The universe is either a confusion, and a mutual involution of things, and a dispersion; or it is unity and order and providence.  If then it is the former, why do I desire to tarry in a fortuitous combination of things and such a disorder? and why do I care about anything else than how I shall at last become earth? and why am I disturbed, for the dispersion of my elements will happen whatever I do.  But if the other supposition is true, I venerate, and I am firm, and I trust in him who governs.

-Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

I am reading a most interesting book on philosophy right now.  It is interesting not because of the answers it gives, which are few and far between, but because of the questions it raises.  They pique my curiosity and irritate my modernist basis of thought, and out of that chafing I am forced to sidestep my basis and examine the underlying foundation for my belief, which is faith.  Faith is not at all averse to the scrutiny of reason, and in fact we may say that that scrutiny is welcomed, although the exercise is not always successful: because it takes a more accomplished thinker than I to unite the two in the context of Christian thought.  This is a reality which is usually borne out by how badly the concord is accomplished when it is attempted.

That matter is beyond the scope of this inquiry, however.  The book is an introduction to philosophical thinking written (quite well) for laymen, covering such topics as knowledge, the mind, free will, the self etc.  Such questions as the author chooses to discuss are developed thoroughly and with a commendable attention to thoroughness, leaving no intellectual stone unturned no matter how difficult the ramifications.  What bothered me the most was the chapter on God, however.  He moves unswervingly over the proofs of God’s existence based on Anselm (ontological), Aquinas (cosmological) and Hume’s Cleanthes and Philo (the argument from analogy) to come to rest on the problem of evil.  Here is his statement on the nature of God:

My own view about this is that religious traditions are at their best when they back away from the classical virtues of God.  God is elevated in some traditions to being above good and virtue, or in Hume’s down-to-earth phrase, has no more regard to good above ill than heat above cold.  In other traditions, he is by no means omnipotent, but subject to forces not of his own making.  Each of these at least affords some kind of theodicy.  But if we really were concerned to puzzle out the nature of God’s mind from the nature of his creation, we might look seriously at the idea that he (she, they, it) is a God with a twisted sense of humour.  After all, as the Jewish joke goes, he led the chosen people round the desert for forty years just to drop them on the only part of the Middle East that has no oil.  –Think, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, 1999

The extent of the arrogance of this summary is only exceeded by the degree of its shortsightedness.  It is paganism, and at that it is not even good paganism.  Even Marcus Aurelius knew that if you are going to have a god you might as well have a good one.  If you have a god who is utterly out of control, at the mercy of his (her, their, its) own creation, constantly fretting and wondering what is going to come of the universe he has put into motion, you would be well advised to give up on religion and join ranks with the atheists.  Because at that point, whether or not your god exists, for you the benefits of religion have utterly vanished.  That which is sought by the human heart in religion, in Christianity as in all the others (the infinite difference lies in what, or rather Who, you find as a result of your search), cannot be satisfied by caprice and unpredictability and impotence.  You are better off finding solace in your stubborn unbelief in the midst of all the troubles that your deity is unable to rescue you from, than in giving the homage of your soul to an entity that does not merit that homage.  The reward of worship is in the worthiness of its recipient.  For a modern example, consider the Queen of England.  What do the British receive from their devotion to her, if not in the end a quiet enjoyment that she is the queen – she, and no other.  But if the recipient is patently unworthy of the dignity due their position, the equation breaks down quickly and there is no reason left to worship except tradition.

This line of thought has bearing on my series about the purpose of life, because reverence is so inextricably tied up with who we are as humans.  We cannot not worship something.  It will be a king, or a queen, or an idol, or a faction, or a political movement, or a political candidate, or a car, or a job, or control, or fame, or money, or yourself, or a spouse, or someone who is not your spouse, or God, or atheism.  It cannot be nothing.  Blackburn chose to ignore this reality, but we will let it go to focus on one of his more damning omissions later on.  In every part of our lives in some way we are lifting something up before all the world around us and proclaiming, “This is worthy of my highest devotion.  It is greater than I am, and I find my ultimate meaning in affirming that.”

There is a sense in which God does the same thing.  We have to be careful when we draw analogies like this, because you cannot be around God much without realizing that he is above all things and that there is no higher being.  When he says “You shall have no other gods before me” it is not just a command to keep ourselves from idols but also a statement about the reality of his ultimate preeminence.  Because we shall, in fact, ultimately have no other gods before him whether we desire them or not; and we shall, in fact, ultimately bow the knee to Jesus whether we intend to or not.  The question is whether we will live our lives in defiance of that truth or in obedience to it.

But although there is no higher being than God to whom he owes deference, it is still the case that some things are of paramount importance to him.  And we know that truth is one of these things.  Our God founded the earth by this truth, and it was by understanding that he established the heavens.  It was Wisdom that he brought forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old, at the beginning of all things.  It was the Logos that John perceived as the closest approximation of Jesus’ being when he launched the glorious torrent of ethereal prose of his Gospel.  And it is this truth that God lifts up before all the world and proclaims, “This is something supremely important to me.  Not only in my divine counsel will I not go against Truth, and all it stands for, but when my love for my creation forces me into a conflict with the reality of the punishment they have brought on their heads, I will lay down my very life to satisfy the claims of the Law against them.”

So we know that Blackburn was wrong.  God is not “above” virtue as you and I are “above” hot and cold, and yet simultaneously he is not subject to the forces of his own making.  He follows the laws of right and wrong he has put in place because those laws were set up to reflect who he is, not because he is constrained by something he created.  This is summed up best in his revelation to the Israelites through Moses.  I AM has sent me to you, and no further introduction is required.  Those who think they a) need additional explanation of how God’s justice coexists with his love or b) could deal with the explanation intellectually once they had received it, have simply never come into the presence of a holy God.  And the reason they could not deal with it is much more serious than they are willing to admit.  I can think quite well through an issue in my armchair with a pile of books around me, but when the clinging shreds of physical reality as we know it are torn away and my utter unworthiness even to exist is exposed for all the world to see, it becomes a bit more personal.  When the only thing at stake is one’s academic reputation and the satisfaction of one’s philosophical standards, success or failure is at best a rather anemic consideration.  When it is the eternal destiny of the soul that hangs in the balance of the decision, however, one ought to be more circumspect.

Marcus Aurelius also said that every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.  If we spend our lives arranging the ideas about knowledge, the mind, free will, and the self in our heads in just such a way as to suit our preferences, we will find at the end of all things that it is just that – the end of all things.  And that is a sin far more heinous than the occasional false reification for which the philosopher so effortlessly repents.  It is blasphemy against the God who put eternity in our hearts.  But if we busy ourselves with Truth, lifting it up to the position for which it was created (that is, as the vehicle for the revelation of Jesus Christ through his holy Word), we will find that God had more important plans for his holy people than financing the Dubai Tower.  We will find that as the bride of Christ we are worth more to God than we ever dared suppose, worth so much that Jesus will not countenance the thought of eternity without us.  This is the perception of faith.

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV