Archive: Can We Be Good Without God?

by Steve | Jul 14, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Can We Be Good Without God?

By Chuck Colson

Last December, newspapers ran a striking photograph of a group of people held at bay by armed guards. They were not rioters or protesters; they were Christmas carolers. The town of Vienna, Virginia, had outlawed the singing of religious songs on public property. So these men, women, and children were forced to sing “Silent Night” behind barricades, just as if this were Eastern Europe under communist rule instead of Christmas in America in 1992.

During the past 30 years we have been determined to secularize our society. Some months before the incident in Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lee vs. Weisman that a rabbi who delivered a very politically correct “To Whom It May Concern” prayer at a Rhode Island junior high school commencement had violated the constitutional rights of a 15-year-old student in the audience. The Court said, in effect, that the girl must be legally protected against listening to views she disagreed with. There was a time when it was a mark of civility to listen respectfully to different views; now you have a constitutional right to demand that those views are not expressed in your presence.

In another case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, visual religious symbols have been banned. Zion, Illinois, in the “heartland of America,” was forced to eliminate the cross featured in its city seal, because the Justices ruled it a breach of the First Amendment.

In education, the same kind of court-enforced secularism has been so successful that teachers may hand out condoms in school, but they are forbidden to display a copy of the Ten Commandments on a bulletin board. Students, meanwhile, may indulge in almost any kind of activity in school, but they are forbidden to pray.

The Supreme Court is not the only institution out to protect us from the “threat” faith poses. The media-assault upon religious believers has been fierce. Cardinal O’Connor has been excoriated by the New York Times for even suggesting that he might deny the sacraments to a pro-choice legislator. (This was the same New York Times that praised a Louisiana archbishop who refused to administer communion to a segregationist legislator in 1962.)

In February of 1993, the Washington Post featured a front-page article that characterized evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” If a journalist said that about any other group in America, he would be fired on the spot, but the Post didn’t fire anyone. It merely expressed surprise that many readers found the description offensive. A few days later, one of the bemused editors explained that they felt they were simply printing something that is “universally accepted.”

It is no wonder that Peter Berger, professor of sociology at Boston University, says that if you look around the world you will find the most religious country is India, and the most irreligious country is Sweden—and America is an interesting combination of Indians who are governed by Swedes.

A Post-Christian Society

These Swedes have done their job well. In 1962, polls indicated that at least 65 percent of all Americans believed the Bible to be true. In 1992, polls indicate that only 32 percent do, while 50 percent say that they actually fear fundamentalists. If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.

The process of shedding our religion began with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which exalted existentialism and a kind of “live-for-the-moment-God-is-dead-or-irrelevant” philosophy. Today, that 60s philosophy has become mainstream; it is in every walk of life. This is not to say that people aren’t going to church. Forty-four percent of the American people still attend religious services regularly. But we live in a Donahue-ized culture in which we sit and watch, hour by hour, the banality that passes for knowledge on television; and we rarely think about issues in terms of Judeo-Christian truth. We hear carolers singing “Silent Night” or an invocation at a public ceremony, and we are filled with trepidation; we are worried that we are infringing upon the rights of nonbelievers. We see the symbol of the cross, and we feel compelled to paint it out because it might violate the principle of separation between church and state. We exalt tolerance, not truth, as the ultimate virtue.

The City of Man

Can we really sustain the city of man without the influence of the City of God? St. Augustine argued that it was impossible.

Any society, especially a free society, depends on a moral consensus and on shared assumptions: What is ultimate reality? What is meaningful in life? By what standards should we be governed? These common values are the glue that holds society together.

In America, the glue is wearing pretty thin. We are in the middle of an identity crisis in which we are attempting to redefine our basic values all over again. We can no longer assume that right and wrong have clear meanings or that there is universal truth. After all, pollsters tell us that 67 percent of the American people say there is no such thing.

What we fail to realize, however, is that rejecting transcendental truth is tantamount to committing national suicide. A secular state cannot cultivate virtue—an old-fashioned word you don’t hear much in public discourse these days. In his classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the 19th century Russian novelist Dostoyevsky asked, essentially, “Can man be good without God?” In every age, the answer has been no. Without a restraining influence on their nature, men will destroy themselves. That restraining influence might take many abstract forms, as it did for the Greeks and Romans, or it might be the God of the Old and the New Testaments. But it has always served the same purpose.

Even before Dostoyevsky posed his timeless question, an 18th century German professor of logic and metaphysics, Immanuel Kant, had already dismissed it as irrelevant. God exists, said Kant, but he is separate from the rest of life—Over here are the things that we can empirically know; over there are things we can accept only on faith. What does that do to ethics? Kant’s answer was to separate them from faith. He also believed that we can, on our own, with only our rational capacities to depend upon, develop what he called the “categorical imperative.” He explained: “Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.”

This rational, subjective view is the basis of ethics being taught in nearly every school in America today, from Public Grammar School No. 1 to Harvard Business School. Students are never exposed to traditional moral teaching in school, only to rationalism. Pragmatism and utilitarianism are substituted for Judeo-Christian ethics, and students are taught that they have the inner capacity to do good as rational beings, apart from God.

Danger of Self-Righteousness

Nothing could be more dangerous. Let me give you a case study: Chuck Colson. I grew up in the Depression years. My dad, who was the son of a Swedish immigrant, used to tell me two things on Sunday afternoon. Although no one in my family had ever gone to college, he said, “If you work hard, you can get to the top. That’s the American dream.” And the second thing he used to say was, “Always tell the truth. No matter what you do in life, always tell the truth.” (One could not go through Watergate and claim much distinction for anything, but the fact was that I testified under oath 44 times and I was the only defendant who was not charged with perjury. My dad’s lesson stuck: tell the truth.)

I kept both of these pieces of advice in mind as I grew up, earned a scholarship to college and then went on to law school. I also remembered them when I joined a very successful law firm, and years later in 1969 when President Nixon asked me to come to work at the White House, I took everything I had earned and put it into a blind trust. (If you want to make a small fortune, let me tell you how: You take a large fortune and put it in a blind trust.) I did everything to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I passed unsolicited gifts on to my employees. I refused to see people with whom I had practiced law or had made business deals. I really had studied Kant’s categorical imperative, and I knew that I would always do right.

What happened? I went to prison.

Why? Because we are never more dangerous than when we are feeling self-righteous. We have an infinite capacity for this feeling and for the self-justification that accompanies it. It was only when Jesus Christ came into my life that I was able to see myself for who I am. Indeed, it is only when we turn to God that we begin to see ourselves as we really are—fallen sinners desperately in need of his restraint and his grace.

Kant’s philosophy, like much Enlightenment thought, was based on a flawed view of human nature, which held that men are basically good, and if left to their own devices, will almost always do good things. It was also dead wrong in assuming that the categorical imperative could take the place of moral law. Just because men can think the right thing, it does not mean that they will heed it. Pierre, one of the central characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was torn by spiritual agonies. He cried out to God, “Why is it that I know what is right and I do what is wrong?” We can know what is right, but we don’t always have the will to do what is right.

How Shall We Live?

In books like Mere Christianity and Abolition of Man, the 20th century British Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, attempted to refute Kant and make a powerful intellectual case for the City of God that did not wall it off from the city of man. In an essay entitled, “Men Without Chests,” he drew an analogy between the spiritual life and the body, that sums up his objections to the supreme rationalism of the Enlightenment. The head, Lewis said, is reason, and the stomach is passion or appetite. The head alone cannot control the stomach. It needs the chest, which is spirit, to restrain our more base passions and appetites.

Yet after World War II, schools began to teach ethics based on subjective standards without transcendent moral truths. Lewis challenged this, writing, “We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” That is what we are doing in America today. We are taking away the spiritual element and abandoning morality based on religious truth, counting instead on our heads and our subjective feelings to make us do what is right.

In our zeal to accommodate our so-called enlightened and tolerant age, we have lost the ideal of public virtue. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson, who, upon learning that one of his dinner guests believed morality was merely a sham, said to his butler, “Well, if he really believes that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, let us count the spoons before he leaves.” Today, there aren’t any spoons left to count. Look at Washington, Wall Street, academia, sports, the ministry—all the spoons are gone because we can no longer distinguish between virtue and vice.

Recovering that ability depends on asking the right questions. Our brightest and best leaders are concerned with the question, “How shall we be governed?” But in the Book of Ezekiel the Jews asked, “How shall we live?” It doesn’t matter who governs if society has no spiritual element to guide it. Unless we learn how to live—as men with chests—we are doomed.

The City of God

I have seen this truth demonstrated most powerfully in the area in which I’ve been called to spend my life. I work with men and women in prison in 54 countries around the world. The crisis is grave. In Washington, D.C., for example, 46 percent of the inner city black population between the ages of 18 and 31 is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. America as a whole has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, and for the last 25 years, the crime rate has gone up every year. We can’t build prisons fast enough. In the last seven years, we have seen a 120 percent increase in the number of murders committed by those between the ages of 18 and 20. According to some sources, 20 percent of all school children carry a weapon.

Criminologist James Q. Wilson, among others, has tried to identify the root cause of this epidemic of violence. When he began his inquiry, he was certain that he would discover that in the great period of industrial revolution in the latter half of the 19th century there was a tremendous increase in crime. But, to his astonishment, he discovered a decrease. And then he looked at the years of the Great Depression. Again, there was a significant decrease in crime. Frustrated by these findings, which upset all our preconceived notions, Wilson decided to search for a single factor to correlate. The factor he found was religious faith.

When crime should have been rising in the late 1800s because of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and economic dislocation, Victorian morality was sweeping across America. It was a time of intense spirituality. It was not until the conscious rejection of Victorian morality during the “Roaring” twenties that crime went up. This was the era when Sigmund Freud’s views were coming into vogue among “thinking” Americans: people weren’t evil, just misguided or mistreated, or they required better environments. Sin was regarded as a lot of religious claptrap.

The crime rate did not decline again until the Great Depression, a time when people banded together in the face of crisis. Wilson concluded, therefore, that crime was in large part caused by a breakdown of morality. Since 1965, the crime rate has steadily risen. In the same period, religious faith has waned. We have told people there are no absolutes and that they are not responsible for their own behavior. They are simply victims of a system that isn’t working anymore, and they don’t have to worry about it because the government is going to fix it for them. We thought that in this “brave new world” we could create the perfect secular utopia. But the secular utopia is, in reality, the nightmare we see as we walk through the dark, rotten holes we call prisons all across America.

In this context, it always amazes me when I listen to politicians say, “We are going to win the war on drugs by building prisons, appointing more judges, and putting more police on the beat.” During the seven months I spent in prison, there was not one night that I did not smell marijuana burning. If you can get marijuana into prison, with watchtowers, inspections, and prison guards, you can get it into a country. You can send the U.S. Marines to Columbia to burn all the fields, seal all the borders, and build all the prisons you want, but you won’t stop drug use in this country, because it isn’t a problem of supply; it is a problem of demand. When there is no greater value in the lives of so many people than simply fulfilling individual desires and gratifications, then crime and drug abuse become inevitable. The soaring crime rate is powerful testimony to the failure of the city of man, deprived of the moral influence of the City of God.

If we cannot be good without God, how do we sustain public virtue in society? We cannot do it through the instrument of politics. Alasdair MacIntyre, moral philosopher at Notre Dame, says that “Politics has become civil war carried on by other means.” Without moral authority to call upon, our elected leaders are reduced to saying, “We can’t say that this is right and that’s wrong. We simply prefer that you wouldn’t murder.” And crime and drug abuse are not the only results of this loss of moral authority. Forty-four percent of the baby boomers say that there is no cause that would lead them to fight and die for their country.

In the city of man, there is no moral consensus, and without a moral consensus there can be no law. Chairman Mao expressed the alternative well; in his view, morality begins at the muzzle of a gun.

There has never been a case in history in which a society has been able to survive for long without a strong moral code. And there has never been a time when a moral code has not been informed by religious truth. Recovering our moral code—our religious truth—is the only way our society can survive. The heaping remains of ash at Auschwitz, the killing fields of Southeast Asia, and the frozen wastes of the gulag remind us that the city of man is not enough; we must also seek the City of God.

Charles Colson, former special counsel to President Richard Nixon, is founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship, a ministry devoted to helping prisoners, ex-prisoners, victims, and their families. Born Again, Colson’s international best seller, detailed his conversion to Christianity in 1973. His other widely read books include Life Sentence, Loving God, Who Speaks for God?, Kingdoms in Conflict, Against the Night, The God of Stones and Spiders, The Body (with Ellen Vaughan), and Why America Doesn’t Work (with Jack Eckerd). He is the recipient of the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College.

Archive: Triumph over Tragedy

by Steve | May 11, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Triumph over Tragedy

By Dave Dravecky

How to Celebrate Life When it Throws You a Curve

Ever since playing catch with my dad, baseball had become my life. It’s what I watched on TV. It’s what I played. It’s what I read about when I spread out the Sunday paper.

My life was wrapped up in baseball. And my life as a ball player was wrapped up in my arm. It wasn’t long before that arm gained the attention of the neighborhood when they chose up sides for sandlot ball. Then, it wasn’t long before that arm caught the attention of the entire school, when, as a teenager, I pitched my first no-hitter. My name started showing up on the sports page, even in the headlines.

That arm attracted the attention of major league scouts, and the part of me that was my boyhood became my livelihood. My ability to provide for my family was based solely on what my arm could do on game day. The more strikes that arm could throw, the more I was worth. The more games that arm won, the more people wanted me on their team.

My arm was to me what hands are to a concert pianist, what legs are to a ballerina, what feet are to a marathon runner. It’s what people cheered me for, what they paid their hard-earned money to see. It’s what made me valuable, what gave me worth, at least in the eyes of the world.

A Small Lump

It started as a small lump on my pitching arm. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. It didn’t hurt. Then it got bigger.

At the advice of the team doctor, I saw a specialist. I’ll never forget that day. My wife Jan and I were in a room by ourselves, waiting for the test results. Through the door we could hear the muffled voices of the doctors.

“Look at that tumor!”

Tumor? The word hit me like a line drive. I looked at Jan. “I think we need to pray,” she said.

“Dear God,” I prayed, “we don’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, help us get through it.”

What he helped us get through was cancer. The cancer was diagnosed as a desmoid tumor, and it had to be cut out. But in cutting out the tumor, the surgeon also had to cut out much of the surrounding muscle—the deltoid muscle, the very muscle that enabled me to lift my arm and throw.

I asked the doctor how long it would take before I could pitch again. He told me I would be losing the use of the most powerful muscle in my arm and that simple things like taking out my billfold would be hard. He told me I might be able to play catch in the backyard with my son.

Jan pressed him. “In other words, short of a miracle he will never pitch again.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said, “short of a miracle, he will never pitch again.”

Jan and I believed in a heavenly Father with big, strong hands that could fix anything. I told the doctor, “If I never play again, I know that God has someplace else he wants me. But I’ll tell you something else, Doc. I believe in a God who can do miracles. If you remove half of my deltoid muscle, that doesn’t mean I’ll never pitch again. If God wants me to pitch, it doesn’t matter whether you remove all of the deltoid muscle. If he wants me to pitch, I’ll be out there.”

After the surgery my arm burned from the memory of the surgeon’s knife. I was prepared for that. I had a prescription to push back the pain. What I wasn’t prepared for was the pain that shot through me one night as I watched the 1988 World Series, seeing my friend Orel Hershiser pitch the game of his career. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself, thinking that it could have been me out there. For the first time since the tumor was discovered, I cried.

In a few weeks I started physical therapy. After five weeks I could take the billfold out of my back pocket. After three months the doctor was so impressed with my progress he let me go to Arizona for the last two days of the 1989 spring training. I was put on a grueling regimen of exercises. I worked out five days a week from April through June. I felt like a prizefighter training for the heavyweight title. By midsummer my physical therapist said, “It’s a miracle, but you’re ready to pitch.”

Comeback

On August 10, 1989, I pitched my comeback game against the Cincinnati Reds. It was the highlight of my major league career. The crowd at Candlestick Park stood and cheered as I came onto the field. I couldn’t believe the outpouring of love I felt that day. The scoreboard framed their feelings with the words: WELCOME BACK, DAVE!

I waved my cap to the crowd, then stepped off the mound and bowed my head to give thanks. Each inning I took the field, they cheered. There I was, right smack in the middle of my biggest boyhood dream.

Five days after our 4-3 victory over the Reds, we traveled to Montreal. There was no stadium full of fans cheering me. There were no scoreboards welcoming me back. It was business as usual. For three innings I threw well and didn’t give up a hit. I felt no pain. By the fifth inning, though, I found myself rubbing my arm. It’s hard to describe the feeling. A tingling sensation. It ran halfway between my shoulder and my elbow.

During the next inning my control started slipping. The first batter hit a home run. I hit the second batter! The next batter up represented the tying run.

My catcher signaled for a sinking fastball, low and away, on the outside part of the plate. I nodded and started my windup. But when I brought my arm over my shoulder, I heard a crack next to my ear. It sounded like a brittle tree limb snapping in two. It was so loud, even the people in the stands heard it. The ball went sailing wildly somewhere between home plate and first base. Instinctively I grabbed my shoulder, but my forward momentum sent me tumbling face first to the ground, where I landed on my back. I groped for my arm, the pain knifing through it like a jagged blade. As odd as it sounds, I wasn’t discouraged as I lay there, because with the excruciating pain came a strange sense of exhilaration, a sense that God wasn’t finished with the story he was trying to tell with my life. It was weird. There I was gritting my teeth, biting back the pain, and I was thinking, Okay, God, what’s the next chapter gonna be? Then suddenly, I became overwhelmed at what God was doing in my life, and I realized what he was doing was much bigger than baseball.

“It’s broken,” I said, grimacing, and they brought out a stretcher and wheeled me off the field.

Everyone knew I would be out of the lineup for a while. But my teammates were all rooting for me, even my doctor. Another comeback was certainly possible. I had done it before; I could do it again.

Or so I thought.

My arm was set and put in a brace and a sling in time for me to watch the Giants clinch the 1989 championship that sent them to the World Series. After the final pitch of that game, I ran with my teammates to the pitcher’s mound and was caught in the crush of the celebration. Someone bumped me from behind, and my arm broke a second time. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why did I go out there? What was I thinking?

A ballplayer doesn’t think when his team wins the game that sends them to the World Series; he reacts. And I reacted.

While they were celebrating in the clubhouse, I was lying on the trainer’s table in tremendous pain.

On November 13, 1989, I announced my retirement from baseball, the game I had loved since I was seven years old.

The dream was over.

The decision to retire from baseball was a difficult one for me to reach. But when I did retire, I left with no regrets. Yes, my boyhood dream was over, but for me that dream was fulfilled the first day I put on spikes and suited up in a major league uniform. The rest—the all-star game, the two play-offs, the World Series—were all icing on the cake. And when I came back from cancer to play again, that was the candle on the cake.

Learning to Walk

On January 4, 1990, we discovered that the tumor had returned. My surgeon took the rest of the deltoid, leaving only a small portion intact to cover the curve of my shoulder. He also took 10 percent of my triceps, the muscle on the underside of the upper arm.

During my recovery someone asked if I would visit the children’s floor. I visited an eight-year-old boy who had had cancer since he was four. While I was there, he had to buzz the nurses for a shot of morphine to ease his intense pain. As the morphine was taking effect, we talked about baseball.

After a while he drifted to sleep, and his mother and I talked. “As a mother,” she said, with tears spilling from her eyes, “you long for heaven; then his suffering would be over.”

I came away from my time with that boy and his mother with an enormous sense of sadness. I was sad that we lived in a world where suffering was so ruthlessly impartial. I longed for a world where good people were rewarded with health and happiness, where bad people were the ones who got the terminal diseases and died young. But that’s not the world in which I found myself, as I next met Linda, a 39 year-old mother of three. She had had gastric problems since the summer of 1989, and had lost a lot of weight. The doctors didn’t discover her tumor until Thanksgiving. By that time it was too late to operate. Instead, she was given radiation treatments and chemotherapy.

From the way Linda talked, I could tell she knew the Lord in a personal and intimate way. We talked about her kids and her husband. Her face lit up as she told me how much she loved them, how much they meant to her. She was a good woman, and had everything to live for. But cancer is an indiscriminate disease, blind to good and evil, blind to a young boy or a mother of three.

A remarkable thing happened when I reached out to others in that hospital—a portion of my suffering was brought to an end. Not the physical part, but the mental and emotional part, which is often the worst kind. The relentless throb of introspective questions. The sudden, stabbing pain of realizing the meaninglessness of your life. The dull ache of loneliness.

God had stood by me so miraculously in my comeback from cancer, but now he seemed to be withdrawing. What was he doing? C.S. Lewis once said that God wants his children to learn to walk, and must therefore take away his hand. When raising our two children, Jan and I did the same thing. I remember Tiffany and Jonathan, still in diapers and clinging to our hands, trying to steady themselves on their feeble legs. To teach them to walk we would gradually have to withdraw our hand. Time after time they plopped down on their Pampers. But gradually they took a step on their own. Then two. They got a lot of bumps and bruises during that time, but they learned to walk. I wish I had read Lewis at the time. The rest of the quote would have brought me a lot of comfort: “And if only the will to walk is there He is pleased with their stumbles.”

That God could be pleased with my stumbles was so foreign to my mentality as a major league pitcher. If you stumbled on the mound, it resulted in either a balk or a stolen base. Every batter you walked sent your manager looking off toward the bull pen for a replacement.

“And if only the will to walk is there He is pleased with their stumbles.”

Could he be pleased with me even though I couldn’t perform? Even though I stumbled? Could God really love me like that?

Too much sin, too little faith

After speaking at a chapel service, I was approached by a man who told me I had cancer because there was sin in my life. He told me that the Holy Spirit revealed to him that God had a special plan for me—to be a preacher—but first I had to get rid of the sin. I asked him about some biblical characters who had undergone suffering: “What about Joseph? Was there sin in his life that kept him imprisoned for so long? Was there sin in Paul’s life when he prayed three times for the thorn in his flesh to be removed and it wasn’t?”

To me the issue was not whether I had sin in my life. I don’t think we need any great revelation to convince us that we’re sinners. The issue is not our character but the character of God. Is God the kind of God who gives people tumors when they sin? Does he dole out diseases when we fail him? Say, maybe, cataracts when we lust or hardening of the arteries when we hate. Does he punish us with leukemia and muscular dystrophy and blindness?

The Pharisees thought so. When they came across a blind man, they asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responded by saying “neither,” and then proceeded to heal the man.

In moments of compassion like that, Jesus mirrored the picture of God revealed in Psalm 103:10-14:

He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.

Is that the picture of a father who takes a belt to his children when they spill their milk or wet their pants? Is that the picture of a God who gives people cancer when they sin? I don’t think so.

I didn’t get angry with the man. I felt sad that he was carrying around such a distorted picture of God. I wondered how that picture would get him through life when one day he would have to walk through his own  valley of suffering.

At another time a woman told me that God wanted all his children to be 100 percent healthy. But does he? What would God’s children grow up to be like if all the bumps in the road ahead of them were made smooth?

Cancer introduced me to suffering, and suffering is what strengthened my faith. Yet that woman implied I was suffering because I didn’t have enough faith. She seemed to be saying, Have enough faith and get the life you want. That struck me as making God into some kind of cosmic vending machine, where, if you pushed the right button, you would get a sweet life, free of suffering.

The Bible tells us to rejoice in suffering because it helps to shape our character (Romans 5:3-4). We all want character. Few of us, though, want to go through suffering to get it. The truth is we live in a fallen world and suffering is an undeniable reality in that world. But suffering is not a very pretty sight, and illusions are a lot easier on the eyes than reality. That’s why we look away from the bag lady on the street and look to the displays in the store windows. That’s why we prefer going to the movies instead of visiting hospitals and nursing homes.

It is by the mercy of God that even in a very great loss something can be found. That something is your own life.

The Decision To Amputate

On June 17, 1991, I had my three-month checkup. My arm was almost immobile. I could move it only at the elbow, and then only about 20 degrees. My shoulder was extremely sore. I experienced a few sharp pains, but most of the time it was a dull ache. It was as though the muscles had lost their memory and forgotten how to move.

My doctor came to the conclusion that it looked like it was time to amputate.

Up to this point I had hoped for the best, but I had prepared for the worst. Still the news was hard to take. The surgery was scheduled to be one week later.

The day after my amputation surgery I walked to the bathroom where, for the first time, the image of a one-armed man stared back at me from the mirror.

“Okay, God. This is what I’ve got to live with. Put this behind me; let me go forward.”

When the one-armed man looked back at me, there was peace in his eyes.

I cleaned myself up a little and took a walk down the hall. The nurse who had administered the anesthesia stopped me and said, “I really appreciated your prayer.”

“What prayer?” I asked.

“You prayed this beautiful prayer for the doctors and the staff. In fact you prayed twice.”

I was totally blown away. It was one of the things I really wanted to do before I went under, but I had no memory of my doing it. None.

Then she went on to say, “I’ve heard a lot of people praying for loved ones as they go to surgery, but that was the first time anyone has ever prayed for us.”

A couple of days later when I was walking around, pushing my IV, I came upon a family in the visitors’ room—waiting, paging mindlessly through last month’s magazines on the coffee table. I sat down next to the mother. Her husband had cancer throughout his body, and his prognosis wasn’t good.

Her son sat down beside me and asked: “Where do you get your peace?”

He had seen me in the halls talking to several of the patients and their families, and could tell that cancer hadn’t shattered my life. I could still smile and laugh. He knew something was different about me, but he didn’t know what.

I told him that Jesus Christ was the source of my peace. The entire family listened as I shared my faith. When I was finished, the woman said: “My husband has never done anything bad. He’s worked hard, been a good husband, a good father—yet he’s in here with cancer while all sorts of bad people are out on the streets, healthy.”

It’s hard to understand the suffering in this life, I told her, but this much I did know: You can’t blame God for it. Sooner or later our life on this earth is going to pass. Even the best lives someday come to an end. The only thing that will matter then is whether or not we’ll get to heaven. I believe in miracles, that God can and does heal people, but more important than that, I believe in the eternal hope of heaven. When I die that’s where I’m going, because heaven is my home.

Why Does God Make You Suffer?

Jesus said, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of the Father.” By saying that, is Jesus implying that God is the cause of the sparrow’s death? Is he saying that God sits in heaven and says, “Okay, it’s time for that pigeon with its nest on Second Avenue to die,” and then puts the poor bird in the cross hairs of his rifle and squeezes the trigger?

Sounds silly when we put it like that, doesn’t it? But that is what people imply when they say God picked them to have pain or chose them to suffer or gave them a disease.

So why do people say things like that about God? When C.S. Lewis lost his wife to cancer, for example, he said his faith collapsed “like a house of cards.” When it did, he questioned God’s character: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So, there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So, this is what God’s really like”‘ (A Grief Observed).

When suffering crashes into our lives, we have a hard time understanding how a good and powerful God can be at the helm of the universe. We fear coming to the conclusion: “So this is what God’s really like.”

To protect God’s character from the assaults of such questions, we may look to ourselves, saying the suffering came because we deserved it, because our sin was so great or our faith was so small. Or we may look to a higher good, saying that the benefits derived from the suffering outweigh the pain inflicted by it.

II Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles.” If we turn things around and say that the good which comes out of our suffering is the reason for our suffering, we confuse the character of God and turn things around there, too. He then becomes not the Father of all compassion but the Father of all chastisement; not the God of all comfort but the God of all trouble. That’s why our understanding of suffering is so important. It affects how we view God, which, in turn, affects every area of our life.

God willed a world that is as mysterious as it is majestic. I believe God rules over that world, but I don’t believe he gave me cancer. He allowed it. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know the purpose of my suffering. But I do know the results. When I compare the Dave Dravecky before cancer and the Dave Dravecky after, there’s no comparison.

I used to see everything in black and white; now I see the shades of gray in between. I used to be dogmatic and think there was an answer for everything; now I realize a lot of things don’t have answers. I used to think I could put God in a box; now I believe his ways are too deep for any box to contain. I used to depend on myself; now I depend more on God. I used to be preoccupied with my own needs; now I am learning compassion for the needs of others. I used to view Christ’s death on the cross intellectually; now I view it more emotionally. Through my own suffering I have become more aware of his. And I love him more as a result.

When You Can’t Come Back

What do you do when a part of your life is taken away from you forever? How do you adjust? How do you handle problems of self-esteem and depression? What do you do when no matter how hard you try, how much faith you have, how fervently you pray, things will never return to the way they were? What do you do when you can’t change the circumstances of your life?

What do you do when you can’t come back?

Sooner or later that’s a question we all have to face. For me it just happened to be sooner.

Tragedy pushes us through a one-way door, and once we pass through it, we can never return to the way life was before. A parent who loses a daughter to leukemia can never again go back to her bedroom and kiss that little girl goodnight or read her bedtime stories or kneel beside her bed and pray. A Vietnam vet with legs blown off can never go back to the sidewalks of his youth where he skipped so kiddishly and carefree. A woman who has been brutally raped can never go back to a time of innocence when, as a starry-eyed little girl, she dreamed of being swept off her feet by some handsome prince.

We can’t go back, no matter how much we ache to do so. All we can do is give thanks for what once was, for the good that was there, for the happy times that were had, for the laughter, for the love, for the memories that were shared. Then, saying goodbye to those times and to those loved ones, we can put our hand in the hand of him who gave orbit to the sun and the moon and the stars, and trust that he has a course for our lives as well.

Celebrating Life

I am so much more awake now, alert not only to eternity but to the gift of life here on earth. I am more aware of how precious each day is; how sacred a moment is; how it, too, is a gift, something that comes to us by grace, something that is to be held carefully and treasured.

So many people, it seems, let those sacred moments slip by without notice because they are preoccupied with the future, with their hopes and dreams and plans. We can be so intent on looking down the road at what we want out of life that we miss the beautiful scenery along the way. Playing catch in the backyard with your son. Reading to your daughter nestled next to you on the couch. Feeding the ducks on a walk around the pond with your wife.

The beautiful scenery along the way. It goes past our window in a blur as we push the speed limit to arrive at our destination. No thank you. I’ve been down that road before.

Looking back, Jan and I have learned that the wilderness is part of the landscape of faith, and every bit as essential as the mountaintop. On the mountaintop we are overwhelmed by God’s presence. In the wilderness we are overwhelmed by his absence. Both places should bring us to our knees; the one, in utter awe; the other, in utter dependence.

One by one the wilderness took from us everything we had depended upon in place of God. It took away our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our church, our friends, and even took us away from each other. All those things that we relied on for our source of strength were gone. We were forced to turn to God because there was nowhere else to turn. But at times in the wilderness he seemed to be distant, if not absent altogether.

In the wilderness, Jan and I learned to walk by faith rather than by sight. Where was Job when he said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”? In the wilderness of his own suffering. Where did David say, “O God, My God! How I search for you! How I thirst for you in a parched and weary land where there is no water”? In the wilderness when he hid from his enemies. Where did Jesus say, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”? In the wilderness when he fought off the temptations of the devil.

It was in the wilderness, too, that Jan and I learned to trust God, even though at times every visible trace of him had vanished. The spiritual starkness of the wilderness was what was so difficult to deal with. But we finally came to the point that Habakkuk did when he prayed: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights”(Habakkuk 3:17-19).

Jan and I can’t say we had the feet of a deer as we went through the wilderness. Ours were a lot more clumsy than that. But I can honestly say we had the will to walk. In our heart of hearts we wanted to please God, to trust him, to love him, to obey him.

And I truly believe he was pleased.

Even with our stumbles.

This article is taken from the book, When You Can’t Come Back by Dave & Jan Dravecky with Ken Gire. Copyright © 1992 by Dave & Jan Dravecky. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Q&A Good News Interview

Good News interviewed Dave Dravecky after a recent speaking engagement sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the University of Kentucky’s Wesley Foundation, and the Cool Cats Ice Hockey Club.

In the midst of all your problems with your arm, your wife Jan was dealing with severe depression and stress, which ultimately caused a chemical imbalance in her system. How did you handle this?

I first had to realize my lack of understanding and compassion. I had to see my own insensitivity. It wasn’t until I went through my own depression that I could relate to the depression my wife was experiencing. After all, I was going through a physical problem, and I was sucking it up. She couldn’t do that. When I went through my own depression, I began to realize, in a small way, how I had been lacking in understanding and compassion toward Jan.

Going through all of this allowed me to begin to see more clearly the kind of pain and suffering that goes along with dealing with cancer. It’s not just the physical affliction, and it’s not just the individual who has cancer. It affects the spouse too. And it’s the depression, it’s the anxiety, it’s the fear, it’s the doubt. It’s those questions that come into your mind that somehow as a Christian you push aside, because you’re supposed to be above having to deal with them. That’s a bunch of baloney.

When you read the Bible and look at the men and women—in particular David, the prophet Jeremiah—they experienced depression, they experienced suffering. Ultimately, they ended up realizing that it was only God whom they could trust to give them the strength to get through what they were going through.

They had to experience anguish first to realize their weakness. In my own particular case, I thought my weaknesses were my strengths: not being emotional, being the tough guy, dealing with it, this whole athletic mentality of hanging tough and sucking it up. “What do you mean you can’t get up and walk! Pick up your bed and walk. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. Do it!”

It was in seeing that those things are weaknesses instead of strengths that I learned and began to understand the whole issue of why I’m really here, and why I’ve gone through what I’ve gone through. And that is to reach out and help people in the midst of their suffering, to give them the hope that brings true peace and true joy in the midst of difficulty.

How about your kids? How has your experience affected being a dad?

I have a much greater appreciation for my role as a father, my role as a husband. I realize now, more than ever, my greatest ministry is to my wife. In that ministry, when the two of us are one, as the Scriptures say, then we can have a strong influence on our children if we’re willing to give our lives to them.

Part of the problem with raising a family is the dilemma between the role of financial provider—house, food, clothing—and the role of spiritual provider. There is a real downplaying of our spiritual accountability; we want to let the church take care of it, we want to put our children in a private Christian school if we can afford it, instead of taking the responsibility. One valuable lesson that Jan and I have learned in going through this process is the value of our family, because it pulled us closer together when we were struggling. It gave us a unique opportunity to be able to give our kids some golden nuggets that they can carry with them when they are confronted with adversity as they walk down their path of life.

Ultimately, there are no pat answers. Through our lives, I hope we can express to our kids that we really do mean it when we say we trust in God. We try to live that before them.

What are you teaching your kids about suffering? They understand and know a loving God. They understand Jesus Christ suffered for them, but watching their dad go through all of this—how do you explain it to kids who don’t understand the complexities of life?

We have tried to keep it as simple as possible. People make the gospel a very complicated concept when in fact it isn’t! We tried to approach this by being completely honest with our children. When they asked questions we didn’t have answers to, we told them, “We don’ t know, but we still know that God is in control. How do we know that? Tiffany, Jonathan, let’ s look and read in the Bible where it says that God is in control. Let’ s go to the Scriptures and show you there! It’s okay if you don’t understand it all. You just have to trust that the Bible will help us get through this.”

It has helped us to get through.

We also tried to teach them to know and understand that mom and dad are here for a reason—always available to them when they have struggles. God uses people in this vast universe. He uses people to bring about the comfort that we seek through a relationship with God.

Because we can’t see God, we can’t feel him or touch him, how in the world do we know that God exists? Well, we have the Bible, which is his written word. The only additional means by which we can experience God is through the lives of other people. If God can use a pharaoh as an instrument to free the Israelites from bondage and slavery in Egypt, then he can use anyone to be an instrument of healing or comfort, whether he’s a Christian or not.

It seemed so unbelievable that some Christians felt comfortable enough to tell you that your cancer and amputation was caused by sin in your life or because of a lack of faith. If we do this to Christians, what is the rest of the world getting from us?

The thing that was so comforting to both Jan and me was that we didn’t get angry with people. They were quite sincere, God-fearing, wonderful, loving, concerned, caring people. They just didn’t know their Bible. When we get messed up—and this is where Christians have really been a poor example—we try to make God fit into our neat, little box and say, “Ok God, this is how you’re to operate, because this is what I believe you say or do in your operating.”

Wait a minute! God is the creator of the universe. How in the world is he going to fit into my box? He just doesn’t! So, we have to allow God to work freely in his universe.

Many times, we’ re not going to understand fully why things happen the way they do. However, we do understand that God in his sovereignty is going to work things out for good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose. God is going to use those things, those trials, or whatever takes place in our life, to draw us closer to him. If we could just come to grips with that, instead of always praying, “God, lift the burden from my back so I don’ t have to go through this stress, this struggle. I don’t have the strength to go through it.”

What we don’t realize is that God has given us all the strength we need to go through it, through him. If we start to pray for a stronger back, I think we would be a much greater light in this world of darkness.

Archive: Back to the Future with Thomas C. Oden Part II

by Steve | Mar 13, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Back to the Future with Thomas C. Oden

Part II

The January/February 1993 issue of Good News highlighted the illuminating thoughts of Thomas C. Oden, professor of theology and ethics at the Theological School, Drew University. The following is a continuation of his interview with Good News. —the editors

You have stated we have moved beyond modernity in the American university. Yet the fundamental values of modernity you mention still characterize the university and seminary scene. How have we moved beyond modernity?

When I speak of the death of modernity, I do not mean the death of all popular expressions of modernity. They will continue to have vitality for some decades, until observers realize that modernity’s moral and rational foundations have crumbled. What I am mainly referring to is the death of the ideological foundation, the energizing spirit of modernity. The spirit has died; what we have on our hands is really a cadaver, maybe still a little warm and dressed up in a black leather jacket.

The university remains more addicted than the rest of society to the illusions of modernity. If the conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, fewer on campus have been mugged. There is a culture lag in the university. Faculties whose ranks have swelled with tenured radicals remain quite behind the curve in recognizing the limit of modernity. Outside the ivy-covered walls of the university, ordinary sufferers from modernity have long ago been forced to begin to kick its habits.

These values—reductive naturalism, autonomous individualism, narcissitic hedonism and speculative historicism—may seem to have achieved unalterable dominance in the university, but scratch the professorial surface and you will recognize their vulnerability. The heart is gone from the idyllic song of modernity. It has become a dirge with a heavy, hard metal beat.

Narcissism in the form of sexual experimentation may seem to be much alive in the university with its free condoms, gay advocacy groups, and coed dorms; but the party is over for the sexual revolution. The party-crasher is AIDS. The intellectual foundations of narcissistic hedonism are crumbling. We are living just prior to the time of its full collapse, and from this vantage point we can see that its inner structure is ablaze. We still have many popular remnants of hedonic experimentation, yet they are spawning so many human derelicts and no-win situations that the present trajectory cannot long be sustained—a little like the situation with the national debt. Condoms won’t fix the fiasco into which modernity has fornicated itself. No latex is thick enough to protect against the memory of impoverished relationships.

What about the influence of modernistic heroes such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud?

I do not imply that Marx will have zero influence in the future; but the actual history of Marxist experimentation has so many strikes against its recovery that it will need to allow people at least a couple of centuries worth of forgetting even to venture a revival.

I do not suggest that Freud will have no influence, but the once awesome tide of Freudian moral plausibility has almost totally receded, due primarily to its poor record of therapeutic outcomes. If the Freudian project, the Bultmannian project, the Marxist project, and the Nietzschean project are all dead, then modernity is dead.

How would you describe the theological condition of the UM Church today? Are we sick or healthy?

Chronically sick, but now gradually mending. There are many brilliant scholars in UM theological education, but keep in mind that brilliance can be brilliantly destructive. There remain many healthy dimensions in the theological situation: a growing cultural pluralism, a greater variety of faces in the classroom than were present some years ago, a return to the study of primary texts of the religious tradition. But amid this achievement of cultural pluralism, we are cursed with a cancerous growth, a toxic doctrinal pluralism that lacks attentiveness to the unity of the classic tradition. The cancerous growth is our forgetfulness, our amnesia, and therefore an aspect of our sickness—if amnesia is a sickness. I believe it is.

UM theology is recuperating, like a patient recovering from a lengthy, severe addiction. Our addiction has been a self-chosen disease, a compulsive accommodation to a dying culture; and we have been desperately looking for something in the culture to make right our religious emptiness. Wesleyan theology is sick only to the extent that it has forgotten Wesley. It is not an irreversible illness. But we are finding it difficult to reverse our regnant addictions. There are frequent relapses. United Methodism mirrors the waning cultural environment to which we have been desperately accommodating for several decades. Theological educators will be called to accountability on the Last Day.

By addictions, I speak of relapses into sexual experimentation and flirtations with dying ideologies—Marxist, psychoanalytic, nihilistic, and deconstructionist hermeneutics, and the more reckless forms of liberation and process theology. Liberation theology has clearly lost its vitality with the demise of Marxism and the embarrassment of the Cuban Revolution. Process theology keeps trudging along with sporadic adherents, but few in the laity are willing to listen as they are supposed to want to. Process theology has a few brilliant intellectual apologists, but they still have a negligible effect upon the life of the church. Yet, the voices of moderation and piety among women and minorities—notably African Americans, Hispanics and Koreans—are thriving.

If we mean by the “UM theological condition” the quality of theological writing and teaching in the church, the answer is hardly encouraging. If we mean the quality of the typical believer’s daily walk in the presence of God—its honesty, sincerity and tenacity—the evidences may be more heartening. The liturgical life at Drew’s Theology School is healthier now than at any time in the last quarter century, with less fluff, fewer balloons and group gropes; more classic hymnody, better preaching. If the liturgical life of the community is reasonably stable and deepening, it is a good indication of recovering theological health—or at least proximate recovery from previous addictions.

The presence of small groups of evangelical testimony and prayer has become a flourishing, recent dimension of the current life of most UM seminaries. At Drew there are prayer and Bible study groups with considerable sustaining power.

What has been the impact of radical feminism upon the church?

According to some definitions of feminism, I am happy to be viewed as a feminist. What I mean by radical feminism, however, is that particular form of feminist ideology that is deeply shaped by lesbian ideology, or at the very least, open to lesbianism as a legitimate lifestyle (Germaine Greer, Mary Daly, Kate Millett, et al.); and by a Marxist theory of history and oppression, by which one class, male, becomes fixedly cast in the role of demonic oppressors, and the victim class is viewed consistently as oppressed, regardless of the facts. The oneness of humanity is thus divided into two classes, a guilt class of oppressing misogynists and a guiltless class of oppressed women. This is a faddish form of demonization.

Those assumptions prevail in the dying form of radical feminism. That form is not as vital today as it was 10 years ago in our seminaries. Feminism of recent years is becoming more humanized, more influenced by the central body of women, less lesbian, less Marxist, less strident and outraged, more empathic. The earlier radical feminism is being corrected by neo-feminist or counter-feminist writers like Midge Deeter, Arianna Stassinopoulos, Ellen Hawkes, Megan Marshall, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Karen Mains, and Luci Shaw.

Many more women of moderation and piety are now coming into ministry to correct the earlier exaggerations of radical feminists. Women are more frequently refusing to allow themselves to be represented by pro-abortionist, lesbian advocates and sexual experimentalists whom they recognize to be unfriendly to women’s long-range interests.

In an earlier period, when the more radical feminists had a media pedestal of unquestioned moral authority—that was unfortunately acceded to by the moderate center—they gained a position of authority in some liberal-elite bureaucracies. They became very influential in reshaping language, diminishing free inquiry and setting limits on academic freedom.

Such feminists almost succeeded in taking over some venerable United Methodist institutions, which tended to become dogmatic in direct proportion to the amount of “unresisted” influence the feminist were allowed to exert. There are some UM seminaries that likely will not survive the next quarter century because they will be far too alienated to be supported in their sexual experimentation by the grassroots church.

This primrose path has already been taken by at least one Episcopal seminary, which has openly become a lesbian seminary with virtually all women, having the lesbian sexual assumptions taken for granted as a premise. Grassroots churches are now simply refusing to allow ordinal candidates to attend this seminary.

That could happen in a United Methodist seminary, one or two, but it only has to happen in one or two in order for the rest to flee in moral revulsion. It will not happen across the board. Even with our skewed forms of representation, the UM Church is smarter than to allow its institutions to be taken over by an ideology so alien as lesbian Marxism.

In light of your analysis, what do you believe about the future?

In every moment, human freedom is being given an opportunity to respond to grace. In every moment of theological inquiry, the human desire to know God is being given a fresh possibility of responding to God’s entry into history as attested in Scripture and confirmed by ecumenical tradition, rational inquiry and subsequent committed lives. The situation as given by grace is neither sick nor healthy as such, but full of possibility which persons can respond to in a sick or healthy way.