship. One can easily see how important this is in war. 

Occasionally we hear of a military group or team bonding as if it were an important milestone. This bonding occurs in the process of toiling together in the heat, marching in the cold, struggling for a common goal, fighting a common foe. When a group strives together and triumphs together, they bond. When they battle side-by-side and face death together, they become closer than family. When soldiers bond in this way, they will give their lives for each other. On the battlefield, it is not so much that you are willing to die for your country, but that you are willing to die for your brother in the trench next to you. This may be what Christ meant when he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13).

This is the essence of philia. My hunch is that God programmed us with a desire for philia because in order to destroy any work of the devil, he knew we would need the byproducts of camaraderie: teamwork and invincible morale. On their own, individuals can’t “win a war.” To win a war you need a lot of organized effort. Think of the eradication of smallpox, or the Civil Rights Movement – these things required organized human effort on a massive scale.

Self-love

One last thing I find most interesting about the desire for love: as with my desire for power and creativity, my thought process goes, “If others love me that means I am lovable. If I am lovable, then I can love myself.” That’s at the root of the desire for love. The deeper motivation is self-love. I’ll explore this desire for self-love a bit more in my next and last entry.

Endnotes

[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
[2] The Greeks had a fourth word for love, “Agape,” or divine love, which I’ll cover in my next entry.

Photo Credits: 
1.  Felipe Bastos/Flickr
2. PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE/Flickr
3. Darren Johnson / iDJ Photography/Flickr
4. Ikhlasul Amal/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Brian Lowther and filed under Blog, Fourth 30 and tagged love warfare worldview C.S. Lewis eros storge philia.

Why Did God Give Us a Desire for Power?

By Brian Lowther

Today I continue my series exploring six common human desires and why God instilled them into us. You can read the first installment here: The Desire for Survival and Pleasure. As I noted in that post, I’m writing from the assumption that our desires at their roots are good and programmed into us by God for a good reason. Specifically, I think his reason is to help us participate with him in bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, which is essentially a battle against darkness and evil.

Power

Beyond survival and pleasure, I desire power. Is that wrong to admit? When we say someone is powerful that can either mean he or she has a lot of physical prowess, or it can mean that they wield authority over others through wealth, or wisdom, or influence. As an adolescent, I wanted physical prowess more than anything. I wanted to be the best athlete in school. One day my coach told me, “No matter how good you get, there will always be someone who is better.” I took this as a terrible discouragement at the time. But as it turns out, he was right. There are few things more short-lived than athletic success.

When I became a young man, wealth became my desire. The idea of having a 10,000 sq. ft. mansion and a stable of exotic cars was so appealing that I began to orient my life around one thing: financial success. I pursued it with tremendous resolve and embarrassing greed. One tragic day, my father-in-law was killed in an accident. As is often the case with the sudden loss of a loved one, his death prompted me towards introspective soul searching. Along the way I landed on Jesus’ advice, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…” (Matthew 6:19) These words were an alarm clock to my sleeping soul. I had been chasing precisely the wrong thing. I’ve spent the fifteen years since his death trying to redirect that tremendous resolve (minus the embarrassing greed) toward glorifying God.

However, now into my late thirties, I still can't seem to shake this desire for power. Only I desire it not in the form of physical prowess or wealth, but in the form of wisdom and influence. I want people—either singularly or en masse—to embrace the ideas I hold dear. And I want those ideas to result in their flourishing. Is that such a bad thing to desire? I don’t think so. Though I suppose it is a bit arrogant. But isn’t this desire at the core of many professions like teaching, pastoring, counseling, or self-help book writing?

Why Did God Give Us the Desire for Power?

I think God instilled in many of us a desire for power because we were made in part, to oppose the enemy. When Jesus said, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against my church” (Matthew 16:18), he may have chosen these words because gates are a defensive structure, intended to protect against an onslaught. As though we are supposed to be on the offensive against Satan and not just defending against his attacks. It takes a lot of physical and moral power to storm the gates of a terrible enemy. Additionally, I think God instilled in many of us a desire for wealth, wisdom and influence because we would need those things to subdue (kabas) the earth (Genesis 1:28), which has connotations of military victory in other passages, and to guard (samar) the garden (Genesis 2:15). [1] In a war, wealth can provide rations, boots, and weapons; influence can recruit an army; and wisdom can make a plan of action while minimizing unintended consequences.

Now, it’s no surprise that God’s idea of power, and our idea of power are quite different. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians. 1:25)

  1. Sacrifice as Power: The most profound display of power in history came when Christ allowed himself to be crucified. Somehow by dying he destroyed the power of death. (Hebrews 2:14)
  2. Generosity as Wealth: Similarly, the most admirable use of wealth is when it is given freely to the needy. Jonas Salk became a national hero, his generosity and compassion legendary because he chose not to patent his polio vaccine, forgoing a personal fortune.
  3. Humility as Influence: In an era of swaggering self-promotion, entitlement, and unbearable arrogance, Mother Teresa had no ambition to become a celebrity. Instead, her goal was to wholeheartedly give free service to people who were a burden to society and shunned by everyone. Along the way she won a Nobel Prize and always makes the list of the most influential people of the last century.
  4. Foolishness as Wisdom: This principle is why—to paraphrase C.S. Lewis—an uneducated believer was able to write a book that astonished the whole world. [2] That believer was John Bunyan and the book was Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan was born poor, never went beyond the second grade, and did most of his writing while in jail, yet Pilgrim’s Progress became the most widely read piece of 17th-century English literature.

The point is, God’s version of power, wealth, influence and wisdom are counter-intuitive, paradoxical even. In foolishness, sacrifice, generosity and humility we are powerful. These things somehow overpower and defeat the strongman (Satan), take his armor and divide up his plunder. (Luke 11:22)

Self-respect

One last thing I find most interesting about the athletic achievements and the extravagant lifestyle I once desired is, I didn’t so much want those things for the pleasure of having them, but for how people would perceive me for having them. The same holds true for the wisdom and influence I seek today. “If I am powerful/wealthy/wise/influential,” my internal monologue goes, “people will respect me. If they respect me, I can respect myself.” That’s at the root of these desires. The deeper motivation is self-respect. I’ll explore this desire for self-respect a bit more in a subsequent entry.

Endnotes

[1] Greg Boyd, “Satan and the Corruption of Nature: Seven Arguments”
[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Photo Credit: Laura Ferreira/Flickr

Brian Lowther is the Director of the Roberta Winter Institute

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Brian Lowther and filed under Blog, Fourth 30 and tagged brian lowther Power warfare worldview wealth wisdom influence Jonas Salk Mother Teresa John Bunyan C.S. Lewis self respect.

Where Intelligent Design Fails to See Intelligence

January 8, 1944- The HMCS Camrose which helped sink a German submarine in the North Atlantic during Second World War. VAC | ACC/Flickr

By Ralph D. Winter

In saying that some of our creationists are glossing over the surprisingly prominent reality of intelligent evil in nature, I don’t mean that any of these ID people really deep down are unwilling to confront the enigmatic reality of evil. I just mean that, from the current discussion as seen in their written materials, that would appear to be the case.

As a matter of fact, I myself have all my life believed in what C. S. Lewis called “that hideous strength.” Yet only recently have I begun to reflect on the possibility that this hideous and intelligent evil must not reasonably be dealt with among us any longer merely by superficial references to the philosophical concept of sin and to a fall of man. Why? Because the mere idea of sin is not personifyable. Sin as an abstraction is defined by some as the departure from what is right. In that case the concept itself does not necessarily imply the potent and powerful existence of a diabolical personality any more than would a wrong score on a third-grade arithmetic test. The key question is, “Does it make any practical difference if we conceive of ourselves, on the one hand, as tempted by freedom to sin or, on the other hand, fighting against an evil one who tempts us intelligently?”

Note, for example, the huge difference, back in the days of the Second World War, between, on the one hand, the often nearly invisible icebergs that sent many ships to the bottom of the ocean and, on the other hand, the stealthy, intelligent submarines which caused far greater damage. What if the sinking of thousands of ships had been conceived of as merely the result of inanimate forces? What if scientists had not figured out a way to bounce underwater sound off steel-hulled submarines in such a way as to distinguish the difference between an iceberg and a submarine? This technique, to be called sonar, came late in the war, and implementing it took even longer. By that time not a thousand ships had been sunk, not two thousand, but six thousand ships crossing the Atlantic, loaded with food and war material, had gone to the bottom. It may be hard to believe but the outcome of that enormous war turned on the subsequent success in fighting these intelligent submarines.

It could be alleged that I am missing a main point. A conversation I had with Philip Johnson several years ago brought this forcibly to my attention. I began by congratulating him (and Michael Behe) on the potent logic of the ID movement, but I said, “When you look at your computer screen and if it says suddenly, ‘Ha, I just wiped out your hard disk,’ you have not the slightest difficulty in concluding that you have suffered the onslaught of a computer virus concocted by an intelligent, real person. Curiously, then, when we contemplate a real biological virus, which, though only a tiny assemblage, assails the health of an enormously larger human being, why do we have trouble concluding that we are dealing with an intelligent EVIL design?”

His answer, essentially, was, “Ralph, in my writings and public appearances I can’t even mention God much less Satan. I have a very specific battle to fight, namely, to take apart the logic of unaided evolution. That is all I am trying to do.” Okay, I have respected that response. I have not pestered him further. In fact, I am not even now endeavoring to fault the ID movement and its objectives.

Rather, I would ask a larger question. There are very many people, even Bible-believing Christians (not just non-Christians), who are to this day profoundly puzzled, perplexed, and certainly confused by the extensive presence in the created world of outrageous evil, created apparently by what we believe to be a God who is both all-powerful and benevolent. In coping with this, they may frequently attribute to God what is actually the work of an evil intelligence, and thus fatalistically give not the slightest thought to fighting back.

  • When my wife died in 2001 more than one person tried to console me by observing that, and I quote, “God knows what He is doing.”
  • When Chuck Colson’s daughter concluded that her brain-damaged son was, and I quote, “exactly the way God wanted him to be,” the impressively intelligent and influential Colson actually applauded her conclusion.
  • When Jonathan Edwards fatally contracted smallpox in his effort to try out a vaccine that might protect the Indians in Western Massachusetts, the vast majority of the hyper-calvinistically trained pastors of Massachusetts concluded that God killed him because, to quote them, “he was interfering with Divine Providence.” These pastors went on to organize an anti- vaccination society.
  • Going further back in time, a Mother Superior in Spain woke up one morning and detected a small lump in her forehead. She concluded that it must be God who was doing something to her presumably to deepen her devotion and nourish her character. When it finally turned out that a worm was burrowing there, and had broken the surface so you could see exactly what it was, she concluded that it was God’s worm. When she would stoop over to pick something up, and it would occasionally fall out, she would replace it so as not to obstruct the will of God.

These are, however, only a few examples compared to the thousands of times a day among even modern Evangelicals that some blatant evil goes unattacked because it is resignedly if not fatalistically assumed to be the initiative of God. I am not so much interested in the philosophical or theological aspects of this situation as I am in the resulting passivity before eradicable evil, the practical fatalism.

I will go one step further. If we are dealing with an intelligent evil, even our thinking about that fact may likely be opposed and confused by that same evil force, that evil power, that evil personality. Is there any evidence of this additional complexity? In what form would it appear? How could we identify it? 

This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Ralph D. Winter and filed under Blog, Fourth 30 and tagged intelligent design creationist C.S. Lewis intelligent evil Philip Johnson Michael Behe ralph winter Chuck Colson jonathan edwards.

Is God Capricious, Mean-minded, and Stupid?

Flickr/Christian Payne

Editorial Note: Famed English comedian, actor, and writer Stephen Fry made recent headlines with his opinions about God. You may remember Fry as Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, in the second of the two Robert Downey Jr. films, or perhaps you’ll remember him as half of the comic duo Fry and Laurie. Prince Charles even referred to him as a national treasure. Recently Fry was asked in an interview what he would say if he encountered God at the gates of heaven.

Fry responded, "I'll say, 'Bone cancer in children?  What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that's not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’" The video of this segment of his interview has now garnered almost six million views in just a few week’s time.

As a team, here at the RWI, we discussed how we might respond to Mr. Fry and those who share his perspective. Since Fry’s video went viral, scores of Christians have published responses. We’ve read a number of these responses, and many were disappointing to us, mostly boiling down to "Well, I don't believe in that God either," or "It will all come to light in the end." Frankly, we were dissatisfied by how unconvincing Christians can appear in the media when it comes to the problem of evil. We as a group share a certain perspective about the problem of evil (though with plenty of individual variation and nuance) and felt that perspective was under-represented. Below you can read our director’s personal view, framed as his response to Stephen Fry. 

A Response to Stephen Fry

By Brian Lowther

If I found myself in a conversation with Mr. Fry, and if he asked me how I could believe in a “capricious, mean-spirited, stupid God,” I would simply say, “I think your opinions are perfectly logical. Actually, essentially, I agree with you. I believe that what you’re describing is ‘utterly, utterly evil.’"

“Then, why do you believe there is a God?” Fry would undoubtedly ask.

“Well Stephen, (I assume we’d be on a first name basis) we can agree, if God does exist, he is a highly skilled artist because the universe is quite glorious. But, as you say, if that God exists he must also be a ‘capricious and mean-spirited’ artist and thus unworthy of our devotion because his creation is also very dangerous and terrifying.” C.S. Lewis fans will recognize this line of thinking. [1]

“Then we agree?” Fry might say.

“Not completely.” I would respond. “For me, everything is easier to understand in this world, when I think of it as a world at war, a war between God and Satan.” While you might assume that Fry would laugh at this suggestion or at least point out its absurdity, I think he might sincerely consider it. In the interview, he explains his inclination toward Greek Pantheism of all things.

I’d continue, “Just for fun, let’s assume that Satan does exist and that he and other fallen angels are at war with God and behind much of the evil and suffering in our world. If this were true, then we could expect bone cancer, misery, injustice and pain. We wouldn’t question why bad things would happen to good people. To paraphrase my mentor, Ralph Winter, when we reinstate Satan’s existence as an evil intelligence loose in God’s creation, only then do a lot of things become clear and reasonable. Suffering, in a perverse way, starts to make sense.”

“Ah, you’re describing Dualism,” he might say. “Next to Greek Pantheism, I think that Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.” (Fry would surely be able to paraphrase C.S. Lewis as well as I could.) [2]

“Yes, but Dualism has a catch,” I would add. “The essence of Dualism is a war between two equal powers—a good god and a bad god—and thus a never-ending war. It would be easy to trust in the goodness of the good god, but not his power, for he is incapable of defeating the bad god. Christianity, on the other hand is built on two promises, that God is all-good and all-powerful, and that one day the war will end. The ‘bad god,’ Satan, will be conquered.”

If Fry took these ideas seriously, as he might, I would imagine his next question would be, “But Brian (again, first name basis), why would God create Satan in the first place? God may be good, he may be powerful, but surely he isn’t very bright.”

I would respond, “Why did God create you in the first place?” I picture Fry glancing at me slyly as he pondered the inherent humor of God creating him, Stephen Fry, solely to point out God’s lack of intelligence.

“To do evil?” I would ask.

“Of course not,” he would certainly reply.

“Can you do evil?”

“Yes,” would have to be his answer.

“God didn’t create Satan to do evil either.” I would offer. “Satan was good when he was created, and went wrong.”

“But why did Satan go wrong?” he might ask. Not in a simplistic way, but in a way as to question why God would allow such a thing, given the possible repercussions.

“Well, a simple answer might be, because he could.”

“But why would God allow Satan that freedom?”

“I think God gave Satan that freedom, and gives all of us that freedom because he wants our authentic love, and you can’t have authentic love without freedom. Take the story of a young man who got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend, but before she could answer he pulled out a pistol and said, ‘You better say yes, or else.’ [3] Now, of course the young woman said yes, but was this authentic love? Or was it simply fear? When you take away freedom it always destroys love.”

“That’s all well and good,” Fry might say,  “but that doesn’t exactly answer why God allows Satan so much freedom. God could have set parameters around him, which would prohibit his most dastardly deeds. Maybe not chicken-pox, but certainly bone cancer.”

“Let’s put it this way,” I’d say. “Imagine that you are God.”

“Oh, I like where this is headed.” He’d respond.

“And imagine that you are trying to decide the kind of world you’d like to create. You could create a world entirely populated by dogs. And each of those dogs would love you, like all dogs love their owners. They would fetch sticks for you. They would provide companionship. They would bark at your mailman. But would that be enough? A dog world might be nice, but not compared to a planet full of humans who would love you. Humans—at their best—can love in a much deeper, more intimate, more profound way than any dog. Plus, dogs…”

“Actually I prefer cats,” Fry might interject.

“Okay, cats. Cats are not generally capable of nuclear fission, or Shakespearian poetry or even making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But humans are. Humans are capable of enormous good. Now imagine that kind of love and goodness multiplied by a hundred, or a thousand, or a million. Maybe that approaches the angelic capacity for love and goodness.

However, there is a proportional flipside to all this love and goodness. Dogs—or cats in your case—are marvelous companions, but they can bite and scratch and require constant cleanup. Similar issues apply with humans. As much as another human being can love you, and enhance your happiness and make life seem complete, they can also make your life a living hell. Now multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand, or a million and maybe that approaches the angelic capacity for harm and evil. 

If you don’t like that analogy, how about transportation? A skateboard is a good mode of transportation, but a bike is, in many ways, better, safer, faster, etc. A car is better still and a train is better than that. But perhaps the best form of transportation is a plane, for its speed, safety, cost per mile, etc. But the flip side is the proportional amount of injury, destruction and death that can result if something goes wrong.

The point is, if you put parameters around a person or an angel’s capacity for evil, you would consequently put parameters around that person or that angel’s capacity for love and goodness. Who in their right mind would limit how much love they could receive from their parent, or their child or their spouse?”

“But if this is all true, why doesn’t God save us from all this misery and simply wipe Satan out of existence?” Fry might ask.

“Every Christian I know believes that one day, he will,” I’d answer.

“Then what on earth is he waiting for?” Fry would ask. “And before you answer, please, please don’t explain that God is waiting, not because he is slow to act, but because he is patient. I don’t want to hear that God is waiting because he doesn’t want anyone to perish but to come to repentance and faith. And the reason I won’t allow this explanation is because every day 350,000 babies are born. That’s 350,000 new human lifetimes added every day that God has to wait out to see if they’ll come to repentance and faith. As long as humans continue to procreate, it will never end.”

“Okay, that’s fair,” I’d admit. “I like to think of the earth as a stage and the entire universe is intently watching the drama unfold. Satan is causing all kinds of havoc and destruction just waiting to see if God will strike him down. Because if God strikes him down, Satan wins. If God strikes him down, the whole universe will see that he isn’t a god of love and freedom; he’s a god of coercion and force.”

“But God will strike him down,” Fry would respond. “You said that yourself, ‘one day the war will end. Satan will be conquered.’”

“Right, but, I wonder if he will be conquered in a way we’ve never imagined,” I’d reply. “Jesus never did things quite the way the people of his day expected, especially his disciples. In fact, you could argue that Jesus ‘conquered’ his enemies in a completely counter-intuitive manner – by dying for them. Perhaps God is waiting for the moment in history when he doesn’t have to use his power and force to conquer Satan. Perhaps the war will end, when Satan is fully and finally exposed as a fraud.” [4]

“But hasn’t he already been exposed?” Fry might ask.

“If he were already exposed,” I would answer, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be blaming God for bone cancer, misery, injustice and pain. No one would raise their fist to the sky and ask, ‘Why God, why?’”

“And what changes when we stop asking those questions?” Fry might ask.

I’d respond, “When enough people acknowledge that Satan is the source of evil, not God, and stand up to fight every evil with everything in our command, I think a tipping point will occur. Perhaps that’s when Christ will return to this war-torn world and Satan and all his minions will realize that the tide has turned, their war will soon be lost, and they will be crushed under the weight of their own hopelessness, consumed by a ‘lake of burning fire’ from within.” [5]

“So,” Fry might ask, “God is just sitting up there in heaven, passively waiting for all this to play out?”

“No,” I’d respond. “I don’t think God is passive. I think he is constantly at work generating life, beauty, perfection, order and all other things that demonstrate his character of love and goodness, or as the Bible puts it, bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And I think he’s influencing every free will in the universe to participate in that process.”

“Until Satan is fully exposed?” Fry might clarify. “That’s the end of the story?”

“Oh, no. That’s just the beginning,” I’d respond. “Once it becomes clear that Satan’s kingdom is unsustainable and self-destructive, no person or angel will ever follow Satan’s path again, not because of fear that God will punish them if they do, but because Satan’s road is exposed as a dead end. [6] Then the story can really begin, and heaven can be a place of never-ending peace.”

“I sense that we are now taking great liberties with traditional Christian theology,” Fry may respond.

“To a degree we are,” I’d answer. “But I think it’s worth pondering more deeply. Don't you?”

“Oh, this is all just too much,” Fry might say, as we walked off into the sunset discussing the unfathomable complexity of life.

Brian Lowther is the director
of the Roberta Winter Institute. 

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Brian Lowther and filed under Blog, Third 30, Top 10 and tagged Stephen Fry theodicy C.S. Lewis satan ralph winter Dualism free will cats.

Epic, by John Eldredge - A Review

Editor’s Note: This book review was originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of the International Journal of Frontier Missions.

From the author of Wild At Heart comes this Epic: The Story God is Telling, a small book, which, like Brian McLaren’s [The Secret Message of Jesus], is very logically structured. In addition to the important Prologue and Epilogue it tells the story, the epic, of the entire universe in four “Acts.”

In the 16-page Prologue he insists that we must see the overall story, “the larger story,” if we want to understand the sub-plots.

Act One is where all is good and beautiful.

Act Two is the entrance of evil in the form of fallen angels. (Which, my guess is, at the moment in history when predatory life first appeared in the Cambrian era.)

Something happened before our moment on the stage. Before mankind came the angels. . . . This universe is inhabited by other beings . . . Most people do not live as though the Story has a Villain, and that makes life very confusing . . . I am staggered by the level of naiveté that most people live with regarding evil. (pp. 30, 39)

He now quotes a famous passage from C. S. Lewis,

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death, disease, and sin . . . Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees . . . this is a universe at war. (p. 40)

Act Three is where, he says, the Biblical story begins in Genesis 1:1, after angelic powers went wrong.

This act begins in “darkness . . . is still under way, and we are caught up in it. A love story, set in the midst of a life-and- death battle.” (p. 72)

Act Four gestures toward the final future in a brilliant, eloquent, imaginative flight of fancy which frowns on all human guesses of the grandeur of the future. He says playfully:

I’ve heard innumerable times that “we shall worship God forever.” That “we shall sing one glorious hymn after another, forever and ever, amen” It sounds like hell to me. (p. 80)

The Epilogue is a significant part of the book. He says,

First, things are not what they seem. . . . the unseen world (the rest of reality) is more weighty and more real and more dangerous than the part of reality we can see.

Second, we are at war. . . . We must take this battle seriously. This is no child’s game. This is war . . . a battle for the human heart.

Third, you have a crucial role to play. . . . We must find our courage and rise up to recover our hearts and fight for the hearts of others. (p. 102)

Here we see talk of war. But, strangely, it does not speak of a war against a Dark Power and his works, but a rescue operation for human hearts. That is certainly a basic part of it, but to liberate the French from the Nazi yoke the dark evil of Hitler had to be eliminated first.

““Most people don’t live as though the Story has a Villain, and that makes life very confusing.” ”

Here is a thought: theoretically if every soul on earth were finally born again we would still face a ravaged creation, riddled with violence (in nature) and disease. And God would continue to be blamed for all this evil—unless Christians were finally identifying it with Satan. However, that is precisely why this “thought” is purely theoretical: we CAN’T win everyone without destroying the works of the Devil in that very process. As long as hundreds of millions of mission-field Christians have eyes running with pus and incipient blindness, as long as such horrors are blamed on God (for the lack of a Satan), WE ARE NOT GOING TO WIN MANY MORE PEOPLE. And, all those hundreds of millions of rural people and uneducated people we have recently won are eventually going to lose their faith just as they have in Europe and much of America. We are not winning very many educated people.

We must, it seems to me, accept it as our true mission to fight these horrors in the name of Christ. That is essential if we are to glorify God in all the earth, and that glorification is the basis on which we invite people to accept God as their Father in Heaven—and recruit them to help fight this war.

Both of these two books [Epic and The Secret Message of Jesus] brilliantly describe the restless pew. One of them actually speaks of war, not so much against evil as a rescue operation of humanity.

Thousands of writers and pastors are puzzling over the essential question of what a believer does as a Christian besides being religious and decent and active in (small) good deeds.

Is there something wrong with the DNA of American Evangelical congregations? Many leaders today are suggesting that we need new church pioneers with ideas so different that the very word “church” may not be ideal.

Both authors here are discontent with “normal” church life in America and in one way or another are groping toward something vitally different.

These two book writers, plus myself, plus a whole host of other restless, relentlessly inquiring Christian leaders today are aware that Evangelicals have never in any country of the world grown as prominent in national affairs, have never more closely approximated the culture of those outside of the church, and have never generated in reaction such a profound phobia of religious people taking over the country (witness the avid attention given to the Da Vinci Code book and movie which so skillfully throws doubt on the validity of the entire Christian tradition).

Here we see an outcry for something more, something different, something more serious. I believe what is lacking is a clearer idea of evil and what to do about it. 

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Ralph D. Winter and filed under Second 30, Blog and tagged John Eldredge Brian McLaren IJFM books christ evil ralph winter satan theodicy worldview cambrian angels C.S. Lewis disease evangelical america.