The only resolution to the basic human predicament

I just followed an Internet trail that led me to a website I've bookmarked and will be checking in with frequently, I'm quite sure. Just look at some of the tantalizing article titles featured on the front page. Juicy questions, no?

I'd not heard of J. Warner Wallace, who runs the website, before I followed this trail of writings. It started with a column he has today at Townhall.  The column is a real wet blanket in a certain sense. He cites the findings of a recent Pew study, and they don't bode well:

Our Numbers Are Shrinking – Only 56% of Americans say they believe in God “as described in the Bible.” The number of people who claim a belief in God – or who self-identify as Christian – is steadily shrinking each year according to Pew surveys conducted over the past decade.

Our Members Are Less Educated – Of those who have a high-school education or less, 94% say they believe in God as described in the Bible. But, as our collective educational level increases, our collective belief decreases. Of college graduates surveyed, only 45% believe in the Biblical God. 

Our Ranks Are Aging – The younger we are, the less likely we are to believe in the Biblical God. While 65% of Baby Boomers believe in God as described in the Bible, only 43% of millennials hold a similar view (a recent Barna survey also revealed that Gen Z Americans, ages 3-18, are far more likely to be atheists than older age groups). 

Our Understanding Is Withering – Of those who identified themselves as Christians, only 80% said they believed in the Biblical God. 20% said that they believed in a higher power or spiritual force, other than the God described in the Bible. 

To be candid, the uplift he offers after putting forth these figures is rather thin gruel. The study finds that "88 percent of Americans believe in some kind of God / higher power / spiritual force, even if that being is not the God of the Bible." A starting point, I guess.

But I followed some of the links he inserts in the course of the column, which led me to his website, and then to some particular posts therein.

This one, entitled "Why Some People Simply Will Not Be Convinced," is good.

As is this one, entitled "I'm Not A Christian Because It Works For Me."

I think we can safely say that one reason for the dismal stats cited in the Pew study is that the entire notion of sin is a turnoff for post-Americans. It was for me. And to be sure, the subject is often presented in an egregiously boneheaded fashion. We've all seen the little pamphlets that think they're getting the secular person who has just happened upon them excited with a message like "So we can see that we deserve Hell and death. But the good news is that Jesus died for our sins so that we might escape such a fate!" I know my response was always, "Save that crap for somebody else, pal."

I've said before - a few times - that one of the last sticking points for me was that the Christian scenario looked like a rigged game. God gives us this gift of our free will, but we're inevitably going to use it to sin and thereby incur God's wrath, and then we have to perform this particular ablution in order to get right.

But I finally had to admit to myself that, at some level, every last human being - myself most definitely included - is broken. Has issues. Falls short of perfection, even if you want to define perfection as the Platonic state of the ideal, or the Buddhist state of enlightenment. As the trite old saying puts it, nobody's perfect.

Now, there's a predicament. What's the way out of that? To see that that is so, and then to think that after we die, we'd just experience bliss. that eternity would be peachy-keen, just doesn't add up. It amounts to the same thing as atheism. It saps the meaning out of life in this realm. None of our thoughts and actions, and none of what we experience as a result of interacting with others, would make any sense. We'd have no basis for defining right and wrong, good and bad.

So we need a release valve, an escape hatch.

God has to be the kind of god the Bible describes. It's the only way anything is going to mean anything. It's the resolution to the questions the ancient philosophers had.

I was a tough customer. Even in the last few seconds before I said yes to Jesus - and I'd been going back to church for quite some time by then - I was scouring my mind, asking if there wasn't some other model of reality that was at least equally valid.

But there comes a point at which it's not so much you approaching Him as it is Him drawing you in the rest of the way. The dynamic flips.

God said, "Quit squirming and let me love you."

And once I did, I was filled with a sense of compassion for all the stages I went through prior to that moment.

That's the element we need to bring to any conversations we have with spiritual-but-not religious post-Americans, as well as secular agnostics (which I know all about, since that's what I had become), the ones who say, "There may be some kind of higher power, but it's not real high on my list of things to think about."

These are all points on the journey, the journey that ends at the foot of the Cross. From that vantage point, we can see that God smiles on any of those who are not so embittered as to be willfully rejecting it altogether.

He'll see them up close and personally eventually. In fact, he'll let go of his plow and run across the field, with tears streaming down his face, saying, "My child has come home!"