(New College Berkeley blog, August 1, 2014)
By Russell Yee
Recently a friend told me he no longer considered himself a Christian. His reasons were understandable–deep disappointments with God and heartbreakingly unanswered prayers, but meanwhile a busy and fulfilling season of grad school and work. His plan, he said, was to try to do good in the world without churchgoing or his former faith commitments.
As a bumper sticker I saw put it: “Doing good is my religion.”
The world is full of ways to be community-minded and neighborly, to be kind and generous to the needy, to create beauty, to care for the environment, and to do professional and volunteer work that promotes the common good. We indeed don’t need God to tell us the good we can do. So why do we need God?
Last week I went to a memorial service for a Christian friend who passed away in his 50’s, of cancer. The stories were fully heartwarming and inspiring: an admirable and winsome life as a caring family man, beloved dentist (patients invited him to their birthday parties), respected community leader, and tireless church volunteer. Strikingly, he had several truly close men friends who shared at the service, with tear-filled memories going back to childhood.
I thought to myself: If such a man needed a Savior from his sins, surely the rest of us do too.
One of my favorite G. K. Chesterton quotes is, unfortunately, probably apocryphal. It’s said a British newspaper posed the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” and Chesterton replied simply, “I am.” Chesterton specialists with digitized archives have searched in vain for the exchange (though Chesterton does have a 1910 book with that title, which I borrow for this essay). Regardless, I can simply state it myself: What’s wrong the world? I am.
What’s wrong with the world is not just “out there” and fixable with better schools and more jobs. Bernie Madoff had a fine education and a great job. He defrauded others of billions seemingly for nothing more than his own ego needs for admiration. Guess what—I have those same ego needs. Foibles differ from criminality more by degree than by kind, more by circumstance and opportunities than by inner substance. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked—who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) As one of C. S. Lewis’ poems confesses, “All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you / I never had a selfless thought since I was born.”
So what’s wrong with the world is also wrong with me. What’s is wrong with organized religion at its worst, Vladimir Putin, the pimps and drug dealers in my church’s neighborhood, identity thieves, environmental criminals, and people who don’t use their turn signals is also wrong with me. I am a carbon emitter with every breath. There is no escape via private spirituality, philanthropy (Madoff was a charitable work titan), new tech stuff, or good government. There is no escape from the human condition.
I am thankful for people who, like my post-Christian friend, try to do good in the world. I wish there were more people like him. There is a real measure of suffering and evil to be obviated by good works. Nevertheless, I hope for him the same thing I hope for myself: to nevertheless come to the end of oneself, to have somewhere to turn when we fail to do the good we full well knew to do, to find grace after we hurt those we love, to have someone who can face the darkest parts of our hearts, and to have a credible hope that our longing for a different, better world is not in vain.***
Russell Yee is the author of Worship on the Way. He teaches at Fuller Northern California and St. Mary’s College, and is developing a NCB seminar on approaches to worship. An Oakland native and resident, he is a member of New Hope Covenant Church.
Russell Yee 