Why Stephen Fry Is Right, and I Love God.

Stephen Fry recently said some really powerful things in an interview about what he would say to God if he met him – he talks about suffering and injustice, especially for children, he refers to the East African Loa Loa eye-worm which eats children’s eyes and blinds them, and he imagines himself asking God, “How dare you?” He says, “It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.”

And I think that he’s right. I think that the reason that the video has been so widely shared and has provoked such a huge response of support and agreement is that everyone knows deep down, and feels really strongly, that it’s not right. It’s not right. Bone cancer in children is not right. It is utterly, utterly evil. So part of what I want to say is that I completely agree with that.

There’s just a couple of things I want to share about how I feel about it as a Christian; as someone who believes in Jesus and believes that he is God – the creator of the world revealing himself as a human being. Two things.

One is that it made me think of something I heard a man say recently, when he was talking about how he became a Christian. He was brought up atheist, but when he was in his twenties his father died suddenly aged 52. And he said something like this:

“It really made me look up and think about the world for the first time. And I thought, there’s really two ways the world might be – either it’s all just a product of matter plus time plus chance, you know, the sort of normal, no-God universe; or there’s a God who created it all. And I felt like the way I was feeling about my dad, the sorrow of it, didn’t seem to make sense in the no-God universe, if we were all just stuff.”

He was saying that his sense of grief about his father seemed to him like something that did not fit in a universe that was purely the product of time and chance and evolutionary process. And as I watch Stephen Fry speaking it seems to me like he’s really expressing a deep feeling that we all have – this profound sense of injustice, that the world is not as it should be – and that strangely, that feeling doesn’t quite fit in a world where there is no God. I think we are heartbroken and outraged by suffering because it is actually wrong. It is not right. We know, deep within us, that there is good and there is evil, and that the Loa Loa worm, and Auschwitz, are evil. And I just want to suggest, as gently as I can, that it seems to me, we have that feeling because good and evil are real things. There is a way that the world should be and a way it shouldn’t be, and if everything is just matter plus time plus chance, then that doesn’t really make sense. If that’s all it is, then this is just the way things are. There can be no ‘ought’. But if there is a God, and there is right and wrong, there is what ‘ought’ to be; then it makes sense that our hearts would hate pain, and wrong, and injustice, and suffering.

And the second thing I want to say is that I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry hates. If I met the God he describes, I hope I’d have the courage to say what he says too. But I think that God isn’t like that. I think God isn’t like that because he died on a cross. A guy called Pete Greig puts it much better than I could:

“The Nobel Laureate writer Elie Wiesel recollects a terrible moment in Auschwitz when he saw a child hung from the gallows. For more than half an hour the boy writhed, his body not yet heavy enough to finish the job quickly. Forced to watch this atrocity one observer cried:

‘Where is God? Where is God now?’ But another person pointed to the child’s corpse and wept: ‘There he is, hanging on the gallows’.

This is the tragedy at the heart of Christian faith: the belief that God suffered with us, like us and for us. That God is not distant, malignant or dispassionate. The cross, if it means anything at all, means that he identifies with us in our suffering, and that he is not yet fully in control. Evil things happen which God does not want or intend. When a woman is raped, this is not the will of God. When a child is sold into slavery, God is not the perpetrator but the victim.”

Stephen Fry talks about how he would prefer the Greek gods, because they admit to being human and capricious, whereas the Christian God presents himself as all-seeing and all-wise and so on. I see what he means, but I think that in the bible, and in Jesus, God presents himself not as a kind of ultimate dictator who watches approvingly over every agony, but as a God who to a very serious extent has allowed the world to be not what he wants it to be, and feels the pain of that. There are loads of reasons for him doing that, and it would make this blog way too long to go through them, but the most important thing is that in Jesus we see God himself not as the perpetrator but becoming the victim with us. And for us.

When Jesus saw his friend Mary after her brother had died, he wept. God weeps. And after I’d watched the video I started to imagine, what if Stephen Fry really did get to say that to God, to stand before Jesus and say those words? And I am sure that if he did, when he’d said his piece and he looked up, he would see tears in Jesus’ eyes. And he would see the wounds in Jesus’ hands. I think this is why for so many people who are oppressed, whose lives have been devastated by suffering, Jesus makes sense.

And I also think he makes sense to people because he isn’t just sympathetic but then powerless to help. He is the true source of hope. He came back from the dead, and he tells us that we are right that injustice and suffering and pain are wrong, that they are not the way things should be, and he says to us – Look. I was dead, but now I am alive, and it will not be this way forever. Evil will not prevail forever, cancer will not exist forever and one day death itself will die. There will be no more tears.

Walter Wink once said, ‘Against some images of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.’ So what I’m saying is, Stephen Fry is so, so right. We are right to hate evil, and injustice, and pain. But I don’t believe he’s right about what God is like. If God were like he thinks he is, I would hate him too; but I think God is revealed in Jesus, who wept, and died, and rose, and so I love him.




You can watch the original interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo#t=35