It was in the spring of 2007, if I’m recalling correctly, that I first traveled to Slovakia. I was younger then, though not so young as to believe I had seen enough of the world. I had not. And it was there I met Miro. He was about my age, but the soundtrack of Miro’s life was set to a very different key from my own.
Miro dressed like a bohemian—scarves, boots, the kind of hat you’d expect to see in a smoky art studio. I was khakis and polo shirts.
I’d come of age in the long shadow of Pax Americana, Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill” and George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light”—that great and comfortable season when America strutted across the world stage like a frat boy too proud of his shiny new Corvette. Miro had come of age under bombfire, in Belgrade, a city whose name once felt faraway and foreign to me. I grew up with David Letterman’s top ten lists. Miro grew up counting missiles overhead at night. I spent my Sunday evenings at youth group, singing upbeat songs and eating Fritos with my friends in a fellowship hall. Miro spent his nights huddled, listening to the wail of sirens and the tremble of buildings collapsing under bombs.
To tell you the truth, I was a young man of zeal, full of answers and certainties. Miro—bless him—was a man of questions.
Some people call themselves “agnostic” in order to register with you their superior intellectual honesty. Miro called himself agnostic, not out of arrogance or escape, but out of truth. Little in his life had confirmed the existence of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-caring “Father who art in heaven.”
“Little in his life had confirmed the existence of an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-caring ‘Father who art in heaven.'”
We were headed to a retreat together, tucked up in the Carpathian hills, a gathering of Christians from across the Czech and Slovak Republics. The mountain lodge where we were bound was just a couple hours south of a place that still wears its scar in the name: Oświęcim. To Western ears, that’s Auschwitz.
With a few hours to spare ahead of the time we were allowed to check into our rooms, we decided to visit the Death Camp—a place I’d only read about in books like Man’s Search for Meaning or Night, or seen depicted in films like Schindler’s List. And so we went. A kind of literary pilgrimage for me.
Beyond the infamous entry gates, festooned with the cynical lie Arbeit Macht Frei, we walked the corridors of the camp-turned-museum. We stood in the cell where Maximilian Kolbe gave his life for another. We saw the surgical rooms where Dr. Mengele practiced cruelty under the name of science. We passed piles of human hair, suitcases never reclaimed, prosthetics and shoes, and the long gallery of faces and silence.
When the tour ended, we didn’t say anything for a long while. The car rolled on in silence as we crossed back into Slovakia. I felt the weight of what I’d seen—and the added burden of wondering whether I’d made a mistake. Who brings an agnostic, a seeker, to such a godless place?
But after many quiet kilometers, Miro turned and said something that shocked me.
“You know, I think there must be a God,” he said. “There must be. This sort of thing has to be made right.”
“You know, I think there must be a God,” he said. “There must be. This sort of thing has to be made right.”
It struck me, as truth often does, with the force of a two-by-four disguised as a whisper.
Miro could not believe in a world where such evil was simply done and buried, filed away as history. He needed the story to end in justice—not vengeance, but the kind of judgment that heals. A reordering. A reckoning. A restoration.
He needed a God who could fulfill the promise of the prophet Joel: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…” (Joel 2:25, ESV).
I realized I had—quite inadvertently—brought Miro to a place that seemed forsaken by God, and yet there he found not the absence of God, but the undeniable need for Him. Miro could not live in a world where Auschwitz had the final word, where the war criminals who terrorized his youth were allowed to slip into death unaccounted for.
His words were not a theological argument or polished defense of faith. They were a lament—a cry born of moral realism, of a heart that instinctively knows there must be more to the story than cruelty.
What Miro reached for in that moment—what he dared to hope for—is what Christians proclaim: that God is not absent in suffering, but that in Christ, He descended into it. And not just into suffering as a general idea, but into the real, historical, institutionalized evil of places like Auschwitz.
These are not edge cases for theology. They are its proving ground.
Ever since then, I’ve carried with me one unshakable conviction: if the gospel I preach cannot be spoken beneath the gates of Auschwitz, it is no gospel at all.
“If the gospel I preach cannot be spoken beneath the gates of Auschwitz, it is no gospel at all.”
As Miro spoke, I thought of the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. As a teenager in the Hitler Youth, he had been sheltered from the worst atrocities of his nation. But after Germany’s defeat, in a British POW camp, he was handed a Bible. There, as he confronted the horror of what had been done in his country’s name, he came to believe—not in the triumphant deity of Hitler’s preachers, but in the crucified Christ.
When Moltmann read Jesus’ cry from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—he realized this was a God who did not stand above human suffering, but entered into it.
The cross is not just a symbol of divine love; it is the moment when the full weight of sin and sorrow crashed down on God’s Son. In that sense, what we saw at Auschwitz had already been borne in the broken body of Christ. He had gone there before us.
The irony, if you can call it that, is this: we walked through a place many call godless, yet Miro came out speaking of God. Why? Because when the soul beholds radical evil, it begins to yearn—demand—that there be a Judge.
Not a bureaucrat, not an algorithm, but a holy Judge who sees the child’s toy beside the tracks, the woman’s hair woven into bolts of cloth, the echo of boots marching human beings to their deaths—and says, with holy fire, “No more.”
That longing isn’t for revenge. It’s for righteousness. For moral coherence. For final healing. And that longing, strange as it may sound, is itself the whisper of God.
“That longing, strange as it may sound, is itself the whisper of God.”
It’s what philosophers from Plato to Kant have hinted at, and what Christians proclaim with boldness: the human ache for justice is not an illusion. It’s the soul’s homing instinct for the One who will judge the living and the dead.
And here is the mystery: God does not judge from afar. In Christ, He entered the cell. He stood in the surgical room. He wept beside the tracks. He bore the wound.
Our churches, especially those shaped by the Restoration Movement, often hesitate at the words of the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended into hell.” We balk, unsure what it means, uncomfortable with the claim.
But maybe hell isn’t just a place beyond the veil. Maybe it breaks out here, too.
If we believe, as the book of Hebrews suggests, that heaven sometimes touches earth—why struggle to imagine that hell might as well? That there are places where the flames of Gehenna lick the edges of our world?
I think of Treblinka. The hiss of gas in the dark. I think of the galley of a slave ship—the stench of iron and salt. I think of Damascus, of bombed-out neighborhoods and mothers wailing under skies turned to ash.
If there is a hell—and surely there is—then it is not only beyond. It is among.
“If there is a hell—and surely there is—then it is not only beyond. It is among.”
It hides in systems that grind the weak to powder. In the cold calculus that counts bodies as collateral. In the silence of neighbors and the apathy of nations.
And if that is hell, then Christ has descended into it.
Not once, but again and again. In solidarity with the suffering. In judgment against the wicked. In the cruciform shape of His love.
He does not wait for the lost to arrive in some infernal afterlife. He goes to them. He steps into our graveyards. He weeps over our ruins. He breathes among the bones.
That is what makes the cross so scandalous, and so beautiful. Not that God condemns sin from a distance, but that He enters its darkest corridors.
And when He does, the devil begins to lose.
Not because Christ comes with a sword—but because He comes with wounds.
He harrows hell not with might, but with mercy.
He descended into hell.
He descends still.
“Not that God condemns sin from a distance, but that He enters its darkest corridors.”
Into camps and prisons.
Into waiting rooms and war zones.
Into the aching silence of those who have no words left to pray.
And from there—from the lowest and darkest place—He rises.
