Who has won the most Nobel Prizes in the last 100 years?
Pastor’s Blog - By Pastor Roy Summers
Our value in God's eyes has nothing to do with our "abilities"
Human value, according to Christian doctrine, is completely disconnected with any human gifts or earthly achievements. Human value is determined by the fact that we are made in the image of God, and consequently human beings are of great value in God's eyes.
And this is how we should view one another - not as the world views each other, but as God views us.
In the church this "egalitarianism" ought to be even more visible: we do not view any believer through the lens of wealth, prestige, education, intelligence, or any other temporary, man-made label.
But the church, in this present age at least, is tragically too often beset by such worldly attitudes. Men and women who are regarded as "great" in the eyes of the world, are regarded as "great" in the eyes of the church. This should not be so. Educated people, or rich people, or people from aristocracy are promoted above the equally noble professions, road sweepers, factory labourers and school cleaners. It should not be so! And if it had been so in the early church, The Twelve would not played any role in founding the church!
Contrary to all human thinking and judgement, God has consistently chosen the foolish of the world, because through them he can demonstrate his almighty power and get the glory for his wonderful works.
Of course there are some godly Christians who just happen to be wealthy, influential, clever, etc. And how we thank God for them. I have some wonderful Christians like this in the church I am privileged to belong to.
A few shocks are a coming in heaven!
Won't the church in heaven look different from the church on earth! Here, the clever and famous are celebrated in the churches (instead of the hated and despised - who are in point of fact closer to the kingdom). In heaven we shall probably not hear of any of the earthly big shots who were famous down here, but instead hear of completely unknowns who served the Lord in obscurity and had no education or any other earthly privileges. But they were godly, humble, frail, faithful, pure, poor, courageous - and of course bore the wounds of suffering and persecution. Amy Carmichael put it well:
“Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
Hast thou no wound?
Yet, I was wounded by the archers, spent.
Leaned me against the tree to die, and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet as the Master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole. Can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?”
So, why bother with Nobel Prizes?
So why bother with who won Nobel Prizes? What is a Nobel Prize? A prize awarded by a group of people on earth who make a human judgement, tied, as we all are, to their tiny transient temporary world-view. What one committee deems to be prize-worthy, another, in a short time, would scarcely deem to be so!
No Christian should be awed by Nobel Prizes or Nobel Prize winners - who in this world is to say that this person or that person are worthy winners?
(For goodness sake, the European Union won the "Peace" Prize of 2012! There is hardly a British man or woman who would awarded the EU a "peace" prize seven years later in 2019!)
No, a human panel of fallible judges makes the decision - not The Judge of all the Earth.
After saying all of this, it is interesting to discover who has been awarded these prizes, when it comes to the faith or beliefs of the winners. Why? Because there are folk who think that Christians don't or can't use reason. They say that faith and reason are opposites. They say that if you have faith it means you believe without any evidence. Of course this is about as untrue as it is possible for a statement to be untrue.
Example? The resurrection of Jesus is the central truth of the Christian faith. And Christians believe it only because of the considerable evidence before us, in the four Gospels and the rest of the New Testament - not to forget the witness of history which shows the dramatic growth of the church founded on this miracle.
So, who has been appointed Nobel Prizes over the last 100 years, we've arrived at last...
Are you ready?
65% have identified themselves as Christian
20% as of Jewish faith
11% as atheists, agnostics and freethinkers
1% as of Muslim faith
3% other
There may be all sorts of reasons for these percentages - and indeed some worthy folk in the non-western world may have been completely overlooked by the western Norwegian committee - but we cannot avoid the remarkable stat - that Christians and Jews make up 85% of the winners.
Of course merely stating the facts and merely presenting a table with this kind of truth on it is politically incorrect today.
But here it is...
Pastor's Blog
This post is taken from our Pastor Roy Summers’ blog, where he discusses and comments on a wide range of current subjects and issues both in the world and in the church.