Scriptures selfattesting authority question doctrine truthfulness Scriptures

282 Conclusion
An Understandable Obstacle
For some of you, this claim presents an enormous obstacle. You may
belong to another religion with its own sacred scriptures. You may have
no religion. Or you may have your hands in many spiritual pots, attempting
to find the most inspiring and helpful parts from all of them.
In all these cases, the totality of the claim that the Christian Scriptures
lay on you may feel out of the question.
You may feel that the only things such a total claim can breed are
intolerance, and then hate, and then violence. You may point to religiously
motivated terror in our day or to historical violence in the name
of Christianity. An answer to that concern is worthy of an entire book.
But short of that, I would briefly ask you to consider another angle.
Does reason and history show that totalitarian abuses of ethnic and
religious minorities are avoided by the avoidance of religious absolutes?
The great horrors of the twentieth century were not perpetrated by
lovers of God—six million Jews murdered in Germany, and sixty million
people killed or starved under the Soviet regime, and forty million
destroyed under the Chinese Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong, and
over a million purged in the Communist Killing Fields of Cambodia.
These atrocities were pursued by those who considered biblical religion
(and all other religions that give allegiance to God over the state) to be a
threat. In other words, the solution to the historic problem of religious
violence is not irreligion. We have tasted the horrors of those who exalt
themselves above the absolutes of religion.
Is it not obvious (or at least, very likely) that where God is rejected
as an authority over us, we tend to put ourselves in that authority?
And if we are our own supreme authority, there is no way for us to be
checked in what we justify. This is what happened with Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, and Pol Pot. There was no one above them—no God and therefore
no law—that they would be accountable to.
Which leads to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that we need a
worldview that contains truth that has higher authority than ourselves
and that prohibits the coercion of others who do not share that worldview.
Let me say the paradox again: violence against ethnic and religious
minorities is best prevented by holding to a faith in the absolute claims
of the biblical God, because his truth not only limits our self-exaltation