Hopefulness

Thanks for listening to this special podcast series, "Questioning Christianity." This short series is meant to address common questions people have about the claims of the Christian faith. In each podcast, Tim Keller addresses a variety of questions like "Can there be moral absolutes?" and "How can you believe in something you can't prove?" We encourage you to share this podcast with others and discuss the topics addressed with friends. And for more content about "Exploring Christianity," visit gospelunlife.com/exploring. Every week we've been sharing a fun fact about Tim and the first week, if you were here, we highlighted. He's actually a very musical person and it's it's been said that he memorizes the entire, several entire musicals like "Marfair Lady" and "The Music Man" and "The Fun Fact Tonight" is that if you Google Tim Keller and HFNY, which is a non-profit that serves the city in multiple organizations, you might find proof of that. So again, if you look that up, there might be proof of Tim's musical acumen there. So that's the fun fact. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Timothy Keller. Hi, those are by the way. Those are facts. Not necessarily fun facts actually, but they, but unfortunately I must admit they are all facts. So let's, let me, let me, this is the last night in this series, at least this year, and let me look back and look forward, orient us. What we've been saying every week is you can't prove demonstrably that there is a God. You also cannot demonstrably prove that there's not a God. So in a sense, everyone is living by faith. And we've been saying secularism is actually not so much the absence of belief. It's the presence of a new set of beliefs. And that means, for example, if you're a secular person, you're not sure if there is a God, you're not sure if you believe in God that actually necessarily entails that you believe certain things about matter, like the material world just generated itself, or it's been here beginninglessly. It at certain beliefs about human rationality, human purpose, moral values, and that sort of thing. And none of those things can be proven. So the question comes up, then, is there any way that we can know which of these belief systems is more likely to be true? Is there any way to do that? And I've been trying to say each week, yes, just because you can't prove something that demonstrably doesn't mean you can't rationally weigh the various belief systems to figure out whether or not one is more likely true than another. I've been trying to steer you between two poles. On one end is what has been called logical positivism, or at least it used to be, called that. And logical positivism was a school of thought that said that you should never believe anything unless you can empirically verify and prove it. That was called the verification principle. You shouldn't believe anything unless you can empirically verify and prove it. And then, somewhere in the 1950s, somebody pointed out that the verification principle couldn't be empirical proven. And as a result, right now, today in the academic world, it would be hard for you to find any philosophy professor anywhere that believes you must believe only things that you can be proven. Or even the idea that secular beliefs could be proven. So that's one end. Though I'd say the average person often does say that to me. They're logical positivists without knowing the problems with it. And that is, I'd be happy to believe in Christianity or in God if you could prove it to me. Even though logical positivism has been undermined, on the other end is what you might call "perspectivalism." And "perspectivalism" takes the idea, and this is true, by the way. I think we can all agree on this, that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. That therefore nobody's really totally objective. There is no such thing as a perfectly neutral person. That everybody has a set of beliefs, and you're sitting in a culture, and your culture has helped you form those beliefs. But "perspectivalism" says, therefore, there's just no way for anybody to know the truth of anything. Because you have your truth, and we have our truth. We're all sitting in our cultures. Our communities of discourse, they're called, by some people. Our cultures have constructed our view of truth. And there's just no way for us to figure out which one is true. Peter Berger, who was a prominent sociologist and religion, however, very famously, in a chapter, I'll give you the title in a second, very famously, and one chapter pointed out that if you say nobody can know the truth, because all truth is culturally constructed, well that statement would have to be culturally constructed, and that means you wouldn't be able to know that. And what you're actually doing, you're saying everybody's got their own truth, but what you're saying there, you would think that escapes the scalpel, and it doesn't. Because if everybody's got their own truth, then that very statement is something that you've just made up, and you have no reason why I should believe it. And so what Berger says is, ultimately, his chapter is called, "Relativizing the Relativizers." And he says, "Ultimately, complete relativism, the idea that nobody can know the truth always undermines itself, because you get to the place where, well, how can you be sure of that?" And he says, "In the end, we have to go out and try to figure out which of these belief systems is most likely true. Do it humbly, do it in a, you know, be chasened, don't be arrogant, but you can't stop back and say, "Nobody can know the truth." You've got to get out and find out what the truth is. Now, this middle path I've been trying to give us is called critical realism. And in critical realism, we know that you can't prove any one of the sets of beliefs, but what you can do is you can ask at least three questions. Which of the sets of beliefs are the most consistent with our experience? Which of these sets of beliefs are most consistent with itself? And which of these sets of beliefs are the most consistent with the evidence? Now, this year, these seven times we've been together, we've been mainly talking about the first two. We've been looking at things like meaning in life. You can't live without a meaning in life that helps you face suffering. You can't live without identity. You can't live without a basis for making moral judgments. You can't live without happiness and satisfaction. And we've been asking the first two questions. We've been saying, which of the various belief systems secularism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, but mainly been looking at secularism and Christianity? Which of the various sets of beliefs are more true to our experience? Which of the sets of beliefs explain the needs we have? Which of these sets of beliefs seem to fit more with our experience and are things that we can live? And which of these sets of beliefs actually are consistent enough that they don't have to smuggle in things from other sets of beliefs in order to help their members live life? And that's what we've been looking at. This year, we have one more topic. One more topic, meaning one more thing that you can't live without. And you have to ask yourself the question, how does your belief system help understand that need and help you with it? And I'm talking about the need for hope. You can't live without hope. Hope to face the future. You can't live without it culturally and personally. Let me explain what I mean. Imagine two women, same age, same educational background, same culture, same temperament, basically, two women, very much the same people. And they're hired to do a job. And they come to the factory and they're put into identical rooms and their identical lighting and identical temperature, identical circumstances. And they're asked to do the identical thing all day, which is to put certain pieces together in the creation of some mechanical mechanism. So they're given the same job, the same situation. Everything's identical except you tell one woman, by the way, you're going to be paid $2,000 a month. And you tell the other woman, by the way, going to be paid $2 million a month. So after about two weeks, three weeks, the women have lunch together, you know, they get the lunch break. And one woman, the first woman, says, don't you think this job is tedious? I can't imagine doing it for very long. Don't you find it boring? Don't you find it tedious? And the other woman says, oh no, it doesn't bother me. No, no, no. In fact, I whistle while I work. I mean, I'm having a wonderful time. What's going on? These women have identical circumstances and they're interpreting their identical circumstances in radically different ways because their hopes for the future are totally different. We are irreducibly hope-based creatures. And without knowing it, we live and experience our lives right now determined by what we believe is going to happen later. Our futures determine our now. What we believe about our futures, our hopes, has an enormous impact on how we experience and how we live right now. And that's true both culturally and personally. What I mean by that is personally, does it make any difference as to whether or not when you die? That's it. What if you believed in an afterlife? What if you believed in a particular kind of afterlife? What if you believed in a particular kind of afterlife that was actually connected to how you live now? All of those options would drastically change the way you live and even how you experience life. And then [BLANK_AUDIO] cultural hope, personal individual hope and cultural hope. What's our hope for the human race? What's our hope for history? What's our hope for society? And whatever your beliefs are about our future corporately and personally, has an enormous effect on how we live life now. So now, having shown how important it is, you can't live without hope. Let's compare how we might say the secular belief system, the secular culture, which we live in. How does it help give its members hope? And then what is the unique contribution of Christianity? And the reason I put it that way is because I guess I'm going to say right off the bat, something that you shouldn't, you already do know, but I'm going to try to spell it out, that our culture, our secular culture, or you might say your secular beliefs have an enormous amount of trouble giving people a lot of hope for the future. Let me give you some example. Let's start with the cultural. Now these are things you certainly know, especially if you're older and a lot of you are not, most of you don't look as old as me. But you certainly do know that 40 or 50 years ago fiction was a lot more hopeful. Just look at the difference between the first star trek and the later star trek. And now you have over, people are constantly talking about how many movies are about dystopian futures. They're about disasters, they're about, you know, all of life, you know, wiped out except for a few people. It's amazing all the disaster films, in other words the movies and our storytelling is filled with dread about the future. A second thing, of course, is our birth rates, it's true that they declining birth wet rates in Europe and in America amongst the most secular people. You might say well that's economic, it's, well yes it's true, listen I'm not going to go, you might ask me about this later and I'm going to say duh because I don't know enough, I'm not a statistician, I'm not a sociologist, but I do know everybody says hope has something to do with it, that the cultures in which people have more hope about the future have more children and the cultures in which people have less hope about the future have fewer children, in fact so few children that don't do replacement which means cultures die out without hope. A third thing though is, and this is in the news all the time, is the ridiculously frightening almost statistics about depression and suicide and you know just for example in the last year there was an article, they come up like every six months in the New York Times, here's one June 7th 2018, defying prevention efforts, suicide rates are climbing across the nation. And this is the bottom line, suicide rates are the last ten years for teenagers up 70%, it's going to be pretty soon doubling, suicide rates for girls aged 10 to 14 over the last 15 years have tripled, it's 300%, overall suicide rate up something like 30 or 40% over the last 10 years and whenever they, and of course far more reports of depression, far more reports of that sort of thing, and you might say, I mean there's two or three things you can say, one is, well there's less stigma today to go to the doctor and maybe people are more willing to go, that still doesn't explain the incredible uptick, all college, by the way, those of you who are involved in universities and college, you know when an astounding increase in students going to mental health services for depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, it's amazing. Some people of course say, well the economy is not good, and so people are feeling hopeless because of the economy, interesting fact, here's a little interesting fact for you. Do you know that suicide rates are massively up in virtually every category, so it's a lot of category, gender, age and race, except for one thing, it's down amongst African-American men. Did you know that? By the way, don't ask me why, nobody knows, but I can tell you this, if anything they are the most economically distressed, and so the idea that suicide rates are going up because people don't have as much money and jobs doesn't fit. Robert Putnam, a famous political sociology person at Harvard, looked at the stats and he says, this is because of hopelessness, there's no way that you have this kind of epidemic of depression and suicide unless there's hopelessness, now why, and why would the hopelessness be there? Some years ago, some years ago, wrote a book which I have loved, it's called The Real American Dream. In fact, somebody recently pointed out, he says, you know, you've quoted Andrew Del Bonco's Real American Dream in seven of your books or something like that, and I said, oh, I guess I really do like it, and the subtitle is A Meditation on Hope, and this is the great quote. "The heart of any culture is its hope. Hope is the way we overcome the lurking suspicion that all of our getting and spending amounts to fidgeting while we wait for death. Hope is the way we overcome the lurking suspicion that all of our getting and spending amounts to fidgeting while we wait for death." That fear of hopelessness, that death is going to come to us, and in the end we will have accomplished nothing. That's what every culture worth its all tries to overcome, and he goes on and says, every culture must imagine some into life that transcends our own tiny allotment of days and hours. If we were to keep it bay, the dim back of the mind's suspicion that all human beings have, that we are drifted in an absurd world. Now, the three chapters in Andrew Del Bonco's book, where he tries to explain how American culture has tried to deal with the fact that our deepest intuitions is that death makes life meaningless, and every culture has got to try to overcome that. Otherwise you can't have a functional culture. The job of a set of beliefs is to help people with that, and he says the three stages in American culture in which we tried to put forth a hope for people. Here's the three stages, the three chapters of his book are God, Nation, and Self. He says originally we were religious nation, and that did in a way give people hope. Why? It gave you personal hope, because if you believed in God there was heaven, there was personal life with your loved ones forever, and it also gave you cultural hope, and we'll get back to this, because the Christian hope was the resurrection of new heavens and new earth. He says for various reasons, as America secularized, as America said now we don't want the religion so much. It turned from God to nation, which was another way of saying we started to get our hope by looking to humanity. Instead of looking to God as a culture we started to say science, technology, human ingenuity, human goodness, that we're basically down deep, reasonable good people, and that basically human beings are going to find a way to the future. So he said basically we said the reason we can have hope for the future is we have trusted human beings, and then there was World War I, and then there was World War II, and then there was the capitalist inequality, H. G. Wells some of you know he wrote a bunch of books on science fiction, he was a well known British writer in the early part of the 20th century, and before World War II he wrote at one point quote, "Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, that it will live, that children of our blood and lives will live, and a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength, and an ever widening circle of adventure and achievement." He wrote that 1928 and 20 years later in 1948 he wrote quote, "Homo sapiens as he is pleased to call himself, is played out, his depravity has come near to breaking my spirit." In 1850 there was a book written, a very well known book, and it was a novel, in 1850 called The Carl Island, and it was about a bunch of young English schoolboys who were shipwrecked on an island, and they basically built a paradise, because they were away from civilization, and they didn't have any of the Bugabooza civilization, they built this paradise. In the 1960s William Golden wrote a book called The Lord of Flies, and it was basically a modern view of the Carl Island, and a bunch of English schoolboys, you know, are shipwrecked on an island, some of you may know the story, and they descend into savagery. And what you have there is what's happening to the hope that the human race is somehow going to pull it together, and through science and technology and sharing of our resources we're going to build a wonderful future. That hope is playing out. It just is. Thank you for listening to Questioning Christianity. If you're exploring the claims of Christianity, we would like to send you a free book, making sense of God by New York Times best-selling author Tim Keller. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it's easy to wonder why would anyone believe in Christianity? As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. In this book, Dr. Keller demonstrates how Christianity provides modern people with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. [BLANK_AUDIO] your free copy go to GospelUnlife.com/free. Free copies will be shipped while supplies last. Again, that's GospelUnlife.com/free. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of his talk. And so the cultural hope is starting to diminish and we're having trouble finding it. We're trying to having trouble finding some way of having cultural hope. But what about personal hope? Secularism does struggle with the thing with the idea of personal hope in the face of death. A guy named Luke Ferry who was a French atheist who wrote a wonderful book some years ago called a brief history of thought. He's an atheist but he is very fair when he looks at every set, you know, he looks at when he looks at Christianity, when he looks at Greco-Roman paganism, when he looks at the enlightenment, he's actually remarkably fair-minded and it's a great book to read. But at one point he talks about as a secular person, he talks about the enigma of death and he says, "All religions strive in different ways to save us from the peril of death." And then he goes on to say, his secular friends often say things like this, "Death is really not a big deal." He quotes Epicurus. Epicurus was basically a kind of atheist or at least a agnostic ancient Greek philosopher. And Epicurus taught that when you die, you just go away. You know, you just go unconscious. You're just not there. When you die, that's it. And he says, "Why should you be afraid of that? You're not suffering? You don't know you're dead." You just stop feeling or thinking or having any kind of sensation. So basically, what is it to be frightened of? In fact, at one point, Epicurus says something like this, "By definition, when I die, I am not here to worry about it. So why should I bother myself with such a pointless problem as death?" Luke Ferry actually says this. This line of reasoning, in my view, is too brutal to be honest. And he goes on and says this, "What makes your life most meaningful? What is it that gives you your life meaning? Love, love, not money, not health. If you have all this stuff and you don't have love, it's nothing." So what makes your life meaningful is love. And we, he said, "We secular people believe that when you die, that's the end of love. That's the end of personality. That's the end of a personal existence." And he says, "To say to me that when I die, everything that means and matters to me will be taken away from me. Everything, all level will be taken away from me. And that I shouldn't be afraid of it. I shouldn't dread it." He says, "That's not honest." It's just not honest. So how to secular people then deal with death? Every other culture was religious. And every other culture gives you some kind of hope for life after death. But secularism says, "No." And as Luke Ferry says, "You try to write that off and say, "Oh, no, no, no. It's not a big deal." You know, when you die, that's it. And it doesn't matter. He says, "I don't think you're being realistic." He says, "You need to face, it's a problem." So how to secular culture help its members face death. And I think one of the main ways I've been looking in trying to figure out how they do this and, you know, all around me for many years, and basically what they try to do, what secular thinkers try to say to people is that death is really just a part of life. Now, a popular, accessible version, I don't want you to snicker at me here, but a very well worked out, a secular version of how you handle death is the Lion King. Because in the Lion King, at one point, Simba is asking his father something about death. And the father has a very wonderful, lyrical answer. And he says, "You know, Simba, when we die, our bodies fertilize the ground, our bodies go into the ground and enrich the soil. And because our bodies are enriching the soil, grass comes up. And then when the grass comes up, the antelopes eat the grass. And then when the antelopes grow up, the lions eat the antelopes. And then when we die, we become, you know, part of the ground." And he says, "So, actually, death is really just a part of the circle of life." Remember that? He says, "We're all part of the circle of life. There really is no death. Death is just a natural part of the circle of life." Which isn't bad. I've heard people also try to say, "You're Stardust. Eventually, you're going to be part of the Stardust." In other words, your organic life continues. Of course, your cells go into some other mode of existence, but you're part of the organic life. And therefore, your death is really a natural part of the cycle of life. Here are some limits to that. Peter Kreft, Boston College, Professor Philosophy. Some years ago, wrote a story, true story. About a friend he knew, who had a wife, who had a seven-year-old boy, her son, and his cousin died. And his cousin was only three. So, the boy was seven. The cousin was three. And the boy comes to his mother and says, "Where's my cousin now?" Now, the mother was a secular person, and with integrity, I mean, you've got to give her credit here. She didn't take the easy way out, which is to say, "Always in heaven, and someday we'll all see him." She didn't believe in heaven, didn't believe that. So, what she said was, I'll tell you where he is, his body is going into the ground. She said, "And his ground is making fertile the soil, and as a result, food comes up out of this fertile ground that we can eat, and flowers come up that we can see." And therefore, your cousin is actually part of the ground and part of our lives. And he ran out of the room screaming, "I don't want him to be fertilizer." And Peter Kreff said, "It was a noble try, it was a noble try, but what she wasn't doing was dealing with two deep, deep, deep human intuitions about death. They are very deep, and the secular beliefs try very hard to kind of eradicate them, and they're not going to be eradicated." The first is that death is not natural. It is not natural. The secular view says, "Well, it's just a natural part of life, it's nothing to be afraid of." And there's something deep inside of us say, "It's not really not natural. It's not right, it's wrong." Dylan Thomas is way closer to the reality of the human heart, and our deepest intuitions when he says, "Do not go gentle into that night, rage, rage, against the dying of the light." That's right. Rage, why? It's not natural. It is not natural. It is not a natural part of life. This isn't right. It's not supposed to be like this. And so the first moral intuitions is so deep is that you try to make something natural. A seven-year-old kid knows better. Maybe we're going to educate him so he, you know, you might say suppresses that part of the heart, but honestly, it's strong. Samuel Johnson, you know, the famous biographer novelist, 18th century, Samuel Johnson, once a secular friend, Ms. Seward, said to him, "You know, death isn't anything to be afraid of." He said, "Death is only a pleasing sleep." And Samuel Johnson got very upset and said, "It is neither pleasing nor sleep." And went on to say, "If somebody involuntarily rendered you unconscious violently and against your will rendered you unconscious, that would be considered a crime." And when death does that to us, that's a crime. It's not natural. Death is a thief. So the first intuition is it's not natural. Here's the second intuition though. This is one I want to dwell on a little bit. The second intuition is what makes life meaningful is not the idea of life after death. The idea that my life in somehow becomes part of the earth or becomes part of the ocean, or even the idea that my life becomes part of the all soul of the world or and we become, you know, we organically stay part of the cycle of life and all that. Actually, that's not what the human heart wanted. That is not what makes life meaningful. It's not life after death. It's love after death. The thing we most want is love after death. And to have love, you've got to be a person. And secularism denies those two of our deepest intuitions. What it says about death is not fit what we most believe. That is absolutely not natural. And that it is in no way what we really want. In other words, we don't want to just extension of organic life. That's what we want. We want love. And that's the reason why it's unnatural. It's like this isn't right. We're not made for this. We're not built for this. We're built for, we're built for love without parting and death makes us part. We're built for love without parting and death makes us part. So what does Christianity, how does it help? What, how does Christianity address the cultural and the personal need for hope? I want to first of all start right out by saying lots of other religions are better than secularism on this way better anyway. In fact, I guess I would go so far as I say, the two moral intuitions that death is not natural and that what we most want is love after death, not life after death. I would say that pretty much all religions are better at secularism at dealing with that first intuition. All religions are saying there is life after death because it is not natural to die and that we know we should be living on and it's not right that we die. And every religion says, "Yes, we do." Islam, Judaism, some parts of Judaism, some of you know if you're Jewish, some parts of Judaism are kind of murky about the afterlife, other parts are very, very strong. But basically Judaism, Islam, and Eastern religions all talk about an afterlife. And so in one sense, all other, just about every other culture, every other, every religion is better a secularism at dealing with that deep intuition that life's not natural. But here, I'd like to look at the second one, because Christianity gives you unique help when you look in your heart and say, "What I really believe and what I really want more than anything else is the idea of love after death." And here's the three things that Christianity gives you. There's the Christian hope is personal, restorative, and certain. I'll just go through those three and then we'll be done and we can take questions. First of all, it's personal. Christianity says, "You remain a personality." You remain a person. John Updike in his memoir, he wrote a memoir, the famous novelist John Updike wrote a memoir at one point. And I've always loved one of the last chapters where he talks about his Christian faith. And basically, and the name of the chapter is, "On being a self forever." "On being a self forever." Because you know Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism say, "Your soul continues, but it's like a dew drop going into the ocean. It loses its individuality and its personality. You become part of the also. You don't remain a conscious person." Well, the problem with that, of course, is if you don't remain a conscious person with a personality, then there's no love. But Christianity says, "Your afterlife is personal." To me, one of the most moving things, and this is in the Christian world, this is the week leading up to Easter. So here's my little doff of the hat to that. When Jesus Christ rose from the dead, in all the accounts that talk about it, most historians say it is very, very strange to see that all the accounts of the first eyewitnesses of Jesus after he was raised from the dead did not recognize him. But then they did. See, in other words, on the road to Emmaus, they were talking with him, and then they recognized him. Or maybe you might remember, if you've heard on Easter Sunday, a lot of people, times when I'm speaking on John chapter 20, Mary Magdalene is at the tomb. She sees the tomb as empty. Jesus shows up, and he's looking at him, she's talking to him, and she doesn't recognize him. But then she does. It's odd. It's almost like, "If you're anybody, you're really new well until they're about 12, and now you're 28, and you haven't seen them since you were 12, but you were really good friends with them." You knew them very well. And one day, somebody comes, this woman man comes up to you and says, "Hey, you recognize me," and you say, "No, I don't recognize him." I say, "It's me, it's Sally." And then you look and say, "Oh, it is." I mean, if you remember Sally at 12, and you look at Sally at 28, "Yeah, yeah, you can see it's Sally, but it didn't hit you." It's something like that. Historians say, "One of the marks of the authenticity." I know I'm not talking to you about the resurrection here tonight, but one of the marks of the authenticity of these accounts is, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing you would make up. If you're making up a story about a person with a resurrection body, you would either make up the story that the body was identical, and after all, he does have the nail prints still, according to the text. Either identical or completely different, but the idea was with all the imperfections of a mortal body, a body subject to death, a body subject to disease, a body subject to decay, to take all of the imperfections out of a mortal body. It means you're still you. They recognize it. Oh, Sally, Jesus, it's you. And yet there's something perfect and beautiful, too. What this means is, since the Bible says, Christians believe that Jesus was the first born from the dead. You know what that means? Christians believe we're going to be like Jesus, and you know what that means? Okay, here's my belief as a Christian. When I see any of you, if you're a Christian and I see you after death in your new resurrected body and you see me, we're going to look at each other, we're going to say, "Who are you?" And we're going to say, "It's Tim." And you're going to say, "I always knew you could be like this. I saw glimpses of it, just little glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you." Personal. Did that moving? I'm trying to move you. Okay, so there you go. All right, so at the point is, I mean that's not a drop going into the ocean. That's not star dust. That's not becoming fertilized or that's your personal. So the first thing that Christianity teaches that your future of is personal. That's very moving. And Luke Ferry, by the way, says, "It's enormously, enormously attractive." Number two, it's restorative. Now, what do I mean by restorative? Most religions say that when you die, you go to heaven. And heaven is a consolation for the life you lost. But Christianity believes in the resurrection, which means you don't just go to heaven and live out there, live up there. Someday, God restores the world. At the end of time, He judges all things and removes all evil and moves all suffering and removes all corruption. And He actually recreates the world. And so you see, the Christian hope is not a consolation. Heaven is a consolation for the life you lost. But the Christian hope is a restoration of not only the life you lost, but the life you actually never had always wanted to have. Now, how powerful is that as a cultural hope? You can probably find this. It's not that easy to find, but in 1947 Howard Thurman, who was an African-American civil rights leader and he was a scholar at, he's long gone now, but he taught at Boston University. And he did a famous lecture at Harvard in 1947, and the name of it was the meaning of Negro spirituals. And he was looking at these songs, of course. And his argument was that the songs were sung faith by the African-American slaves of their theology, especially of their future hope. Now, these are quotes from this lecture. See, he engaged the criticism of African-American spirituals that many critics said, "It's too much otherworldly." You know, all this reference to crowns and thrones and the robes we would wear when Jesus returned. And the argument was, "Ah, that's just, that actually didn't help the slaves. It made them too otherworldly." And Thurman really pushed back. On the contrary, he argued, "This sung faith served a deep in the slave's capacity for endurance." The spirituals encompassed the Christian belief in a final judgment, a day in which all wrongs we may write. It also included a belief in personal immortality and reunion with loved ones. And out of these doctrines, this is his quote, "The conviction grew out of these Christian doctrines of the future hope." Out of these doctrines, the conviction grew that this kind of universe will not be able to deny ultimately the demands of love and longing. The conviction grew amongst the slaves, that this is the kind of universe that could not deny ultimately the demands of love and longing. Uniting with loved ones turned finally on the hope of immortality and that the hope of immortality hinged on God, therefore God would make it all right. And then he went on and said, "The slaves hope, their Christian hope, in judgment day in the New Heavens and the Worth, taught people how to ride high in life, to look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope, and to use those Christian facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that their environment with all its cruelty could not crush. This enabled them to reject annihilation and to affirm a terrible right to live." Very eloquent. And at one point there's a thought experiment done, and this is a paraphrase. At one point he answered the objection, "But you can't take all that stuff." Literally, the thrones and the crowns and judgment day, you can't take all that literally. And then he said, "If such things were just seen as mere symbols, if the African American slaves thought they were just symbols, that would have been the end of their hope." And here's the thought experiment. Imagine sitting down with 19th century slaves and say, "Hey, there's no judgment day in which wrongdoing will ever be put right. There's no future world in life in which your desires will all be satisfied." This life is all there is, and when you die, you simply cease to exist. Your only real hope now is for improved social policy. So with that knowledge, get out there and keep your head high and live a life of courage and love and don't give into despair. He said, "That'd be ridiculous." Which shows the power of the Christian hope over the power of a secular hope. The last thing is, Christian hope, I said, is personal. It's restorative, And it's certain. Here's where Christianity does differ from every other religion. I've tried to show you Christianity differ from secularism, but it's also different from the Eastern religions that say your future isn't personal, but it's also different from Islam and Judaism because it says you can be absolutely sure that you're forgiven. You see, a religion in which I go to heaven when I die, if I live a good enough life, means you can never live with assurance of your future, can you? What if you could be absolutely and totally sure that no matter what happened to you, even the worst thing, even if something fell on you and you died, the worst thing that could happen to you would only make you into a bright immortal, loving person, would only make you perfect. What if you could be sure about that? And of course Christianity says you can be because your salvation is not based on what you do, it's on based on what Christ has done and when you embrace it by faith, you can have that certainty. And that certainty means, for example, it means, for example, if you know the great debt has been paid and if you know the great disease has been healed, then all of their debts and diseases look like fleabites by comparison. What's the great debt? Well, the Christians believe it's the barrier between God and us that Jesus took away when he died for us and he paid our debt that we owe because we're imperfect. And therefore, the great debt's been paid. The great disease, what's the great disease? It's my mortality. I mean, I'm dying right now. Everybody, the minute you are born, you're dying, your clock's winding down. But if the great disease has been cured and the great debt has been forgiven, then all of their debts, all other diseases. You see what it means to live in hope? Let me just finish with this. There's a place near the end of Lord of the Rings, it does not come out in the movie. Even though there is actually a place in the extended version of the Lord of the Rings movie where you actually see Sam at the end, as he's on his way to Mount Doom with Frodo and they're just, they're weighted down by the power of everything and they're just, it looks horrible. There's one place even in the movie where he sees a star in the sky. But in the book, there's a remarkable place in the book where Sam is just about losing hope and they're both trying to sleep that night and they can hardly sleep. And Sam looks up and he sees a star. It says, he looks up and he says, he saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart. And like a shaft clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. Before, he had only been able to get his strength up through defiance rather than hope. But he was then thinking of himself. Now for a moment, his own fate and even Frodo ceased to trouble him and he fell into a deep untrouble sleep. Do you see what he's saying? He suddenly realized that all the evilest world was basically a tiny passing thing. There's light and high beauty for ever beyond his reach and he had hope. And once he had hope, he says, you know, no matter what happens, it's going to be okay. If we die now, it's going to be okay. If we complete our quest, it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. You're going into surgery and you don't know whether you're going to come out. There's light and high beauty for ever beyond the reach of shadow. This entire world, this is the Christian idea. This entire world is a little dot of darkness, a little dot of evil and suffering. And it's in an ocean of joy and light and love. And a Christian knows if I die on the operating table, it'll be okay. Well, what about your family? They'll be okay. Everything will be okay. That's hope. So it's certain, means you can live with that hope, it's restorative, it's personal, powerful. Okay. So I don't know that there's any other set of beliefs that has the same resources. I know what somebody's going to say and you can do this to me. Well, how do you know it's true? Well, why would you sit around to listen to any kind of presentation of why the evidence is there, which I want to do next year anyway? Why would you even sit through that unless the thought occurred to you? Gee, it would be great if it was true. There's no way you're going to sit down and look at all the evidence for why it's true, unless you first said, "Boy, be kind of good if it was true." And I hope you do see it would be great if it was true, because it fits the deepest intuitions of the human heart about death. Thanks for listening today to Tim Keller on the Questioning Christianity podcast. We encourage you to subscribe and share this podcast series with others and discuss them with a friend. We hope you'll go on to listen to the Q&A session for this talk in the episode that follows. And remember that you can find more content about exploring Christianity by visiting gospelandlife.com/explore. That's gospelandlife.com/explore. The Questioning Christianity talks in this series were recorded in 2019 in New York City, where Dr. Keller spoke with a local live gathering made up of attendees who did not identify as Christian and their Christian friends who invited them.