TAUG: Freedom, Fall 2017

TAUG To An Unknown God: A Journal of Christian Thought at Berkeley

Freedom Volume 10 | Issue 2 | Fall 2017

To An Unknown God is a journal of Christian thought

at UC Berkeley. We exist for the purpose of encouraging Christians and people of other faiths to engage in dialogue about how the Christian faith may influence thinking about important cultural, philosophical, political, and academic issues. We seek to foster a deeper understanding of the faith by providing a forum for discussing these issues.

Every semester, To An Unknown God relies heavily on private donations to fund its printing costs. Please prayerfully consider donating to make our next issue possible!

Checks should be made out to ASUC/To An Unknown God and mailed to ASUC/To An Unknown God University of California 112 Hearst Gym, MC 4520 Berkeley, CA 94720-4520 Any amount is highly appreciated. Thank you for your generosity!

letter from the Editor 04 Masthead 05 artwork credits 35

Themed Articles Chain Breaker

Filling the Void

Empathy And the Hope of

HAnnah Lin 08

S.A. Eruit 22

Nuance

Standing United

Is God an Unjust God

Victoria Lai 15

Fraylin Gramajo 26

Josh Ko 28

Novel Truth Melodie Deisher 30

The Joy in Destruction Simon Kuang 18

Unthemed Articles Dialogue in the Modern Age Anashe BArton 12

Poetry The Chalice of Peace

Masks

What Waits in Ahead

Jacquelyn Vasantachat 06

Aaron Barnabas 21

Cindy Lo 32

Photo&Illustration Pouring out Love: “Wake Up!” Joel Rojas 14

Acts 17 Harmonie Lau 34

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader,

W

e are so excited that you picked up this journal and decided to flip through it. This semester, the TAUG editorial team had initially invited submissions for an “Unthemed” edition. However, as we read through pieces and examined the artwork and photography, we found a common thread between many of these submissions. Thus, it is with great honor and anticipation that I introduce the theme of our newest issue: Freedom.

Here you will find topics such as freedom of speech, free will, sexuality, and what it means to be free from condemnation. There are many more topics addressed, each with its own importance—each highly relevant in some way to our world today and to our campus.

We are fortunate to attend UC Berkeley, which has experienced many things this year in 2017. We’ve seen protests that have turned destructive, and we’ve grappled with questions of what freedom means: in speech, in conduct, and in where we call Home. We live in a country that protects the freedoms of its citizens through documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Yet as we’ve seen on campus this year, concepts of freedom and what it means to be “free” are still elusive.

In John 8:32 (English Standard Version), Jesus says, “and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But what does it mean to be free? Reader, we invite you to consider this question with us. As Christians, we believe that freedom is inherently based on truth. And both freedom and truth are found in the cross of Jesus, who was condemned to die for crimes he never committed. After all, someone had to pay for freedom, so that others could be free.

Perhaps you will not agree with everything in here. That is okay. You have the freedom not to. But dear Reader, the one thing we ask is that you consider. Because with consideration, may come truth—and the truth, indeed, will lead to freedom.

In Christ,

Aurora Ling

4 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

“Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you.”

—Acts 17:23 *Not photographed: Amy Fann, Anna Park, Deborah Kyong, Harmonie Lau

Editor in Chief

Business Manager

Associate Editors

Aurora Ling

Anna Park

Amy Fann, Deborah Kyong, Crystal

Executive Editor

Poetry Editor

Simon Kuang

Calvin Han

Chang, Harmonie Lau Editors Emeriti Chris Han, Sarah Cho, Stephanie Executive Design Editor

Website Manager

Chiao, Laura Ferris, John

Ami Yuen

Kerri A. Chen

Montague, Whitney Moret,

Publisher

Social Chair

Joanne Chen

Jacquelyn Vasantachat

Wesleigh Anderson, Natalie Cha, Micaela Walker, Laura Clark

To An Unknown God is not affiliated with any church or any religious group. Opinions expressed in articles do not necessarily represent those of the editors. We are completely student-run and funded partly by the student body as an ASUC-sponsered student publication. Funding is also provided through individual donations. Distribution is free while supplies last. To contact us, please email us at unknowneditors@gmail.com.

Visit us at unknowngodjournal.com.

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The Chalice Jacquelyn Vasantachat, STAFF WRITER

Wait a moment.

Just one moment

Until I feel the golden heat of light’s glory glow,

Until I see heavenly heights pour forth manna more,

Until I smell velvet milk promises stream below,

Until I taste honey sweet sap of flower’s seeped core,

Until I hear wispy wind whispers swirling in low.

Surely this is when my heart and soul shall freely soar!

And yet, in a moment, This one moment,

I think of people from times long ago.

The men and women, whose minds like mine, sought

Shadow glimpses and echo murmurs low,

Of beauty and goodness ‘mongst earthly rot;

Where anguish, despair, and visceral woe

Ravage to consume––any and all of noble lot.

But I must pause for a moment­­— For in this moment,

Unease jabs at me to know what I know:

That they turned from God with hearts, mighty hard,

Despite wonders, signs, and works—these things grow

Not the faith of the soul. What I regard

As answers might not cause wonder to flow,

But might leave me as I am, wholly marred.

Then, I wonder,

What exactly is it I’m waiting for?

Could it be a sign?

A momentary miracle?

Yes––but what am I to do?

How am I to live?

Should I keep waiting and waiting for a sign,

A sign that might not do anything; might give

No rise in my faith while weeds twist and twine­­—

6 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

of Peace

Life’s weeds, that is­—round and round, Smothering and choking it without a sound?

Perhaps what I am searching for

Is wrong.

Perhaps, I am longing and seeking

Not a sign, But a someone—

Is it a savior?

A creator?

God among men?

Perfection sublime?

Hmm­—But what do I really know of him?

How can I clearly see God himself,

If all this time I have been peering brim

Deep, thirsting for a sip, a scent of holy hymn?

Wait a moment!

Just one moment.

Perhaps God is the one waiting for me, To lift stale eyes above a stagnant reflection, To cast my gaze on a person, not a performance Of ripples, of magic, or of mystery, But on he who will direct my steps rightly Towards greater knowledge of his identity.

Now, wait no longer, Not for one more moment,

And drink.

Feast from the chalice Of unparalleled peace, For out from poverty were Perilous pieces brought and made whole.

Jacquelyn is a junior double majoring in English and Political Science at UC Berkeley. She enjoys exchanging various kinds of stories with friends and strangers.

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Chain Breaker Hannah Lin, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

“For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person— though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

(Romans 5:6–8, ESV)

I

will never forget the day I met Oliver.1 I am sitting in an interview room in San Francisco’s County Jail #4, waiting for the sheriffs to bring Oliver to me. The cells in this particular jail are located on the 7th floor of the Hall of Justice, which is the courthouse located just across the street from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office.

From the outside, it is hard to tell that at least a hundred men are pacing in their cells just several floors above judges, lawyers, and news reporters conducting their day-to-day business. Many of the decisions made on the bottom four floors of 850 Bryant determine the fate of the men held in the higher floors of the same building.

As a Bail Unit Intern for the San Francisco Public Defender, part of my job description consists of regular visits to the county jails. County Jail #4 (we refer to it as CJ4) houses many of our male clients. County Jail #2 (CJ2), a slightly newer facility, is right next door to CJ4 and houses most of our female clients, as well as a number of inmates who require special medical attention.

On this particular day, I sit anxiously waiting for Oliver

1

Name changed for privacy.

8 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

to arrive. Although this is my third or fourth time visiting CJ4, the experience never fails to make my heart beat just a little bit faster.

In order to reach the designated interview rooms on the 7th floor, there are a number of security measures I have to pass through. First, there are the standard metal detectors on the ground floor that everyone who enters the courthouse must go through. A few steps past the metal detectors, there’s a small elevator hidden by the snack shop in the corner that takes me up to the 7th floor, where our clients are held. Stepping off the elevator, I am met with a wall of metal bars reaching to the ceiling. The bars are painted white, perhaps to make them seem less menacing to outsiders. There is a door etched into the metal bars which can only be opened by a sheriff with a specific key—the first sign that freedom is limited to those who reside on this floor. (I remember my first time going to the jails. I was accompanied by a more experienced intern who chuckled when I tried to push open the door only to realize that it was locked. “Remember,” she laughed. “These doors don’t open for just anyone.”) After signaling to the sheriff standing guard, I hear a loud buzzer which indicates that the door is unlocked and

I am permitted to enter.

I walk up to the sheriff—he’s completely clad in black and carrying the standard equipment that all sheriffs carry. He has thick, black military boots and a sturdy-looking belt from which hangs walkie-talkies, handcuffs, a large ring of keys, and a gun. The keys and handcuffs jingle loudly when he walks, so it’s always easy to tell when a sheriff is passing by.

“Good morning,” I smile nervously to the sheriff. “I’m with the Public Defender’s office, I’m here to see a client.”

The sheriff looks up and nods. “Alright. Who you here to see?” “Oliver Johnson.”

“Johnson…Johnson…” The sheriff flips through the stapled packet of papers on which are written the name, location, race, and date-of-birth of every inmate housed at CJ4. The sheriff ’s eyes land on a particular name, which tells me that he’s found what he’s looking for.

He pushes the button on his walkie-talkie and speaks clearly into it. “I got a legal interview here for Oliver Johnson. You got any interview rooms available? Yeah? Okay, great. Ma’am you can go in now.”

I thank the officer and walk to a second door, once again waiting for the loud buzzer before I open the door and step inside. I greet the officer standing just inside the door who signals for me to walk down the hallway on the right (which is just beyond another wall of bars) and wait for Oliver in one of the six interview rooms. Today, the interview rooms are mostly empty, so I choose the first one, walk inside, and sit down.

The room is mostly bare, save for a small table and two chairs situated on either side of the table. The white paint on the walls is peeling off and there’s writing from past occupants etched on the walls. There’s a strong scent of Lysol and bleach, which is surprising considering the nature of my environment.

Before long, I hear the sound of footsteps and I look up to see a tall, African-American man standing in the doorway of the interview room. He’s dressed from the neck down in bright orange. His orange sweatshirt has “XL” written right underneath the collar in permanent marker, and his large orange sweatpants just barely cover the tops of his orange, rubber shoes.

“Oliver Johnson?” I ask. He nods and extends his hand to me. His handshake is firm and confident but as he sits down for his interview, I can see the slightest indications of insecurity.

“Hi Oliver,” I begin. “My name is Hannah and I’ve been asked by your lawyer to draft a motion for your release.”

As I continue to explain what to expect during his interview, Oliver holds my gaze with deep intent. His large, dark eyes

stare at mine, only blinking on occasion. Unlike most of the previous clients I have interviewed, Oliver is relatively young (around the same age as me, in fact), with no prior record. He’s well-mannered, eloquent, and handsome by most standards— not the typical type one might expect to find in a county jail awaiting trial.

I begin by asking Oliver the standard background questions: where were you born, who raised you, what’s your employment history? He carefully and thoughtfully answers each of my questions. Occasionally, I stop and ask a clarifying question, to which he either answers with “yes, ma’am” or “no, ma’am.” Though I appreciate his good manners, I can’t help but find it odd that he feels the need to address me with such respect, especially since I’m dressed in jeans and a faded sweatshirt.

The interview goes smoothly and my thoughts wander off for a moment (probably because it’s late in the afternoon and I have not had my daily cup of coffee yet). But as I begin to discuss Oliver’s motives for the incident in question, he starts to shift in his seat and wring his hands in a frustrated manner. I mention that he has no prior record and comment that it doesn’t make sense to me that someone in his relatively privileged situation would knowingly and foolishly commit a crime. He wasn’t in need of any money, and he was not under the influence of any substances, so why did he do it?

“I don’t know, man,” he wipes his hand across his brow and sighs. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he continues.

“It was a stupid mistake. This is my first time in here, and I know I’m not made for jail.”

His eyes begin to water and he lowers his head, looking at the ground. “My daughter was just born a few days ago. I’ve been taking her to all of her appointments and everything. It really crushes me that I won’t be able to spend her first 4th of July with her.”

Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, it is clear to me that, if he could, Oliver would give anything to go back in time and take back what he did. Even if he is not convicted of his crime, he will still have lost this precious time with his daughter, and he will always remember the experience of being arrested, stripped of his freedom, and placed in a jail cell. The deed has been done, and the consequences of his actions will follow him for the rest of his life.

As I am overwhelmed with sympathy for Oliver, I am suddenly reminded of a verse I have heard many times in the past: Romans 6:23—“for the wages of sin is death” (English Standard Version). This is a verse that I memorized at a very 9

young age, having grown up in the church. But, sitting across from this orange-clad gentleman, this verse takes on a new life.

Romans 3:23 says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” I believe this to be true—at least, I am fully aware that I have sinned in every possible way. I can’t remember the first time I told a lie, or looked down on others, or disobeyed my authorities. As with most people, it’s impossible to count the number of times that I have done wrong against others and against God. And, just like Romans 6:23 says, the wages of my sin is death. I deserve to die for what I have done.

I suddenly see myself in Oliver’s place—dressed in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, my freedom taken away. Unlike Oliver, I have already been convicted of my crime(s)—charged with infinite counts of Sin. I have broken God’s law countless times, and I have been given the death sentence. I will spend the rest of my life behind bars—unable to experience the world and all its beauty, unable to interact with the people that I love, and destined to die alone and forgotten. There is nothing I can do to change my fate.

This picture may seem overdramatic, but it is the reality of what it means to sin. For anyone understands what it means to spend the rest of your life in jail, it is an unbelievably horrifying and inhumane state of existence. In 1994, Erik Menendez was convicted of killing his two parents with the help of his older brother, Lyle Menendez. He was sentenced to life without parole at the age of 24. When asked in an interview how he copes with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, he stated “I can’t think about the sentence. When I do, I do it with a great sadness and a primal fear. I break into a cold sweat.

It’s so frightening I just haven’t come to terms with it.”2 Sitting here, looking at Oliver and listening to the remorse in his voice, I am able to understand the gravity of my sin to a greater degree than I have ever understood before. The image of myself, dressed in orange and wearing handcuffs, continues to resurface in my mind and I feel the Holy Spirit prompting me to dwell on that image. For a brief moment, I allow myself to embrace what it might feel like to be in that situation. Feelings of hopelessness, despair, terror, and guilt wash over me.

Then the Holy Spirit brings a new picture to my mind.

I imagine myself sitting in a jail cell on death row, alone with my thoughts of remorse and regret when I hear the sheriff rap on my door. “Lin,” he yells gruffly. “There’s someone here to 2

Hewitt, Bill. Life & Love Behind Bars People Magazine, Novem-

ber 7, 2005.

10 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

see you.” I am handcuffed and led to an interview room, hardly caring who might be waiting to speak with me. When I enter the room, I am greeted with the person I would least expect to be there—the judge in my trial. Just days ago, the judge sat up on his bench, banged his gavel, and sentenced me to death. But now he’s here, visiting me in prison.

He invites me to sit down and smiles warmly at me. He asks me how I am doing and I reply that I am not doing well. There is no longer any purpose to my life and I am simply waiting around for the day they call me to my execution. Finally, the judge addresses the reason for his visit.

“Hannah,” he tells me. “I am here to tell you that you are free to go.” I am shocked and speechless. “What? What do you mean?”

“I negotiated something with the court and you will not need to spend another day in prison. You will be able to walk out, a free woman. You will have a clean record and no one will ever know that you were once sentenced to death.”

“How is this possible?” I ask. “I pled guilty to all my charges.”

“Because,” the judge looks in my eyes. “I am going to take your place. I will serve your sentence, and I will die in your place so that you can be free.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Why?” I ask in disbelief.

“Why would you ever do that?”

“Because I love you,” he says. “And though you can’t change what you did, I can change your future. I choose to die so that you can live.”

With that, the judge stands up, puts on an orange jumpsuit and extends his hands to the sheriff. The sheriff handcuffs him and leads him away like a criminal. He is placed in my old prison cell, along with all the other death row convicts. Meanwhile, I am un-cuffed and led outside, free to live my life with the knowledge that the judge will be executed within the next few days for the crimes I committed.

I will never fully understand what Jesus did for me on the cross, but my interactions with Oliver and the forty-or-so other clients I met during the seven weeks I interned with the public defender have shown me just a glimpse of what it meant for Jesus to pay the price for my sins. Witnessing the pain and regret on their faces, and seeing the desolate state in which they now live because of a choice that they made gave me a deep appreciation for what it truly means to have my sins forgiven and my “death sentence” pardoned.

Romans 5:6–8 says: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely

die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The image of a judge dying in the place of a convict is categorically impossible in our world. There are judges who would not even lower the bail of a “good” person who has no prior record and committed a relatively minor crime. But God, who is the great and just Judge, became lower than criminal for me and died the most shameful of deaths so that I would be free from sin.

Furthermore, God was the victim in all of my crimes—every sin I have ever committed personally hurt and offended God. But God forgave me and even adopted me as his own daughter. How is such forgiveness, grace and love even possible?

I continue asking Oliver questions and writing his answers on my notepad. As Oliver tells me about his daughter, I hear the distinct sound of heavy boots walking past me, keys and handcuffs jangling loudly with every step. I look to the right to see an officer leading an inmate down the hallway. There is a clear distinction between the officer and Oliver, and it is obvious to any observer that one holds power over the other.

The officer himself is clearly aware of this, as he walks with long, proud strides and barely glances at the inmate, who has his back hunched and walks with his head down. In the eyes of our society, they could not be more different.

But as I watch these two seemingly divergent figures, another thought enters my mind—despite how different they may seem, in God’s eyes, they are the same. They are equally loved, they are equally valued, and they are equally broken. The officer may be free to come and go as he pleases, but, just like the inmates over which he holds authority, he is still enslaved by sin. His sins may not have landed him in a jail cell, but I’m sure that he has done things that he regrets, things that have hurt himself and others. I’m sure there are moments when he feels trapped, unable to free himself from addictions and habits that he wishes he could be rid of. I’m sure that he needs Jesus as much as the man walking next to him.

That day, I leave CJ4 with a heart burdened for Oliver, for the rest of the inmates, and for the sheriffs that oversee them.

And when I return to my office at 555 7th Street, I am further burdened for the lawyers that walk the halls. For the first time, I am overwhelmed with the realization that everyone around me— whether they are an inmate, a lawyer, a sheriff, or just a random stranger passing me on the streets—are lost people in need of salvation. “We all like sheep have gone astray: we have turned—every one—to our own way” (Isaiah 53:6).

But there is hope.

Because of his great love for us, Jesus “was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not…he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:3–5). The Just Judge took on the identity of a criminal and died in our place so that we could be free. It is unheard of, unfathomable—but it is the truth.

For me, the seven weeks I spent as a Bail Unit Intern for the San Francisco Public Defender were much more than just an internship. Yes, I was able to learn valuable skills that will surely assist me in pursuing a future career in law and I can now use this internship to boost my resume. But the most important thing I gained from this experience was something I did not expect—I saw the Cross as I have never seen it before. Even in the darkness and brokenness of the San Francisco County Jail, I was able to feel the love of God and to know that his loving heart grieves for every single man or woman held in those jail cells.

I don’t know what happened to Oliver—I don’t know if his bail motion was granted, and I don’t know if he will be convicted. In fact, I don’t really know what happened to most of the clients I interviewed over the past several weeks. I will most likely not see any of them again in my life. And while I hope that they will be freed from jail someday, I pray even more so that they will find freedom from their sins by experiencing and accepting the love of Christ. God has the power to break earthly chains, but more importantly, he has the power to break us from the chains of sin and death so that we can experience true freedom in him.

“If you’ve got pain, he’s a pain taker If you feel lost, he’s a way maker If you need freedom or saving, he’s a prison-shaking Savior If you’ve got chains, he’s a chain breaker” —“Chain Breaker” by Zach Williams

Hannah is originally from Seattle, Washington but is currently in her fourth year at UC Berkeley majoring in Political Science and Legal Studies. When she is not painstakingly writing critical papers about John Rawls and Michael Walzer, or pretending to study for LSATs, she is joyfully serving as a student leader at her campus fellowship, Gracepoint Klesis.

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Dialogue in the Modern Age Anashe Barton, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

I

n one of my classes, we discuss global history in the 20th Century. We talk about how the modern age has created so many new methods for production, politics, and power. We see skyscrapers in Shanghai, renewable energy systems developing in California’s central valley, comprehensive healthcare systems in Sweden, etc. The world is changing— for the better or worse is up to interpretation. But, to be sure modernity is a conglomeration of destruction and development, of progress and decline, of human connectedness and disparity.

One of the developments in our modern world has been communication. We have become global citizens in a sense that travel is more accessible to greater amounts of people. The Internet is readily available to the masses to communicate with people halfway across the world at the click of a finger. Through its hundreds of different variants, social media is a way for people to share their lives with the global community. While this intense globalization of communication would seem to connect more people together, it actually has numbed human interconnectedness to a click or a like. Now more than ever before, we see people attached to their screens in places that could be arenas of discourse: public transportation, coffee shops, lunch lines, those moments before class starts…

While modernity surely has its benefits for humanity, we cannot ignore the ramifications it has fostered within us humans.

What happens in a world where people do not communicate?

They become desensitized, uninspired, disconnected from human feeling and individual thought. A lesson we can learn from the 20th Century’s modernist writers is the danger of desensitization. Writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Joyce highlight the existential struggles that come from the division between people.

Dialogue fosters groundbreaking ideas, some of which are responsible for the way we live our modern lives now. It also furthers individual thought as humans learn from others and use that knowledge to come to their own conclusions about important issues. We can also see how the lack of discussion between peoples also reinforces class structures and the large gaps between the rich and poor. By not breaching the differences between

12 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

“modernity is a conglomeration of destruction & development.”

people, we allow those rifts to self-perpetuate and ultimately create the class differences that are apparent now. Aside from economic rifts between the super rich and the incredibly poor, we also see walls built between people of different identities and backgrounds. People of different religions, color, schools of thought—they remain distant until we can viably breach these walls.

As a writer, conversations with people of all backgrounds are what inspires my work. The people I meet, the stories I hear, the names I learn all become a part of me. In a way, I find it my responsibility to give credit to the vast amount of wealth each person instills in me—an intellectual wealth of knowledge, that is. The true active commitment to listen and to engage is what drives a world of interconnectedness.

In the Christian way of life, people rely on one another for fellowship, pastoring, and educating. Dialogue is one thing that becomes so key to the Church. Jesus talks about the need for unity among the Church. If someone hurts you, you must try to reconcile with them, and if that is not possible, you need to have others with you to keep each other accountable. This is a warning against division among people. In Matthew 18:20, Jesus says that when two or more people gather in his name, God is with them. This is the basis for church. The very notion of it relies on people to interact together. Jesus could have very well said that the Church is when one person opens his or her Bible—but he didn’t. There is something about the idea of community that Christianity depends upon. The dependency of people on one another creates a community where dialogue can be thoroughly had. Such dialogue allows individuals to share

and connect with others; ultimately, the model Christian society would be one of connectedness, empathy, and diversity.

Christians follow a God who calls for this unity between people. He calls us to be brothers and sisters for each other, taking the other’s burden on our own shoulders and helping out in difficult times. Jesus demonstrates a love for the “other” that was incredibly liberal for the first century. He called people to love their enemies, showing them forgiveness and grace instead of hatred and revenge. Jesus’ radically loving actions in the first century highlight the importance of communication and breaching differences between people. In one of his most notable instances of healing, he encounters a woman caught in adultery. The Pharisees—the highest religious authorities in Jewish society—ask him what should be done with the woman; traditional law would have the woman stoned for such a crime.

However, Jesus pauses, writes something unknown into the dirt, and turns to the crowd saying, “Whoever is free of sin can throw the first stone.” Slowly, one by one the crowd disappears and Jesus’ defense of a person on the outskirts of society, no less a woman, highlights the essence of Christian principles. These principles are none other than to love one another as yourself and to love your enemy. How radical! Perhaps my ideas of countering classes are not so modern at all. So, as we approach the issue of communication in the 21st Century, we can look to this idea of dialogue and discourse to connect people from all backgrounds in a way to further independent thought, progress, and individualism in our world.

Anashe is a third year student at UC Berkeley studying pre-law. She loves looking for ways to connect people across the globe together through photography, writing, and poetry. Her passions are foreign policy, the Scottish Isles, and learning new languages.

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Joel Rojas

Contributing Photographer

Pouring out Love: “Wake up!”

T

his past summer, I was blessed with the opportunity to travel to Athens, Greece for a two-week mission trip.

Through different conversations there, I discovered that the economic, political, and social climate of Greece leaves people with very little hope for a brighter future. Our mission team believed that we were called to serve in Athens, so we partnered with a local church and with Alliance Relief, where we helped with the physical reconstruction of the church and outreached to local businesses and neighborhoods. We also had the chance to visit the refugee camp in Elliniko, where hundreds of refugees stayed in makeshift shelters inside the abandoned buildings of Athens’s former Olympic airport.

This picture was taken near the entrance of the camp. I found this graffiti-filled wall striking because of how many people in the world are unaware of the reality of the refugee crisis and the situation in Greece. There is a great need for humanitarian

14 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

service, and a greater need for love to be poured out to families in which parents and children are being separated and placed in refugee camps throughout Europe. On this mission trip, we hoped to pour out the same love and care that we had received from Jesus Christ to other people. We realized that the only way to fully “wake up” to the reality around us was to serve the Lord in any way we could—whether this was playing soccer with the kids, cleaning and repainting walls, or simply just being a listening ear for people who had experienced so much.

Joel Rojas is a 4th year studying Public Health at UC Berkeley. He is involved in the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), public health advocacy and research, and Christian fellowships including Gracepoint and Living Water. In his free time, he loves to meet new people, take pictures, play sports, and explore new hobbies!

Victoria Lai, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A

ugust 9, 2014, a young man was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri. The young man was an unarmed black teenager. The man with the gun was a white police officer. Thus, the start of the Black Lives Matter Movement.1 December 20, 2014, 2 NYPD Officers were killed in Brooklyn, New York. The 2 officers were sitting in their patrol car. The man with the same gun later committed suicide. Thus, the response of Blue Lives Matter.2 January 12, 2015, an affiliated professor from UC Berkeley was interviewed about the slogan “All Lives Matter.” In the interview, she says this: “When some people rejoin with ‘All Lives Matter’ they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter, which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve…I mean only to say that we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ That said, it is true that all lives matter…But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, ‘all lives matter,’ is a struggle, and that is part of what we are seeing on the streets.” 3 April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton announces her presidential campaign. The slogan that she settled on: Stronger Together.

June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announces his presidential campaign. His slogan would be: Make American Great Again.

Images like the following flooded the political space on campus and pleaded with a divided campus and nation to be otherwise. Despite all the hate and violence that materialized on our campus, there was a deep desire and hope for something better. A rather relieving word but nonetheless a difficult one, is “united.”

Truly, it seems that the rhetoric on campus is pointing

to a great need. The leftmost picture challenges her audience to think what is meant by “we the people .” Who counts as part of this “we”? Who is taken for granted to belong, and consequently, who doesn’t get to share in that privilege, if we can call it that. The rightmost image is posted all over local businesses here in Berkeley and it makes a clearer message that everyone is welcome here. The statement is made clear that even the ones whom society and media have tried to marginalize and discriminate against are part of a greater whole; they are part of everyone. Both the side pictures point to a need for some sense of unity that is not yet the reality of our social political space.

Both pictures point to a need to re-evaluate who belongs and who doesn’t; to challenge the rhetoric that separates the one and the other; to challenge that separation itself. The possibility of a “we” and an “everyone” is the first bit of hope in what seems to be a polarized and politically irreconcilable present. A call for unity seems appropriate, but the question is how to do so without furthering the chasmal divide.

This brings me to the center poster that has been proliferating on campus and in the city of Berkeley. It is obvious in its highlights that “united” is the word to take away from the poster. It is a call for Berkeley to stand united, to stand together. This is a genuinely important stance to have during such times of animosity and violence. However, I want to propose although the message of standing together is a pertinent one, the call to stand united against is potentially a little problematic. Although nothing is necessarily wrong with standing against something that is wrong, the implications of the word “against” reiterates the divided and polarizing environment we are looking to transcend. To be clear, this is not to say that it is wrong to stand against hate or against anything that is wrong. In fact, standing up for what is right and so also against what is wrong is a good thing, but perhaps, not one that will move political and social discourse to addressing the greater need.

If the need is to be united and to see the potentiality of a “we” and an “everyone” that is inclusive of all people, then the language of “against” might not be the most appropriate. What I want to suggest is a change in proposition. It is true that the

“the best way to stand against hate is to stand united in love”

16 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

hatred and violence that propagate is also something that we need to address. To both those, the intuitive and unintuitive response is to love. The greater need not only for this campus but also the greater political and social space is a need to love.

The call to love is equally as important as, if not more important than, just a call against hate. It is a call to change. It may be easier to say and point out what is wrong with the world that we live in, but it is a more difficult thing to be the change that we want to see. A call to love is different than a call against hate in that one points out a wrong while the other does right. Both are important, but one is perhaps more productive to the change that we are striving for.

The suggestion here is this: Berkeley stands united in love.

At the end of the day, pointing out everything wrong in the world is not going to solve the problem. Granted, it is a much needed first step to expose the wrong for what it is and why it is hurtful to society, but that cannot be the end of the discussion.

We are a community that already pointed to and argued for all the wrong that has been done. The next step is to respond, and to respond in a way that will continue the discourse and bring about change. If we can move past the rhetoric of differences, then maybe we can begin talking about what it means to be united and what it means to love.

As a Christian, the Bible offers an interesting account of the relationship between unity and love. Often times, Christians refer to each other as brothers and sisters, and more so, they refer

to themselves as a body, or the Church. This body of people is interesting because they are united by love. Agape is what Christians say love is, and it is often understood as a selfless love, a love that is in essence benevolent and charitable. It is a love that opens up the possibility for seeing “the other”—no matter what race, ethnicity, age, or any other category or label we have for one another—as part of a larger body that all have a responsibility towards—almost as family. Granted, in so far as this world is imperfect, and human beings are imperfect, it is a shared struggle even for Christians to love selflessly and charitably. Thus, the greatest struggle is learning and relearning what it means to love for the best way to stand up against hate is to stand united in love.

1

https://www.thenation.com/article/origins-of-a-movement/ https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/two-police-officers-shot-in-theirpatrol-car-in-brooklyn.html?mcubz=3 3 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-livesmatter/ 4 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*EdU-jF4Vk8o5cGSLrvVhfQ.jpeg 5 https://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/poster.jpg 6 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52f93b58e4b03018f9550664/t/5830aba746c 3c4d861790967/1479585619867/everyone-welcome-bazant-sml-color.jpg 2

Victoria Lai is a graduating senior double majoring in Philosophy and Rhetoric. She is a self proclaimed foodie and loves all things philosophical. Her preferred method of payment is milk tea.

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Simon Kuang, STAFF WRITER

The Joy in Destruction

18  To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

M

ost will agree, by some level of indirection, that the aim of life is to be happy. To many, happiness is found in productivity and industry and creativity. We boast in our ability to generate new sights and sounds and tastes and sentences, and to make them interesting and useful and pleasurable to our fellow human beings; indeed, countless heroes— scientists, politicians—of past and present are canonized for achievement in this way.

Tear the veils of decorum and altruism, however, and you might discover that our joy in production is matched, if not exceeded, by our joy in destruction. Perhaps my claim sounds strange, so I will show come concrete realizations of this pursuit. In Russia, one may come across rage rooms, which are sturdy containers furnished with the vulnerable amenities of halcyon domesticity: a decades-old computer tower and its accompanying CRT monitor, particle board shelves, spindly wooden sofas and tables and chairs with soiled upholstery and gradually disintegrated varnish. Those burdened by surpluses of money and frustration are invited to relieve them both by a protective plastic suit, a sledgehammer, and enough time to lay waste to the entire room’s contents.

It sounds strange to secure this exotic delight at one’s own hands, and indeed there are other avenues by which it may be attained. The closest thing to exacting destruction is to witness it, and the entire genre of tragedy is directed to satisfy this. One hardly needs speculate why an honors class studying Sophocles’s Antigone doesn’t reach full excitation until the final act. What can compare to imagining the lone antagonist reduced to absurdity by a parade of his victims’ suicides?

But the key here is as I have said “imagine.”

Indeed, the satisfaction of reading Creon’s tragic end is not like that of witnessing human suffering, e.g. in natural disaster. It is of course more decorous, but it is also much stronger. The satisfaction of fictional tragedy is not the fiction’s immediacy and reality; it is not that we enter the narrative to see clearly for ourselves. Rather, the scene laid at arm’s length is our own creation, and according to our thirst for exacting destruction, we are at liberty to amplify even fictional disaster to our uttermost satisfaction. The rage room is peaceably transplanted into the theater of the mind.

What is to account for all this? I claim that the joy in destruction is founded in these: joy in destruction asserts power and sufficiency in the self and distracts from one’s true suffering.

To destroy a thing is to exercise supreme power over it. For the sake of contrast, suppose I am in dire need of another’s possession, and I find that it is within my ready access. It is reasonable to say that I have at the moment a positive right to violate the possession’s ownership and claim the item, if for a limited time for my use. This right may be seen as a commitment to “efficiency”: the object that serves its owner no better purpose might as well serve mine. Likewise, my need to “borrow” must be measured in how much my use preserves the object’s value to its owner. But to destroy it brazenly violates both commitments! My need to destroy is neither severe nor acute: it is at best a philosophical oddity, a metaphysical placebo exploiting the very readiness of my access, so self-evidently foolish it is hardly a need at all. And I have not conserved its utility; rather I have by definition realized its uselessness.

Every possession’s final cause is to be enjoyed by its possessor, and others after. When I declare (e.g. by action) the right to destroy, I declare my total ownership by fulling claiming the final cause for myself. As such, I must bend my activity to none other than my own sheer pleasure. I do not follow rules; I make them. I do not pursue a purpose; I am the purpose. I freely pretend mercy to admire my mercy; I freely pretend vengeance to admire my vengeance. This the human spirit loves.

Moreover, to destroy a thing is to prove that you are able to live without it. People have a lot of possessions, and we are fond of believing that by our abundance of possessions we have 19

made ourselves no less valuable than in their their absence. If productivity is the end and measure of human living, then we have succeeded, for by our tools we are able to do more work in our time; by our money we are able to make more time of our lives. Even so, we are confronted with this accusation: have I really done better by my profusion of possessions—have I truly made my possessions the means to my end rather than the end itself—can I be the same independent of my possessions? (For it is a capital grief to be measured by one’s possessions.)

Challenged in this way, I will prove my independence of my every possession by destroying it before our very eyes, and observe that my smashing, burning, and swallowing forfeited no dignity that was mine. Insofar as their existence was unnecessary, their violent passing into nonexistence is eminently satisfying, for it has but purified my joy complete in myself. Shall this display of selfsufficiency be called foolish? Yet that is of no consequence, for a sufficient self is measured by no exterior judge.

Last, the joy of destruction lies in its ability to remove us from the desperate suffering of real existence. The existential anguish of the man who is suffering is so: first, that suffering is painful; second, that it is my fault. But I will return to the villain of Sophocles’s tragedy. To soothe my fault, I may consider my own guilt, and the more monstrously vile will I imagine Creon. I consider my own pain, and the more excruciating will I realize pain upon the imagined character.

Here the German agglutinate Schadenfreude is an argument unto itself: by his harm I am joyed; by his wounds I am healed.

The Christian tradition brings to bear two theses that illuminate all this confusion I have fabricated. The first is that in destroying another I destroy myself. The second is that our mortal desires reflect our eternal needs.

In the Apocalypse, two witnesses appear to prophesy God’s will. They are destroyed by the bloodthirsty inhabitants of Earth, and their deaths are a source of great rejoicing, albeit short-lived, for soon after they are raised from the grave—voiding their three-and-a-half days’ destruction— and inaugurate divine judgement consisting of an earthquake leading to 7,000 deaths. That they are martyrs strengthened by their deaths is an understatement, for their deaths are matched by unprecedented ruin on Earth.

It is in our nature to destroy, and by destroying to destroy ourselves: “The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows … their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken” (Psalm 37:14–15, English Standard Version). To destroy and to be destroyed are simultaneous quests that we are doomed to undertake until, drunk with sick passion, we find there is nothing left to destroy, either in the world or in ourselves.

Corresponding to the mortal desire to kill and destroy is the eternal need for atonement. We are born knowing our greatest joys lie in our grossest acts of destruction. Corresponding to the mortal desire to be destroyed is the eternal need for regeneration: as we are born, we cannot stand even ourselves, for we are deeply knowledgeable of the happy ideal to which we were formed and from which we are so far fallen.

But I have found a perfect solution: I have found a bottomless sink that will bear all of the guilt that is my work, and all of the pain that is my pay. He is at once God, powerful and sufficient, and man, weak and needy. I have joined the crowd ascending Mount Calvary around him, and I am guilty of horror (this guilt he took too). I have destroyed him seeking power, but my power is taken away; seeking sufficiency, but am left helpless.

Destroying him I have destroyed myself; once dead, he is risen; at last destroyed, anew I am created. I have not changed him, but he has changed me.

20 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

Simon

is

a

second-year

EECS student who occupies his free time with math and philosophy he doesn’t understand.

In the closet of my mind I have a hundred masks To wear appropriately as the case demands.

Carefully I let each person I know See the mask upon my features That fits what they would like to see me be.

So I have one mask for my parents, Another for my teachers, Still another for my friends, I have masks to impress those of whom I am jealous

Masks

And those of whom I am afraid.

I let those who dislike me see something different From what I share With those who find me likable.

And do you know

Aaron Daniel Barnabas

What should be a slick trick

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

To interchange my masks at will Has brought me only confusion and additional worries?

Suppose I wore the wrong mask At the wrong time with the wrong person?

Suppose I forgot where I was And startled who ever I was with by showing them A stranger They had never met before?

What then?

Sometimes when I am alone with God, I try on many masks to fool Him, But I always fail.

I feel so naked and exposed Without protection in His sight.

He knows me as I am and as I can become.

When I accept this, then I can relax with Him. Help me, Lord, to put away my many masks in the closet of my mind to gather dust.

Let me be myself as You see me Before all people.

I’m really tired of playing games.

Aaron is a student at University of California Berkeley currently studying biology. Having been raised in a predominantly Catholic setting, Aaron took the TAUG DeCal to gain a better understanding of the secular view point of God.

S.A. Eruit, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Filling the Void Reconciling sexual brokenness and finding joy again

This story is based on true events. However, all persons portrayed are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

I

n middle school, I noticed that I felt attracted to boys the same way I felt towards girls. In high school, I labeled myself as bisexual—someone different from most people— but I didn’t feel wrong for being this way. After all, what was wrong with love, no matter whom it was I loved? That being said, I had never been in a relationship, despite always wanting to be in one. I was also scared that my parents would somehow want to be involved with this area of my life, so I always kept it a secret if I liked anyone. However, once I graduated from high school, I was ready to explore in college.

My dream coming into Berkeley was to find a man who would love me the way I wanted him to. But I got something quite different. The sensuality that I had imagined my college life to be filled with remained a fantasy I would continue to buy into on my laptop. Aside from that, my first friends were people from a church. I was baffled with myself. What was I doing, hanging out with Christians? These people were the ones I hated in high school, the people who told me that if I didn’t believe in Jesus, I’d be going to Hell. These are the people who say that homosexuality is wrong. If that is true, then why is it that I am the way that I am? Why was I born into having the sexuality that I have? I told myself Christianity would never offer a satisfactory answer.

Even though I resolved to remain firm in my beliefs, I kept

spending time with the people from church, joining their Bible studies and even attending their services sometimes. Arguments would arise, but I found myself opening up to these people.

I gave them a hard time, being rough and hurtful with my words—yet, they still wanted to be close friends with me. One of these Christians was Sam. From the first time I met him, I had already thought, “I could see myself falling for this one.”

Ironic that he became a spiritual leader of sorts in my life. That was the start of one of the most tumultuous storms in my life.

How did I reconcile this? I didn’t. I told myself that I would put off the homosexuality arguments and try to see what Christianity was really all about, partially because I wanted to know why God would say it’s wrong, and partially because I really liked the people here at church. Besides, if God were right… I didn’t want to disagree with God at the end of the day.

For the time being, that reasoning would suffice.

As the year continued, my craving for physical intimacy and entertainment continued in my addictions. Not only that, but I started to neglect a lot of areas of my life: my relationships with my family, academic life, and overall cleanliness. My mind would not allow anyone to be free from my lustful gaze, and that began to bother me. A fear sank in that, the issue of bisexuality aside, I wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I thought that it was normal to lust after people, but I began to seriously doubt that. The messages at church rang true: messages of how empty life is if it’s just about pleasure and if people are nothing more than bodies, and of how we were meant for more than just physical sensations. Yet the fact that I

still lived in a manner that agreed with those sentiments showed me that I really was broken, far from God’s design for me. That idea amazed me, that God has a design for me. There’s actually a way that I am meant to be. God wants me to thrive in his plans—it’s just that I didn’t want to. I chose not to align with him. I knew that I couldn’t fix this, so I decided that I would trust in God, trust in Jesus to deliver me from this brokenness, and live in line with the one who made me. But how wrong I was to think that that would be the end of it.

A few months passed and not much changed. I still liked guys as much as before. If anything, my feelings towards Sam grew through the time he spent with me. As I grew closer to Sam and confessed to him my problems with my addictions, he was resolved to be with me in fighting them. I found myself so attached and reliant on Sam’s presence in my life to get me through difficulties. When he helped me, I was overjoyed, but when he wasn’t there, I felt lost. I knew that this was trouble, but I didn’t know what to do. What was I doing? I had feelings for my spiritual leader, who was of the same sex, who was an older brother to me. What was wrong with me?

At the end of my second year of college, I had a dream where a man was being physical with me. Waking up from it, I knew a large part of me desired this kind of interaction still. My chest felt clenched, and my world felt grey. I just wanted out of this all. Finding a pair of scissors, I drew a small line up my arm near my shoulder. It hurt, but the cut didn’t compare to the visceral agony I was feeling. The pain seemed to alleviate the aching in my heart as I had something else to focus on. Part of me wanted to show Sam, to draw him closer to me. That chance came when Sam noticed that there was something wrong with me the next time I talked to him.

What was I going to say? I explained to Sam the dream and that I had cut myself. His face became stern, and I felt locked in place, unable to move. He asked me to show him my cut, and I did. He rebuked me, saying that I’ve been like Judas, taking punishment and atonement into my own hands so I would feel justified, rather than Peter, who grieved over the state of his heart and got to restore his relationship with God. I missed the point in all of this. God had no longer been in the picture. Despite this being a sign that I needed to rekindle my relationship with God, I pressed on to the following year, reminding myself that my feelings were unwanted and wrong, and so I came to ignore them.

The next year came, and so did more emotional stress. I tried to push out my feelings for Sam, but it was impossible. As

a result, I turned even more towards my addictions, and I was unsure whether or not I could remain one of Sam’s students that year. My decision became clearer when Sam asked me to meet with him. He had big news. He was engaged. I knew I was supposed to be happy for Sam. I tried really hard to be—or at least to appear happy. Part of me was excited for him, but part of me felt pushed away. I immaturely held onto anger towards Sam’s fiancée, until I met her in person. After that, I couldn’t be mad at her—she was so nice, and what was I? I was an angry, jealous, envious, bisexual mess. The next Bible study, instead of joining everyone to hang out afterwards, I rushed back to my apartment alone. I barely made it past my front door when I crumpled to the floor, tears streaming down my face. As I made it to my bed in the midst of my sobbing, I knew that I couldn’t do this anymore. The next day, I asked Sam’s leader to place me with someone else. I never brought up Sam and all that transpired within me to my new leader. I thought about the result of what my feelings could have had. What effect would it have on the church? On people who knew Sam? I didn’t want anything to happen, so I resolved to hold in these feelings for as long as necessary.

Before I knew it, it was summer. My church experienced a structure change, and I had another new leader, Jake. I saw this as an opportunity to try to reconnect with God, so I decided to open up to Jake. After sharing all that happened, Jake asked me, “Are you okay with homosexuality being wrong?” I said, “Yeah, God designed from the very beginning for intimacy to be between a man and a woman. Homosexuality rejects this design, communicating to God that I know better than his design for my relationships.” Jake rephrased his question, “How have you emotionally reconciled to yourself that homosexuality is wrong?

I’m just getting an intellectual answer.” I didn’t know how to respond. That was what I had been missing. I refused to stop and think about my attractions to the same sex, telling myself that I was okay with an intellectual answer. I never came to terms with the fact that a great deal of my attractions were not how I should be.

First, what was this intellectual answer that I came to?

After I became Christian, it was during my sophomore year when I sought out stories and books to help explain to me why homosexuality is a sin against God. One impactful story I came across was that of Christopher Yuan, a son of Chinese immigrants who noticed he was attracted to other boys. His story is described by him and his mother, Angela, in their book, Out of a Far Country, which narrates how the two of 23

them became Christian. For Christopher, he had decided to leave his family after coming out to them as being gay and for a large deal of the book, he remains offended and angry over the Christian opinion on homosexuality. Getting involved with the party scene, Christopher gets caught up in drug dealing and his involvement escalates at a surprising rate until he finds himself behind bars. It is then that Christopher gives Christianity a chance. He stumbles across a Bible and a suggestion scribbled on the bunkbed of his cell to read Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future’” (New International Version). This intrigued him, leading him to read more and more of the Bible, and the more Christopher read, the closer he came to trusting in the message of redemption and salvation that Jesus brought. However, there was still the one issue that he wasn’t sure how to address: his sexuality. Going to a chaplain after recently deciding to follow Christ, Christopher received a book as well as a surprising message from the chaplain: that the Bible actually doesn’t condemn homosexuality. What struck me was that after visiting the chaplain, Christopher read the book and read the Bible passages that it referred to, yet concluded that God unmistakably condemns homosexual sex.

One passage where Christopher saw the truth of how God sees homosexuality is Leviticus 18:2: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” (New American Standard Bible). Here, we see that God did not call lesbians and gay men abominations, but rather, the act of homosexual sex an abomination. Even though God is against homosexual acts, God is not against the homosexual. What did God want from me, then? In Leviticus 11:45, God says to Israel through Moses, “you shall be holy, for I am holy.” God was not telling me to be heterosexual. Sure, that may be within his design, but what does God really want? He wants me to be holy, God wants me to be like Him, and that means He has the ultimate say, even in regards to my sexuality. So what does a “holy sexuality” look like? Christopher says, “Holy sexuality is not focused on orientation change—that is, becoming straight— but on obedience. And I realized that obedience means, no matter what my situation, no matter what my feelings—gay or straight—I must obey and be faithful to God.” There’s definitely a way to conduct heterosexual relationships in a way that’s displeasing to God, such as premarital sex, adultery, and rape.

God’s not asking for me to be straight, God’s asking me to have God-honoring relationships, to be obedient to my Heavenly Father, my Creator. Is this not the claim God has over me? Is 24 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

He not correct? When I try to have relationships the way I want them to be, does that not offend God? And based off of the way things have been, is it not right that God’s intent for how relationships should be is a lot better than my own? It made a lot of sense to me, when Christopher said, “Everyone is created to desire intimate, God-honoring, nonsexual relationships with the same gender. But because of the effects of original sin, this normal feeling has been distorted. I believe homosexuality (and any other sin, such as jealousy, pride, and gluttony) stems from a legitimate need fulfilled in an illegitimate way.”

“What do I think I can’t live without?” This is the question that Christopher had been asking throughout his struggle. With the way his life played out, he realized that his addictions, sexual attractions, and sexuality were things he didn’t need to identify himself with. At the end of his search for answers, Christopher came to know that there was one person he couldn’t live without—and that was Jesus, because the fact remains that Jesus still came down to die for Christopher’s sins on the cross and that he redeemed more than just his sexuality. Jesus redeemed the lust, the envy, the pride, and all the multitude of sins and wickedness that Christopher could not hope to change or cover up. Not only that, but Jesus also gave his own righteousness for Christopher to present before God, so that just as God and Jesus are holy, Christopher could be holy, too.

I knew that I needed to be obedient, that I should trust God with my sexuality… but it was so hard. How can I trust that God has better plans for me when daily I felt desires He disapproved of ? Jake told me that he wanted to help me bring God into this area properly. I was scared. What if what happened with Sam happens again? Jake affirmed my fear that the same thing could happen again, but he brought up that expecting not to feel close and intimate to someone who’s going to spend a lot of time with you would be naïve. Of course I would grow in my affection as I open up to someone—but that didn’t mean that I shouldn’t have a meaningful relationship. We agreed that if it got to that point, then we would just need to respond accordingly again. The next thing Jake said changed how I saw the situation with Sam. “Even though you experienced so much anguish, why did you bother fighting against your feelings? Were you not trying to honor your relationship with God? God sees that, and I think God is really pleased that you held to the idea that, ‘I am not going to jeopardize my relationship with God.’ God is pleased with you.” In the midst of all that, God was pleased with me?

Jake was quick, though, to remind me: “Don’t forget, you still

haven’t allowed yourself to accept the gospel in this area of your life, but God has forgiven you for rejecting him.” Sam was never meant to fulfill all that was missing in me—that was a role only God could play. Chasing after Sam to fill that void inside was never going work because he wasn’t designed to fill it. I’d been trying to find eternal and complete security, comfort, and fulfillment—things that only God could give—in temporal and flawed people.

This is not a story to persuade someone that homosexuality is wrong, or that God delivered me from my sexuality. This is a story of a faithful and loving man who chased after and bled for an unfaithful and broken boy, a boy who would keep breaking that man’s heart even after he accepted his love to be most important thing in his life. This is a story to show that God loves His children, no matter who they are and what they’ve been through, and He will keep pursuing them so that they will know they are loved.

I don’t know why it was this way, but I know that this is another chance to grow my trust in God. He is good, and He is the one who is worthy of all affection, time, and effort. He has done more than enough to prove that, and He loves me more than any man or any woman can and will. God doesn’t love me because I’m trying to “fix” my sexuality, God loves me because I am still His, despite how my cravings for intimacy turned out.

He uses it as a way to show His power, and He promises that it will be restored, it will be redeemed, and I will be remade in the glory of God. As I reread Christopher’s story while writing this, I caught these words that I didn’t read closely the first time around: “So the question is, if I continue to have these feelings I neither asked for nor chose, will I still be willing to follow Christ no matter what? …God’s faithfulness is proved not by the absence of struggles but by his carrying us through them. Change is not the absence of struggles; change is the freedom to choose holiness in the midst of our struggles.” The issue was not that I

needed to be cleansed of my sexuality, but that I needed to yearn after God, to be at a point where it’s not a man’s love that I can’t live without, but rather, it’s Jesus’ love that I can’t live without.

I want to say God is sufficient for me, that He is all I need, and that I would never forget that. This struggle may last a lifetime, but it will be the way in which I can choose holiness, choose God, in the midst of my anxieties.

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul speaks of a “thorn in his flesh” that was given to him. This thorn is uncomfortable, enough that Paul states in verse 8, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me” (ESV). However, Paul realizes that God was using this to show Paul something he needed to remember.

This comes up in verse 9, when Paul continues, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” Paul looks at this thorn now as the avenue through which God will make perfect His power in Paul. It is an opportunity in which Paul will truly find God’s grace being sufficient for him, which is why in verse 10, Paul says, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

This sexuality is my thorn in the flesh. It is painful, and I have pleaded with the Lord about it, that it should leave me.

However, God says to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I have no reason to doubt God, and I have every reason to trust Him, who gave His life for me, who has loved me and has given me purpose, life, and hope in ways no one else can.

If you have felt the gnawing pain of confusion and selfloathing inside or if you have cried tears of frustration over yourself, my friend, I plead with you to seek Jesus. There is someone who loves you and knows you deeper than anyone ever can. To be fully known and fully loved is what that constant ache inside our heart is yearning for: something to fill our void.

S.A. Eruit chose their name because S.A. are part of their initials, and “Eruit” is “redeemed” in Latin.

Fraylin Gramajo

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Is God an Unjust God: A Solution to the Paradox of Free Will and an Omniscient God

T

he concept of free will attracts the attention of many people, including Christians and nonChristans. This concept, I believe, is crucial to the related concepts of punishment and justice.

The problem lies in the following: If my actions are completely out of my control, then how is punishment justified? In the Christian bible, it is known that God is all knowing, i.e., he knows the past, present, and the future. This attribute of God seems to present a worry for many. Augustine delves into this issue and provides what I believe to be a compelling response.

In Augustine’s, On Free Choice of the Will, he defends the claim that humans will voluntarily. In Section II and III, a man, Evodius, challenges Augustine’s conviction about the relation between the human will and God’s foreknowledge. Augustine portrays God as an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being. In effort to show that God is just to punish man, he utilizes Sections II and III to provide arguments to show that man’s will is blameworthy because man is free to will. Evodius, like many, seem to be troubled by an apparent paradox: If God foreknows all future events, how can we say we choose freely? Does it not mean that we act in accordance to God’s foreknowledge? I will use Augustine’s examples to argue that God’s foreknowledge does not compromise free will.

To preface the debate, I will begin by addressing Evodius’s worry. Evodius begins by asking a basic question: How can it be that God has foreknowledge of all future events, and yet that we (humans) do not sin by necessity? The claim “by necessity” should be perceived as occurring because it is in accordance with God’s foreknowledge. In other words, it is already known that one will sin, therefore,

it is inescapable that one will sin. Evodius is concerned with sin because if he can prove that since God foreknows all things, he must have known that man would sin. Therefore, when man sins, he does by necessity and should not be punished.

As we can see, this is a serious problem. As a Christian, this can be worrisome, and by the same token, as a nonChristian, we can perceive God as an unjust God. I will provide Augustine’s response to Evodius’s worry. Augustine attempts to show that there is compatibility with God’s foreknowledge and free will. He does this by bringing up the example of happiness.

I will divide the happiness argument in two parts. The first part shows that it is absurd to claim one can be happy against their will, which is why Augustine uses the reductio ad absurdum to display his point. Secondly, he aims to show that the will is our power, therefore, God’s foreknowledge does not affect our power to will voluntarily.

Augustine begins the first part of the happiness argument by asking Evodius, “Suppose that you are going to be happy a year from now, does that mean that a year from now God is going to make you happy?” Evodius replies “Yes.” Then, Evodius claims that “God’s will is my necessity.” Thus, if God knows that he will make Evodius happy a year from now, it must happen by necessity. Augustine then proclaims that Evodius is saying he will be happy against his will. This seems absurd. Let me explain. How is it possible that one can be happy when one does not will to be happy? If Evodius had the power to be happy, he would surely be currently happy. This means that Evodius will be happy only when he wills to be happy. Thus, Augustine concludes that when one becomes happy, it occurs in accordance with our will, not against our will. Augustine creates an obstacle for Evodius because essentially, he is claiming that nothing is in our power but our will. This takes us to the second part of the happiness argument.

Augustine makes the powerful claim “nothing is completely in our power as the will itself ” (9).1 He makes a quick distinction about events happening by necessity, e.g., growing old and death and events happening by will, e.g., willing to be happy and willing to be good. He emphasizes that only a madman would say that we do not will with the will. Even though God foreknows that we shall will in the future, we are happy because we will to be happy. Augustine believes that we cannot deny that we have the power of the will because if we had the power, we shall will to be happy and that alone will grant us happiness. We cannot be happy without willing it. Consequently, our will is not a will unless it is our power, and since it is in our power, it

is free in us.

The happiness argument is supposed to show that God’s foreknowledge of all things does not abolish our power to freely will. Even if God knows what we will do, the will is still present in us. Let us look at it through a different example. Assume God knows John shall will to eat chocolate ice cream tomorrow.

This means that God only has the knowledge of John’s will, not that he has set John’s will to want chocolate ice cream. Come tomorrow, John wills to buy ice cream, hence he goes to an ice cream shop. As he evaluates his options, John ultimately wills to get the chocolate ice-cream. He still possessed the ability to freely choose the type of ice-cream to purchase. God as omniscient, knew that he would will that specific type of ice cream. In essence, having knowledge of the future does not take away your free will. Thus, the happiness example and the ice cream example show that it is consistent to claim God has foreknowledge of all things and that we have free will.

If we turn to Augustine’s main purpose, which is to prove God is just, we can see that by convincing Evodius that God’s foreknowledge does not diminish our free will, Augustine sets up the claim that God is just. Justice, then, is present in God because although God knew that man would sin, man still possesses the freedom to decide whether he should sin or not sin because the will is man’s power and it only is present in us if it is free.

The aspect of free will is crucial to our social coherence. It constitutes punishment, responsibility, blame, and shame. If we did not have free will, then I would reluctantly have to admit that punishment is unwarranted because of the undeniable fact that our will is out of control, hence our actions may out of our control. Whether one believes in God or not, free will is certainly something important. If someone does not believe in free will, how does one successfully justify blame, responsibility, and punishment?

1 Augustine, and Thomas Williams. On Free Choice of the Will. Hackett., 1993.

Fraylin Gramajo is a senior majoring in philosophy. Due to his Christian background, he became primarily interested in Ethics (Moral Philosophy), namely, topics like free will, justice, punishment, and morality. When he is not reading or writing philosophy, he enjoys playing basketball, playing guitar, and hanging out with this friends.

27

Empathy and the Hope of Nuance Josh Ko, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

E

mpathy is a difficult beast. I used to hear stories about David and Goliath, and Moses crossing the Red Sea, and I would assume that with God on my side, I was David and Moses. I was a hero on the good side. I would not have said that I could empathize with Lot’s daughters. You remember them, the ones from the book of Genesis who were rescued by God from the evil people of Sodom and Gomorrah after nearly being turned over by their father to be gang raped? Not for the faint of heart, but after escaping to a cave, they decided to get their father drunk and rape him to continue their family line. Is this a jaw-droppingly evil act? Yes. It’s easy to chalk this up to pure evil, and it very well is, but it also says something about who we are: in the face of the unknown, sometimes I try to take control of my life and take matters into my own hands because I not only just worry, I don’t trust that the God who rescued me has a plan for me. Suddenly, these two daughters become not just “bad people,” but devastatingly human.

Tom Gilovich and Shai Davidai are two psychologists who recently wrote a paper on what they call “headwinds and tailwinds,” which examined two main biases we have: an availability bias where we tend to overweigh our own

28 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

experiences to everything else, and a confirmation bias where we interpret new evidence as confirmation of what we currently think or believe. This leaves us resentful and unhappy. It leaves us vulnerable to fake news, to think that everyone is against us, even when they’re not, and to put us into this victim mentality where we think we’re always in the right, while not giving that same grace to other people as we do to ourselves.

There seems to be something new coming into the outrage cycle every day. One of the most legendary ones was a white woman headed to Africa for a business trip, who tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Twitter was not having it, and she was fired and shamed by the Internet before her plane even touched down. While I agree that what she said was racist, we have this tendency now to destroy any mistake that we make in regards to talking about any number of controversial topics, and that’s not a conducive environment to make each other better or learn from our mistakes. It instead leads to that confirmation bias where everyone turns against us, and we lean into that headwind/ tailwind example and see ourselves as victims and ultimately “good people” being oppressed. It’s a lot easier to play the victim

in the narratives we create for ourselves.

If we’re to move forward and get out of this polarized, divided state, we need to stop ignoring the nuances and specific contexts of specific situations. While there are times where we need to speak up, I don’t get why we feel like we immediately need to jump to a conclusion and have that define the experience for us for all time, like when we see a movie trailer and immediately make a judgment about the film before actually watching it. By focusing on ourselves and what we want, we fail to empathize with others and see the forest for the trees.

Instead, we come up with these preconceived notions of what we want to believe or what we want to be true, and that takes away a lot of the potential nuances that really make situations special and different. Instead we try to recreate things to “how they used to be,” or try to put God in a box and make decisions that we think are best for us, instead of what God necessarily has in store for us, and think that that will make the world more comprehensible. From Lot’s daughters to reading news that align with your political viewpoint to creating enemies you can hate, whether “Commie leftists” or “right-wing nutjobs” to the people of color who supposedly took one’s jobs, these so-called simple solutions leave us gasping for answers when we take God out of the equation. It’s in these instances where perhaps we need to put our identity in who we are, not what we are not.

Gilivich and Davidai have a surprising solution for these biases that focus on ourselves: turning to a place of gratitude.

Focusing on gratitude does not mean ignoring the very real oppression that you or someone you know might be facing, for the Bible takes great lengths to remind us to take care of the least of these. Solomon describes the scene still true today as it was then in Ecclesiastes 4:1: “I saw the tears of the oppressed - and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors - and they have no comforter.” Rather, it’s starting from a place of thanksgiving where we are overcome with the fact that we don’t even deserve any of the blessings we’ve been given, from having a roof over our heads to eating comfortably to having people who love us. The Bible talks about how we as sinners deserve death and have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). In spite of all of our failures as humans, God brought Jesus to die for all of us, not some, but all. Acknowledging our sinfulness becomes a way for us to appreciate everyone’s nuances and everyone’s humanity.

It can be tempting to enter the outrage cycle and simply declare people good or bad. I’ve engaged in my fair share of social media wars, with one memorable war ending with an old

woman yelling, “I don’t care what you say; I’m sticking to my comment 100%!” That stuck with me. I don’t think there’s been a large percentage in the history of angry confrontations where it ended with someone saying, “Wow, you’re right! I will now repent of my anti-Christian, racist ways!” When we start from places of empathy and allow people to be open and talk about how they feel, it allows for more real conversations to better understand where people are coming from. We’re then able to talk to them where they are.

There’s a co-study between, coincidentally enough, someone at Berkeley and someone at Stanford who observed that simple conversations where people were able to see the humanity of people who didn’t necessarily look like them showed more empathy towards them and found some semblance of common ground. One thing that seemed to work, even though it didn’t necessarily change people’s minds, was having conversations where they were able to better understand each other. That’s a lot of work, but it shouldn’t necessarily fall on one group of people to carry it out. It should be something that all of us as children of God are working toward in making the places we live and the conversations we have better and more fruitful.

If we want to make meaningful positive social change, it’s not going to start with everyone suddenly changing their minds.

If we start showing up and meeting people not like ourselves, or make a bigger effort to see ourselves represented in the media and have our different stories told for other people to start even comprehending where you’re coming from, collective empathy provides a collective dignity and acknowledgement of every person being fearfully and wonderfully made. It will take a tidal wave of empathy and an effort to try and understand the nuances of the conversations we have and the things that we post.

That strength to embrace each other as imagebearers of God is something we can’t do on our own. We’re going to mess up and we need to acknowledge our mistakes, supporting each other through our walks with God to make each other better humans and better people. I am not Lot’s daughters, but like them, I have been made in the image of my Creator and I deserve to die.

By the grace of Jesus, I’ve been set free in full knowledge that He knows what’s best for me, and what’s best for us in the midst of culture wars, drone wars, and even Twitter wars.

Josh is a senior who loves stories and loves people. Sentimentally snarky to a fault, he’s really into TV (“Parks and Rec” is his spirit show) along with terrible puns, good friends, and okay times.

29

Novel Truth

Melodie Deisher, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

H

ow do Christians answer the question: what is life’s purpose? How do non-Christians respond to this same question?

According to an old Puritan catechism, the Christian’s life purpose is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. Christian apologist John Piper elaborates on this point further in Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, stating that “Praising God [is] the highest calling of humanity and our eternal vocation.”

However, for the non-Christian, what is life’s purpose and how does one seek purpose?

The multiple types and quantity of texts that have been written and generated to answer this question include, among others, the novel.

The novel has long been an outlet for thought and discourse, an outlet for discussion and argumentation, and it has been used throughout history to discuss and analyze important yet difficult questions to both postulate and answer for authors and readers

alike. However, its failure in substituting for the truth found in the Bible simply diverts its writers and audiences from the truth of the purpose found within the Gospel story.

For Christians, the question of purpose was answered by Jesus in His conversation with the Jewish people. In the Gospel of John, Jesus addresses the crowd of Jews assembled before Him, saying, “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”1 This truth is the truth of salvation through Jesus Christ and the purpose humans have in this world: to glorify Him through their lives and actions. The knowledge of this truth and purpose then sets the Christian free from the existentialist doubt of uncertainty.

Modernist literature of the 20th Century, in particular, marked the advent of a novel that became more glaringly introspective and conflicted in their idea and understanding of the truth. In the 20th Century novel, the internal mental struggle of the novelist becomes more evident in narration and stylistic choices. As the authors battle with ideas of identity and

“we already ‘know the truth— 30 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

—and the truth [sets us] free”

purpose, they create characters into whom they channel many of their own questions and uncertainties about the world.

An author representative of modernist thought and writing is British author Virginia Woolf, whose 1928 novel, To the Lighthouse describes, at its surface, a family excursion to the lighthouse. However, the novel’s deeper underlying themes seek to define Woolf ’s own ideas of truth and purpose in this fictional story which have strong similarities to her own life.

The novel paints a portrait of the broken and shattered Ramsay family and its numerous ideologies and values that frequently come into conflict with each other. None of these ideas are simply “true or false,” however, but according to C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, are either “‘academic’ or ‘practical,’ ‘outworn’ [etc.].” However, because of the conflict of these ideas that is not resolved we have characters like Mr. Ramsay, a main character within the novel and an uncompromising academic whose pursuit of the truth is never truly satisfactory, and results in him never penetrating “beyond ‘Q,’” only to “get as far as ‘R’” (Part I, To the Lighthouse). The helplessness of the academic lies in the pursuit of something that cannot be found through mere thought exercises and discourse alone, but abides in a text in

which truth already abides.

However, after discourse upon discourse it seems that all of literature’s great works cannot, in fact, guide the reader or the novelist any closer to the Truth. With all the pondering and deep analysis of the human plight, should one not have a closer semblance to the truth? Perhaps we can find a somewhat satisfactory answer in the works of C.S. Lewis, who, in The Screwtape Letters, suggests that, as people living in the modern century, we are all used to “having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside” our heads. For many writers of our modern age, their novels can be explained as explorations between various forms of thoughts and ideals, and the novel’s development occurs as the characters struggle between philosophies to ascertain truth and purpose. The novelist presents a complex way of looking at the world through the realm of literature, and utilizes the novel as a discourse by which they analyze these various philosophies “dancing about together” within their heads.

Thus, literature is at best, a discussion of philosophy. It seeks to satisfy a question that we all inherently struggle with, a question that humans throughout history have sought to answer. For many people however, their pursuit of Truth and their pursuit of purpose involves a lifetime of searching.

1

John 8:32 English Standard Version

Melodie is a second year intending

on

majoring

in English and doubleminoring in Education and Chinese. She loves to bake and read Victorian novels in her free time.

31

Cindy Lo

Spoken Word Poetry

What Waits in Ahead

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Wind whistles through the branches, Sunlight trickling in teardrops down the stream, Towering gentle giants, shooting uprightly towards their source of light— I feel so lost.

While I’m sitting at this little hidden picnic table by Barrows, sitting amidst this peace, Watching squirrels rushing to get to class, Everything feeling like an illusion of movement, My anxiety doubles, doubles, toil and trouble Bubbling upwards without knowing how long it’ll take for me to burst.

And I’m reminded of the certainty I had as a child, dreams secured To grow old with my family, and have a small picnic in our front yard Honey dripping and ice clinking against the sides of a glass of apple juice, Or lying down on a soft rug in the middle of the living room, Smooth jazz on the radio fading into mellowness— A leaf falls in front of me and I’m brought back to the reality of midterms, A storm of papers before me, and my body is brought back to this continuum Time moves forward, and I drag my heart with my feet.

Who knows what waits ahead? I can only hope for a future where there’s a skip in my steps, and my feet soar as high as my heart, but if this means spilling my soul and losing my mind…

I’ve been taking pieces of the world to build myself up from the ground up, A toothy smile here and research job there, I’d wear masks and play charades-But am I doing the right things? Saying the right words? Playing the right game?

When my mind is this tick-tick-ticking bomb, how far can I go before I go up in smoke?

How long until my heart is consumed by the world’s flames?

32 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

But by grace I’m saved, by grace I’m— Saved.

I tell myself to let that sink in.

There. Are. So. Many. Things. That. Make. Me. Anxious.

And these fears of the intangible encroach on my willingness to move forward, but Man, this grace!

This love!

God’s love is an impromptu dinner with a huge mixing bowl the size of a watermelon filled with a ton of spaghetti just because it was possible, His love is a conversation by the courtyard and having an older sister cry for you, even though she wasn’t even the one who was hurt, but crying purely because you were in pain His love comes in the form of upperclassmen who were willing to host not one, but two!

Math 55 study sessions, just so they can help us feel more ok, and less frightened His holy, boundless love comes as the Son of Man, who gave up his own life as a sacrifice for my sins.

And so He loves because he can, Feels pain because he loves And wishes for me to feel so much less frightened by the world and its darkness The plans He has for me are so much greater than mine, so what is there to fear?

What am I so afraid of when such a God vows to be by my side?

And so, I am propelled into eternity, hinged on this great promise.

Cindy is a child of God who loves waffles and dogs (and dogs who love waffles).

33

Harmonie Lau

STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

Acts 17

I

n Acts 17, after Paul is released from prison in Philippi, he and his companions travel to Thessalonica. From there, Paul goes on to Berea and then Athens, as jealous Jews incite mobs and agitate the crowds. In Athens, Paul’s spirit is “provoked”1 as he takes in the city full of idols. He reasons with the people, and Epicurean and Stoic philosophers invite him to present this “new teaching.”2 Paul’s message is effective in its specificity to the Athenians. He uses the environment around him (an altar “to [an] unknown god”)3 to introduce the gospel to them and uses quotations from Aratus’s poem “Phainomena”4 which would have been familiar to his contemporary audience.

He presents the gospel in a way that is relevant to the Athenian’s lives.

While illustrating this, I was struck by how what I was drawing (a composition of buildings in ancient Athens, not atop the Areopagus,5 where Paul gives his message—I took some artistic liberties) reminded me of Benard’s 1897 vision of classical architecture for the Berkeley campus that is manifested in buildings like Wheeler Hall and Doe Library.6 As the buildings are temples to a multitude of gods to the Athenians, these

34 To An Unknown God | Fall 2017

buildings can or have become “temples” to idols of intelligence and success to me. The Athenians were also “doing nothing but”7 discussing the latest ideas. This talking and listening may have been extremely mind stimulating, but not life transforming. I have found myself, like the Athenians, reading the Bible without it having any implication in my life.

This passage reminds me that the gospel pervades every area of life. I want to see the altars around me realize that even that can be an avenue for declaring the unknown God. As Paul says, God “does not live in temples built by human hands.” God does not need us to do the work of sharing the good news with others, but gives us the opportunity to do so.

Acts 17:16 English Standard Version Acts 17:19 3 Acts 17:23 4 Acts 17:28 5 Acts 17:22 6 https://archives.ced.berkeley.edu/campus-architecture 7 Acts 17:21

1

2

Harmonie is a freshman who enjoys design and illustration.

Artwork Credit

Front Cover: Ami Yuen; 2: Ami Yuen; 5: Simon Kuang; 6, 7: Nine Köpfer, modif ied by Deborah Kyong; 8: Casey Horner; 12: Brooke Cagle; 15: “Obligatory Statue of Liberty picture #2” (https://flic.kr/p/4z9ucf) by Anne Thorniley licensed under CC by 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/), modif ied by Harmonie Lau; 18: Nolan Issac; 21: Oliver Thomas Klein, modif ied by Harmonie Lau; 22, 25: Ian Keefe; 26: Ami Yuen; 28: Patryk Dziejma; 30: Alex Ivashenko; 31: Daniel Jacobs, Felipe P. Limarizo, Yousef Al Nasser; 32: Ami Yuen; 35: Crystal Chang; Back cover: Ami Yuen

“and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.�

John 8:32

www.unknowngodjournal.com