Some of you may have seen Evan Almighty, the 2007 film starring Steve Carell as Evan Baxter and Morgan Freeman as God. Evan Almighty is no cinematic classic. At one level it is just another lighthearted comedy, yet at another level it is a compelling illustration of a very real discomfort known all too well to believers today. Many of us fear to think and, therefore, to act as Christians, because to do so is considered unreasonable given modern assumptions. We wonder, “Is faith reasonable? Must I commit intellectual suicide when I commit my life to Christ?” Evan Almighty brings questions like these into very clear focus.

           

If you have not seen the movie, try to imagine Evan, a newly elected congressman, sporting ancient Noah-esque robes and long, flowing, white hair and beard, and building an ark—that’s right, an ark, as in Genesis 6:14—on a few vacant lots in an upscale, Northern Virginia suburb. Evan tried and tried to ignore God, but God would not be refused. Reluctantly, Evan obeys God, builds the ark, and endures mocking, scorn, and censure from his congressional peers and neighbors. On the day Evan has been assured the flood will happen, his humiliation reaches a peak. Evan has loaded the ark with his family and with hundreds of animals. The police are demanding that he leave the ark so it can be demolished by the wrecking ball recently brought to the scene. His neighbors are heckling him, and the press is broadcasting the action for the whole world to see. Evan, in a scene reminiscent of a psalm of David, looks to the sky and bellows, “Is it too much to ask for a little precipitation?” He is desperate for vindication from the God he knows is True, but Whom others don’t seem to know or understand.

           

Do you sometimes feel like Evan? If so, you have a lot of company. For over 300 years, through what are often called the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been moving away from faith in God. In His place, people have elevated faith in human reason (rationalism); they have emphasized what can be measured (empiricism and positivism); they have imagined and tried to construct various utopias (communism and Nazism); and they have denied that there is anything beyond the natural, material world (naturalism and materialism). While the intellectual elites who posited these ideas were often willing to deny God, many others were not. Hence, the faithful often compartmentalized or privatized their faith, in effect, accepting the famous atheist, Bertrand Russell, at his word—he was reputed to have said, “Religion is like digestion; you just don’t talk about it.”

 

People of faith, therefore, have had to adopt one set of assumptions for interacting and getting along in the modern world, while at the same time holding a different set of assumptions in sustaining their faith. This dualistic approach to life is inevitably fragmenting, and it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to live an integrated life. Is it any wonder that even though a huge majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians,[1] both individuals and our society increasingly act in ways that are out of line with Christ’s teachings? Christians typically spend a few hours or less each week striving to worship and to conform their minds to Christ, and the remaining 165 or so meeting the world’s demands (or goofing off, in some cases!).

           

The disconnect between Christ’s teachings and our actions is even more understandable when we remember that Enlightenment ideas have shaped the institutions that, in turn, shape us. Take education, for example. At one time, all education in the West was what we at Montreat College now call “Christ-centered.” It was unthinkable that education could have been otherwise. The very name “university” was a statement that there was unity in diversity—everything in heaven and on earth (in all its diversity) pointed to Christ, and in Him all things held together (unity). In the latter half of the 19^th century, as more and more academics began to believe that faith was unreasonable (yes, even academics have been subject to the winds of fashion and peer pressure), colleges and universities began to separate faith and learning. By the middle part of the 20^th century, most so-called “Christian” colleges had adopted essentially secular academic programs surrounded by varying degrees of Christian life in student programs—thus modeling the dualism with which people were expected to live. In 1952, when William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale[2] and pointed out that “…a Yale education was more likely to shatter a person’s commitment to Christianity than to fortify it,”[3] a prominent supporter denied his claim and decried him as a “violent, unbalanced, and twisted young man”[4] until the administrators realized that nobody seemed to care. Then, quietly, Yale and many other formerly Christian colleges simply gave up the illusion and dropped the pretense.

 

The transformation of higher education is so nearly complete that colleges and universities, like Montreat, that are trying to integrate faith and learning are now a tiny fraction of the educational world. These colleges are largely unrecognized by most students seeking an education. Also, these colleges are struggling to communicate what it really means to integrate faith and learning in a world that is more interested in job preparation than in assuring that people live integrated, meaningful lives, consistent with their faith.

           

Given all this, is it reasonable to think Christianly? Evan Almighty provides an exaggerated illustration of the alternatives. Evan Baxter knows God to be True. Evan has seen irrefutable evidence. He trusts God to be faithful and chooses to follow, despite ridicule and scorn. In the end, Evan learns that God is indeed faithful and that following God is best for him, for his family, and for society. If God is indeed the True one, what could be more reasonable than conforming our minds to Christ, thinking Christianly, and following Him?

 

Alas, that way of thinking is not dominant in America today (despite the fact that most Americans describe themselves as Christians). In the movie, Congressman Long, played by John Goodman, personifies the pressures the world exerts to move away from God. Long is interested in power, wealth, and personal aggrandizement. In Long’s view, that’s what life is all about. Congressman Long has neither time for God nor patience for those who invoke His name. If there is no God, then power, wealth, pleasure, and fame are the measures of a successful life.

           

How does Evan come to faith? He is bombarded with evidence he cannot ignore. Regardless of when he sets his alarm clock, it always rings at 6:14. The words “General Electric” on the face of the digital clock are obscured such that only the letters “G-E-N” are lighted, creating the effect of the Bible reference, Gen. 6:14. Evan’s street address is changed to 614. His assistant’s new telephone extension is—you guessed it—614. Materials for building the ark are delivered to his doorstep. Animals follow him around. Evan’s clothes disappear from his closet and are replaced by robes. His beard and hair grow long and white, and they grow so fast that the beard on one side of his face grows back while he is trying to shave the other side. Finally, God even appears to Evan and makes His demands clear.

           

We too are bombarded by evidence, but we often ignore it or explain it away. God does not overpower us the way He did Evan, because that would leave us no choice, and He wants us to come to Him voluntarily.[5] However, God does provide ample evidence of His existence and promptings for us to seek Him.[6] In my own process of coming to faith, I also was confronted by events that I believed could not be circumstantial.[7] God used these events to prompt me to look into the evidence of the historicity of Jesus Christ and of the authenticity of His claims. Others are moved by intellectual curiosity, by the testimony of others, by expressions of love and mercy, and by lives of integrity demonstrated by Christians. Still others speak of a personal encounter with Jesus, something like the Apostle Paul had on the road to Damascus.

           

Whether you are a Christian, a seeker, an adherent of another religion, or an atheist, consider reviewing the facts. The facts, the arguments for God and for the deity of Jesus Christ, come in many forms—only one of which is the special revelation of the Bible. The apostle Paul tells us:

 

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.[8]

 

Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, in their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, provide a lot more detail to Paul’s assertion.[9] They outline four arguments for the existence of God. First is the Cosmological Argument, which explains the logical necessity and scientific evidence pointing to a creator. Next is the Teleological Argument, in two forms. The first form is called the anthropic principle. That’s a fancy way of saying that the universe has been “fine-tuned” to support life on earth. Gravitational force is one example. If the gravitational force were weaker by 1 x 10^-37 percent, galaxies would never have formed. Had it been that much stronger, the universe would have collapsed back on itself. There are over 100 of these so-called coincidences. The second form of the Teleological Argument regards the design of life. One example points to the simplest form of life (a single-celled amoeba) and points out that it has more information in its DNA than 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Finally, the Moral Argument asserts, in short form, that since all humans make moral judgments, there must be some form of moral law. If there is a law, there needs to be a lawgiver.

 

The Cosmological Argument is useful not only because of the necessity of a creator, but because it makes apparent the need for the supernatural. Science itself points to a supernatural beginning of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics and the half-life of radioactive substances both imply that the universe had a beginning. And the “big bang” theory points toward an event when all matter, energy, space, and time exploded into existence from nothing. It was a supernatural event because natural laws simply cannot explain it. To put it another way, in the beginning, “supernatural” happened. Einstein recognized the problem when developing his theory of relativity. He was so disconcerted by the proposition that his theory pointed to a beginning of the universe (thereby implying a creator) that he made what he later called “the biggest mistake” of his career and changed the equation to avoid the need for a beginning.[10]

           

One may come away from investigation of these arguments convinced that there is a God, but still not convinced that Jesus Himself is God. To get to that conclusion, one needs to review the historical evidence. Christianity is an historical faith—not simply in the fact that it is old, but also in the sense that its central characters and events are historical, documented by many different sources and subject to the same proofs that lead us to believe in or deny other historical facts. If you follow this trail, you will learn that there is more documentation on Jesus’s life and activities than on any other person or event from ancient times (including Homer, Socrates, and Caeser). You will learn that Jesus’s motley band of followers, His disciples, though fragmented and discouraged by the crucifixion, were so transformed by the resurrection and Pentecost that they set in motion events that transformed the West and provided the basis for many of our modern ideas and values.

 

Unfortunately, because secular thinkers typically exclude the possibility of the supernatural a priori, any talk of God as creator, or of the miracles recorded in the Bible, is rejected as intellectually inconsistent. Secular historians, like the Medal of Freedom recipient Will Durant in his book Heroes of History,[11] are placed in the awkward position of acknowledging the historicity of Christ and identifying him as a great man while at the same time explaining away His divinity and the well-documented miracles that caused people to believe. C. S. Lewis reminds us that this is

 

the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.[12]

 

There is a whole body of literature called “apologetics” that addresses the facts that Christians believe. C. S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel have each investigated the faith with the intention of debunking what they considered myth and have become Christians in the process. You can read about their journeys in their books Surprised by Joy, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, and The Case for Christ.[13] Norman Geisler, one of the world’s leading academic apologists, has written an entire encyclopedia documenting in incredible detail (over 800 pages) the facts, the historical research, and the arguments for and against belief in Jesus Christ.[14] Others, like Ravi Zacharias, Os Guinness, Francis Schaeffer, and Charles Colson, have demonstrated the philosophical and intellectual consistency of the Christian faith and its importance as a foundation for our society. The information is there for you to review, and it is, I believe, compelling.

 

Back to Evan Almighty. Evan Baxter was sitting on the ark in a very dry northern Virginia suburb suffering humiliation for following God. Do the authorities destroy the ark and complete his humiliation? No. The flood comes. I won’t tell you how, in case you haven’t seen the movie, but know that Evan is vindicated, and Congressman Long is exposed for his manipulation of the law.

 

Like Evan Baxter, we too can have confidence that God is indeed here, and that we can think Christianly in all aspects of our lives—a practice we hope we will all continue to develop here at Montreat College. I leave you with a quote from the philosopher-apologist Francis Schaeffer:

 

I find that many people who are evangelical and orthodox want truth just to be true to the dogmas, or to be true to what the Bible says. Nobody stands more for the full inspiration of Scripture than I, but this is not the end of the truth as Christianity is presented, as the Bible presents itself. The truth of Christianity is that it is true to what is there. [emphasis in the original] You can go to the end of the world and you never need be afraid, like the ancients, that you will fall off the end and the dragons will eat you up. You can carry out your intellectual discussion to the end of the game, [emphasis mine] because Christianity is not only true to the dogmas, it is not only true to what God has said in the Bible, but it is also true to what is there, and you will never fall off the end of the world![15]

 

 

 

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