Religion in a Modern World

Description: Science hasn't found an explanation of spirituality.

Question: Does Christianity answer all of your questions?

Transcript: Well Christianity, strangely enough, does answer all my questions. I mean, it’s the lens through which I view reality. It’s how I make judgments. It’s how I respond to others. It’s how I define reality to all intents and purposes. The Christian myth makes sense to me. It provides a world that’s as orderly and stable to me as the . . . as the Greek myths did for the Greeks and the Romans did for the Romans. I . . . I don’t live in a dark world. I mean, I don’t . . . I don’t live in the sense that everything is going to go up in flames, and we’re all destined and doomed, and terrible things are happened . . . happening. But I do believe we live in what the scriptures refer to as a fallen world. Christian theology speaks of it as a world that has not achieved its ideals. And we are struggling, and moving towards them, and trying to manage as best we can. And certain ideas and ideals have been set before us. The person of Jesus Christ, for me, is such an idea and an ideal. I believe He really existed, but that doesn’t diminish the ideological power or the . . . the sense of imagination that is employed. And I aspire to live my life in the light of what I understand that truth to be – a truth which I have received through the wisdom of thousands of other smarter and cleverer people who existed before me. I admit to being a child of the Western Christian experience, and I embrace it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. And I don’t deny my dependency upon it. It’s the vocabulary with which I work.

When I travel, as I often do, through Western Europe and I look at those great cathedrals and those monuments, they all speak to me. They all makes sense to me. It’s describing a world in which I did not live, but which still lives for me. And that’s very important. Part of my work, I suppose, is trying to call back, as best I can, the life of that world and the people that are far removed from it. I’m much comforted by the . . . the remark G.K. _______ once said that “Christianity is not a religion that has been tried and failed. It is a religion that has been wanted and never really tried.” And my job is to try it, and to get other people to try it on for size and hope for the best.

Question: How do you reconcile science and religion?

Transcript: I haven’t found any scientific advance that explains joy, or happiness, or genuine peace. Or that has achieved perfect satisfaction in mind, body or state. I haven’t found any scientific discovery that’s done that. There was the great cynical observation that when we started exploring outer space, that we might actually find where heaven was. And the Russian cosmonauts were supposed to report back as to whether God existed. Did they find him up there? And nobody did. Or medical science, when it _____ operating on the brain, or the very interior of the human body, could never quite find the soul. They keep looking and they never managed to do it. It seems to me that science could never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside. And thus it seems to me science is able to describe certain realities, but it has it limits. And religion goes beyond those limits. That’s why they call it faith. That’s why it’s exciting. It seems much more exciting to me to be a pioneer on the frontiers of faith, than working out my salvation in some laboratory hoping that I’ll discover something in a jar of chemical unknowns. I think that’s very unlikely.

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I think these young people have been brought up in a culture of enormous wealth, enormous power, enormous opportunity. The least well-off of them is considerably better than the best of their ancestors. I think they recognize that. They see the signs off success – as the world defines success – and opulence on every hand. They’re surrounded by sensation. They’re surrounded by violence. They’re surrounded by politics. None of these are capable of delivering the goods and I think they recognize that. And I think there is a desire to find something that will last, something that will endure, something that will not disappoint. And when you do that, inevitably you are tempted to turn back to the elders, to the wisdom of another age, to something that might not seem to have appealed to you in your earlier phase; but your earlier phase, you recognize, was a deceitful and deceptive one. You ask Harvard graduates where they’re all going, and they’re all going to go . . . 90% of the seniors in any given class say they’re going to three cities. They’re going to go to Washington to put things right: power. They’re going to go to New York to make lots of money: the material world. And they’re going to Los Angeles to have fun: fantasy. And I think they come back from all three of those cities discovering that, like Oz, there’s no there there. Washington is not going to turn the world right side up. All the money in New York doesn’t spare it the troubles and tribulations of living in New York. And all the fantasy from la la land doesn’t dull the pain from living in a life with no meaning and no value. And that’s a modern symbol, I think. People say, “Okay. There must be another way.” Maybe Jerusalem is the place. Maybe a pilgrimage to a holy city is the place. Maybe some ______ somewhere. Maybe sitting under a ____ tree. Who knows? But there are wiser people than we who, years ago, have discovered some of these truths. Maybe we even heard them in our youth. And maybe the trick is to try to recapture, recover some of that for ourselves now. I think that’s part of the excitement.

Question: What advice do you have for today’s youth?

Transcript: Well one of the things that I find that I have to say to young people – which is a strange sort of conundrum – is I have to tell them that they are of value. They suffer not from high self-esteem. They suffer, by and large, from low self-esteem. They tend to believe they are the result of this materialistic, mendacious culture. When I am sitting down with young couples who are getting married, I always ask them, “Would you like your marriage to resemble that of your parents?” Invariably they say, “No. Thank you very much. I love my parents. Presumably they love each other, but we hope for something better than this.” So there is a sense that they recognize the limitations of the world in which they are. They tend to over-emphasize their own limitations. And part of my job is to say, “You can aspire to be more than the sum total of your parts. There’s more to you than just a brain, or just a body, or a set of marketable skills.” And I find, rather than trying to deflate their ego, part of my job is to try to raise it up so that they can understand that they are, in the biblical phrase, “created a little lower than the angels”, having been given great power to represent God and ______ the world. That we are images made in God’s image. That there are great things that we can be, and do, and aspire to – that they should do that, especially those who are going to raise families. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your children for heaven’s sakes! Let them blossom and flourish.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: there’s a certain degree of intellectual humility that has to be introduced here. “Oh, things are not going the way they should. Oh woe is me!” Come on! Get off it! Who are you? You think you’re Job? Job dealt with this a long time ago. Of course, most of them have not heard of Job so I introduce them to Job. Part of my job is to try to connect them with . . . to our rich inheritance, our rich history. But the great line, for me, is a line of St. Paul, which I use in nearly all of the baccalaureate sermons that I give – and I give a lot of these across the country. In Romans 12, St. Paul yells and _____ almost literally off the page, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind!” And I say, “Those of you who are privileged to be members of a great university like this, and who have had your minds renewed – even if you didn’t do much about the renewing yourself – simply being here has been a part of this process – you have an opportunity and an obligation to be agents of transformation out there . . . to make things better than they are, to make a difference, to find your place and to exercise that. It may take you a few years. It may take you the rest of your life! But as John Bunyon points out in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, that’s a life worth living – a life in pursuit of some worthwhile, ultimate, and maybe even unobtainable goal – you should do that!” And some of them say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that.” And of course, my reply, “Why couldn’t you? What talent do you lack? What opportunity is missing? What skills do you think you need in order to do that?” And when they start thinking about the talents, the skills that they have, and the things that they might need, they begin actually to think, “Well what difference might I make? How could I do something about this?” Now surely, that comes with more authority from someone like Bill Gates, who says, “Look. I’m the richest man in the world and I’m screwed up. I didn’t know what I was doing, so surely you can out and find something.” What I was interested in when Bill Gates spoke at Harvard, that not many of the students with whom I spoke said that they wanted to be the richest man in the world. They wanted to find out, given what I have – my talents, my time, my opportunity – what can I do? What can I do to make myself a happier, better person? What can I do to make my world a happier, better place? And in most cases, for most people, it’s a relatively small enterprise. At commencement, it’s customary to say, “You’re going to change the world.” They’re not going to change the world. Let’s be realistic about this. These kids are not going to go out and turn this tired, old world upside down. But there may be certain aspects of your own life that you can attend to, and certain relationships that you can cultivate and encourage . . . certain places where you can make a difference. The trick is to find those places and to do it! And I think people are searching for that, looking for that. That’s what we call looking for meaning, looking for wholeness. Most people experience the brokenness of the world. They wanna do something about it. And my job is to encourage them to do something about it.

Recorded on: 6/12/07