Saints: Signs of God or Nice People?

So, here’s how he explained it. Back in the Ratzinger report before he became Pope Benedict, he explained that the only really effective Apologia, remember that’s defense is where the word apologetics comes from for Christianity comes down to two arguments. Namely, the saints the church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Now, a couple of things to notice here. I didn’t mention this I don’t think directly last week. But beauty and the saints, he’s not just arguing that there is some kind of creator. He’s actually arguing specifically that the Christian claims about God are true and that the uniqueness of Christian beauty and the uniqueness of Christian saints help to demonstrate and verify that truth.

Years later, after becoming Pope in 2008, Benedict would reflect on this argument and say, “Yeah, I did want to say that to me art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith. Then he explains why. He says the arguments contributed by reason are unquestionably important and indispensable, but then there’s always dissent somewhere, right? Even if you’re 100% right and you make a really great logical case for the existence of God, a smart atheist can come along and say, “Ah, but what about this counterfactual?” Even a not smart atheist can say, “Eh, I don’t find it persuasive, right?” An argument using structured reason can be logically valid and still unpersuasive. Because someone will say, “Well, maybe there’s an answer out there. I just don’t know what it is. But there’s some kind of rebuttal out there,” and this happens all the time.

You can have an airtight argument against atheism and you’ll be told, “Well, that’s just God of the gap somewhere. We’re going to find the answer to your argument. You’re just making an argument from ignorance because we just don’t know what the answer to your argument is.” Now, those are usually illegitimate responses, but nevertheless, you should know those are out there. And so, logical arguments only get you so far with ordinary people. This is not a problem with logic, but it is something to be aware of in terms of persuasion. And so, he says, on the other hand, if we look at the saints discrete, luminous trail in which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good which resists the millennia. There truly is the light of light.

In other words, it cuts through. Imagine a relationship, if you want to know, “Does this person love me?” You can go through the logical syllogisms. “Well, they agreed to marry me. They’ve moved across the country for me. They’ve done all these things.” But then sometimes you just see something and it speaks to you more profoundly than any of the kind of logical reason could. It doesn’t mean either approach is bad, but one speaks more directly to the heart, and that’s Benedict’s point, that beauty and the saints speak directly to the heart in a way that is immediately satisfying. And if you want to take maybe a deeper examination of it’s because truth, goodness, and beauty are all interconnected because they’re all one in God.

And so, an argument that is true but is not immediately obviously good or immediately obviously beautiful, can kind of fall short. But an argument that wraps truth, goodness, and beauty up. Like when you see the life of a saint and you realize that their profound belief in God, this true thing causes him to behave in a way that is good and beautiful, you can see the truth, goodness, and beauty all wrapped up in one just as when you see some scene of scripture depicted in a beautiful way, truth, goodness, and beauty are all there. And so, something about that really seems to satisfy the human heart in a deeper way. It’s a more persuasive kind of apologetic approach. This is something Christians should be mindful of, I think.

So, at the risk of doing the very thing Benedict warns against making an intellectual argument out of this thing that appeals to the heart, I’m going to make a syllogism, right? That if we want to think about this logically, we can say if Christianity is not true, there are no saints. But the second premise then there are saints. This is of course where the whole debate is going to fall. And the conclusion, therefore Christianity is true. And a lot could be said here, “What do we mean by saints and how do we prove any of this?” Well, I want to suggest a simple -ish proof that we find this category of people, saints behaving in a way that is beyond merely human capabilities. It’ll become a little clearer. I think what I mean at the time that we see people acting with what appears like divine power, that God himself is acting in history.

And the reason we believe this is because they’re acting in a super human way, a way that suggests superhuman endurance, superhuman strength that is very difficult to explain in a merely human way. And again, I’ll explain all of that as we go. But before I go any further, I want to point out that this is not just an argument Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict the XVI likes. This is an argument that it seems to me Jesus Nazareth likes. He makes a pretty similar argument about himself in John 10. He says, “If I’m not doing the works of my Father, then don’t believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, you may know and understand, the Father is in me and I’m in the Father.”

In other words, Jesus is making two possible bases of your belief. Number one is the truth claims, you can believe his teaching. Number two is the observed goodness. People saw his miracles and that validates who he is. Even if they found all of his teaching shocking, challenging, provocative in all the worst ways, they could still say, “Yeah, but he’s healing the sick. He’s doing all these things, driving out demons. Well, he can’t be doing that in the name of the devil.” So, all of that kind of points to the fact that Jesus is who he says he is. And then, in John 14, he makes clear that this isn’t just a way of proving who he is. This is also a way of establishing his followers. “Truly, truly I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do and greater works than these will he do because I go to the Father.”

Now, we often associate that with really kind of flashy miracles and certainly in the 2000-year history of the church, we have plenty of really flashy miracles, but I want to suggest that there’s another way we see this, which is that superhuman endurance in doing good that I kind of alluded to earlier. And again, we’ll get into that in more detail, but that’s something that we see Christians behaving in a way that non-Christians know they should behave but find difficult or impossible to actually do. So, I anticipate an objection here, which is isn’t religion a necessary formality? Because a lot of people imagine that the argument here is if you don’t have the Bible, you don’t know right from wrong, and therefore you don’t know how to behave. And to be sure, I have heard Christians make arguments like that, but I want to stress that is a conflation of two important ideas.

And more importantly, that’s not the argument scripture makes. Scripture does not make the argument non-Christians don’t know right from wrong and therefore just don’t understand morality. We need to come along and introduce this Christian thing called morality that is an argument Christians make, not Christianity itself. I hope that distinction is clear. Back in 1916 in an article in the Atlantic, an Anglican priest by the name of Bernard Iddings Bell, who is a very good writer, has an article called Goodness and Religion in which he addresses this and he’s responding to the guy who says that he’s not connected in any way with religion, but he is a good husband, father and citizen. So, what more could one ask?

And I think you’ve probably heard this, “I can be good without God.” That’s the argument and that’s a really loaded argument for several reasons, but Bell addresses a few of them. I want to just give you his answers. He says, “The sublime complacency of the man who tells you this about himself is beyond remark.” You have to be extremely full of yourself to say, “Yeah, I’m doing great.” As a believer, as a non-believer, it takes a certain level of delusion to think, “Yeah, I’ve got no major faults. I’ve got no flaws.”

And so, in his words Bell says, “The egoist who esteems himself infallible,” like I don’t have any wrong opinions, “is as nothing to his cousin who deems himself impeccable.” I’ve got no bad behavior. “What we do fail to perceive quite often is that,” then he gives a kind of extended treatment of this, that this man, the guy he’s answering, “has confounded morality with religion.” So, it’s not just that he’s astonishingly arrogant, it’s not just that he’s totally blind to his own self because of his egoism. It’s also that he has completely misunderstood what Christianity’s all about. And Bell puts it like this. He says, “This mistake is so commonly made that it is worthy of some attention.” There is to be sure a relationship between being good and being religious, but it’s not the relationship of identity.

Being good and being religious are not the same thing. It is the relationship of producer and produced, of antecedent and consequent, of cause and effect. And he gives some examples. He says, “It’d be foolish to say that green apples is a term synonymous with indigestion,” you can say green apples causes indigestion. I don’t know if that’s actually true of green apples, but to just say green apples and indigestion mean the same thing would be ridiculous. And any more than to say, “That an architect’s plans are the same thing as the building.” No, the plans might give rise to the building, but the plans in the building are not the same thing. Being sexually attracted to someone and having a family, not the same thing. The attraction might lead you to get married and form a family, but they’re not identical.

And so, when we conflate being good and being religious, we’ve lost sight of this very important and fairly obvious distinction. And so, Bell says, “This is an evidence of muddled thinking to maintain that being good is the same as being religious.” Instead, he says, “No matter what religion you take up, you’ll find that it is not in essence a system of ethics. It is, rather, an agency for strengthening people by means of context, real or fancied, real or imaginary with supernatural power that they may have the courage and the power to fulfill a system of ethics.” This is a really important and I think underappreciated idea that when we’re talking about religion, certainly when we’re talking about Western religion, what we mean isn’t just there’s a God and he’s got a rule book, but it’s also that God in some way helps to bring about the thing that he tells you to do. It’s an important dimension of this.

God doesn’t just say, “Here are the rules. Good luck. I’m going to catch you if you mess up.” And so, Bell says, “In other words, the essential thing about religion is its mysticism, the fruit of which is the nerving,” meaning strengthening, “of men and women up to a system of morality.” That the morality or the achieving of the morality is the result of the mystical, spiritual, prayerful kind of core in religion. “The purpose of religion in their origins will invariably be found to be the imparting of supernatural sanction for and supernatural power to fulfill the ethical system deemed necessary by the culture of the worshippers.”

Now, he’s describing a lot of religions here. I don’t think that’s actually true of all religions, but I think he’s making a good point that in a variety of religions, the religion teaches do X, not Y, but specifically they’re saying God says, do X and not Y, and God will somehow make it possible for you to do X and not Y. And what that looks like, maybe it’s not God or it’s the gods, or even in the worst forms it might be here’s this demonic kind of power to go do this thing you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. But there is still nevertheless some sense of being strengthened by a supernatural agent. And that’s Bell’s claim generally about religion, that it’s not just, here’s a moral code you didn’t know about. It’s you already knew about the moral code. Here’s God helping you or the gods or whatever, helping you to pursue and achieve the moral code you couldn’t have done by yourself.

And Bell says this is true of all religions. Again, I don’t think it’s literally all religions, but a lot turns on what we mean by the word religion. But he says, “It can be seen to be true of Christianity in particular if we look at the methods of Jesus or the expression which it took upon that founder’s removal of his material presence.” So, he says, “We’ve often noticed that disparages of Jesus of Nazareth will point out that there’s nothing new in his ethical teaching, no original contribution to ethical thought.” You’ve got things like the golden rule, but you find variations of that before. “The principle of universal fraternity was a part of much of Jewish messianism in the century or two before he came. “It gives one after another example of this that we think of these things as Christian morality.”

But then, you find these other religions that had it first or other cultures that you find some earlier example of it and people will say, “Aha. Jesus isn’t this great moral teacher that you Christians make him out to be.” And the thing about this that’s funny as Bell points out is all they’re doing is confirming what Jesus said himself. Jesus doesn’t say, “Here’s a radical new moral code you’ve never heard of.” Instead, Bell says, “He spoke truth when he said that his function was to fulfill, to round out to completion the utterance of the law and of the ancient prophets or preachers of his people.” That there are these Jewish roots of Jesus’s teaching that Jesus comes and fulfills them. He doesn’t just present something radically new and alien.

And so, for instance, when he deals with people who have gone astray, he doesn’t give them some new system for doing good. When Mary Magdalene, she’s taught no new code of sexual morality. When he says to the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more,” he implies that she already knew what she ought to have been doing. He doesn’t say, “Well, let me tell you why adultery is wrong.” Now, this is strangely enough what the Bible actually has to say about the subject. St. Paul in Romans Chapter 2 says, “When the Gentiles who do not have the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves even though they do not have the law.” There’s an entire world out there outside of Israel that doesn’t have the Mosaic law, and yet they still know the 10 Commandments. Even if they don’t have them written on tablets, they have them written on their hearts.

And so, Paul says, “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on judgment day.” So, the striking thing there is when non-Christians say, aha, Christianity is not presenting some new ethical code or ethical system, that’s what Jesus and the apostles were saying, right? They are bringing out things that you knew or should have known already. The 10 Commandments are a nice clear summary of things everybody should have already known. That’s kind of the idea. So, returning to Bell, he says, “The thing about Jesus which attracted people was not especially the newness or beauty of his moral science.” It was not aha, here’s some ethical code we’ve never heard of before.

To be sure there are things Jesus does in the Beatitudes where he calls you to love your enemies, that really do go beyond the morality of the day. That’s not the heart of what Jesus is known for or what people are attracted to. It was rather he says, “That men and women felt a power flowing from him, which they unhesitatingly deemed the power of God himself, filling them with a force sufficient to make them deny the world, the flesh and the devil, and aspire toward living up to a morality which they already perceived, but which was theretofore deemed beyond their power of achievement.”

In other words, the people in Jesus’ day were not impressed because Jesus was telling them right from wrong. They knew more or less right from wrong already. What they were impressed by was that here was someone who seemed capable of doing what they knew they should do but fell short of. If you read what St. Paul says about the law, this is a point he’s making over and over and over again. The law brings death, not because God’s there to trick or trap you, but because once you know right from wrong, you realize how often you choose wrong over right. Unless you’re just a self-delusional egoist, then you’ll realize that the more you try to live right, the more you are rigorously aware of your own behavior, you realize how far you fall short of the mark, not just in what other people expect of you, not just in what you think God would expect of you, but what you’d like for yourself.

That if you have any kind of moral standards, you’ll find you fall short of your own standards. And the temptation there of course, is to always lower and lower and lower your standards. But there’s some sense in which you know should do better than you are doing. And in Jesus, we find the power to do the things we know we ought to do. That’s Bell’s point. And so, he says, and this is again over a hundred years ago, and I think this is still true today, “The rare moderns who take up Bible are regularly astonished to find how little ethical instruction there actually is in the New Testament.” When people parody the Bible, it’s always thou shalt do this. Thou shalt not do that. That’s a very small amount of what the Bible actually is about. And vanishingly small amount of what the New Testament in particular is about.

It is much more about this personal contact with the power of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Now, this is also true in the life of the church, which again just gets this bad reputation of being about rules and regulations and needless dogmas. But Bell, who again is Anglican, but he has a lot of common views with Catholics on these issues says, “Look, the early creeds have little to nothing to say about ethics.” They’re all about what did Jesus do? He lived, he died, he rose from the dead. It’s about the divine power in and through Jesus. And then he says, “The sacramental system likewise is not about teaching morality. It is rather a means of getting mystical contact with Jesus.” The sacraments are called the mysteries. It’s all about this mystical contact with God.

So, “Baptism is the rite of incorporation into Christ. Confirmation where Christians receive the outpouring of the spirit. And the Mass and the Eucharist, you have the rite of personal communion with the Redeemer.” These are not primarily a set of things that is just believe this abstract proposition or here’s some rules of behavior. This is about having places where you come in contact with divine power when you come in contact with God directly here on Earth. That’s at the heart of the sacramental system, and this is at the heart of ancient Christianity. Look, I know there are people who present a kind of moralistic form of Christianity where it’s mostly just about making sure your skirt is the right length or that you follow the right rules, and that’s just not the Christianity you find in the Bible in terms of the emphasis, in terms of what’s actually important. To be sure there’s things that you should and shouldn’t do.

But if you think the instructions about things you should and shouldn’t do that the heart of the New Testament, I would encourage you to read the New Testament yourself, and I think you’ll be surprised to find it’s not there. And Bell points out, the church did a great job of building a whole liturgical structure around the sacraments to draw people into the mystery of it and to help them understand perfectly that the Christian religion is not nearly so much a morality as it is a coming into contact with him of whom the evangelist St. John said, “That he came so they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

So, all of that’s to say you can absolutely know right from wrong without the Bible, without knowing who Jesus Christ is. You have the law written on your heart. In the same way, as I’ve said before, you can drop an apple on the ground and have it hit the ground even if you don’t believe in gravity, even if you deny gravity, it doesn’t matter. There’s still something basic that it’s true. Well, likewise, conscience. The notion of right and wrong is there. Now, maybe there’s some higher-level moral stuff you need help with, and it would be really helpful for God to reveal it to you. Sure. But the basics of morality are abundantly clear.

Okay, so what then do the saints provide? Because it sounds like I’m saying you can be pretty good at that God. Well, yes and no. The thing that you can’t do is really achieve the moral law in a long-term, consistent way. Meaning, if you take the high road and say, “I’m really going to do everything I feel called to do.” I think one of the things you’ll find happens is that you become very frustrated and discouraged with yourself. And this is the thing Bell was suggesting that divine power is really important for. And this leads us to the luminous trail of the saints. And here again, I think Jesus presents this basically as an apologetic for his own claims. He says in John 15, “I’m the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me and I in Him. He it is that bears much fruit. Far apart from me, you can do nothing.” So that’s the idea.

If Christianity is true, we should find the saints doing things that we find ourselves incapable of doing if we’re not living that kind of life. And so, there are many examples I could give. I want to give two, basically by way of sketching out what I mean by this. And the two lives I want to take a very brief look at, first, Mother Teresa, also known as St. Teresa of Calcutta. And second, St. Maximilian Kolbe. So, let’s look first at Mother Teresa. I don’t feel the need to give an extended biography of her. She’s an Albanian who becomes a nun. She goes and teaches at a girl’s school in Calcutta, India, but she’s doing private Catholic school for girls who are apparently well enough to do circumstances. And she’s really struck by the radical poverty.

And so, she feels what she calls a call within a call where God tells her to go serve the poorest of the poor. She’s already a nun, but now she’s called the founder of a new religious order, The Missionaries of Charity, and to go and care for people who are in some of the most desperate circumstances on earth. She does this for decades, even when she’s getting no spiritual kind of euphoria from it, even when she’s in these kinds of horrendous conditions, she endures in the face of it. The reason I don’t feel the need to go too much into her story is that I think most people already have at least a general sense of it. Back in 1999, Americans voted her The Most Admired Person of the Century. She beat out Martin Luther King, JFK, Albert Einstein, and Helen Keller, which is a very kind of funny list, but Mother Teresa is right there at the top.

In more recent years, her reputation has come posthumously under attack from people trying to knock her and religion down a peg. Christopher Hitchens had some pretty vile stuff to say about her, and I’ll get into that briefly, but I don’t want to do too much and you’ll see why. Most people, if they haven’t been completely poisoned by sort of the smear campaign against her, look at her as someone who is the embodiment of saintly behavior on earth, whether you’re Christian or not. If you were to just say, what does a saintly person look and act like? I think it’s fair to say Mother Teresa would probably be the top of the list of people who’ve lived in the last 200 years.

Benedict the XVI in 2010 said that, “She lived charity to all with that distinction, with a preference though for the poorest and the most forsaken.” He called her a “luminous sign of God’s fatherhood and goodness.” He said, “She was able to recognize in each one the face of Christ whom she loved with her whole being, she continued to meet the Christ she worshiped and received in the Eucharist on the roads and streets of the city, becoming a living image of Jesus who pours on man’s wounds the grace of merciful love.” I love that description that precisely because of how much she’s rooted in the worship of Christ in the Eucharist, she’s able to recognize Jesus in the least of these.

And then Benedict says, “The answer to those who ask why Mother Teresa became so famous is simple, because she lived in a humble and hidden way for love and in the love of God. She herself said that her greatest reward was to love Jesus and to serve him in the poor.” There are a lot of people who’ve tried to help the poor, but there’s something about the radical loving way in which she did it that made the world stand up and take notice. “Her slight figure, her hands joined or while she was caressing a sick person, a leper, someone dying or a child is the visible sign of a life transformed by God.” This is not someone who would be here in Calcutta where she not deeply in love with God first and foremost. She could know it’d be great if somebody did something about all that poverty, but we know as a matter of fact, that the reason she is there is not just there are poor people, someone should do something, but there are poor people and God is calling me to take care of them and their hour of greatest suffering. “In the night of human sorrow,” Benedict says, “she made the light of divine love shine out and helped so many hearts to rediscover that peace which God alone can give.”

So that’s the argument. And again, as I’ve been saying throughout this episode, it is not that a non-Christian or an atheist or whatever would be incapable of realizing someone should do something, but I would suggest that there’s a reason why the saints are able to do something and able to do something for so long while everybody else sort of sits on the byline saying someone should do something. Dominique LaPierre and the City of Joy, which is a book from the mid 80s in French about Mother Teresa, it’s been translated into English. It talks about when the missionaries of charity moved into their famous house of healing or comfort for the dying. And LaPierre says, “At first, the intrusion of a nun dressed in a white sari and adorned with the crucifix in a neighborhood wholly consecrated to the worship of Kali, provoked curiosity.” This is a Hindu goddess of destruction, and Mother Teresa and her nuns are moving into an abandoned temple to Kali and turning it into basically a Christian hospice house for the sick and dying.

And so, at first, they’re just like, “Oh, that’s weird.” But over time, some of the Orthodox Hindus become indignant and they become worried, “Oh, Mother Teresa and her sisters are there to convert the dying to Christianity.” So, “Incidents begin to break out. One day, a shower of stones and bricks rained down upon an ambulance bringing the dying into the home. The sisters started to get insulted and threatened.” Eventually the police are called and the police captain goes in and he goes to investigate what’s going on. He said he was going to expel her from the building, but I first wanted to figure out what they were up to.

So, he sees the way they’re caring for the dying, and he comes out of the building and the kind of fanatical Hindus are waiting for him on the steps. And he says to them, “I promised you that I would expel this foreign woman and I will do so on the day that you persuade your mothers and sisters to come here and do what she is doing.” That’s at the heart of this. And this is what I think of the critiques of Mother Teresa. The Christopher Hitchens and the like can sit in comfort in the first world and say, “Oh yeah, you’re not doing it the right way.” And just kind of critique the manner of her doing things. And they can do this largely because they operate from a tremendous amount of ignorance and even indifference to the situation on the ground like, “Oh, well, she’s not using the best Western medical practices.”

Well, good luck. If you want to try it, go to Calcutta, see how easily you get access to all these medicines. How easily you as an untrained physician can administer the kind of aid necessary in this situation for year after year after year and see if you can do it for a half century. And it’s much easier to stay on the sidelines and just critique those who are actually making the tremendous amount of difference. But like the police captain said, “We’ll get rid of her on the day that you persuade your mothers and sisters to come and do the same thing,” you yourself should go and do the same thing. If the issue is this could be done better, show me who is doing it better.

So, one of the women who went and stayed with her, a non-Catholic, I’m not sure, I don’t believe she was even a practicing Christian at the time, but I may be wrong about that. Mary Poplin stayed with her for a couple of months. And when she came back, she did a Q&A session and one of the questioners said, “Non-Christians also do social justice. What made Mother Teresa’s work special? Could one do her work without following Jesus?” This is I think the question everybody has, and that’s what Mary Poplin said. She said, “It’s a great question. It’s the first question people really have in their minds.” She goes, “I was only there two months. And the thing that Mother Teresa had, I believe that was different is she had God actually working through her, through prayer. They and the sisters stayed very peaceful and very satisfied with what they were doing. I think for most of us, that work would’ve been so monotonous after a while we wouldn’t have had the perseverance.” And Poplin says, “We’ve got a lot of projects at the graduate university and service learning projects for students. What we find is that after the initial enthusiasm wears off, there’s nothing there to keep them going.”

So that’s the argument I would make, that you don’t have to be a Christian to realize it’d be good if somebody helped the poor. But we see a class of people that we as Christians call saints that really seem to embody this supernatural charity and perseverance and the level to which they allow themselves to be inconvenienced or harmed for the good of others. And they do it over and over and over and over again in this way that we find ourselves tapping out and cannot by our own strength, by our own effort, imitate without divine help, without the assistance of divine grace.

And so, I would pose this challenge in slightly different ways, both to you, any atheist you might be watching, and any Christians who are skeptical of Mother Teresa or Catholic saints. To the atheist, I would just say, how well have you been able to live the life you think you ought to live? I don’t mean can you be basically nice to people? Everybody can do that. You find serial killers and their neighbors say, “Oh, we never would’ve expected it. He was so nice.” That is not a moral bar worth even discussing. If your bar is that low, I’m not interested in what you have to say about morality. I don’t mean that in a rude way, but just that’s a laughably low kind of standard. Everybody is nice to those who are nice to them. Everybody is basically decent when it’s convenient.

The question is, do you allow yourself to be inconvenienced? Do you allow yourself to really be pushed and pressed? How do you handle when things are not going well? How do you feel when the person is difficult to work with? How does it when the nice kind whatever thing isn’t convenient, socially acceptable, and the rest, what happens then? And I think if you are self-aware, you, like me, you’ll have to say, “I fall short of the mark.” And that’s what the ancient word for sin actually means is a missing of the mark that it’s not, I didn’t know where the bullseye was. It’s I knew where the bullseye was, I aimed at the bullseye and I maybe didn’t even hit the dartboard. So that’s to atheists who were watching.

To Christians who were skeptical about Mother Teresa, I would just say this, there is an ancient heresy called Pelagianism that suggests we can do extraordinarily good without God. Jesus says, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Pelagius thought, “Ah, we can actually do good without God. He’s an example. We don’t really need Jesus except as an example.” There’s a lot more that could be said about Pelagianism. Protestants have historically been very good at rejecting Pelagianism and anything they think is Pelagianism, which is where it sometimes goes off the rails. But if you say, Mother Teresa isn’t a saint and she’s not doing all of this good stuff by divine grace, then you seem to have to say you can do extraordinary holy things without divine assistance.

And that strikes me as an impossible claim for a Christian to really make. You’d have to either say, Mother Teresa’s behavior was not holy, or you can do holy things without divine grace. Or you just conclude Mother Teresa is living this life of holiness because of divine grace, which is of course the Catholic position. That’s what we mean by calling her a saint, that she’s living in divine grace and that we see this through these actions that are inexplicable apart from grace. That’s the idea. I know there are a lot of even Catholics who are maybe skeptical about Mother Teresa and I would just say the work she does demonstrate the quality of her relationship with God. That’s Mother Teresa. By the way, if you find the examples of Mother Teresa and Maximilian Kolbe unhelpful, you can fill in literally thousands of examples of extraordinary saints. I’m giving these two just by way of example.

So, with that, the second saint, St. Maximilian Kolbe. Maximilian Kolbe is an incredible saint. And again, because I’m not trying to do just like a biography, I’ll give a very truncated form. He’s a Polish saint. He started the first Japanese language Catholic newspaper in Japan and had a circulation, I want to say, of 65,000 by the time he left six years later. And what was remarkable about that is he started the newspaper without knowing Japanese. And so, this is a man who had kind of the Midas touch. He started a monastery in Poland. And within a few years, it was the largest monastery in the world. It was like one thing after another after another. He would put his mind to it, believing that God was calling him to do it and it would be extraordinarily successful. But this was the 20th century, and if you know anything about Poland in the 20th century, it was a pretty unhappy history.

And so, the Nazis takeover, Kolbe speaks out against Nazis, and he gets taken to Auschwitz. He’s famous for the very end of his life, but one of the fellow prisoners at Auschwitz points out that he lived this remarkable holiness, not just so while he’s in Auschwitz, the entire time he’s there, he’s living in this really saintly kind of way. And so, a fellow prisoner who is a member of the Polish resistance later said of him, “Everybody was starving. And a man is an egoist when he’s starving and doesn’t care what is going on. All he can think about is getting a bit of bread.”

When you are actually starving, all of this thought about I should care for my neighbor so easily goes out the door. I mean, look, if I haven’t gotten enough sleep or if I’m having a stressful day, I find the basic actions of being charitable to the people I’m around exponentially more difficult. I have no idea what that would look like in the extreme radical situation of something like a concentration camp. But both Kolbe and his fellow prisoners did know that they knew experientially. And the reputation Kolbe had was while everyone else quite understandably goes into this selfish survival mode, Kolbe was living in this remarkable way.

And so, the prisoner said, “It was not only the last sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe, which was remarkable, but his whole behavior in the camp. He often offered himself to be beaten in place of someone else and he always shared his rations.” These are starvation rations. These are not, you’ve got a full stomach. It was not like, “Oh, you know what? I can’t eat this entire thing of bread so you can have my leftovers.” No. While facing starvation, he’s still sharing what he has habitually, not one time. But this reference to the last sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe being remarkable in this special way, although it’s not a standalone, it’s part of a habit of this saintly behavior. If you don’t know the story, it is a beautiful story.

A prisoner escaped from Auschwitz and in response, they gathered 10 randomly chosen prisoners to be starved to death. But one of the men cries out that he has a wife and children. And so, as Diana Dewar, in The Saint of Auschwitz explains, “Suddenly a slight figure stepped out of line, took off his cap and moved with halting gait to stand at attention before the SS. He had a flushed face, sunken eyes and cheeks and wore round glasses in wire frames. Prisoners crane to see, because although forlorn cries were not uncommon, no one had ever dared to break rank.”. They’re all standing at attention and he’s just now come forward without permission.

And she says, “It was probably because it was something incomprehensible that Kolbe was not shot where he stood to just boldly step forward like this was so surprising that even the SS are taken aback. “Fritzsch,” who was one of the worst people at Auschwitz, “who had never before had conversation with the prisoner asked, “What does this Polish pig want? Who are you?” Maximilian Kolbe replied, “I’m a Catholic priest. I want to die for that man. I am old. He has a wife and children.” Incredible. He doesn’t even know the man and he has just volunteered to die in his place. No greater love as men than this.

And so, Dewar says this was a shrewd answer because in the German philosophy, they wanted to liquidate as a priority, the old and the weak. And so, the Nazi signals to the sergeant who had said, I have a wife and kids to return to his place in line. And then the other Nazi without a sign of emotion changes the numbers on the list. And so then, Kolbe was sent off to a starvation camp and he doesn’t starve. And so, eventually on August 14th, the eve of the Feast of the assumption of Mary, he’s poisoned because he just would not die. And he lived this incredible, this is someone who is just living this incredible life. And you look at that and say, not just why did he do that, but even how did he do that? And I would suggest the answer to both questions is the same, because of divine life living in him, because of this radical transformation to participation in the life of Christ.

Having said all of that, like I said, there’s innumerable other examples one could offer. But then the answer is, well, what about the bad Christians? Sure, you’ve got your Mother Teresa, you’ve got your Maximilian Kolbes. We’ve got a lot of other people who are not living like that. So, what do we make of that? If the Saints prove the truth of Christianity, why don’t all the sinners who aren’t saints disprove the truth of Christianity? That’s a good question. I want to give it a fair hearing. The first thing I’d say is that we should understand when we’re talking to someone who’s like a bad Christian actor, whatever that is, a predator priest or fill in the blank, whatever your go-to bad Christian is, a Catholic politician who votes for horrible things. Whatever it is. There’s an important question you should be asked. But before I get to that question, I want to give a go-to line from G.K. Chesterton that, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

If we’re right about morality and ethics and all of that stuff, and if we’re right about how to achieve holiness, as Jesus says, “The gate is narrow, the way is difficult.” And so, the fact that a lot of people can say yes, that is the right way and still either struggle to get there or maybe just give up getting there is not particularly difficult. You can say, I think the key to being physically healthy is a good diet and a regular regimen of exercise, and you can still be out of shape, believe me, because it’s much easier to say, this is what I ought to be doing. And then the daily practice of actually doing it can be a very different thing. You haven’t disproven the importance of diet and exercise by pointing out all the people who say diet and exercise is important, but then don’t have a good diet or don’t exercise.

All you’re doing is showing they don’t practice what they preach. What they preach may be true. How they’re practicing or failing to practice is the problem. That’s the idea. I’ll give you an example, like take the Temperance Movement. In the Temperance Movement, a lot of it was largely a female led movement in the 19th century to encourage moderation and alcohol because of problems of drunkenness and spousal abuse. Well, imagine if you found out that one of the leaders in the Temperance Movement went home every night and got drunk and abused her husband? Okay, if that happened, what would that mean for the Temperance Movement? What would certainly mean that that woman was a hypocrite or that that woman was at least failing to live the life she knew she ought to live? But would it disprove the actual claims of the Temperance movement? It doesn’t seem to me that it would.

So, as we are thinking about this, it’s important to distinguish the preaching and the practice because with the saints, we see people who practice what they preach. With the people who are not particularly holy, it’s usually because they’re not practicing what they preach. By the way, this is not just a given in all religions. You can have cases of religious fanatics who do evil things. So, take not just religious fanatics. You can have Al-Qaeda. The problem with Al-Qaeda is not that they’re not religious enough, it’s that their religious convictions are actually evil. The problem of a Marxist revolutionary who kills innocent people isn’t they didn’t believe in their cause enough. No. The problem is that the things they believe in are actually telling them to do wicked things. So, apply the same kind of reasoning to Christianity.

And the critical question is this, the people you’re objecting to is the problem that they are to Christ-like? I doubt it. Or is the problem that they’re not Christ-like enough? Because if your argument against Christianity is that Christians should be more like Christ, every Christian will agree with you. And that is an argument for Christianity and not against it. We should all be more like Christ. And if we were, the world would be an enormously better place. If we want to be more like Christ, Christ is really clear, we’re not going to get very far on our own. We need to be in constant communion with him. So that would be what I would challenge. Even you find these books written about how bad religion is, they often don’t say, “Here’s this New Testament passage that’s calling people to go commit to horrendous acts of genocide or something.” It’s always just Christians were bad in spite of really clear teaching to the contrary.

And again, that is very different than say, an anarchist who reads anarchist texts and is motivated to violence because the texts encourage violence. They’re not bad in spite of their anarchism. They’re bad because of it. So, with Christianity, is the person bad because of being Christ-like or because they’re not Christ-like? That’s the question to consider all that’s to say that even the bad example of those who’ve half-heartedly tried it doesn’t really disprove it. And again, use the example of a diet. If there was a diet where everyone who rigorously did it came out looking great and totally in shape, and then a lot of other people said, “Oh yeah, that’s really good.”

“And then in January for two weeks, I’m going to try it really hard and then I’m going to give up.” Okay. They haven’t really disproved the diet. They’ve shown something about maybe their lack of fortitude, their lack of real commitment. Maybe they’re not sufficiently convinced they need this for their own good. They haven’t told you anything about whether the diet itself is good or bad. Now, if someone was rigorously pursuing the diet with all their heart, mind, and soul and getting into terrible physical condition, that would be a strong kind of counterpoint. But I would suggest we don’t really see that with Christianity.

Now, there’s plenty of examples you could raise, and it’s worth kind of probing those things because there are people who are serious Christians who still sin. Of course, I’m one of them. And those sins are a scandal, and Christianity acknowledges that. But nevertheless, all that’s to say the more one imitates Christ, the less one sins. Christianity is not a moral code, but there is a relationship between this contact with Jesus Christ and the living of the moral code. So, to conclude then, how should a Christian respond to all of this? If what I’ve said is right, what should we do about that? And the Pontifical Counsel for Culture and its discussion of the Way of beauty, I looked at that in the last episode, says that, “The absolutely original and singular beauty of Christ, the model of a truly beautiful life is reflected in the holiness of a life transformed by grace.”

There’s something about Christ that even non-Christians look at that and they’re really drawn to frequently, and the saints have the opportunity to reflect that in their own lives. “Unfortunately, many people perceive Christianity as a submission to commandments made up of prohibitions and limits applied to personal liberty.” Like the stereotype, the caricature of Christianity is that it’s a bunch of rules and regulations. That’s not the lived reality of Christianity. And so, the Pontifical Council for Culture quotes Benedict XVI in a 2005 radio interview in which he says, “I, the other hand would rather help people understand that to be supported by a great love and by a revelation, it’s not a burden. It gives wings and is beautiful to be Christian. The experience lets us grow. The joy of being Christian is beauty, and it’s right to believe it.” That’s what we need to live. And people are not going to believe that if we’re not actively living that.

So, I want to, in closing here, look at one of the most famous texts apologists like to go to. I am an apologist, right? Someone who likes to explain and defend parts of the faith and the go-to text is 1 Peter Chapter 3:15-16. And the reason is because St. Peter tells us to “Always be prepared to make a defense.” It’s an apologia. It’s like an apologetic. Great. Make a defense, have apologetics, and that’s the kind of what to say, right? No good answers so that when people ask you questions, you can respond to them. That sounds really good, but Peter doesn’t stop there. He then says, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence and keep your conscience clear so that when you are abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”

He’s given three words, I think two in Greek, make a defense for what to say and gives five criteria for the how to say it. You need to do it gently. You need to do it reverently. You need to do it in such a way that you’re keeping your conscience clear. Don’t lie to people, don’t abuse them. Don’t do all that. Allow yourself to be abused and have good behavior in Christ, but even this isn’t at the very heart. The very heart is a part of the lost over. You make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for what? For the hope that is in you. All that’s to say you can memorize 95 arguments for why theism is true, why the resurrection really happened, why we should be Christian, why we should be Catholic, but none of that replaces the absolute necessity for you to go and be a saint.

And if you are a saint, then you have the foundation to have the conversations that will lead to apologetics. And then, you also have the means by grace of having the gentleness, reverence, clear conscience, and the rest that you need. If you don’t have that, all the arguments in the world are not going to help you. You’re not prepared to do Christian apologetics because you’re not living a Christ-like life. You don’t have that hope in you, and therefore no one has any reason to ask you to explain this thing you don’t have. So, being a saint isn’t just an optional possibility.

I hear a lot of Christians say, “Oh, I’m no saint, but,” and that is unacceptable. You were made to be a saint, and so don’t settle for anything less than that. You need to be a saint in training. I understand you may not be Mother Teresa, you may not be Maximilian Kolbe, and you’re not called to be. You’re called to be the saint you are meant to be. But being that saint is utterly essential for proclaiming the gospel to the world, because if Benedict is right about this, your lived holiness is going to be more persuasive than the logical syllogisms you can pull out of your back pocket.

So that rounds out the five arguments against Atheism, and I’ve closed with what I think is the most important of the five in some ways. I hope you enjoyed. I look forward to hearing what you have to say about it. I always enjoy reading the comments and the conversations that it generates. Next week, we’ll go in a new direction. I have a couple of ideas. I don’t actually know what next week is going to be yet, but hopefully it’ll be good. Hopefully, it’ll be exciting. Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.