Straight to the Heart

Christopher Hitchens believes in God. He didn’t when he died last Friday.

One of the sharpest, wittiest, most intelligent modern British writers, Christopher Hitchens published his best-selling book “God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything” in 2007. He spent the last four years of his life promoting his book and its message before cancer of the oesophagus forced him to cancel his preaching tour. There may be more dangerous things for a person to do with their final four years of life, but I can’t think of any and it makes me feel great grief for a man who grieved so very little for himself.

Christopher Hitchens was superbly intelligent, but he failed to turn his intelligence into wisdom. When Psalm 14 tells us that “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” it isn’t being rude to atheists. It is simply pointing out that when they rage against the idea of a divine creator they fail to notice their instinctive knowledge of who he is. Hitchens’ writing doesn’t rage against the Buddha, pagan idols or any vague sense of the divine. He is very clear about the God he doesn’t believe in. He instinctively rages against God as described in the Bible.

Christopher Hitchens was superbly inquisitive, but he failed to turn his curiosity into investigation. Although he admitted in his book that “Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence,” he failed to offer due diligence to the evidence for Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. American historian Professor William Hamblin reviewed his book and concluded that “It is quite clear that Hitchens’ understanding of biblical studies is flawed at best … Hitchens’ understanding of the Bible is at the level of a confused undergraduate.” God gave Christopher Hitchens a brain which could have delved as deep as any professor into the all of the exceptional evidence he was looking for in the life of Jesus. The great tragedy of his life is that he used God’s gift to resist the one who gave it to him.

Christopher Hitchens was articulate about what he thought of God, but very poor at listening to what God thought of him. God asks in Psalm 2, “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Messiah. ‘Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters,’ they say. But the One-Enthroned-In-Heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.” Even Christopher Hitchens, the king of the clever one-liner, had nothing in his arsenal to reply to God the Judge. It is destined for everyone to die and then face judgment. Hitchens’ book was loud and popular, but it was God who had the last word.

That’s why it gave me no pleasure whatsoever to hear that Christopher Hitchens had died as blinkered and deaf towards God as ever. It simply made me sad that he held his soul so cheaply that he gambled it away without self-analysis, detailed study or humble listening. He wrote in his book that “The Gospel story of the Garden of Gethsemane used to absorb me very much as a child, because its ‘break’ in the action and its human whimper made me wonder if some of the fantastic scenario might after all be true. Jesus asks, in effect, ‘Do I have to go through with this?’ It is an impressive and unforgetable question, and I long ago decided that I would cheerfully wager my own soul on the belief that the only right answer to it is ‘no.’”

It was a flippant wager, one which meant destruction for his soul, and one which warns us all not to let our clever rhetoric drown out the gracious voice of God. Christopher Hitchens’ died an atheist, but moments later - too late, tragically - he suddenly believed in God.