Several years ago, I wrote a book called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Scepticism. Based on my twenty years of experience as a pastor in Manhattan, I chose the most persistent arguments that sceptics make against Christianity and sought to show that, in the end, they were not convincing. Then I presented what I considered to be the most compelling reasons why Christianity is the only true hope for the world and also why it makes so much sense to those who believe. Iâve always appreciated scepticsâ arguments and the invaluable role they play in defining and clarifying what is unique about Christianity. It bothers me when Christians dismiss these questions glibly or condescendingly. Taking the time and effort to answer hard questions gives believers the opportunity to deepen their own faith while creating the possibility that doubtful people may become open to the joy of Christianity.
This essay is based on the first of a series of talks I gave in Oxford Town Hall in Oxford, England in 2012. A campus group asked me to speak for five nights to studentsâmost of them scepticsâexploring encounters that Jesus Christ had with five individuals in the Gospel of John. I could not imagine a more exciting project. First, of course, these accounts reveal the core teachings of Jesus, and in a particularly dramatic and vivid way. But the conversations Jesus had with these persons were not merely about personal sins and specific religious practices. In these encounters we see addressed the big, âmeaning of lifeâ questions: Who are we, and why are we here? Why be a good person; why love instead of hate? Whatâs wrong with the world? (Obviously, something isâyou just have to look at the newspaper or in the mirror any given morning to be aware of that.) And what, if anything, can make it right?
Everyone has a working theory of what the answers are to these questions. If you try to live without one, you will soon be overwhelmed by how meaningless life seems. We live at a time when some insist that we donât need any such answers, that we should admit that life is just meaningless busywork in the grand scheme of the universe, and leave it at that. When you are alive, they say, just try to enjoy yourself as much as you can, and when you are dead, you wonât be around to worry about it. So why bother about trying to find the meaning of life?
However, the French philosopher Luc Ferry, (who, by the way, is in no way a Christian himself) in his book A Brief History of Thought, says that such statements are âtoo brutal to be honest.â He means that people who make them cannot really believe them all the way down in their hearts. People cannot live without any hope or meaning, or without a conviction that some things are more worth doing with our lives than others. And so we know we do have to have answers to these big questions in order, as Ferry puts it, âto live well and therefore freely, capable of joy, generosity, and love.â
Ferry goes on to argue that almost all our possible answers to those big philosophical issues come from five or six major systems of thought. And today so many of the most common answers come from one system in particular. For example: Do you think itâs generally a good idea to be kind to your enemies and reach out to them rather than kill them? Ferry says this ideaâthat you should love your enemiesâcame from Christianity and nowhere else. And as we will see, there are plenty of other ideas we would consider valid, or noble, or even beautiful, that came solely from Christianity.
Therefore, if you want to be thoughtfulâif you want to be sure that you are developing good answers to the fundamental questionsâyou need at the very least to become deeply acquainted with the teachings of Christianity and, especially, with its founder Jesus Christ. And the best way to do that is to see how he explained who he was and what he was all about to people he encountered.
One of the biggest obstacles in the way of people coming to Christianity is that they think they know all about it already. They think they already know the answers that Christianity offers to the questions of life. But based on my experience, I donât think they usually do. So my aim in this essay, and in the subsequent ones in the Encounters with Jesus Series is to give the Christian answers to these fundamental questions by doing a close reading of several of Jesusâ encounters with various men and women. These are answers I believe we cannot live without.
The first encounter I want to look at is a subtle but powerful one with a sceptical student. It has lessons for those who are sceptical themselves about Christianity, and also for Christians who encounter scepticism from those who do not believe. To understand the encounter, we must put it in context. It comes just after what has been called the âPrologueâ at the beginning of the book of John. Ferry points out that this prologue was one of the turning points in the history of thought. The Greeks believed that the universe had a rational and moral order to it, and this âorder of natureâ they called the Logos. For the Greeks the meaning of life was to contemplate and discern this order in the world, and they defined a well-lived life as one that conformed to it. The gospel writer John deliberately borrows the Greek philosophical term Logos and says this about Jesus:
In the beginning was the word (Logos), and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things were made. Without Him, nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and in that life was the light of all mankind. . . . And the wo...