Jesus or NOTHING!

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Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber ...
Jesus is God (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Consider the story of Mark Baurelein, professor of English at Emory University. He describes his teenage conversion to atheism as beginning with nothing. One morning he looked out at the shrubbery in his front yard, and he saw nothing. The landscaping pointed simply to itself and not to a grand designer in the sky. The bushes didn’t host fairies or goblins. They had nothing to do with gods or holy books. They just were.

Let’s be honest, nothing can be quite therapeutic. It’s likely that nothing has soothed your fears at some point in your life. Parents calm their children with the words, “There’s nothing in the closet.” No monsters. No boogiemen. Nothing. You can go back to bed and rest in peace: Nothing can’t hurt you.

This is why the recent atheist marketing campaign caused such a stir. For many the message connected with a deep longing for ultimate freedom, “God probably doesn’t exist. Go ahead and enjoy the rest of your life.” This proposal touches a nerve in the believing community as well. Many professing Christians, for all practical purposes, live as functional atheists with little regard for God’s sovereign rule over their daily lives.

But what if nothing is only a superficially liberating force? What if deep down, it is actually a cold and careless tyrant waiting to rob our lives of meaning and purpose?

Either the universe contains its own explanations or answers to our deepest questions must be found outside of the material world. The earth either points to itself or it points beyond itself to a transcendent creator. There is either a God who is there and who is not silent, or the world must go on without any ultimate meaning or objective purpose.

In the end, it’s either Jesus or Nothing. That’s why Mark Baurelein describes his return to Christianity as less of a trajectory towards God, but as a movement away from the nihilism, the philosophy of nothing.

All of creation stands at this cosmic crossroad facing the consequential choice between Jesus or Nothing.

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