In light of Larry’s passing, on Sunday February 24th, 2008 this is a great tribute to the depth of his work. He was a wonderful, down to earth man, whose simple faith in Jesus Christ spoke to millions. Larry, can’t wait to see you in Heaven!

Doctor: It’s stress.
Psych: It’s a chemical imbalance.
Chiro: It’s tendonitis.
ENT: It’s probably just a cold / the flu.
Mechanic: Needs an alignment.
Civil Eng: It’s a defect in the material.
Chem Eng: It’s impurities in the mixture.
Elec Eng: It’s not properly grounded / it’s a short.
Comm Eng: Too much radio interference.
Construction: It’s a problem with our supplier.
Programmer: It’s a database issue.
DBA: It’s a code issue.
Helpdesk: It’s an ID10T / PEBKAC / Microsoft issue.
Sysadmin: Cosmic Rays / Solar Flares / [insert BOFH reference here]
Project Manager: The budget’s too small.
Finance Manager: The project’s been mismanaged.

And so on…
(Pinched from thedailywtf.com )

According to the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey temperament theory, I am not primarily a ‘thinker’ but a ‘feeler’, and a lot of my writing is trying to explain in a rational fashion how I feel about things. Intellectual abstractions, words, rationalizations cannot do justice to the subjective experience of God’s power in my life. “Truth” is encountered not just by the 5 senses and rational faculties, but it is also perceived by the subconscious, the spiritual. I am not trying to ignore the problem of evil in my references to the beauty of creation etc; but to me it speaks of a greater reality than the problems of this middle Earth.

The spiritual realm is real. Many faith traditions attest to that fact. Human actions have consequences beyond the immediately visible. Call it ‘karma’ or ’sowing and reaping’. The line between good and evil passes through the heart of every person… However only Jesus Christ offers humanity the way to real freedom from the curse of sin and death.

Atheists have made a “faith” decision to not believe. I respect their choice. But I actually do believe. Even though Christianity may be a flawed enterprise and seen in “a terrible light”, God is faithful. I choose to accept the testimony of miraculous interventions throughout history, fulfilled prophecy, the blood of the martyrs, my personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, the Word, and the majestic Creation. He is Risen, He is Lord! It’s a faith that fills the soul with hope and makes me sing.

Yes, utterly despicable things happen all over the world. I appreciate the force of the argument. I live here too, you know. Rotten things have happened to me and my friends and family. I know a lot of Christians who are suffering. There are also a lot of charlatans out there acting as though you can just say a few prayers and everything will be groovy. They make the Gospel out to be some kind of escape from reality. It’s the opposite! Evil and suffering should challenge any thinking person’s conviction that God is Love. I’ll admit it’s not easy sometimes. However after years and years of doubt and darkness, God has brought me to a place of humble acceptance where I freely admit my desperate need for redemption. Jesus was the scapegoat and willingly took the blame for all the heinous things that are wrong with the world. God is engaged with the suffering of the world, but his kingdom is still being established in this time of Grace. When Jesus returns in glory, he will wipe away every tear.

Some atheists enjoy a fanciful black-and-white view of the world, where every christian is some kind of Brian Tamaki clone, and obstinately refuse admit that ID might be a valid alternative to the extreme materialist scientism preached by Dawkins, Hitchens etc. Perhaps they could tell us exactly what drove the Cambrian Explosion!?

It is unfortunate that polarised thinking leads people to feel their religion is challenged by science. Conversely, metaphysical beliefs often inform and motivate the scientific enterprise; atheists should not feel threatened by those who perceive an unseen intelligence in the wonders of nature. Creation ex nihilo is a philosophical question just as much as a scientific one. Cosmologists have some far-out theories about the early universe and deep time, but they aren’t really forming testable hypotheses. When the laws of physics break down, we look to metaphysics. Also, no historical proof is ‘incontrovertible’. But there’s more manuscript evidence for Jesus Christ than any other ancient figure. Yes he was (is) a real dude! Is intelligence, creativity, love, beauty, complexity, an inherent property of mindless physical processes? Does Something come from Nothing?

As the high priests of modernity and materialism, Western academics have a vested interest in denying the existence of the supernatural. It’s a peculiar modern conceit. Life itself was formed by an unfathomable chain of ‘coincidences’. Many unusual things occur that materialists struggle to explain away with the rational mind. In fact the evidence is ignored by a skeptical media elite and a culture whose idolatry of money and material wealth mocks authentic faith with such derisive terms as “fundy”. Perhaps C.S. Lewis was right, that “pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world”.

Suffering occurs because Earth is the domain of humanity, and God’s will is NOT done. Adam chose to follow the serpent (a choice which all people shared in BTW), God and Man had a bit of a falling out, sin and death are embedded in our DNA. Evil prospers because people have allowed it. God is constrained by His respect for our free will and giving humanity authority to “fill the earth and subdue it”.

When the modern world chews you up and spits you out, one tends to seek deeper answers than the empty secular humanist platitudes that are inserted into your cranium by the idiot box every night. I meant so say that sh!t happens to everybody. Only in this post-Christian, Moloch-worshipping society, is pain used in evidence against God. Such an attitude is unthinkable to other cultures.

Even Job (oldest book of the Bible, found before Psalms) was not so hasty to accuse the Almighty, despite all his trials. During his agony upon the Cross, Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” but he still willingly accepted death in order to redeem this lost world. God cares about this planet. The Earth is given to people to live in, and God’s intervention and presence among us is greatly constrained. We see “through a glass, darkly”.

That’s why we pray for the Kingdom to come; to help make poor old Earth a nicer place.

If you don’t want to read the next 1000 words, here is my argument in a nutshell:

Current contempt of religion is just a culturally conditioned product of a particular time & place. It will pass.

Geering’s attempt to discredit the Scripture and the Resurrection has failed. It was embraced by liberal academics, and admittedly found much popularity amongst those with an axe to grind. Unfortunately for Geering, (but happily for humanity) God still undeniably intervenes in very personal ways in people’s lives, and shatters materialist preconceptions.

Sure, it was good that Geering enabled people to be honest about their unbelief and discard the ritualistic trappings of religion. I don’t think Christianity operates too well in the confines of a hierarchy and tradition. It’s a living, vital, experiential faith. And that’s why postmodern man isn’t at church on Sunday. He still thinks of Christianity as some musty old ritual. However even at the shopping mall, the mighty fortress of materialism, you may find a “Cosmic Corner” shop, or some kind of alternate medicine practitioner, and tons of New Age literature. People haven’t abandoned God, they are bored with a tedious, academic liberal church that has lost faith in itself. But Spirit-filled churches that hold to the faith, and love the Lord, and speak the truth, are growing vigorously, even here in Helengrad.

A couple of very fair reviews can be found at “Sea of Faith” :

[In Geering's book] God is dethroned, humanity is enthroned, we live a secular, rational existence. The post-modern however is not so celebratory in the triumph of a western rationalist ethos, noting that progress and liberal values often become enthroned in the place of the now departed God — religion reappears with a secular, liberal face. Does Jesus lead so inexorably to a western liberal position? How can western liberals be so sure that they know that 2000 years of Christianity was misguided and that the truth is now abundantly [and finally] clear?I stated the problem is with the bibliography because the narrow focus of reading, the almost total disengagement with continental theory and theology, the implied dismissal of late modern/post-modern theology and thought is a great pity because as Lloyd has consistently shown, he has a rare gift to take other’s thoughts and insights and refract them in an accessible way. To a degree he has done this with this book — but in doing so he has merely written the book he should [by this logic] have written back in the 1960s [or early 1970s at a pinch]. Geering on Vattimo, Virilio, Nancy, Derrida, Baudrillard, Mark C. Taylor, Caupto, Kristeva, on Bauman, Milbank and Ward to name but a few would be interesting. For in philosophy God has come back — not the God the modernists sought to dethrone but a God on the other side of the dethroned God, a god that challenges the claims of secular modernity as yet another form of religion. The trouble secular moderns have with such claims is that they read such writers in the secular equivalent of religious literalists — and so dismiss them as ‘gobbledygook’ in much of the same way religious literalists dismiss any reading that does not fit their selected expectation.

Perhaps in the end the publishers did understand the real intention of this book. To argue for Christianity without theism is a different thing than what occurs here. For while this is an attempt to have Christianity without God — it really, at heart is a call for Christianity without Christ. As such it needs to be placed on the bookshelf somewhere between the 1960s ‘death of Godders’ and Fukuyama’s End of History.

In conclusion the irony is that while for many people Geering will be seen to have now, finally, ‘gone too far’, the reality is in fact that he has not gone ‘far enough’, being stalled in a version of 1960s triumphant modernity while the world is attempting to move on from (and in) a desecularizing postmodernism.

Many who applaud Geering’s attempts to spurn the Spirit and secularize the Church, have simply traded the unquestioned authority of Scripture for an unquestioning faith in certain scholars.

In developing his ideas Geering was heavily influenced by three major ideas. The first: according to 20th century analysis of language (which in turn is based on the ideas of Emmanuel Kant) is that we construct our own world, influenced by language and culture. The second is a progressive view of history strongly influenced by the axial theory of Karl Jaspers. The third theme is projectionism influenced by Freud and Feuerbach in which humans are assumed to project onto God our deepest longings and desires…

The belief in a supernatural god, a spirit realm and in Jesus as being both fully human and divine is, according to such thinkers untenable in the 21st century.

Yet contrary to the assertions of Geering that supernaturalist belief is declining, most people still cling to “premodern” beliefs in some kind of spiritual entity. And the Christian community is not fading away, but in many parts of the world, particularly in Africa and South America is growing strongly.

Geering, despite his undoubted intelligence, represents the last gasp of liberal theology. Christianity without God is not Christianity. By denying the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, Geering is stripping Christianity of its power, reducing it to a variant of secular humanism. Such a movement is doomed to die for it shares with humanism its fundamental weakness, namely the inability to regenerate the human heart. Nor is it particularly new. It is based on a radical nominalism, a heresy that has been in existence for centuries.

Geering, like his fellow liberal theologians is a study in the failure of the human intellect, when it divorces itself from the God who created it. All its utterances become nothing more than a clanging cymbal, full of noise signifying nothing.