Hard times reveal hard
truths. The panic-buying exemplifies the selfishness that ultimately drives us.
We can be very generous and altruistic when we are sure there is enough to go
round, but the moment we think we might have to do without, it shows that we
are nowhere near as generous as we thought – the consuming thought is, “It has
to be mine!”
Times of plague and
pestilence have shown this again and again. A recent article by David Brooks in
The New York Times looks at the history of pandemics and warns us, “You
may not like who you are about to become.”[1] He
speaks about how people get hardened during such times and basic compassion is
lost. (We see confirmation of this in the fact that people are stealing hand
sanitisers from hospitals!)
Many atheists say that we ought
to live our lives in a way which contributes to the greatest good for the
greatest number. But if the atheist is right, and God doesn’t exist, then why
not adjust your morality (since it isn’t an objective, fixed reality anyway) to
doing that which contributes to the greatest good for me?
Timothy Keller writes about
Langdon Gilkey, an American teacher of English at a university in China during
the Second World War.[2]
When the Japanese took the region he was in, he was sent to an internment
compound in Shandong Province. Gilkey believed religion was “merely a matter of
personal taste” and adhered to “secular humanism”. He believed that rational
human beings would behave in a kind and generous way without the need for a
deity imposing His will. His time of internment thoroughly dismantled that
view. There was a dispute that arose over living space. There were nine men
living in one room, and eleven in another room of exactly the same size. The
answer seemed so clear and rational – move one of the eleven into the room with
the nine to make it fair. All he needed to do was appeal to their rationality
and self-interest (because if the nine acted with fairness, they could count on
being treated fairly in the future). But no – the nine wouldn’t accept it.
Gilkey went back to his quarters utterly defeated, and then a thought struck
him, “Why should a man wish to be reasonable or moral if he thereby lost
precious space?” If you say the nine should be reasonable and moral because
it’s ultimately in their best interests, then you are appealing to the very
thing that caused them to make the decision they did – selfishness. We need
something higher than self-interest to motivate us. Gilkey came to believe that
only a genuine faith in God could do this. He said:
[Human beings] need God because their
precarious and contingent lives can find final significance only in His
almighty and eternal purposes, and because their fragmentary selves must find
their ultimate center only in His transcendent love. If the meaning of men’s
lives is centered solely in their own achievements, these too are vulnerable to
the twists and turns of history, and their lives will always teeter on the
abyss of pointlessness and inertia. And if men’s ultimate loyalty is centered
in themselves, then the effect of their lives on others around them will be
destructive of that community on which we all depend. Only in God is there an
ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from
which nothing on heaven and earth can separate us.[3]
Gilkey saw this loyalty
lived out in the compound in the life of one man, Eric Liddell, the Scottish
Olympic gold medal winner whose story was told in the movie Chariots of Fire.
Liddell was a Christian and became a missionary to China. He was imprisoned in
the compound and died there. Gilkey said, “It is rare indeed when a person has
the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have
ever known.”
If the greatest good in our
lives is our comfort, then we won’t sacrifice our comfort for anyone else. If
the greatest good in our lives is God’s glory, then it will enable us to
sacrifice our comforts for the good of others. Easy to say, but not so easy to
do. This crisis exposes the idolatry of the human heart and causes us to face
the question – who occupies the throne in my life, God or me?
[2]
Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, An Invitation to the Sceptical,
Hodder & Stoughton, 2016, pp. 247-254.
[3]
Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure,
Harper and Row, 1966, p. 242, cited in Keller, Making Sense of God, pp.
252-253.
