Meaning Q&A

Thank you for listening to this Q&A session of Questioning Christianity. We hope you'll continue exploring Christianity by requesting your free copy of Tim Keller's book Making Sense of God. Free copies will be shipped while supplies last. Thank you also to those who have already sent in some questions. And I...

This one came early on, and towards the end of your talk, you did talk more, Tim, about what the Christian worldview offers, that it gives you skills to cope and hope for beyond this life.

But you also talked a lot about how the secular approach to meaning doesn't work. But this person's asking, what are the ultimate goals of a Christian life? For example, do Christians want to be happy? Is it love? Is it to not sin? Yeah, that's great. Christianity has an interesting... Christianity, and actually, if you're able to get back here... the next two weeks, you'll hear me talk more about this. Christianity talks about the ordering of our loves. So, for example,

I need to love my wife, but I should not be loving my wife more than God. And actually, I alluded to it a little bit tonight. In other words, there's nothing wrong with loving your work. But if you actually love your work more than anything else in life, it becomes your meaning in life, and then it makes you radically vulnerable. So the...

The Christian idea would be, if you aim at pleasing God, you will be happy. In other words, if aim at pleasing God is the number one thing, then happiness is a byproduct of that. If you say... I'll aim at happiness first, you won't get either happiness or please God. C.S. Lewis, forgive me for, I just know too many. He's so quotable. It's hard to...

Avoid it. C.S. Lewis says, aim at heaven, you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. Got that? Aim at heaven, you get earth thrown in. In other words, don't aim to be happy. In fact, Jesus says it too. He says, you lose your life to find your life. And what he means by that is, don't try to be happy. Love God and love your neighbor and you'll be happy. If you try to be happy...

directly, you won't actually love God or your neighbor and you won't be happy either. And you can see how this might work. I've had people come to me and say, I'm really discouraged, and I'm really downcast, and I see my Christian friends that have got a lot of happiness, and I'd like to get that, which is okay to start.

There's nothing wrong with saying, and maybe somebody in this room is in that situation. But you see, the danger is if you use God as a means to an end of being happy, you just aren't... Essentially, you may be saying, well, my career is not going very well. I want to find happiness. And what you really mean is I want God to let my life go better. You can't use God to be happy because in the end, what you're really doing is you're making God into an instrument.

If you say what's most important, my meaning in life is to please God, to know him, to please him, to come to resemble him, to delight in him, to enjoy him, it's to be God-centered. And if you are, then the other things come. And that's probably the best, that's the fastest way to do it. But if you keep coming back, you'll actually hear what I just said.

in a couple other ways. And the best way for some of these ideas to sink in is to hear them along different perspectives. But I think that's the fastest way to answer that question. Thank you.

There are many questions coming in about suffering. You ended highlighting that you don't know why God allows for suffering in the world. But someone asked, can there be a just... God when he lets innocent people suffer? Well, see, here's the thing. Jesus was an innocent person. In fact, he was completely innocent. In fact, the only completely innocent person.

but he suffered. Now, if you counter and say, well, we know why he suffered. Ah, that's right. You do know why. You see, inside the Bible, in fact, in some ways, the entire Bible is... dedicated to showing why an innocent man, Jesus Christ, had to suffer and what his suffering accomplished. You could say the entire Bible is basically dedicated to that. So it's this massively complicated long book and story, but that's its main point. If God is just, and the Bible says He is,

that that must mean that there's a book for every single bit of suffering. Got it? In other words, he said, we don't have that book. We don't have your book. We don't have it. We've only got Jesus. So, if Jesus Christ, who was completely innocent, and He suffered, there was a plan there, there's no reason not to believe there's not a plan for everybody and everything.

Or, listen, let me give you a little, let me do a little philosophical move on you. I hope you don't feel it as being unfair. But if you say, there can't be any good reason. for God, a just God to allow innocent people to suffer. There can't be. I just gave you one example.

of an innocent person who suffered and there was a good reason. And you say, well, there can't be any others. Well, see, just because you can't think or I can't think, just because we can't think of a good reason why God would allow an innocent person to suffer doesn't mean there can't be one.

If you say, because I can't think of it, therefore it can't exist, that doesn't make sense. Because if there is a God big enough for you to be mad at for allowing evil and suffering, then you've got a God big enough to have a reason for it that you can't know. or you don't know. So there has to be a little bit of willingness to admit that it's possible that God might have a reason for allowing it that we don't know yet. Another question about suffering.

Did God create suffering, and if so, why? Well, Christianity gives a half an answer to that, okay? Christianity says, no, God did not create a world of suffering. He didn't create that. However you read the first couple chapters of Genesis, and I don't want to get into talking too much about it, there's various ways of reading it.

But I think everybody knows that the message of it is that God did not create a world in which he intended there to be suffering, but that because we turned away from him, everything stopped working. Just in a way, for example, if my, well, I may come back to this illustration later, but if any of you ever had a bone pulled out of its socket, out of joint, you know. What am I calling that? It's a dislocated shoulder, which means the bone's not in his proper socket.

It's enormously painful. Not only is it painful, but as you're moving around, you may be tearing up tissue and you may be tearing up the muscle and that sort of thing. We were built, the world was built to have us completely centered on God. loving God, serving Him. And when we decided to turn away from that,

Everything in the world, everything has been pulled in a sense. We've been pulled out of our socket, and it's nothing but damage. So there's social problems, psychological problems, physical problems. Everything in the world doesn't work. Now, you can still say...

And here's where I don't have an answer. So the answer is no, God did not create suffering and evil. On the other hand, he made us capable of bringing it about. And then you say, I pushed the mystery back further, and I'm not going to be able to answer this. Well, why did he do that? Let me be honest and say, not only don't I know, I don't know.

Again, though, you've got to remember my answer from a minute ago. Just because I don't know doesn't mean, well, then there can't be a good reason. I don't know why he made us capable of bringing it about. But I have to tell you...

Some of you are out there saying, well, it's because he gave us free will. And maybe upstairs, if you want to come and ask me, I'll tell you why that doesn't actually, that's not sufficient for me anymore. I think 20 years ago I might have said, well, he made us capable of free will. There must be something beyond that because if you love somebody and you know that that person has free will and that they use that free will, they are going to hurt themselves. You usually stop them.

And so if he hasn't stopped us from doing this, then why? What's the reason? I don't know. So I'm just being honest about that. But you've got to remember my last answer, which was, because we don't know doesn't mean, therefore, you can't believe in God.

And on that point, someone says, you mentioned that thinking deeply gives Christians more meaning in life. It should. Therefore, I have trouble reconciling this idea when so many of your answers are just because I can't think of a reason doesn't mean there is one. Oh, yeah. Thoughts? Well, yeah, no, no, no. See, but... But I did give you something. I said, there's one, to me, if the reason for God allowing evil and suffering is that he doesn't care.

Because that's the implication. People are implying when they say, why would a just God allow all this evil and suffering? The implication is what? He just doesn't care. You know, he's not loving. And I'm telling you, Christianity is the one religion that doesn't just show you a God up there. who's looking down and maybe being indifferent, but a God who, whatever his reasons are for allowing evil and suffering,

They must be good. Why? Because he loves us. Why? How do I know that? Because he got involved in suffering himself. He came and experienced infinite suffering. What am I doing right now? I'm thinking. See, I'm thinking out the implications of the cross. I'm thinking out the implications of Jesus dying. And what I'm doing, that does not get me all the way.

to knowing why God allows it, but it gives me confidence that I can trust God that has good reasons. See that? So, I wouldn't say I'm not… I'm not saying don't think. I am thinking. I want you to think too.

A couple questions like this one. No matter how much meaning Christianity may in practice give you, isn't it founded in a belief system which is just as temporary as the material world? And so just as much as an illusion... as the secular approach to meaning? Well, no, because, I mean, there are reasons.

I've said before there's a lot of different ways to compare systems, and one of the problems I have with this whole series is it's very natural. It happened last week, too. It's very natural for you to want to run forward to all the other... questions. So is there, for example, are there arguments, are there good logical arguments for the existence of God? Or do we just say, which I've already granted, you can't ultimately prove there's a God.

So you say, okay, so you can't prove there's a God. You can't prove there isn't a God. Therefore, and the implication of this question is, In other words, all of our houses are built on sand. You believe your way, and I believe my way, and so it's all an illusion. which I don't think I ever, I didn't say that. I just said it was based on faith. But here's my question. I would never grant that some of the belief systems aren't more rational than others.

I mean, I even, tonight what I was trying to say is, if a belief system actually doesn't fit your experience, it's not livable. then isn't that actually a mark against it? I'm just trying to say, yeah, I think it is. But I was not trying to make a case for the truth of Christianity.

rationally and logically tonight. I just, I'm not there yet. I would be very happy to say, I think the arguments for the existence of God, some of them have a lot of weight. So I even think it might be more reasonable to believe in God than not to. I believe that there's evidence for the resurrection. I believe that there's evidence for the historical reliability of the Gospels and what they tell us about Jesus. I can get you there.

But not tonight, that's all. So I would never say that because we can't finally prove that any one of these systems of belief are the ultimate, or you can't empirically prove any one of them. in a demonstrable, slam-dunk way, that doesn't mean I believe that they're all equally rational or irrational. I think some are more rational than others, and I think some are more livable than others, and I'm trying to accumulate my evidence.

over a period of a number of weeks. You said that the secular approach to meaning in life doesn't work for anyone. At the suffering level. At the suffering level. Someone asked, though, why can't I adopt coping mechanisms without converting to Christianity? Oh, by the way, well, you can. I made a real...

I said this very briefly because I realized as I was speaking that I hadn't read it recently, but I made an allusion. Richard Schwetter, this cultural anthropologist, I don't know if any of you know Jonathan Haidt.

who's a pretty well-known author right now. He took his doctorate at the University of Chicago under Schwedder. Schwedder says that his studies of how secular people handle suffering is they do borrow from other... belief systems in other words when suffering happens they have a tendency to borrow from other belief systems

He would say, though, that that's a mark of the weakness. If you've got a belief system that in the end, as you try to live it out, you actually have to borrow ideas from other systems that actually don't fit in yours. They actually don't fit. That is, they're inconsistent with your understanding of the world. Then don't you have to start to say, maybe I need to alter my belief system. So Schweder does say that most of the coping mechanisms...

are things like that. Viktor Frankl, for example, in his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist that survived Auschwitz, and he wrote a book afterwards. that talked about why certain people were able to survive the death camps and why some people weren't. He said it wasn't just that people got gassed. A lot of people just died before they were ever put into the ovens or into the...

Before they were executed, they died. Sometimes they just lost hope. They just curled up and just died. Sometimes they became evil, and they started trying to collaborate with the Nazis. So afterwards, he tried to add it up, and he decided... Go look for this, Man's Search for Meaning, that the people who had meaning in life that was somewhat inside this world, so their meaning in life was their career or their social status or their beauty, for example.

The death camp took that all away, and they were the ones that kind of just shriveled up. The people, he said, who survived usually were people who got more religious. They did. And he told us one story about a man who actually said, At one point, Victor Franco, I guess had spoken to him, and he said, you seem to be keeping your, you're loving to people, you're kind to people, you're keeping your poise. Why? And you know what he said? He says, my wife is dead, and I believe she's looking down.

at me from heaven, and I want her to be proud of me. Now, that's not a full-blown, certainly that's not a, well, obviously he was Jewish. That's not even a full-blown Jewish faith. But what had happened was he had relocated. He was a secular person, evidently, that had relocated his meaning in life somewhere outside in order to survive.

Now, what you can say is, well, why can't I do that? Sure you can, but right here, we're here actually trying to compare belief systems. If you've got to smuggle goods in from some other belief system, to handle suffering, maybe you should be in that belief system instead of the one you're in.

Many questions related to the reality that unfortunately the church and Christians are actually a part of causing suffering to others. One specifically asks, how should victims who suffered from the sexual abuses by the Catholic Church deal with the suffering? Well, by the way, we ought to dedicate, and we will, I think, in the future, dedicate a fair amount of time.

I don't mean to the Catholic. I'm not saying in the future I'll dedicate a lot of time to that particular, but the fact is that there's just plenty of things in the history of the church that are... that are quite terrible. I guess this question is, but I certainly will address it right now. Let me just think. There's too much to say, so I've got to be brief, right?

Well, there's a macro and the micro question. The macro question is, when you see the church inflicting suffering and injustice on people, how do you respond to that? And all I can tell you is... There should be no excuses for the church. There shouldn't be any defensiveness. There ought to be truth-telling. There ought to be as much restitution as possible. There shouldn't be any...

There shouldn't be any little two-step or any way of minimizing it all. All I want to tell you, though, when it's all done is keep this in mind. When you criticize the church, virtually always you're using Christian standards to criticize the church, aren't you? In other words, you're saying, and this is perfectly right, perfectly warranted, perfectly fair, to say the church is not living up to its own Christian standards.

It's betrayed its own standards. That's right. But notice what you're doing when you judge the church and condemn the church on the basis of their own standards. In another weird way, you're actually affirming Christianity. In other words, you're rightly denouncing the church, but that certainly doesn't disprove Christianity because you're using the Christian standard.

You know, the love your neighbor and as yourself and all that stuff. You're using the Christian standard, which actually doesn't invalidate Christianity. So that's one thing to say. Secondly, when it comes to, if you're really talking about the sex scandals, I guess I already mentioned, Christianity actually has plenty of things in it that tell you what you're supposed to do. You are supposed to tell the truth. You are supposed to seek justice.

There does need to be complete repentance. There shouldn't be any excuses at all. So the apparatus for that, again, is actually in the Christian faith, even though it may seem obscurity. The church's injustices may obscure and say, I don't want anything to do with Christianity because of that. But I'm just trying to say Christianity has actually got the solution inside it for what's wrong with the church. So let's tell the truth about the church. Let's...

Let's not in any way make excuses at all, but let's realize that it's in the very gospel itself that you actually have the, you might say, the tools to not only bring justice, but also bring healing. I think a lot of ways that... I'm sorry, that's too short. Whoever you are, it's too short. I apologize. But we pretty much have to keep going on.

I think a lot of ways that people have experienced suffering from the church is... Often, sometimes the church is responsible for creating barriers, even from believer to non-believer, secular, non-secular, so that it feels exclusive. I'm paraphrasing someone's question, so forgive me that I'm having to cut. part of it out to get straight to some of the questions, but is there a more loving, accepting way to derive meaning that doesn't exclude our fellow humans?

Good. By the way, all these questions are... Here's the good thing. Please keep them coming back if you can, or watching or coming, because... And this might sound like a broken record. You're asking questions about things that we will actually spend more time on in the future. But I would say that there's no way... not to be to some degree exclusive. Everybody believes that there's a right way, that there's good and there's evil.

that there's a right way to think and there's a wrong way to think, and that the way you would like people to think would be better than the way that a lot of people are thinking, right? Isn't that exclusive? In other words, I've had people say to me, You know, Christians say that if you don't have my view of spiritual reality, you're wrong.

Christians are always trying to evangelize and they're trying to convert me to their way of thinking. And that's too exclusive. And I say, okay, well, what's your view? Well, I believe, you'll say, that... You could say, all good people go to heaven, or all religions are good, or no religions are good.

But then I'll say, so you really do think, right, that your way of looking at God and spiritual reality is better than the Christian way. So, in other words, you're saying your way was more open-minded and the Christian way is more exclusive. Is that what you're saying?

Right. Well, in other words, you're saying you're right and they're wrong, and it would be better if they believed what you believed. Yeah. Well, isn't that—but aren't you doing to the Christian then what you just told the Christian they can't do?

See, in the end, everybody thinks, I think the answer is yeah, everybody has a take on things that you think it would be better if more people believe the way I do. And if you don't believe the way I do, I'm going to try to convince you to see it my way.

And by the way, even if you say, no, no, no, I don't convince anybody that way. I think everybody is free to live the way they want to live. But that's still a view of things that you think is better than a person who's trying to convert people. In the end... Being exclusive is not what you believe. It's how you treat people who don't believe what you believe. That's it. Being exclusive is not a matter of what you believe because everybody thinks they're right.

and other people are wrong, and if more people who are wrong believe the right thing, it'd be better. Everybody believes that. Everybody's exclusive. It's not a matter of what you believe. It's how you treat people who don't agree with you. Christianity, even though, look, and we can get back to, oh, what about all the awful, bigoted Christians? There's plenty of them I know. In fact, if I'm going to be so, and we haven't escaped it here, but I mean,

Most Christians know about all the bad parts of Christianity. We're always trying to improve it. We know that. But in the end, in the end, what you have to keep in mind is... Christianity has some resources for loving people who are different. My wife, two days after 9-11... Two days after 9-11, we were reading in an editorial in the New York Times, actually, that it said the real problem with the world is fundamentalism. People who think they have the truth.

That's the reason why we have terrorism. That's the reason we have this. People who think they have the truth. And of course, my wife, Kathy, said, no, everybody thinks they have the truth. Even people who say, people who say they have the truth, they're the trouble. Well, is that a truth or not?

If it's false, why should I believe you? And if it's true, don't you think you have the truth? She says, no, no, no. She says, it depends on what your truth is. And then she said, have you ever seen an Amish terrorist? And what she meant by that is, if you believe, if you're fundamental,

If your main truth is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, saying, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. If that's the very heart of your faith, that's got to make you more open to people who differ from you. So there's resources in Christianity. to make you less exclusive in your attitude. So being exclusive is not a matter of what you believe, it's how you treat the people who disagree with you.

A question. If that's true, if what matters is how you treat the people who disagree with you, this person is asking actually about Christians that they... potentially experience or view. It says, if Christians are supposedly better at loving people who are different, then how come evangelicals have fueled that polarization in our country right now? Now, let me do a little analysis of that question.

What was that? Give me the first clause. If Christians are supposedly better at loving people who are different. I did not say that. True. Wait a minute. I hope you're taking this in the... I'm trying to make a joke about this. That's a premise that actually I won't grant. I did not say that Christians are... I say Christians have got unparalleled resources.

They have unequaled resources, and if they're not drawing on them, that doesn't mean the resources aren't there. That doesn't mean you can't draw on them. It doesn't mean they don't exist. But I did not say Christians were better than other people. What did I say? If Christians are supposedly better. Yeah, I mean, I realize, look, I don't mean to be beaten up on you. That question's fair.

But even the word supposedly, I think I'd argue with and say, I just know that, by the way, there are plenty of places in history and in the world today where you will find Christians that are unbelievably good at... loving people they disagree with, and not being superior to them. But Christianity is like this big lake, and there's lots of warm spots, but there's lots of cold spots.

And you can get into the lake at one place, and there's a tendency to think, oh, gosh, the whole lake's like this, and it's not. I do know plenty of people who become Christians after not believing at all, and they get into a very warm spot in the lake where it's really wonderful.

and then their job changes. They go somewhere else, and they find it very difficult. They say, I thought all Christians were the way the ones that I originally met were, and that they're not. So on the other hand, if any of you have actually grown up in the...

cold spot and feel like the whole lake's like that. It's not necessarily true either. All right. Tim, you highlighted that Christians have a suffering Savior, an angry Savior. This person is asking a couple questions like this. How does it matter to my suffering that Jesus suffered as you say? How does that work? Well, admittedly, that's a great question. Because, again, because tonight I confined myself to talking about the fact that at an intellectual level, it shows me, unlike...

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism. It shows me a God who has been willing to come and suffer. In the book of Hebrews, just two things. In the book of Hebrews... which is a New Testament book. It says, because he's been tempted and tried in every way like we have, when you are suffering, in prayer, go to him because he's... He has experienced everything you have. See, there's no other God, you might say, that you can pray to that has actually experienced something worse than you have.

A lot worse than you have in suffering. So that's in the book of Hebrews. Or there's another, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, there's a famous chapter in Daniel chapter 3. where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are three faithful Jewish men who will not bow down to the idol. And so King Nebuchadnezzar throws them into the furnace to kill them. But there's a miracle.

and they don't die, and Nebuchadnezzar looks in, and he says, I thought we only threw three men in the furnace, but I see four men walking around, and one of them looks like the Son of God. and then they come out the other end, and of course they've been miraculously saved. But it's really a foretaste of what we have in the New Testament, which is we actually have a God who has walked with us in our furnace. Now, I...

I only talked about that at the, I know what your question is. I talked about that at sort of the intellectual level. It's just a way for you to say, whatever the reasons are that God allows evil and suffering, it can't be that he's indifferent or he doesn't love us. because he's that willing to get involved with us. But at the personal level, if you actually did believe, if you say Jesus died for human beings on the cross, that's one thing.

When you get to the place where you can say, he died for me, he suffered for me, if you're able to appropriate that at a very visceral level, it really, really is a powerful... resource for handling suffering. Basically, what you say is, if you, Lord Jesus, suffered infinitely more for me, and you stayed patient and you stayed strong during that whole time, And if you did that for me, then I can do this for you. I can go through what little. You see, the point is, there's so much more to say.

The Christian approach to suffering, which I hinted at, is if I hold Jesus' hand during the suffering, when I come out on the other side, I'm going to be more like him. I'm going to find myself being happier, being more resilient. being humbler, unknowing myself, being more sympathetic to other people. And therefore, if I'm moved enough by his suffering for me that I hold on to him during my suffering, it's sort of like...

Just like the pressure turns a piece of coal into a diamond, so the pressure turns you into something great. So if you believe it, it has an enormous impact. But even tonight, I just try to show you at the intellectual level, it has a... And it's something of an impact on even understanding how God could allow evil and suffering.

Thanks for listening to the Questioning Christianity podcast. And remember, you can find more content to help you explore the claims of Christianity by visiting gospelandlife.com slash explore. That's gospelandlife.com slash explore. The Questioning Christianity talks in this series were recorded in 2019 in New York City, where Dr. Keller spoke with a local live gathering made up of attendees who did not identify as Christian and their Christian friends who invited them.