Helmut Thielicke (1908-86), a German pastor and educator who remained faithful even under Hitler’s regime in WWII, wrote that the real competition in theology is not between modernists (or “liberals”) and conservatives but consists in a more basic—and unnoticed—conflict between Cartesians and non-Cartesians. As I’ll share below, I agree with him, but first let me unpack in very basic terms what he meant; then I’ll offer a corollary to his axiom.

Cartesianism, a label for the approach to God and knowing inaugurated by René Descartes (1596-1650), has been treated by many academics as the point where the Enlightenment was launched and where our current versions of secular modernity took root.

Descartes was a Roman Catholic yet his religious views were complex, shaped in part by his appreciation for mathematics and for the insights of the Copernican revolution. Additionally he had some acquaintances who were weary of the religious battles of the day and had turned to radical skepticism as a way to dismiss religion. Descartes, in response, applied his mathematical skills to matters of faith. His goal was to achieve certainty in the face of doubts. How? By showing how the rational certainty of solving a geometry or algebra problem can also be applied to a Christian problem—the need for certainty in matters of faith—in the face of challenges brought by the skeptics.

The unusual step he took was to adopt a weapon used against faith—skepticism—in order to defend faith. In this scheme he needed an insurmountable axiom or doubt-proof starting point to begin building a faith that has full certainty. By having a point beyond doubt—indubitable truth—he was confident that all other truth could be constructed around such a certainty. Doubt would be the instrument for finding such a starting point. Another way to say this is that he decided to doubt everything in order to discover what was left after his doubting.

So he sat down by his fireplace and began doubting. In time it dawned on him that his doubting could be treated as an axiomatic certainty. Thinking (the exercise of the mind in doubting) certifies existence. So that became his starting point: “I think, therefore I am” (or, in Latin, cogito ergo sum). Then he moved on to another step—in a logical pathway from an effect (his act of thinking) to a cause (something that must account for his act of thinking) and he concluded that this necessary cause is God. But what is this God like? Additional stages of reasoning achieved a portrayal of God very close to the Roman Catholic portrayal of God.

What happened with this little exercise? It was revolutionary in that it relocated the question of “how-we-know-what-we-know” (epistemology) away from the Christian tradition that God is the ultimate reference point of knowing—as in “In the beginning was the Word”—to a human starting point. And it also relocated the notion of being—God’s being and our own—away from God’s personal self-disclosure. The basis for knowing who God is and who we are is no longer his word but our rationality so that the new starting point became the act of human rationality. In philosophical terms, reason had trumped revelation and epistemology had leapfrogged ontology. In more practical terms humanity moved ahead of deity in the process of explaining reality. Rational certainty also became a new ambition in religion in place of relational encounter with God.

With this is an all too brief introduction let me return to Thielicke’s axiom. What he noted is a pattern: that Christian academic institutions, in particular, tend to depart from a living faith as soon as reason begins to trump revelation in a given setting. This movement from a pre-Cartesian confidence in God’s existence (and in his capacity to communicate effectively) to a Cartesian confidence in the human ability to determine God’s nature through intellect and logic, has often reshaped Christianity to something more satisfying to human reason—with human reason still subject to the Fall of Adam. Simply put, the Cartesian shift relocates the Scriptures to a place “below” reason instead of “above” reason.

To a non-Cartesian Bible reader it seems that all hell (to note the underlying spiritual impulse) is set loose in the shift: it features a new devotion to accommodating faith to current trends that are to be found among intellectuals yet not found in the Bible. The non-Cartesian, however, prefers the Bible to the ever-changing “certainties” of a given era.

On the other hand a bright young college student who has never heard of Descartes but who knows that a brilliantly logical professor is teaching things that the Bible clearly resists or denies—even when that teacher is a professing Christian—faces a dilemma. Who is right? Given the social and academic leverage the professor has, after a semester or two the student will often be a convert. How so? By coming to share the professor’s Cartesianism that seeks rational and logical certainty in place of a Word-based confidence. When viewed collectively the trajectory away from biblical Christianity will follow the direction of travel seen among any number of once-Christian institutions: Cartesianism becomes increasingly indifferent to Christ and even overtly hostile to any notice of the biblical God. The change is never intended at the start, but the outcome is inevitable.

Thielicke’s insights are useful but fail to solve the problem—he only sheds some light on why so many Christian academic centers move away from faith as they gain greater intellectual standing. He knew that any given non-Cartesian—Thielicke is a recent example, with a host of precursors such as Augustine, Luther, Calvin and others—can be as intellectually able, or more so, than a given Cartesian scholar. So his point was not to condemn learning but to show where it goes astray spiritually.

This is a crucial point: the problem is not in having and using one’s intelligence! The fundamentalists who rejected formal education made that mistake: by failing to distinguish Cartesian from non-Cartesian learning they linked a conspicuous erosion of faith among students to any form of higher education. Yet the real difference is not in learning but in the starting point of learning: do we begin by presuming the primacy of God or of man?  Do we start with “In the beginning God” or “In the beginning cogito“?

So now my corollary: the matter actually begins in the heart. Only when sin is resolved by the coming of Christ’s Spirit who pours out his love in the hearts of new believers will a non-Cartesian trajectory be formed. What Thielicke merely describes must be interpreted by an affective corollary, that the heart always follows its greatest desire. The love of self is the ultimate desire for a non-believer. Only when God captures the heart by revealing the loveliness of the Son through the wooing work of the Spirit will the intellect begin to think properly: as God made us to think. Only when God is the heart’s highest desire will honesty prevail in academic settings. Only when Christ is exalted will a proper bias be in play—the bias of the creation in showing off the brilliance of the creator.

Some readers may be skeptical of my skepticism towards Descartes’ axiomatic use of doubt. What can be done to overcome such doubts? Jesus offered an answer to some of the Bible scholars of his own day who were, it seems, proto-Cartesians. In John 5 Jesus was challenged for claiming his equality with the Father. Jesus answered with all the rational logic and evidence one could hope for—citing the witnesses of God, of Moses, and of the Scriptures in his favor—yet his bottom line issue is found in verse 42: “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.” They rejected his logic because, without a love for God, they were blind to the Truth. They loved, instead, the glory of mutual approval—a human and Cartesian focus.

So the cure to Cartesianism is a discovery of God’s love, a love freely offered in Christ and unfolded throughout the Bible. Don’t go to school, read a book, or watch a movie without it!

Children grow. Their bodies get bigger, stronger, faster, and more coordinated in a steady march to physical maturity. Appetites are satisfied by food and applied through exercise.

But growth is never so certain in our inner makeup. Educators, for instance, have identified stages of cognitive growth: how we grow in our thinking skills. They point to an invariable sequence from infancy to adulthood. The final two stages are concrete operations and formal operations. The first of this pair refers to a person’s ability to understand and solve practical, tangible problems—to memorize, do arithmetic, describe and recreate. The second involves more complex exercises of analysis, synthesis and judgment— the ability to solve algebraic equations, to find patterns in seemingly random fields, and to create new products from formerly disconnected elements. But, unlike our physical growth, some people never move into formal operations. Why not? We can’t be certain but seems that a lack of appetite and exercise helps explain the lag.

Another inner realm of personal growth is the spiritual. Most observers locate our moral and emotional development here—as the value-sensitive motivational center of the soul. These facets of spirit progress from the basic need-responses of infancy to the vastly complex responses, dispositions, and drives of adult life. The mature person displays what we refer to, collectively, as “maturity”—a balance in life that handles upsets and opportunities with evident equanimity and wisdom. We all know a mature person when we see one; and we also know that many adults are less than mature. Spiritually immature people lack stability: their life priorities change in line with fads and fancies; they make poor judgments in how they spend time, resources, and handle relationships. They lack an effective moral compass.

How is it that some people reach moral and emotional maturity and others never do? Once again the answer is uncertain but it is clear that losses of nurture and exercise play a major part in failed growth, just as in partial cognitive growth. What ultimately differs in spiritual growth, however, is the presence or absence of God’s Spirit.

Paul alluded to this as he wrote to the Corinthians about the union of God’s Spirit with our human spirits—as in a marriage (1Cor 6:15-20)—so that for those who have this union there is also communion with God. This, in fact, was the starting point of Paul’s letter—in 1 Corinthians 1-2—and the measure by which he distinguished those who follow Christ from those who do not. Those who share in this communion, Paul wrote, are those who are truly “mature” through access to the “secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory” (2:6-7). And what’s more the Spirit of God displaces the influence of the “spirit of this world” so that “we might understand the things freely given us by God” (v. 12).

Paul has, in effect, challenged us to rethink what it is to grow up. In a fallen world we move through the complex and interrelated set of growth events noted already: our physical, mental, social, and spiritual progressions. But each of these reach a finite peak—our human maturity—followed by a decline into physical death. It’s a cycle that has been repeated through the ages and one we understand and appreciate—at least up to the final stage: death.

An annual and accelerated reminder of this cycle is the budding, growing, and maturing of a fruit. When maturity is reached, all who taste the fruit are pleased. Fruit that aren’t eaten go soft, degrade, and die. Jesus drew on this agricultural reality as a metaphor for our union with him—in his allusion in John 15 to the vine, the branches and the fruit produced by those branches. What differs for humans is that the plant cycle is not meant to end. In Christ our growth goes on forever—something appropriate to being united in one whose life and love are unending!

Needless to say, then, every form of human growth is meant by God to be a beginning point for our spiritual growth. Yet it is only by our union with God’s Spirit that we begin the growth of eternal life—into Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:19).

How does this stage of our growth go forward? In the same way our earlier stages worked: by appetite, nurture and exercise. What changes, once we shift away from the life guided by the spirit of this world—and what Paul spoke of as a living death in Ephesians 2:1-3—is that we are now hungry for true love: the love of God. With that new appetite we find that we love having communion with him—available to us as his Spirit takes his Word to feed our new spiritual appetite—and communion (Greek “koinonia”) with others who know him.

With this in mind we need to turn to Paul’s summary of God’s design for growth.

And [the Lord] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way unto him who is the heat, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:11-16)

Real and lasting growth, we find, is growth birthed in mutual love: in Christ’s love for us and in our love for each other. It is this latter love—for each other—that the exercises needed for growth take place. Each of us, now in communion with the Spirit, have the spiritual resources we need to care for others. Our fruit—returning to the metaphor of the vine in John 15—is a growing maturity within the community of faith. The measure of this maturity is Christ’s own life: what he valued and how he lived is now expressed in the Church, his body.

Let me end with a reminder that we now have the nurture of the Spirit himself within us as we grow in our eternal growth. The Spirit is using what he has written through the hearts of earlier prophets—the Scriptures—to feed our spirits. Yet we are still living out the progression of our human growth—the physical life—and we realize that it ends in death. That requires food as well. Included in that realm of our “flesh” is its spiritual aspect. The spiritual food we ate when we were still dead towards God is also doomed to die.

What is that spiritual food? It is what every neighbor of ours who has yet to meet Christ is still eating. It includes a broad variety of spiritual nutriments: secular education, secular entertainment, secular social exercises and more. And in as much as this “un-Spirit-based” spirituality is rooted in the spirit of this world, it lacks the fruit of the Spirit and koinonia as its outcome. It is what Jesus called worthless branches—destined to be gathered and burned.

Children grow and Christians grow, so our ambition is to engage in the growth that is lasting, nourished by Scriptures and exercised in love. 

Today I preached a sermon on hell. A friend and pastor, who was interrupted in a sermon series on heaven by a surgery, had scheduled the sermon for today to address hell as the obverse of heaven. As I agreed to cover for him it was a chance to visit an important but rarely visited topic.

The limited time I had both in preparing and in preaching the sermon kept me from any breadth or depth of coverage. Yet reading the Bible with a Trinitarian lens set me up to see some features I’ll share here.

First it jumped out at me that Jesus forces the subject to the fore. In the Gospels he regularly pits the destination of heaven over against the alternative. It’s not that he regularly mentions hell. He doesn’t. Instead he set out themes of the kingdom, using his insistent calls to embrace God’s kingdom to polarize his audiences. He forces them to the question of trajectory: one either loves God, his Father, and is moving towards him; or one hates him. There is no middle ground. So that every invitation to participate in heaven contains an implied opposite: those who dismiss him display themselves as children of hell. The final outcome is twofold: “And these [the ungodly] will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt 25:46).

The Trinitarian piece is this: the purpose of the Father-Son-and-Spirit One is to bring together a people to join and enjoy the Godhead’s eternal loving communion. Joined not as equals-in-being but as those elevated into a marital union with Jesus, the God-Man. The Son came to gather his bride to himself and, in his true humanity and true deity, offers a relational/ontic bridge into the eternal Life of God. We who respond are a collective bride, drawn into oneness by the Father. The Spirit is the one whose union with our spirits—in the awakening moment of regeneration—unites us with each other and to Christ: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? . . . But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him . . . . Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” (1 Cor 6:15-20).

This union of the Church with Christ illuminates a sometimes overlooked reality: heaven and hell are already present realities of this age. Some in this world are experiencing heaven already, and others are experiencing hell. Yet the realms are still overlapped—a confusion of old and new that Peter illustrated when Jesus rebuked him for still holding, Satanically, to former values rather than to the new kingdom reality Jesus was presenting (see Matt 16:21-23). Jesus was bent on distinguishing—but not yet separating—the two realms before he returned to the Father. In John 8, for instance, he dismissed a group of pseudo-disciples for being “of your father, the devil”; and he confronted the religious leaders of his day for turning converts into “twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matt 23:15).

We should note here that the underlying Hebrew and Greek terms for hell (sheol and gehenna) also speak of simple physical death: the “grave”. Yet physical death is not the ultimate issue of the words but an indicator of the death Satan unleashed on the world in Eden. That is, the debate in Eden on whether eating the forbidden fruit would lead to death—as God said it would and as the serpent said it would not—was answered by the instant loss of God’s gift of Spiritual life in Adam. He and Eve died in the moment they ate—now functioning separately from God’s eternal life.

Yet their physical life continued for a time. But only until their dust-based bodies, consisting of the material of the newly cursed and dying earth, also expired. The point is that they had two aspects of life and death—what Jesus distinguished as the life birthed of the flesh and that which is birthed of the Spirit—so that they were now physically living but spiritually dead. Paul, of course, broadened this to all humanity in Ephesians 2:1-2, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.”

What, then, is hell? How does it overlap with, and yet differ from, physical death? Jesus clarified the point by speaking of the dual aspects of life and death in yet another warning meant to help his followers catch the distinction: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28). Hell denoted the place where all who reject God’s love and life will be found in the future state of eternity. In Revelation 21: 7-8 God enlarges the warning:

The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Finally let me underscore the most important point of all: sinners prefer hell over heaven. No one will be in hell without their having voted for that option! And, as now is the case, they will blame on God all the evils that they have birthed and embraced in their autonomy.

Consider, for instance, Psalm 2, where God is represented as laughing as the nations rage against him. He is not upset by a world that votes against him, even if it is by a vast majority. Why not? Because the measure the fallen world uses is “freedom”—meaning the freedom that forms the fallen human identity. Ever since Adam first declared independence from God in Eden, a preference for personal freedom has been reaffirmed in every subsequent generation. A freedom that flies in the face of the Son who tells us, “For apart from me you can do nothing.” And so it is that in Psalm 2 the Father warns the world, “Kiss the Son.” This is the measure of heaven and hell: how we respond to the Son.

Hell is simply this: the locale where all who hate God and who refuse to love—to “kiss”—the Son, despite the beauty of his own sacrificial love, are free to retreat from his presence for all of time: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed” (2 Thess 1:9-10).

Let me conclude by saying that my own conversion came in reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. I invite readers to turn there: there Jesus pits heaven and hell against each other. There he confronted me for being a hellbent sinner, even in my youth. And he then invited me to join him in heaven as one whom he loved. My response to his invitation to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” came in the context of discovering that Jesus was both strong as hell—as he swallowed death on my behalf—and as heavenly as any can imagine! Let’s all join him in a complete and joyful dependence.