¶ Introduction, Book Prompt, and Cognitive Science Origins
You guys are listening to the Confronting Christianity podcast, and I'm here with my friend Gray Satanto. Gray is an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. along with the Dutch reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, Dr. Sotanto's research interests abroad, ranging from modern Protestant theology, prolegomena, humanity and sin, the relationship between philosophy and theology, analytic theology and Christianity and culture.
Gray is currently writing on the doctrines of humanity and sin. He serves as associate editor of the Journal for Reform Theology. He is ordained in the International Presbyterian Church and has served as a teaching elder. in Covenant City Church, Jakarta, Indonesia. Gray is married to Indita together. They have two daughters, one received into the world relatively recently. Congratulations, Gray.
Yeah, thanks so much. Greg grew up in Jakarta and Singapore and in his spare time he enjoys watching indie movies, playing the guitar and reading. Folks who are avid listeners to the Confronting Christianity podcast may have heard our previous conversation, Greg, which I think maybe was last. Right. But you have a new book out that I'm excited to talk to you about. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what prompted you to write your new book, Ascend to the Divine?
Yeah. So as I mentioned at the very end of the book, I think I've been thinking about this book since like undergraduate years. I remember in undergrad, I was exposed to Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology. And Plantinga had this idea that... Everybody is born with this cognitive sense of the divine. That is, we seem to have a faculty that is wired for belief in God. When you encounter, for instance, the great beauty of the Grand Canyon, the beauty of a waterfall.
When we think about our smallness in the universe that is so grand and big, we tend to form beliefs naturally in God or some sort of God. After thinking about planning this epistemology in undergrad, I was also exposed to this new burgeoning field called the cognitive science of religion. And the cognitive science of religion is basically an empirical science that reports...
That apparently, whether you're a child or you're an adult, people have a tendency to form beliefs about God. There's this theory called the theory of mind where we seem to... Naturally, we're hardwired to form beliefs that there are some agents behind the circumstances around me. So we're going out and it's raining and we say, oh, I must have done something wrong yesterday. Why is someone punishing me out there? I wanted a beautiful day today, but instead it's raining.
Or we hit our toe on the rock and we say, who put the rock there, right? So these are all kind of trivial ways. Thinking about an agent behind the circumstances that are before me. And we tend to therefore think that the circumstances around us are formed or put there by some intentional mind. And the question is, what is the relationship between these empirical reports about these regular beliefs that even children have about some supernatural being?
being behind my circumstances with what the bible seems to say in romans 1 and psalm 19 that the heavens declare the glory of god and there's lots of theologians and philosophers wrestling with the cognitive science of religion And there's a particular problem that starts to arise because the reports don't just say that we are hardwired to believe in a mind behind the circumstances around us. This mind is also oftentimes...
not like the God of the Bible. So the mind that we happen to believe in or are hardwired to form beliefs about seems to be a God that is in time, a God that is in a give-and-take relationship with us. A God that is more like a superhuman being rather than the sort of metaphysically rich, simple triune God of the Bible. If you could put it that way, right? So it seems that the God of the Bible is one thing.
And the God that we are hardwired to believe in is another thing. And there's a lot of theologians debating the implications of that. Some theologians would say, well, maybe because of the effects of the fall, we don't really have a natural belief in the God of the Bible. We don't have any beliefs about God at all. Maybe Romans 1 is talking about not a universal knowledge of God, but it's really a knowledge of God that is maybe sort of available in nature, but not everybody gets there.
Or others would even argue that the findings of the cognitive science of religion is itself identical with the God of the Bible. And maybe we should jettison the older metaphysically complex notion of God that we have. Or we should go with... A model of God that is more like a superhuman being. Maybe the God of the cognitive science of religion, which looks more like a God in time. A God more like the model of open theism. Maybe that's the God that is exposed in general revelation.
and we should jettison the older notions of classical theism. So all kinds of debates like that were far-ranging, involving interpretation of biblical texts to interpretation of older debates about the natural knowledge of God or what it means to say that everybody knows God in some way.
to contemporary debates about this new science, the cognitive science of religion, which is only about 40, 50 years old right now. So that's what led me to ongoingly revisit this topic, even as I was writing on different things. And when this opportunity came up...
I just couldn't resist writing on it. And it's really, I feel like it's been, yeah, a good close to two decades of thinking about it. And finally, I get a chance to put it on paper, if that makes sense. Okay. Okay. I love this. I love this in terms of the crisp.
academic summary you just gave us of what you've just written, which I think some in our audience will be like tracking with you every word that you said there. I think there are others who would have been thrown by various pieces of that. So I'm going to unpack this.
¶ Epistemology, The Fall, and Distorted Knowledge of God
Please, please do. So number one, you mentioned the word epistemology, which is... a word for sure that is thrown around in your classes on the regular, but probably most of our listeners will think epistowhat. So tell us what is epistemology and how is that relevant to this conversation? yeah epistemology just refers to a theory of knowledge so the discipline of epistemology is really a subset of the discipline of philosophy
So think about philosophy as the study of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Metaphysics refers to the study of being. What does it mean to be human? What does it have a human nature? What does it mean to... To believe in God, what kind of nature does God have? That's the discipline of metaphysics. Epistemology is the discipline that studies our theories of knowing. So what does it mean to say that there is such a thing as truth? How do we know the truth? What justifies our beliefs?
is that it constitutes a good argument versus a bad argument. That's all within the realm of epistemology. And an ethics is the study of the meaningful life, the study of the good life, good and evil, good versus bad. analyses of those sorts of terms, evaluative terms that we throw out. So epistemology refers to that second subdiscipline. And really we're talking about here a theological epistemology, right?
It's a theory of knowing with respect to our beliefs about God. Like what is it that constitutes right belief in God? What does it mean when the Bible seems to say that we all have this universal knowledge of God? Romans 1 says, we all know God and yet we suppress the truth. So again, Psalm Lantide says that the heavens declared the glory of God and we're all exposed to its heat, right? So what does it mean that the Bible seems to say this?
You know, every day we encounter people with all kinds of different religious beliefs or even no beliefs at all, right? So how do we scare what the Bible says about this knowledge of God with what ordinary experience seems to tell us? Yeah, yeah. Which seems to contradict the Bible. Yeah. Well, but it's interesting, as you know that I've gone into in much greater depth, that on the one hand, the Bible does say that as humans, we have some...
innate recognition that we are in fact created beings, that there is a God of all the universe to whom we're sort of morally accountable. But at the same time, because the Bible tells us that... from the get-go we humans have turned away from God and that that's impacted not only our behaviour but also even our thinking and our ability to sort of recognise who God is, that there's going to be that sense of...
confusion or suppression of the truth as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans. So do you think that's one of the ways in which the findings of modern... sort of science of psychology actually could be reconciled with our biblical understanding of how we understand God even if we haven't been exposed to the specific revelation of the Bible.
yeah so that's exactly the sorts of questions that i was trying to introduce us at the very beginning of my response to your first question which is yeah there's there seems to be conflicting reports in the cognitive science of religion
about the sorts of god that we happen to believe in and those reports are definitely in conflict with what the bible seems to present about god or what at least the classical christian tradition has said about god which is that god is timeless god is absolute god is beyond our ken in a really significant sense and god is simple that he sees not
composed of parts but he's absolutely one thing and he's he's not someone who is in a gift and take relationship with us right so he's independent of us for instance again the findings of the cognitive science of religion seems to really conflict with that because it presents to us a god That is reactive. So we say. The sun is eclipsed by the clouds this morning. And we say to ourselves. Why is God doing this to me? We're talking as if God is reacting. To something we did yesterday maybe.
And we talk as if God is listening to our prayers and therefore he changes his mind, right? So regularly outside of even the churches, we see people talking this way, right? I'm praying to God. I hope he changes his mind.
and I hope he changes my life in some way because he's reacting to my prayers in a more give-and-take relational sort of way, which is not the way in which God has been described in much of the classical tradition, whether in Judeo traditions or Christian traditions or in the Islamic traditions.
So, yeah, a lot of theologians, therefore, have to reckon with that fact that the empirical reports say one thing, and it seems that the biblical and Christian data says another thing. Just drilling in there a second, when you say that cognitive science points to a different... kind of god is is it fair to say also a plurality of gods that there's perhaps less of a disposition to think that there is one god behind the universe but perhaps that there are multiple potential gods
right yeah so that's exactly right so a lot of these findings that are empirical right they're really survey reports they ask about what kinds of god do you believe in even if you don't go to church and things like that in different parts of the world And yeah, it depends on if you're taking a look at parts of Asia, for instance, the reports are going to be that there are multiple deities behind different events, right? That maybe there's a regional god.
or more animistic beliefs, for instance, that are being espoused, will inform what they say is the common theological beliefs of the particular people groups in that particular space. But, you know, so...
What some theologians have tried to do is say, what is the lowest common denominator of all these different reports of God? Obviously, context and upbringing will determine the sorts of names we give to these gods. But what do non... religious non-church goers in America say about God versus what do Indonesians say about God or what do Chinese people say about God what's the common beliefs that are pretty universal and the most universal sort of belief that
underlies all these different religious claims about God is that whatever this God is, apart from these revelations, whatever this God is, he must be in a reactive give and take relationship with us. He's in control over my circumstances. He responds to what I do.
but he's definitely in time. And so, yeah, again, some people have tried to say, well, to reconcile this with the Bible, if it's really the case that the Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God, and this is what people tend to believe in. If the Bible is true,
It therefore follows that what people tend to believe in must be the God of the Bible. And so we've got to reconsider our classical Christian theism, right? Or if you go with the Plantinga route, he would actually say a lot of people...
just don't have a natural knowledge of God anymore because a lot of people don't produce beliefs in the right God. But there is a minority class of people that's more recent scholarship would argue that yes, we tend to have theological beliefs, but we don't have... Given the fall, we don't have natural beliefs about the true God. We have all kinds of wrong beliefs about idols. And so what the cognitive science of religion actually exposes to us is not our beliefs in the true God, but actually...
It's confirming what Calvin said, that our heart is a factory of idols. We will end up believing in something less than the true God, just so we can get away from the true God, if that makes sense. And that's a minority report. And I wanted to kind of advance that.
¶ Old Testament Idolatry and Suppressing Truth
particular line of interpretation and i wanted to bring new resources for that line of interpretation in this particular work that we're talking about interesting yeah yeah i'm reading through the the old testament at the moment and One of the kind of recurrent features that you'll find as you read through the Old Testament is that time and again, God's people, the Jews, the Israelites, will be trying to either sort of add other gods to the...
collection of people they're worshipping as it were or a collection of of deities or simply sort of turning away from the god who has revealed himself to them as the one true God of all the universe, that it's like the default setting that they keep coming back to is this multiple God worshipping sort of form. And the prophets of the one true God keep sort of calling them back to...
the one true God who has uniquely revealed himself to them as the God of all the universe. And it seems like there's this sort of flip-flopping back and forth that God's people do throughout the Old Testament. So if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is that... That's one way of understanding the data that we see today is to say, actually, yes, humans have an inbuilt tendency for sure to recognize a supernatural agency.
interacting with them in the world, but that it may, rather than being pointed them necessarily to the one true God of all the universe, that we sort of have a tendency to veer toward idol worship instead. That's exactly right. Yeah. So you're seeing, you know, in the Old Testament. The Old Testament people of God want a God that they can see, want a God that they can form with their own hands. The golden calf would be a paradigmatic example of that in Exodus 32-33.
where they wanted a God like the other nations, a God that is manipulatable, a God that is somewhat under our control, because if we give it something, then it'll give us something, right? But a god of the universe is not like that. And the god of the universe is someone on whom we're absolutely dependent. And also someone on whom we're absolutely accountable. And that's a terrifying place to be in. To be accountable and dependent upon someone.
is to be absolutely dependent in a maximal sense. So we're vulnerable in the maximal sense. And what Romans 1 tells us is that it's not just that we know that God exists. We also know that God is wrathful towards us. So what I try to argue in the book is Romans 1 teaches us that we all know God deep inside. We have this, what I would call a psychological knowledge of God or a knowledge of God deep in our psyche, in our soul. But we suppress that.
And we don't want to worship the right God because it's scary to be vulnerable before him. So we end up confessing with our lips worship of either other gods who don't keep us as accountable. On whom we're less dependent. Because those idols are under our control. They can leave us sort of off the hook. But even while we're worshipping these idols, internally, we know the real God exists. So what I would say is, you know, this...
The data about the natural reports or the natural tendencies that we have to believe in God or some supernatural agent is manifesting this dynamic of suppressing and knowing at the same time that we see in Romans 1. that we end up reporting these supernatural deities that are under our control, that is in a give-and-take relationship with us, because that's more comforting to us than the God that we know deep inside exists. Namely, the true absolute God of the Bible, right?
So I think what Paul is saying there is, we know that God exists, then we suppress the truth and we worship creaturely things over the creator. So the worship of creaturely things is simultaneous with the knowledge of the creator. And so what starts to emerge, I think, is a distinction between the impact of what we call general revelation, that God has revealed himself generally to all creatures in the universe, and the impact of that is this internal knowledge of God.
that doesn't always manifest in proper worship. But instead, this internal knowledge of God drives us to worship in creaturely things because it's scary to deal with what we know deep inside is true. So that's the sort of dynamic that I was trying to tease out.
And that's why I call it an affective model of general revelation as a subtitle of the book. Because I want to say the impact of general revelation is affective, namely an internal knowledge we're wrestling with, rather than merely propositional, as in the reports that we give out.
¶ God's Nature: Transcendence, Imminence, and Pre-Incarnate Appearances
about the sorts of beliefs about God that we have. And we don't want to identify these reports with the internal knowledge that we have. So you've said a couple of times that the God revealed in the Bible is a God who is not. in time and who is not in a sort of give and take relationship with us and my guess is some people listening to this will be thinking well wait
doesn't the God of the Bible routinely interact with humans? Like in some ways that description sounds like a sort of deistic God who maybe made the universe once upon a time and then... stepped out and you know it has has no interest in interacting with human beings but in in the bible we see actually a god of all the universities who's profoundly interested in interacting with human beings so help unpack a little bit for us what do we mean by saying
that the god of the bible is not in time and it's not in a uh sort of give and take relationship with us as human being yeah great great question um so these are questions in systematic theology for sure So I think the more accurate way of putting it is to say that God transcends time, right? And so God is not containable in time. God is not constrained by time. And even though God is engaging with creatures.
in the history of the universe he's not to be confused with the ways in which he condescends to creatures in the universe right even though for instance god walked with adam and eve in the garden right God remains the very one who preserves all things. God remains the very one who sustains Adam and Eve's life in the garden. And so we cannot confuse the modes of God's condescension in Christophany or Theophany.
So I think when people are talking about those moments in which God seems to reveal himself in time in the Old Testament, we would call these theophanies. These are actually prefigurations of the incarnate Jesus, I would say. But that's a different topic for a different time, maybe. And over and over again, God reminds the Israelites, don't confuse me with the ways in which I'm revealing myself to you. So in 1 Samuel 15, 11, he says, God regretted making Saul a king.
And then immediately, like 16 verses later, for Samuel 15, 28, 29, he says, but God is not like a man that he should regret. Or in Numbers 23, right? It says, God is not a man that he should lie or change. So God oftentimes manifests himself in the Old Testament especially in order to, as Calvin would say, babble to human beings.
to appear to us in ways that we can fully comprehend. But we should not confuse the divine babbling with who God is in and of himself, namely a God that transcends space and time. So, you know, Tim Keller. would oftentimes refer to this great analogy of Shakespeare, for instance. Shakespeare is not a character in the play, but he is in every page, in a sense. And in the incarnation, Jesus finally becomes a character in the play while being the author of the play itself.
So there's that dynamic of God transcending time and yet he is very much imminent in history. So great, you used the word Christophany, which is one of my favorite. like lingo theological lingo words and i have a question for you before we get to the impact of the incarnation and jesus or god the son sort of revealing himself in the person of jesus christ so In the Old Testament, there'll be these moments where...
And strange kinds of revelation of God seem to happen. And one of my favorites is in the sort of famous Old Testament story that even folks who are not very familiar with the Old Testament in general might be familiar with, which is when... In the book of Daniel, these guys, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, get thrown into a fiery furnace by the sort of nasty king guy. And as they're in the fiery furnace, so they're staying faithful to the one true God.
and refusing to participate in idol worship etc and so they're being thrown into this this furnace and while they're in the furnace another figure appears to be in the furnace with them, who even in this very fiery furnace looks exceedingly shiny. And you've got to be pretty luminous to look shiny in the middle of a fiery furnace. I would love your take on...
whether that is a revelation of a sort of revelation of Jesus before the incarnation and what that might mean for our understanding. I definitely think so. I think that God has condescended in many ways in the Old Testament that prefigures his ultimate coming, namely in the incarnation, right? So God, for instance, and my favorite example of a Christophany would be in Exodus 3, verses 2 and verse 4.
When God shows up to Moses in the burning bush, he's disclosing himself as a great I am there in Exodus 3, 14. But in Exodus 3, 2 and 4, it says, you know, God appeared to him in the middle of the bush. And then it says the angel of the Lord. called out to him. And then it is the Lord himself called out to him. So when you're reading that, I think naturally you're going to ask, is it the angel of the Lord or is this God himself? If it's a mere angel as in a creaturely angel.
then how does he share the glory of God such that the ground on which he was standing was holy ground, right? And he had to take off his sandals. Moses had to take off his sandals to come closer. And if this was a mere messenger of God, how did he speak as the Lord himself? And I think that brings us to the question of, what is this angel really? And angel could just mean messenger of God. So there's one who is a messenger of God, who is himself God.
And that brings into view, I think, John 1, the one who was the word from God, who was of God, who was himself God. And, you know, when I preach on Exodus 3, I point us to John 18, where when Jesus was betrayed,
The text makes sure that we know that Jesus was betrayed in a garden. And Jesus repeats three phrases, the same phrase, I mean, three times. He says, you know when judah says are you he and he says i am the soldiers ask are you he i am and then they fell to the ground when he said i am he the narrator wants you to know that jesus said i am and then they fell to the ground so
That should bring into view Exodus 3, because here in Exodus 3, here's a garden in the wilderness. There was a bush. And God manifested himself in that garden, but as the omnipotent one. But here, in the context of another garden, John 18, the great I am has come in the flesh.
And ironically, the soldiers did not come to the holy ground in a worthy fashion. And so they fell. They should have taken off their sandals at their feet. And it says they fell to the ground. The ground there, I think, refers us back to Exodus 3. When Moses was taken. So I think there's a lot, especially if you take a look at the Greek translation of Exodus 3, next to John 18, verses 1 to 9 or so, the parallels are just quite striking. And so, you know, that's...
That's sort of a nerdy detour. I love it. I love Christophany. Yeah, yeah. So then let's go to the incarnation specifically that you've already taken us there. So we've been talking about the God of the Bible being revealed as not.
constrained by time so so transcending time interacting with us in time as as time constrained beings that we are but not himself constrained by time right and we've been talking about the relationship that human beings can have with god that is is not one that is is a sort of tit-for-tat transactional uh give and take kind of relationship but nonetheless is is according to the bible a profound and personal and deep
And I think this is one of the differentiators between the God revealed to us in the Bible and a sort of, you know, people will sometimes have a generic conception of who God is, you know, that there's a... being behind the universe or the universe has a plan for me or whatever that there's there's actually a profound relationship that is in view as we read the pages of the bible and sort of see how god is interacting not only with the people groups but also with
with specific individuals. And then we see in the New Testament, this wild claim, which is, I think it seems more normal to us because we're used to hearing it, but from a first century Jewish perspective, it would have seemed utterly... the claim that this transcendent God of all the universe, the one, you know, the great I am who you can, you can't actually see and live, has in fact become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ. So help us understand how that...
¶ General Revelation's Condemnation and Christ's Redemption
ultimate revelation self-revelation of god in the person of jesus relates to our universal sense the divine as your book title puts it great great question So how does this incarnate climactic revelation of the one God of the universe address our natural knowledge of God, let's say?
I think the way to answer that question is to go back to Psalm 19. And I end the book with this idea that actually if you believe that everybody is already wrestling with God in some way, this is going to be very wearying.
Precisely because we're wrestling with, again, a God on whom we're absolutely dependent and absolutely accountable, which means that we're absolutely vulnerable before him. We hate to be vulnerable. We hate to be naked and ashamed. As Genesis 3 says, And so we're constantly wrestling with it and we try to suppress it and we try to confess our allegiance to other deities that don't actually ultimately satisfy.
And what people miss about Psalm 19 is at the very end of the first part of Psalm 19. So if you read Psalm 19 in your Bibles, the first seven verses is about the revelation of God in nature. And the latter seven verses, 7 to 14 or 8 to 14, somewhere around there, is about the revelation of God in the Old Testament, namely in Scripture, in the book.
And at the very end of Psalm 19, the first half of Psalm 19, it says, nothing is hidden from its heat. And then the first thing that the second half says when it comes to the revelation of God in the Bible, it says, The word of the Lord and the law of the Lord revives the soul. So what the natural revelation of God does, it actually gives to us, exposes us to a heat that exposes to us our deadness.
We're not able to live up to the glory of God. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. And so Romans 1.32 says, we all know that we've fallen short of God's decree and so therefore deserve to die. And that's a terrifying place to be. And that's why we don't want to confess.
our allegiance to the one true God. Because it's a terrifying thing to actually admit that we are dead and we deserve to die. And that's why the special revelation of God in the book of Holy Scripture communicates to us not merely The law of God, but also that the Lord, Psalm 19 at the very end says, is our rock and our redeemer. And so the natural knowledge of God is not something positive for us to build or construct a quote unquote.
you know, pre-dogmatic natural theology or a philosophical knowledge of God for us to just speculate about. No, the natural knowledge of God disclosed in Psalm 19 and Romans 1 exposes us to our need for a savior. We've been wrestling with it. And so when the book of scripture comes in and tells us about Jesus Christ, it communicates to us a redeemer who says to us, yes, you've fallen short of the wrath of God. Yes, you've fallen short of the glory of God.
But someone else was good on your place. And because of that, you can come to him and he will give you rest. Rest from what? Rest from the anxiety and the wrestling and the effective knowledge of God that we've always been arguing against in our hearts. And so we should come to Jesus because the knowledge of God that we have from nature alone condemns. It's not sufficient to save. And we need...
The redeemer who doesn't just show us what is good, but who is good in our place. To die on our behalf so that we can come to him and have rest.
¶ Christianity's Exclusive Claims and Global Religions
So my guess is that some people will be thinking, okay, we've been talking about a sense of the divine or some degree of knowledge of God that every human being is going to have sort of by virtue of being human and existing in the world. And then... We're saying that actually only those who have received Jesus as revealed in the Bible.
can have a true knowledge of God and a knowledge of God that saves them from God's wrath, saves them from the judgment against their sin, as the Bible would describe it. Spent significant portion of your life in Indonesia, a vast country with, I think it's Indonesia the third largest country by people. It is the biggest by population Islamic.
Right. Okay. Yeah. So massive country with a relatively small proportion of people who would recognize Jesus as their savior. You know, how can you... make that claim when you know you're looking at a country that is so religious that is so um desiring to be in relationship with god and and yet you're saying actually the majority of people in that country are not
experiencing true relationship with god like how can you how can you make that that claim my guess is there would be some who would yeah want to pose that question yeah that's a great question a couple things to say there i think the first thing i would say is the fact that there's so many religious people in the world shows us that
Romans 1 and Psalm 19 are true, right? We can't help it but be religious creatures such that if you don't worship the God of the Bible, you're going to be worshiping something else. Even if I think I would say because of Romans 1, everybody knows that the God of the Bible is the true and living God. But...
We suppress the truth and we end up therefore again wanting to worship creaturely things over and against the creator. So religiosity isn't going to go away. And even if you're the most secular sort of person, you are worshiping something. We all are. If it's not the god of Islam, as you would have in most contexts of Indonesia, it's going to be the god of career, the god of your family, whatever it might be, you're sacrificing something to this deity to keep it satisfied.
And I would say so therefore the religiosity of the different religions and the presence of the different religions actually confirms, I would argue, what we see in scripture about the religiosity of the human being. And everybody has a theory of how these religions come to be.
If you're a Christian, you're going to say, these religions come to me because we're made in God's image. We're wrestling with general revelation, but we don't want to deal with the God who is really there that we know about. So we substitute God with idols. But if you're a secularist, you're going to take a look at these religions and you're going to be making pretty dismissive claims about them too, right? If you're consistent. I think they would say, if you're a secularist, you know...
well, these religions are wish fulfillments or, you know, they're just not yet enlightened. They need to be enlightened by science or something like that, right? That's a secular theory of how the religions came to be.
If you're a Muslim, you're going to be taking a look at the other religions with their own Islamic theory of how the religions came to be. That Christianity and Judaism are just, you know, paths toward Islam. And Islam is the final fulfillment of what Jesus and Moses did. They would argue, right? So I would challenge listeners who are skeptical of these universalizing claims maybe from Christianity to consider that every worldview has their own theory of how the different religions came to be.
If you're a Christian, you got this theory about idolatry. If you're a secularist, you got a theory about maybe the evolutionary byproduct that created these religions or wish fulfillment, psychologizing it or something. If you're a Muslim, you also have your own theory.
everybody has these theories i think the question is you know not whether we're making these interpretive judgments about the different religions but which ones are true and maybe we can have a conversation about that yeah So maybe drilling into that one step further, somebody might say, okay, I understand that there are a lot of different kind of religious perspectives around the world and there are many people who...
For example, you know, if you look at India, one of the largest countries in the world, predominantly Hindu and not necessarily worshipping one god, sort of depending on views you take of Hinduism. But, you know, many people would say that there are sort of multiple gods being worshipped.
Are you really saying that if we look even just at the three sort of great monotheistic religions, so Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that even within that sort of subset of religious... worship that we see around the world today that we can't say well these are all three basically valid ways of getting to the same god you know how can you be so exclusive and divisive and disrespectful of others as to say that
Right. And I think, you know, if you said that to a Jewish person who's Orthodox, if you said that to a Muslim who's Orthodox, if you said that to a Christian who's Orthodox, all three of them would say, no, these are not three equal ways of getting to God, right? Muslims would argue that Jesus was merely a human prophet, not divine. Judaism would argue that Jesus was not the Messiah, right? So it's actually arguably a more arrogant claim to say that
these are just three equal ways to God because you are delegitizing the ways in which these religions speak about themselves. If that makes sense. And so, yeah, I would just challenge him to say, everybody's going to make... some universal claim about what the religions consist in the question is again which one is true so i think you know the onus is not of the christian it's not as if it's only the christian who's saying well
Here's my way and every other way is wrong. Everybody's also making that claim. So let's be honest about that. Let's bring that to the table. Yeah, yeah. What if somebody said, okay, great, you know, you seem to be a smart guy.
¶ The Case for Christianity and a Personal Journey of Faith
You have a PhD. You've thought and read about philosophy from various angles. You've had some significant interaction with some of the modern scientific ways of understanding who we human beings are. How can you still be clinging to this idea that not only is there a God who created the universe, but that that God has specifically revealed himself through the pages of an ancient book that somehow...
still valid for us today? That seems like a lot for a smart guy like you to have taken on board. That's a huge question. First of all, I don't think I'm that smart in the big scheme of things. But yeah, that's a great, wonderful question. I think when we take a look at the whole span of the disciplines of academic inquiry, right?
So you're putting the question in the context of academia and what we do here theologically, academically. You can't get beyond what the older philosophers have called the transcendentals. So in whatever field that you're getting into.
whether it's law, literature, even I would argue the natural sciences, you will always encounter notions of the good and the true and the beautiful. And the good and the true and the beautiful right so law arguably is about justice even the natural sciences you want to think about even progress and finding the truth of the matter and why the truth matters and things like that right
The good and the true and the beautiful are inescapable notions. Everybody has to deal with it. And everybody makes evaluative judgments about the good and the true and the beautiful. You can't walk out of your house without making judgments like that. You know, it's raining.
It's terrible, right? It's not good, right? So we're making judgments like that all the time. So what are we doing when we're making judgments like that? And if you have a materialist worldview, that is, if you believe that all that exists is material, matter, physical.
You can't account for these judgments that we often and always inescapably make about the good and the true and the beautiful. Because the good and the true and the beautiful, by definition, is not material. You can't touch it, kick it, you know, punch it. But yet we depend on the good and the true and the beautiful for anything, for any of our disciplines to even function. So the question is, who is the good and the true and the beautiful? And why do we feel that we ourselves are...
falling short of the good in the tree with the beautiful we know what the good is and we know deep inside i would say that we're not that good we know what the truth is and we know deep inside we oftentimes do not speak the truth we do not know the truth so that to me is
That which drives all religions. That which drives all of our academic inquiry. The good, the true, and the beautiful. And I think that those three things consist in the one true God. And we fall short of that. And I think something happened 2,000 years ago.
where somebody claimed to be the good and the true and the beautiful who was walking around on earth and people recognized that claim and people tried to stone him for it and ultimately they crucified him for it and then something happened that believers of this particular messianic figure
would argue that he rose from the dead, appeared to them, and would die for their beliefs. And this was attested to by not only Christian, but also non-Christian reports. So to me, it's... I really do think, and maybe this is... bold of me to say i really do think that people who ridicule christianity just has not taken a look at the arguments for it you know molly warden just became a christian a couple years ago and she said
i was surprised at the fact that even though i was a historian i did not read the historical texts about what happened in the resurrection or the resurrection reports i would just invite listeners hey look into the arguments what is the good and the true and the beautiful how do you know that
you're falling short of it because you have that sense. We're anxious about something. And what happened 2,000 years ago? Let's just try to account for that. So I'd invite listeners to do that. Last question, Gray, and this will be a... Rerun for those who listened to our first episode together, but I would love for people to hear how you personally became convinced about Jesus and a little bit more of your story. Yeah, great question.
You know, I was raised up in a Roman Catholic household. I think I've mentioned this first time we talked about it. And I immediately thought that this probably wasn't for me. Whatever this religion is talking about. I'm definitely not there. I'm not a good person. So the moment I turned 12 and I took my first communion, I never went to church again. Until it was my senior year in high school, where I was really going through a pretty...
pretty low point in my life i think at that point thinking that if there is a god then i'm not good enough for that god and if there is no god then there is no such thing as the good so why bother so either direction if there's a god why bother trying if there's no god why bother trying
So that put me in a kind of nihilistic sort of worldview that there is no meaning in life and so on. But I never realized that there was a third option, that God is good. And I have fallen short, but God became man to become good in my place. And it was through a series of long conversations with an old mentor of mine. He's actually from Manchester. Name is Brian Cox. Manchester in England.
Yeah, Manchester in England, that's right. And you were in Indonesia at the time. In Indonesia, that's right. He was the headmaster of this Christian international school that I went to. Through long conversations there and also a Pentecostal church when there was a sermon about the prodigal son.
That really confirmed this third alternative for me. You know, this third way really of relating to God. And realize, oh, this is completely different than what I thought Christianity is. Maybe because I was reared up in the Roman Catholic Church. It's not about me becoming good to please God. It's about God who was good in my place so that I am already pleasing to God because of what Jesus Christ had done. And I remember texting Brian, that old mentor of mine.
I think I got to turn a new leaf. I think I got to become a Christian now that I realized this. And I remember feeling frustrated. Why can't people get this, right? But it's all the grace of God that you could even recognize it, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks so much for joining me, Gray. You guys have been listening to the Confronting Christianity podcast. You can follow us on X or Instagram. You can leave a review on iTunes if you'd like to.
Leave a comment there as well, suggesting a topic for a future conversation. And maybe between now and next time you listen in, perhaps you can consider whether God might have... placed eternity in your heart, whether he might have given you a sense of his presence in the world and whether that might be a sense that you could respond to just as Gray responded to many years ago.