[SPEAKER_00]: good morning everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So good to be with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to service today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we're very full.
[SPEAKER_00]: In here, so there's a few seats here and there, so if you are feeling squished, you can look around you, but wonderful to be with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Tim.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am the senior minister here at one.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're new or visiting here, maybe because of this question in Christianity series, you're very welcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are in week five of this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been exploring over the last five weeks, whether the claims of the Christian faith still makes sense in 2025 and contemporary culture in contemporary secular Western culture, in particular.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this morning, we're going to be looking at the question of morality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: That means how do we determine what is right and wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: Good or evil?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we get those ideas?
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's the basis for making moral judgments?
[SPEAKER_00]: do we need God or a belief in God or in some kind of transcendent reality, some spiritual principle outside the natural world in order to determine these things, or can these things be determined by natural means?
[SPEAKER_00]: By reason or by utility, that's just the way of saying, we just work out what's best for the most people, for the greatest number of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it a byproduct of
[SPEAKER_00]: Biological and social evolution that we've progressed as a society and so we know better over time how to live good lives, how to love each other well.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a nutshell, can you be good without God is God necessary to live a moral life, however you might want to define that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or in fact, as some argue, is belief in God actually an impediment to living a moral life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christopher Hitchens once said that religion is an insult to human dignity.
[SPEAKER_00]: With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in the god delusion, God delusion, excuse me, Richard Dawkins argues that the idea of kind of needing a great policeman in the sky who tells us what's right and wrong is a flawed and patronizing view of human nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he argues instead that things like altruism, or empathy, or human rights, are better understood as the result of natural selection
[SPEAKER_00]: Social progress, essentially the morality and moral judgment, is a progressive, always evolving, always improving aspect of human society, which is happening independent of religious belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, he would also argue, along with Hitchens, that as we've thrown off religion, we're able to more clearly see what is required of us in order to live good moral lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, however, you might define that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I have some big problems with that view as you can imagine, I think you have to largely ignore history if you're going to make that kind of argument, but essentially the point is, the argument is that in the past, you know, we may have needed a concept like God to provide us with moral absolutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But over time, we've evolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: We through trial and error, through positive and negative feedback.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have been able to determine what is best thought of as right or wrong for ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've kind of over time outgrown the need for a concept like God at the center of the universe telling us what to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so what we're going to do today is compare those claims with the claims that the Christian faith makes about the sources of morality and of the basis of moral judgment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we're going to be talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first thing I want to say is that pretty much, as you probably know, pretty much every culture in history, and obviously many still today, of course, in fact the world's getting more religious, not less, have based their moral judgments or have drawn their sense of right and wrong from religion, from a concept of God or from a spiritual transcendent reality that exists outside the natural material world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even actually, even ancient philosophies that didn't really have a concept of God as a personal being, as a being that you could know, instead sort of thought of the divine as like a rational principle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the ancient Greek sort of the divine really, the source of all things really being the logos.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is translated loosely the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea was that this was a rational principle that
[SPEAKER_00]: was the foundation, or was the thing that informed and held everything together.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like an organizing principle of all of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Buddhists have a similar idea, with the Dharma, which is sort of like a cosmic law, which permeates all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a personal God that you would know, but it's more like a rational principle of law, a spiritual principle that operates in everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, even if God isn't personal, they still believe that there was a divine order that informed what was right and wrong, what is good and true and beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this regard, the modern secular West is completely and utterly unique.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are really, as Charles Taylor says, we've been quoting him a bit through this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first secular society, the first culture in human history, that has attempted to do this, to create a system of human flourishing, including kind of forming a basis for moral judgment, on the assumption that there is no God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is only really emerged on mass since the Second World War, after the Second World War, and particularly through the sexual revolution.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was brewing at an intellectual level among academics and intellectual circles for about a hundred years before that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But either way, if you think historically, this is very, very new.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the issues I have with Dawkins view.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we really saying that out of all the thousands, maybe millions of years people have lived on this planet?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only we enlightened few in the last 100 years that have finally worked out that we don't need God to be good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the question I want to explore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very simply.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this work, is it working for us?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it working for us in the West?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd suggest it doesn't work, and there's a number of reasons for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the main reasons that it doesn't work according to Tim Keller in his book, Making Sense of God is that there is a difference, there is a difference between a moral conviction,
[SPEAKER_00]: and a moral obligation.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a big difference between a moral conviction and a moral obligation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a moral conviction says, I feel, I feel that this is wrong, or I feel that this is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: A moral obligation says, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is wrong, or this is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not just I feel it's wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is absolutely wrong for everyone everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a moral conviction is I feel X is wrong, or I feel Y is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is you can't take a moral feeling or a moral conviction and turn it into a moral obligation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's one thing for me to say, I feel X's right or I feel Y is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's another thing for me to say, therefore, you ought to also feel that X is right or Y is wrong, regardless of what you actually think or feel about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, if someone was to say, I'm a racist and I feel that racism is fine, I think it's perfectly fine for me to hate or discriminate against people of color.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, I feel that that's the way things should be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of us are not going to want to say and reply.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, you're entitled to your feelings, for your opinions.
[SPEAKER_00]: But personally, I feel that racism is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can say that, but you probably won't want to stop there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Will you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want to just say, okay, you feel racism is fine and I feel racism is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, what you want to say is, no, no, no, okay, even though you don't think racism is wrong and then you don't feel racism wrong, I'm telling you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though you don't subjectively feel it's wrong, it is objectively morally wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the difference between a moral conviction and a moral obligation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because a moral conviction or a moral feeling that this suddenly just get really loud,
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, I'm going to keep going.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the difference with a moral conviction that's based on opinion and a moral obligation is that it's believed to be based on objective truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a moral conviction, I might feel that racism is wrong or that slavery is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might feel those things are right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But really, if we're going to argue about it, that's about as far as we can go.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the end of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the dude says, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man, if you know you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a moral obligation says, no, no, no, no, hang on, hang on.
[SPEAKER_00]: You ought to, in fact, you must think that racism is wrong and that slavery is wrong, whether you feel like it or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the question is of course, what's the basis for making that moral judgment, for making that a moral obligation?
[SPEAKER_00]: As we've said, historically, pretty much all cultures answered that by saying, there's a sacred order.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a divine order, a transcendent order outside of this world that informs what is right and wrong inside this world and we have to obey that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So regardless of how you feel, that's the source of moral obligation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you ought not to do XYZ because God says it's wrong and therefore it's wrong or you ought to do ABC because God says it's good and therefore it's good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't matter how you feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: moral absolutes, moral judgments are not something inside you, those are moral feelings, and we all have those, but obligation is something outside of you, something objective, not subjective, therefore you are required to align yourself with that if you want to live in the kind of ethical flow of the universe, if you want to live with the grain of the universe and not against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Greek philosophy, Platonism, Confuciism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, all have different opinions about what that sacred order is, what that moral order is, and what the moral obligations are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they obviously don't all agree on what the moral absolutes are, but what they did have,
[SPEAKER_00]: that's or do have in those cultures that a secular culture doesn't have is that they do have a basis for making moral judgments.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can say, this is right, and this is wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in a secular culture, we don't have that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, you don't have any right really to say to somebody that my feelings, my moral convictions should take precedence over yours, over your feelings, in your moral convictions.
[SPEAKER_00]: who has the right to say that in the Western secular culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, it's just my opinion against yours, and that's about as far as we can go.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what right do you have to say in a secular culture that your feelings about racism or about slavery or about anything else should take preference over somebody else's feelings about racism or slavery or anything else you don't?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the obvious question is, how does a secular culture then make moral judgments?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm definitely not saying here that if you're an atheist or a secular person that you can't be good, you can't be a good person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course you can.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can an atheist be good without God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there's plenty of atheists.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know who have incredibly high moral standards and convictions and who live with amazing integrity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's plenty of religious people who don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just believing in God, no more makes you a good person than believing in a toaster will turn you into toast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why that is, I'll come back to, not the toast.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we're looking at here is whether regardless of what you believe in God, what we're looking at here is whether you can truly believe in the idea of something being good or goodness.
[SPEAKER_00]: moral goodness without believing in God at all, or without their being at God at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip Kiccher, who teaches at Columbia University, prominent scholar and atheist once wrote this, I believe that we are obligated.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's that word, all human beings are obligated to work toward remedying or ameliorating the plight of millions, even billions of people, that do not have the opportunity for a worthwhile life.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are obligated to provide equal opportunities for such a life to the entire human population.
[SPEAKER_00]: We must seek social equality for all.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an incredibly high moral standard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's plenty of secular people who try to live according to that standard.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, we can be good at least try to seek what we think is good without believing in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as I'll argue in a minute, you can never do it without God, at least in the background.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if you don't believe in God, I'm going to make the case here that you still really need God in the picture.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's the question, how do you make moral judgments and how do you call for moral obligations if you're a secular person and you don't believe there's a sacred order?
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles Taylor puts it like this in his book a secular age, he says it could be argued
[SPEAKER_00]: that secular Western society is, in fact, ironically, one of the most moral cultures in human history.
[SPEAKER_00]: So compared with the past, nearly every human life is more highly valued today in a Western secular framework, or at least in the culture that we now inhabit, at this point in history than at any other point in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he writes this, our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so much as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you know what's going on in the West, particularly in Europe, though that ethical framework is beginning to fracture.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, all the immigration riots protests that happen in across Europe are suggesting that this moral framework is beginning to dissipate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, he calls this universal benevolence, and to the demand for universal benevolence, there's added the demand for universal justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he says, we are asked to maintain standards of equality, which cover wider and wider classes of people, bridge more and more kinds of difference, and impinge more and more on our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again, I think that has been true up till now, but I think that's beginning to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if we ask, why should we live this way?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should we live in these ways, holding those values?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should we support equality and guard the rights of the weak and sacrifice on behalf of the poor?
[SPEAKER_00]: Our cultural or political institutions can really give us no answer to that question other than saying, well, it's just what we do, that's just the right thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But on what basis?
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, all previous societies could point to some shared moral or ethical source that's outside the world, but we can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the morality of modern secular people is what Charles Taylor calls self-authorizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But that leaves us with a very fragmented and fragile moral vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in any case, what do we do if we disagree with each other?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if my convictions come up against yours, how do we navigate that difference?
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what we were saying last time about identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, if we live in a world now where we create ourselves out of ourselves on the basis of ourselves, and we're essentially trying to do the same thing in regards to morality.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're saying all morals we believe should be chosen by us individually, or we agree on them socially and collectively, you know, maybe by popular vote or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But since there are no objective moral facts out there to be discovered, what we must do is be our own legislators of meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we live our own truth, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the way, that's kind of what underlies the sovereign citizen movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's been in the news lately because of what happened a couple of weeks ago with that person.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was his name?
[SPEAKER_00]: Desi Freeman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that a student him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Shot, you know, tragically shot those two police officers in the name of his own freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the name of his own sovereign rights that he decided to base on whatever on his own choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the legislature of his own meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it had tragic consequences.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we live our own truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is we're all trying to do this in our culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that makes us utterly unique as a culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've no other human societies ever tried to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Taylor says, the claim to issue the values that we live by, on our own authority has never happened before in history across a whole society.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, let me ask you, is it working?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm sure you've also seen the news this week, so much political unrest, so much division, so much senseless violence, and so much hand-ringing by our leaders who have no idea what to do, no idea how to paint for us a moral vision for the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, secular people have morals.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the issue is where did they get them?
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we've just heard, Charles Taylor says, secular people in particular have two moral values, equal human rights, and universal human billet, benevolence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've seen this play out in the protests over the war in Gaza, across the West these many months, over the last few years, a couple years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is quite relevant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, there's a whole lot going on politically over the Gaza war that's fueling these protests.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the secular people that I've spoken to about this, there's a feeling that the war is unjust that it's a violation of human rights, that it's hurting the innocent, and people feel some kind of moral obligation to do something about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now whether or not that's right, the point is it flows for many people, from the idea that every human being is equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: in value and in dignity and should have equal rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from the second moral belief, universal benevolence, which is that I shouldn't just take care of my own, shouldn't just take care of the poor in my own community, or in my own family, or in my own nation, or even among my own ethnicity,
[SPEAKER_00]: I should also be concerned about the poor and the helpless everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not right that some people should be safe and healthy and prosperous.
[SPEAKER_00]: While others are suffer or are enslaved or exploited or marginalized, we feel that that's deeply wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing is, in a secular framework, those are beliefs.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not facts, they're beliefs, or they're moral convictions.
[SPEAKER_00]: that we happened to hold very deeply, of course, the problem is that without God or a transcendent order informing those beliefs, they become impossible to maintain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, I would argue they become illogical.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is obvious or becomes obvious when you try to prove it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is what Charles Taylor says.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, okay, prove it to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give me a scientific proof that all human beings are equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give me a scientific proof that everybody's got equal rights, and that everyone everywhere should be cared for, and should not suffer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give me a scientific proof for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course the answer is you can't, because those moral values, like all moral values, are in the end, matters of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: their convictions, not obligations, but they only make sense as obligations, however, if you have a higher authority telling you that these things are obligations, not just convictions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you believe there's a God who created the universe who made all human beings in his image and who commands you to love them as he loves them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you believe in a God of love who created everyone equally and puts his image in everyone equally, if you believe in a God like that then human rights and universal benevolence are the logical rational outcomes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you don't have a guy to inform this moral conviction and who makes it an obligation, then all you need to say is, well, simply no.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't believe everyone is equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't believe that we should care for anyone outside of our tribe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who cares about those other people?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who cares about them?
[SPEAKER_00]: We look after our own.
[SPEAKER_00]: I look after number one.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the only truth I live by.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's simply no way you can argue against that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we can pass laws, of course, we pass lots of laws to regulate people's behavior, but at the end of the day, there's no way that we can say, in a secular culture, that that person's belief about how we should behave as right, and that person's belief about how we should behave as wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality is, the last hundred years or so, as we've thrown off our need for God, have been the most violent and blood-firsty in all of human history.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think the real social consensus in a godless world is that when our arguments fail, morality simply collapses into power and into violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where one group's feelings are imposed on another group without any rational justification except for who has the loudest voice and who has the most power and who has the biggest gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we've seen this week, if you don't agree with your opponent, then you can resort to violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: You pull the trigger.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, it was the German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writing in the 19th century who saw this most clearly, like you may not have heard of Nietzsche or you may have not really sure what he was about.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has been one of the most influential voices in the world that we now live in today.
[SPEAKER_00]: So even though this may seem like ancient history, this is really important.
[SPEAKER_00]: Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century saw this clearly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said that if there is no God, if God is dead, he famously argued, which is what he believed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the universe is impersonal and meaningless, right, if we're not here for any purpose,
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's no tell-offs in Greek, no end, no goal, no endpoint for humanity for the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the way we got here was through natural selection by the strong eating the week, and if that's the way of nature, then that means it is absolutely natural actually and right for the strong to devour the week.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the logical conclusion of a materialist, naturalist universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the unnatural position to take for Nietzsche was to care for the weak, to care for the poor and the downtrodden.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that runs against the way that nature works, which is, you know, we ignore the weak, we abandon the poor and the downtrodden because that's nature's way of sort of getting them out of the system.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the future belongs to the powerful, so it makes no sense to care about those others.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Nietzsche said, OK, if you still want to believe in equal human rights, you should take care of the poor and the powerless, if you still want to believe in those moral convictions, that's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you need to recognize that it's an incredible leap of faith that has nothing to do with reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually more of a leap of faith he argued than believing in a creator.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, Nietzsche said it's not fine because if you say you believe in human rights and if you say you believe in universal benevolence and yet you also say I don't believe in God then actually you still believe in God and specifically the Christian God whether you want to or not that was his argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that we actually do live in a society where we should take care of each other, where we value each person equally, where we take care of the week and the vulnerable, is because we live in a society in the West that has been profoundly shaped over the last 1,500 years by Christian morality, profoundly shaped for 1,500 years by the Christian message and by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Tom Holland argues in his very large book Dominion, which I've got a copy of here.
[SPEAKER_00]: fantastic book, I encourage you to read it, or at least listen to his podcasts.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he argues in this book over 500 long pages is that most of the laws and the institutions and the way that we live in the world that we take for granted in the West are deeply deeply Christian and stood in radical contrast to the ethics of the ancient world out of which the Christian movement emerged.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he writes here we are in his book that to live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is no less true for Jews or Muslims.
[SPEAKER_00]: He means like living in the West.
[SPEAKER_00]: than it is for Catholics or Protestants.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable indeed the inescapable influence of Christianity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy or slavery is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, in regards to say, sexual ethics, he writes this, you know, what we might call consent these days has its basis in the fact that Christians rejected the Roman sexual order, which was based on the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferior to use the body of a slave or a prostitute or really any person in his household to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That had been ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: The biblical insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instincts taken for granted by the Romans had been recast as sin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never before had an attempt to recalibrate sexual morality being attempted on such a scale.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never before had one enjoyed such total success.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or in regards to human rights, he says that every human being possessed in equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth to in a ancient world.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Roman would have laughed at it to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption that everyone possessed an inherent worth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The origins of this principle as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out lay not in the French Revolution or in the Declaration of Independence or in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now what Holland is arguing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what Nietzsche argued before him is that without Christianity, it makes no sense to say that slavery is wrong, that exploiting the weak and the powerless is wrong, that the powerful taking what they want or doing whatever they want to other people is wrong, that every person has an inherent worth, because that's not how nature works, so if we're in a universe without God, then what authority are we appealing to when we say that those things are wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no God, there's no moral absolutes, which means all you're left with is a vacuum, and into that vacuum always rushes power that might make right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Nietzsche says those Christian values only made sense in a universe in which you had a personal God of love and made everyone equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they don't make sense in a materialist universe at all as the Russian philosopher Alexander Solviov quoted this in week one said,
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Nietzsche saw that their strong and powerful would survive and the weak and the poor would be crushed in his conception of the future, and it would lead to a total reversal of the sacred order given to us by Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: to love our enemies, that humility is strength, that we should value justice and mercy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's an inversion of Micah 6-8, what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
[SPEAKER_00]: In each his universe, that would be the opposite would be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think in the light of the death of God, what we're seeing happen, again friends, is people seeking after meaning not in God's kingdom,
[SPEAKER_00]: but in political ideologies, in empire, in nationalism, in Marxism, even in Nazism again, religious fanaticism, terrorism, perpetual revolution, are all forces that we're seeing at work again today and even more so in the last few years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know about you, but it feels like the world is on fire and no one has any idea what to do about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the values that many of us take for granted in the West, which are uniquely Christian, what we see is that as the West is becoming less and less Christian, less shaped by the Christian story, those values are being eroded.
[SPEAKER_00]: So things like equality, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even, which were only possible in a Christian framework.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're all ideas that an ancient Roman would have laughed at,
[SPEAKER_00]: As Holland says, are being eroded or are being applied selectively to certain groups and we are becoming tribalistic again?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not sure that we'll like where this leads us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So having taken Christ out of picture in the West, we are returning to something that's beginning to look more and more ancient, more and more Roman, more and more cruel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while a new testament definitely presents Christ Jesus as a great moral principle and a great moral example, in fact, the greatest that we've ever seen in human history, that's actually not the thing that's most important about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might have all heard C.S.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis's argument, liar lunatic or Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not enough just to believe in Jesus as a great moral teacher, because if he was a great moral teacher, but he was actually lying about the fact that he was God, then he wasn't a moral teacher at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a liar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if he was a lunatic, if he was out of his mind, then we would have no reason to trust him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if he actually did the things he did and said the things he said and they were true, then we really have no choice but to acknowledge him as Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not just that Jesus is a great moral example that we're called to follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's actually not enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Christian faith is never taught that all you need to do is reform your behavior, and that's the point of being saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the point of being a Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that is not the point of being a Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no doubt, say, in John 1, Jesus has presented as in his writing into an ancient world, as the Logos, in the beginning was the word or Greek Logos, and he's using this word intentionally.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yep, Jesus is the one who is the rational order underneath everything, which the ancient Greeks and Romans believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the word was
[SPEAKER_00]: with God and the Word was God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was with God in the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And through him all things were made without him nothing has been made that has been made.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, Jesus is the source of all things in Him was life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that life was the light of all mankind, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Yajana's trying to show Jesus as the rational order of the rational principle of order that informs and creates and holds everything together.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not his main point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Jesus was wanting to do is not just show us a moral example to live by, but to actually
[SPEAKER_00]: come among us and in fact as we believe in him change us fundamentally change our nature so that we can become more like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not as we're called to be like him, but he does are working us as we believe in him as we ask for forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does a work in us that changes us, not from just...
[SPEAKER_00]: deciding to become people who pursue moral goodness, but to actually becoming the kinds of people who can live into it because he makes us new creatures, new creations, he gives us a new kind of human life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paul, I think, puts this most clearly in Colossians 1.
[SPEAKER_00]: For Christ, pardon me if I go back.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, all right, where are we?
[SPEAKER_00]: For Christ has rescued us from the dominion of darkness,
[SPEAKER_00]: and brought us into the kingdom of the Son who loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Son is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: For in him all things are created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, where the thrones or powers or rulers or authorities
[SPEAKER_00]: All things have been created through him and for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's before all things and in him all things altogether, for God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things whether things on earth or things in heaven by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, Paul is very clear, Jesus is the Logos, he's the moral principle, he's the creator of all things in him, all things hold together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And without him everything will fall apart, but that's not enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also needs to do a work in us by his grace and by his mercy through his bloodshed on the cross to transform us into people that can become like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the call of the Christian life is not just be a good person, follow the rules, do what God requires.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is no, submit your life to Christ and then he will make you into the kind of person who can do these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Christianity is not a moralistic religion, it's a religion of surrender.
[SPEAKER_00]: Surrender to the grace and mercy of God, which then transforms us to be able to become moral people, who know what is right and who have the power in the Holy Spirit to do what is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the religions ask you to work your way into that position, what Christianity says is that God has done all of that on your behalf and all you need to do is surrender yourself into that position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me finish with what Tom Holland says.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we're going to come to the communion table.
[SPEAKER_00]: If secular humanism, sorry, this is a long quote, if secular humanism itself in the end derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity's evolution, a course that in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America has left God dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then how our its values, anything more than the shadow of a corpse, yet to be a Christian, is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why the cross that ancient implement of torture remains what it has always been, the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the audacity of it, the audacity of finding and a twisted and defeated corpse, the glory of the Creator of the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: that serves to explain more surely than anything else, that she estrangedness of Christianity and the civilization to which it gave birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has manifest in the great surge of conversions that have swept Africa and Asia over the past century, and in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian, all are airs to the same revolution, a revolution that has at its molten heart, the image of a God, dead on a cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we come to the community table and invite the band to come on up.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what we're called to remember every time we break bread and drink the cup.
[SPEAKER_00]: That God didn't want to just leave us to our own devices to figure these things out on our own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you didn't want to just give us a law that we had to follow, which is what many other religions teach, particularly religions like Islam.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get the law and you just debate and that's how you please God.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, in the Christian religion we say, yeah, there's a law that's a moral order.
[SPEAKER_00]: but no one can keep it well enough to please God enough to be saved to make their way to heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, God has done what has been needed in order to transform us.
[SPEAKER_00]: and to heal what is most broken in us, so that we can become the kinds of people that please God, as a gift, not as something earned or something deserved, but as a gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we come to when we come to the community and tell you to remember this immense gift, this incredible grace and mercy of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he didn't just leave us wolling in our pain, but stepped in and took it on himself and absorbed it into his body and died a brutal death in order to set us free and to transform us so that we can become the children of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Adopted airs of God's kingdom, holy and righteous in His sight, not by our own effort, not by our own goodness, not by our own morality, but because God so loved us that He was pleased to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It burns in us like a fire so that we then are compelled.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's our obligation in the mercy of God to then offer that to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that becomes the foundation of a good society.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me ask you, would you rather live in a society where everyone is saying, I'm going to live my own truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to do what's right for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to seek after my own rights,
[SPEAKER_00]: Or would you rather live in a society where shaped by Christ we're saying, how can I best love my neighbor?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I serve those around me?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I offer people the love and mercy of God?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the key difference that the Christian faith makes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is an obligation of course, but then it comes flows from the fact that we, ourselves, have experienced that in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then we have all the resources we need in Christ Jesus and in the power of His Holy Spirit to offer that to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as we come to the table, let's remember that on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples and he said, this is my body, even for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You take an eat as often as you do this and remember it's of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And likewise after supper he took the cup and he said, this cup,
[SPEAKER_00]: is the new covenant, the new order.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my blood through my death, through my sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember this every time you drink it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do this in remembrance of me and remember in what I have done for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, every time you eat this bread, and you drink this cup, you proclaim Paul says, the death of Christ, the sacrifice of Christ, until he comes again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, as people shaped by the cross, marked by the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's come and receive these elements as an act of thanksgiving for what Christ has done for each of us that we could not have done for ourselves.