The Resurrection of Hope Part I: Hope and Humanism

I was doing some spring cleaning the other day, and while rummaging through a bunch of dust covered boxes I found an old Obama “Hope” sticker from his 2008 election campaign. I’m sure you remember those. It has a picture of his face in red and blue colors with the words “hope” in all capital letters. For just a moment, I was reminded of the fervor of that election year, a fervor that I myself bought into. I went to see him speak during a Democratic rally held at a local area high school football field. He talked about how he was going to turn the economy around, how he was going to create new jobs and help the suffering middle class. He said he was going to end our foreign wars and favor diplomacy over aggression. He was saying all the things I so desperately wanted to hear and I found myself completely hooked. The “hope” sticker went up on my refrigerator that very night.

Clearly, I was not alone. He won the election in a landslide, and just about everyone I knew did indeed place their hopes in him. People seemed to think he would change the world and right all wrongs. But what happened as a result of our hopes? Our economy is in shambles, the middle class is being eviscerated, unemployment is rampant, and we always seem to be teetering on the brink of some new conflict. A survey says only 30% of the population feels our country is headed in the right direction. In short, our hopes were dashed. My “hope” sticker went from its prominent place on the refrigerator to a forgotten about box stuffed in a closet. To me, this is just another indictment of the false hopes of humanism; that world leaders and governments always have our best interests in mind and will fundamentally change the world and change lives for the better.

I cannot help but contrast the hope of humanism with the hope of my Christian faith. This past Sunday was Easter, and this year my church did things a little differently. Several people from our congregation went up front, one after the other, and talked about how Jesus Christ had transformed their lives and given them hope. In the United Methodist Church, we call this “faith sharing.” This was not the first time I’ve heard such testimonies. I’ve heard countless people talk about how they were freed from addictions, depression, abusive parents or relationships and all manner of bondage. I’ve even heard people talk about how they were healed of various physical afflictions and ailments. Skeptics of Christianity and religion often say that our faith is pie in the sky; but they ignore the transformative power of faith in our daily lives. Our lives have been transformed by hope.

I have asked these same skeptics a question; “what does the atheist hope in?” As of yet, I do not believe I have found a satisfactory answer. This matter is an easy one for me to probe, because I was once an atheist myself. Long before people jumped on the God Delusion bandwagon, I was reading the great atheist philosophers of old. The works of Nietzsche, Hume, Sartre, Camus and Schopenhauer once lined my bookshelves. Many of their views were not near as rosy as the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others.

Russell once wrote “that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Sartre, whose “Being and Nothingness” was one of my favorite books when I was an atheist, echoed this when in his final interview he said: “With this third world war, which is going to break out one day, with this miserable ensemble that our planet is, despair returns to tempt me again. The idea that we will not ever finish it, that there is not any goal, that there are only individual goals for which people struggle. People start small revolutions, but there is not a goal for humanity, there is nothing that interests mankind, there are only disruptions”.

For Sartre and Camus, atheist “hope” boiled down to one thing; “authenticity.” Sartre argued that we live in an “absurd universe”, the total of which is “ridiculous.” All we can do, then, is to authenticate ourselves by an act of will. It doesn’t matter which direction you go; if you find a wallet on the ground you can either return it or steal it, because either way, you will have “authenticated yourself.” Such was the “hope” of the ‘old guard’ of the atheist philosophers that I was once so heavily influenced by; a kind of blind existentialism.

But now there has been a distinct paradigm shift in atheistic philosophy. With the explosion of the New Atheists onto the philosophical scene, we have moved from a naturalist despair or a subjective existentialism to a more broad sense of utopian idealism. These harsh critics of religion have put new clothes on the old guard to make it appear more attractive for pop culture consumption. Indeed, the New Atheists have become evangelists in their own right. We have gone from the bleak writings of a Sartre to “Atheism offers the idea that this world is all we have and it therefore offers the hope that we have the power to touch that world, and shape it, and shove it a little bit in the direction that we’d like to see it move. And that’s a pretty big hope.”  Substitute pessimism for a repackaged utopian ideal and you have the New Atheism. Open the windows; the sun is shining and the flowers are blooming; spring has come to atheism at last, after a long, long winter!!

It is ironic that those who would accuse followers of religion as being irrational; are themselves guilty of irrationality. It is ironic that those who would accuse followers of religion as having a blind faith; are themselves guilty of having a blind faith. They say that we can “end all wars” and have “world peace” (especially if we get rid of religion!). They say we can “end poverty” and “end world hunger”. They say we can bring about better economic conditions for all of mankind. They say we will go out to the infinite stars. They say that secular morality will replace the need for a god. And while these things (with the exception of that last one) are certainly what we should always be striving for; they are at the same time unrealistic expectations in their totality. It is nothing more than a repackaged utopian philosophy brought into the 21^st century. The writer of Ecclesiastes said “there is nothing new under the sun”, and indeed there isn’t. I wish I could say that we have the power to end all wars, for example, but there have always been wars and there will always be wars. Because the desire for selfish gain has always been and will always be rooted deeply in the human heart; the utopian world that these New Atheists tout in their books and in their lectures is simply impossible. They advocate reason over faith; but this is not reason, this is faith of an altogether different kind, and is thus a flight fromreason. Perhaps the ‘old guard’ would have seen this as well. They are guilty of the same non-rational leap that they accuse theists of taking.

And like the utopian philosophers of old and the “hope” stickers of the present day, these ‘hopes’ will ultimately be dashed by reality. When we take off the rose tinted glasses of the New Atheism, we see the hope of humanism for what it really is. As Bertrand Russell put it, “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on in its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest tomorrow, himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.”

So what does the Christian hope in? I will be examining that in the second and final part of this series. Regardless of where you stand on these issues, thank you for coming with me on this journey and please stay tuned…… 

He is Risen: How an Atheist Came to Believe in the Resurrection

When I was very young, my mother used to read to me from the Bible and tell me stories about Jesus; and as a kid I loved hearing those stories. My eyes used to go wide with amazement when she would tell me how He calmed storms, walked on water, gave sight to the blind, made the lame walk and how He rose from the dead. I believed those stories without question; I loved this Jesus very much and I prayed to Him every night before going to bed. I felt that He was really there, really listening, and I felt that He was always with me.

But as I grew older I became convinced that they were just stories. After all, my parents had also told me that Santa Claus was real and I’d believed that too, until late one Christmas Eve I went  downstairs to get a glass of water and I caught my mom wrapping my Christmas presents. That was a very good Christmas. It was the year I got Grimlock the Dinobot; but it was also the year my belief in Old Saint Nick was shattered forever. I didn’t care at all, mind you. I still got Grimlock; it didn’t matter where he came from. But it did make me wonder; why tell the story at all if it isn’t true? What’s the point?

By the time I was a teenager I had become a philosophical atheist, and in my early twenties the great mythologist Joseph Campbell provided a sound, if only partial explanation to that question. Myths, he argued, are the essence of what makes us human. They reflect a profound inner reality rather than an outward or divine reality. Myths are true, not in a literal sense, but because they are part and parcel of the human psyche; for what is man if he cannot dream? I saw the Christian story, therefore, as just another version of the ancient Roman, Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Babylonian myths; stories that tell us not about God, but the human condition. The countless stories of dying and resurrected gods that have dominated our mythological landscape were to be seen only as our own reflection in the mirror. They represented our longing to transcend this material reality and to conquer and defeat death.

I never questioned the fact that a man named Jesus had actually existed. I just couldn’t accept any of the supernatural nonsense. To quote a famous line from the movie the Crow, I thought “there ain’t no coming back!!” Jesus had lived, He had been a great moral teacher, but He was put to death and that was the end of it. His followers crafted a myth around Him and it was that myth that became known as Christianity.

Then in the year 2,000 I had my own personal encounter with God and amidst a lot of grumbling and torrents of doubt, I became a reluctant believer. You see, even after I’d had what I believed to be my own supernatural experience; accepting the supernatural as a reality was very difficult for me. It seemed to fly in the face of all logic. I doubted everything, questioned everything. The first Christians and pastors I came into contact with must have thought I was crazy because here I was confessing to be a Christian, and yet I was challenging them and debating them on just about every point. I was especially skeptical about the resurrection. In the back of my mind, I kept hearing that guy from the Crow saying “there ain’t no coming back”. And then someone told me to read C.S. Lewis.

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.”

I had simply come to the wrong philosophical conclusion about the power of myth; I had assumed that it was only a symbol. But what if that symbol could become reality? C.S. Lewis argued that all of mankind’s previous myths were expressions of our deepest yearning; that the transcendent and unknowable God would come into intimate contact with mankind and thus be made known. Christianity, Lewis said, was not merely one myth alongside countless others; rather it was the fulfillment of all previous mythological religions. What we once longed for in our myths became true in Jesus Christ, when God Himself entered into space and time.

And when it came to the resurrection story, I had ignored all the internal evidence for its reality. As I investigated the claims, the idea of the whole thing being a fabrication or a fiction just seemed more and more unlikely to me. There are a number of things I could talk about here, but instead I want to focus on just a few things that really stood out to me. First, we have the matter of the empty tomb. When something is purely invented, especially in ancient literature, the general idea was to show a thing in the best light possible. The Gospels tell us how women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb, and this just isn’t the best way to start a myth. Women were little more than second class citizens in ancient times, and this alone would have discredited the whole story for most people right out of the gates! If they were trying to start a myth, why in the world would they use women who couldn’t even testify in court? Then we have the problem of the body itself. Where is it? If the women had simply gone to the wrong tomb, or the Roman authorities had moved the body, why didn’t anyone produce it? They could have stamped out the whole hoax in a minute just by producing the body! The silence here is deafening, and it was but one smoking gun that led this former atheist to think that maybe, just maybe this myth had indeed become fact.

Then we have to look at the reaction of Christ’s followers. The Gospels didn’t gloss over the bumbling of, and at times, even the stupidity of the Apostles. When it came to the resurrection, not one of them readily accepted that it was true. They were all filled with doubt and fear, and I happen to find this fact encouraging. The way I see it, if I had been there, I would have reacted in exactly the same way as Thomas and the others did. If someone told me that a man was raised from the dead I would have thought they had gone mad! Thus, the skepticism on the part of the Apostles as depicted in the Gospels is to me evidence of its plausibility. They didn't just accept that He had risen from the dead. They demanded proof. The Gospels depict a very rational and human reaction to the supposed resurrection event. It is how most of us would have responded. They believed as you or I would; that “there ain’t no coming back.”

But then a change happens in them, literally overnight. They go from cowards and skeptics hiding in the shadows to boldly proclaiming the Good News that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. They did this under constant persecution and the threat of death. How is this possible if it were all just a myth; unless that myth had become fact?!

You see, this change occurred because when myth became fact in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, they now had hope. Death itself had been defeated on that first Easter Sunday. What all of humanity had been yearning for since the dawn of time became reality in the moment that Jesus first stood and the stone was rolled away. Saint Paul wrote of this, saying: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” (1 Thes 4:13-18)

So as we move through this Holy Week up to Easter, I want you to remember that we have hope. As an atheist, this was one thing I lacked; hope. I would think of all those I have loved and lost, I would think of my own mortality and I would be filled with an overwhelming sense of despair and futility. And if you have ever felt this way yourself, I would challenge you to ask a simple question; “what if it were true?” What if myth had indeed become fact on that first Easter Sunday?