Calvin begins his magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion with the observation that ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.’ He saw these two aspects of wisdom as related to one another, indeed as tightly connected. Modern Western society tries to separate these things, and sees no real connections at all. So, for example, we are quite used to claims that a person’s private morality is irrelevant to his public morality, or to the view that goodness has nothing to do with faith in God.
Let us begin with God. If the God of the Bible exists, He is all-powerful and foundational to everything. He is the creator of the universe (Gen.1:1) and its judge (Heb.4:13). If He does not exist or people do not really care whether He does or not, then there is no foundation for living, no integrating factor to life, no beginning of wisdom, indeed no obvious beginning or ending of anything. All of life is explained without recourse to God, and there is at best a kind of pitying condescension adopted towards those who think otherwise. At worst, it may arouse fierce hostility.
In the late nineteenth century, both Fedor Dostoevsky (who was strongly Christian) and Friedrich Nietzsche (who was vehemently atheistic) recognised that if God does not exist, anything is possible. What they meant was that if people did not believe in God, they would have to decide for themselves what was right and what was wrong. Dostoevsky prophesied that the result would be tyranny and disaster, while Nietzsche thought the outcome would be liberating.
Logically, if the Christian view of God is discarded, the Christian view of humanity goes the same way. If man is made in the image of God (Gen.1:26-27; 9:6; James 3:9), that would make no sense if there is no God. Compared to the heavens, man seems insignificant (Ps.8:3-4), but he is actually made a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned with glory and honour (Ps.8:5). No heavenly beings, however, and all we have left is apparent insignificance. That is precisely the problem with the unbeliever’s view of humanity. C. S. Lewis saw this in 1944 when he wrote his little work on The Abolition of Man. The subtitle was ‘Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of School’. No doubt, he was looking over his shoulder at the eugenics programmes under Hitler, but he knew that a similar kind of debased worldview was being embraced throughout the West.
Lewis wrote: ‘A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.’ Most modern thinkers believe the opposite; they see objective morals as a threat to freedom. The reality is that if there is no God, then we become the highest beings, answerable to no one. But if there is no God, we cannot be in the image of God, so we are ultimately on par with the slug. We become a kind of god-slug, lacking both dignity and humility.
The third step concerns ethics. If God is dead, man is dead, and ethics is dead. This does not mean that people will stop using words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but that these will become subjective. People will say: ‘I believe it is wrong to lie and cheat in the parliament’, but this will be in the same category as ‘I cannot stand eating beetroot.’ God says: ‘Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’ (Lev.19:2). Sin can be defined. It is not necessarily anti-social behaviour (John the Baptist might have been accused of that) nor is it going against the majority (Hitler was a genuinely popular leader in Nazi Germany). It is not a matter of opinion, where the one with the loudest voice or the cleverest public relations team wins. Rather, it is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). It is going against the law of God.
The Christian view of God, ourselves, and our lives is a seamless garment. When Rev. Leslie Stephen abandoned the Christian faith in 1875, he thought he could still live and die as a gentleman. Nietzsche, for all his insanity, had more sense. Abandon God, and you abandon humanity, and you abandon any true grasp of how we are to live here on earth.
With warmest regards in Christ,
– Peter Barnes