The Heart of Reality

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”

~ C. S. Lewis

The heart of the Christian worldview exhibits the light of its own truth.  Whether we apprehend it on a more intuitive level or in the form of explicitly-articulated arguments, the Christian worldview testifies to us of its truth by providing us with the key that unlocks the door of reality.  It tells us the truth about ourselves and our world, cutting through the confusion, the errors, and the incompleteness of alternative viewpoints.  To describe it is thus to exhibit both its beauty and its truthfulness.

The heart of Christianity is that God exists.  Matter and energy, time and space, are not the ultimate reality.  The story of history is not, as Macbeth put it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  There is a Person at the back of all things.  Consciousness, and everything that goes along with that--awareness, wisdom, love, relationship, values, purpose--is the stuff of ultimate reality. It is not simply a by-product of mindless processes of matter and energy.

There is only one God, one Supreme Being from whom all things come.  This accounts for the unity of reality.  There is a oneness to all things.  All things are bound together and interdependent - like pieces of a puzzle.  Puzzle pieces fit together to make a puzzle because they come from a common source and a single vision.  Likewise, reality is one and interconnected because all of it flows from one common and unified Supreme Reality.  If there were only multiple, independent gods or original causes with no common source in one Supreme Being, or if God was himself disunified and divided into independent pieces lacking a common source, there would be no explanation for the unity of reality or source from which that unity could have arisen.

God is also a Trinity.  There is one God, and that one God exists in three Persons.  Each Person is a distinct, but full, manifestation of the single Divine Essence.  For an analogy, I like to think of a website.  There is an original version of each website that exists on a server computer somewhere.  Then that server “serves” the website to different computers, so that the same website exists on multiple computers.  It's one website, but multiple manifestations of that same website.  Each manifestation is distinct from the others, but they are all manifestations of the same site.  Similarly, there is one Divine Being, but that Divine Being manifests himself in three distinct Persons.  God the Father begets the Son, sharing with him his very Being, and the Holy Spirit is a third instantiation of the single Divine Essence who proceeds from the Father and from the Son and from their relationship.  (In my website analogy, the Holy Spirit might be analogous to the website as it exists flowing through the air or through the wires between computers, going from one computer to another.)  This is important because one of the essential characteristics of personhood is relationship.  Relationship, love, community--these are not mere accidental by-products of the universe; they are at the very heart of what reality is all about.  God is not just a Person; he is a Community.

Everything that exists that is not God was made by God, and the entire story of the universe is meant to reflect and exhibit God's glorious perfections, his supreme beauty.  We humans are made in God's image.  On a lesser scale, we reflect God's nature--his life, his consciousness, his reason, his love, his relationality.  Because we exist by sharing in the Supreme Good, we too have value.  Human life, and indeed all life, has value and dignity which we ought to respect.  Morality, too, is not simply a by-product of an amoral universe.  It is part of the fundamental essence of reality.  God's values constitute an objective standard of morality.  Moral goodness is not something we pursue simply because we are programmed to do so by our genes, while it has no meaning in any more ultimate sense.  Treating people with respect and love, treating all things with respect and love, and loving God above all else, really matters objectively and ultimately.

We were created to share in, to reflect, and to enjoy God's beauty, the beauty of the Supreme Good.  That's the purpose of life.  At the very heart of reality is the loving, joy-filled Community of the Trinity where the three Persons bask in the full enjoyment of all Good.  The goodness of this world--all the beauty, all the things we enjoy and that delight us--are derived from God and point back to him.  Our destiny, if we follow it and don't reject it, is to enjoy what God has made and to "follow the bread crumbs," as it were, of joy as they lead us back to the fount of all good, God himself.  We all know from experience that this world is but a foretaste of joy.  It is full of appetizing delight, but it never satisfies.  This is not because the universe is ultimately meaningless and we've simply evolved a taste for joy that can never be satisfied.  It is because this world comes from a Higher Realm and we are meant to follow its sign-posts to finally arrive there in the end.

The Christian faith teaches us that evil and suffering are a very real part of our world--something else we know only too well from personal experience.  The very idea of evil is meaningless unless there is true goodness.  Because God exists and we sense that intuitively, we are also aware of how far short our world falls when it comes to goodness.  The world is full of horrible acts of wickedness and terrible suffering.  Christianity does not sidestep this or trivialize it.  In the Christian worldview, God dives down fully into the world of our experience, thus validating it while at the same time linking it to something more.  Our world, while reflecting God, also contrasts with him.  Our weakness, ignorance, foolishness, ugliness, wickedness, and suffering contrast with God's strength, knowledge, wisdom, beauty, goodness, and joy.  Only God possesses Life and Joy in himself.  Our world can only get these things from God.  And the Christian faith teaches us that our world has rebelled against God, declaring independence from him and trying to strike out on its own, with the result that we have brought infinite calamity down upon ourselves.  We do not have the resources to save ourselves.  But God has come down into our world.  The Second Person of the Trinty, God the Son, has taken upon himself a human nature, so that his Divine Person is expressed now not only through a divine nature but through a human nature as well.  He has embraced our weakness, ignorance, foolishness, ugliness, wickedness, and suffering.  Rather than remaining aloof from us and our condition, he has come right down into it fully, but because he is God he has also brought with him the only thing that can save us--the power of the Divine Life.  He has bridged the gap between God and the world.  He has absorbed our evil while not being destroyed by it, and he has overcome our evil with his own infinite goodness.

This is why the cross is the central image of Christianity.  Notice the depth of profundity in this.  Some views of the world recognize the Supreme Good, but they fail to take seriously the reality of evil.  I sometimes call these "playground religions," because they sidestep the horrors of the world and try to make out that everything is really OK.  They do not speak to the darkness we all know so well.  Other views embrace the horrors of evil, but they become mired in despair and nihilism, abandoning hope of a Supreme Good that can provide the ultimate context for evil and promise its eventual overthrow and the redemption of the world.  Christianity embraces both sides and maintains the proper balance.  The cross exhibits this fully.  There we have a man whose feet and hands are nailed to wooden beams.  He hangs there, suffering and dying in agony, a victim of the wickedness and cruelty of the world.  He cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  God himself suffers and dies an agonizing death at the hands of the evil of this world.  The cross is thus a sign and validation of the reality of evil and the full horror of it.  And yet the Scriptures tells us that this scene, with Jesus dying on the cross, was planned by the Sovereign and Good God from all eternity as the lynchpin to the fulfillment of his good plan for all history.  On the cross, by absorbing all our evil, he brings that evil in contact with the Supreme Good, and the end result is that Goodness overcomes and obliterates the evil.  Jesus does not give way to despair.  He does not fall into sin and reject God.  He dies, but in dying he destroys death.  In embracing evil, by facing it and not sidestepping it, he defeats it, and three days later he rises from the dead, conqueror of sin and death and hell.  He ascends into heaven, completing the circle.  He who came down from heaven into our world goes back up into heaven.  But he brings back up more than he brought down.  He has bound us to himself.  He remains fully God and fully human forever.  In his ascension, he brings our nature up with him, filling us with his Divine Life.  The Holy Spirit, who flows between the Father and the Son eternally, flows down to us and brings us up into the Divine Life and Love, and we are adopted as children of God.  Our evil overcome, we become heirs of God, destined, unless we refuse it, to share in the eternal celebration that is God's own inner life.  Only in Christianity are both sides of the equation affirmed and properly balanced--evil is acknowledged and accepted for all that it is, and yet it is put in its place as subservient to the Ultimate Good, giving way to that Good in the end.  The cross is a symbol of the power and reality of evil, but also a symbol of its defeat and the ultimate triumph of Goodness.  Whenever we see a cross on the outside of a church, in a church building, in the homes of the faithful, or anywhere, we see the sign of a faith that tells us the full truth about ourselves, leaving out nothing.  The whole story of all we are is there.  As the Church, we are the official witnesses of God in this world, bringing the message that unlocks the door of reality to all people, calling them to take up their crosses and follow Christ to eternal life, suffering and dying and rising with him, rejecting evil and putting it to death and turning to God to live out his life and goodness.

Deep within all of us, whether we recognize it or not explicitly, we know that consciousness, love, relationship, and joy are a deeper part of reality than mere mindless matter and energy and physical laws.  We know that there is a point to all of this, that reality is a story with a purpose that is unfolding.  We know that life and happiness matter, and that we ought to seek the good of ourselves and others and hate and oppose cruelty and wickedness and suffering, and that we ought to love the Supreme Good above all else, because goodness is not merely a by-product of a mindless and amoral universe but is at the heart of what reality is all about.  We know that there is great evil in this world, and that that evil is not merely out there but runs through our own hearts as well.  We know that we need to get back to the source of life and goodness, and that that source is outside of us, outside of our world, and we don't have the resources within ourselves to fulfill our longings for goodness or to fix the brokenness of our world.  We have to go back to the Source of all Being, the Supreme source of Goodness, to fill and replenish what we lack.  We know that if we are to be saved, and if any meaning is to come out of all of this, it must come from goodness overcoming evil--not sidestepping it, or ignoring it, or trivializing it, or succumbing to it, but facing it head-on, embracing it, and overcoming it.  There must be a bridge that can link us to the Supreme Good, and only the Supreme Good himself can build that bridge.  We can see in the cross the fulfillment of all that we know deep down, at the most fundamental level of our being.  And that is why we know, or can know, that Christianity really is God's message to us, God's coming to us, and that therefore it is true.

For more on our intuitions about morality and why they require God, see here and here.  For a short case for Christianity that makes use of explicit philosophical arguments, see here.  For a fuller case for Christianity, see here.  For a short case for Catholicism more specifically, see here.

Published, appropriately, on the Feast of the Transfiguration.