Moving on in Luke, Chapter 11:14, the author tells us that Jesus was in the process of driving out demons from a man who was struck dumb and one of the religious “spies”, equated the power of Jesus to that of Satan.
Firstly, how many times have you and I come into contact with physically challenged people in our daily lives, and thought of praying over them to drive out the demon(s) causing the affliction. If you were to openly speak of driving out such demons, people would think you mad at the very least. I’m not talking about doing this in a shopping mall, try doing it at your church next Sunday, the pastor would probably ask you to leave!
We have sanitized our faith to the point that we fail to follow the example of Jesus in the Bible. I’m preaching to myself here and this revelation is unfolding before my eyes as I write. We, as Christians want to leave the wisdom, religious knowledge and direct healing in the hands of the professionals. It should be noted that they are more than willing to take that leadership and have you send them money for doing the healing on television. We have and apparently will continue to abdicate religious authority to a clergy who makes it up as they go along.
Back in Chapter 10:9, Jesus tells His disciples (you and me) to heal the sick. That is a pretty straight forward command if you ask me. Now, for those of you who feel that I have gone off of the deep end (it happens all of the time, just ask my wife), consider that a part of Christian belief is that the Bible is the true word of God and that Jesus is God and we are to follow His example.
Based on that knowledge, I will pray for healing with the very next impaired person that I meet and I will expect healing in the name of Jesus Christ.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Good Gifts
Starting in verse five of the eleventh chapter of Luke, Jesus tells us to be persistent in our pursuit of what we want from our Father in heaven. I have always loved the rhetorical question that Jesus asks us, if even sinful people know how to give good gifts to their children, how great will the gift be from our Father in heaven?
Most of us are familiar with Ted Turner, the cable television millionaire. Turner, at the American Humanist Association banquet, where he received an award for his work on the environment and world peace, openly criticized fundamental Christianity. He said, "Jesus would be sick at his stomach over the way his ideas have been twisted." He went on to say, "I’ve been saved seven or eight times. But, I gave up on it, when, despite my prayers, my sister died. The more I strayed from my faith, the better I felt!"
Most of us have had loved one’s be sick and in some cases, die. Ted Turner, like most of us, require that God operate on our schedule and according to our wants.
Life, itself, is cruel.
When we are in the tough spot of losing someone we love, like Mr. Turner did, we put all of our past and future faith in flux, relative to the outcome of that one particular event. In times like that we are vulnerable and say things that we believe separates us from our God and our faith and if pride was a fast car, we jump in it and get as far away from our original position of faith, all the while mocking it at excessive speeds and distance.
The problem is that, while in the process of trashing God and rejecting faith up to that point, we fail to remember the many good things and blessings that He has put in our lives. Many of those blessings are placed there by God so as to give us comfort in times of sadness and discomfort. Because we choose to be hurt, we can fail to receive the comfort value from those things that God has provided. As a result we can view those blessed things through prideful vision and chase them away or destroy them. This action just adds to our feeling of separation from our Heavenly Father.
We simply can’t give God blame for what goes wrong in our lives without first giving Him credit for what has gone right. When we ponder the amount of good things that He has put into our lives, we may then question what we don’t understand and find comfort in the words found in this chapter of Luke.
Most of us are familiar with Ted Turner, the cable television millionaire. Turner, at the American Humanist Association banquet, where he received an award for his work on the environment and world peace, openly criticized fundamental Christianity. He said, "Jesus would be sick at his stomach over the way his ideas have been twisted." He went on to say, "I’ve been saved seven or eight times. But, I gave up on it, when, despite my prayers, my sister died. The more I strayed from my faith, the better I felt!"
Most of us have had loved one’s be sick and in some cases, die. Ted Turner, like most of us, require that God operate on our schedule and according to our wants.
Life, itself, is cruel.
When we are in the tough spot of losing someone we love, like Mr. Turner did, we put all of our past and future faith in flux, relative to the outcome of that one particular event. In times like that we are vulnerable and say things that we believe separates us from our God and our faith and if pride was a fast car, we jump in it and get as far away from our original position of faith, all the while mocking it at excessive speeds and distance.
The problem is that, while in the process of trashing God and rejecting faith up to that point, we fail to remember the many good things and blessings that He has put in our lives. Many of those blessings are placed there by God so as to give us comfort in times of sadness and discomfort. Because we choose to be hurt, we can fail to receive the comfort value from those things that God has provided. As a result we can view those blessed things through prideful vision and chase them away or destroy them. This action just adds to our feeling of separation from our Heavenly Father.
We simply can’t give God blame for what goes wrong in our lives without first giving Him credit for what has gone right. When we ponder the amount of good things that He has put into our lives, we may then question what we don’t understand and find comfort in the words found in this chapter of Luke.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
God Will Hear Us, The First Time
I heard a saying, some time ago, and it goes like this. “When we speak to God, it is called prayer. When God speaks to us, it is called psychosis.”
At the start of chapter eleven in the book of Luke, the apostles get curious and ask Jesus to teach them the proper way to pray to God. They also mention that one of the reasons they ask this is because they are aware that those who followed John the Baptist at that time may have had a little more structure in their ministry and that this structure may be helpful to them in their spiritual life.
I am always intrigued by the example of how the apostles are a representative of the church through history, all of the way to the present. From the freestyle prayer days one thousand years before Jesus, exhibited in Psalm 139 where the psalmist states “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. Point out anything that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” to the Lord’s Prayer that I learned as a child, outlined in the beginning of chapter eleven.
As I was raised a Catholic, I was very surprised to hear the ending of, ...for thine is the power and the glory... We were always told that was the Protestant ending, not the Catholic ending to the Lord’s Prayer. I think it is funny how we parse a common religious belief and even in the use of a common prayer, we can’t wait to exclude our fellow believer.
The Lord’s Prayer has so much importance because the source of the prayer is Jesus Christ Himself and according to St. Augustine, “whatever else we say when we pray, if we pray as we should, we are only saying what is already contained in the Lord's Prayer.” Because of it’s original sourcing and it’s simple completeness of thought, it is considered the most complete Christian prayer. In the words of the Catholic Saint Cyprian, "The same Lord who made us, also taught us how to pray, so that our petitions will be more easily heard, when we speak to the Father in the words offered to us by his Son.”
As we always seem to want to do, we can’t wait to institute some religious law to keep us in the proper lane of the faith highway. Starting with the Council of Toledo, the Lord’s Prayer was prescribed to all of the faithful as something to be done repetitiously and repetitively in order to be a good Christian and to please God.
God is not hard of hearing. Say it once with feeling and I am sure He will here us.
At the start of chapter eleven in the book of Luke, the apostles get curious and ask Jesus to teach them the proper way to pray to God. They also mention that one of the reasons they ask this is because they are aware that those who followed John the Baptist at that time may have had a little more structure in their ministry and that this structure may be helpful to them in their spiritual life.
I am always intrigued by the example of how the apostles are a representative of the church through history, all of the way to the present. From the freestyle prayer days one thousand years before Jesus, exhibited in Psalm 139 where the psalmist states “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. Point out anything that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” to the Lord’s Prayer that I learned as a child, outlined in the beginning of chapter eleven.
As I was raised a Catholic, I was very surprised to hear the ending of, ...for thine is the power and the glory... We were always told that was the Protestant ending, not the Catholic ending to the Lord’s Prayer. I think it is funny how we parse a common religious belief and even in the use of a common prayer, we can’t wait to exclude our fellow believer.
The Lord’s Prayer has so much importance because the source of the prayer is Jesus Christ Himself and according to St. Augustine, “whatever else we say when we pray, if we pray as we should, we are only saying what is already contained in the Lord's Prayer.” Because of it’s original sourcing and it’s simple completeness of thought, it is considered the most complete Christian prayer. In the words of the Catholic Saint Cyprian, "The same Lord who made us, also taught us how to pray, so that our petitions will be more easily heard, when we speak to the Father in the words offered to us by his Son.”
As we always seem to want to do, we can’t wait to institute some religious law to keep us in the proper lane of the faith highway. Starting with the Council of Toledo, the Lord’s Prayer was prescribed to all of the faithful as something to be done repetitiously and repetitively in order to be a good Christian and to please God.
God is not hard of hearing. Say it once with feeling and I am sure He will here us.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Sam and Handsome
In Luke 10:38, Jesus and His disciples went to stay with Martha and her sister Mary. Now, Martha was a good hostess who cleaned and cooked and made sure that everything was in order during the visit. Mary, did nothing but sit at the feet of Jesus and hung on His every word. Martha got angry and asked Jesus to tell her lazy sister to get up and help her. Jesus told her that Mary was doing the right thing in listening, and while Martha was getting upset over details that got in the way of her priorities, He wasn’t about to scold Mary for getting it right. When I first read this story, I sided with Martha who was stuck doing all of the work. I even wondered why this seemingly unimportant story would even be recorded at all. After much thought, I will try to explain why I think this bible account is important.
I have two dogs, who no matter what I do, adore me and my family. Their adoration is so complete, I feel guilty and usually get them a doggie treat to reward them. We can do no wrong in their eyes and if we are gone ten minutes or two weeks, they react the same when they see us. “Sam” and “Handsome” do not know what is going to happen in their future. They don’t wonder if we will live in the same house, buy a new one, lose the one we have or ponder whether their dinner will be late or if the portions are smaller. All that they think of is how they can get into our presence and will scoot through any small opening of the back door (no small feat for Handsome) and lay at our feet, receive our attention or just be happy to hang on our every word.
If I would approach God, the way that my dogs approach me, God would be pleased with me. Instead, I am always complaining and wondering about the future. Where will my income come from, who will win an election or what will happen with the value of my house? God must really tire of us (me) and our complaining.
Another thought on this subject is the nature of the church around the world. So interested in pomp and circumstance, vestments, art work, rules and regulations and well as regimented prayers and procedures that are all designed to do God’s business on this earth. According to this account in Luke, if we were to just sit down and listen to the word of God, let it sink in and apply it in our life, we would please God beyond measure.
I have two dogs, who no matter what I do, adore me and my family. Their adoration is so complete, I feel guilty and usually get them a doggie treat to reward them. We can do no wrong in their eyes and if we are gone ten minutes or two weeks, they react the same when they see us. “Sam” and “Handsome” do not know what is going to happen in their future. They don’t wonder if we will live in the same house, buy a new one, lose the one we have or ponder whether their dinner will be late or if the portions are smaller. All that they think of is how they can get into our presence and will scoot through any small opening of the back door (no small feat for Handsome) and lay at our feet, receive our attention or just be happy to hang on our every word.
If I would approach God, the way that my dogs approach me, God would be pleased with me. Instead, I am always complaining and wondering about the future. Where will my income come from, who will win an election or what will happen with the value of my house? God must really tire of us (me) and our complaining.
Another thought on this subject is the nature of the church around the world. So interested in pomp and circumstance, vestments, art work, rules and regulations and well as regimented prayers and procedures that are all designed to do God’s business on this earth. According to this account in Luke, if we were to just sit down and listen to the word of God, let it sink in and apply it in our life, we would please God beyond measure.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Loving Our Neighbor, Want to or Not
As I mentioned before, Jesus had a group of religious followers who either really wanted to know what Jesus thought or were there to fulfill the roll of an undercover spy, destined to testify against Him later. They were constantly asking Jesus how His teachings coincided with the old testament writings.
As Jesus was teaching one day, in the temple, a religious man asked Him the question regarding the attainment of eternal life. Jesus asked the man if he knew what the law of Moses said about the subject and the man answered that the word of God said to love God with all of your heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as yourself. Jesus told the man that He thought that was the correct answer. The man then asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?”. In response to this, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I have always felt that Christianity is great and that the only downside of it is us Christians. A case in point would be, that on Sunday, I can hear the greatest sermon and feel great about where I stand with God, as I have sung with the choir, was polite to the old woman who stood on my toe as she climbed to the middle seat, gave my tithe and received the blessing and after two minutes of waiting on fellow crabby church members in the coffee ministry (where my wife and I volunteer every week) I am ready to clock one of them. Don’t even get me started on how mad I get driving down the freeway less than two hours from my state of religious bliss.
We, all people, are a pain in the neck. Just ask the cop who gives tickets, ask anyone who gets a ticket, let a waitress bend your ear after serving a group of twenty “church” people who just had brunch and left a whole tip equaling 20 cents a piece along with an invitation to attend their church the following Sunday.
We, as people, gravitate away from getting too close to strangers. One of the reasons that I love my neighborhood is because my neighbors give me privacy and I give it back. In fact, right now in China, people are helping total strangers who have been affected by the recent earthquakes. The Chinese religious values and the communist political structure brought the focus for a person to help their family, not strangers. In fact, volunteer activity is so high in China, a certain amount of giddiness and newness has come with it and the Chinese seem to be enjoying the showing of compassion for their fellow citizens during this difficult time. When we look at this with a western mind set, we can fail to see the significance of this social change.
Countries that have a high degree of socialism and taxation show a lower rate of willingness to volunteer and help people. The reason for this is because the people are forced to give so much of their money to the government that they don’t feel a need for individual helping of one’s neighbor and they feel that it is the governments responsibility. It is no coincidence that in those same countries, Christianity is fading and the population is becoming more and more atheist in their beliefs.
This passage does two distinct things for us. First of all it brings to the forefront that Jesus came to fulfill the law and not to destroy it. This is critical when trying to understand His ministry. Secondly, this rule or law from God may well be the hinge that the door of society swings on. Think about it from this standpoint: without a love for your neighbor, you could never leave your home alone, without a guard to watch your possessions. For the longest time, one man watched another man’s house and went over to steal everything when they left. That is our nature. Until we understood that we needed to look out for our neighbor and they for us, we couldn’t leave our possessions so that we could go and make a living and feel reasonably certain those things would be there when we got home. Without that trust in our neighbor, we would still be a backward and impoverished society.
Now, if I could just remember to love my neighbor when he or she cuts me off on the freeway while talking on their cell phone and eating a cheeseburger. Wait a minute, I do that some times. Sorry!
As Jesus was teaching one day, in the temple, a religious man asked Him the question regarding the attainment of eternal life. Jesus asked the man if he knew what the law of Moses said about the subject and the man answered that the word of God said to love God with all of your heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as yourself. Jesus told the man that He thought that was the correct answer. The man then asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?”. In response to this, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I have always felt that Christianity is great and that the only downside of it is us Christians. A case in point would be, that on Sunday, I can hear the greatest sermon and feel great about where I stand with God, as I have sung with the choir, was polite to the old woman who stood on my toe as she climbed to the middle seat, gave my tithe and received the blessing and after two minutes of waiting on fellow crabby church members in the coffee ministry (where my wife and I volunteer every week) I am ready to clock one of them. Don’t even get me started on how mad I get driving down the freeway less than two hours from my state of religious bliss.
We, all people, are a pain in the neck. Just ask the cop who gives tickets, ask anyone who gets a ticket, let a waitress bend your ear after serving a group of twenty “church” people who just had brunch and left a whole tip equaling 20 cents a piece along with an invitation to attend their church the following Sunday.
We, as people, gravitate away from getting too close to strangers. One of the reasons that I love my neighborhood is because my neighbors give me privacy and I give it back. In fact, right now in China, people are helping total strangers who have been affected by the recent earthquakes. The Chinese religious values and the communist political structure brought the focus for a person to help their family, not strangers. In fact, volunteer activity is so high in China, a certain amount of giddiness and newness has come with it and the Chinese seem to be enjoying the showing of compassion for their fellow citizens during this difficult time. When we look at this with a western mind set, we can fail to see the significance of this social change.
Countries that have a high degree of socialism and taxation show a lower rate of willingness to volunteer and help people. The reason for this is because the people are forced to give so much of their money to the government that they don’t feel a need for individual helping of one’s neighbor and they feel that it is the governments responsibility. It is no coincidence that in those same countries, Christianity is fading and the population is becoming more and more atheist in their beliefs.
This passage does two distinct things for us. First of all it brings to the forefront that Jesus came to fulfill the law and not to destroy it. This is critical when trying to understand His ministry. Secondly, this rule or law from God may well be the hinge that the door of society swings on. Think about it from this standpoint: without a love for your neighbor, you could never leave your home alone, without a guard to watch your possessions. For the longest time, one man watched another man’s house and went over to steal everything when they left. That is our nature. Until we understood that we needed to look out for our neighbor and they for us, we couldn’t leave our possessions so that we could go and make a living and feel reasonably certain those things would be there when we got home. Without that trust in our neighbor, we would still be a backward and impoverished society.
Now, if I could just remember to love my neighbor when he or she cuts me off on the freeway while talking on their cell phone and eating a cheeseburger. Wait a minute, I do that some times. Sorry!
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Examples of Faith
When we get to Luke 10:22, Jesus clarifies the relationship that He has with the Father by explaining simply that the Son and the Father are intimate in regards to knowledge of each other. He also tells us that it is His exclusive franchise regarding any knowledge about the Father and will be revealed by him in His own time frame.
Chapter 10:23 tells us that when Jesus was alone with the disciples, He told them that they were fortunate to have seen and witnessed the miracles of God. Many powerful and influential people through history have wanted to see exactly what those disciples have seen.
In order to give an example of this, I searched for factual accounts of the famous and powerful people who have searched for God their whole life.. I came across accounts of people like Houdini, Hitler and Stalin. Their stories were interesting but in my research I came across the names of the famous people in the past and present who, because they weren’t able to see what the apostles had seen, just couldn’t or can’t bring themselves to believe.
In fact, one of the greatest mysteries is the fact that the apostles didn’t believe that Jesus was who He said He was, until He appeared after the Resurrection. As I have stated before, I realized who Jesus was and is through the example of the faith of the apostles and how that faith was exhibited in their martyrdom and death. Without the refusal to deny who Christ was and is, while under extreme duress, pain and eventual cruel death, all of the apostles were secure in giving their earthly lives so as to attain an eternal life in Jesus. If even one of them faltered in the course of their martyrdom, they would have been removed from peril, cleaned up and paraded around the empire, telling everyone about the “Jesus hoax” and we can be sure that those accounts would be secured through the ages and delivered to us on a regular schedule throughout history. Because that did not happen, God gives us an excellent example of how to anchor our faith to something solid and comprehensible, to coincide with our simple faith in His word.
Chapter 10:23 tells us that when Jesus was alone with the disciples, He told them that they were fortunate to have seen and witnessed the miracles of God. Many powerful and influential people through history have wanted to see exactly what those disciples have seen.
In order to give an example of this, I searched for factual accounts of the famous and powerful people who have searched for God their whole life.. I came across accounts of people like Houdini, Hitler and Stalin. Their stories were interesting but in my research I came across the names of the famous people in the past and present who, because they weren’t able to see what the apostles had seen, just couldn’t or can’t bring themselves to believe.
In fact, one of the greatest mysteries is the fact that the apostles didn’t believe that Jesus was who He said He was, until He appeared after the Resurrection. As I have stated before, I realized who Jesus was and is through the example of the faith of the apostles and how that faith was exhibited in their martyrdom and death. Without the refusal to deny who Christ was and is, while under extreme duress, pain and eventual cruel death, all of the apostles were secure in giving their earthly lives so as to attain an eternal life in Jesus. If even one of them faltered in the course of their martyrdom, they would have been removed from peril, cleaned up and paraded around the empire, telling everyone about the “Jesus hoax” and we can be sure that those accounts would be secured through the ages and delivered to us on a regular schedule throughout history. Because that did not happen, God gives us an excellent example of how to anchor our faith to something solid and comprehensible, to coincide with our simple faith in His word.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
"So Wise and Clever"
As we move on in Chapter 10:21, Jesus says a prayer of Thanksgiving that includes an observation that the Father, purposely hides the truth from those who (and the world) deem themselves wise and clever and clarifies that same truth to the childlike who approach faith simply.
In our modern world, there was one man who’s very name is synonymous with intelligence and wisdom, Albert Einstein. Einstein must be a great example for this particular passage because there are web sites all over the internet devoted to his theories and comments on the existence of God.
If you will go to the following web site entitled, “Einstein and God” by Thomas Torrance at, http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm, this modern theologian addresses the issue of Einstein’s faith in great detail. While I will feature some of Mr. Torrance’s article here, I will ask you to visit his site to get the full flavor of his work.
Albert Einstein was born in 1879 of secular Jewish parents who lived in Ulm and then in Munich, where he went to school. There in accordance with state law he had to be instructed in his faith; he was taught Judaism because of his ethnic heritage. By the age of twelve Einstein became deeply religious, combining ardent belief in God with a passion for the music of Mozart and Beethoven. He composed songs to the glory of God which he sang aloud to himself on his way to and from school.
Einstein regularly read the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike (which he continued to do throughout his life). He was taught the rudiments of Hebrew, but never mastered it, and he avoided the course for the traditional Bar-Mitzvah. He reveled in mathematics and music, especially in playing the violin, but recoiled from rigid orthodox rites such as those regarding kosher food, compulsory rules, and Talmudic ways of thought. He began to develop a distrust of all authority, including biblical and religious authority. He had an unusually independent attitude of mind, critical but not skeptical, which was accentuated by his resentment against the authoritarian discipline of his German schoolmasters. This led him to give up his uncritical religious fervor in order to liberate himself from what he spoke of as "the only personal", but without becoming atheistic or hostile to religion.
He never lost his admiration for the fundamental ends and aspirations of the "Jewish-Christian religious tradition", and had no doubt of the significance of what he called those "super personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation". It was in this independent spirit, as "a typical loner", as he spoke of himself, without personal religious commitment, but with deep religious awe, that he cultivated and retained throughout his life unabated wonder at the immensity, unity, rational harmony, and mathematical beauty of the universe.
Later in life in a speech delivered in Berlin, he gave this illuminating account of himself:
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.
Before Albert was sixteen when he would have been obliged to undertake military training, he decided to move from school, leave Germany, give up German citizenship, and join his parents who had moved to Italy. Instead of continuing his education in Italy, however, Einstein chose to attend a school in Aarau in Switzerland where he enjoyed a rather freer mode of study and continued to cultivate his passion for Mozart and physics and think out things in his own way. As he was not an ethnic Swiss he was exempted from military training, which gave him time to indulge in extra-curricular pursuits, such as natural history expeditions with friends. He taught himself calculus and kept musing and thinking about light: "wondering especially what things might look like if someone went along for the ride with a light wave, keeping pace with it as it traveled through space".
When he was seventeen he finally announced his exit from the Jewish Religious Fellowship. After Aarau Einstein went to Zürich where he took courses in electrical engineering at its world famous Polytechnic. This led eventually to his first employment in a technical school at Wintertur, and then at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where he wrote his early epoch-making scientific papers published in Annalen der Physik for 1905.
Particularly interesting for our understanding of what Einstein held about God was his marriage to Mileva Maric, whom he had met in the physics classes, who belonged to a Greek Orthodox family in Serbia. While it was not personal belief or religious faith but physics which brought them together, there can be little doubt that it left some imprint on what he was to think and say of God, evident in the use he frequently made of terms such as "transcendent" and "incarnate" to speak of "the cosmic intelligence" which lay behind the universe of space and time, which seems to indicate that there was rather more than just a way of speaking in what he said and thought of God. This is clearly reflected in an interview which Einstein later in life gave to an American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, in 1929:
"To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?"
"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."
"Have you read Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?"
"Emil Ludwig's Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."
"You accept the historical Jesus?"
"Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life." 7
In view of this interview it is understandable that Einstein is reported to have said that Christ Jesus was the greatest of all Jews.
Be that as it may, Einstein remained generally committed to the Jewish tradition and outlook, a commitment which became more and more resolute in face of Nazi attacks on himself and his Jewish scientific friends in Berlin, where he was appointed a Professor in 1913. The following year his wife Mileva with his two sons joined him in Berlin, but returned almost immediately to Switzerland–she hated Germany. Einstein wept when she left him–they were reluctantly divorced. He had once written to her, "You are and will remain a shrine for me to which no one has access." Several years later he married a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, a widow in Berlin, who with her daughter Margot cherished him throughout the rest of his life. He continued to pursue his scientific research and teaching in Berlin, in spite of the Nazi campaign against the Universities, and the vilification of Einstein's special and general theory of relativity, especially after his publication of Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie in Annalen der Physik in 1916.
Einstein's fearless championing of academic freedom finally drove him and Michael Polanyi, his Jewish colleague in Berlin, abroad. Einstein went to Princeton and Polanyi went to Manchester. Throughout his years in Berlin, Einstein had retained the admiration and support of Max von Laue and Max Planck, but objections to nominations for the award of the Nobel Prize to Einstein were lodged year after year, in fact six times, by several leading German physicists, notably by the virulently anti-Semitic Nobel Laureate Philip Lenard. The award was finally made in 1922, for his work, not on relativity, but on the photoelectric effect–Einstein sent the prize money to Mileva.
The bitter persecution of the Jews in Germany had the effect of drawing Einstein into closer relations also with Christian people, as his personal friendships with Max and Heidi Born who had become Quakers in Edinburgh, and with the Ross Stevensons and Blackwoods of Princeton Theological Seminary, make clear. When the Rev. Andrew Blackwood handed him a magazine clipping about the interview published in the Saturday Evening Post, and asked him if it was accurate, he read it carefully and answered, "That is what I believe".
While the hounding and harrowing slaughter of Jews in Germany, and attacks on him by anti-Semitic Americans, had the effect of making Einstein more and more resolute in open affirmation of his Jewishness, deepening the bond with his fellow Jews, they also had the effect of deepening his appreciation of the Christian Church and its opposition to Hitler and the holocaust. Here is a paragraph from a letter Einstein once sent to an American Episcopal Bishop about the behavior of the Church during the holocaust.
Being a lover of freedom...I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
Let me relate here what a friend of mine in Princeton told me about an illuminating event one day during the war, when Einstein learned of a prayer-meeting where Christians gathered to make intercession for Jews in Germany. To their surprise Einstein came along from his home at 112 Mercer Street with his violin and asked if he might join them. They welcomed him warmly, and he "prayed' with his violin. Yet in relation to petitionary prayer Einstein not infrequently reacted against "the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfilment of their wishes", for that implied for him, as we will note, a selfish "anthropomorphic" idea of God which he rejected.
Once, after hearing the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, it is reported that Einstein was apparently so moved by the music that he heard that he is quoted as saying, “Now I know there is a God in heaven”.
I list the following quotations that came from Einstein much later in life. They are as follows:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43.
“When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
“As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came — though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents — to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal,’ from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”
Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, Chicago, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1979, pp 3-5.
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.… This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
Albert Einstein, in a letter to Hans Muehsam, March 30, 1954; Einstein Archive 38-434; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 218.
Now, I have recorded this information to make the following point. It isn’t all that important in actuality, whether dear old Einstein believed in God generally or had salvation through the Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us in Luke 10:21, 22 that the Father allows a child to understand Him and allows the wise and clever to miss Him. Albert Einstein was truly wise and clever and it seems that others who are also wise and clever continue in their ability to miss God all the while using the words of their hero to lead their way into continued darkness.
We are told not to judge our fellow man and if Herr Einstein did receive salvation before his death, I shall look forward to talking to him in heaven and if he didn’t he will live without the presence of God for eternity. Something, that no person of wisdom would surely wish on themselves or others.
In our modern world, there was one man who’s very name is synonymous with intelligence and wisdom, Albert Einstein. Einstein must be a great example for this particular passage because there are web sites all over the internet devoted to his theories and comments on the existence of God.
If you will go to the following web site entitled, “Einstein and God” by Thomas Torrance at, http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm, this modern theologian addresses the issue of Einstein’s faith in great detail. While I will feature some of Mr. Torrance’s article here, I will ask you to visit his site to get the full flavor of his work.
Albert Einstein was born in 1879 of secular Jewish parents who lived in Ulm and then in Munich, where he went to school. There in accordance with state law he had to be instructed in his faith; he was taught Judaism because of his ethnic heritage. By the age of twelve Einstein became deeply religious, combining ardent belief in God with a passion for the music of Mozart and Beethoven. He composed songs to the glory of God which he sang aloud to himself on his way to and from school.
Einstein regularly read the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike (which he continued to do throughout his life). He was taught the rudiments of Hebrew, but never mastered it, and he avoided the course for the traditional Bar-Mitzvah. He reveled in mathematics and music, especially in playing the violin, but recoiled from rigid orthodox rites such as those regarding kosher food, compulsory rules, and Talmudic ways of thought. He began to develop a distrust of all authority, including biblical and religious authority. He had an unusually independent attitude of mind, critical but not skeptical, which was accentuated by his resentment against the authoritarian discipline of his German schoolmasters. This led him to give up his uncritical religious fervor in order to liberate himself from what he spoke of as "the only personal", but without becoming atheistic or hostile to religion.
He never lost his admiration for the fundamental ends and aspirations of the "Jewish-Christian religious tradition", and had no doubt of the significance of what he called those "super personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation". It was in this independent spirit, as "a typical loner", as he spoke of himself, without personal religious commitment, but with deep religious awe, that he cultivated and retained throughout his life unabated wonder at the immensity, unity, rational harmony, and mathematical beauty of the universe.
Later in life in a speech delivered in Berlin, he gave this illuminating account of himself:
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.
Before Albert was sixteen when he would have been obliged to undertake military training, he decided to move from school, leave Germany, give up German citizenship, and join his parents who had moved to Italy. Instead of continuing his education in Italy, however, Einstein chose to attend a school in Aarau in Switzerland where he enjoyed a rather freer mode of study and continued to cultivate his passion for Mozart and physics and think out things in his own way. As he was not an ethnic Swiss he was exempted from military training, which gave him time to indulge in extra-curricular pursuits, such as natural history expeditions with friends. He taught himself calculus and kept musing and thinking about light: "wondering especially what things might look like if someone went along for the ride with a light wave, keeping pace with it as it traveled through space".
When he was seventeen he finally announced his exit from the Jewish Religious Fellowship. After Aarau Einstein went to Zürich where he took courses in electrical engineering at its world famous Polytechnic. This led eventually to his first employment in a technical school at Wintertur, and then at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where he wrote his early epoch-making scientific papers published in Annalen der Physik for 1905.
Particularly interesting for our understanding of what Einstein held about God was his marriage to Mileva Maric, whom he had met in the physics classes, who belonged to a Greek Orthodox family in Serbia. While it was not personal belief or religious faith but physics which brought them together, there can be little doubt that it left some imprint on what he was to think and say of God, evident in the use he frequently made of terms such as "transcendent" and "incarnate" to speak of "the cosmic intelligence" which lay behind the universe of space and time, which seems to indicate that there was rather more than just a way of speaking in what he said and thought of God. This is clearly reflected in an interview which Einstein later in life gave to an American magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, in 1929:
"To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?"
"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."
"Have you read Emil Ludwig's book on Jesus?"
"Emil Ludwig's Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."
"You accept the historical Jesus?"
"Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life." 7
In view of this interview it is understandable that Einstein is reported to have said that Christ Jesus was the greatest of all Jews.
Be that as it may, Einstein remained generally committed to the Jewish tradition and outlook, a commitment which became more and more resolute in face of Nazi attacks on himself and his Jewish scientific friends in Berlin, where he was appointed a Professor in 1913. The following year his wife Mileva with his two sons joined him in Berlin, but returned almost immediately to Switzerland–she hated Germany. Einstein wept when she left him–they were reluctantly divorced. He had once written to her, "You are and will remain a shrine for me to which no one has access." Several years later he married a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, a widow in Berlin, who with her daughter Margot cherished him throughout the rest of his life. He continued to pursue his scientific research and teaching in Berlin, in spite of the Nazi campaign against the Universities, and the vilification of Einstein's special and general theory of relativity, especially after his publication of Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie in Annalen der Physik in 1916.
Einstein's fearless championing of academic freedom finally drove him and Michael Polanyi, his Jewish colleague in Berlin, abroad. Einstein went to Princeton and Polanyi went to Manchester. Throughout his years in Berlin, Einstein had retained the admiration and support of Max von Laue and Max Planck, but objections to nominations for the award of the Nobel Prize to Einstein were lodged year after year, in fact six times, by several leading German physicists, notably by the virulently anti-Semitic Nobel Laureate Philip Lenard. The award was finally made in 1922, for his work, not on relativity, but on the photoelectric effect–Einstein sent the prize money to Mileva.
The bitter persecution of the Jews in Germany had the effect of drawing Einstein into closer relations also with Christian people, as his personal friendships with Max and Heidi Born who had become Quakers in Edinburgh, and with the Ross Stevensons and Blackwoods of Princeton Theological Seminary, make clear. When the Rev. Andrew Blackwood handed him a magazine clipping about the interview published in the Saturday Evening Post, and asked him if it was accurate, he read it carefully and answered, "That is what I believe".
While the hounding and harrowing slaughter of Jews in Germany, and attacks on him by anti-Semitic Americans, had the effect of making Einstein more and more resolute in open affirmation of his Jewishness, deepening the bond with his fellow Jews, they also had the effect of deepening his appreciation of the Christian Church and its opposition to Hitler and the holocaust. Here is a paragraph from a letter Einstein once sent to an American Episcopal Bishop about the behavior of the Church during the holocaust.
Being a lover of freedom...I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
Let me relate here what a friend of mine in Princeton told me about an illuminating event one day during the war, when Einstein learned of a prayer-meeting where Christians gathered to make intercession for Jews in Germany. To their surprise Einstein came along from his home at 112 Mercer Street with his violin and asked if he might join them. They welcomed him warmly, and he "prayed' with his violin. Yet in relation to petitionary prayer Einstein not infrequently reacted against "the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfilment of their wishes", for that implied for him, as we will note, a selfish "anthropomorphic" idea of God which he rejected.
Once, after hearing the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, it is reported that Einstein was apparently so moved by the music that he heard that he is quoted as saying, “Now I know there is a God in heaven”.
I list the following quotations that came from Einstein much later in life. They are as follows:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43.
“When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
“As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came — though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents — to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment-an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely personal,’ from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”
Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, Chicago, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1979, pp 3-5.
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.… This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
Albert Einstein, in a letter to Hans Muehsam, March 30, 1954; Einstein Archive 38-434; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 218.
Now, I have recorded this information to make the following point. It isn’t all that important in actuality, whether dear old Einstein believed in God generally or had salvation through the Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us in Luke 10:21, 22 that the Father allows a child to understand Him and allows the wise and clever to miss Him. Albert Einstein was truly wise and clever and it seems that others who are also wise and clever continue in their ability to miss God all the while using the words of their hero to lead their way into continued darkness.
We are told not to judge our fellow man and if Herr Einstein did receive salvation before his death, I shall look forward to talking to him in heaven and if he didn’t he will live without the presence of God for eternity. Something, that no person of wisdom would surely wish on themselves or others.
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