Adapted excerpt from What Is Wrong with the World?
by Timothy Keller
Questions arise in our minds and hearts every day. Some are easy to answer: “What should I wear today?” or “What should I make for dinner?” Some are weightier and harder to determine: “Should I move to a different city?” or “Should I marry this person?” But one question rises above all others, the supreme question that each of us asks ourselves time and time again: What is wrong with the world? What is wrong with the human race?
Years ago I read a book on the subject of evil in modern life and how we view it. In his introduction, the author noted that it was rare for a week to pass without him seeing news reports detailing horrific events. He noted an account of teenagers performing contract killings for just a few dollars, a story of a man shot in the head over the keys to a car, and—the week he finished the book—reports of atrocities in concentration camps where ethnic cleansing was happening.
What’s wrong with us? What could lead human beings to do things like this? The truth of the matter is that we will never be able to answer these questions unless we come to understand sin. We will never be able to resolve our personal problems, let alone the rest of the world’s problems, unless we possess a full comprehension of sin. I’ll give you two reasons. The first reason is that the biblical teaching about sin is one of the strongest arguments for the truth of Christianity. The second is that it equips you to best handle life as it is.
To take the first reason, I can show you person after who abandoned Christianity but were pushed back to embrace it because nothing other than the idea of sin could account for the darkest depths of human behavior. These individuals saw human evil up close. The Bible was the only way they could find to explain what they saw.
In The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and a self-described secular liberal, argues that if you get rid of the ideas of religion along with the moral, spiritual idea of sin, you are forced to conclude that the reason we do the terrible things to each other as described earlier is due to either biology, psychology, or sociology. That creates all sorts of problems. As Delbanco writes, “A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.”
If the terrible acts humans commit are a result of biology, they’re part of our evolutionary makeup, where aggression is bound up with the idea of the survival of the fittest. Or the reasons are found in psychology: We do these terrible things because of repressed emotions. Or in sociology, we do them because of economic deprivation. But when you get a close-up view of the horrors of evil, all those theories fall apart. If those theories are true, then we really can’t help doing what we do and therefore we’re not really evil. But anyone who witnesses a parent killing their child knows that makes no sense. These acts can’t be so easily explained away, no matter how hard we try.
As the serial killer Hannibal Lecter says to the FBI agent trying to analyze him in The Silence of the Lambs, “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism . . . You’ve got everybody in moral-dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?”
In his book The Brothers Karamazov, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky addresses the idea of seeing biology as the culprit: “People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.”
As Dostoevsky knew, something else is going on here, something beyond biology or sociology or psychology. That something is sin.
The second reason it’s all-important to understand sin is that if you don’t take up the old-fashioned, traditional understanding of it, you will be led into countless personal and social miscalculations. You will not be able to deal with life as it is. Not only that, but you won’t be able to understand the glory of God’s love and grace. You’ll never be stunned or amazed by it.
Here is what I mean. If someone came up to you and said, “I was at your house the other day and you weren’t there. Then a man came with a bill for you, and I paid it,” how would you react? Well, it depends on the size of the bill, doesn’t it?
What if it was postage due for seventy-five cents? That’s one thing. What if it was the landlord demanding rent? That’s another thing. What if it was an auditor from the IRS saying, “You owe ten years of back taxes, and we’re repossessing your property unless you pay up”? That’s something else entirely.
How does this relate to the idea of sin? Here’s how. If there is a lack of joy in your life today, if the thought of Jesus dying for you does not transfix and transform you, if you’re not able to draw power out of the thought of what he has done for you on the cross, then you don’t understand the enormity and power of your sin.
Put another way, if you don’t understand sin, you are neither pessimistic enough nor optimistic enough to deal with life. If you believe the reason people do the terrible things they do is because of poor social conditioning or evolution or repressed psychology, you’ll never be able to deal with life as it is. You’ll be like Agent Starling, speechless before Hannibal Lecter.
In her book Creed or Chaos?, English author Dorothy L. Sayers observes that Christianity, far from its caricature as an escape from reality, is a supremely clear-eyed way of viewing the world. She writes, “It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy. On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.”
In other words, one of the things that precludes an “unreal, idealistic” view of life is Christianity’s clear-eyed view of sin.
If we stand any chance of answering the question of what is wrong with the world—much less of being saved from the answer to that question—we must begin with understanding the complexity and multifaceted nature of sin and end with understanding the unfailing love of a God who chooses to save us from it.
Taken from “What Is Wrong with the World?” by Timothy Keller. Copyright © October 2021 by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.
