"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.