Jesus and the Ruckus About Other Religions

In some of my discussions as of late, the topic of logic and illogic has come up frequently. These discussions have invariably revolved around Christian apologetics and how the latter relates to alternative worldviews; not surprisingly, the topic brings back many memories, for I have been as zealous a defender of apologetics as anyone else. There may be some of you who have joined this mailing list more recently and do not even know that to which “apologetics” refers: the word is ultimately a derivation of the Greek logos (“word”) and comes to us from the mid-16th Century French apologie and Latin apologia. It means “give a defense of” and it is usually understood to be rational in nature: that is, it appeals to reason. An apologist for apologetics, then, is someone who tries to convince other people of the need to convince other people. :)

My thoughts are not necessarily finely focused, but I have noticed a certain almost knee-jerk reaction or resistance to the topic that I have never held before and it has interested me to explore the reasons why I feel this way. What is there about the apologetics I once pursued with such vigor—still do pursue at times and to some degree—that leaves me feeling just a little cold?

I have been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about Jesus lately. My thoughts concerning Him have been all over the map throughout the course of my life. There was a time in my life in which the name “Jesus Christ” was a profanity uttered in the most ugly and irreverent fashion one could imagine: an expression of my bitterness and disillusion with the world that surfaced anytime I was inconvenienced even slightly by reality: someone cuts me off in traffic? Loudly and bitterly “Jesus Christ!” I stub my toe, even louder and more bitterly, “Jesus Christ!” Such frequent expression on my part prompted my roommate, who showed scarcely any inclination toward spirituality of any sort and whose life was certainly not that of the pious parishioner, to state: “As often as you say that name, I think you really do believe in God.” I do not think he had given the subject much thought but he seemed nonetheless uncomfortable with my particular choice of phrase. He seemed to see what I could not: that on some level I think I really did believe—and I was bitter, angry, and resentful.

The name Jesus has also been an embarrassment to me. It is an antiquated name that gets held over other people’s heads as a threat or as an attempt to scare them into penitence and confession. It brings back memories of tedious Sunday school classes, adults who seemed hopelessly out of touch with the world and certainly not in the least “cool,” and a whole lot of baggage both deserved and underserved that makes one want to hide his association with that name altogether. Yet somehow I think the name has always held a level of respect for me. I think when I abused it, it was because I respected it, as crazy as it sounds: we do not defy those things we care nothing about. And I have often cringed when people use the name lightly, even when my own heart was far, far away. Further, I have never liked the Jesus jokes; I remember a course I took some time ago in literature in which we read a lot of contemporary novels. One in particular had a lot of this type of humor in it—I do not care to mention which one it was even now—and it did not so much offend me as pain my heart in much the same way that one would feel if his wife, child, or best friend was being snubbed.

I suppose I was raised to respect that name; I have certainly heard it almost all of my life. But in so many ways even now, it is only a name. I try to wrap my mind around its owner and what He must be like and I invariably come up empty handed. In fact, sometimes believing in that name at all—some invisible entity, apparently a very real historical figure, believed by many including myself (though I could rarely explain why) to be God—seems almost silly to me. I certainly rarely feel that I have any lasting or permanent connection to the name’s owner and yet there have been moments where I have become convinced that He is indeed the answer the world has been looking for, not as many would have it where He gets dangled over heads on threat of eternal torments, but just because He is. It is really quite hard to explain and I am not certain I even wish to try. His appeal and His offering may be somewhat enigmatic, but my heart knows it is real in some deep, unexplainable way, maybe like a child who looks into the eyes of an adult and knows that this adult, while little understood on any precisely defined level, is good and will meet its needs, even those needs it may never know it has.

Then too, comes all the ruckus about other religions. I have been as quick as anyone to jump in and suggest that without relativizing them to death, all religious paths cannot possibly be equally true. I am still inclined to agree with that idea, but I think for me the biggest thing is not that other religions are false—quite the contrary, I often find a great deal of human and spiritual wisdom in them—but that they have one conspicuous oversight, an oversight that I am increasingly coming to believe makes all the difference in the world: they do not center on Jesus. Some of them respect Him a great deal and I respect them for it: truly I do. Some of my fellow believers find it offensive that they pay my Lord this kind of respect, I suppose because they are looking again at personal salvation and reprieve from the fires of hell that are said to burn somewhere on the other side of this life. Perhaps rightly, such believers feel that other religions do not respect Him enough or mistake who He really is or fail to recognize the ultimate role He plays in the universe. I really think a lot of people want to pick fights with me here, for they hear (perhaps not entirely incorrectly) the voices of Sunday school teachers, church leaders, and countless others in their past who find it appropriate to disparage anything that is not overtly “Christian” in nature. It appears that to many minds, those who are not obviously for us must most assuredly be against us. Frankly, I see very little of the love this Jesus was supposed to have in that approach: in fact, it even goes against some of the other very valuable lessons such adults taught me as a child about respecting other people and if you did not have anything good to say about somebody else then you should not say anything at all. But these same adults would come back and declare that we surely do not mean by this teaching that we should allow deceivers to deceive; further, these false prophets in other religions are doing precisely that with their blasphemous words. They deceive the world, if not by what they say than by what they do not: by their conspicuous oversight and their retelling of our Lord’s story, recasting Him as merely mortal and little more. Okay. I understand. I am not certain I agree always though, though I think I do in some cases. In any case, rightly or wrongly, I reserve the right to make up my mind for myself, trusting that common-sense wisdom is a reasonable gauge in discerning the difference between those whose deference is true and those intent to deceive. (And if there is no intent to deceive, we are not dealing with false prophets but at worst misguided persons who need, if anything, gentle correction: certainly they do not need disparagement on our part.)

I have been doing much thinking lately. I find myself more and more drawn to this Jesus. I do not really understand why. He had little that would attract my attention: His words, though widely venerated and often considered poetic in a literary setting nevertheless do not seem to find their way into the inner realms of academia very often (again, except as a literary device that is only meant for window dressing to say how widely we are read and little more). He certainly did not have any money, though I cannot very well hold that against Him. Rarely in my life have I ever had much money either and during the short time that I did, it was gained through (shall we say) questionable means, if I may speak euphemistically. No, I really do not see why this man should be esteemed as He is: if He is remarkable, it is mainly in His lack of remarkability. Yet even as I type these words, something in my heart swells and I feel almost indignant with myself in expressing them. I really do not know what there is about this figure, but He has worked His way into my heart in ways I do not understand and to which I seem oblivious a great deal of the time.

I spent numerous classroom hours pursuing a degree in philosophy. Most of you have read the fruit of that pursuit here. I would still be pursuing the subject, may even yet still. And most of you know that my plans were thwarted: that I was rejected by all of the schools to which I applied for a Ph.D. program in the subject. I took that pretty hard for a while because I am an excellent student, my grades superior, and I have an aptitude and a love of that subject unmatched by many others. But that is not what has been causing the change in my thoughts. Certainly it still counts as one more piece of evidence for rejection: we all tend to accumulate suitcases full of the various rejections in life and if we are not careful this baggage will weigh us down and cause us much grief in life, for we become convinced that we are just not quite as good as everybody else: that somehow we are fundamentally flawed to our deepest core. We become adept at hiding this flaw, but we will not let anyone come too close for fear that they will see through us. We remind ourselves of times in the past we have let someone close and been rejected. Our suitcases tend to be full to overflowing with rejection slips: even one or two is sufficient to fill a very large carry-on bag.

I pursued philosophy with a passion. Yet I do not believe the study ever made me happy. It did when I studied at home, when I was pursuing the curiosities that presented themselves to my mind, for philosophy once was—and ultimately is in its better moments—the pursuit of wonder at the amazing and awesome world in which we live. But the formal study of philosophy at the university, however, did not make me happy. It did not make me wise either, for it only reminded me that our reason is entirely inadequate for finding what is real and true in this life. Not only did it not make me wise, it did not always make me so much fun to be around either, because I was using words nobody else had ever heard of and arguing that there is almost nothing we can know with certainty. That is true enough, at least if we are to accept the presuppositions of our Western culture where the knowledge we seek is refined and certain. In terms of common sense in the practical affairs of life we can know many trustworthy things but we cannot know them—I am convinced of this idea—to the level of certitude that many in the realms of higher learning would like. The same could be said for physics too: what could be more wonder-filled than this amazing world in which we live? But when knowledge is made a commodity to be bought and sold, that sense of wonder so often gets squashed flat. I do not rue my university education; I am not even finished pursuing it and likely will still linger on to teach at this level. But I also recognize I can become poisoned by it, for it can take a very good thing, extract all the joy from it, and pass off the deflated remains as the most true and certain thing the world has to offer.

What I have learned in these free moments as I have reflected on being rejected from my program of choice . . . no, that is not true. Let me back up and start over again. My program of choice was just another sock in the suitcase, soon enough overshadowed by weightier clothing and accessories and only conveniently pulled out when further evidence of my failure was warranted. Let me back up and start again. What I have learned as I have had my first summer off in fives years from constant university education is that my life and my world often revolve around my mind. My source of pride, my strength, my sense of meaning were being predicated on how smart I was, what I knew, how sophisticated I was becoming. Not always obviously, not always in so many words, but in general, yes, in general. And part of that was and is fueled by my pocketbook, for these have been very lean years as well. I cannot begin to count the times I have felt foolish and like a sponge because somebody else was always footing the bill to go out and eat or watch a movie or whatever else we might do in the few hours of recreation. There have been times I have not had the quarters to do laundry. I do not often talk about the matter, partly because I know that we have all—myself included—been conditioned to believe that being poor means being lazy. In my case, there is truth to that: I loathe looking for work: the mere thought is enough to turn my stomach in knots. Like many of my anxieties, it is irrational: so many things in life are not really so bad but we—I—turn them into insurmountable obstacles that cripple me from moving forward.

Money is not everything. But it is not nothing either. It has been shown that money can in fact provide happiness. That is to say that those who have been in abject poverty and who now are able to meet their basic needs do report a marked increase in happiness: money’s ability to give us food, shelter, and some degree of social interaction (thus helping to alleviate loneliness and the like) does indeed contribute to happiness as studies clearly show. But once those basic needs have been provided for, money has increasingly diminishing returns. My desire has never been to get rich, but certainly during those times when I did not even have the quarters to pay for laundry, I had some extra motivation to claw my way out of the blue-collar world that has been the reality of most of my life.

I was speaking about my mind; money was just another thing blinding me to the realization I am about to unravel. My worth was again being wrapped around my mind. But I thought to myself as I was walking down the sidewalk yesterday that there are many things that could make me happy. I have spoken quite often of Web design, in part because I was hoping to attract a few more clients, but also because I genuinely do enjoy doing that. There is nothing particularly intellectual about it: mental yes, intellectual? well, not really: it is more systematic than insightful. In short, I realized that if tomorrow all people stopped seeing me as being intelligent, the world would hardly come to an end on that account. In fact, I had extra reason for thinking as I was, for earlier that day I had a few errands to run and bumped into a man I have known from a church I previously attended. He has no car and in spite of his fifty some years on this planet, only about a fifth grade education. He has been teaching himself how to read and as I was riding him home, he asked me quite a few questions, one of which I get asked quite often, in fact. It seems he has worked his way up to Francis Schaeffer’s He is There and He is Not Silent—a book that he described as being especially deep and hard—and he wanted to know what “epistemology” was. He did not have quite the proper pronunciation, but I knew what he meant and was happy to answer him. Ironic that epistemology was the very study I had been hoping to pursue.

My friend understandably feels self-conscious about his lack of education, yet because he is still untouched by years of “refinement” and “sophistication,” he has not learned to disguise such things. If he feels something, he expresses it: quite refreshing, actually. I cannot tell you how good it felt to be in the company of a real human being, to be of true service without being prideful. He was not my “project”—that is often the temptation—but a fellow traveler on life’s journey. If you like, he had little bread and I had bread to spare. And then he said something to me more meaningful than he knew: he said that the truth was only found in Jesus and was not to be found in education. I think this may have actually been more an expression of lingering self-consciousness on his part coupled with what he has been taught by the various churches he has attended to say: it sounds pious to say such things. But he was far more right than he perhaps knew and I told him so.

The question, for me, is: “Who is Jesus?” What does this mean when we say that Jesus is more important than all these other things? It seems to me that the Jesus who entrances me is personal. Yet He really does not seem to me to be that much like the Jesus I have heard talked about in church for this reason or that reason or this other reason, depending on which church and who was doing the talking. Maybe the fault was mine and I was running into a language barrier. Or maybe I just did not understand.

Last night, I was reading the first in the “Unspoken Sermon” series by George MacDonald (available online here; for purchase in book form here). MacDonald was known for writing fairy tales and was the author C.S. Lewis credited as “baptizing” his imagination. I have said often how much I love fairy tales and I think it has much to do with some of MacDonald’s observations. He says that the heart of Jesus is a child’s heart. In fact, he had some very thought-provoking things to say about growing in childlikeness and about the Kingdom of God where the least is greatest and the Son of God—the King—came not to be served but to serve, not to be saved, but to save. The picture was beautiful and suddenly the apparently intellectual lapse that has seized me as of late was seen in a new light. What if, rather than there being something stunted in my growth, I was actually growing wiser? What if wiser meant more like a child and not less? It does seem to me that many older adults I know do seem to lack something of the intellectual rigor of youth—an empirical observation on my part and not always true of course. But many older adults I know who are very well educated do not seem to be especially erudite in conversation or even in the ways they choose to present themselves to the world, though there are times in which their mental prowess is evident. Could it be that they have (whether consciously or not) discovered something deeper about life that the rashness and impetuousness of youth often overlooks? That so many things that matter to youth do not matter? Perhaps that as a youth, they had their heart set on being adults, but as adults they are content to be children? While it is only anecdotal on my part and could well be a product of the colored lenses through which I am now peering, it does seem that in many ways the brightest minds are younger: my mind finds no shortage of examples of older adults expressing amazement at the creativity and mental acuity of youth. Even in my beloved world of Web design, a lot of the cutting edge technologies and innovations are being designed by nineteen and early twenty-somethings.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

Whatever the case, the topic of logic and illogic has come up a lot in my world. I have again re-read arguments that attempt to demonstrate that only the Christian answer is logical and that other worldviews are not logical by their very own presuppositions. And I am not convinced. I am not convinced not because I do not believe Christianity is true, not even because there are not philosophies which are logically inconsistent, but because I do not believe the world revolves around logic. We are to use our heads and some people, I admit, do not. But higher learning has much to do with refined knowledge. Refined knowledge, as we have said before, is processed from the same common-sense ore that we all share. But its desire is to take that basically reliable but sometimes faulty ore and turn it into an infallible product that is always reliable. There are many who confuse this illusion of infallibility with reality. But I am no longer convinced we should rush in to join them, showing them that our infallibility is not only every bit as infallible as but actually superior to their own. As I wrote my young friend who takes great interest in these subjects, I do not say that apologetics, philosophy, and higher learning in general do not have their place: I certainly have spent enough time pursuing them myself and likely still will. But in terms of the deeper things in life, they seem to me these days only so much straw. I find so much more joy and satisfaction in some (apparently) half-formed and childish notion of this indefinable, enigmatic Jesus than I have ever found in any of that. So as I told my young friend (and as we have also said before): these things are not everything. They are not nothing either. They are in many ways so much straw. But it was upon a manger filled with straw that the infant Jesus laid His head and even straw, in all of its humbleness, may very well have its legitimate place in His kingdom. Who knows? It might even cradle the head of a King.

“When the DaVinci Code hoopla is all said and done, it will still be Jesus that we’re talking about. It’s Jesus whose face on the cover sells a million magazines, whose name instills widespread awe. Even people who despise Christians paradoxically admire their Lord. In discussions of religion nearly everything is up for grabs, yet on this one point there’s widespread agreement. Why do people instinctively admire Jesus?”

—the opening paragraph of the excellent and highly recommended short article by Frederica Mathewes-Green entitled Da Vinci Code: Yeah, Whatever. It has almost nothing to do with the Da Vinci code and virtually everything to do with Jesus. I cannot recommend it highly enough, at least if you have enjoyed this week’s musings.

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