Our finitude is palpable. We see it in the mangled bodies of victims of war and natural disaster; we smell it in the acid-sweet stench of sickness and the stuffiness of declining years. We experience it firsthand in our own foolishness and immorality and in the mistakes of the ones we love. We are born into it, and we die of it. It colors every day of our lives, the dim glass through which we view our world.

Moreover, the horrors we encounter in our finite existences seem indiscriminately distributed. The righteous suffer while the evil slip away unscathed. Wealth wrongfully acquired brings countless advantages, but virtue counts for little to the poor. Not even after years of waiting are we sure to get our just deserts. And yet God, we say, is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.

Thus Job’s lament: Why, God? Why, if you are good, do you permit such horrors? Our theme for this issue is the question — Where is God? How do we reconcile the pervasiveness of evil with the Christian conception of a powerful and benevolent Deity? How do we understand the Bible’s insistence that God has commanded the deaths of entire nations, including civilians? Can a loving God truly be behind such stories? Or do these considerations count as evidence against Christian faith?

We certainly cannot hope to settle these questions within a single issue of The Ichthus. But we are confident that in the pages that follow, we have gathered together a collection of writings that can offer both believers and non-believers an invaluable entrée into the ideas employed and positions defended by Christian thinkers in today’s academy. We are especially pleased to feature contributions by celebrated Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen and Harvard’s own Tyler VanderWeele, a biostatistician and member of the faculty of the School of Public Health. Both offer timely additions to Christian scholarship at Harvard and elsewhere.

I invite you to join us in our corporate reflection and discussion of these important and difficult issues. We sincerely hope that God will reveal to us His truth and character, so that we may see clearly for the sake of the Church and the world. But even if philosophical clarity is not forthcoming, we will still rejoice in the opportunity to proclaim God’s final answer to the evils of this world, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Many blessings now and in months to come,

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini Editor-in-Chief

My sleep last night was not its usual dreamless gray, and instead I saw an angel in vivid Technicolor, so much more saturated and heart-achy than it ever could have been in eyes-open-real-life. She was just like Updike had told me she would be: “weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.” She interrupted my dream-within-a-dream and coughed loudly until I stirred.

“***,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “You’re an angel.”

“Mhm.”

“And you’ve been sent by He who made all things?”

“Mhm.”

“Then tell me why He wakes me this night,” I said. “Am I to proclaim as prophet the fiery tongues of His word? Does the Living God bid me serve as king over all I see? Will my pen speak Christ-inspired words to his people?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Her glow seemed dimmer now. “But know this: You are called.”

“Maybe? Is there nothing definite to be done? Are all God’s children free? Is Nineveh saved? Is there no Ark for me to build? If this is to be my burning bush, then let it be!”

Suddenly her hair turned to flames and lit my bedroom. Tongues of fire kissed the books on my shelf, singeing them. The blazing angel looked bored. She reached over to my bedstand and took my glass of water, pouring it over her head and putting out the fire. “Enough of that,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“These,” she said. The angel gestured to the stacks of books on my desk: Barth, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Augustine, Luther, Edwards, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Tertullian. “Your calling. Speak to these dead men and see what kind of God-talk you can dredge up, both old and new. What you will make will fuel the rest of the human enterprise. It will make sense of yourselves in this grand, cosmic waltz. And it will send humanity forth with an awareness of its place and purpose in all history. Most importantly, you will be a steward of hope in a life that disciplines your kind into only seeing the world as it is and not re-imagining the world as it could be. Theologians — and artists and poets and inventors and musicians and dreamers of all stripes — are the greatest enemies of the status quo. They create the conditions of a new and coming world over and over again. This will be you.”

“No. Tell Him I can’t,” I pleaded. “I’m a sham. I’m a fool. I can’t write. I haven’t the mind for it.”

“God loves your mind,” she said. “Learn to use it.”

What is it Good For?

I was seven when I first saw war.  It was 1995, and NATO had recently entered Bosnia, joining a conflict marked by incredibly brazen war crimes, including ethnic cleansing and brutal mass rape.

As the conflict raged on that September, I watched from the safety of my living room in DC’s posh suburbs.  All I could see of the war — indeed, all most of America could see — was whatever news-media outlets relayed to us from the front.  So the night-vision footage that CNN talking heads analyzed over and over again didn’t really feel like war; it might as well have been a green-and-black fireworks show that was taking place “somewhere else.”

I’ll chalk it up in part to my age, but I don’t think my detachment was unique.  My distance from the violence left me unshaken by war’s gruesome realities and perversions.  The Gospel should snap us out of this placidity and demand that we recognize the way war deforms the soul, even when it is happening halfway around the world.

We look ahead, of course, to a new heaven and a new earth in which all Creation is freed of such ills.  But if we resign ourselves either to a purely apocalyptic eschatology (waiting idly for God to act because the world is so wracked by sin) or to a purely realized eschatology (not expecting God to ever act because it’s all up to us), we cheapen the Gospel.  Instead, Christians should hope constantly for God’s return to, as NT Wright says, “put things to rights,” all the while living into the Kingdom and anticipating life under the final reign of Jesus.  The Cross and the Resurrection call Christians out of passive hope into active, missional hope.

This means living in such a way as to bear witness to the world as it will be — that is, living as a people that loves peace as much as God does.  We ought to consider Isaiah 2 and take seriously what it means to hope actively for a world in which the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and tanks into tractors.  What does it mean to live faithfully to Jesus’ proclamation of a new and perpetual Jubilee in a world as yet unredeemed?

It’s not a simple question to answer, and so we tackle one particular aspect of it — war and what Christians ought to think of it — in this issue.  We’re particularly pleased to feature Professors Stanley Hauerwas and Glen Stassen in this issue.  Stassen, of Fuller Theological Seminary, applies his “Just Peacemaking” theory to terrorism to ask what Christians can actively do to seek peace (p. 8).  And Hauerwas, one of the world’s sharpest and most provocative theologians, examines the ties between American civil religion and war (p. 24).  Join us as we think critically and Christianly about war and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Not enjoyed it, not found it pleasant, not thought it nice. Loved it in the most nakedly powerful way possible with the kind of fierceness that defies explanation. When was the last time truth gave you the tingly chills you felt during your first kiss? How often do you let an idea crawl into bed and snuggle with you until you fall asleep in each other’s arms?

And has an idea ever given you a stomachache? What was the last idea that caused you real, physical, visceral pain? When did you last allow a belief to devastate you, to crawl underneath your fingernails, take hold, and pull?

More often than not, we live lives devoid of the intensity that our beliefs really demand. We engage our world with an uninspired complacency that takes extraordinary ideas with extraordinary implications and renders them commonplace. We lose sight of the fact that the powerful beliefs we choose to steer our existence aren’t just abstract assertions of some far-off truths, but charged, gritty, taxing expressions of the most fundamental forces that should drive everything we do.

Indeed, ordinary people who believe extraordinary truths – which is to say, the vast majority of the world’s 2.1 billion Christians – are called to similarly extraordinary lives. If we truly believe in the empty tomb, a moment that defies all sense of earthly order, then our lives must be radically re-shaped by the truth of the wandering God-man who swallows death whole.

This issue, we tackle Pontius Pilate’s famous question, “What is Truth?” We begin with students from Christian journals across New England defending the central truth of Christian faith.  Managing Editor Cameron Kirk- Giannini ’11 critically examines a theology about the last days that has gained ground over the past few decades among conservative American evangelicals.  Seminarian Carson Weitnauer attempts to reframe a traditional vision of “truth” as more vibrant, relational, and communal to show that propositional truth isn’t dead after all.  And Joseph Porter ’12 attempts to address one of the most challenging truths of all, examining a philosophical argument for the existence of God that deserves further consideration.

We also pay special tribute this issue to a champion of the truth, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. Ichthus founder Jordan Hylden ’06 remembers Neuhaus from his time as a First Things junior fellow.  Neuhaus was a brilliant thinker whose journal, says Ichthus Books & Arts Editor Anne Goetz, “with its energetic attention to the implications of orthodoxy and its bracing grasp of life’s irony, played a significant role in forming how I think.” Those sentiments are shared widely, within these pages and beyond.

If we are to take seriously God’s desire – indeed, His command – for us to “love truth,” then we must commit to an honest and open search for it. We hope in this issue to help you lay the groundwork for your own search.

Peace,
Samir Paul, Editor-in-Chief

I was going to write this article about the purpose of education; indeed, more broadly, about the meaning of life. As if I know the answer to such questions. It is something that has been on my mind lately—my roommate, for example, has been going through the recruiting process for the past few weeks. He just got a wonderful job, and I’m very happy for him. But it was nerve-wracking for him; I could tell. He was so nervous, he made me nervous, too. And I got to thinking about what I was going to do after I graduate—law school? Seminary? Consulting? Graduate school? The possibilities swirled around in my mind, and before long, became something of an obsession. If seminary, which seminary? Lutheran? Episcopalian? None of the above? Or if law school, which law school? Am I smart enough to get into Harvard or Yale? If not, where will I go? Where will I go afterwards? Do I really want to work 15-hour days in a big corporate firm? What, where, when, WHY? That, finally, was the question that stuck most in my mind. If I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get into the best law school or the best seminary, why am I doing it? What really do I want? Why, why, why, why, why???

Death has a way of concentrating the mind. Most college students, I imagine, don’t often think about death—I certainly don’t. Living in the Quad as I do, the shuttle takes me each day to the Yard, and drops me off right smack in front of an old cemetery—God’s Acre, I believe it is called. But I rarely look at it. Really look at it, I mean. Rows upon rows of gravestones, most of them inscribed with gruesome little winged death’s heads—I don’t really see that when I get off the shuttle bus. “Even in the midst of life, we are in death,” the old Puritan preachers used to say. That’s not really true, I think. In the midst of life, we do everything we can to forget about death. We think about the problem set due tomorrow, and the cute girl in section, and so on, and so forth. In the midst of life, we tell ourselves, we are in life, and death is something far, far away…

Until it actually hits home. Death, I think, is something so strange, so different, so other, that we can’t handle it on a day-to-day basis. But when it comes, it changes us for a bit, and makes us see things differently, if only for a little while. It’s a lot like the mini-existential crisis brought on by my roommate’s job search—it makes us ask the why questions, only more so. Why do I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, or a pastor? More than that, why do I want to be anything at all? What should I spend my life at? I won’t have it forever—someday, even if I don’t like to think about it, I too will die. And so will my parents, my family, and my friends. Does that sound morbid? I suppose it is—but unfortunately no less true. Most of us don’t ask these questions out loud; they seem silly, in a way; too personal, and too subjective. But I think, in the end, they are the only questions that matter at all. What am I to do with my life? Who am I to spend it with? It’s so fragile… like a house of cards, or a sandcastle. How will I live? Why?

G. K. Chesterton said somewhere that God gave us death so that we might appreciate life. I am not sure if that is true, but there may be something to it. Adam and Eve, so the story goes, were given everything they ever could have wanted—a blissful Eden in which to live out their days, in perfect happiness and perfect peace. But still, they were not satisfied. “Ye shall be as gods,” the serpent told them, if only they would eat from the forbidden tree. And so, they took, and they ate. And God came and found them in the garden, and told them then that they would one day die—that, somehow, there would come an end to things. Adam would not forever live with Eve, nor Eve with Adam—someday, they would die. I wonder what Adam and Eve thought of that—I wonder if they even had any idea what to think. How can someone who has not known death understand it? But even as I write, I know that this is a silly question. I do not understand death; I don’t suppose that I ever will. All I know is that there will come an end to things—that, so to speak, I will not forever dwell in the Garden. I suppose Adam and Eve grasped that somehow too, when God told them that they were going to die. And I imagine that the fruit on the trees, and the grass on the hills, and the flowers on the meadows, looked all the more beautiful because they knew that they would not always have them. Adam and Eve had it all, and still were not satisfied—maybe God really did give them death so that they could appreciate life.

Life really is a funny thing, when you think about it. It doesn’t really answer the why questions for you—you’re born one day, even though no one asked you about it; you start spitting up and crying and eating mashed peas; you go to kindergarten and try to avoid the school bully; you go to middle school, and as if that wasn’t confusing enough, you get shipped off to high school; then you go to college, and wham!—there you are, 21 years old, and not too much more sure about things than you were during your mashed-pea days. At least then, you knew for a fact that you didn’t like mashed peas. The why questions are still out there, waiting, and they don’t get a bit easier as you go along.

I don’t think I can answer the why questions for you; not in a tidy little magazine like this one, published thrice yearly and door-dropped for your convenience. I don’t think truth works like that; I don’t think you can wrap it up tight with paper and string and leave it on someone’s doorstep. But I can tell you to please, please—start asking the why questions for yourself. Sometimes I worry that we forget to ask the why questions—we’re too busy running around, making sure that we get good grades, have the right friends, get the right job, and things like that. It’s like we spend our whole lives running, and don’t stop to think about where we’re running to, or why we’re even running in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe more of us lie awake at night than I think, wondering what we’re doing down here, and asking if there’s a God up in heaven who cares about all of us. I hope so. But I just worry that lots of us forget to do that.

Anyhow, I’ll be home this weekend for the funeral. It’ll be in a little side chapel at the First Lutheran Church ; they use it mostly for funerals, I guess. I remember once when I was much younger, I was in that chapel with my grandmother, and she told me that she thought she’d like to have her funeral there someday. It sort of creeped me out—to think that, one day, I would be back in that room, attending her funeral. And now, very soon, I will be. I still don’t know what to think about it all—my grandmother was a wonderful lady, and I know that she loved my brothers and me very much. The last time I saw her, it was in the nursing home, over Christmas break. She couldn’t talk very well, but I told her that I loved her, and that I’d miss her when I was gone. She understood what I’d said, and told me the same. And then I left, and now she’s gone. Death is too big for us to understand—any of us, no matter how much we’ve seen it—which is why, I think, we have funerals in churches. Things like that are too big for us, and so we bring them to God. I’m not going to understand death any more than I do now after the funeral, but I imagine that somehow, it will help to know that even if I don’t have all of the answers, God does.

There are some things in life, I think, that really count. Like love, for instance, and God, and what we’re here for, and what we’re going to do with our lives, and who we’re going to spend them with. Death has a way of concentrating the mind—of making you realize how important things like that are, and how so many other things that we spend our lives chasing after don’t really matter all that much. I’ve never been able to buy the notion that life is meaningless—that we’re just cosmic accidents, tricked by chemicals in our brain into thinking that things like Love, Truth, and Beauty really exist. I don’t buy that—I think they do exist. I think that, in this life, there are some things that count, and that those things are what make life worth the living. I even think that some of those things are stronger than death itself. I suppose, finally, that that’s why I am a Christian. I’m not going to get into what I think about all of the why questions right now—as much as I hold what I’ve found close to my heart, and care deeply about finding answers to the questions I haven’t figured out yet, those are the sorts of answers that we all have to find for ourselves. I just hope that, wherever you’re at, you start looking for them. I, for one, am still sorting them out.

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

But although the old man upstairs may have built himself into our campus architecture, it’s often difficult to see how he matters in our everyday lives. While some students here seem to have him all figured out, for most of us the question is much more difficult. If you grew up in a devoutly Christian home, you might have gotten the impression that knowing God has something to do with not drinking, not smoking, not swearing, not having sex, and generally NOT doing a lot of things. If you grew up in a less religious home, you probably weren’t really sure what knowing God meant—if it meant anything at all, it meant taking care of poor people and living a good life, but then, since lots of atheists and agnostics did that as well, it was hard to tell what difference it made. And of course, if you grew up in a religious tradition outside of Christianity, you received a completely different set of preconceived notions about God, and have your own struggles about how best to know and serve him (or her). One of the largest problems we face is that God means different things to different people. It’s hard to know just who God is, and even harder to know how he matters to us, or why we matter to him.

The way we live doesn’t help, either. Most of us worked our tails off in high school in order to get into Harvard, and now that we’re here, we’re still working our tails off in order to get into the best law school, med school, or i-bank. No matter how we were brought up, there just isn’t a lot of time to think about God—it’s all we can do to keep up with our homework, our extracurriculars, and to try to have a little fun once in a while too. And so, given all the difficulties involved, many of us simply give up. It’s simply so much easier to stop asking these sorts of questions, and to either believe, by default, what we were brought up believing, or to conclude that there are too many problems with religion to have faith in anything, choosing instead to float along in a sort of comfortable agnosticism. After all, there’s a problem set due tomorrow, and a party tomorrow night, and why does any of this matter in the first place…?

The Harvard Ichthus exists to change that attitude. We believe that religion is something entirely serious, requiring the complete energy of one’s mind, and that the choice of and devotion to a religion is the most important choice any of us will ever make. Religion is nothing less than the framework by which we live our lives, whether we choose to follow Jesus, Adonai, Allah, someone or something else, or nothing at all. We at the Ichthus are Christians—we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that He died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday, and that He is the answer to the problems of our broken world. We believe this so strongly that we are not willing to put our faith upon a shelf or take it for granted—we want to think about it critically, and talk about it with whomever will listen. The Ichthus is a journal of Christian thought, written by people who endeavor to apply that faith to every aspect of their lives—to think Christianly about biology, psychology, mathematics, physics, history, philosophy, economics, political science, art, music, poetry, literature, film, relationships, marriage, careers, beauty, truth, and love. We are not interested in proselytizing; we are interested in discussing, and we hope that people of all faiths, and of none, will join with us in the discussion. We are interested in searching for Veritas—Truth—and in putting that Truth into practice in our everyday lives. We might be right, and we might be wrong, but we are searching for something that we can hold on to. We are a journal for searchers, and we invite you to join us in our search.