His Kingdom
We discussed in a previous entry (PaxFutura.org 11/14/19) that worldview failures can be catastrophic. Also that there are at this time two prevailing world views; that they are fundamentally different and incompatible; and therefore that only one can be correct. Of course the rational actor, especially including family leaders, ought regardless of current fashion to embrace the one most likely to ensure success.
We examined in brief evidence for acceptance of one worldview over the other, and say simply that one believes in the Christian God and tries to live accordingly, and the other does not. For the time when you might undertake a worldview evaluation the following examines what ‘belief in the Christian God and trying to live accordingly’ entails.
In the book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis, a former atheist converted to the Faith, seeks to “explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”
We will call upon the brilliance of Lewis’ powerfully cogent explanation, extrapolate to examine societal benefits and connect the theology of the believers to reality in America as engine of the West.
From Lewis’s formulation:
1. God exists. This is proven by the fact of human morality; our innate understanding of right and wrong behavior, particularly how we have concrete belief in whether others are treating us fairly or not. This personal standard of fairness is possessed by everyone, in generally equivalent form, at all times and in all places. The untruthfulness of anyone’s claim not to care how they are treated is revealed as soon as someone treats them unfairly. This accepted human code of conduct cannot have simply evolved from successful changes in the process of natural selection, because right behavior does not always favor the actor or lead to survival. In many instances, morality involves putting oneself at risk, as in right conduct for soldiers in war and for those protecting the vulnerable during times of peace. Further, it cannot have resulted from socialization because it is present even before socialization has any impact, and endures even against negative conditioning. God’s existence is proven by the instructions for human behavior undeniably written upon each person’s heart.
2. God created Man. He alone possesses the knowledge about our body, mind and soul, and what is vital for our individual survival and success. It should be easily recognized that the original and sole creator should have the supreme understanding about the creation. This becomes especially true when one begins to understand the near incomprehensible complexity of humankind. One example is human DNA. The molecule has been under study since 1953 and more specifically during and forward from the Human Genome Project which concluded in 2003. That study successfully sequenced 3.2 billion nucleobase pairs of the human genome from which are drawn the genes which make each person human, and unique.
Recent discoveries are awe inspiring. Melissa Cain Travis in 2018’s Science and the Mind of the Maker wrote, “An amazing fact about the DNA molecule is that it is the most compact data storage medium in existence, far surpassing any man-made technology. Consider that the human genome contains over three billion base pairs arranged in specific sequences on strands of DNA. Two meters of DNA is tightly coiled into 23 pairs of chromosomes located within the nuclei of our cells – a space that is only 10 microns in diameter (a micron is one millionth of a meter). The human body consists of around 10 trillion cells, which means it contains about 20 trillion meters of DNA – roughly 12.4 million miles! It is estimated that one gram of DNA – about the mass of a small paper clip – can be encoded with 215 million gigabytes of data. By way of comparison, that’s the storage capacity of 4.3 million 50 gigabyte Blu ray discs or several thousand of the densest computer hard drives available.” Just one gram of DNA . . .
The further awe inspiring aspect of the complexity of this mass of data is the unique, and necessary, ordering of it. In Signature in the Cell, Dr. Stephen Meyer explains, “As it turns out, specific regions of the DNA molecule called coding regions have the same property of “sequence specificity” or “specified complexity” that characterizes written codes, linguistic texts, and protein molecules. Just as the letters in the alphabet of a written language may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do the sequences of nucleotide bases inscribed along the spine of a DNA molecule convey a precise set of instructions for building proteins within the cell.”
Meyer continues, “Whether we are looking at a hieroglyphic inscription, a section of text in a book, or computer software, if you have information, and you trace it back to its source, invariably you come to an intelligence. Therefore, when you find information inscribed along the backbone of the DNA molecule in the cell, the most rational inference, based upon our repeated experience, is that an intelligence of some kind played a role in the origin of that information.” This evidence strongly suggests that God created Man, and wrote the ‘users manual’ as for such ordered complexity, transcendent characteristics and tightly controlled variability within a range of outcomes to have evolved completely at random is a near statistical impossibility.
3. God designed Man to be in relationship with God. The first question, unique among living things to Man, and asked by every person born on earth is “What is my Purpose?” Regardless of the innumerable answers hypothesized over the millennia, Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest answer, that requiring the fewest assumptions, is likely the correct one. In this case, in a world viewed with God as the Creator of Man, Man’s purpose is to get to know God and God’s will for us. This view satisfactorily explains another question, or mystery of life: Why all people in all times have experienced an innate sense of unrequited idealism for a better world. The Christian worldview simply explains that a better world is achieved on Earth through knowledge and honoring of God, and so ultimately passing from this earthy life to an eternity in the perfect world Heaven.
The requirement for this relationship is binary by design. Similar to the requirement for electricity to power an electric appliance, there are only two outcomes possible; either the individual operates successfully according to design, or it does not. God created Man, uniquely knows the functioning of body, mind and soul, and His reasons for triggering in each one of us a search to find and drive to fulfill our purpose. Interestingly, one of the typical answers given among secular thinkers is that Man’s purpose is to continue to live and to continue to evolve in the search for health, happiness and longevity. The Christian worldview endorses this understanding as far as it goes, while recognizing that the secular world would try to be comforted by and content with only baby steps. With certainty, Christians believe that fulfilling their God-given purpose to be in relationship with Him delivers health, happiness and longevity beyond the greatest expectations of the unbeliever, even into eternity.
4. God gave Man free will to chose. God is freedom. Freedom to chose, freedom from slavery-to-sin, freedom from purposelessness and freedom from death. Man is free to chose whether or not to believe in God, have faith in His promises and enter relationship with Him. Man’s God-given ability to chose empowers us with rights and requires of us responsibilities, opens the possibility of achievement, joy and contentment, and differentiates man not only from other forms of life, but distinguishes a Man using his reasons to guide his thoughts, words and deeds from a mere souless automaton. God designed Man with the freedom to chose to enter into relationship with Him.
5. The Goal of relationship with God is to become like Christ. To recall, many accept the theory of evolution to explain the rise of humanity, even many Christians who believe evolution may have been part of God’s plan. And a popular answer to the question of life’s purpose is to “continue to evolve as humans.” The question becomes, “What is the next step in human evolution?” For Lewis, the answer is, “To evolve into New Men, as little Christs, the perfection of the human form.” Christ is the realization of humankind’s continued evolution into something new and improved; Man born again, invested with God’s Holy Spirit energizing and directing our lives through our thoughts, words and deeds; experiencing God’s grace and blessings on Earth; defeating death and joining God in his perfect Heaven for eternity. Now that is a next step!
Critically, to be Christlike is to be born again, invested with God’s Holy Spirit. Consider that all living organisms are thermodynamic systems. Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow William Thomson, Lord Kelvin’s 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy, the measure of the inefficiency of heat exchange of the system increases over time: living organisms age and eventually die. But in the Christian understanding, the Spirit lives forever. To become Christ-like is to be born again of the Spirit to continue in relationship with God the Creator and his Children on this temporal orb and into eternity.
6. Christ is Love. To become Christ-like and invested with the Spirit is to love all, as the Spirit energizes and guides us in loving everyone as God loves us. Each person as an individual, a unique Creation of God’s, equal in worth and importance, each an organ of the larger body of God’s Kingdom. Each individual is as a tile in a mosaic ,the design of which is known completely only to God, yet incrementally advanced toward completion and revelation as each individual is secured into their place in His Kingdom.
7. God’s Kingdom on Earth is real and advancing toward fruition. Like the mosaic that has seen the tiles placed one by one over the centuries as Christians committed their lives and souls to His service, God’s Kingdom is expanding to “all nations” for the betterment of all mankind.
And what does God’s Kingdom look like? Christians living according to God’s will as little Christs moving toward perfect humanity. The traditional Christian virtues are: Prudence; Justice; Temperance; Fortitude; Faith; Hope and Charity. The first four are called the cardinal virtues, and Lewis points out that cardinal comes from the Latin word describing the ‘hinge of the door’ or meaning they are ‘pivotal’ for mankind. Prudence means practical common sense, using your mind to guide you and being reasonable – having sensible reasons – for your thoughts, words and deeds. As Jesus taught in Matthew 12:30 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all of your soul and with all of your mind and with all of your strength.”
Temperance is the ability to control one’s appetites, taking enough of earthly pleasures but not too much. Intemperate behavior is possible regarding every human endeavor. Aristotle wrote in the 4th Century BC that virtue consisted in knowing needs from wants and pursing each in the correct measure.
Justice is all encompassing and demands truthfulness and fairness in every relationship and all walks of human life. Fortitude supports the two kinds of courage – the one that overcomes fear to face danger, and the one that that Kipling spoke of when he wrote, ‘If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on, when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold On!’” Lewis says that we will notice that we cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing Fortitude into play. Further, persevering in virtuous behavior returns a certain quality of character. Returning to Aristotle, we recall that he taught, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” This type of excellence, this progress toward the perfection of the human being, is what God desires for all people in advancing his Kingdom on Earth, and in preparing every soul for harmony into eternity in Heaven.
The virtue of Faith is the ability to sustain belief in what we know to be true when inescapable doubts arise, as they alway do. The example Lewis provides is his belief in the efficacy of anesthetics and the proficiency of surgeons becoming challenged upon being wheeled into the operating theater. It is his faith in what he believes to be true that must triumph over the fears of his imaginings. “The battle is between faith and reason on the one hand, and emotion and imagination on the other.”
Hope is the virtue required of Christians of looking forward to improvement in this world and entry into the next. Lewis writes, “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversation of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on Earth precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. Aim at Heaven and you will get the Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.” Continuing, he explains, “ We shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something even more.” In the same way as we have observed elsewhere, the reason “exporting democracy” most often fails is that there exists a prerequisite, a something more, before the freedoms and responsibilities of self-rule can obtain. While heaven may initially be a difficult goal to focus on, it may be because when the real want for heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. “Most people, if they really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that what they do want, and want acutely, is something that cannot be had in this world.” Christian Hope is connecting with the eternal God for his blessings today and for evermore.
Now according to Lewis, Charity means ‘love, in the Christian sense’; that state of love which we have about ourselves, and must learn have about other people. As Jesus taught in Matthew 22: 37-39, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This love is not emotional but intentional; the two parts being forgiveness even for acts and people we do not like, and honest universal goodwill, wishing and promoting for every other person the happiness and success we desire for ourselves. The manifestation of this Christian love is tangible, written across the pages of history and upon the hearts of multiple millions of believers throughout the last two millennia. Before Christ, for the great majority of people on Earth, life was cheap, brutal and short. Christianity and with it, it’s worldview and applied Christian living, were first to sanctify life, making life important as the cherished gift from God, and then dignifying it, making it worth living in relationship with and according to the will of God. Our God of Truth and Love delivered foundations for all the great achievements of humanity. The most important discoveries of moral philosophy and political economy came from belief in honoring our Christian God. It was the Christian God that commanded Thou Shalt Not Kill; that instigated personal liberty to chose what to believe and how to live, and personal responsibility for ones choices; that cherished women and children, taught the value of monogamy and family life; that established private property, honored creativity and inquiry and dignified work, prudence, sobriety and thrift. It was our Christian God that taught that people should not covet, and should not place importance on earthly wealth and desires of the flesh, but to be honest, moral, diligent, thankful and generous. It was Christian values that saved the world from barbarity, changed the age from dark to light and ushered in the greatest era in the human experience on Earth. Maybe it goes without saying, but we will say it anyway: it was not atheists, socialists, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Hindus, Native American shamans or witches that made the world the best it has been – Western Civilization – but God honoring Christians.
Christianity is objectively the foundation of most all that is good in the world. The corollary is that determined Godlessness delivered evil in awful abundance. While the Bible’s sixty-six Books of law, narrative, poetry, prophecy and letters record God’s revelation of Himself and of Jesus, and their relationships first with Jewish and later Gentile culture, the central theme is God’s plan and purpose for the earthly blessing and eternal salvation of all his children. And wouldn’t you know, an objective view of human history closely parallels that message – History is His Story. It is broadly true that those who believe are blessed and fulfilled, and those who do not are often wanting and discontented, which the epidemics of self-induced human misery attest. Societies and countries follow similar distinctions. Absent God there would be no America, and with no America no Western Anglosphere to lead the world to freedom and prosperity. It is popular to highlight the death and destruction of the Crusades and Christian wars of religion, and the evils of Colonialism and Imperialism. The truth is that modern interpretations of those topics are very often simplistic, one sided and take the events out of historical context. Even considering the terrible errors of judgement, misunderstandings, mistakes and true human tragedy, they simply pale in comparison to the atrocities of the atheists. In just the 20th century, revolution and war among the Godless killed more than 100 million people with abortion adding another 50 million murders annually, or one billion babies killed just in the last twenty years! Is it coincidence that over the last 2,000 years, God honoring people, families, communities and countries have seemed to have cracked-the-code to a better life on Earth in comparison to the Godless?
Which brings us to America. We have written previously about our Nation’s Christian foundations, in The Essential Christian Character of the United Sates (PaxFutura.org July 4, 2020) and One Nation Under God (PaxFuture.org January 14, 2021). We illuminate how America is unique in all the history of world, and how our uniqueness makes us exceptional, objectively measured by the unprecedented liberty, health, wealth and happiness of our citizens and those reached by American institutions, values and charity around the world. It is America that has come closest to delivering His Kingdom on Earth. Never forget that the American Declaration of Independence authored the immortal words:
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States . . . And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
With respect to the exposition of the elements of God’s Kingdom above – knowing what we know about His Will for us on Earth – three questions emerge:
First, among every religion and philosophy invented by Man, is there another more congruent the hopes and dreams, indeed the reality, of the human experience, that more impels the highest expression of our nature for the good of all here on Earth and into the ever after?
Second, among all other nations instituted among Men in the long history of the world, is there another that surpasses America for bringing liberty, equality, justice, opportunity, prosperity, health and charity to its citizens and the world?
Finally, is there a better model for continuing the building of His Kingdom on Earth than the political, economic and religious freedoms of Christian America?
Scotus
photo credit: Madaba Mosaic Map, Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan