“If God does not exist everything is permissible” Fyodor Dostoevsky
In ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by Dostoevsky in the long conversation in Book Five between Ivan and Alyosha. The Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in his cell to tell him that the Roman Catholic Church no longer needs him, for his return would interfere with the mission of the ‘Church’ which is to bring people happiness. Christ has misjudged human nature according to the Grand Inquisitor and most of humanity cannot handle the freedom which he has given them. In other words, in giving human beings freedom to choose, Jesus has excluded most of humanity from redemption and doomed to suffer….according to the Grand Inquisitor the ambassador of the Papacy.
This concise yet profound statement from Dostoevsky raises questions about the nature of morality, all of reality and the significance of a transcendent realm beyond the physical. At its core, this quote suggests that the absence of a personal infinite eternal Creator God, would render all human choices and actions permissible and and neutral. Is ethnic cleansing and genocide morally neutral? I think we know the answer to that don’t we?
Of course this has been the whole issue of philosophy throughout its history going back to the Pre-Socratic philosophers in Ancient Greece. Philosophy means from the Greek ‘the love of wisdom’….
Is it wise though to reject the belief that a personal infinite Creator God created all things? What will those with all the money and the power do then with their resources to benefit humanity? We’re living through this right now in 2024.
Fyodor Dostoevsky implies in his last novel before he died, that without the Creator God as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, truth and justice, human beings would be unrestrained and able to justify any action they desire, including the wanton slaughter of countless numbers of other human beings…simply because they are of another belief, or race or are in the way of the oil and the profit etc.
Human Beings
One of the most significant contributions that the Christian faith has given to the world other than the Gospel itself, with reconciliation, redemption, forgiveness of sins etc, is the fact that human beings have been created in the Image and Likeness of the one true Triune God, yet this is not separate from the Gospel. For without creation, there is nothing to redeem, and if there is no redemption, there is no purpose for creation.
The Imago Deo as it is called, is the very basis for Human Rights. It is why truth, justice and freedom are so crucial to us as human beings.
Throughout the narrative of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, human beings have a crucial role to play in God’s bigger Story of the redemption of all creation. The Creator God made the first human being from the dust of the earth, breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life and he became a living soul. At specific points in the Biblical narrative, we find important realities of what it means to be Human that directly counter the dehumanising false ideologies that characterise modern society.
A key point here is that this means that we don’t know who we really are outside of Story. The implication for this is that as Human Beings we cannot know what the Image of God is outside the Biblical narrative and therefore what it means to be human, not just in the details of how we are made in the Image of God, but how humanity is described throughout the story line of Genesis to Revelation.
David McIlroy in ‘Christian Perspectives on Law, A Biblical View of Law and Justice’ states
“Because human beings are made in God’s image, an assault on another human being is virtually as assault on God himself. Moreover, a Christian vision of the dignity of human beings’ rests not only on the fact that we are created in the image of God, but also on the fact that Jesus, the Son of God, became incarnate as a man, God dignified human beings by becoming incarnate as one himself! And Jesus himself was conspicuous by the dignity with which he treated the outsiders of his society…Therefore, all human beings have inherent dignity because they are created in the image of God, and because of their inherent worth, all human beings are possessed of intrinsic rights which no other human being can take away” 5
If there is no God, everything is permitted as noted above from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. What then does it really mean to be human?
Again, referring to John Stonestreet, President of the Colson Centre for Christian Worldview in a lecture that explores the substance of an anthropology informed by Scripture, as the basis of a Christian worldview. ‘The Image Restored, the Gospel in a culture wide identity crisis’ given at the Acton Centre in 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan said
“The Theory going into the 20th Century was that the death of God would lead to the progress of man, to more freedom and autonomy to define reality as man decided. Secularism made Humanism possible but instead it led to a profound De-Humanism.
What has happened? The Death of God….leads to the death of truth and the death of humanity. When we look at where we are at now in the 21st Century. We find that we go from God as the Centre of all of life….to the death of God in public life….to the death of man in the 20th Century…..and now here we are in the 21st Century holding onto terms like; dignity, equality, diversity, Transgender, hate speech, rights, tolerance etc but basing them on what?
After the most violent century in human history-the 20th century where more people died than in any other century- Here we are in the 21st century in a rebuilding phase trying to work out what it means to be human” . There has been a war every year in the first quarter of the new century".
The late 19th century ‘Enlightenment thinkers’ effectively declared the Creator God dead. When humanity does that, the ancient gods rise again and this is also a major reason for the current culture wide spiritual crisis in Western culture.
For the ‘ancient gods’ that rise again are basically idols that is also about the unseen spiritual war that the Western Institutional church seems to pay mere lip service to. Idolatry of money, sex and power especially, subverts our true human identity as Image bearers created in the image and likeness of the Triune God. Our position was stolen by the fallen angel Lucifer who is called the ‘god of this world’ and he has his chosen instruments, in particular today human governments, especially Western governments.
So, the West is characterised by a military-industrial complex with the conflating of war and big business. Therefore, there is perpetual war, violence, genocide, eugenics, depopulation, an ever-increasing insidious Statism that is Totalitarian by nature. This is facilitated by a corporate controlled media, including the damage that is being done to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech in our own day.
So many people have lost the ability to trust institutions such as government, the health service, the education system, the police force, the military, and more besides. Why?
They exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator, that’s why. This may seem like a naïve oversimplification but Romans chapter 1 reveals that at the heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart. Nature and the human soul abhors a vacuum, so something has to fill it.
'Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts our restless until they find rest in Thee' (Augustine)
Here we are then in the 21st century in a rebuilding phase trying to work out what it means to be human. So much for ‘progress’ for Science, for Technology. But to trace the true roots of the unseen spiritual war going on, you have to go back to The Three Rebellions from Genesis chapter 3-11 which also explains the spiritual crisis of 21st century Western Culture.
Comments