Around this time of year, in the context of the countries in which Christianity was historically culturally the mainstream at one point, even people who disbelieve in Christianity often wish to appropriate some of the Christian story. At least, some of it, an innocent child, gifts, and peace among humans, are attractive even among post-Christian westerners. Salvation from sin is not so much in view for many such people–but salvation from unkindness or meanspiritedness or sadness is attractive enough for people to enjoy watching a film version of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life. At one level, I don’t want to complain about that and am happy to share in these things with people who disagree.
However, the context in which we put these things is different in some key respects. We might have joined together in some or other aspect of the Christmas celebration, we might both think these aforementioned stories beautiful pictures of redemption, but for believers the Advent which preceded it both memorializes the coming into the world of the “Beauty so Ancient and so New”[1] who made the stars and also points our minds towards His future coming to make the whole world new. Each Christmas we’re encouraged to recognize Him now as the Sun of Righteousness who offers “Light and Life” to all.[2] Someone like George Bailey or Ebenezer Scrooge might have hope of not just learning to love their fellow men in the present, but also of continuing in that love throughout all eternity in the presence of the Creator shining on them all in a way that the Sun only dimly pictures.
As much as the seasonal partaker in Christian holidays may think the Christian story and Christian-influenced stories picture opposition to evils, in the end, for many non-Christian views (I except some such as the Islamic) the person the holiday is named after, and all practitioners of the evils one might take it to symbolize the overcoming of, end in the same place. For example, any two real world counterparts of Mr. Potter and George Bailey, in the materialist view, will both in the end die and know nothing and eventually both be forgotten.
Or, to take a real world example which is in our culture used as one of the primary symbols of evil in the world, Adolf Hitler. Modern Christians and non-Christians both use him as a symbol of evil. For the Christian, his actions (barring some unknown turning away from and repentance of them which appears unlikely to have happened considering the circumstances) show an alienation from God which we have reason to believe will send him to a final abode which might be described figuratively and perhaps literally as one of burning darkness. Now, non-Christians may believe that “darkness” describes his ultimate state as well (minus, if they are secular materialists, the punishment implied by “burning”); insofar as darkness means absence of fellowship with others there is a similarity with the Christian point of view.
Let’s think about that for a moment.
People use use Christmas to embody peace, love, joy, and hope, without believing in the Christian theological underpinnings of those things. However, if the theological claims of Christmas (and Easter) are not true, then Jesus himself would be in the same condition as Hitler–darkness.
According to the most widely accepted modern science, the material world is naturally decaying. Some day our sun and every sun will burn out, every atom separate from every other atom, every piece of every atom lose connection with every other sub-atomic particle. Then in the entire universe there will (if the natural strength of the elements is allowed to run its course) be no light at all and only darkness forever.
Now, I don’t think that is a complete story, but let’s not run away from it too quickly. In the end, each one of us, whether through cancer, a car accident, human malice, or whatever, will lose the ability to keep living in this world. If the elements are allowed to run their course, every atom of us will (likely after being recycled through other creatures for a few hundred million years) eventually fade into the universal darkness. (An alternative but currently less popular theory is that the elements of the world will crash back into each-other and everything in our current universe will be destroyed that way before exploding again and forming a new universe which is otherwise discontinuous from our own, which has similar implications for the argument here.)
There’s a question of who you are trusting who could possibly save you in that moment. The material forces themselves, if we rule out any arguments they are governed by any overarching Intelligence, will prove quite unable to save anyone. In such a view, whether you lived like Hitler or like Jesus, the darkness will take you forever.
Some may object that the opening was too provocative, that we should just live and let live and (though this likely won’t be said out-loud most of the time) not care so much. In many such cases, implying that we shouldn’t care so much would be to imply that Jesus and Hitler are in fact in the same condition, but that it doesn’t matter. Someone might complain that they do not think Jesus did anything miraculous, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the same condition as Hitler. Why not? I think Jesus is in a different condition than Hitler because I believe he rose from the dead and is the Word of God clothed in humanity, but for a run of the mill post-Christian secularist, there is not some judge who might give a better eternal state to a Jewish carpenter than to a mass murdering tyrant.
One possible complaint is that Christianity leads to similar results by believing people can repent–but according to Christian teaching repentant evildoers are by God’s grace aligned with the good and not with their evil deeds. By contrast, the starless darkness to which the natural elements are tending does not, considered by itself in isolation from any consideration of providence, care whether one turned away evil deeds or went to one’s death encouraging others to participate in them. (It should also be noted that in Christian teaching there is typically an idea that there are different levels of reward, so someone who repents on his or her death bed and is saved and someone who follows the Lord his or her whole life will quite likely receive different levels of honor even though both saved.)
Someone might complain I am grabbing onto two culturally resonant people (Jesus and Hitler), but that there are cultures for which these people do not have such a resonance. Alright. Just consider a generic “good person”, or a generic “normal person”, or a generic “a bit dishonest but not that bad a person” and compare their situation to some unnamed mass murdering tyrant. When the last star has run out of fuel is there going to be anyone left to judge between them?
One might jump ahead and warn of the danger of being Judged by Ultimate Reality and found to have been an opponent of that Reality (as we are reminded of by the pleading and awful double resonance of “Who May Abide the Day of His Coming?”[3] with regard to both the first century and the final judgment). However, talk of burning darkness is likely, by many post-Christian westerners, to be used to juggle the burden of proof such that various elements of Christian hope are kept by these post-Christians–and various things derived from some subset of Christian thought, like human rights, are even, their origins forgotten, used to attack Christianity–but the issue of eternal death made to appear as something that is solely a matter of claims made by Christians, which can be dismissed while these other things are kept. Some belief systems teach there is no judgment of burning darkness to be feared, but they do leave open the issue of the darkness. In advanced western societies we do not encounter death so often as many of our ancestors would have (people are statistically less likely to die in front of us than in the past, or so I understand), so it may be easier for modern westerners to act as if they don’t have to worry about it–but everyone who isn’t worrying about it is going to die too. So, considering that you live in a universe in which every star is dying, who or what are you trusting in to save you from the darkness?
Now, there are some non-Christian belief systems which do attempt to address such questions, but they often require a level of commitment that is unappealing to a typical post-Christian westerner (I am not attempting in this essay to refute high commitment non-Christian religions like, say, Hasidic Judaism).
Someone might say they don’t need to trust in anything, they just accept the darkness is going to take them and live till it does. In reality, no one fully lives like this. The arguments used to attack Christianity by post-Christian westerners are very often developed from complex belief systems which were only able to develop within a context provided by Christianity. Modern science itself was only able to breakthrough to a situation of Great Divergence-level massive accumulated progress in a culturally Christian context. People claim that the universe will end in starless darkness but live their day to day lives appealing to human rights which were justified during the period this mode of articulating things became dominant, even by non-Christians, in terms of “nature and nature’s God”. Post-Christian westerners will often want to claim a bit of the awe of the transcendent (a higher purpose, etc.) during this or that holiday while then selectively claiming that everything is a matter of random chance at other times. When someone dies some vague gesture towards a higher purpose for human life will often be made–as if somehow the darkness won’t win in the end. While people differ and there are some people who are relatively willing to take unpleasant positions (and Christians should engage with such arguments), most post-Christian westerners are not simply following evidence and then accepting an unpleasant conclusion, rather, for various reasons they are using an edited version of the Christian worldview which denies several of the things which make it (even the parts they accept) coherent. One cannot coherently claim that empirical study of the world proves it is meaningless and hopeless and then place one’s hope in a meaning to be derived from empirical science. Everyone lives at least some of the time like it is true that there is some source of “Joy to the World”[4] external to ourselves, why not actually believe that and commit to be the sort of people who strive to live lives consistent with that Joy?
[1] https://epistleofdude.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/a-comparison-of-different-translations-of-augustines-confessions-late-have-i-loved-you/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGw-VZC_oDo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefxlLpuq_E
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRhcgBFnBAc
ibperry 