Editorial
From the Newsletter of Revesby Presbyterian Church
September 2007
Rev Dr Peter Barnes
The Psalmist tells us that it is the fool who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1). Indeed, the Psalmist finishes the verse by attributing this atheistic conclusion not to the power of the person’s intellect but to the corruption of his heart. This rejection of God can take many forms. Today we are witnessing a new-found militant zeal on the part of secular fundamentalists. Richard Dawkins says nothing mild – nor particularly accurate – in his tirade against the God of the Old Testament as ‘a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe.’ Somewhat bewilderingly, Dawkins claims that religion is truly horrible, and was devised by human beings as some kind of comforting delusion to distract people from the sufferings of this world. It is difficult to see how it could be both. That does not bother Dawkins who presses on to assert that religious instruction is a form of child abuse, and that governments should put a stop to it. Presumably, we could all sleep more soundly at night if a policeman were posted at the door to every Sunday School.
Sam Harris has also been rushing into print, and declaring that all religion, especially Islam, is unreasonable, uncivil, and dangerous. Michel Onfray has issued the Atheist Manifesto, while Christopher Hitchens has declared God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. They all say what Dawkins says, that ‘Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.’ Actually, it is Dawkins and his ilk who come across as unhinged, with closed minds. It reminds one of Bozo in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell describes Bozo: ‘He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), … He was a very exceptional man.’ Not altogether exceptional, says the apostle Paul, for all the descendants of Adam are by nature ‘alienated and enemies in your mind’ (Col.1:21).
Other practical atheists seem milder in their rejection of the faith. John Piper warns that ‘The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie … And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.’ In Jesus’ parable there are those who make rather boring excuses for not coming to the great supper. One had bought a field, another wanted to try out five yoke of oxen, while a third had married a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The three of them reject the gospel of the kingdom, but they seem rather more civil about it than are Dawkins, Hitchens, and Onfray.
Ultimately, however, the difference belongs to the surface. Any rejection of God’s coming to us in Christ is not a result of our superior wisdom and altruism, but our worldliness and fallenness. Jesus told the Jews that they could not believe because they received honour from one another, and not the honour that comes from God (John 5:44). They were not rational and objective judges weighing up the evidence before them. They were sinful rebels who needed to lay down their arms. When Paul preached to Felix about righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was stung, precisely because he was a man who had exhibited little righteousness and self-control in his life, and so the judgment to come was not something that he looked forward to. Not that he could admit that to himself or others. Instead , he told Paul: ‘Go away for now; when I have aconvenient time I will call for you’ (Acts 24:25).
It is all smoke and mirrors. We may be eloquent and decidedly hostile, we may be fairly laid back and indifferent, or we may be protective of our standing in the community – but in all this there is the heart of a fool. God does not address us as impartial philosophers or decent bystanders but as sinners with sinful hearts. ‘This is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practising evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed’ (John 3:19-20). Behind the aggressive atheism of a Dawkins and the worldly indifference of the man who had just bought a field is the same heart – foolish, corrupt, and dead before God, until the Spirit of God brings about the new birth. Dawkins, like Nicodemus, you must be born again.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes