God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 3: A Blind Believer Concludes His Discussion About Hell

Introduction:

            What a week! It’s been busy, stressful, and at times scary. Still I wouldn’t trade it in. My dissertation is humming along, and I’m leaving for Tennessee in just a few hours. First though, I have to finish this. This week was so hectic that I wasn’t sure I would meet my self-imposed deadline. You see, I wanted to post each essay in this cycle on Fridays starting with the first Friday in November. It looks like I made it, if only just.

 

            As I wrap up this series of essays on hell, I am reminded not only of what the bible says about it but what people say about it. Mark Twain once wrote, “it’s heaven for atmosphere and hell for company.” A popular rock song from the 1980’s refers to hell as “the promised land.” There’s a pervasive image out there in popular culture that us “narrow-minded Christians” will go to heaven, but they, seemingly all the really likable and interesting people, will be off in hell recounting their exploits and sipping cocktails. This imagery of hell, in one form or another, is everywhere, and it is in need of the same corrective discussion as the thinking that would dismiss hell altogether. It’s also a shame that we Christians have somehow developed this reputation as unloving and unlikable in many circles, but that is a whole other discussion. Imagining hell as a pleasant place and imagining it as a non-existent place are both so beyond the realm of truth that I for my part see little to distinguish between them from the perspective of truth. So as I write, I will be refuting both hell’s non-existence in terms of God’s attributes which I covered in post 1 [http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/11/god-humanity-and-hell-part-1-blind.html] and our sinful nature in post 2 [http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/11/god-humanity-and-hell-part-2-blind.html], but I will also attempt to correct, however insignificant my contribution may be, misconceptions about the actual nature and purpose of the place in hope that we may stop being so cavalier about it. As always, my scriptural quotations will be from the NIV and will be as thorough as I have tried to make them all along.

 

All Roads Lead to Heaven?

In his massive book Heaven, Randy Alcorn writes of a certain Indiana tombstone with this inscription:

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by:

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you will be.

So prepare for death and follow me.

It seems that someone else came along and added this:

To follow you I'm not content,

Until I know which way you went.

            I would love to be able to say, “all will be saved.” The truth is that I can’t say that. I can’t say it because the Lord himself does not say that. I have met many folks who think that hell is just something the Christians invented, maybe something those medieval churchmen came out with to scare supposedly ignorant and illiterate peasants into giving them money. I’ve met folks who dismiss hell as something Paul invented, because Paul is the favored whipping boy for many. Such thinkers will charge Paul and people after him with hell’s invention, while in the next breath they go on to depict Jesus as the great sage, the wise and gentle teacher, the one whose example we should follow instead of those “greedy churchmen.” Lastly, I’ve met Christian universalists who simply do not believe that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross will fail to reconcile anyone’s sin. So, they argue, you will go to heaven in the end one way or the other because with what Jesus did on the cross, you can’t help but end up there. Yes, I have met all of these and more.

            The problem is that Jesus, gentle Jesus, says more about hell than anyone else in the bible. The Jesus Seminar would no doubt step in at this point and try to tell me that all of Jesus’s utterances about hell are inauthentic, thereby taking those words out of his mouth. I don’t buy it. If we take the biblical record as being accurate, and I do, then he talked about hell, and he had a great deal to say. Jesus tells us in very plain language that not only are some people not going to make it into heaven, most won’t get there: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Later in that same chapter Jesus goes on to say this: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you” (Matthew 7:21-23). So not only will most people not make it to heaven, some folks who think they are headed there because of all the great works they have done will be terribly surprised on that final day. There are other passages like these, but the important point is this: heaven is not a one-size fits all place. Not everyone is going there. In fact, most people won’t be going there, and that is one of the hardest truths. “Why wouldn’t he just let me in,” you might be asking? The answer is this: it’s not that Jesus doesn’t let people go through the doorway to heaven. The truth is simply that many won’t let him open the door for them.

If you are imprisoned for a crime, it may be that the governor or the president will pardon you. A pardon wipes away any and all punishment. There is just one catch. You have to accept a pardon for it to be valid. You can legally refuse to be pardoned, though why anyone would refuse a pardon is a whole other question. Jesus is not out to make things hard. But he does make it clear that many will not accept his pardon. The terms of that pardon are that we seek reconciliation and salvation through Christ alone. The pardon is indiscriminately available to you no matter your list of offenses. You need only accept it. How to do that is its own discussion, and I recommend seeking out local Christians or even me if you want to know more. The point I’m driving home right here is this: Jesus’s own words make it crystal clear that, whatever means of making it to heaven he sets up, many will choose to go their own way. That way lies hell. It is very tempting to get sidetracked into such questions as, “what about other religions,” or, “what about children who die,” but that way lies a whole set of other discussions, and I am only presenting the Christian arguments for hell with responsible readers in mind, that is, readers old enough to know right from wrong and to make principled choices. Jesus also said of himself: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6). If he really did say those words i.e. if the bible is an accurate account of what he said, then they either are or they are not true. That’s the funny thing about truth. So-called fuzzy logic systems aside,  it admits exactly two possibilities, true and not true. Since we Christians hold the bible to be an accurate record of Jesus’s words, it follows for us that those words are true. And being true, he excludes all other “ways” as leading to heaven. So if any method of getting to heaven fails to recognize Jesus as the doorway into heaven, it is false, a one-way street, a dead end. Not all roads lead to the same place. Even when it’s said that all roads used to lead to Rome, it must be added that while that was true, you still had to travel in the proper direction to get there. All roads do not lead to heaven.

 

The Ultimate Sentence:

            When not making fun of hell or disavowing its existence altogether, most people who take issue with God and Christianity on the basis of hell have in their minds a picture of some poor trembling soul, begging and pleading, who is cast shrieking into hell by an unforgiving deity. This is an understandable picture of judgment even if it, thankfully, isn’t quite accurate. I used to imagine that going to hell happened in just that way myself. Such a picture of hell overlooks God’s mercy, however, and the price he paid to be able to extend that mercy. By ‘price’ I mean His death once for all on the cross. In any case, that conception of judgment as a sentence handed down from on high may embody holiness or righteousness, but it is hard to find God’s mercy in such a picture.

            So let us consider what the son of God says about those who go to hell. In the twelfth chapter of John, Jesus says this: “If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day” (John 12:47-48). This passage takes some careful teasing to pick it apart accurately. Jesus almost sounds as though he says he doesn’t judge anyone, and yet he says that he does? It can be confusing. The key to understanding this passage lies in the second half of verse 48: “the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day.” When Jesus speaks of ‘my word’ or my words,’ we understand him to mean his teachings. When he speaks of ‘accepting’ those words, He doesn’t just mean that there is an expectation that someone believes them, but that they uphold and practice those teachings as well. So then, our eternal reward or punishment, he says here, isn’t based on how he personally feels towards us. That is already certain. He loves us with an everlasting love. The measuring stick that will be used is the extent to which we accepted, i.e. upheld, his teachings, or else the extent to which we did not do so. Now then, I realize, and Jesus certainly realizes too, that we are imperfect and will, even on our best days, be but imperfect followers of Him who are in need of his grace and mercy. Let us assume that Omniscience knows this and has taken it into account. If you know an examination is coming and you do not prepare for it by study and careful application of the principles and concepts involved, you will not pass, and it doesn’t matter how much the teacher likes you. You would still fail. So, we know that those who fail to gain heaven have failed, not because God is arbitrary and whimsical, but because they failed to accept and follow the teachings of Christ, the standard of measure by which we will all be judged. He says in verse 47 above that his purpose is to save. Not all will be saved. That is abundantly clear. He claims he is the only way to heaven, and if so, it follows that many will not believe him and will elect to find their own ways. Nevertheless, His purpose is to save, and he will discern among us based on who accepted His words and who rejected them. In the end, those who go to hell choose it, because they choose their own paths. They choose paths apart from Christ. Hell is heaven refused, not damnation imposed.

 

Hell as Mere Nothingness:

Why is it that many people I have met believe that hell means an end to all existence? I don’t mean folks who believe there’s nothing at all after death. I have met people who talk about heaven in vague and nebulous ways, but in ways that tell the listener they believe they’ll be conscious and have some sort of existence in heaven. Yet when they speak of hell, they have this notion that hell simply means a cessation of everything. No consciousness, no experience, no nothing. Annihilation. In one way this is a comforting notion. If we think of death as a never-ending sleep, it sounds rather restful. More to the point, if we think of hell as obliteration, a reduction to nothingness, this may comfort some people. You can’t object to being nothing, because you will feel no pain and non-existence won’t bother you once you achieve it. The terrible truth is that the biblical picture of hell is a bit different.

Jesus describes hell in graphic terms. Was he trying to be frightening? I find hell frightening. It’s heartbreaking. As Randy Alcorn once wrote in Heaven, “The reality of Hell should break our hearts and take us to our knees and to the doors of those without Christ.” The story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31) is most revealing. It is not a parable, and Jesus doesn’t start the story with “Hell is like,” or, “Hell is like unto.” He narrates the story in a straightforward, “this is how it really is,” fashion. Let me quote the story here and note a few things about it:

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire. But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.“ He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’’

 

            Keep in mind that Jesus was telling this story before his own death and resurrection, before there was Christianity. So he very obviously believed in a hell and that people went there. In this story, “Moses and the Prophets” is understood by Jesus’s hearers to refer to the scriptures. At that time the bible would have been the Torah or what Christians call the Old Testament. So what the figure of Abraham is saying is that if Lazarus’s brothers won’t heed the words of the bible, sending Lazarus back from the dead won’t do any good either.

            There are several things to note about hell and about the rich man. First, he is conscious and in possession of his powers of reason. He is not a mindless zombie. He is a reasoning being with a will and desires that he wants fulfilled. He is going to keep on wanting, I’m afraid, for the hell of hell, so to speak, is desire that can never be fulfilled. Miserable as that picture is, it remains a far cry from nothingness. Secondly, hell is a physical place. The rich man speaks of Abraham’s sending Lazarus across the chasm between heaven and hell to comfort him. Abraham also mentions the chasm, telling the rich man  that it cannot be crossed in either direction. So then, however other worldly hell is, it is depicted as having a physical dimension.

            To take it a step further, perhaps you also noticed that Lazarus is still called Lazarus, but the rich man isn’t given a name. This suggests to me that whatever we retain of self-awareness and of mind in hell, we lose our essential identities. Jesus didn’t forget the rich man’s name; he left it out to make a point. The significance of that soul had dwindled to such a vanishingly small proportion that even his name was no longer relevant. In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis envisioned it this way, “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity.” Finally, a point so obvious it hardly needs to be stated, the rich man is suffering. Hell is not a party, not a place where people will go and knock back drinks and reminisce about life on earth. Jesus talks about hell being a place of endless torment (Matthew 25:46). Finally, the rich man in our story is alone. This lonely rich man is juxtaposed with Lazarus who is shown as being with Abraham. What do we make of this? In heaven there is company, the best company and forever more. Hell is solitary confinement. Some will say, “at least we’ll be together there.” Maybe so, but the man in hell is forever alone, isolated in suffering. There is no upside to hell. There is no hope and no reprieve. There is no good in hell, no nobility in suffering. Sometimes people express the wish that God would just leave them alone. Hell is, alas, the place where he does that. But there is no good there without the creator of good. As a character in Randy Alcorn’s novel Deadline once understood it, “No God. No good. Forever.”

 

Sentenced to Eternity:

            The final objection to hell that I am choosing to confront is the notion of an eternal punishment. How, the objection runs, can we posit a deity who would leave you to suffer in hell forever and ever, no matter what sins you may have committed in your brief lifetime? From a human standpoint, it is a good question. The underlying accusation against God seems to be that if we wouldn’t countenance such a thing, surely God, if he has any morals at all, wouldn’t do such a thing either and if he would, well, he must not be God.

            This is perhaps the hardest question about hell I have confronted. The first thing to remember is that we cannot stack our sense of morality and justice up against God’s and expect ours to look better. It just doesn’t work that way. If he indeed is absolutely holy and absolutely just, and we are not, presumably he has some inside information about morality and justice that we don’t happen to have. Yet, we reason because God reasons, and we have a rudimentary notion of justice because God is just. So I think we may come a bit nearer to the answer than to stop at, “God knows best. Leave it alone.” Though often times that is the answer we’re stuck with.

            If we think of hell as the continuation of the human story, as heaven continues our story in God’s presence, then the injustice of hell becomes an unsolvable problem. I don’t think that it is any sort of continuation, however. Hell is spoken of as a place of finality. We often speak of heaven and hell as though we might one day sit in heaven and say, “people are suffering in hell right now.” But I am not convinced that the sufferings of hell run in parallel to the joys of heaven. Hell is the final and tragic end of a story, not a bad sequel to that story. Finally, hell endures forever because in it, our sin endures forever. If you never cure the cancer, the cancer never goes away. If our sin is never forgiven, because we don’t accept the forgiveness i.e. the pardon I mentioned earlier, than our sin continues to separate us from God in hell. The difference is that in hell there is no more opportunity to receive the pardon. This life is the life of second chances, the era of choice. Heaven and hell represent the era of consequence that stems from the choices we made here. I’ll close this discussion with a final question that stems from this notion of an unjust eternal punishment. Why are there no second chances? The truth is that there are. Every day you live on earth is yet another day filled with endless opportunity to seek the truth, to knock on the door as it were. Death stops the game clock. There are no more shots allowed after the final buzzer. Lastly, to take a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, often times a teacher knows it is no good letting someone retake an exam for the third or fourth or fifth time even if the student or their parents think otherwise. If second chances after death would do us good, I believe they would be given. But finality has to come sometime, and it is not too great a stretch to suppose that the omniscient God knows when that should be. We must all face death and receive our reward, good or bad, for what we have done and how we have lived in life, “for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). A related passage is found in Hebrews 9:27 which tells us that people are destined to die once (no second chances) and to face their judgment. Be ready for that day, because its coming is inevitable.

 

Conclusion:

            I have not been trying to prove the doctrine of hell as tolerable or enjoyable. It is neither. It is terrible, and if I myself could remove it from Christian doctrine, I would probably do so. Then again, I am not holy and not just in the ways that God is holy and just. So, it’s probably a good thing I don’t make cosmic decisions. To those who would disavow hell because it seems unpleasant, I would remind them that truth, contrary to what relativists like to believe, is as it is, and was always as it was, regardless of how we feel about it. You can argue with it, reject it, put your own spin on it, or you can accept it, but you cannot change it. It is what it is and will be what it will be long after you and I are gone.

            While hell remains a terrible and frightening consequence, I think I have demonstrated that on the Christian view it is moral and has the support of reason. When we properly understand God’s holiness and his justice in combination with his love and mercy, what is startling is not that some go to hell. Where else would sinners go? Rather, it becomes amazing that anyone gets to heaven. So I would encourage you to seek out a bible and read what it says about how to take care of your sin problem. That book contains the cure, and seek out a local church that teaches the bible as truth. I was originally going to close this post with the plan of salvation as it is presented in the bible, but that discussion deserves its own separate forum. I don’t expect to tackle it any time soon. My blog is not a religious blog, and I have come to the end of what I set out to do, explain why Christians believe in hell. That much, at least, I have done. Strictly speaking, I haven’t been attempting to persuade anyone of anything. You are as free to argue with what I have said as with any other information presented to you, but my job here has been to answer, as completely as I was able, the question of why there has to be a hell in a universe created and sustained by a loving and merciful God. For further discussion on the issue of hell, I recommend the eighth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. In addition, I recommend chapter 3 of Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven as well as chapter 29 of his book If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil, which discusses the subject as well. Those references should get you started, and from there I hope you go on to try and understand heaven, the home of humanity. Next time I will return to much lighter fare.

 

 

God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 2: A Blind Believer answers Objections to Christianity's Doctrine About Hell

Introduction:

I have to be honest. This essay was the hardest to write. It took me all of the week between the last post and this one to get this at all right. So let me be clear when I say I didn’t find it easy by any means. The first essay is far less controversial, because in it I say things that most people who believe in at least some version of God, however inaccurate or one-dimensional that perception of God really is, will usually agree with. We want to believe that God, assuming we believe there is one, is a God of love because as I said last time. Everyone loves love. We want to believe in a merciful God because we like to think that, whatever our foibles, such a god will let us off, that being mercy’s function in our thinking. Lastly, no one likes to disagree with the idea of God as a just God. We like to think of people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin getting “what’s coming to them” or “getting their just desserts.”

The third essay, the one that covers Hell itself, is more controversial than the first because it states some are actually going there. This makes people uneasy. Here again though, many would sit still for that essay because however much we think we’re not going there, we’re perfectly ready to consign child molesters and ax murderers and the aforementioned world leaders to hell. So we often times agree to some vague idea that there is a hell for those sorts of people who justly deserve it.

What makes this essay so hard is my knowing how many will react to it. It is my job, before I can give anyone any good news, to first convince you that all the bad news is actually true. I have to convince you that no one on earth is actually good or actually deserves mercy. That includes you. It also very much includes me. So know this: I am not excluding myself from anything I say here. Just as in the last essay, I would remind the reader that I am only talking about hell as being an objection to Christianity in today’s America. I am not dealing with any other objections here. Lastly, for everything I say, I will quote plenty of scripture (again from the New International Version or NIV) so as to put everything into one place for the Christian and the non-Christian alike.

Natural Kindness:

For about two hundred years now, we’ve valued kindness above all other virtues. This is at least partly understandable. Kindness is magnificent. It has no perceptible downside. Over seventy years ago, C. S. Lewis also noticed this preferential treatment of kindness, and in The Problem of Pain he suggests that we actually mix up the ideas of love and kindness. We think that love and kindness are the same thing, so as long as a person can say that “his heart’s in the right place,” it is well enough and we should leave the situation alone.

There are two problems with our notion of love equaling kindness as this idea relates to God. The first is that when it comes to God, we drop the aspect of love that involves discipline or correction. If you are a parent, do you discipline your child or do you allow them to do as they like. If you’re a parent who loves your child and wants them to get as far in life as they can, you discipline. You teach them right from wrong, you praise them for doing what is good and honorable and you punish them for doing what is wrong and hateful. In saying this, I don’t even mean particularly Christian parents. I think it likely that most parents everywhere at most times throughout history would agree readily enough that letting children do whatever they please just so long as the children are happy and the parents are thought of as loving and kind makes for a terrible outcome. In today’s America we would call such parents enablers, and we would say that in displaying such kindness, they are neglecting their parental duties. So my question becomes this: if we have this more complex view of parental love, one involving discipline and correction, why then do we have such a simplistic view of God’s love, such that we think—when we give it any thought at all—that God’s love should (or at least that it ought to) boil down essentially to kindness? Indeed, the more we actually care about our children, the more unwilling we are to let discipline go for the sake of just being agreeable or nice or kind. I don’t mean to imply that all loving parents are harsh disciplinarians. Indeed, that would be the other extreme. Discipline without love and grace is cruel, but to say that love consists only of kindness is simply untrue. If it is true of human parental love that it requires discipline and correction to enforce right behavior, why wouldn’t it be equally true of God’s love and for much the same reasons?

The second major problem with our view of kindness involves something we forget about its nature. Namely, kindness is learned. Again using children as an example, what happens if a parent never steps in to correct a child’s behavior? We have to teach children to share or not to hit, and we have to make them understand that not everything around them is “mine” all the time. If you think I’m being overly harsh, think about what happened the last time you saw a toddler who was never taught these limits on behavior, the kind that screams and throws stuff around the isles at Wallmart because mommy and daddy won’t get that toy or trinket. Pretty bad, isn’t it? This isn’t to say that children are at fault when they don’t learn these things; the parents are the ones we single out and rightly so. But the fact remains: children have to be taught civilized behavior. Otherwise, their normal unchecked impulses, which are the same natural inclinations all of us have in full measure, would tend towards selfishness and savage behavior. Ours would too, the only difference being a greater cognitive capacity. My question is, if all of that is true, and if it is as true of adults as it is of children, what does that say about our true natures versus the behaviors that we learn? Are we inherently good? Is goodness inborn? If it is true that good behavior and kindness are learned skills, then the evidence suggests that we are not inherently good and that goodness is not just naturally found within us.

Sin:

‘Sin’ is another of those church words like ‘holy’ or ‘righteous.’ Its meaning is one that people usually misunderstand. When I talk to people about sin, they usually like to list actions.

“Well,” people tell me all the time, “I know I’m no sinner. I don’t steal or cheat on my wife or refuse to pay my taxes, and I’ve never killed anybody. So where do you get off calling me a sinner?”

This perception of sin is right up to a certain point. The person is right when they associate all those actions with sin or as being sinful. Having said that, if you are doing those things and you feel you shouldn’t, by all means stop doing them. Still, just as the note on a sheet of music is not, in and of itself, that music, neither too are all those things the whole of what we mean when we say sin. TO be sure, they are sins in every way, but if sin was limited to just a list of things I should and shouldn’t do, imagine the consequences. We would be perfectly free to compare ourselves to each other and to say things like, “Well I’m certainly no better or worse than A, and I’m a whole lot better than B over there.” As things stand, I say don’t be so sure. Why did you choose to compare yourself to A, and are you so sure you’re so much better than B?

This act of comparison is, in fact, often what we slip into when we talk about sin, because it is the definition of sin that has come down to us in our culture. To the average person in America today, sin equals bad things, and if my list is shorter than most people’s lists of bad things, I must be doing alright and who is Brad Blair to say different? The trouble is, Brad Blair didn’t invent it.

On one level, part of me wouldn’t mind if the universe was run along those lines and if sin could be defined like that. However, it is clear to me that I don’t live in such a universe and that the bible has something very different to say about sin, what it is and who does it. And if I at all want to find my way to God, I had better wrestle with what He Himself says about sin. So let’s examine what the bible says, shall we?

Let’s start with something easy. We can agree with Isaiah when he says of some people: “Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. They pursue evil schemes; acts of violence mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths” (Isaiah 59:6-8). There are many passages like these describing evildoers throughout the old and new testaments, so let’s take that one as representative. There are people out there who are reprehensible by almost any definition. No question that such people are sinners. Are they the only ones that the bible talks about when it speaks of sins and sinners?

If those people in Isaiah are the only ones the bible means, and if our definitions of ‘sin’ and ‘sinner’ today are correspondingly true, then what should we make of Paul’s comments in his letter to the church in Rome: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)? Earlier in that same chapter of Romans, Paul quotes the writer of Ecclesiastes. Solomon writes: “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The prophet Isaiah adds this in a later century: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6).

There are many more passages like these as well. What are we to make of them? The bible makes it abundantly clear that on our own, every one of us is trapped in sin. We will inevitably do what is wrong, because sin is not just what we do, it’s natural. It’s who we are. Sin is both our immoral actions and the environment into which we were born. That’s what Christians mean when they talk about children being born into sin. They don’t mean that babies are evil and sinning. What they do mean is that the world into which we are born is itself twisted out of shape by sin. That is not to say that God made us to be sinners or that he made the world to be an environment of sin. Not by any means. But that raises a whole other discussion that we haven’t got time for in this more focused post. We don’t have time, for example, to go into the fall of Man and the entrée of sin into the world. Though I must add that the bible is quite clear on these points too. The key thing to remember right now is this: the Christian world view sees the world as one in which sin separates us from God, not only because of things we do once we’re able to choose right from wrong, but also because of our innate natures and the world into which we are born and in which we live.

To take it a step further, our economy of sin is also wholly different from God’s economy of sin. Our laws classify transgression. We have misdemeanors, felonies and first, second and third degrees of this and that. We have to, because as humans, we must differentiate between degrees of guilt. None of us is holy and pure in deed and truth, so we distinguish and we assign relative degrees of guilt. Now then, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that God, being completely holy and just as we said in the last post, might see things differently? Isn’t it even likely that to a God who is utterly without sin, all sin is equally bad? And if he is the ultimate dispenser of both mercy and justice, wouldn’t it be wise to conform to his standards? Once we have even started trying to conform to those standards (and we will never come even close to true conformity here on Earth), we have to acknowledge that however good and upright and moral we think we are, we don’t even come close to being as upright and moral as God.

Consider a limited analogy. If I’m taking a German class and writing an essay for it, I can compare my essay with all the others in the class. Maybe mine has plenty of mistakes, but surely not as many as John’s or Jill’s, right? I could end up feeling pretty good about it on these terms. So maybe the teacher should give me an A+ on it and have done with it, given all my hard work. Then supposing the teacher gives me a B, what do I do now? I have a couple of options. I can curse the teacher for being such a hard taskmaster and being so unfair, for failing to take my frailties into account. And who is he to give me a B? German is easy for him! He needs to cut me some slack! This is the option many of us take with God. The other option, the harder one by far, is to admit that our essay wasn’t as good as we had supposed and to take the teacher’s corrective measures into account. In the case of a German teacher, that means improving the writing. In God’s case, it means acknowledging who and what we really are and going on from there. Only when we have acknowledged this fact, that we are bad, that we will always be bad if left to ourselves, and that there’s nothing we can do to remake ourselves as good, can the cure be introduced. More on the cure in the final post.

What he Deserves:

Just after midnight at the Washington State Penitentiary, a man approaches the gallows. He has confessed to multiple child molestations and murders. He is, so far as the viewer can tell, a perfect example of Isaiah 59 above. He is a violent killer, a defiler of children who would do it again if let go as he admits. His hanging will be the first in U.S. history since 1965, and if anyone deserves death, we naturally think, it is this man. We hope and pray there won’t be any last minute stays of execution, no phone call from the governor, no clemency. When he drops through the trap, we feel that justice has been served and that the man has gotten “what he deserves.” And if there is a hell, we’re quite sure that he’s there enduring every possible torment, and glad we are of it.

The man I’m talking about is Westley Allan Dodd, executed on January 5, 1993. If I said no more on the subject, we could sit back and nod, and even those of us least willing to admit to a hell’s existence might allow that if there was one, he’s surely in it. The trouble with that picture is this: it seems that at some point during his final imprisonment, Westley Allan Dodd became a Christian. I know there are many who would say at this point that he naturally claimed to have become a Christian in hopes of having his sentence commuted or something to that effect. I will only say that I am in no position to say anything about the authenticity of his (or anyone else’s) conversion with any degree of certainty. That is between him and God. If he became a Christian and no one on Earth had believed it, he would still be in heaven. If everyone believed him a Christian and he actually was not, then he is not in heaven. So for our purposes, let’s take him at face value. His final words from the gallows were: “I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way sex offenders could be stopped. I said ‘no.’ I was wrong. I was wrong when I said there was no hope, no peace. There is hope. There is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord, and you will find peace.”

Our contradictory attitude about hell lies in the fact that we want to both deny its existence at some times and to hope it’s there for certain especially bad people at other times. If we allow for a God, we think he certainly ought not to send us there, but that he ought to send Westley Dodd there. Lastly, again if we allow the possibility of a God, we can’t possibly understand a God who allows us to wind up in Hell, but who, most incomprehensibly of all, allows Westley Allan Dodd into heaven. The problem with the attitude (and hence with us) rests on our failure to understand sin. In human terms, none of us is as guilty as Dodd and none of us deserves what we do. We see the distance between ourselves and Dodd as being a distance of miles, of light years even. God, who sees things as they are, sees us as much in our own sin as Dodd was in his, and he reckons the real distance as being measured in millimeters. One of my favorite authors once wrote of this case and said that we ought to be careful when wishing upon someone exactly what they deserve, because we should then be ready, in our turn, to accept just what we deserve. There’s a word for that. Hell.

Conclusion: “So Negative!”

It isn’t just because of hell that Christianity is accused of being so negative. It’s because of the outlook on the world that it espouses. It’s popular these days to think of people as being mainly good. That people can do right and behave admirably, Christianity would not deny. Where Christianity is attacked is this idea of the basic goodness of all people. Again, we are not talking about politeness or good cheer or even kindly dispositions here. We mean the human being in his entirety, as he is or as he would be if only he could get away with it. If we were half so good as we like to think ourselves to be, we would have far fewer laws. Of that I’m quite sure. As things stand, we are desperately ill, and we either do not know it, or we are in the deepest denial about it. In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis, a man trained in the classic writings of antiquity, described the problem like this. He said the men and women of old new themselves to be worthy of the divine punishment. They knew themselves to be bad, and the good news of the gospel came and was often received as though it were a cure for a desperate illness, and that, of course, was just what it was. Today, Christianity must first convince people that they are ill with sin, itself very bad news, before it can win a hearing for the cure.

            There is a cure though, and that cure is God’s plan of salvation. I’m not going to lay it out step by step in this or the last post, because it deserves its own separate discussion. But if you are curious, seek out a bible study or a local church. My very specific focus has been to discuss hell as an objection to the Christian faith and that alone. Heaven warrants its own separate discourse.

 

God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 1: A Blind Believer Answers Objections to Christianity's Doctrine About Hell

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”

C.S. Lewis

 

Introduction:

            I was going to wait until after the elections to post this, but I just don’t see a good reason to. Happily, this post is totally apolitical. So, whoever you voted for or will vote for, in this blog, on we go! I said recently that it seems to me that Hell has to be the most popular objection to Christianity. I hear it over and over again. On many occasions I’ve found myself talking to someone about Christianity and someone says something like this, “I just can’t believe God (if there is such a being) would send anyone to never ending torment, no matter what they did in their lifetimes,” or, “I believe in a God of love. So Hell can’t possibly be real,” or, “If I wouldn’t send anyone to Hell, well, God surely wouldn’t.” There are countless ways of saying this, and what all these people mean is that Hell seems terrible, unfair, unjust, barbaric and quite irrational if God is supposedly this wise and loving God.

            Yet, I am a Christian who believes what the bible says about Heaven and Hell. So how can I believe in Hell or that anyone goes there and still claim that I’m a civilized, decent human being and so on and so forth? The reasoning seems to be that no civilized person would really believe in Hell. As a result, I decided to take on the subject of Hell here in this blog. This is going to be a three-part series on the topic. Our modern beliefs about Hell are based on three misconceptions or if you like, three sets of misconceptions. These misunderstandings combine together to raise these questions again and again. They are:  first, a false understanding of who God is, second, a false understanding of who we are, and third, a misunderstanding of what Hell is. So, each of these three blog posts will take on one of those misunderstandings. So if I don’t answer your questions in this essay, give me the benefit of waiting out the next two. Better yet, post your questions and I’ll make sure to address them! This first essay is about God and who he is. It discusses some of his attributes and tries to paint a more detailed picture of him, laying the groundwork so to speak before going on to the other pressing issues about humans and Hell. I don’t mean to imply that anyone will be overjoyed at the notion of Hell by the time I’m done. People are right to think that it is absolutely terrible. But I think, in the end, it can be shown to be both moral and rational. That is, we can understand Hell much better if we try to understand who God is, who we are and what Hell really is and what it is not.

            It might be reasonable to ask why I have any right to say anything about Hell or anything else. I’m not a bible scholar or a pastor. I am, however, a Christian who is asked these questions over and over again. This set of postings is my attempt, however inadequate, to answer those questions. I know that venerable writers have already spilled a good bit of ink about the subject of Hell, and I don’t want to take away from what people like C.S. Lewis, Randy Alcorn and John Piper have written. The questions are still being asked, though, and they still need to be answered.

            One last thing, keep in mind that this set of blog posts is meant to answer only one objection to Christianity. I’m not dealing with other objections:  Christian claims of exclusivity, the historical basis of the bible, the bible and science, none of those. It’s not that I can’t deal with them, but for now Hell is what I am discussing. It may be that I’ll deal with those questions later on, but my focus is narrower at the moment. Finally, these posts are meant for two groups of people. The first are my non-Christian friends out there. I love each and every one of you. It’s not because I don’t love you that I’m going to say all this, but because  I do. So I ask only that you give me the benefit of the doubt when reading what is to come. The second group is that of my Christian friends. Many churches are silent about Hell or teach things about it that simply aren’t true, and I’d ask you to grant me the same benefit of the doubt as you read and your thinking is perhaps corrected in the light of scripture throughout the coming pages. I mention a lot of bible verses, and when I do, I’ll actually quote them in full. This is more for the benefit of those who don’t have a bible. I want, so far as possible, to put everything right here in one place. So, let’s begin.

 

A God of Love:

            I chose to tackle the complex discussion of God’s nature by looking at a few of his attributes. Love comes first because everybody loves love, and love is the quality we like most to ascribe to God. The oft-quoted phrase, “God is love,” is found in 1 John 4:8:  “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In one important way, those who take away the first part of the verse and just say that, “God is love,” are still absolutely right. God loves us beyond words. The word ‘love’ in its various forms and contexts shows up 442 times in the King James Bible and 686 times in the New International Version that I’ll be quoting from. It’s obviously important, and to be fair, I know many professing Christians who forget from time to time how much God loves and how strong and powerful that love truly is.

            Here are some examples. In Jeremiah 31:2, God is speaking and he says in part:  “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” The Psalms contain some of the deepest and most poetic expressions of God’s love. Consider these words of God:  “I will maintain my love to him forever, and my covenant with him will never fail” (Psalm 89:28). Or consider this, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good and his love endures forever” (Psalm 118:29(. The phrase, “his love endures forever,” appears in each of the 26 verses of the 136^th Psalm. Obviously, the writer of that psalm was making a powerful point.

            The New Testament overflows with references (like the one above from the letter of 1 John) to God as a loving God and to love as something we are to do. The most famous verse that comes to mind is this one: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). I could go on and quote those verses that tell us to love God and how great a virtue love is, but that would miss the point. The point right now is God’s love, not our love. John is telling us, in essence, that we have no idea how truly loved we are.

Imagine being in a courtroom when someone you loved who has been convicted for a terrible crime is standing before the bench and about to hear his sentence. It is a death sentence. He has no appeals to make, but you do. Supposing, in this legal system we’re talking about, that you yourself had a means to take away your friend’s or loved one’s sentence. If you would sacrifice your child to the court and let your child die in your friend’s place, your friend would be let go. Honestly, how many of us would do that? The answer? No one would. After all, we might be willing to stand up and give our lives for a friend, but sacrifice our child’s life? No way. John is telling us that, in effect, that is just the court system we live under, that was the sentence handed down, and that was exactly what God had to do to lift our sentence. If you can at all imagine this kind of trial and that kind of court, you might just begin to get a glimmering, the faintest glimpse, of how much God really does love you. A God of love? If only you knew how much love.

 

A Holy God:

The word ‘holy’ is one of those church words. A church is about the only place you’ll hear it. People spout phrases like, ‘God is holy,’ as though it’s obvious what that word means. It’s not obvious, though. People overlook this most important aspect of God because they don’t understand this word. We just hear it on Sunday mornings or we use it in profanity. So what does it mean to say that someone or something is holy?

Our English  word ‘holy’ comes down to us from the Germanic languages including Old English ‘halig’. It’s one of the oldest words in the English language, and it’s meaning has stayed the same over the centuries. The problem with trying to define it is that most dictionaries like to use other religious words to describe it. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example,  is most unhelpful because it uses ‘sacred’ or ‘consecrated,’ and those two words don’t get us much further, themselves being religious terms that have little meaning in common speech. The problem is that ‘holy’ cannot be separated from its religious meaning. After staring at the Oxford English Dictionary for a long time, I settled on the Free Online Dictionary [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/holy], which gives seven definitions. Among them are:

(1). Belonging to, derived from, or associated with a divine power;

(2). Regarded with or worthy of worship or veneration;

(6). Regarded as deserving special respect or reverence.

Alright. So we know that for something or someone to be holy, it or he has to be quite different from everyone or everything else. If God is holy, he must be very different from us at many points. He is so different and so much better than we (because goodness is also strongly implied in the word) that he deserves our worship. If we think of the purest good, we may come close to grasping what it means to say that something or someone is holy. Something very apart i.e. different, and most purely good. The best of the best. Let’s proceed with that explanation in mind to answer a question. Given these definitions and how we’ve explained them, are you holy? If not, why not? Is God holy? To answer the question, let us now look at how this word is used about things, about people and about God in the bible.

The first time the word ‘holy’ is used in the bible is found in Genesis 2:4: “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” It was a day set apart, a different and exceptionally good and blessed day, a holy day. In Exodus 3:5, we find this: “’’’ Take off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Different ground, not common ground, completely unlike any other plot of ground, and why? Because God was inhabiting it.

Where the bible speaks of holy people, we find verses like this one: “You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Similarly we find this: “I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45). What did it mean, “Be holy?” What do you think of when you think of a priest. Someone who lives differently, acts differently, talks differently and thinks differently. Someone focused on God. We might say that he lives a godly life or at the very least, that he ought to. So then, God was telling the Israelites that they were not to live like those around them. They were to eat, drink, talk, think, behave and live in ways that were completely different from the cultures that surrounded them. Here again we have this notion of holy as being something very different.

One point before I go on to talk about God’s holiness. Don’t confuse this holiness of the people with God’s holiness. This command to the people to be holy didn’t mean that God expected them to be sinless and perfect or that others should bow down and worship them. Rather, he expected them to be different, as different as they could be, and the laws he gave them were the standards they were to use when figuring out how to be that different, that holy, people.

So then, what does God mean right there in that same verse when he says, “I am holy?” He says, “I am holy,” five times by the way. The difference, I think, between God and the people was that they needed guideposts to show them how to be holy, and they weren’t very good at being so. God needs no guidepost. He is one. He doesn’t fail at it. He is absolutely holy all of the time, because he cannot be anything else. If he tried to be less than perfectly holy, he’d no longer be who and what he is, God. Put another way, holiness is something we try for. It is something that God simply is. A basic analogy would be something like this: think of taking music lessons from one of those people gifted with naturally perfect pitch. If you’re anything like me, you don’t have this. You’re lucky if you stay in the right key, and if you sing a whole song without missing a note, you’ve accomplished something great! A person with natural perfect pitch, by contrast, doesn’t have to learn where the notes are. They naturally produce them completely accurately every time. They don’t have to try. Their ability to do this is unfailing an innate, whereas in people like me it has to be trained and we’ll fail all the time. God is holy. We can never be that sort of holy, but we can try.

 

A Just God:

When I took my first college linguistics course, we were assigned a project, writing up a history of a single word. I, poor unknowing soul that I was, chose to write up the history of the word ‘just.’ I still regret it. It has so many meanings and its origins are murky at best. So I’ll just stick to defining it in terms of this discussion, shall I? My trusty free online dictionary yields a myriad number of definitions including ones like these:

(1). Honorable and fair in one’s dealings;

(3). Properly due or merited;

(4). Valid within the law;

(6). Based on fact or sound reason.

So then, if being just means being all of these adjectives in the four definitions above, then failing to be just or being unjust must mean that there are people who are unfair or dishonorable. There must be acts that are invalid, unmerited, and undue. Finally, where there is fact and reason, there exists the possibility of lies and unreason. This isn’t something on which you have to work very hard to convince most people. We readily admit there is injustice in the world. The mistake, and it is one I will address at length in the next post, comes when we start thinking of ourselves as really just. Let’s say for now that if God is perfectly just, and we’re not God, we can at least admit to being imperfect in our justice. Looking at our legal system this admission becomes much easier to make, doesn’t it?

Yet, there’s something deep within us that loves and longs for justice. Why do we love Westerns? Is it because the bad guys win and John Wane gets killed all the time? Of course not. Haven’t you ever noticed that Captain Picard always outthinks the Romulans? We star trek fans loved the Dominion War because in the end, after many setbacks and not a few heartbreaking losses, what happened? The evil, unjust Dominion was crushed. We love seeing good triumph in the end. We’re not the only ones, because God loves it when good wins too. And since he is God, holy and loving, he always wins in the end.

The bible verses in both testaments that expound on  God’s being a just and righteous God are too many for me to number. Entire books of the bible, Job and Habakkuk, deal with the subject of God’s justice. The Book of Revelation tells the story of the final victory of justice and good over injustice and evil. The whole bible is the story of good versus evil from the beginning until the end of time, and evil will finally lose.

Consider a few verses like these: “They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their inheritance. Therefore, the Lord says: “I am planning disaster against this people, from which you cannot save yourselves. You will no longer walk proudly, for it will be a time of calamity” (Micah 2:2-3). In that passage we see both that there are unjust and evil people around, and that God will bring justice. God himself is just, the source of all justice: “My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations. The islands will look to me and wait in hope for my arm” (Isaiah 51:5). God also commands us to do what is just and right in his sight: “’’’’ Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place” (Jeremiah 22:3).

The New Testament continues the theme of God as a lover of what is just and a hater of what is unjust: ““Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Think about this picture of the triumph of justice: “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The last mention of the word ‘justice’ in the bible is found here: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war” (Revelation 19:11).

So, God is just and the source of pure justice. We know that whatever wrongs or injuries we have endured, he will settle the accounts in the end. We can count on it. Good and justice will win, because God is holy and the source of goodness and justice both. A comfort, isn’t it? We’ll be coming back to this theme soon.

 

A Merciful God:

This is the last of God’s attributes I will consider, his mercy. Mercy makes for a good endpoint for this post as well as a Segway into the start of the next post. The Free Online Dictionary defines ‘mercy’ as being: “compassionate treatment, especially of those under one’s power;” and also as, “a disposition to be kind and forgiving.” Mercy is one of those things we love to ask for and to receive. It’s a bit harder for us to be merciful, though. There always seems to be some extenuating circumstance that lets us off being nice to the guy who wronged us, but if someone whose toes we stepped on lets us off, then we think him quite a splendid fellow. That’s both an honest assessment and hard to own up to.

Where God is involved, mercy is the other major basis apart from love by which people today deny the possibility of Hell. “If God is so merciful,” the argument runs, “then surely he will realize that I could never have measured up to him and he’ll let me off any punishment.” The conclusion seems to follow that either God is not merciful or that because he is merciful, Hell cannot reasonably be said to exist.

So then, is God truly merciful? This is the question we must try and answer. Evidently, King David believed he is: “David said to Gad, “I am in deep distress. Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into human hands” (2 Samuel 24:14). It seems David didn’t think much of the mercy of human beings. Consider this picture of mercy: “Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon” (Isaiah 55:7). Mercy is a virtue God cherishes in his people: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).

In the New Testament, Jesus quotes this last passage from Hosea, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” in Matthew 9:13 and again in Matthew 12:7. He also says: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown  mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Finally, the apostle James writes this in his letter: “because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).

Evidently, God is not only capable of mercy, he requires that we extend it too. So now we run into what seems to be a paradox. As C.S. Lewis once put it: “So much mercy, yet still there is Hell.” How can that possibly be?

 

Conclusion:

I have not yet painted the full picture, so you may not be any closer to understanding the reasons why there is a Hell. All I have done is to flesh out our portrait of God if only by a little. He is love and mercy. He is more loving and more merciful than we could ever be even in our noblest moments. Yet he is also holy and just, and hopefully now you have some idea of what those words mean in relation to God. Who can be completely just, yet completely merciful? Completely loving, yet completely holy? No human being, to be sure. Often times we are merciful, and we let some just penalty go, or we come down hard and emphasize justice, and mercy and love seem to be lacking in our judgment. God doesn’t have this problem, this moral balancing act to contend with as it were. Only God can ever be all of these things in equal and full measure. So then if that is how God is, perfect and holy, unmatched in justice and mercy, what does that make us? To carry our discussion forward, my next essay will attempt to grapple with human nature, a sticky subject if there ever was one.

 

 

My Vote's Important?

            Hi Everyone. I’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks. Have I ever. Since I posted last time, six job applications have gone out. In my September 15 post I described how this job search works, and it is just as difficult as it appeared then. Though I am thankful to God to be able to say that a number of positions have popped up and if I was offered all or even a couple of them, I’d really have to think and pray about which one to accept. Now it’s time to finish up the dissertation’s data write-up and move on.

 

            As I write, Election Day is one week away. In some districts such as my own here in Champaign County Illinois, you can take advantage of early voting. I am registered here and I’ve already voted. The voting terminal had the same screen-reading software on it that my computer uses, and the buttons were labeled in braille. I found the electoral commission guys friendly and helpful, and they even let me in a bit early so they could orient me to the machine and leave me to it.

Yet, as I contemplate the vote I cast, I ask myself how much it really mattered. How much does my presidential vote truly matter? It matters, I conclude, more than the cynics think it does, but a bit less than we were told in high school civics class. The reason is the electoral college. Frankly, and here we come to the heart of the matter, the electoral college is outdated and unnecessary. It may, in fact, be harmful as regards the nation choosing its president. I’m going to briefly overview how it works, just how our president is elected, and propose getting rid of the thing. As a side note, you won’t be able to gather from reading this who I voted for. I don’t mind telling you if you ask at some point, but that’s not my focus here today.

 

How The President Is Elected:

            If you are already well-informed about the finer points of this process, you can skip this section or let me know if I have made a mistake in laying out the procedure. Though since this is a blog post and not a course in constitutional or election law, I’m going to skip some of the more minute details. As a side note consider this. What topic has been the subject of the greatest numbers of proposals for constitutional reform? If you said ‘the electoral college,’ you’d be right. Over 700 constitutional amendments have been proposed over the past two centuries that have aimed to reform this system; that means there have been more proposed amendments on this subject than any other.

 

After the ballot scandal in the election of 2000 I heard of this bumper sticker, “Welcome to Florida! Where your vote counts, and counts, and counts …” Judging by the uproar over ‘hanging chads’ and miscounts, you’d think the people had something to do with the election. They do, but only just.

            The electoral college was established by the framers of the Constitution as a compromise between a popular vote (which would have been a difficult thing to efficiently coordinate in the late 18^th century) and having the president elected by state legislatures (which would have eliminated a people’s vote altogether). So, when you cast your vote, your vote is counted up and used to decide which set of state electors will cast votes for your state. The electors are the ones who actually decide the presidency. Your state’s number of electors is based on its population. My home state of Tennessee has 11 electors. Illinois where I live now has 20. No state has fewer than three including Washington D.C.  Texas and California have the largest numbers of state electors with 38 and 55 electors respectively. So, to become the president, Romney and Obama don’t need to win fifty or sixty million votes, certainly not yours or mine strictly speaking. Rather, one of them has to win 270 electors out of 538, a majority by a single vote, and it absolutely doesn’t matter which 270 the  winner gets as long as he does get them. For all practical purposes, only 538 votes really count in this country.

            Here’s a timeline of just what happens after Election Day. These dates and procedures are taken from the site of the Federal Archives, which has extensive material on the electoral process:  http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/key-dates.html. After Election Day November 6, your state’s governor will prepare a ‘Certificate of Ascertainment,’ a document that basically lists who the electors were for your state and which president on the state’s ballot won its vote. These certificates are all sent to Washington D.C. This year, states have until December 11 to finalize their decisions, do recounts if need be and so on. On December 17, each state’s set of electors will meet (probably in your state capitol) and they will actually vote. On January 6, Congress will sit in session to count up the received Electors’ votes, and the President of the Senate will declare the president and vice president of the United States. That’s how it works in a trouble-free election. You elect the electors. The electors choose the president according to your votes. … Question, am I the only one who sees a problem with this setup?

 

Throwing The Game:

            You’ll notice in these last paragraphs that I said not a word about what would happen if electors didn’t vote according to how they were supposed to, that is,  according to what the people in your state decided. That is because electors are held to an honors system when it comes to voting as they’re supposed to. They don’t go to jail or pay hefty fines or anything else if they actually get to your state capitol on December 17 and say, “you know what? Screw X. I’m voting for Y, popular vote be damned.” Aside from being sentured, what amounts to your boss saying, “tisk tisk,” nothing will happen to an elector who chooses not to vote as he or she is authorized. It doesn’t happen often, but it can. If 10 out of your 20 electors through their votes away, that can change the whole election and dishonestly represent what the people of your state wanted. As you might expect, tracking down occasions when particular electors broke with the state’s vote and did something else is not easy. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to publish, but it is possible and even legal in many places, though it’s neither ethical nor honest as I said before. The one instance I found was that of Barbara Lett-Simmons, an elector (or is that an electresse?) for Washington D.C. who cast a blank ballot in the 2000 election. Essentially, she didn’t vote. Her reasons aren’t particularly important for our purposes, but it is a real example from history.

 

The People’s Vote:

            In an election that runs normally, the electoral college ought to reflect the people’s vote. It doesn’t always do that, however. It’s perfectly possible for a president to get elected and not have received the majority vote. The people’s vote or popular vote has no legal bearing on the outcome. Like I said, only those 538 votes truly matter. There have been several elections where the popular vote didn’t reflect what happened in the electoral college. The most recent was the election of 2000, where Gore got half a million more votes than Bush did. So, if your vote really mattered, Al Gore would have been president. As a side note, the other elections when this happened were those of 1824, 1876 and 1888. There are Wikipedia articles on all of these.

 

Conclusion:

            This isn’t a political science class, and I’m not interested in talking about how the electoral system could be misused if we went to popular voting. Corruption is part of human nature, and any system is subject to rigging or abuse. The current system is no exception, and if you don’t believe me, research the election of 1876 and get back to me. Also, I’m uninterested in spouting numbers. Telling me that this state has proportionally equal electoral power with this other state because it has yay electoral votes and we have such a fine electoral college is a numbers game. The fact is, Alaska has fewer electoral votes than Texas because Alaska has fewer people! If we went to popular voting, that wouldn’t change. Here are some things that might change, however.

            In Illinois, your vote truly doesn’t matter. Illinois has voted democratic in most of the presidential elections over the past century. I think it went republican for Reagan, but that’s more an exception than the rule. The reason is Chicago. That city and its surrounding suburbs contain about three fourths or nine million of the state’s twelve million residents. If Chicago votes democrat, Illinois is going democrat. Thus, if I voted for Obama today, my vote’s unnecessary because Chicago took care of it. If I voted for Romney, my vote’s useless because Illinois’s electors will be given to Obama. Because Illinois always goes democrat, campaigning doesn’t really happen here. The republicans know they can’t take Illinois and the democrats know they don’t have to.

            So, how would this be different if we went to popular voting? Well, in Illinois’s case, it might or might not be. TO use this election as an example, Romney might have hit south and central Illinois hard, where republican sentiment is strong, and Romney and Obama would have battled it out in Chicago for the votes of that city. I also think that smaller states would get more of the candidates’ time. Just now, no one gives a crap about what North Dakota wants or how Nebraskans will vote. That’s the hard truth. Those two states combined only have a small number of electors. No one cares. But if every vote counted, then a million votes either way would make a difference, and if those million votes came from North Dakota, New Mexico or Idaho, they would see candidates trying hard to win them over.

            Finally, I think voter turnout would increase dramatically. As it stands, how can you expect people to care a fig for the election when only the electoral college is directly involved? If I knew that my vote directly contributed to the president’s election, I’d care a lot more. How would elections have been different if, for example, 85 or 90% of eligible voters turned out rather than the 40 or 50% that actually tends to show up? I submit that the presence of the electoral college gives people the distinct impression that their vote just isn’t that important. I wonder why. … Last but not least, how is it that I can elect my mayor and my governor based on a popular vote, but not my president? Come on, now.

            The American people are more capable than they’ve ever been of choosing who they want to lead them. This doesn’t mean we will always choose wisely or well, but that’s the way of things. We have the technology to implement computer-recorded voting and to tally it up efficiently. In short, what we can do at the city or state level can be done nationally. I don’t want to elect electors. I want to elect a president, please and thank you.

 

 

Who Teaches the Teachers?

            Hello Everyone. I hope I find you, whoever you are, doing well today. First, an update. Since my last post my list of college teaching positions has expanded. I’m applying to a number of schools that are looking for applied linguists such as myself as well as to a few more generalist positions. Those are the ones where, as I said last time, the school doesn’t specify a particular field of focus they’re looking for in a new hire. So, I am applying to eight places at last count. I think that’s as big as the list will get for now. If I had to pick a number one wish for right now, I’d say Kalamazoo College. They’re a small liberal arts college in Michigan, and they asked for someone who does what I do and who specializes in the sort of teaching methods we use here at Illinois. That is to say, it’s the kind of school I would love to teach at, and it seems to be seeking someone who is qualified in the things I do. So it’s a good fit on both counts. Now I pray that they think the same or that God shows me what he thinks. Meanwhile, the dissertation continues, crushing deadlines loom, the usual. Now I come to my subject for today, professors. What I’m going to say about the duties of teachers will be discussed with reference to college professors in America, but I hope that if you are a teacher elsewhere or at some other level of education, you can and will make the application to your own life. So, I’m going to discuss truth and relativism in our classrooms and offer a solution, something I’d like to see more of at any rate.

 

A Little Linguistic History:

            The noun ‘professor’ is also connected to the verb ‘profess.’ ‘Professor’ came into English from Latin by way of Old French. It comes to us from  the original Latin verb ‘profitieri,’ meaning to lay claim to or to declare. So, a professor is a person who claims knowledge of one sort or another. They also declare that knowledge, ‘professing’ it. We don’t think of college faculty as professing their knowledge, but when you get down into the meaning of the words themselves, that’s just what they do. Distributing and furthering their knowledge  is just what we pay professors to do, and we often times respect them for their knowledge and expertise. That process of knowledge distribution is often what we mean when we talk about another Latin-derived word, ‘education.’ Even in their older Latin forms,  ‘education’ and the verb ‘educate’ evince notions of instruction, leadership and the like. So then, what is it we are supposed to be teaching and professing? At first glance there are myriad answers to this question. Some would answer with engineering, others with philosophy, still others with biology, linguistics, psychology, etc. In short, the answers you’d get cover all the subjects you’d expect to find in college classrooms and coincide with the professor’s training and interests. That’s perfectly fine. Yet—and here we reach the jumping off point of this essay—there is only one thing we should really be teaching and professing no matter our expertise. It is a thing that manifests itself in every discipline and subject from the most obvious to the ones you’d never think people get doctorates in. That thing is the truth. No matter what we teach, we are called upon to teach truthfully, and I’m talking about a little bit more than ‘truth’ as it may be defined in the college code of conduct manual. It means more than getting the facts of one’s area of expertise right or more than not plagiarizing.

 

The Place of Truth:

            Truth, absolute, unshakable truth, is so critical because professors often serve as role models for young students. As students we tend to start out by assuming that our professors have the answers. When you’re a freshman or sophomore and you ask a prof a question, you expect an answer and you assume that answer to be accurate to the best of the professor’s ability whether it concerns reworking a differential equation or what Kant thought about an issue. That’s not an unreasonable expectation given that you’re probably 18 or 19, just starting out in college, and maybe you’re even taking this class because you have to, a class that has nothing to do with what you want to study. So you often take the professor’s answer and go on to write your essay or your term paper.

By the time  you’re a junior or senior, you’ve come a bit further. You’ve developed an interest in something and you’ve started to gain deeper knowledge about it. Maybe you want to go on to grad school, maybe not. By this point your professors are people with whom you have conversations that involve more than you just asking questions and their answering them. You’ve begun to penetrate into the deeper matters of what you’re studying. Finally, as a graduate student, you’re taking the specialized seminars and courses, dialoguing with professors and students about the deepest questions, the uncertainties and gaps in your field of study, and possibly, you’re beginning to find that area of the field you want to stake a claim to and make a contribution to. By the time you’ve staked your claim, you’re probably writing a doctoral dissertation. This, in a very small nutshell, is how learning progresses in college and grad school, and at every stage professors are guiding you, instructing you, correcting you, mentoring you and training you. You’re being trained not only in the knowledge of engineering or English lit or sociology, but also in the methods of critical thinking and analysis that are part of those disciplines. Your professors can and often do shape much of your adult thinking after college.

 

            Truth, however, is a commodity that is all too often in short supply in America’s college classrooms. That’s quite a statement to make, I know. I’m not saying all college professors are liars, and you know me well enough to know that. Nor do I mean that college professors are insincere. In fact, I don’t mean any negative criticism of the characters of those who are, or who become, college professors. Yet, truth is lacking in our classrooms.

            It’s lacking because of the cultural air we breathe in this postmodern age. We find ourselves not wanting to disagree with anyone about anything, lest someone feel slighted or lest some value system be questioned. We find ourselves striving to include everything that everyone believes and holding up everyone’s belief in anything and everything as valid lest we be viewed as other than tolerant. This atmosphere that I’m describing is, of course, the atmosphere produced in a culture of relativism, and nowhere is relativism more passionately advocated and defended than in the college classrooms of America. To give you an idea of what this atmosphere often looks like, allow me to repeat an analogy I made in another blog post in March of last year:

If you are presented with a chocolate cake, you expect certain things to be present, namely chocolate. But our universities would teach you that it is wrong of you to dispute someone else who says that their carrot cake or their fruit cake is also chocolate. You might hear this: “Brad, now that’s pretty insensitive and exclusivist of you. my fruitcake is just as much a chocolate cake to me as yours is to you. You need to be more considerate of my culinary position. Who are you to say that this isn’t a chocolate cake!”

 

            You might argue the point in that post by saying that there’s a difference in my example between fact and opinion. Chocolate, you might say, has certain physical and chemical properties and is what it is even if someone else is mistaken about it. To take my absurd little example just one step further, in today’s climate someone could respond with, “ah, but you see, Brad, chocolate is about much more than the coco and the process that refines it into what you call chocolate. There’s a sense to chocolate, an ineffable experiential quality and relational dynamic between consumer and product that makes their piece of cake as much chocolate in their worldview as that cake is to you in your worldview.”

            I’ll grant you that it’s an absurd example, but it makes my point nicely. On such a basis as the one I just presented, the true chocolate lover is left wrong-footed. You can now hardly defend real chocolate and its genuineness without seeming to call into question the views and thought processes of that other person, something we are enjoined not to do at universities. Rather, our western university training would compel us here to concede that my notions of chocolate are ethnocentric and limited. As any honest person will tell you, however, only one of those people in that made up conversation is right, the one holding the thing that is actually chocolate. Discussions like this one take place every day on hundreds of college campuses concerning any number of topics and questions. Still, I’m not here to go on about relativism itself. I’ve said plenty on the subject in other posts, and you know what I think of it if you’ve read them. Rather, it’s time to consider remedies to it.

 

Talking to the Faculty:

            Campus ministries aren’t news. The University of Illinois has a number of churches close to it that send bible-believing students and youth ministers out to talk to all comers about the claims of Christ on our quod and in our dormitories. The church I attend makes it a special point to set up a table on quod day when everyone’s out and about celebrating and getting moved in and organized. These movements have been around for a good while and have undoubtedly accomplished a great deal. They have, however, one limitation that I see. No one talks to the people teaching these students.

            The general thinking behind school student movements is that those who accept Christ today will be the teachers of tomorrow. Generally, I understand and agree with the thinking. Still, it strikes me as one-sided. What about today’s teachers, I ask? Shouldn’t they have the chance to give the case for Christianity a fair hearing?

            Over the years our news media has been filled with stories about extremists or fringe groups on the margins of the Christian faith. David Koresh for the one and Harold Camping for a more recent example of the other come to mind. Our professors, of whom I may soon become one, are people like anyone else, people who observe these goings on and draw conclusions from them. Unfortunately, they don’t always see Christianity represented in both love and truth. My experience with my professors, spanning as it does three universities and over a decade thus far, suggests that your average college professor is exceptionally skeptical of most religious claims and particularly the claims of Christ. Reasons for that skepticism are numerous. Negative personal experiences with churches or people, exposure to certain modes of biblical criticism which we don’t have time to take apart here, doubt about religion’s place in a scientifically minded world, the list goes on and on. There are so many reasons because there are so many professors.

            Those professors deserve to have someone talk with them, give their doubts a full hearing and answer them point for point. The trouble is that professors are seen as being in the vanguard of the intelligentsia today. They can be seen as intimidating to most folk. Even I, who am not yet a professor and who don’t yet hold a doctorate, have been told that my level of education can be intimidating. That’s never been my intention, and I’m sure most professors would say the same. We academics don’t mean to intimidate the average person or in this case the average Christian.

            One important consequence stemming from the difference in education between your average professor and your average American is, therefore, that most well-meaning churchgoers don’t feel themselves able to discuss and debate the claims of Christ with us academics. It can often also be the case that most people lack the specialized knowledge that forms the basis of, say, a biology professor’s objections. For example, you may not agree with the claims of evolution as it’s presented today, but how many of us could sit down with a biologist and take on Darwin’s theory in specific detail, thesis for thesis and term for term? Not many. Another example, you may know and fervently believe that God created the world, but how many of us would be able (assuming we wanted to in the first place) to sit down with a philosophy professor and discuss questions of epistemology, ontology and theodicy? Not many.

            The truth is, professors’ objections to the claims of Christ are much the same ones people have been raising for at least a couple centuries now. They’re still answerable, but I find few people who want to try. Perhaps it’s easier for a youth minister to sit down with a student who may be closer to their own age and level of education. That student may have the same objections, but the words used to express them are shorter. That’s a joke, by the way. I’m not saying it takes a doctorate to be able to talk to professors intelligently and fluently about Christ, but I sense that most people think it does.

 

A Few Notable Names:

            Take a moment and look up some of these people:  Francis Collins, Alvin Plantinga, Marilynne Robinson, Martin Nowak, Michael McConnell, Simon Morris, and Henrey Schaefer. They’re all professors or retired professors. You probably guessed that. Most are scientists. Admittedly, I put the list together that way and it’s not exhaustive by any means. Schaefer is credited as the inventor of quantum computational chemistry. Collins is a geneticist, a physician and the head of the human genome project to map out all of the genes found in our DNA. Nowak is another biologist, a professor of biology and mathematics. Plantinga is a philosopher with multiple volumes to his name. The list goes on. Each one of those professors is known for being an outstanding scholar, many of them world-renowned in their fields. Every one of them is also a practicing Christian.

            I’ve met people on campus who would be happy to tell you that only fools would believe in the soundness of religious ideas. So, are these people fools? Somehow I just don’t think so. The problem remains, however, that they constitute a small minority among college and university faculties in America.

 

More Participants:

            Most people living in college towns, I’d think, have heard of Campus Crusade for Christ or CRU as it’s known since its recent name change. If you haven’t, I’m talking about the large ministry effort started by Bill Bright and his wife at UCLA in 1951. However, how many have heard of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA in general or its Graduate and Faculty Ministries in particular? InterVarsity (spelled just that way with the capital V in the middle) is another organization devoted to college and university ministries. What’s interesting about them is their development of a graduate and faculty ministry. They recognize that graduate students and professors face unique challenges in the field of academia, and their purpose is to found, encourage and sustain Christians in the halls of our colleges and universities.

            Only trouble is they’re not well-known. For my part, I’d never had an inkling about their existence until yesterday as I prepared this post. What does that tell me? It tells me there need to be more people, whether in a given organization or not, willing to go to our professors and our aspiring faculty and sit down with them to talk about truth and the God who is the God of truth. These need to be people who are knowledgeable about the bible, knowledgeable about the professorial mindset and who can rise to the challenge of answering the hardest and sometimes the most vehemently posed of questions.

            How often in your average applied ethics class will you see professors defending the unborn? How often will you see professors in those classes defending the right and correcting students’ misconceptions about what is wrong. Isn’t that what ethics is for? And where there is legitimate ambiguity about the rightness or wrongness of something, how often do you see professors taking a bible-based, principled stand for an ethical position? You do see those things happen, but I’d like to see more.

 

 

Concluding Comments:

            “The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it be scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth.” (Jeanluke Picard). Relativism and skepticism reign at present. The skeptic says, “de omnibus dubitandum,” or, “doubt everything.” This sort of skepticism is nowhere applied with less hesitation than in the realm of religion in general and, among American academics, the realm of Christianity in particular. What I say back unflinchingly is that if you disbelieve everything, you believe nothing. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis, a professor by the way, who had this to say about our skepticism and our rejection of values, and I’ll let his remark, which is taken from the end of Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, serve as my closing comment:

‘’’ the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.