A Glass Half Full

There has been a recent confusion and dare I say uproar about certain comments made by our Holy Father about the fact that God cares about and died for all people, not just good and Holy Christians. You can find a translation of the Pope's comments here at the Vatican Radio website, and you can read an opinion about what he said from Scott Hahn here: The Sacred Page. In response to this, words have been written and opinions have been thrown around, basically asserting that either the Pope is a heretic or all people go to heaven now. The most recent article I've read about these comments came on the Huffington Post from an atheist named Staks Rosch in an article called Dear Pope, Atheists Don't Need Redemption.

Here is some of what he says:

"I'm not interested in being "redeemed" by Jesus. Contrary to the Catholic and even the broader Christian belief, I don't believe humans are evil sinners in need of redemption. I don't see the glass as half empty. The way I see it, the glass is full. Half the glass is filled with water and the other half filled with air. In other words, I don't think people are inherently evil; I think people are more nuanced than that. We do good things and we do bad things....Everything Christianity is about hinges on the belief that we are all wretched human beings and that no one is righteous, not one."

There are a lot of things that I would disagree with in his writing, but specifically this is the part he is totally wrong about: Christianity, and not Atheism, is the worldview which has the glass half full.

You see here's what he doesn't understand about Christian teaching: it is not about our wretchedness, it's about God's love. Christianity is ALL about God's love. As my dear priest-friend always told us: "It's all about love, baby."

You see Rosch operates under this worldview which says that Atheism is happy because it lets us be free and Christianity restricts us. While this is fun and good to say, the reality is that it could not be more wrong. Christianity allows us to have freedom, the sort of freedom which allows us to realize who we are in the depths of our being and to live in freedom out of that knowledge--that is to say, true freedom. You see the teaching of Christianity is that we have sinned, yes, and we have in fact fallen away from God, but our story doesn't end there; if it did, then there would be no point to it.

Thank God (because He's real and He lives and loves us and is worth thanking) that our story doesn't end in our wretchedness, but ends in God. The God who created the world in an ordered and beautiful way and created each person to be unique and in His image doesn't let us live in our wretchedness, nor does He ask us to dwell on it, nor does He even see us as wretched. And that, I think, is where this article goes wrong; it sees our sinfulness as we see it, as wretched, instead of how God sees it, as His children needing to return to Him.  When Rosch says that he is not interested in being redeemed by Jesus, he is simply pointing out what Pope Francis was saying in his comments: people want to find goodness, and no matter how far off they are, this is still a search for God's truth, even if it denies His very existence.

When the Pope stated that redemption is possible for atheists he wasn't attacking atheists, but instead pointing out this truth: we are inherently good. People are not wretched, people are not evil, but people do need redemption; we are all created in the image and likeness of a God who died to give new life to all of His children, and the Pope wants to remind us that whether we realize it or not we are seeking him.

And so while Rosch might be mistaken in his understanding of morality, he is close to the truth when he seeks the glass half-full approach to life, since this is what Christianity is about. Christianity is about seeing truth, beauty and goodness in the face of suffering; Christianity is about the fact that no matter how down you might feel on yourself, no matter how much you might struggle, no matter what mistakes you might make, there is ALWAYS redemption. There is a man named Jesus Christ, and He died for the sins of humanity, so wretchedness and sin never need to be a worry anymore.

So yeah, maybe Christians believe that we're sinners and need redemption, Rosch was right about that. What he was wrong about, though, was how that feels for the Christian. For the Christian, sin is not a downer, glass half empty kind of thing; our sin is a reminder that in Christ redemption is always near to us, and we never have a reason to lose hope.