My world and welcome to it

Donald Sensing, blogger and Methodist minister, has posted an excellent commentary on the Ascension of Jesus which we celebrated yesterday:

“The Ascension of Christ is a critical element of Jesus’s story, and therefore of our salvation. But we are a scientifically minded, technically trained people, and unlike the uneducated, superstitious masses of earlier centuries, we know better than to believe in fairy tales like the Ascension story. At least, that’s how I used to think, including for quite a while after I became committed to Christ. But I think now that we cannot gut the story of Jesus of its miraculous content, leaving holes in the narrative, and expect something sensible to remain. If Jesus didn’t heal the sick in inexplicable ways, then what did he do? Just preach? There have been countless thousands of extraordinary preachers since Jesus’ day. Quick, name two, not including Billy Graham … or Donald Sensing. So preaching itself gets no monuments dedicated to you.
“

Read the whole thing.

The question here is one of faith and faith is a slippery commodity. Anyone who believes that any ethical system can be arrived at without faith is kidding themselves. “The greatest good for the greatest number”? But how do you know that what you’re doing satisfies that requirement? Faith. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”? Faith. Confucius’s “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you”? Faith.

So the purely rational, scientific world is a Hobbesian world, in Tennyson’s words

Nature, red in tooth and claw

Look out for #1. The Devil—is there a Devil?—take the hindmost. Get them before they get you.

For me that’s not a world worth living in. I far prefer a world with an intelligent Creator who loves each creature. And that’s the world I choose to live in.

So I, for one, don’t care a bit about the literal truth of the Incarnation, Resurrection, or Ascension. I believe in them with all my heart and nothing can dissuade me

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

That’s my world and you’re welcome to it.