Staying Happy in a Hollow World

A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________

Robert J. Morgan
November 2, 2003

 

 

This fall I’ve decided to depart from my usual approach in the pulpit—which is expositional—to bring a series of topical messages on how Christians are to relate to the popular culture.  How can we be in the world, but not of the world, as the Bible commands?  And this morning, I’d like to talk about the philosophical underpinnings of our age.  Our text is from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1:

 

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem:  “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity.”  What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?  One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever.  The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose.  The wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit.  All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.  All things are full of labor; man cannot express it.  The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.  That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

 

This rather dismal passage was written by a man who had turned away from God, and, as a result, had lost all sense of meaning and purpose in life.  He had lost the philosophical and theological underpinnings of life, and now nothing made sense to him.  Everything was empty.  He saw generations born and he saw them die.  He was the repetitious cycles of nature.  And he no longer understood what life was all about.  He found himself empty, and in his emptiness were the silent screams of despair.

 

One of the big stories in the news this week has been the revelations being published about Princess Diana by her former butler.   The London newspaper, the Telegraph, said this week in a column:  “The sheer emptiness of Princess Diana’s life also rings achingly true.  When Burrell sees her for the last time, it is on a trip to the Kensington Waterstone’s (book store) to pick up half a dozen books on spirituality, psychology and healing to pass the long hours on her mini-break with Dodi Fayed.”  Princess Diana was arguably the most famous woman in the world, admired by people in every nation.  But at the end of her life she was sending out for books on spirituality, psychology, and healing to try to make sense of what life is all about.

 

Recently I read something that a popular writer named Kathe Koja said.  She claimed that the inner despair and emptiness of the human heart is at the core of every novel she has ever written.  She spoke of “a black hole” (that) is at the heart of every novel… the emptiness we each carry close to our hearts, the emptiness of being alive in a world that doesn’t care.  And the way we fill that Freudian hole, well, that’s the novel.”

 

When asked about that statement in an interview recently, she said, “Everyone is cored by that existential void, the deep hole in the heart that cries for radiance; our entire consumer culture is predicated on the belief that, if you stuff enough things down that hole, you can finally satisfy it into silence.  That has never been the case.  Nor does creativity, sex, art, or even love fill that hole.”

 

Several years ago while traveling in Brazil, I saw graffiti scrawled across a building, written in Portuguese.  I asked my guide what it said, and these were the words:  “We are beautiful drunkards, comets wandering alone, looking at the stars, waiting for a future that doesn’t come.”

           

It reminds me of the words of the philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote in his autobiography, “What else is there to make life tolerable?  We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness.  But it is the voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns.”

 

Well, here in Ecclesiastes, the writer, Solomon, has turned away from God and is searching in other places for answers for the meaning of life.  But he was disappointed and disillusioned at every point.  In chapter 1, he tries education, but he finds that it’s a chasing after the wind.  In chapter 2, he tries pleasure but that also proves meaningless.  He turns to alcohol, then to materialism, building a palatial home for himself.  He institutes great public works, achieving fame and renown.  But nothing filled his heart, because he had rejected the God of the Bible.

 

The French physicist Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator made known through Jesus Christ.”

 

I don’t think anyone illustrates this better than the German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.  He was born in Saxony, in Germany in 1844.  His father and his grandfather were both German Lutheran ministers.  His father suffered a mental collapse and died when Nietzsche was young, about five years old.  As a result, he was raised by a house full of “holy” women, as they have been called by biographers:  his mother and grandmother, two aunts, and a younger sister. 

 

At age 13, Nietzsche was sent off to boarding school, and by the age of 18, he was doubting his faith.  At 19, he went to the University of Bonn to study theology and to prepare himself, despite his doubts, to follow in his father’s footsteps into the Lutheran ministry.  While at Bonn, he joined a fraternity and began drinking with his fellows.  It was also about that time that Nietzsche visited a brothel in Germany, in Cologne, and became infected with syphilis. 

 

During those days, too, Nietzsche was tremendously influenced by the philosophy of pessimism articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer.  When he enrolled in Leipzig University, Nietzsche was physically frail and sick, mentally alert and brilliant, and philosophically moving further and further from Christianity.

 

During these years, he also became acquainted with the composer Richard Wagner, who was one of the most twisted ego-maniacs who has ever lived.  Nietzsche was drawn into his world.  And at age 24, Friedrich Nietzsche was invited to teach at the University of Basel in Switzerland, not all that far from Wagner’s home on the shores of Lake Lucerne.  There he began taking long walks during which he formulated his philosophy.  He articulated his “Will to Power,” and his philosophy about a coming “superman,” and especially his thoughts about the death of God.  Perhaps his most famous parable along those lines is called The Madman. 

           

Nietzsche said that a madman appeared in the marketplace one morning, holding a lighted lantern in the bright daylight.  He startled everyone by crying, “I’m looking for God!  I’m looking for God!”  The people made fun of him.  They said, “Do you think God got lost?  Do you think he’s hiding?”  But the madman jumped into the middle of the people, his eyes wild with alarm.  He said, “Where is God?  I’ll tell you where he is.  We have killed him—you and I.  All of us are his murderers.  We have cut ourselves off from God as though we had unchained the earth from the sun, and we are wobbling out of control, plunging backward, sideward, forward, in all directions.  We’re becoming cold and dark and empty.  Don’t you feel it?”

           

And then Nietzsche asked a profound question:  How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?  Nietzsche was saying that in removing God from our civilization, our life, and our philosophy, we were removing our source of comfort.  We were stripping ourselves of hope and peace.  We were crossing what another philosopher, Francis Schaeffer, would later call the line of despair.

           

Nietzsche understood that when you abandon Christianity, you lose all basis for moral absolutes.  You lose all basis for eternal life.  You lose all basis for inner peace.  But he thought that after an initial time of chaos and despair, his God-is-dead philosophy would pave the way for a great superman to come and take charge of the human race, someone who could lead humanity to its zenith.

           

What happened to Nietzsche?  The insanity he predicted for the world eventually came upon himself.  His health deteriorated so much that he had to resign from teaching, and he wandered here and there through southern Europe, seeking emotional and physical healing.  He was unknown and unread at that time, a virtual homeless philosopher, wandering around, writing brilliant philosophy, living a sick and sad life.

 

In January 1889, while walking down a street in Turin, Italy, he collapsed and flung his arms around the neck of a horse that had just been whipped by its driver.  Nietzsche was helped to his room, and rapidly went insane.  No one knows for certain the reason.  Most biographers attribute it to his syphilis.  But perhaps it was nudged on by a philosophy that rejected God and Christianity, and which, of followed to its logical conclusions, led to absolute and utter despair.

 

Most historians say that Nietzsche’s philosophy not only contributed to his personal insanity; it contributed to the insanity of the Nazi Holocaust; and the superman he predicted for the world was personified in the person of one of his greatest disciples—Adolf Hitler.

           

Ravi Zacharias in his book Can Man Live Without God? wrote, “There is nothing in history to match the dire ends to which humanity can be led by following a political and social philosophy that consciously and absolutely excludes God.”

           

He adds, “I, for one, see Nietzsche’s life and death as a blueprint for where we are headed inexorably as a nation.”

 

William Lane Craig, a brilliant Christian philosopher and apologist, put it this way:  “Modern man thought that when he had gotten rid of God, he had freed himself from all that repressed and stifled him.  Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself.”

 

The reason is because only Christianity provides a comprehensive explanation for the reality of death and a satisfying answer for the problem of death; and only Christianity has authenticated its message about death by providing a leader who actually rose from the tomb.  The world has never found another answer to death; and therefore death is the death of philosophy.  All non-Christian belief systems crash and burn when they come to the subject of death.

           

I’ve never read a better summation of this than Craig’s.  He states with terrible eloquence the logical implications of rejecting Christianity.  He wrote:

 

 I realize I am going to die, and forever cease to exist.  My life is just a momentary transition out of oblivion into oblivion.  And the universe, too, faces death.  Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing farther and farther apart.  As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up.  Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes.  There will be no light at all; there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space — a universe in ruins.  The entire universe marches irreversibly toward its grave.  So not only is the life of each individual person doomed; the entire human race is doomed.  The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction — death is written throughout its structure.  There is no escape.  There is no hope. 

 

Look at it from another perspective:  Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the “Big Bang” about 15 billion years ago.  Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred.  Suppose the universe had never existed.  What ultimate difference would it make?  The universe is doomed to die anyway.  In the end it makes no difference whether the universe ever existed or not.  Therefore, it is without ultimate significance.

 

The same is true for the human race.  Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe.  Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist.  Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same.  The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

 

And the same is true for each individual person.  The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good men everywhere to better the lot of the human race — all these come to nothing.  In the end they don’t make one bit of difference, not one bit.  Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance.  And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities we fill our lives with are also meaningless.  The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships — all these are, in the final analysis, utterly meaningless.  This is the horror of modern man; because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.

 

One of the great Christian minds of the 20th century was Francis Schaeffer.  As a young man he grew up in a liberal church and was heading toward agnosticism or atheism.  But then he discovered the Word of God, and as he read the Bible he compared the answers he found there with the questions he was reading in his philosophy books.   He became a Christian and years later wrote a book entitled He Is There and He Is Not Silent.  In that book, he said:

 

There is no other sufficient philosophical answer.  You can search through university philosophy, underground philosophy, filling station philosophy —it does not matter which—there is no other sufficient philosophical answer to existence.  There is only one philosophy, one religion, that fills this need in all the world’s thought, whether the East, the West, the ancient, the modern, the new, the old.  Only one fills the philosophical need of existence, of being, and it is the Judaeo-Christian God—not just an abstract concept, but rather that this God is really there.  He really exists.  It is not that this is the best answer to existence; it is the only answer.  That is why we may hold our Christianity with intellectual integrity.

 

Schaeffer goes on to say that what when you abandon God and Jesus Christ, you cross a frightening and ultimate line of despair.  That, he says, is where our post-modern world is now living—below the line of despair.

           

If there is no God, there is nothing but despair.  If there is no Christ, we are of all men most miserable.  Perhaps that is why there is so much alcoholism in our society today, and such rampant drug dependence.  That’s why we flooded by sexual images, and why the entertainment industry is such a global phenomenon.  That’s why the movie box-office is such a symbol of our weekends, and why we want 500 channels on our television cable.  Modern humanity can live with neither itself nor its despair, so it drowns itself in diversions.

           

But the diversions don’t provide real, spiritual satisfaction, and that’s why non-Christian world views make it impossible to live both consistently and happily.  Bertrand Russell, for example, admitted that life without God is absurd; but he said we have no choice but to put a good face to it.  He claimed we must build our lives on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.  We must recognize life’s absurdity, and then love one another.

           

If you really live a life consistent with that philosophy, happiness is impossible.  If you live happily, it is because you are inconsistent.  The anti-theistic worldview has build-in logical contradictions and existential inadequacies that ultimately make it philosophically unlivable.  Without Christ, “a philosophy of meaninglessness is an unavoidable consequence.”   The Apostle Paul said that if Christ hasn’t risen from the dead, we are to be pitied, we are of all men most miserable.

           

“But,” the Apostle Paul continued, “Christ has risen from the dead and has become the firstfruits of those who sleep.”  There is a philosophy that satisfies the soul.  There is a theology that strengthens the heart.  There is a Gospel!  There is Good News!

           

Solomon ended Ecclesiastes by declaring there is an answer to meaninglessness and despair.  After searching all the philosophies and speculations and pursuits of mankind, he came to this conclusion:  “Fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man.”

           

One of the reasons we believe Christianity is true is because, in the final analysis, all other philosophies, if followed to their logical ends, lead to chaos and irrationality.  Only Christianity gives meaning to life.  Only with theism in general and Christianity in particular can one be both consistent and happy.  As the Psalmist said 3000 years ago, “My soul finds rest in God alone”  (Psalm 62:1).

           

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

           

He said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”  (John 10:10).

           

He said, “I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even if he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25).

           

He said, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19).

           

If you’ve never had a personal experience with Jesus Christ, why not follow the evidence where it leads—to the foot of Calvary’s Cross.  Commit your life to Jesus Christ.  Place your faith in his shed blood and glorious resurrection.  For these things are written, said John, “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name (John 20:31).

 

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