In the End, God's Still Alive

I subscribe to The Courier Internacional, which is an excellent monthly Portuguese monthly news journal. As well, as it’s own analysis, it picks up and translates interesting articles from the world’s press like Le Monde, Die Welt, La Repubblica etc for a local audience. This June edition is running a feature on .... wait for it... God, with the tile “Afinal, Deus não Morreu” (“In the end, God’s still alive”) and comments that, whereas the Twentieth century was an era of post-religious ideologies and nationalisms that declared with various degrees of intensity, the death of God, the Twenty-first could well see a resurgence of spirituality and religious faith.

The article, understandably, talks as much about the rise of Islam, and the growing New Age style spirituality of today’s generation, as it does about any growth in evangelical Christianity worldwide, but that is also part of the conversation. At any rate, it’s interesting to see that particular slogan (that God is dead) blown out of the water.

Even an article by a leading secularist and columnist in the online magazine “The European”, Alexander Gorlach, which sets out to claim that belief in the existence of God or not makes little difference in the development of the European project, acknowledges the importance of religious thought and Christian values, not only in European history, but as recently as the latter post war period of the twentieth Century.

“After the destruction of World War II” he says “ and this is the flipside of the European project – there was the need for reconciliation. In the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, some found the strength to forgive the Germans for what they had done. Forgiveness was fueled by the power and with the support of Christian faith. It is embodied in the common knowledge of the Christian tradition: Christ forgave his persecutors before he died. This ideal of forgiveness has been a role model of the postwar era.”

http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/alexander-goerlach--2/6722-european-secularism

So, we’re moving on into the Twentyfirst knowing that faith is important, that values like forgiveness and compassion are born out of an understanding of the nature of who God is, and that, in the end, God does matter, and that there’s a lot more to life than just that which exists in the physical, the financial and the political realms.