I recently finished The Picture of Dorian Gray by the famous 19th century provocateur Oscar Wilde. The book was itself a profound picture of a lost soul trying to come to terms with life devoid of a true north with which to make sense of it all. I read it with special fascination as a Christian whose fundamental assumption about reality is that we have no chance of figuring out the true meaning of life without divine revelation. Christianity is above all a revealed religion which asserts that without God revealing the truth of things to us, we will always be benighted. That is, we will be stuck to one degree or another in darkness and remain unenlightened.

As I’ve raised three children with much help, and balance, from my longsuffering wife, I’ve continually impressed upon them that the options of meaning in life are not Christianity and nothing, but Christianity and some other worldview, between Christianity and some other faith commitment, between one set of beliefs and another set of beliefs. The Triple A’s, as I’ve called them (atheists, agnostics, and the apathetic) are convinced (and deluded) that there are religious people out there who believe things, and have faith of some sort; then there are the Triple A’s. They think they are not religious, don’t believe things, and don’t require faith. In baseball we call that a strikeout!

Oscar Wilde may have been an atheist or agnostic, but he was most certainly not apathetic. One almost gets tired reading Dorian Gray while encountering the author’s struggles with the meaning of existence. It’s powerful, and powerfully sad at that. When you know his biography (of which I know some, and just purchased one), it’s all the more sad. As I read the book I couldn’t help thinking of the equally powerful argument of the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

As I look at the word “suppress” and ponder Wilde’s struggle reflected in his novel, I thought of a beach ball. When I was a kid I remember often being in our pool doing everything I could to keep that darned ball under the water, and the constant pressure of it coming to the surface. It takes constant effort to suppress the truth, just like Oscar Wilde’s reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Another image that comes to mind is one of funhouse mirrors, often found at carnivals. Because of the way the glass is concave and convex (i.e., curved), the images we see are distorted. This is life without Christ revealed to us in Scripture, distorted, confusing, and strangely weird. Another metaphor I often use is that life without God in Christ is puzzle pieces without the puzzle; no big picture so the little pieces make sense. This was the life of the poor, sad Oscar Wilde so amazingly portrayed in Dorian Gray.

Former atheist C.S. Lewis gave us a succinct answer to Wilde’s dilemma in a perfect metaphor about the power of Christianity to put the puzzle and the pieces together. In a talk given on, “Is Theology Poetry?” he said the following with poetic simplicity:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

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