Portions Of Clinton's Book Invite Spiritual Reflection

Joe Bell

I have read excerpts of former President Bill Clinton’s biography, “My Life,” as well as columns by conservatives who have criticized the book. I agree with Brent Bozell’s assessment that the book is “an opportunity to recast Clinton’s deplorable legacy in a more favorable light.”

Clinton perjured and dishonored himself as he performed semantic gyrations in order to keep his adulterous White House affair secret. His manifold personal and policy failures have been well-documented and no biography, no matter how ponderous, can disinfect the record. But there are also passages in the book that invite us to explore dilemmas of faith that all Christians likely experience on occasion.

Clinton wrote that in junior high he began learning more about himself and some of it “scared the living hell out of me.”

His uncertainties included “doubts about my religious convictions. I couldn’t understand why a God whose existence I couldn’t prove would create a world in which so many bad things happened.”

Towards the end of the book he wrote that he often referred to the Bible passage John 8:7, in which Jesus instructed those without sin to cast the first stone at an immoral woman.

Clinton wrote, “I had a lot of stones cast at me and through my own self-inflicted wounds I had been exposed to the whole world.”

He added, “And as I tried to understand why I had made my own mistakes, I also attempted to figure out why my adversaries were so willing to say and do things inconsistent with their professed moral convictions.”

Yes, the last portion of that sentence is typical Clinton. Even as he acknowledges his transgressions he cannot resist denigrating others. Yet, Clinton raises issues that all Christians must reconcile if they are to strengthen their faith: Why doesn’t God stop evil? How can a Christian deal with doubt? Why do some who profess to be Christians do un-Christian things?

Yes, evil exists, but if there is no God how could we arrive at a standard of what is good or evil? If there is no God then there is no overarching authority to judge right from wrong. In such a world, distinctions between right and wrong would be matters of individual choice. There would be no criterion by which we could declare one moral option better or worse than another.

In Lee Strobel’s, “The Case for Faith,” Peter Kreeft, philosophy professor at Boston University, was asked: Why does God allow people to get away with doing evil?

Kreeft replied, “People aren’t getting away with it. Justice delayed is not necessarily justice denied. There will come a day when God will settle accounts and people will be held responsible for the evil they’ve perpetrated and the suffering they’ve caused.”

Well, OK, but why doesn’t God at least reduce the amount of evil and suffering – why does God allow so much suffering?

“At what point does suffering disprove God’s existence?” Kreeft asked.

Are we to suggest that if 100 people are suffering today we can accept God’s existence, but if 101 suffer we have passed a threshold and must proclaim God doesn’t exist?

To propose that wickedness and misery disprove God’s existence is the result of man placing himself in God’s role and stating, “If I were God I would end evil. God, if he existed, would agree with me and end it, so there is no God.”

God never created evil. He created the possibility of evil because he gave mankind free will. Kreeft is right: The source of evil is not God’s power but mankind’s freedom.

C.S. Lewis, a professor at Oxford and Cambridge universities, made a spiritual journey that took him from atheism to Christianity. He observed, “God has made it a rule for himself that He won’t alter people’s character by force. He can and will alter them – but only if the people will let Him.”

Mankind, without free will, ceases to be mankind and freedom allows mankind to do good or evil.

How can someone be a Christian and still have doubts about God? Everywhere there is reason to doubt. Parents pray for their child to recover from an illness but the child dies. A man prays he will be hired for a new job that he desperately needs, but he is rejected. Why are prayers not answered favorably?

Faith is a decision people make, despite their doubts. We are free to have faith or not and we must choose absent the amount of information about God that would make our decision easy. After all, if we knew so much about God that we could attain an immovable and logically grounded faith we would have knowledge and there would be no need of faith. People must study the evidence for God as they find it and decide whether to have faith or not.

But faith allows questions and doubt. In Matthew 14:22, the disciples are in a boat and Jesus is praying by himself. That evening Jesus walked to the boat upon the water. Seeing him, Peter said, “Lord, if it is really you, order me to come out on the water to you.”

Jesus told Peter to walk to him. The Bible says that Peter began walking to Jesus but “when he noticed the strong wind, he was afraid and started to sink down in the water. ‘Save me, Lord,’ he cried.”

Jesus reached out to him and said, “What little faith you have. Why did you doubt?”

If it was acceptable for the disciples, who walked and spoke with Jesus, to doubt, then it is permissible for us to struggle and ask God questions.

Finally, Clinton noted that on occasion those who profess to be Christians act in ways that are not in harmony with their declared beliefs. He’s right. Simply saying you’re a Christian does not mean your actions are always in accordance with the teachings of Jesus.

In Matthew 7:21, Jesus said, “Not everyone who calls me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what my Father in heaven wants them to do. When the Judgment Day comes, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, in your name we spoke God’s message, by your name we drove out many demons and performed many miracles.’ Then I will say to them, ‘I never knew you.’”

Jesus knew self-proclaimed followers would commit terrible acts in His name and he warned those individuals would be denied heaven.

Whatever his faults, perhaps because of them, portions of Clinton’s biography remind us of the importance of reflecting on questions of spirituality, especially at times when our own flaws are “exposed to the whole world.”

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com