Ayn Rand, the famous atheist and novelist, died 32 years ago today on March 6th, 1982 in New York City. Pastor John, I have for you a host of related questions, including what drew you to her fictional works? What did you appreciate about them? How does Christ fulfill the intuitive direction that she set out to express in her works?

And finally, did you ever meet her or did you ever reach out to Rand? Yeah, in the late 70s, maybe '75 to end of the decade or so, I was in my early 30s and I read Ayn Rand voraciously. I read Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, Virtue of Selfishness, New Intellectual, The Romantic Manifesto, probably some other things I can't remember.

To some kinds of minds, Ayn Rand is very luring and very dangerous. She's luring for her philosophical braggadocio. She's just she's unbelievably articulate and logically rigorous. And she's dangerous for coming so close to truth and missing it so far. She's like a spaceship that is supposed to land on the moon and just misses the gravitational pull of the moon and is lost in outer space.

I mean, I think I think you watch her coming to the moon. So, yeah, me too. Me too. Miss Rand, me too. Let's let's land there. And she goes, "Oh, no!" I mean, just endless outer darkness, which is I mean, that is an absolute accurate way of describing where she went.

I wrote a long appreciative critique and I sent it to her. So in response to your question, did I reach out? I sent it to her in 1979 with a letter. I never heard from her personally. I have a sense that it probably got to her or at least to her sidekick because I went over to the bookstore at Luther Seminary way back in the 80s.

And I found this book about her. And my name was in the index in a footnote that even, you know, a fundamentalist Baptist pastors have been influenced by such and such. Now, why would they even say that I had never written anything by her? I mean, written anything, published anything about her.

So but here's here's what attracted me and how I think she points to truth and to Jesus. Ultimately, she esteemed reason, individualism and hedonism. And so do I, at least taken in the way the Bible thinks about those three things. She was a brilliant and aggressive rationalist with the laws of reason, law of identity.

A is a and not non-A. Law of contradiction. Two things can't be true in the same way at the same time and yet contradict each other. Law of causality. All effects have sufficient causes. I believe all those and and they are unbelievably foundational to the way we think. I think Jesus believed all those and represented them in his his his teachings.

And so without using any of the technical terms, Jesus assumed and used the laws of non-contradiction. I tried to show that in my book, Think. Number two, she prized individualism. So do I. And so did Jesus. The way the way God intended it. I loathe, I loathe communistic pressure towards sameness and conformity.

I saw the ugly effects of it back in the 70s in Europe with a horrible architectural and other ways that communist deadens people, kills the individualism of people, squashes out all their their the beautiful distinctiveness that God has given to each person. Jesus was relentlessly focusing on the individual.

You individual, don't be angry. You individual, cut off your hand. You individual, stay in your marriage. You individual, don't take an oath. You individual, love your enemy. You individual, follow me. You individual, leave your business, Matthew. It's over and over and over again. Jesus is on the individual. None of this smoshy corporate thinking that people try to, you know, escape from the very personal pointed way that Jesus deals with individuals.

But the unity and the harmony. So I'm circling around to avoid criticism here. The unity and the harmony that God prizes in the body of Christ is precisely the kind that has everyone being their full created individual selves. And because of that, making a beautiful mosaic in harmony and truth in the body of Christ.

So yes to the beauties of the church and the togetherness of individuals in oneness and truth and beauty. And thirdly, hedonism. She espoused it and hers was merciless. She hated mercy. She hated altruism. Her biggest problem, this is her biggest problem. She thought that the highest virtue was happiness through reason.

And I want to say yes, through the right use of reason to know what's really there. And then she made one massive flaw that totally created many other flaws. That is, she totally rejected the existence of God and that made her blind to what true happiness is and what virtue truly is.

Christianity, and this is what blew me away and I wanted to rescue her and call her back because she just totally misunderstood Christian altruism. Christianity stood for altruism, which in her mind stood for giving people what they don't deserve, which for her meant rewarding and honoring stupidity and rewarding and honoring vice and rewarding and honoring weakness.

And so you are honoring the dishonorable, which is a loss of truth and a loss of integrity. And for her, the ultimate evil. That's her reconstruction of Christianity. And you can see where it veers. It goes to the moon and it veers off. Here's what she said. "Sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a non-value.

The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite. Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one." Well, I just totally agree with that principle. Why would she think that in my having mercy upon a person and treating them better than they deserve, I've somehow forsaken my highest values?

And the reason she can't see it is because she has no God in the picture who is our highest value. If God is our highest value and he satisfies our soul and joining him with millions of other people who have been brought from death to life and been won over to enjoy him as their supreme value through being treated better than they deserve on the cross.

If that's true, you don't have to sacrifice your highest values in order to show mercy, in order to be kind and to love your enemy because your goal in that is to bring them out of sin and out of irrationality and into a place where they see clearly, they think clearly, they love clearly, they admire clearly, which are all the things that she wanted.

And so her key problem is once you cut God out of the picture, you just can't make sense of reality. And so she was almost landing on the moon with her rationalism, almost landing on the moon with her individualism, almost landing on the moon with her hedonism and she missed it because she had no God in her system and therefore the highest value of enjoying him and bring others with you, even if they don't deserve it, made no sense to her.

Yeah. So you look back on her life with a sort of sobered appreciation. Yeah. I mean, I cannot but stand in awe of her mental powers and her creative storytelling ability. A lot of people think Atlas Shrug is a bad novel because it's a preachy novel. Well, I like that kind of novel.

She's got a speech in there by John Galt that goes for 90 pages. I mean, that's a book on philosophy in the middle of a novel. That's why, you know, novelists say that's a ridiculous way to write a novel. Well, there was an interview a few years ago, I think it was in the 80s, that said among Americans after the Bible, Atlas Shrugged has been the most influential book of all.

And that was an interview. I don't know who they interviewed, but several thousand folks said, "Which books have influenced your life most?" And the Bible's number one, Atlas Shrugged was number two. Well, you can call that a bad novel if you want, but I stand in awe, number one, of that John Galt speech and the rational powers.

But to praise it would be like praising the powers of a blind person to incredibly understand everything they touch and use all of those discoveries to curse light. That's what she does. She's a brilliant blind person. So she's got these hands of rationality and she's feeling things. And she's saying them with such incredible insight.

And she's using all of her insight as she uses these hands to curse the concept of light. And so she can't get it. She's getting it and then she's totally missing it. Tragic. It is tragic. Thank you, Pastor John. And for more details, see Pastor John's lengthy and detailed critique of Rand, which you can find for free at DesiringGod.org.

Search for the article by its title, "The Ethics of Ayn Rand, Appreciation and Critique." This is the article that was originally written in the 1970s and the paper Pastor John sent to Rand in the summer of 1979. Apparently she got it, but it's not clear how she responded to it.

And the book, Think, is free of charge for you online at the Desiring God website as well. Click on the book tab and browse for the title, Think. Speaking of critique, a brand new book is out criticizing you, Pastor John, and Jonathan Edwards, and neo-Calvinism. Tomorrow I want to ask you one specific question about what's been raised in this book about the interplay between God's love and God's glory.

Until then, I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.