What I appreciate from Christopher Hitchens (and other atheist/skeptics) is the utter impossibility of the human mind to wrap itself around God.

“The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the ‘meaning’ of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what ‘he’ demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude ‘belief’ from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.” [Slate mag]

All the more, this forces us back to the graciousness of God, that He discloses Himself. First, in the “theater” of creation and then more specifically in His Word — Jesus Christ (John 1) — and then confirms His revelation by the power of His Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:16). The answer is in Him, not my blog. As Tom Fluharty profoundly puts it, “I cannot be right and I’m never wrong because Christ is true!” Can the Church, following this revelation of God, be any less solipsistic?

1 John 5:9-10a says, “If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself …” The testimony of men will prove to be a mass of contradictions, an unstable foundation for our eternal hope. But this is all we have until and unless God speaks and seals!