Gunning for God (24 page)

The existence of a profound flaw in human nature has been recognized since time immemorial. The famous Dr Johnson was once asked by his biographer, James Boswell, what he thought of original sin. Johnson replied: “With respect to original sin, the inquiry is not necessary, for whatever is the cause of human corruption men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from crimes.”
⁸

In a masterpiece of succinct expression, G. K. Chesterton got it exactly right when, in answer to the question of what was wrong with the world posed by the
London Times
, he wrote the following justifiably famous letter:

Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours faithfully,
G. K. Chesterton

In the medical arena, a disease has to be faced and understood before it can be cured. Superficial diagnoses lead to superficial solutions. Symptoms have to be distinguished from root cause. A headache is a symptom. Its root cause could be anything from influenza to a brain tumour. It is only when you grasp the seriousness of brain tumours that you can begin to understand why a complex operation is necessary that may put you through a great deal of discomfort. There is no point in treating a brain tumour with aspirin.

Similarly, in order to understand the solution that Christianity offers to the problem of human sin, we need to grasp the radical nature of the biblical diagnosis of sin: that the human race itself is “fallen”, fundamentally flawed by evil. Now, this stark statement should not be understood to mean that all humans are as bad as they could possibly be. Far from it. For, in spite of being flawed by evil, we human beings retain many of the noble features that stem from our original unflawed creation by God. This is indicated in Christ’s remark: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
⁹

It is a self-evident fact that men and women of all faiths or none know how to give good gifts to their children; to have loving paternal instincts, and often care for others far beyond the confines of their families. Indeed, it is an important part of the biblical worldview to develop compassion, to promote and encourage efforts on the part of scientists, physicians, surgeons, psychiatrists, nurses, educationalists, economists, politicians, and others to alleviate the ills and sufferings that afflict humanity.

But nonetheless, the biblical diagnosis is that the human race is flawed by evil, a contention that is surely not surprising in light of our common experience. The source of that evil is given in the following key statement by St Paul: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because
¹⁰
all sinned”.
¹¹
This says, firstly, that we have all inherited a nature that is fallen, sinful, and mortal. Secondly, we have all individually sinned. Sin is universal. We note that Paul says “sin” entered the world and not “sins”, for he is thinking not of particular sins, but of sin as a principle. It is an attitude consisting of a deep-seated egotism, where the human creature asserts his own will against that of the Creator.

Not surprisingly, the New Atheists mock such ideas of “original sin”, by dismissing the Genesis account as a primitive symbolic aetiological myth. However, it should be noted in passing that most scientists assert that
Homo sapiens
sprang from a common ancestor (surely it must have been two?). Nor does anyone appear to dispute that all descendants of those two have inherited their genes, and therefore their nature. So it might be rather unwise to dismiss the biblical account out of hand — after all, no other account seems realistically to face human nature as we actually experience it. For instance, the notion that the moral Zeitgeist is improving,
¹²
in that human beings are gradually evolving to the state where their intellectual nature governs their animal nature, does not look very convincing in light of the monstrous evil of our most recent century. Interestingly, in conversation with me and Larry Taunton, the Director of the Fixed-Point Foundation that organized my debates, Christopher Hitchens, by contrast with other New Atheists, forthrightly admitted that man is unquestionably evil. Let us therefore be patient, and see what the Bible actually has to say.

The story of the Garden of Eden is one of the most famous stories in all of literature. It is also one of the most profound. It relates how the Creator placed the first humans in a garden paradise that was full of promise and interest. They were free to enjoy the garden and explore it and the regions around it to their hearts’ content. However, one fruit was indeed forbidden them by God — the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. Yet, far from diminishing the status of humanity, that prohibition was essential to establish the unique dignity of humans as moral beings. The biblical story here defines the irreducible ingredients that constitute humans as moral beings and enable them to function as such. In order for morality to be real, humans must have a certain degree of freedom, as we saw in the preceding chapter. So, they were free to eat all that was in the garden. But there must also be real moral choice between right and wrong. There must therefore be a moral boundary. So, one fruit was forbidden. God told them that in the day they ate it they would surely die.

This ancient story then relates how the serpent-enemy misrepresented God, suggesting that God was taunting human beings, first by placing them in a magnificent environment with its beautiful trees and luscious fruit, and then forbidding them to eat that fruit. The enemy also insinuated that God wished to limit human freedom by not letting the humans become as God.
¹³
The deception worked.

The “original” sin that infected the human race from its very start was a revolt of the human spirit against the God who created it; a revolt that changed the attitude of the creature to his Creator, to other humans and to the creation around him; a revolt that has given us the New Atheists. As soon as the first humans took the forbidden fruit, they experienced shame, unease, and, above all, alienation from God. The death of their relationship with God would inevitably be followed, but not immediately, by physical death. The man and woman who had enjoyed the joy and friendship of God now felt that God had become their enemy, and they fled to hide from him.
¹⁴

We humans have likewise been fleeing ever since. There has lurked in the human heart the suspicion that God, if he exists at all, is innately hostile to us. He forbids us the enjoyment of natural pleasures, and represses us psychologically. He restrains us from developing our full human potential. Hitchens, in common with untold numbers of others, has swallowed this father of all misrepresentations. It permeates his thinking. As we saw earlier he imagines that God is a tyrant and a bully, and he complains: “It is useless to object that Adam seems to have been created with insatiable discontent and curiosity and then forbidden to slake it…”
¹⁵

This attitude is as irrational as it is false. After all, does it really make sense to think that our Creator, who has equipped us among other things with the capacity to love others, is himself against us? Even a superficial glance at the text of Genesis shows that Hitchens’ complaint rests on severe distortion. God certainly created Adam to be curious, but not discontented. The first humans were not prevented from slaking their curiosity. The very reverse: they had a whole world of possibilities at their feet. God encouraged them to engage in the fascinating task of naming things — in their case, the animals — a task that is of the very essence of science. God wanted them to explore his universe and to discover the treasures of his wisdom.

As for the “forbidding”, it is to be noted that only one thing was forbidden (contrary to the impression Hitchens gives); and that particular fruit was forbidden, not to restrict humanity but so that they could develop a relationship of trust with the Creator. They really could choose whether to trust the Creator and believe his word, or to grasp at what they imagined would come to them by asserting their independence of him.

The biblical diagnosis is that we have inherited a nature that is sinful, and then have proceeded to sin on our own account. We are on all sides influenced and pressurized by the prevailing ethos of a fallen world. As the New Testament puts it, “All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”
¹⁶
However, this seems grossly unfair to many people. They say, “We did not ask to be born from a race that has been damaged at its root. Why should we be condemned as a result of what somebody else originally did?” The answer to this reasonable objection is given in a subsequent statement by St Paul in the very same letter: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
¹⁷

Because we were not personally responsible for the entry of sin into the world, we are not personally in a position to rectify the whole situation. That is why the salvation offered for human sin in the New Testament makes sense, because it (alone) is commensurate with the scale of the problem. If we were made sinners by what some other person did, rescue and redemption is offered to us freely on the very same terms: through what Another Person has done,
rather than by what we ourselves can do
.

Many people seem to find this immensely important principle of vicarious suffering difficult to grasp, and, as a result, misunderstanding abounds. One reason for that misunderstanding is another repercussion of human alienation from God: the widespread notion that religion can be used to merit God’s acceptance, by the piling up of good deeds. As if religion, or any other activity on the part of a creature, could merit acceptance by the Creator, when the reality is that everything of good that any of us has or can do ultimately comes from him. In consequence, many people think that “salvation”, if it means anything at all, is simply some sort of moral code that we have to keep to earn God’s acceptance, like “loving your neighbour as yourself”.

The Christian message is the direct opposite of this popular view. In Christianity “salvation” means exactly that: action on the part of God to rescue those who could not help themselves. At its heart is the magnificent doctrine of the grace of God. It says that, if they will, all can be “justified [i.e. be put right with God] by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus… we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law … to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness”.
¹⁸

In particular, acceptance with God does not depend on attainment of a standard of perfection that is humanly impossible to attain.
¹⁹
Salvation, as the New Testament repeatedly says, is given by God’s grace as a gift: “It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
²⁰
However, like all gifts, it has to be accepted. It is not automatic;
²¹
it involves repentance and putting our trust in God as a deliberate act of our will. The logic of this is important: since the original rebellion involved lack of trust and grasping at independence from God, the way back inevitably involves repenting
²²
of that attitude, trusting God and learning to depend on him. The way back starts, therefore, by our facing the seriousness of our position, repenting, and accepting from Christ the gift of salvation that we could not earn or provide for ourselves.

To sum up then. Just as the human race was infected by sin at the beginning by its founding father’s disobedience to God; so we, individually, can be forgiven, reconciled, and accepted by God. This cannot be done through our efforts at obedience — even at their best they are imperfect and inadequate — but by the obedience of another, that is Christ. Putting that another way: just as we received a fallen, sinful nature from Adam, we can receive from God, through repentance and trusting Christ, his unfallen, eternal life — and with it all the potential to live in harmony with and for him.

IS SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT IMMORAL?

The New Atheists take great exception to what they call the scapegoat theory of atonement — “executing an innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty”.
²³
In fact, Richard Dawkins thinks that the doctrine of the atonement is “barking mad”. It is interesting to see the reason he gives: “If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment?”
²⁴
Why not, indeed?

Because this is a moral universe, and dealing with sin is a non-trivial moral problem. A moment’s contemplation of the sorry moral landscape that is human history ought to convince us of this fact. Dawkins’ superficial reaction comes from a failure to understand what is involved in forgiveness. Let us try to think this through. The word most used in the New Testament for “forgiveness” is the Greek “
aphesis
”, which means “release” or “let go”. In these terms, Dawkins is asking, “Why can’t God just let it go?” The answer has to do with human guilt.