Christopher Hitchens

“Christopher Hitchens died today, he was 62.” This is what will be published in articles across the world. Many know him as a scathing writer. His books against the existence of God are well known; his speeches are all over YouTube. His calling Mother Theresa a, “Fraudulent fanatic,” is remembered well.

Cancer is what killed him. The incurable disease, the one science can’t fully fix. Irony, for the man who put his ‘faith’ in science to be killed by its failure at the end.

But to damn the man in a blog post is to affect nothing. Sure I could rant at his open disbelief in God, but I think that cowardly since he can’t offer a rebuttal.

No, I will call him a well-written man and a wonderful rhetorician. Causing all kinds of people to think and consider. Whether they were Atheist or Christian. I will pity his death; for I rather enjoyed listening to him speak.

But I will also say, there is more to life then being well written and a beautiful speaker. There is more to life than making people think. There’s more to life than all this life and death and tragedy and comedy. There’s love

Not the blind love of youth. Nor the love I have for Oreos. But the love of a Savior for his people, which causes faith in what is unseen.

‘Cause that’s all faith really is, believing what you can’t see to be. Hitchens’ had it in the power of words and our modern sciences; I have it in the power of words and the work of Jesus. While science astounds me it cannot redeem me.

But see, that’s just it; I feel the need of being redeemed from my sins. I feel the need for a Savior. Hitchens never did. It can’t be because his brain was more evolved than mine. Nor can it be that his studies revealed more to him than the studies of C.S. Lewis or Sir Isaac Newton.

Perhaps I’ve believed the lie. Perhaps he believed the lie. I won’t damn him, that’s not my place nor my job and he won’t damn me.

All I know is this; I will die for this Gospel, this Savior, this Jesus. Willingly and lovingly die. I proclaim until then His worth and Excellency and work. As Hitchens wrote so I shall write, as he spoke I shall speak. Yet the difference shall be this one thing: there is a God and He’s knowable.

So, I thank Christopher Hitchens for who he was, for his devotion to his faith and his bold proclamation of it. And I say this meaningfully, he will be missed.