John Newton was a difficult young man who had been hardened by a life at sea and brutalized by a public flogging. He had seriously contemplated murdering the ship’s captain who ordered his flogging and Newton came to have little compunction about abusing others. Perhaps not surprisingly, he became a slaver. Ironically, he was later forced to become a slave himself to the African wife of a slave master in West Africa. He was eventually rescued, and encountered God during a storm at sea as he returned to England.
After his conversion, Newton trained to become an Anglican priest. He worked in London as an evangelical minister and became an ally and friend of William Wilberforce, helping him to bring about the abolition of slavery in Britain. The fact that God could forgive Newton after all that he had done moved him to pen the words of the great hymn, Amazing Grace.
No religion in the world has transformed so many people as profoundly as authentic Christianity. This claim has been put well by the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart in a big juicy statement. He says:
“Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization … there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.”
It seems that God causes people to be good—and this has enormous implications for society. It can have enormous implications for you… if you don’t allow atheism to rob you of it.
The English rabbi and scholar, Jonathan Sacks, has written an explosive article entitled Atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians. In it, he says,:
“You cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.”
He goes on to speak of the German atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s later writings, he warns that losing the Christian faith will mean abandoning Christian morality. This, as Sacks explains, leaves us in some very chilly waters: “No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead, the ‘will to power’. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead, people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak.”
Sacks makes the point that the new atheists are both presumptuous and careless when talking about secular morality:
“If asked where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion, the new atheists start to stammer. They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t.”
He’s right. The American Declaration of Independence proclaims that people have equal worth and an equal right to life, liberty and happiness. It says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The fact is, however, that for those parts of the world that lack a Judeo-Christian heritage, e.g. Africa and Asia, these truths are not at all evident; they are actually quite foreign. The idea that a prince and a pauper should both suffer the same consequence for the same felony is not self-evident for much of humanity. Notions of equality of worth, equality in law, and equality of opportunity are primarily evident in nations founded on Judeo-Christian principles. These biblical principles have undergirded the Western world’s legal system, hospital system, education system and democratic system of governance.
The American philosopher and historian, Will Durant, wrote an eleven-volume work with his wife, Ariel, called The Story of Civilization. As a result of his research, he concluded:
“There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” This is a hugely significant statement. The strident atheists, humanists and secularists of our time are asking us to create a society in which there is no God—when no such society has ever been shown to work well.”
Jonathan Sacks voices a similar concern to Durant. He said: I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other. A century after a civilisation loses its soul, it loses its freedom also.
This is a vital point to make.
Yet Christianity should not be adopted simply for the sake of pragmatism, that is, because it results in a “nicer” society. Christianity only deserves to be embraced if it is true.
If it is true… and you have not embraced the love and hope of God, that would be a tragedy.
Please don’t invite that tragedy on yourself.
