by Keith Bassham
At the confluence of several need-based streams, I have settled on the subject of hope for thought and study for the next several days. With the current economic stresses, needs in my own life, and a pressing preaching date with our Fellowship in Houston in a few days, hope has become my favorite topic.
Like Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds, once you begin looking for hope in your Bible reading, you find an embarrassment of riches. The inherent hopefulness of the opening lines of the creation story, and those selfsame hopes dashed a mere page or two later — yet rising again, and then again falling — hope and despair is woven into each part of the Bible story.
After some time, you begin to ask, “Is it right, after all we have brought upon ourselves, to go to the source of hope yet another time? Can hope still be there?” And the answer comes back, “Yes, there is — a hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast” (Hebrews 6:19).
The so-called New Atheists (who really aren’t all that new after all, for the Wall Street Journal named them The New New Atheists in an article last fall), would find us either lunatics or criminals or both. In the minds of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), and others lesser known, faith in all forms is an enemy that must not only be discouraged but wiped out.
And the field between these warring camps — that is, we the hopeful, and those without hope (which is how the Apostle Paul designates those without God in Ephesians chapter two) — has these past hundred years or so been held by what we knew as religious liberals. The God they held up was partly supernatural, more conceived in man’s image than the other way round. But at least the God of the liberals was more than His creation and creature. That close interaction between those who were without God and those who held to an almost-God led to the inevitable. Now that middle ground is occupied by those who consider belief in God at all to be a problem.
That is the title of a book, in fact, The God Problem, written by Nigel Leaves. According to Mr. Leaves, “the major factor in the waning of Christian faith is its insistence on a supernatural God — the Almighty, the lawgiver and judge who convicts the world of sin.” Did you get that? Christianity is waning because we insist on a supernatural God, he says. His alternatives are predictable — different forms of pantheism and naturalism — which I find ironic, because according to Romans 1:18-20, the created world reveals those very aspects of God’s nature Leaves rejects: the Almighty, the lawgiver and judge who convicts the world of sin. What does that say for those who want to appeal to reason alone?
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a British preacher well known in the last century, was once asked to debate the existence of God in a network broadcast in Britain. His response was documented in his book, Preaching and Preachers. He said, om
God is not a subject for debate. We are told that the unbeliever does not agree with that; and that is perfectly true; but that makes no difference. We believe it, and it is a part of our very case to assert it. Holding the view that we do, believing what we do about God, we cannot in any circumstances allow Him to become a subject for discussion or of debate or investigation. I base my argument at this point on the word addressed by God Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3:1-6). Moses had suddenly seen this remarkable phenomenon of the burning bush, and was proposing to turn aside and to examine this astonishing phenomenon. But, immediately, he is rebuked by the voice which came to him saying, ‘Draw no nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.’ That seems to be the governing principle in this whole matter. …To me this is a very vital matter. To discuss the being of God in a casual manner, lounging in an armchair…is something we should never allow, because God, as I say, is not a kind of philosophic X or concept. We believe in the almighty, the glorious, the living God; and whatever may be true of others we must never put ourselves, or allow ourselves to be put, into a position in which we are debating about God as if He were but a philosophical proposition.
Charles Darwin did not become an atheist because of his evolution studies. He had come to believe that the doctrines of Christianity were unsustainable, that the God of Christianity was unjust, or at the very least, amoral, and these thoughts were compounded by personal tragedy, not the least of which was his daughter’s death. The problem for Mr. Leaves and others is not therefore an intellectual exercise. Arguments against the existence of God often begin as an experience of hope lost and usually end with God in the hands of angry sinners.