This week John Piper, a famous pastor and author, is speaking in chapel. It has been really horrendous. Among the many outrageous claims he’s made:
- God ordained that we should sin, but it is still completely our fault and we deserve to go to hell for sinning.
- God designed and planned every evil thing that happens in the world in order to fulfill his purpose of being glorified.
- We deserve every evil that befalls us; they are all given by God. But even so, we should never be bitter towards God, but constantly thank him for his grace.
- The existence of hell glorifies God, even though most people are going there. Hell also exists so that people who aren’t going there can praise God for not sending them there.
- God designed cancer and terrorism so that in suffering, people can experience the anguish that we should feel constantly because we are sinners.
Piper is really an old-style preacher, and it should relieve you to know that most people here disagree with what he says. Actually, I haven’t heard a single person agree with him on those major points above. I just started reading his book “Don’t Waste Your Life,” and it is a real gem of absurdity. He writes with excitement about his childhood with his father who was a traveling fire-and-brimstone-preaching evangelist, and how thrilling it was to hear stories about teenagers who rejected God and then died soon after. Interestingly, I was talking to someone about this who remarked that that kind of childhood was a form of abuse. That really made me want to refer immediately to Richard Dawkins, but I restrained my excitement.
Several people have even said that hearing John Piper speak makes them want to not be a Christian. I really hope that people come away from these sermons and really scrutinize Christianity with an open mind. It’s not my goal to draw anyone away from Christianity, and I don’t advocate uninformed atheism– that’s why I keep going to chapel and reading things written by Christians. But questioning is completely pointless unless you’re willing to accept whatever answer turns out to be right.
I still attend a church at least a few times a month, though I stopped believing a couple of years ago. I go to a presbyterian church so things are a bit more laid back. but we do get the “jail house” sermons from time to time.
I spend time during the sermons these days incredulous that I ever could have believed. There is so much ….. evil! …. in church. Ok … to me, telling people not to think and “lean on” faith (as if there were something in that vacuous concept to lean on) is evil.
If anything, maybe you are right, the guy is possibly doing “our side” a service?
This is horrendous stuff
If that God is in charge then I prefer Hell
As J. Jonah Jameson would say to Rev. Piper: “Crap, crap, mega-crap.”
The first 4 bullet points are 95-100% biblically sound. The 5th is a stretch; suffering is a result of the Fall and an unintended, yet foreordained and forknown, consequence.
#4 is especially loathesome. I heard a radio preacher preach on that subject once (who also believed in predestination) and it made my stomach turn.
I say the more backward and hate-spewing the sermons of xian leaders, the better. When I showed my (still) xian wife the book of Joshua and other chouice passages, she exclaimed “well, how come no one ever preached about this before? I’ve never heard of this.” (Duh!) I want them to preach what’s really in the bible so people will have to make a clear and conscious choice rather than be lulled into faith by syrupy-sweet words of love and forgiveness all the while maintaining with an unimaginable measure of cognitive-dissonance that their god is the same yesterday (when he ordered the wholesale slaughter of women and childred), today, and forever(when he will burn people in Hell for not believing the unbeliveable).
“Don’t waste your life”, INDEED!
If there is a Deity That Loves Us, then it’s not as all powerful nor smart as the Judeo Christian god is written to be. Oh, but the Book says he’s all powerful, so we’ll invent some manly sounding righteous macho god crap about the perils of sin and evil, and ignore the fact that our version of God is a complete psychopathic evil villain from a comic book.
To me, this is all just mental gymnastics! Just accept that death might be nothing more than complete obliteration of yourself, and live this life to the fullest. Stop going around trying to invent justifications for justifications for justification of justifications.
Just… let… go… of… the … rope… and you’ll see you were only hanging inches above the ground the whole time.
This is Calvinism taken to an absolute extreme…
Remember that theologians are people too. They are not God and do not have it all figured out. Sometimes they represent the real God very poorly….
For what it’s worth, I now go to Wheaton as a graduate student. I am sorry to hear that people are turning their back to you because of your change of faith. That’s lousy. Also for what it’s worth- I became a Christian while attending a VERY SECULAR undergrad institution- Rice University in Houston Tx. I also had friends turn their back on me for the opposite reason… because I came to faith. All that just to say… I have been alone in a sea of 2500 before. So, if you need someone to vent to… I’ll listen. I’m sorry these people are doing such a crummy job of being your friends.
“God ordained that we should sin, but it is still completely our fault and we deserve to go to hell for sinning. ”
Pretty revolting – I’ve heard pretty awful explanations for this though.
Hi,
I like your blog and its topic, and admire your courage. The kind of experience you had is very interesting to me, since I’ve been atheist my whole life, grew up in an atheist family, in a secular society, and on top of that in a large and diverse city environment. I’m not even baptized, and the first time I consciously became aware of the subject I was about twelve, when I noticed that my new friend at school was a Christian (specifically, a Protestant — this was my very first question, because I had heard about that weird Catholics and Protestants thing already).
Anyway, it seems the topic of why there is good and evil really had me hooked this time. I just realized I wrote way too much to be appropriate for a blog comment. Sorry about that. Here we go…
One possible explanation, which actually resonates somewhat with my own world view, is that good and evil are in the end just opposite faces of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Why?
Well, I’m a physically-minded kind of guy, and I think if there’s one recurrent scheme in nature, it is the concept of potentials at different levels moving towards a state of equilibrium, thereby performing the work which ultimately makes this world go round. Drop a stone, watch a waterfall running, put a new battery into your flashlight — it’s everywhere. Nothing happens if the stone is already on ground level, there is no waterfall with zero height, and connecting the two power wires to the same end of the battery won’t accomplish anything. Ultimately, this basic principle of nature finds its expression in the laws of thermodynamics.
With that mindset, it comes more or less natural to make the leap to philosophy and specifically to the topic of good and evil. This is not an original thought by any means: Unless I misunderstood it completely, the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang expresses pretty much the same idea1. Am I stretching the physics analogy too far? Quite possible. After all, humans are prone to drawing false analogies to their own fields of expertise2. But hear me out: If I’m right, we should observe differences in the assessment of good and evil throughout history and across different cultures, since the distance between the two opposing poles is unlikely to be fixed.
Well, I think that’s precisely what we do observe all over the place. Christians struggle with this, too, given that the way the Bible was written strongly suggests that, 2000 years ago, practices we today consider barbaric were acceptable behavior back then. Or another example: Just a couple hundred years ago it was the perfectly accepted view that woman are intellectually inferior to men and thus shouldn’t be allowed to vote, given their incapability of thinking logically. This includes the brightest thinkers alive at the time, luminaries we still hold in great esteem today! Now we’re at the point where it is being discussed whether physical punishment of one’s children should be forbidden by law. There are still people alive today who went to school at a time where physical punishment at the hands of the teacher was performed regularly3.
Civilization advances, and at least the Western world has reached and moved past the point where survival is basically taken for granted. No wonder we now view behavior as unacceptable which would have been at most a minor offense just a century ago. If you look at it this way, decadence is actually a good thing.
It follows that moral values are indeed not absolutes. But this is also a good thing, actually, since it means we can improve ourselves further with each generation. Also, even with a relative scale of good and evil, there can still be fixed directions in morality.
Since my world view is build along these lines, I usually avoid the argument of evil when debating theists. Having good without evil seems meaningless to me. Isn’t that also an element of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? They had no knowledge of good and evil. I can’t blame Christians for accepting both good and evil as necessities. It just rings more true to me, while the idea of a god who would create only good doesn’t resonate nearly as well. Maybe Christians feel something similar, and it just rings more true to them, too. I wouldn’t know.
Now to the fun part: If Christians endorse something akin to this good-evil dualism (maybe without the relative scale bit), the same line of reasoning should apply at least equally well to the eating of your vegetables, if I may borrow your line. Is there actually a difference between eternal life and eternal death? Especially in light of how boring their heaven seems to be when they try to describe what it is like?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one. Seriously though — does the idea of life without the contrast to death actually make any sense? In heaven, there is nothing left to do for you. Eternal stagnation. Christians, if am I misunderstanding the promise I’d be glad about the opportunity to learn.
Again, sorry for the length. I wish you luck.
1 But I swear I didn’t get this from pop culture.
2 Just to avoid any misunderstandings: I’m not an expert in physics, but merely a moderately interested layperson.
3 At this point I should probably point out that I’m from Germany. The situation may have been different in the US.