Eternity On Our Hearts, I.

Dear friends and readers: I am beginning a short, 6-7 part series of essays on the Christian faith. It’s a blend of apologetics, explanation, and thought experiment. I wrote it with a casual, conversational tone, and I hope its helpful and thought-provoking to both non-Christians and Christians. I’ll update regularly, since I’ve drafted the whole series. Thoughts and comments welcome throughout! [/end introduction to the introduction]

Part I: An Existential Crisis
What’s the point? 

In high school English class, they taught us to make our thesis clear in the introduction. I remember that all-important statement needed to come in the last sentence of the first paragraph, and it had to exhibit clarity, take a stand, and pave the way for all the trailing paragraphs. (If you wanted to make an A, at least.) A tall order for a single sentence. Anyway, those were the days before we learned that real writers, whoever they are, usually break the rules.

Well, this is my introduction, and since I’ve freed myself from those Scarlet Letter and Shakespeare spark-noting days, you won’t find anything much like a thesis here. It’s more of a philosophical and personal note—a motivation for my writing this series of essays, and a heartfelt hope that you will consider the content.

2016 turned out to be a bizarre year for many people I know, and the world at large. Perhaps it’s this strange conglomeration of farfetched world events, the stage of life many of my friends find themselves in, etc. etc., orchestrated by God’s providence, that opened the door for a number of thought-provoking conversations and correspondences. Conversations about politics, philosophy, purpose. Conversations with friends of different backgrounds and beliefs. They’ve forced me to wrestle with questions of my faith and worldview, and for that, I’m grateful.

Whenever we go beyond the superficial, our questions ultimately converge to a search for truth and meaning. Where did our universe come from? Is this life all there is? What happens when we die?

What’s the point?

In the halls of elite universities, I hear that question reverberate. We are frail, mortal beings, a vapor that appears for a time on this earth, and then vanishes. Sometimes, I desperately want to throw that question at people I know, pushing their kids into sleepless exhaustion and endless SAT prep, wondering if they remember we are all going to die one day. Harvard or community college, prince or beggar, engineer or janitor, at 35 or 90 years old—we are all going to die. And then what?

(My mom reminds me that would not be a polite thing to do.)

So instead, I felt led to write this: a series of essays explaining and defending the Christian faith, the only worldview, I believe, that consistently, truthfully and beautifully answers the deepest questions of humanity. The only worldview that sees the world and the human heart through, maskless and naked, and offers real hope—God-given, and not man-made.

A disclaimer, since this—like a high school English thesis—is obviously a tall order: I’m a poor, young grad student, not a biblical scholar or theologian. (You can probably already tell from my tone and overuse of parentheses, if nothing else). Nothing I say here is really original, but you’ll find it said by better and wiser people than me. (Many of them probably dead for centuries). But I wanted to write this, partly as a reference for myself, since much of this I gathered and learned and reasoned through over years and different resources—books, sermons, late-night philosophizing with friends. I wanted to consolidate the highlights in one place, and a lot of this content was informed directly by conversations with others.

This is also for you: my friends, both Christian and not. I hope it will encourage you. I hope it will make you think, and ask yourself hard questions. And I hope, by God’s grace, this might be a small stepping-stone on your journey to find truth.

Outside of the church, I have grown up and lived most my (short) life in a progressive, secular environment. I have listened to the anthems of post-modernism marching through our world. And something I’ve learned: even in our open Internet, free-speech touting days, we tend to hear what we like. Echo chamber. Donald Trump’s win suddenly made this phrase a phenomenon. But it’s true, there are such things as “Christian bubbles” and “liberal bubbles” and many more. Sometimes, when I flit in and out between the two, I step back and think of how something that can be spoken in passing, taken for granted, in one circle would be so shocking and senseless in the other.

If you are a skeptic, I simply ask you to consider these things, to question your own assumptions, to doubt your own doubts. We should all do that. I submit these thoughts and arguments to you humbly, but not without conviction, because I stand not on my own authority, feeling, or intellect, but on the Word of God.

Here’s an outline of what’s to come:

• Objectivity and the existence of God
• Assumptions and axioms we live by
• The authority of truth
• How can we know the Bible is true?
• What is the Gospel of Jesus?
• What is faith, and what are its ramifications?

 

* I drew the title for this collection from the following verse, which speaks to the eternal longing and God-shaped vacuum in our hearts:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11