Monday, April 9, 2018
595 - Easy to be Hard
Spirituality Column #595
April 10, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Easy to be Hard
By Bob Walters
“La science qui
rapproche l’homme de Dieu.” (“Science brings men nearer to God.”) – Louis
Pasteur (1822-1895)
I like this
quote not because it is the best thing anyone ever said about science or God –
it’s not – but because it is so on-point in today’s off-point,
build-your-own-truth, over-thinking-“reality” and under-selling-Jesus cultural
atmosphere.
Christians
know that it is not science, a “what,” but Jesus, a “Who” – a proper person – Who
ordains reality and brings us closer to God. That’s because Jesus is God, Who became
a man, God’s Son, Who in God’s loving grace restored fallen humanity to God’s
Kingdom, and upon Whom God bestowed all creative authority over all creation.
That’s reality; that’s Who Jesus is.
Jesus is why we are already nearer to God.
At the same
time, science reveals God and I thank Him for Louis Pasteur’s (and countless
others’) many medical, scientific, and technological discoveries. I especially appreciate Pasteur’s sincere and
thoroughly appropriate nod to the deity Who so much of modern scientific,
social, political, philosophical, and media realms pretend doesn’t exist. It’s as though folks think it’s a personal
insult that God is smarter than they are.
Tracking
the past 300 years or so, it’s easy to see that many do think they are smarter
than God when Jesus, truly, is the good, divine light of discovery and wisdom.
The
Enlightenment – the enduring philosophical movement of the 1700s and 1800s –
was a whole lot less about the “light” of Jesus and much more about the “dark”
of the mind of man. Lots of great stuff
and lots of terrible stuff happened during and as a result of Enlightenment thinking.
I would list the American government and medical, communication, construction,
and transportation technologies among the great stuff. I would list Marxist governments and the
errant but undeniable cultural diminishment of Christian moral authority among
the terrible stuff. Feel free to make
your own list.
The
Enlightenment Now, a new book we mentioned a couple months ago, is a cheerfully
vacant release by Harvard atheist and psychologist Steven Pinker. His view is that things really are quite good
these days, culturally and scientifically, because the Enlightenment has done
so much to rid humanity of the intellectual rot of religious myths and impinge the
faithful pursuit of Jesus Christ. Hence,
praises Pinker, it “gave us the Modern World.”
All, I suppose, for the ultimate purpose of … nothing in particular.
There is some accuracy to Pinker’s
observation if not depth to his end-game.
Israeli
biblical scholar Yoram Hazony, commenting on Pinker’s book in this weekend’s
Wall Street Journal, noted that Enlightenment advocates like Pinker “oversell
the benefits of unfettered reason.” Pinker,
Hazony notes, praises worldly Enlightenment philosophers (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,
Kant, Nietzsche) who “replaced dogma, tradition and authority (i.e. God) with
reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.”
I prefer Jesus in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.” Now that is truly God, up close and personal.
Beware philosophy that – and a
philosopher who – makes truth harder than it is.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) knows that life’s biggest truth and
easiest yoke is faith in Jesus Christ.
Another big truth is that Bob was terrible at French in college.