That we’re made by God for God explains one of the most powerful and persistent longings of the human heart. Paul Johnson, a prolific English journalist/historian noted for publishing some 50 treatises (including Intellectuals, Modern Times and A History of Christianity) recently died, leaving leaving behind a personal testimony titled The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage (New York: HarperCollins, c. 1996; Kindle Edition). He wrote the book because he believed: “The existence or non-existence of God is the most important question we humans are ever called to answer” (p. 1). Yet today, despite the extraordinary proliferation of technology, rooted in what’s called information, “our ignorance of God also tends to increase. We are less sure about what God is, or what he means to us, than our parents were, just as they were less clear and confident about God than their parents” (p. 4).
This being said, it’s remarkable that a certain level of belief in God remains. Try as we may, it seems we cannot quite persuade ourselves that God is dead! It would certainly seem, given the horrors of the 20th century, that we would have abandoned any belief in a good God who works providentially within our world. Yet we have not. Instead we often turn to God for solace and help. In part, Johnson think, this is because atheistic philosophies have failed to adequately explain why our our world exists and how we ourselves experience it. Though individual atheists may live exemplary lives, too many purely secular thinkers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre (whose pernicious ideas influenced Pol Pot in Cambodia) demonstrated an “extraordinary squalor, selfishness, confusion, cruelty and not least cowardice of his own life” (p. 22). Though Marxism was “created by an intellectual crook who constantly invented and manipulated his so-called ‘scientific evidence’” resurfaced under the guise of Liberation Theology, “an anti-Christian heresy, without any moral basis” that has proved itself to be a source of “violence and great moral evil” (p. 29). In short: “There is no substitute for God: this our own dreadful century has abundantly proved.”
To Johnson, Christian theism provides the best understanding of God. It blends natural and special revelation to give persuasive answers to life’s great questions. “Natural Law has thus been part of Christianity since its inception and that is as it should be, because Natural Law is a form of moral absolutism and therefore akin to Christian teaching, which I believe is true for all times and peoples.” The “moral relativism” so influential in modern times results from turning away from the Natural Law. To deny the reality of absolutes, Johnson thinks, is demonstrably evil—“a great evil, one of the greatest of all evils because it makes possible so many other evils” (p. 67). It’s the “cardinal sin” of the 20th century. His deep attachment to and support of the Roman Catholic Church comes, in part, from her traditional commitment to absolutes (in dogma and morals)—the perennial things that ultimately matter most.
Johnson devotes many chapters to explaining basic Christian beliefs, noting how they have given him direction throughout his life, concluding with an essay on prayer, “the most important chapter in my book.” We may not be able to begin to understand God, and we may be confused in many ways, but “we can all pray. It is the one resource that can never be taken away from us except by the total collapse of our minds” (p. 184). At times, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” may be all we can say, but it’s still an efficacious prayer. Praying the Psalms—an ancient practice embedded in the worship of the Church—is one way of consistently talking with God. Written prayers—and writing one’s own prayers—have proved helpful to Johnson, as is going to church on a daily basis when possible, and he encourages us to find ways to join him in talking with our Father.
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In God on Stage: 15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions (Elk Grove Village, IL: Word On Fire, c. 2024; Kindle Edition), Peter Kreeft activates his philosopher’s acuity to show how great playwrights have brought God into their artistic works. He considers himself a “tour guide,” and he wants us simply to Stop, Look, and Listen! Take note of what some great seers have seen. “The world’s a stage,” says Joseph Pearce, “and we are all called to play our part in the drama of life and love. Peter Kreeft doesn’t merely play a part. He plays many parts, and he plays them all so well. He is one of our age’s greatest philosophers. He is a great apologist. He is a very good writer. He entertains. He makes us smile. He makes us laugh. He makes us look at ourselves and each other in a new light. And now, this tried and tested guide to life guides us through some of the greatest plays ever written. Those wishing to go deeper into the meaning of life and death, and the mystery of love and suffering, will find no better guide than Peter Kreeft.”
Kreeft explores five important questions, looking at plays illustrating the pagan, Christian, and post-Christian perspectives. In dramas dealing with “life and joy,” he finds the pagan view evident in a radio play, “Under Milk Wood,” written by the 20th century poet Dylan Thomas shortly before he died. Setting forth the play’s main theme, one of the characters exclaims: “Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?” Kreeft thinks these words set forth “the central theological point, the God-point, so to speak, for God is not absent or dead, He is simply “off-center. And loved, however anonymously and implicitly. That’s the point, the ‘thank God: the cosmic gratitude” (p. 22). Thus pagans often have a certain “pietas,” a sense of gratitude for the goodness of life rooted in their love of nature. The Christian position on the same issue can be found in Thornton Wilder’s classic “Our Town,” a play that “lets us see life from the viewpoint of the dead” (p. 34). The play does not give us “a human perspective about God but a divine perspective about man. . . . . God lives inside Wilder’s house, in his soul, in his eyes, in his perspective” (p. 37). Radically different from “Our Town” is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” wherein God is utterly absent. It’s a play without a plot or meaning. The characters do nothing but wait around for Someone who never comes. Consequently: “The absence of God’s presence in Waiting for Godot is really the presence of his absence; and that is a real presence! If you want to see what difference God makes to everything (and to Everything), this is one of the most helpful books you can ever read” (p. 57).
Turning to dramas dealing with religion, we find the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus representing paganism. His “Prometheus Bound”—“the first and oldest of all great plays” Kreeft discusses—deals with “man’s relationship to the gods, and to Fate, which rules over all, men and gods alike”. (p. 59). Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, enabling him to make civilizations. For his effort Prometheus is chained to a rock and suffers endlessly thereafter. Devout pagans have their good points, but ultimately they cannot escape the chains of despair. Quite different is the Christian religion as depicted in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” a moving portrayal of St. Thomas More, whom Samuel Johnson called “the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced.” Kreeft considers the play his “candidate for the most perfect movie ever made.” (p. 68). Bolt’s play tells the story of More’s resistance to King Henry VIII that led to his execution, but the play “is also about God,” who gave More reason for living and dying.
A Christian drama dealing with suffering is ‘Shadowlands,” wherein C.S. Lewis is shown responding to his wife’s death. “Lewis,” Kreeft says, “is my candidate for the most brilliant and effective Christian apologist of modern times, and he is a very good selection to exemplify the Christian response to suffering, especially the very worst suffering of helplessly seeing someone whom we deeply and totally love gradually sink into death” (p. 95). In his weeks of mourning Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, feeling as if his faith was a “house of cards”—lsomething critics have taken as a confession of despair. But what he really discovered was that his fallible faith was in himself, not the One Whom he trusted. Whereas Lewis kept the faith, his contemporary, an atheistic nihilist, Archibald MacLeish, had none. His play, “J.B.” espoused the atheist’s ancient refrain: “If God is God, he is not good; / If God is good, he is not God.” MacLeish’s final “word is ‘nothing.’ That’s the devil’s favorite word. Karl Marx’s favorite quotation, from Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, is ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish.”’ That’s the devil’s philosophy and ultimate goal” (p. 109). Nothing really matters in a world of nothing but matter.
Turning to one of the four “last things” we mortals face, Kreeft discusses plays dealing with death. “Nothing is more immediately important,” he says, “more difference making, than how we die. Death is the most important journey we ever make. In fact, it is the only important journey we ever make, for life is the only important journey we make, and death is the last and determinative event in that journey that we call life” (p. 144). Though Shakespeare is in profound ways a deeply Christian dramatist, Kreeft thinks his “Hamlet”—the “greatest play ever written”—reflects a pre-Christian view of death. Hamlet’s great soliloquy asks the deepest of all questions: To be or not to be. In the play death itself is the protagonist, and in the end it prevails. Thus the play’s a tragedy acknowledging the inexorability of Fate. The terrifying aspect of death is damnation, a theme explored in another of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth, which treats it in a pre-Christian way. “The consummation of Shakespeare’s psychology of damnation is Macbeth’s justly famous ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’ speech, the very manifesto of nihilism. Nihilism means literally nothing-ism, the ideology of nothingness. Obviously, things still exist, but their value and purpose, their meaning and teleology, is gone, and therefore so is our hope. Dante was right to put over hell’s door the warning: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ Conscience is at the very heart of man, so that when God and conscience are dead in a man, as they are in Macbeth, when the voice of God dies, man dies as well, since man is God’s image—just as your reflection disappears from the mirror when you disappear from the room” (p. 181). “Macbeth is living in an anticipation of his eternity in hell, whose entrance ticket is abandoning all hope and whose philosophy is nihilism: nothingness, purposelessness, meaninglessness. Life is not a story told by a wise and loving God but ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’” (p. 183).
After death comes the Judgment—and the possibility of damnation. A Christian interpretation of damnation is afforded by C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, a novel that lends itself to theatrical renditions. The book faces a difficult question: “Why would anyone freely choose damnation rather than salvation?” Employing the words of Goerge MacDonald, Lewis notes: “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing” (p. 195). A series of vignettes reveal some of the reasons explaining why people end up in hell, and they are all ultimately rooted in our desire to have our own way. Ultimately, says Lewis: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God: ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” Those who refuse to do God’s will frequently slip into the view of Jean-Paul Sartre in his play, “No Exit,” declaring “hell is other people” and endorsing nihilism. “God’s absence,” says Kreeft, “is more massive in this play than his presence is in most religious plays. Since there is no God, there is no purpose, reason, value, or design for human life, except the ones we invent ourselves” (p. 198).
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As a businessman, Robert Trussell went through times of failure as well as success. During a dark time he found strength and direction as he recovered his Christian faith. Hoping to encourage others to do likewise he wrote a short treatise: The Logic That God Exists: A Handbook on Belief in God through Simple Reason to Bring You Peace (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, c. 2024;Kindle Edition). He writes not for academics but for ordinary folks who need assurance, so the book’s not so much an accomplished work of apologetics as an encouraging word of testimony. Though he knows many people doubt God’s existence: “The point of this book is to show that there is ample and compelling evidence that there is a God, and further that Jesus was God and is God. Contrary to some who say there’s no evidence, I maintain the opposite — it is impossible that there is not a God” (p. 8). This is a bold declaration, but to folks who are open-minded it may very well be compelling.
There’s a widespread, and generally unexamined, notion that the cosmos popped into existence by chance. “Everything just happened by itself” we’re told. To the extent this is explained we’re told about “evolution through natural selection.” This idea, Trussell thinks, is “the root of many of the problems we face today. It is entrenched in the culture, manifestly false, and should be removed from cultural orthodoxy” (p. 10). Though evidences of microevolution abound, “it is tough to come up with examples of macroevolution where major species evolved into a different significant species. Importantly, no evidence or theory exists of how this could work from inanimate objects growing into animate ones.” After more than a century of intense investigation, “no intermediate fossil forms have been found for macroevolution from one species to another. The fossil record shows no evidence of simple life forms transitioning into complex life forms. Instead, there was a virtual explosion of animal types during the Cambrian era” (p. 17).
Rejecting naturalistic evolution leads Trussen to also reject the theory’s philosophical foundation in scientism, defined by one scholar as “an exaggerated kind of deference toward science, an excessive readiness to accept as authoritative any claim made by the sciences, and to dismiss every kind of criticism of science or its practitioners as anti-scientific prejudice.” Replacing theism, scientism denies not only the reality of God but or goodness, truth, and beauty. It’s an atheistic philosophy, not science itself , which “is all about logic. Logic dictates that something cannot come from nothing. Therefore, science itself dictates that there has to be a God” (p. 27). There are “laws” of nature that explain its workings. These laws are not “things”—they are non-material realities governing things. “It should be easy to understand that the laws of nature that run the universe could not have made themselves” (p. 28). The laws of nature need a Law-giver. To illustrate this, Trussen says: “It takes about 2 billion lines of unique handwritten code by more than 25,000 engineers and a vast empire of computers and data centers spread throughout the entire globe to run Google. But it takes more than 3 billion letters of unique genetic code arranged in a precise, specific manner, written inside a cell weighing 2,000 millionths of a gram, to run YOU, a far more complex and superior system than all of Google. Imagine looking at all that Google code and then me telling you it all evolved together on its own somehow. So, what makes more sense? That life and intelligence and the ability to think and love come from something that has life and intelligence and thinks and loves or that it comes from … random chaos” (p. 31).
Still more: to prove the “existence of God in a completely different way” one should consider the miracles and Person of Jesus Christ, who repeatedly said He was God’s Son. He claimed (as John’s Gospel records in his “I AM” statements) to be the way, the truth and the life, the bread of life, the light of the world, the door of the sheep, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, and the true vine. These are astounding claims, but reading about Him leads one to believe he was really Who He claimed to be. His followers spread His Word throughout the world and the Church He founded stands as a witness to its transforming power. “So dear readers,” Trussen says, “if Jesus did all these things, He was God; therefore, there is a God. I f He came down here, literally walked on water, and raised the dead, this becomes a spectacular reason to believe in God” (p. 50).
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One of the most intriguing extra-biblical evidences for Jesus’s Resurrection is set forth by Gilbert Lavoie, M.D., in The Shroud of Jesus: And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, c. 2023; Kindle Edition). Years ago as a pre-med student the author found a copy of Dr. Pierre Barbet’s A Doctor at Calvary and began to look at Jesus through a medical doctor’s eyes. Barbet “was the first to forensically confirm that the man of the shroud was definitely crucified” (p. 35). This led Lavoie to study the Shroud of Turin—and, importantly, clues in John’s Gospel unveiled by it. “Remarkably, John wrote about all the details that are seen on this Turin cloth. They all correspond exactly to John’s description of Jesus’ torture, crucifixion, and death. In other words, all the significant wounds on the shroud are found in John’s Gospel. So, what John saw on the day Jesus died is exactly what happened to the man who was buried in this Turin cloth” (p. 43).
A lifetime of research led to the publication of this book, endorsed by Mike Aquilina as “a veritable summa of Shroud studies, incorporating evidence from disciplines as diverse as botany and history, chemistry and theology, Judaic studies and forensic science. It leaves no stitch unexamined, no stones of history unturned. Over the course of decades, Dr. Lavoie has tested every objection to the Shroud’s authenticity. He details his findings here without ever bogging the narrative. The book would be a page-turner if only the photos weren’t so riveting! You’ll want to stop and examine every one.” I’ve been fascinated by shroud studies for years and fully agree with Aquilina—this is a treasure chest of detailed information setting for the best assessments now available on the subject.
Modern studies of the shroud began in 1898 when it was discovered that its image was, incredibly, very much like a photographic negative. Photographic techniques enabled scholars to analyze “the only ancient textile known to display the blood marks of a crucifixion. But even more astonishing, this cloth also displays the negative image of a naked man who was crucified” (p. 24). The shroud revealed fascinating details, including the fact that nails had not penetrated in the palms of the man’s hands (as had been depicted in artistic works for centuries) but his wrists—something now confirmed the remains of men executed by Romans in the first century. In earlier centuries it was possible to argue that the shroud was painted by a medieval artist, but today’s powerful microscopes show us that no paint was used. Indeed, you can “see that the individual fibers of each thread were yellowed. It was these individual yellowed fibers of each thread, not paint, that caused the image” (p. 50). We can now see “heme derivatives, bile pigments, and proteins” demonstrating that it’s human blood—blood that flowed from a tortured body—that colored the shroud. Despite all our modern technologies no one has been able to reproduce such a shroud image. Amazingly: “the blood marks are a natural event, but the image formation is an event that is outside of our ordinary understanding of time and space” (p. 126).
Trying to better understand the shroud, Lavoie devised some experiments using human volunteers to make photographic negatives. Perusing them, one picture of an upright man’s stood out. “In awe, I sat there. Then I stood up, and out of reverence for what I saw, I slowly backed away from the image of the shroud face that was on my living room mantel. There was no denying it. The light areas around the eyes, between the lips, and under the nose were all there. The volunteer’s face had all the same characteristics as that of the shroud face. This negative of my volunteer was photographed differently from the one taken when my volunteer was lying down. This accidental discovery was the beginning of an understanding of the shroud image that I could have never realized in two lifetimes” (p. 130). He was “overwhelmed” by the possibility that the shroud shows “a reflection of the moment of his resurrection. It was a moment in direct contrast from all that I previously understood.” (p. 141). He’d thought the shroud had covered a prostate man. But now he saw “the image of the upright man” demonstrating His Resurrection.
This realization drove him back to a meticulous examination of John 12:32: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Lavoie says, “It was the word lifted that brought forth an image of what I saw on the shroud” (p. 142). Christ crucified arose—and it’s evident on the shroud!