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Nine Questions Everyone Must face

John Patrick

A Brief Overview

The questions are ancient but their form changes from generation to generation; they constantly undergo modification to fit different professions and different stages of life but in one form or another, at some stage in life, they will exert their ancient power to confront us, to disturb our sleep, to take away our peace. No matter how busily we run from them they pursue with a majestic constancy. All the world's great religions know about them, only in the late twentieth century has a culture arisen that tries to pretend they don't exist. The result is the morass of drugs and depression, the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, the scars of infidelity and divorce and the wastelands of burnout which characterize us so pathetically. Sadly, the root problem of all these ills which is the avoidance of the moral realities of being human, is as true of Christians as of non-Christians: some using the church rather than drugs and alcohol as a means of avoidance. Some delay divorce by ten years or so, our sex lives are happier in general and our health statistics are much better than those of the rest of the population. These are all merely quantitative differences, differences of scale not fundamental differences like those which characterized the early church. Jesus said to his disciples; "You must be different, you must not be like the heathen." The difference Jesus wanted was a difference of heart, of core principles. This was the radical new idea that Jesus brought that we were not to be merely keepers of rules but lovers of Him so that the rules could be transformed from constricting burdens into means to help us to express our love.

Why is this such a radical doctrine? When things go wrong we frequently look round for an external cause, someone or something to blame, but Jesus says we should look inwards. In a key passage (Matthew 15:15-20) Jesus tells us that the evil in the world comes from the heart of man and that therefore the solutions to problems lie not in environmental change, better education or more wealth but in a fundamental change of heart. This means changed ways of thought as well as feeling and sentiment. We however, are largely uninterested in this gospel so we alter the critical texts so that although the correct words may be read we hear our own version. Here is an example of the modern rephrasing of Paul so that what we hear goes like this;

If you have followed my argument then you will not be like your neighbours but will be transformed by the renewal of your feelings.

Now I have purposely not referenced this "quotation" because if you don't recognize it and don't know what is wrong with it then this book is for you because you are so deeply into hearing the siren calls of the surrounding culture rather than the hard truth of scripture. What I have written is a distorted paraphrase of the beginning of Romans chapter twelve and what I have done to it represents a wholesale trashing of the cultural history of the western world. Some of you may think that is not a bad thing, especially if you are recent graduates of the social sciences, where hatred of our own history is endemic but you should know what you are doing and be able to defend it. Paul, nowhere says anything remotely like that paraphrase but only one word needs to be changed to correct the error. The word is, of course, "feelings" which should read "mind". Evangelical Christians have largely given up on the practice of careful thought because they have not had it impressed upon them that they have a duty to transform the way they think with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is a problem which was first recognized in the forties but it is coming to its full fruition only now. Here is how CS Lewis puts it in the Screwtape letters. (In these letters Lewis uses the device of letting us read the correspondence of our tempters to give us insight into our own defects.) In the first letter from Screwtape to his underling Wormwood, Screwtape writes;

My Dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But... with [the media]... we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing around in his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true " or "false" but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church ...The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground.... By the very act of arguing you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake who can foresee the result?

The problem has now progressed to the stage where the following conversation occurred between myself and a medical student. I had expressed a belief in objective moral truth and this shocked the student, who said; " But all moral truth is relative, merely personal." I replied by asking; "Including that statement?" The student was bright and realized in a moment or so what I was driving at. "Oh", she said, "I see I have made an absolute statement." "Yes", I said, "The most you could say is that all moral truth may be relative but on the other hand it may not be." Then after a few moments further thought she said, "But I am not going to change my opinion just because of a philosophical argument!" What does one come to University for?

In stark contrast to our much maligned logical medieval brethren, who were concerned about truth, the modern Christian community, the local church, is more easily understood as a social club, where not offending anyone is primary. Instead we are meant to be the world -changing community of seriously minded folk intent on bringing their thoughts into subjection to Christ. Its primary concern is to keep the members happy not to radically change the way they think and act. Os Guiness described this phenomenon in the Gravedigger File where he proposed that the primary strategy for undermining the church in North America was to reduce it to a socially acceptable family activity which had little or no impact on society at large. In this respect it appears that this is exactly what has happened. Never have there been more people claiming to be "born-again" Christians in North America and never has there been less evidence of Christians radically re-shaping the culture, of being salt and light.

So what is wrong with the church? Here is how one writer perceptively expressed it.

The adult members of our churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches.

This conspiracy covers the fact that the churches do not change the lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.

I would add the modifier that this applies to deep personal devotional struggles with the fundamentals of the Christian life. On the more impersonal issues like precisely which view of Revelation or Genesis chapters 1-3 is correct, quite heated discussion and even angry debate will ensue. We do well to remember Our Lord's admonitions to the Church at Ephesus; their work and doctrine were perfect but they had lost their love. They were told to repent and if they didn't their lamp would be put out. Apparently they did not repent and the church at Ephesus died.

It was precisely this sense of the utter passionless irrelevance of so much Christian activity which gnawed at my soul and still does. I sat in church for fifteen years without hearing a sermon I remember as life changing. It seems that almost everyone believes in God and almost everyone prays at some time or another but these "gut realities" are a million miles removed from "church". In the medical profession it is reported that 80% pray but only 20% go to church and there may be little overlap.

What people are looking for is a passionate personal faith that connects them to God in the ways the Psalmists express so eloquently.

Eugene Peterson in his book, "Under the Unpredictable Plant", wrestles with the tendency of churches to be wrapped up in projects and process, leaving aside the better and more important verities of prayer, adoration and knowing God, which Our Lord intended to be the central joy of our lives. ("I am come that you might know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.") Peterson deals with how we might attack the problem from a pastoral and devotional perspective but he begins with a devastating critique of the church as having no spiritual depth and no hunger for God.

The Christian community does not evoke either the response; "Behold how these Christians love one another!", or the awestruck recognition that "these men have turned the world upside down". In the time of the Apostles it did exactly that. But let me quickly modify this criticism by adding that it is a criticism of the western church. The warmth and generosity of the church in Africa, China, Asia, Russia and S. America is attracting converts at an extraordinary rate. These churches are also often like the Corinthian church, full of talent and almost out of control; disordered in many ways but alive, whereas we more often display the well ordered behaviour characteristic of a graveyard.

Part of the explanation is that in these other parts of the world, life is so hard and so unpredictable that reliance on God is a sheer necessity and consequently because God loves to respond, experiences of God's active love are commonplace. As one Rwandan refugee expressed it;

"Before the war I was very content, I had a thriving church and I thought I knew God and I thought I knew how to pray but it was only when I had lost everything and was living under a United Nations blue tarpaulin, in the middle of thousands of others with no more than a meter between us, that I really learned to pray. I would not wish the experience of the refugee on anyone but neither would I have missed it for anything in the world."

Another, who was a high church official, put it like this;

"I was used to having my life under my control, I knew where I was going and I knew how to get there. My plans seemed very real, then everything crashed. I could not even protect my own life. My wife and I had to pray for everything, safety, food, shelter, clothes and as a result, we have learned the meaning of trust. God has protected us for work here, others he strengthened to face death with courage. Like Stephen many have learned to know God in adversity, learned to live the truth of the epistle, that here we have no abiding city but we seek a city whose builder and maker is God." This man and his wife exude an aura of graciousness which we rarely meet in the West.

How did we get to our current state? The evidence for moral decay is undeniable. Once upon a time sexual activity was known to be properly limited to a man and a woman within the bond of marriage, not that adultery and other sexual activities did not occur but they were acknowledged as wrong. Now we are told that we are narrow and bigoted if we do not approve of promiscuous sexual activity between any set of consenting adults you can imagine. We are further told that all moral opinions are equally valid and it therefore follows that there is no such thing as moral decay, only moral change. Most Christians are at a loss as to how to begin to confront such radical libertarians who are determined to change our culture to accommodate their own tastes. Given their starting propositions it is important to realize that power is all important, and that if a lie will serve their purposes best then they will use it without apology. This rampant relativism and the need to understand its historical roots has troubled several modern writers of whom Allan Bloom and Alisdair MacIntyre are two prominent examples. MacIntyre's After Virtue was a particularly interesting work because it represented the thought of a very serious philosopher who had started as a Marxist and was moving back towards Christianity. He opens his book with a wonderful parable in which he asks us to imagine a "know-nothing" government taking power. They decide that all our discontents are caused by science and scientists and so to correct this lamentable state of affairs they lynch the scientists, blow up the laboratories and burn the libraries. To their surprise, things get worse rather than better and so they decide to re-introduce the teaching of science into the schools. Without any true scientists left they can only comb through the ruins and assemble bits and pieces of equipment, torn pages of equations and partial theorems and they teach these remnants of learning in the only way available to them, by rote. Of course, it is of no value whatsoever, being divorced from any overarching sense of what science is. MacIntyre's point is that we are in exactly this position, though not in respect of scientific learning but of moral formation. He then proceeds to review the whole of western intellectual history, which is Christian history, and concludes that the enlightenment has turned out to be a moral endarkenment. He is pessimistic about the future. We are like those who tried to teach science without knowing what science is. We try to teach values without foundations beyond saying that everyone has a right to their values. But if there is no overarching moral reality then justice and morality are no more than empty words.

Bloom approached the problem from a somewhat different perspective, being concerned that his students did not understand their own cultural history and were therefore effectively without a history. In his view they were Barbarians. He compares the wisdom of his religious but uneducated grandparents with that of his MD or PhD cousins and concludes that the grandparents were truly wise because they belonged to a community of belief which gave meaning to their lives, reasons for the performance of their duties and the bearing of their sorrows. His highly educated cousins had no comparable wisdom and could discuss the great issues of life and death only in the language of cliche. The book that is foundational to the whole of western history, the bible, is no longer known.

My book has grown out of a recognition of the truth that both MacIntyre and Bloom describe and a desire to speak a vigorous truth into our effete world of western Christianity, to re- engage with the eternal questions in ways which will make us, once again, into the salt and light we were called to be. This metaphor from the Sermon on the Mount, has been a crucial component to the development of this work. To our culture the metaphor has lost much of its thrust and power. We no longer use impure rock salt to preserve meat and fish, but in the time of Christ they did. Because rock salt is an impure mixture of other minerals and salt, a sack which had been in contact with water may have had the sodium chloride, the salt, leached out of the bottom of the sack whilst still retaining enough at the top to taste salty. When this mixture is used to preserve meat and fish the truth emerges as a bad smell fairly quickly. When this happens, the housewife blames the salt not the meat and fish. The moral is clear, when the world around us decays we are not to be surprised. After all, it is only doing what comes naturally. The decay is due to the lack of salt in the Christian community. Furthermore Jesus points out one more consequence of this lack of tang in the Christian community; we are miserable. The reason is simple. If you say you are a Christian but have no serious commitment to working out the meaning of that faith, you will be unhappy in the presence of real Christians. However, your apparent commitment will be enough for your non-Christian friends to be wary of you. The result is that you are like unsalty salt thrown out and rejected by all.

What is to be done? One thing to do is to start again with a serious engagement in some of the basic questions. So here is my sequence, which will be the outline for the rest of the book.

The Nine Questions

To have missed these questions is to have lived the proverbial unexamined life. Much to my surprise I discovered a few years ago that many students were so immersed in the details of their courses that they had never been introduced to these questions. There are many lists but mine is culled from a variety of sources and intended for the young at heart.

1. WHERE DID I COME FROM?
   The question of how things begin is the deliberately avoided question in most science courses, yet the answer to the question must influence the way anyone, including a scientist, lives and practices his profession. The answer can either limit or enlarge his horizons. Most often it limits. If there is no God, said Dostoyevsky, everything is permissible, including cheating and lying. The only question is "can you get away with it?"
   
   
2. WHY AM I HERE?
   If we believe the advertisers the answer is simple; to just do what we feel like doing. The problem is that this is a deeply unfulfilling way to live, as the huge consumption of antidepressants and tranquilizers by our culture illustrates. A book could be written about this alone, indeed many books have been written and largely forgotten. The law was given that it might go well with them and their children.
   
   
3. WHERE AM I GOING?
   This question is suppressed by most of our contemporaries. They say, according to the polls, that the overwhelming majority believe in God but they live as though this God makes no demands and will not judge. This is a monumentally incoherent theology.
   
   
4. HOW DO I COME TO TERMS WITH DEATH?
   Here is another question whose insistent beat in the background of our lives we constantly deny. We are a culture in denial of its own deepest needs, namely to honestly deal with the question of death. Truly things fall apart when we can no longer hear God calling to us in the valley of the shadow of death. For wise men of old, living with the inevitability of mortality was central to wisdom.
   
   
5. HOW DO I MAKE SENSE OF SUFFERING?
   In all our lives suffering will interfere to a greater or lesser extent. There is no satisfactory account to be rendered if that account must invoke only what we can know now. Suffering therefore forces us to address the question of whether we have eternal spiritual dimensions. If we don't, life is an absurd form of the blackest of black humour.
   
   
6. HOW CAN I POSSIBLY BELIEVE IN JUSTICE?
   This old cry is found most profoundly in the psalms, where again and again the poet asks; "Why do the evil prosper?" Again this is a question which cannot be resolved in the here and now. Yet again it forces us to ponder the possibility that there are awesome eternal dimensions to our being. Most of our judges believe that they make the law, which necessarily makes the rest of us serfs; the severity of that serfdom being merely a consequence of the whims of our rulers.
   
   
7. WHAT CAN I KNOW?
   Many students think that only science can provide secure knowledge, until it is pointed out to them that the question; "Is secure knowledge obtained only through science?" presupposes categories, ideas and concepts that science could never have invented. One of the great needs of our society is to become less enamoured of science. Currently too much is given and too much expected from a discipline which deals only with the limited amount of reality which can be touched, seen, heard, smelled or tasted directly or indirectly.
   
   
8. WHAT SHOULD I BELIEVE?
   The fundamental ideas that rule our lives and either do or do not succeed in making sense of our lives, cannot be proved in the way that science conceives of proof. But the question of whether there is or is not a God, what sort of God, whether sin is a real category, whether Jesus really died for our sins, whether the resurrection occurred and whether Jesus will come again are undeniably important questions. The answers to these questions will change our lives if we think at all.
   
   
9. WHAT MUST I DO?
   From the answers to question 8 flow logical answers to this question. If you believe there is neither God nor judgement then any expression of personal power or desire is perfectly legitimate, provided that you can persuade or intimidate your fellow human beings into acceptance. Politics becomes a realm not of ethical discussion but of sophisticated persuasion.

So here in the merest sketch is the journey on which we are about to set out.