Gunning for God by John Lennox

Author:John Lennox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE JUDGMENT OF GOD

The central issue, then, is the judgment of God and its ramifications. It is important to be clear from the outset that, contrary to popular opinion, this topic is not confined to the Old Testament, just as the topic of the love and compassion of God is not confined to the New. Indeed, it is the Old Testament prophet Isaiah that people frequently quote to encapsulate their longing for a world in which there is no more war: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”35

When it comes to the matter of judgment, the New Testament is, if anything, more solemn than the Old in its description of a final assize that is eternal in its implications. The fact is that, according to both Old and New Testaments, there is to be a final judgment at which human behaviour will be impartially evaluated. It is the claim of the New Testament that Christ is to be the judge.36 That final assessment will proceed on the principle of judgment by peer: it is humans that are to be judged; it will therefore be a perfect human who will be entrusted with the judging.

Such claims are more than enough to send atheists into orbit, since they reject out of hand the existence of a final judgment, to say nothing of Christ’s claim to be the judge. For atheism, by definition death ends all; and so there is no judgment to be feared. Remember the bendy bus message: “There’s probably no God, now stop worrying…” That element in the atheist message is very ancient. It certainly goes back as far as the Epicurean philosophy, so well expressed in the Latin poet Lucretius’s famous poem “De Rerum Natura”.37 In his poem, Lucretius takes up the ideas of the atomists Democritus and Leucippus, and argues that, because the atoms of the body disperse irretrievably on death, there can be no life after death: “Nothing at all will have the power to affect us or awaken sensation in us.” He preaches this as a charter of freedom: freedom from the threat of a final judgment.

This “freedom” remains a key element in the New Atheism. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, many atheists deeply resent the idea of a God who is watching over people, since they think that this is an expression of tyranny, and they wish to be free. However, the notion of God watching over us actually makes a great deal of sense, which the New Atheists, with their a priori conviction that God is a tyrant, do not seem to realize. Yet they ought to. Would they wish to live in a country where there was no police force watching over the people? Would they be prepared to fly across the Atlantic from an airport that had no security screening? I think not. For it is common human experience that we need people to watch over us. Of course, some people are tyrants — as dictatorships both of the right and left have proved.

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