I recall with clarity a night a few years ago when my wife and I were on vacation in southern California. We’d spent the day hiking in the mountains and, in the afternoon, had descended to explore the mysterious and ancient landscape of Mono Lake—one of the oldest lakes in North America.

Pinned to the information board by the parking lot was a sign advertising a talk by a Park Ranger that evening: “Stars over Mono Lake”. And so it was, at 9pm, we found ourselves lying on the ancient sands, looking up at a night sky in which a million points of light glowed with an intensity I’d never seen before. The air was cold and clear, the hauntingly beautiful desert silence broken only by the occasional howl of a lonely coyote, cry of an insomniac gull, or scream for help of a distant and woefully lost tourist.

But it was the sky that really struck me. I’d never seen it so beautiful before: in many of our towns and cities, light pollution drowns out the splendour of the heavens and the lights that do punctuate the night tend to be of the red-amber-green-red variety. But what I was seeing, lying on those freezing sands at Mono Lake, was the spectacular sight of the night sky in all its glory—God’s handiwork writ large as a myriad of stars twinkled above me. I was awestruck and listened with fascination as a Park Ranger talked us through the various constellations that slowly wheeled above: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, Aquarius.

And as I looked up, I was reminded of a Bible passage, of Philippians 2:12-16, which reads:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labour for nothing.

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That passage got me thinking, in particular about this question: what does it mean to “shine like stars”? What does it mean to burn brightly against the inky blackness? As I pondered this, it occurred to me that there are different types of star. For instance, there are shooting stars. Stars that burn brightly, roaring across the night sky leaving a trail of fiery dust behind them; burning brightly, lighting the way, but then falling to earth as no more than glowing embers. There are Christians like this: who want to go it alone, blaze their own trail, and draw attention to themselves.

Then there are supernovae, stars that have exploded. One almighty bang, a flash of intense brightness that lights up the night sky, and then they’re gone, fading into obscurity. Again, there are Christians like this: who burn themselves out, who make a brief impact, and then they’re forgotten.

And then we have constellations. Stars which, on their own, would be but one small, glowing dot in the darkness, but together form a bigger picture—together, they tell a more powerful story. On their own, they’re much less; together, they’re something very special. Nobody has heard of the star “Merak”, for instance; but most people have heard of the constellation it forms part of—the “Big Dipper” or the “Plough”, one of the most famous formations in the northern hemisphere.

On that same trip to southern California, we also visited the Griffith Observatory, set on the slopes of Mount Hollywood. Attached to the observatory is a planetarium and we sat in this incredible building and watched amazing images of planets, galaxies, and stars projected onto the giant dome. The show’s narrator explained how human beings are designed to think in stories: modern science is one attempt to tell a story about reality, but so too did the ancients tell stories, as they looked at the heavens and named the stars. And thus each of the major constellations bear names—usually from myth and legend or history.

Stars burning together in constellations whose names tell a story. And that’s part of what Christians are called to do: to stand together, to form a constellation, and to tell a story—a story whose significance is also painted in the beauty of the night sky, the wonder of the atom, the fire of the equations that animate it all, and the depths of the human heart.

But there’s one last aspect to stars and to constellations I learnt that night at Mono Lake. Constellations don’t stand still. They move. In particular they rotate, slowly wheeling around a singular fixed point in the northern night sky—the “North” or “Pole” Star. And that, too, is our task and calling and challenge as we aim to “shine like stars”—our axis needs to be God himself—the very centre of our purpose, our calling, our universe, our beings. He is our fixed point, our north star, our pole star, he who determines how we move and turn. The temptation is always to make ourselves the axis and have God spin about our personalities, aims and ambitions—but that way lies idolatry, the worship of oneself. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find Him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands.1

Long before the invention of GPS, sailors, and navigators far out in the oceans or the deserts were reliant upon the pole star, the north star—the fixed point. By orientating yourself to it, you could find your way home through the wildest of seas or the remotest of trackless deserts. But in a sky filled with a billion points of light, how do you find the pole star? Well, the easiest way is to take a look at the most well-known constellation—the “Big Dipper” or “Plough”—for this constellation actually points directly at the Pole Star. And as we shine like stars, in a constellation, not alone but standing together, telling our story, His story, this is what we’re ultimately about. Shining brightly amidst the darkness, we point at Him around which everything turns—Christ Jesus himself, heaven’s bright sun, whose radiance glows brighter than the brightest star, so much so that the new heavens and the new earth need neither sun nor moon. May He and He alone be your fixed point and lead you home.

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When I was thirteen years old, one of my favourite hobbies was conjuring. Every Saturday morning, I would faithfully trek across London to attend classes at Davenports Magic Shop, an Aladdin’s cave of a place which was all the more wondrous for being located in an underground mall deep below Charing Cross. There I learnt how to baffle people with card tricks, make money disappear, and pull rabbits from hats.1

Of all the tricks I mastered, my favourite was the shell game. One of the oldest tricks known to magicians, its premise is simple: behold, three small wooden cups. Beneath one is placed a small ball. The cups are shuffled and some innocent bystander asked to guess where the ball is. No matter where they guess, their answer turns out to be wrong: the magician always wins.

For all of its audience-entertaining potential, the shell game is just a trick, merely an illusion. The ball was always somewhere, namely wherever the magician put it. Try as you might, you couldn’t actually entirely dispose of it: however cunningly you palmed it up a sleeve, stuffed it under a rabbit, or hid it in an assistant’s nose, you were always stuck with it: the ball still existed. Some things you simply cannot get rid of—the best you can do is to distract people and hope they don’t notice the bulge in your sleeve.

The same problem applies to metaphysical versions of the shell game. I was reminded of this when a contemporary magician, Penn Jillette, one half of the popular comedy double act, Penn and Teller, said this during an interview:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.2

Jillette is a well known atheist and his statement is an attempt to claim that it is the non-religious who have the moral high ground, atheists who are better people. Why? Because they’re good for the sake of goodness, unlike those terrible theists who are basically sexually rapacious psychopaths, only refraining from rape or murder because they believe that God is constantly watching them like a heavenly policeman. So, who would you rather trust: the friendly atheist magician with the lovely smile, or the theist who is longing to start a land war in Asia and go pillaging and raping, only holding back because they’re afraid their Sky Daddy is watching them?

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To give Jillette his credit, this is a clever piece of rhetoric. It’s punchy, it’s witty, it’s memorable, it’s tweetable, but it’s also a trick. Just like the shell game, Jillette has misdirected us with some clever shuffles of the cups and then, whilst we’re distracted, snuck out the ball and stuffed it up a sleeve. “Nothing to see here, mister,” he winks, turning over each cup. Now in this case, the ball is a question—a question that screams the moment you give Jillette’s statement a second read. And it’s this: who gets to define what good is?

Built into Jillette’s pronouncement is the assumption that rape and murder are bad, whilst helping old ladies across the road, giving money to charity, and rehoming kittens is good. But hang on a moment: who gets to decide? If atheism is true, then nothing is inherently good or bad—things just are. Rather, what we have are a set of labels (“Good”, “Bad” and “Neutral”) and a list of human actions. Who gets to decide which sticker gets stuck on what action?

There are really only two choices: either every individual gets to decide for themselves what is “good”, or we have to defer to something like the state. But in either case, all we have are personal preferences: yours, mine, or the majority’s.3 Thus Jillette’s bumper sticker of an idea (“Atheists Can Do Good Without God”) simply collapses into “Atheists Can Do Whatever They Want Without God”. All he’s done is a classic piece of misdirection, distracting us from the most important question of all: what does the good life actually look like?

Well, then, how do we decide what counts as “good” in the first place? In most contexts, we answer that question by addressing the issue of purpose. Consider a watch, for instance. How do I decide whether my watch is a good one or a bad one?4 Suppose I take my watch and try to hammer in nails with it, breaking it in the process? Does this make it a bad watch? No, because I have misunderstood its purpose, which is not to hammer nails but to tell the time. We determine whether a watch is a good watch by how well it tells the time, by whether it does what it was designed to do, by how successfully it aligns to its purpose.

So what about human beings? Is there something we were designed to be, do we have a purpose? The message of Christianity is that yes, there is: our purpose is to know God, to be in relationship with him. As God transforms us, as we live out what it means to be a “new creation”, as the Bible puts it, then our lives and our character reflect that relationship. We become who we were intended to be: not good because we hope that God may then love us, but good because he loves us and has forgiven us. On the other hand, if the atheism to which Jillette adheres so passionately is true, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of another well-known atheist, Lawrence Krauss, who remarked:

We are a 1 percent bit of pollution within the universe. We are completely insignificant.5

If Krauss is correct, it would seem to follow that rape, murder and pillage are perfectly okay: after all, what one piece of pollutant does to another hardly matters, does it?

Most people’s natural reaction when they see a good magic trick is to ask: “How was it done?” And the problem is that the answer is always mind-numbingly banal. The woman is sawn in two, right before your eyes, and you’re amazed. You then discover the method and you’re disappointed at the simplicity.

The same holds for Jillette’s attempt to construct a godless morality. It looks clever and sophisticated, but then the veil is drawn back and you see how it was done, namely by sidestepping the very question that matters the most: what do “good” and “evil” actually mean in the first place? When it comes to magic and illusion, a good trick is a good trick because it achieves its purpose: it entertains. But when a trick obfuscates, hides, or manipulates, I think it’s a bad one. Excuse me, Mr. Jillette, but you appear to have a metaphysical ball up your sleeve.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider subscribing. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you.

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The date was 10 March 1748; the location was the Atlantic ocean. The winds that had been building for days had finally exploded with violent ferocity and in the midst of a crashing gale with waves as tall as buildings, a wooden merchant ship called The Greyhound was struggling to stay afloat. The storm had already wrecked huge sections of the ship, even punching a hole in its side. As flood waters raced through the breach, crew members worked feverishly to patch the hole whilst others desperately manned the pumps. Some unfortunates screamed in terror as they were swept overboard, along with much of the provisions. The end looked near and it was surely just a matter of time before the ship was consumed by a hungry sea. But for one man in particular, this storm was to prove even more significant, for it would mark a radical and dramatic turning point in his life. That man was John Newton.

Many people have heard of John Newton for one reason alone: his penning of arguably the world’s most famous, most recorded, most regularly sung hymn: Amazing Grace. What few people realise is how astonishingly autobiographical that song is. The first verse runs like this:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound;
that saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost but now am found;
was blind but now I see.

In this essay, we’ll take a look at the life of John Newton. We’ll explore how he sunk to the lowest of lows, how God dramatically broke through into his life—and how Newton then drew upon his experiences to develop a ministry that combined preaching, publishing, apologetics, politics and hymn writing: Newton has been described as one of the most significant evangelical Christians of his own and indeed any era. His story is a powerful illustration of how dramatically God can turn around even the most wretched of lives.

Early Life: The Making of a “Wretch Like Me”

John Newton was born on 24 July 1725 at Wapping in London’s East End, an area dominated by shipping. John’s father was a commander on merchant ships plying the Mediterranean, which led him to be away for long periods, contributing to the very distant relationship John had with him. John was, however, very close to his mother, Elizabeth, a deeply religious woman, who made her son’s moral and spiritual education a priority. There were other early influences on Newton, too; their church minister was an excellent preacher to whose sermons John was drawn. The famous hymn writer, Isaac Watts, also visited their church, illustrating his sermons with hymns. This was a radical idea for the day and one that would later influence Newton.

But tragedy soon struck, for Elizabeth Newton died suddenly when John was just seven. His father quickly remarried, had more children and John was slowly sidelined. He soon drifted into bad company, hanging out (as he would later put it) with “careless and profane children” until finally he was sent away to boarding school. None of this helped the relationship with his father and despite his father taking John on several sea voyages as a teenager, their relationship remained distant and unemotional. Whilst at sea, John’s spirituality began to wither. His father had drummed into him the importance of an iron self-discipline and John mistakenly applied this model to his relationship to God; the result was a series of massive swings between great religiosity and utter disinterest. Periods of being very devout would collapse into utter moral failure, guilt would then lead him to try to win back God’s approval by controlling his appetites, that would fail, and the cycle would begin again. Newton went to amazing lengths during his devout periods: he became a vegetarian and for a time avoided all conversation so as to avoid saying sinful things. But as he would later reflect, there was a basic problem: “I loved sin”, he wrote, “and was unwilling to forsake it”.

Newton’s life changed dramatically in March 1744. Failing to turn up for a job interview his father had arranged, he took off instead to see his childhood sweetheart but ran into a Royal Navy press gang. Press gangs were naval platoons sent ashore to seize men for military service and a fit young man like Newton, with seafaring experience, was an ideal catch, especially as England was on the verge of war with France. Newton joined HMS Harwich and soon saw action. On-board he made two friends: a Christian, Job Lewis and a “freethinker” called James Mitchell, who chipped away at what little faith Newton had left. He soon swung from apathetic to actively atheistic, taking out his hostility on Job Lewis by constantly attacking his faith. Newton’s character deteriorated and he became increasingly rebellious, eventually deserting his ship. Arrested, returned to the Harwich in chains, publicly flogged and demoted, Newton blamed everybody other than himself for his fall. He regularly contemplated murdering his Captain; although he knew this would result in execution, his atheism meant he saw death as mere extinction. Newton wrote: “I was as miserable on all hands as could well be imagined. My breast was filled with the most excruciating passions, eager desire, bitter rage, and black despair.”

Finally Newton’s luck seemed to be on the turn. On 9 May 1745, he was sleeping in late in his hammock, ignoring the wake-up whistle of the bosun. A passing midshipman decided to deal with this insubordination by slashing the ropes of the hammock, sending Newton crashing to the floor. Arriving on deck, Newton saw some fellow sailors being loaded in a rowing boat—he enquired and found they were being exchanged with some sailors from a civilian trading ship. Desperate to escape the navy, Newton pleaded with the Captain and his lieutenants to exchange him. Possibly more through the chance to rid himself of a rebellious crew member than through compassion, the Captain agreed and Newton was exchanged. He was now a member of the crew of the Pegasus—a slave ship, bound for Sierra Leone. Newton had entered the slave trade.

Despite this good fortune and his new captain treating him well, Newton continued to be vile and rebellious as ever. He defied authority, refused duties, composed rude songs about the captain, blasphemed horribly and mocked Christian crew members. He may also have sexually abused female slaves, writing in his journal that he was “slave to every customary vice”.

But then ill-fortune struck again. His captain died and was replaced by the first mate—a man who utterly hated Newton. Newton took the first opportunity to leave the Pegasus, remaining in Africa to work for an English slaver on Plantain Island, a small island off the coast of Sierra Leone. But the trader had an African mistress who instantly disliked Newton. Whilst the trader was away inland on a trip, Newton fell ill and she abused him horribly, denying him food and encouraging her own slaves to pelt him with rubbish. After his master returned, things briefly improved, until another slaver lied about Newton and his master chained him to a boat deck, leaving him with just a bowl of rice for days at a time. Exposed to blistering heat by day and storms at night, Newton’s health collapsed, and, as he wrote later, “my pride was also humbled”. The worst moment of his life, he was lower even than the slaves, a wretch who, like the Prodigal Son, had been brought low by his own poor choices.

During his months in Africa, Newton had managed to write letters back home, imploring his father to rescue him. Finally a letter made it through and his father contacted an old friend, Joseph Manesty, who alerted his Africa-bound slave ships to lookout for Newton. In February 1748 Newton was discovered by The Greyhound. But by this time, Newton’s fortunes had turned and he was reluctant to leave: the ship’s captain had to concoct a story about a large inheritance awaiting back home to persuade Newton aboard. Believing that finally he had enough money to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mary, Newton agreed to return to England.

Despite his later talk of his African experiences having humbled him, Newton initially showed little gratitude at his rescue. Soon he was cursing, blaspheming and drinking heavily. He held drinking contests, the winner being the last man standing. Yet providence continued to provide: on one occasion, utterly drunk, Newton almost fell into the ocean and drowned, only saved by a quick-witted crew member grabbing him at the very last moment. Another time, he and some friends went inland hunting and got utterly lost, ending up wandering waist deep in a swamp whilst all around the roars of wild animals punctuated the night. Suddenly the clouds parted and the moon glinted on the sea, allowing them to find their way. Yet despite all this, Newton refused to see the hand of God at work.

Conversion

Then in March 1748, Newton stumbled across a copy of the classic devotional work, The Imitation of Christ. Despite his hatred of religion, he began to read and was increasingly disturbed by the question: what if these things are true? This worried him profoundly: if they were true, he was doomed. Newton tried to push the question aside and distract himself, but the question kept nagging. Then, one night, The Greyhound was hit by the storm to end all storms.

In the midst of the storm, Newton caught himself saying to the captain after they’d plugged another hole: “If this will not do the Lord have mercy on us”. His flippant words suddenly struck him: what mercy could a sinner like him actually expect? The next day, as the storm continued, Newton took the helm for eleven hours and had time to reflect on his life: his immorality, his blasphemy, his rebellion. Newton wrote: “I thought there never was such a sinner as myself. I concluded at first that my sins were too great to be forgiven.” Finally the storm subsided and the battle to save The Greyhound was won. Exhausted and relieved, Newton actually prayed: not a prayer of repentance by any means, but it was a start. One thing that concerned him was authenticity: he wanted to know Christianity was true, not to turn to it because he wished it to be true. Newton decided to put it to the test: he would pray, ask for God’s Spirit to fill him, then live as if it were true: “The truth would be in the living”.

A few days later, the battered ship arrived safely in Ireland, hours before a second major storm hit. This alone convinced Newton that God answered prayer. For the first time in years, Newton visited a church and prayed, dedicating himself to serving God. Providence was again watching over him: on a shooting trip with the town mayor a few days later, a gun accidentally discharged, missing Newton but setting fire to his hat.

Back in England, changes to his character began to come in answer to his prayer, albeit slowly and painfully; his old habits died hard. Nor did Newton at first grasp the social implications of his new found faith and so he saw nothing wrong with slavery. Not least, slavery was a highly lucrative career. He returned to the seas and to slave trading in Africa, but with no Christian friends suffered a “rain of temptations”. But, unlike in his youth, Newton had grasped an important lesson: what he needed was divine grace, not renewed intentions, so he “cast himself on the Lord” and found peace and improvement in health and character. Returning again to England, Newton finally wed Mary, his childhood sweetheart, and was promoted to the rank of captain. He was an unsual figure, unlike the usual slave traders, seeing part of his role as the spiritual formation of his crew. He prayed for an hour or two twice a day, insisted his crew attended a service on Sundays and began to write prayers for his men, as the Book of Common Prayer was too complex—this was the beginning of Newton the hymn writer, keen to communicate Christian truths in ordinary language.

Around this time, Newton met another captain, Alex Clunie, an active Christian. Strong Christian fellowship was what Newton had been desperately seeking so over the time Clunie and he worked together, they met regularly to study, talk and pray. Clunie had the gift of explaining complex theology very simply and he had a profound influence on Newton, in particular helping him to see the difference between living ‘Gospel Christianity’ and dead traditionalism.

From Slave-Ship Captain to Anglican Minister

Eventually Newton’s health, damaged by his time on Plantain Island, began to fail and his time at sea came to an end. Newton took a job as tide surveyor, responsible for taxing ships coming in and out of Liverpool. His experience of Christians broadened and he heard and met men like George Whitefield—Newton himself began to receive invitations to preach and he soon became convinced that God was calling him to full-time ministry. In 1758, he decided to pursue Anglican ordination and he approached the Archbishop of York, but was rebuffed as he hadn’t had a university education. But a friendly Baptist minister encouraged him to write his story down and circulate it. A copy of Newton’s “spiritual autobiography” was seen by Lord Dartmouth, a wealthy landowner and influential evangelical, who was extremely impressed: as a large landowner, Lord Dartmouth had the right to appoint the vicar in the village of Olney and so in 1764 John Newton became vicar of St. Peter & St. Paul Church.

Church ministry suited Newton’s character, gifting and temperament. The congregation grew rapidly under his leadership and soon there was demand for more than just a Sunday meeting. Newton added prayer meetings, a mid-week lecture and a time of hymn-singing after church on Sundays, an event that proved so popular that Newton was forced to issue tickets! He also organised special children’s meetings, a precursor to the Sunday school movement. But it was his skill at hymn writing, aided by his friend, the poet William Cowper, that was to prove one of his greatest legacies. Hymn singing was a hallmark of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival, a movement of which the wider Church of England was deeply suspicious. The Church said only metrical psalms could be sung, but Newton and others challenged this, Newton wanting to use hymns to communicate complex truth to people. Hymns, he wrote, are “for the use of plain people. Perspicuity, simplicity, and ease, should be chiefly attended to.” Newton aimed to write a new hymn every week to fit his sermon and it was as part of this pattern that Amazing Grace was first penned, probably in late December 1772.

In February 1779, Newton moved from Olney in Buckinghamshire to the bigger church of St. Mary’s Woolnoth in London’s Lombard Street. His reputation had grown, aided by his bestselling biography, and also by the publication of his hymns. In London, Newton’s public image grew yet further and he began to take an interest in politics, especially in the growing anti-slavery campaign, many of the loudest voices within which were evangelical Christians. But one political contact in particular was to prove extremely significant: William Wilberforce, son of an old family friend.

Wilberforce had been raised a Christian, but after becoming a Member of Parliament aged just 21 quickly became a topic of media discussion. Wilberforce was rich, powerful, witty, a singer, a dancer, a card player, an impressionist, and a friend of royals. Newton suspected that Wilberforce’s Christian faith had “worn off”. But after five years in politics, one summer Wilberforce went travelling in Europe with a Christian friend, read the New Testament in Greek and a desire to know God was re-awakened. Wilberforce considered getting back in touch with his old family friend, John Newton, but hesitated—it could be damaging to his career to be seen associating with a religious enthusiast. Finally, Wilberforce quietly dropped a note through Newton’s door, asking for a meeting.

On the evening 7 December 1785, after repeatedly walking around the square outside Newton’s home several times, constantly changing his mind, finally Wilberforce summoned his nerve and knocked on Newton’s door. Wilberforce’s mind was awash with questions: should he abandon his society friends? Give all his wealth away? Leave politics and enter the church? He was shocked by Newton’s answers—in Newton’s opinion, Wilberforce could be far more effective for God by remaining in politics and using the influence and contacts that he had. Over the next year, Wilberforce worked hard on integrating his faith and his politics, staying in constant touch with Newton. Beginning with a campaign to improve the moral decay he saw all around, Wilberforce was soon contacted by the anti-slavery movement, who were struggling to find access to those in power. They needed a high profile MP and Wilberforce was an obvious choice. Eventually he was persuaded and on 28 October 1787 Wilberforce wrote in his journal: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of Manners”.

Wilberforce’s excitement motivated Newton to take a stand and in 1788 Newton published an essay, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade which was utterly condemnatory, claiming that the slave trade brutalized and dehumanized all involved, slaves and owners. Drawing from the story of his own career, Newton spoke of the rape, torture and brutality inflicted on slaves, telling, as just one horrific example among many, of a sailor who threw a baby overboard because it was crying. Meanwhile, Wilberforce and his colleagues worked within parliament and in 1788, the Trade Committee of the Privy Council convened and interviewed those with first-hand experience of the trade; John Newton’s testimony made a tremendous impression. Yet powerful voices continued to argue against abolition: it would ruin the British economy and destroy cities like Liverpool. Lord Heathfield even tried to argue that slaves had more cubic feet of space than soldiers in their tents! On hearing the argument that African slaves were much happier than if they’d been left in Africa, Wilberforce wittily retorted: “Be it so. But we have no right to make people happy against their will.” Finally in 1789 the Privy Council published its report and Wilberforce put forward a bill in the House of Commons for the formal abolition of the slave trade.

In the midst of all this politics, one final tragedy struck Newton: his beloved wife died on 15 December 1790. This was the toughest test his faith had ever faced: his love for Mary had been absolutely central to his life and Newton had always hoped he would die first. Yet he’d preached about how trials were an opportunity to show the power of divine grace and now he had to live this out—the proof was, once again, in the living. Newton found a source of strength that he would never have imagined existed, writing in his journal: “The Lord, the all-sufficient God, can give strength according to the day.”

Meanwhile, the anti-slavery bill was facing stiff opposition in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It had suffered defeat, had been amended and now apathy was beginning to set in even among its supporters. But it was Newton’s constant prayer that he would live to see it pass and God was gracious once again: in May 1804 Wilberforce finally got the bill passed; it would take another three years before it became law on 25 March 1807. Newton’s prayer had been answered, his life’s work complete and on 21 December 1807, Newton passed away. To one of his final visitors Newton said these now famous words: “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great saviour.”

The Heart of Newton’s faith

The story of John Newton is more than just another conversion story, the tale of a life dramatically turned around by God’s love and grace. Yes, all that is true. But Newton’s faith was also marked by a number of emphases that are as vital today as they were in Newton’s day.

First, Newton was constantly aware both of what he had been saved from and what he was saved to. For example, Newton constantly referred back to his time on Plantain Island in his preaching and writing, saying that whenever he was tempted to hold himself in too high esteem, he would remember how low he had once sunk.

Newton’s life was marked by faith, humility and gratitude—he knew who God was, he knew who he was, and he never forgot just what he’d been saved from. But he also grasped that Christianity is not just about salvation from but salvation to. Once he felt the call of God to preach and teach and write, Newton held nothing back, throwing himself into service and investing time and energy in the lives of his congregation and his friends, not least the poet William Cowper, who would probably have committed an early suicide had not Newton been constantly there for him.

Second, Newton developed an astonishing personal spirituality and prayer life. In this age of quick and easy answers, of short-cut spiritualities and a profound shallowness in parts of the Church, Newton is a challenge to us all. He prayed for hours a day, he immersed himself in the Bible, and he read widely.

But nor was Newton some kind of monastic recluse: he threw himself wholeheartedly into life, seeking to bring his faith to bear in whatever circles of influence he found himself in: church, society, media and politics. His was a truly wholistic approach to ministry: Newton saw his task as a Christian to preach evangelistically, disciple and mentor, engage in pastoral care, social action, political activism—there was no “sacred/secular divide” for Newton. Arguably he was also an apologist, constantly looking for ways to communicate profound truth simply whether it was to the “plain folk” who attended his churches or those in society circles with whom he increasingly came into contact, especially during his time in London. This desire to communicate clearly drove his hymn writing—for he was far ahead of his time in seeing the vital need for Christians to think through ways to connect with the common man.

Lessons for Today

There are many lessons that can be drawn from the life of John Newton. First, an encouragement: God can save even the most apparently lost of souls. None of the contemporaries of the younger Newton—who was rebellious, arrogantly atheistic, a drunkard and sexual deviant—could possibly have foreseen just how dramatically his life would turn around. If God can rescue a Newton, could we have faith that he might yet reach the unbelieving friend, colleague or family member who we could never imagine finding Christ? The story of John Newton shows that God is able, if he wishes, to touch even the hardest of human hearts.

Second, a warning, for the younger Newton’s life shows how easy it is for one to drift from a veneer of religiosity into atheism. In particular, Newton made the mistake of grounding his early Christianity purely on self-improvement, self-denial, and sheer effort; a teetering edifice that collapsed at the slightest pressure. The lesson of his later conversion and a theme that dominated his preaching and hymn writing was the importance of grace. Again, this is a lesson we sometimes forget at our peril.

The third lesson one might draw from Newton’s life is that conversion is often a process. Whilst that dramatic storm of 10 March 1748 was the turning point for Newton, God had already been at work in his life—the many examples of divine providence, childhood influences, his “accidental” picking up of The Imitation of Christ. But one might push this further and say that before John Newton could be amazed by grace, he first had to plumb the depths of rebellion, despair, and wretchedness. God, the Grand Weaver, sometimes takes many years to draw all of his threads together.

Fourth, one might note how well John Newton’s life demonstrates that the chief obstacle often standing between us and God is not always intellectual but is often personal pride. Newton was arrogant, self-confident, bristled at discipline and, as he himself put it, loved sin. Pride, self-sufficiency, and the desire for moral autonomy can be a toxic combination.

Fifth, Newton’s life demonstrates the importance of discipleship and mentoring—Newton’s life is replete with unsung heroes, whose cumulative effect on his life was profound. One might mention the childhood influences: his godly mother, his pastor, and Isaac Watts who laid a foundation that many years later, Newton could build upon. And after his conversion, Alex Clunie, the fellow ship captain and Christian who infused Newton with a love of scripture and of prayer was a hugely significant influence.

What can we conclude from this? Namely that the impact we can have on those around us is profound, even if we cannot see the immediate fruits. Elizabeth Newton never lived to see her son’s discovery of faith and his amazing ministry—but without her, it is possible Newton would never have eventually found Christ. Likewise, we may never know who we are sharing the gospel with, praying for, showing love and compassion to—and there is often a multiplier effect at work as we faithfully obey God’s call and serve others. Newton himself modelled this, with his support of his friend William Cowper and the discipleship of William Wilberforce. Without Newton, we would have had no Wilberforce and without Wilberforce, the abolition movement might have taken much longer to see slavery eradicated.

Concluding Thoughts

John Newton has been described as the second founder of the Church of England, so profound was the effect of his ministry. His life combined spiritual depths with great practical wisdom and he saw the need to have the gospel impact everything: the church, culture, the media and politics. But for all of his success, all of his fame and influence, Newton never forgot how deep was the pit from which God had rescued him. His epitaph at St. Peter & St. Paul Church in Olney sums up his attitude perfectly:

JOHN NEWTON, CLERK
ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE
A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS
BY THE RICH MERCY OF OUR
LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST
PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED
AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE
HAD LONG LABOURED TO DESTROY

His was truly a life lost and found.

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Join me as each week I read part of a chapter from The Lord of the Rings and talk about some of the great themes that Tolkien addresses.

Find it on my YouTube channel here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF83cVcd74ZE&si=eNwwcpPZbkUSaOu8

A couple of years ago, some good friends of ours suffered a devastating house fire. They awoke at 3am to the smell of smoke, discovered a kitchen blaze that had already spread to the lounge and the hall, and so they grabbed their kids, the cat, two guinea pigs, and (at the insistence of their six-year-old) a glass tank containing three stick insects, and fled to the safety of a neighbour’s house, from where they called the fire brigade. By the time two fire engines had arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing, it was too late—the fire had taken hold and although the hoses doused the flames, almost everything was destroyed. “We lost virtually every possession,” our friends said afterwards, “but at least nobody was hurt. Not even a stick insect was left behind.”

Our friends’ experience got me thinking, not least about the virtue of pets who can find their own way to safety in an emergency. It especially got me thinking about the question: if my own house were to catch fire, what would I save? If, after rescuing my wife, kids, and pet hamster I had the time to pull one thing from the flames, what would it be? Would I save the TV, our family photo albums, or our collection of novelty teapots?

No, I think my first instinct as a bibliophile would be to try to save my library. The only problem there is that I have an eclectic collection of over 3,000 books crammed onto my shelves (my wife thinks that a small, self-contained, one-room fire could save us a fortune next time we move house). So I guess I would have to pick one book to rescue before the flames took hold.

And my choice would be easy: I would retrieve the most expensive book I own. A book that I paid almost £300 for some ten years ago. A book that most readers have probably never heard of: The Assault on Mount Everest 1922. It’s an exciting report of the second British expedition to Mount Everest, full of thrills, tension, and drama—and as an avid student of mountaineering history, I bought this first edition copy and it has pride of place on my shelves.1 The book is especially valuable because stuck inside it is a postcard that I paid an additional £50 for around the same time—a postcard that was actually sent from the advanced base camp on the 1924 Everest expedition.

Now I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t that a lot of money to pay for a dusty second-hand book and a faded old postcard? And on one level you’d be right: the postcard is merely a piece of cardboard and the book, just a collection of pages, yellowed with age. But I was willing to pay that price because the book and the postcard were valuable to me.

Interestingly, this is actually a basic principle of economics: namely that value is not intrinsic to something, but is determined by what somebody is prepared to pay. Consider a more modern example—a digital tablet. Perhaps some of you are reading this essay on an iPad, for instance, safe in the knowledge that if I start boring you, you can play Angry Politicians or Candy Crush Kardashians or something. You probably paid a lot of money for your iPad and why? Because it’s useful to you: perhaps for email, web browsing, work, or—if you’re like me—playing the occasional game while sitting on the toilet.

But think about this for a moment: your iPad isn’t intrinsically worth hundreds of pounds. That was simply what Apple believed people were prepared to pay. Take your iPad to a desert island, with no power, no WiFi, no phone reception and what would somebody pay? Probably very little, for aside from making a fancy glass chopping board for seafood, your iPad would be useless.

Value is not intrinsic or inherent to something—whether it’s a book or a gadget or anything—rather value is purely determined by what somebody is prepared to pay.

Which raises a fascinating question: what then of human value? Deeply ingrained in our culture is the belief that human beings have fundamental value, intrinsic worth, that humans are priceless and precious. The whole edifice of human rights, for example, is built upon this idea. But where is human value located?

Once you ask “Why do humans have value?” you quickly run into difficulties. After all, if you consider the stuff of which we’re made, the chemical parts—so much iron, so much carbon, so much fat (too much, in my case)—it’s been calculated that the typical human being is worth about £37.50. Nowhere near enough to purchase an iPad or a first edition book, not even enough for a historic postcard.

Thankfully nobody actually thinks the worth of a human being can be discerned by considering the stuff we’re made from. Or do they? Actually, many famous atheist thinkers throughout history have made precisely this claim. For example, Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA in 1953, wrote:

Your joy and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’.”2

Whilst theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, put it even more bluntly:

We are a 1 percent bit of pollution within the universe. We are completely insignificant.3

If I had the time and was feeling of a nihilistic frame of mind, there are plenty more similar statements by other atheist intellectuals I could cite, but that would be a bit depressing. Rather let’s at least commend the attempt of Crick and Krauss to be honest about the implications of their atheism for human value whilst pointing out that it would be a very brave person who tried this idea out in the real world. Whether it’s the war in Ukraine or Gaza, or the genocide of the Uyghurs, or sexual trafficking, or poverty, simply shrugging and saying “What does it matter if a bit of pollution or a collection of neurons suffers in some way?” is going to get you about as far as trying to scale Mount Everest whilst wearing nothing but swimming trunks and using a toothpick as an ice-axe.

By contrast, the Bible has something very different to say about human value. Remember what we discovered about value not being intrinsic, but instead being conferred by what somebody is prepared to pay? So what was somebody prepared to pay for you and I, for each and every one of us, no matter our background, status, race, or sex? The Bible answers that very question directly:

God demonstrates his own love for us in this—while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

In other words, the Bible says, God was prepared to pay the life of his son, Jesus Christ, for us—an incredibly costly, infinitely high price—for each one of us, even while we were God’s enemies, in outright rebellion against the one who created us and loves us. That price that God was prepared to pay gives a tremendous basis for human value—and therefore a foundation for human rights, justice, and dignity.

Reflecting on the challenge for atheists in trying to come up with a basis for human value that does not depend upon God, the Australian atheist Raimond Gaita made this powerful observation:

We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious … that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course, that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgment these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it. Be that as it may: each is problematic and contentious. Not one of them has the simple power of the religious ways of speaking.4

More recently, in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, secular historian Tom Holland sets out in considerable detail just how much of what we take for granted about human value has thoroughly Christian roots. For all of its attempts to be secular and post-Christian, the West is deeply Christian in its convictions about human personhood. Tom writes:

Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world.5

Next time you see a story in the news about justice, or your friend or colleague speaks positively about human rights, or you see somebody suffering and you instinctively think “That’s not right!” pause for a moment and ask yourself where human value is located. Then reflect on the starkness of the choices of answer on offer: if atheism is true, then human value is a fiction; perhaps a beautiful fiction, a lie breathed through silver even,6 but an untruth none the less. Whereas if Christianity is true, then human beings are not merely the stuff of which we are made, but are people infinitely precious, bearing value and worth because of what God was willing to pay for each one of us.

As an atheist friend once remarked to me in an unguarded moment: “I can’t escape the conclusion that even though I don’t believe in Christianity, I increasingly want it to be true, because if it isn’t, the consequences are utterly depressing and horrific.” To which I replied: maybe it’s therefore time to give the evidence for Christianity a much deeper look.

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At the time, I had no idea how magical my childhood was, or how fortunate a child I was. Not because I grew up surrounded by wealth and riches, far from it; but because I grew up surrounded by books. My parents were voracious readers and the highlight of my week was Wednesday evening, when I would go with my father to the local library, a cavernous Victorian Gothic building, and be let loose for an hour or two. He would always disappear into the transport or history sections; I would make a beeline for fantasy.

By the time I hit my teens I had worked my way through the usual suspects—from C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to the vastly underrated Alan Garner, who by setting his myths in real world locations re-enchanted the English landscape of Cheshire in the way that Tolkien re-enchanted language.

Then came the day when I stumbled across a copy of T. H. White’s wild and wonderful (and occasionally wacky) retelling of the Arthurian stories, The Once and Future King and the world of older myths opened up to me. I can still remember the sheer thrill when I was fifteen of visiting Glastonbury and coming home with a copy of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

If manners maketh the man, as the saying goes, I think that books maketh the child and I am hugely grateful that my imagination was thoroughly baptised in stories throughout my formative years. It’s probably one reason why as an adult I have found that the most compelling arguments for Christianity are those that point to our deepest desires for meaning, purpose, beauty, and goodness.

I’m also reminded of something that C. S. Lewis once said, namely that we should regularly read old books and old stories, because we need a counterpoint to our current moment, a window through which we can gaze upon another age—and in so doing, see our own more clearly. Given that we cannot see into the future, we can look to the past—because although our ancestors made mistakes, they made different mistakes to the ones we are currently engaged in.

But there is something deeper, too, namely that myths, legends, and fairy stories aren’t just for children; they’re not easy escapism, quite the opposite. The reason why the oldest stories have been passed down and retold for centuries, millennia even, is because they tell us truths that we are in danger of forgetting at our peril. Truths about ourselves, about the world, and about the deepest meanings that lie behind it.

All of which brings me, by a long and winding road, to Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, the first of a planned four-book epic retelling, in ballad form, of the Arthur stories. If you haven’t yet discovered Malcolm, he is a gifted poet and writer who has also elevated eccentricity to an art form. Indeed, he looks the very part of the medieval wandering minstrel, with a beard that has its own postcode and a pipe constantly in place. His plan is for his “Arthuriad” to be the culmination of a life’s work helping people rediscover the beauty of words, poetry, and story.

And the Arthur story is ripe for retelling because it has in many ways been lost. Not lost as in ‘down the back of the sofa’ but lost as in buried behind Hollywood action movie stereotypes, cheesy merchandising and, well, the less said about Monty Python and the Holy Grail (much as I laughed), the better. The real Arthur stories—wild, dangerous, mysterious, and above all, ancient—have been lost behind all of that cultural clutter.

That loss has been compounded by other things, too. First, the fact that in the West we don’t know what to do with myth (the very word has simply become a synonym for ‘not true’). We’ve become thorough-going materialists, the sword of meaning forever buried in the stone of scientism, and the idea that there might be a bigger story to reality than just that told by physics has been disenchanted out of us.

But then, second, the Arthur story lost its power when it became de-Christianised; partly because of a secularisation that didn’t want even the hint of a divine foot in the door, but ironically also because Christians became suspicious of anything that smelt even remotely of paganism.

Malcolm Guite has no time for either of those dead-ends and Galahad and the Grail is his magnificent riposte to both of them. First, because he’s wisely seen that story is a powerful way to point people to the vital idea that we live in a world infused with meaning. (And once you realise this, that naturally leads to questions like “who put that meaning there?”) Indeed, as I read Galahad and the Grail I heard those words of C. S. Lewis echoing in my mind:

Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.1

While when it comes to the Christian-ness (if we might call it that) of these stories, Malcolm writes, in the appendix to Galahad and the Grail:

The stories that first moved me were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing: haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws. At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself: the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and the faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories.2

But the power of Galahad and the Grail comes not just from the story that it retells, it also comes from the form in which Malcolm has chosen to cast that story; namely poetic English ballad.

When I first heard of the book I confess that this aspect caused me to ignore it for a while. I’d long said things like “I don’t do poetry”, probably due to being beaten around the head with poetry as a schoolboy and made to feel stupid for not ‘getting it’. But one wet afternoon between talks I was giving in Cambridge, I happened upon a copy of Galahad and the Grail and with a “well-let’s-see-what-all-the-fuss-is-about” air to me, picked it up and cracked it open.

I was hooked from the first page. Not merely is it a beautiful book, from the quality of the binding and the print to the incredible illustrations by Stephen Crotts, but the poetry wasn’t like the half-remembered stuffy stanzas from my school days; this was ballad, this was epic verse, the scale of the story and the beauty of the words melding as one.

Rather than a hindrance, the poetry of Galahad and the Grail is an inspired choice, because the rhyming, rhythmic form of the verse adds whole new depths to the story. Prose can at times be somewhat two-dimensional, compared to, say, music where a composer has so many more tools at her disposal: pitch, tone, etc. But with ballad, a story can be lifted into something closer to that musical register, especially when read aloud. Listen to these opening lines from Galahad and the Grail:3

As I walked out one morning
all in the soft fine rain,
it seemed as though a silver veil
was shining over hill and vale,
as though some lovely long-lost spell
had made all new again.

And through that shimmer in the air
I seemed to hear a sound,
as though a distant horn were blown
in some lost land that I had known,
that seemed to speak from tree and stone
and echo all around.

And with the music came these words:
“Poet, take up the tale!
Take up the tale this land still keeps,
in earth and water magic sleeps,
the dryad sighs, the naiad weeps,
but you can lift the veil.

From where the waves wash Cornwall’s caves
out to the white horse vale,
the lands still hold the tale of old
like hidden treasure, buried gold.
Once more the story must be told.
Poet, take up the tale.

Tell of the king who will return,
tell of the Holy Grail,
tell of old knights and chivalry,
tell of the pristine mystery,
of Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye.
Poet, take up the tale.

Take up the tale of courtesy,
take up the tale of grace.
Revive the land’s long memory,
summon the fair folk, let them be.
Something of Faerie, wild and free
still lingers in this place.

Lift up your eyes to see the light
on Glastonbury Tor.
Then come down from that far green hill
to where the sacred waters spill
and shine within the chalice well
and listen to their lore.

Yea, listen well before you start,
be still ere you begin.
See through the surface round about—
the noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt.
Though Modern Britain lies without,
fair Logres lives within.

You may yet walk through Merlin’s Isle,
by Oak and Ash and Thorn.
The ancient hills do not forget
and you might wake their wisdom yet.
Who knows what wonders might be met
on this midsummer morn.”

So I have taken up the tale
to tell it full and free.
The tale that makes my heart rejoice,
I tell it, for I have no choice—
I tell it till another voice
takes up the tale from me.

As you read those words—especially if you read them out loud—you’re immediately drawn into the world that Malcolm is building. There’s also a beautiful nod to the tradition in which he’s writing and retelling the tale, for others—Thomas Malory, Roger Lancelyn Green, T. H. White and more—have told the tale before him. But rather than ignore that, Galahad and the Grail deliberately acknowledges what it is doing, namely standing in a long tradition of storytelling.

There is also some beautiful foreshadowing in those opening lines of where this story will go. Because the story of the grail quest is not some knights-whacking-each-other-with-swords-and-swinging-from-chandeliers Hollywood pastiche. But this is a story about hope and memory, love and loss, pride and arrogance, fall and restoration. A story above all about how God has reached down into the world, both its high places and its wastelands, to offer in Jesus not just an epic idea, because we fall short of those; but himself and his presence.

With Galahad and the Grail, Malcolm Guite has given us a gift—and not just a literary achievement that will, in time I believe, sit up there with the likes of Tolkien and Lewis. But Malcolm has written a book that is incredibly timely because, in a disenchanted world, so many of us need our imaginations rekindling and re-exciting with the idea that this world is saturated in meaning.

For those who are seekers and searchers, longing for meaning and who do not sit happily with shallow claims like “atoms are all there is, live with it!”, Galahad and the Grail will help your spirit soar and point you to a bigger story, beyond grails and knights, but to which those things are signposts. And for Christians: maybe it will lift the veil slightly and remind you that the Christian story is not just about you, Jesus, and a ticket to heaven, but is much bigger, wider, and deeper too; about just how deeply God loves his creation and what lengths he took to rescue it, enter into it, and infuse it with meaning.

If you’re in the USA, you can buy Galahad and the Grail from Rabbit Room Press. In the UK, it is published by Canterbury Press. (And if you wish to help send Jeff Bezos to space, it’s also on Amazon). The audiobook (read by Malcolm) is available on Audible. Finally, Malcolm’s YouTube channel, ‘A Spell in the Library’ is also well worth a visit.

Why are we still talking about C. S. Lewis, 63 years after his death? There were plenty of Christian leaders, theologians, and writers who were well known in his day yet their legacy has been nothing like that of Lewis. What is it about Lewis that has given him such longevity ensuring that his books still sell by the truckload today?

One reason is because Lewis developed an approach to sharing the Christian faith that is very, very unusual—in that he figured out how to address three very different types of audience: owls, elephants, and dragons.

Perhaps that was a little cryptic, so what do I mean by those three animal archetypes? By owls I mean people whose primary objection or stumbling block to the gospel is intellectual. By elephants, I refer to those whose primary objection or stumbling block is a heart, emotional, or existential issue. Finally, by dragons, we are talking of people who have no time for an argument but for whom an appeal to their imaginations can bear fruit.

Throughout his three decades of Christian work, Lewis’s apologetics1 and his public theology continually had these three dimensions to it: he addressed people’s minds, hearts, and imaginations. This three-dimensional aspect makes Lewis highly unusual, or at least very rare, in his and indeed in any period since.

In this essay, based on a talk I gave in Belfast for the C. S. Lewis Institute, we are going to explore what we can learn from C. S. Lewis. But before that, it can be helpful to consider the soil in which Lewis’s three-dimensional approach first grew.

THE MAKING OF A THREE-DIMENSIONAL APOLOGIST

C. S. Lewis’s three-dimensional approach to explaining the Christian faith is deeply rooted in his own story. Born in 1898 in Belfast to an austere religious family, as a boy Lewis would dutifully say his prayers and go to church, but he never had any real interest in God. Nevertheless, his was a happy childhood, with Lewis drawn from an early age to the love of nature and of reading.

But when he was ten years ”old, tragically Lewis’s idyllic childhood was shattered forever when his beloved mother died suddenly of cancer. Lewis’s view of God now took a turn for the worse; he had prayed unceasingly for his mother and yet she had died. Lewis wrote later that:

The trouble with God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.2

There then followed an unhappy schooling, as his grieving father packed Lewis and his brother Warnie off to a succession of horrible boarding schools. Throughout his teens, Lewis grew into a committed atheist, considering the religion of his childhood to have been “an illness of long standing”.

This atheism was reinforced by Lewis’s experiences in World War I, which left deep emotional scars and reinforced his atheistic views, especially about how evil disproved the existence of a good, powerful God. His best friend, Paddy Moore, was killed and then Lewis himself was invalided out of the army when a shell exploded next to him, blowing his sergeant to bits and wounding Lewis. In all of the horror of war, however, Lewis proudly boasted:

I never sank so low as to pray.3

So Lewis’s atheism began with issues of the heart—the existential crises of bereavement, loneliness, war, and violence. But there was also an intellectual aspect to his atheism. Much of this can be traced to the time when, aged 16, Lewis was taught by a private tutor, William Kirkpatrick, who had been his father’s old headmaster. Known as the ‘Great Knock’, Kirkpatrick was a staunch rationalist and atheist and he helped Lewis add reasons and arguments to his more experiential doubts about God.

In 1916, Lewis wrote to his close friend Arthur Greeves, stating that “I believe in no God” and asking:

Why would any intelligent person want to believe in a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever?”4

So Lewis’s atheism was founded on both reason and emotion, mind and heart. But when God began to draw Lewis back, it was through the third dimension, the imagination, that God initially spoke.

This journey began when Lewis discovered Christian writers, especially G. K. Chesterton, who started to make sense to him—and then there was something else. Lewis slowly began to realise, with horror at first, that all that he held dear made no sense if atheism was true. Lewis wanted to believe in goodness, in beauty, in meaning, things that he found woven deeply into the literature he loved. But if atheism was true, then the universe was ultimately empty, cold, and bereft of meaning.

So Lewis began a slow journey through a succession of worldviews, beginning by moving from atheism to idealism, from idealism to pantheism and then realising that, as he put it, ‘the least objectionable theory’ was to postulate some kind of God.5 The problem was, though, that the God who began to break into Lewis’ world wasn’t passive but was active and questing, banging on the door. Lewis later wrote:

Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God’. To me, as I was then, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.6

A few months later, the chase was over:

In the Trinity term I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.7

Although Lewis now believed in God, he was not yet a Christian, for he had no idea how Jesus fitted into the scheme of things. It was his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a deeply committed Catholic, who helped him work most of this out.

So all three dimensions—mind, heart, and imagination—had played a role in Lewis’s descent into atheism and his eventual reconversion. Which meant when Lewis found his calling as a Christian apologist, a moment we can trace to the invitation from the BBC in 1941 to prepare a series of radio talks on Christianity, Lewis instinctively knew the importance of using all three dimensions.

As Lewis’s writing career developed, those dimensions then played themselves out across the different styles of books he wrote. Consider works like Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, written primarily in ‘mind mode’. Then there are books like The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed, which work more in ‘heart mode’. Finally, there is Lewis’s fiction, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy, which Lewis wrote very much in the third register, the dimension of the imagination.

LEARNING FROM C. S. LEWIS

So what can we learn from Lewis’s three-dimensional approach? For those of us who are Christians, how can he help us engage our friends in conversations about Jesus? And for those of us who are seekers or spiritually curious, what did Lewis say in these three areas that might help us explore the Christian faith?

OWLS: THE MIND

Thinking about the type of person I have termed an ‘owl’, the kind of person for whom rational arguments and intellectual reasons are important, it goes without saying that Lewis could use this type of argument well. Think, for example, of his Argument from Reason—in which he argued that if our thoughts are just the results of blind, irrational forces, we can’t trust them to give us truth reliably.

Or, more accessibly, think of the argument in Mere Christianity that’s often known simply as the moral argument. Reflecting on his atheist days, Lewis observes:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.8

Or more formally:

1. If there is no God, objective morals, values and duties do not exist (all we have is human preference)

2. Objective morals, values and duties exist (anyone who had lived, like Lewis had, through the brutality of trench warfare had no time for the idea that hatred of war was just a mere preference).

3. Therefore, God exists. The conclusion follows naturally from the premises. Now at this point, some atheists might protest and say things like “You don’t need God to be good”. To which Lewis would gently but firmly respond: that is not the argument. Rather the argument is that if God does not exist, good and evil don’t exist either.

ELEPHANTS: THE HEART

I love a good argument, as I’m a philosopher by training. But for some people, their primary barrier to the gospel was never intellectual in the first place (as it wasn’t for C. S. Lewis). Even shown a powerful argument in which every step is watertight, they may still look at it and say “meh”. What is going on here?

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers the metaphor of a rider and an elephant to help explain how we make many of our judgements. We like to think we are making judgements by using careful reason, but really much of the time they’re instinctive. The Rider of Reason is sitting on top of the Elephant of Intuition—and whilst the rider can attempt to steer the elephant, much of the time the elephant will charge wherever it sees fit.

This is why it can sometimes be hard talking to people who hold a very different view to our own: we may think that our arguments are the bee’s knees, but our friend refuses even to consider them. The problem, Haidt would say, is that you’re appealing to the rider. Listen to Haidt’s advice—he’s talking in this example about moral discussions, but the same applies to conversations about faith:

When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favour, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants.9

For Christians, this is a reminder from a secular psychologist, of the words of the New Testament in 1 Peter 3:15:

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.

If we engage people with gentleness and respect, then they are far more likely to be drawn toward us, rather than veer away from us. I’m reminded, too, of Matthew 5, where Jesus talked about Christians being the “salt of the earth”. In the ancient world, before we’d discovered refrigerators and before fast-food restaurants had worked out how to make food out of plastic, salt had a vital role as a preservative. But in order to work that way, it had to be in contact with the thing it was supposed to preserve. And the same is true when it comes to Christianity. In their everyday lives, Christians need to be mixing with those we want to influence. If we’re so busy at church, for example, that we can’t do that, maybe we need to rethink some priorities.

But as well as our availability, when it comes to persuading people, our character and our manner are also important when we’re engaging with questions of the heart. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably put it like this:

Make [Christianity] attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.10

What Pascal is saying is that if you’re a Christian, you want to think about the manner in which you communicate and the story you tell, the picture you paint of what it looks like if Christianity is true. In other words, we can use Elephant Friendly Language, appeals that engage the heart as well as the mind.

This was also an approach that C. S. Lewis was familiar with. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis reflects on many experiences he had when he was young—in poetry, or in nature, or in beauty—that caused a yearning in him for something deeper. As he reflected on those experiences, Lewis realised they were aspects of the same thing:

An unsatisfied desire which is more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy.11

When he became a Christian, in part through pursuing this theme and where it led, Lewis developed an argument around this idea; it has come to be known as the Argument from Desire and we could set it out this way:12

1. Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.

2. There exists in us a desire which nothing in time, or on earth, no creature can satisfy.

3. Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy it.

The sceptic might grumble “well, we don’t always get what we want” but this is not the point. If I am hungry, I may not get food; perhaps it’s midnight, the refrigerator is empty, and all the stores are closed. Nevertheless, my being hungry surely proves that food exists. Lewis put it like this:

A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. We feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.13

This idea of deep desires within us for something more than this world is fairly universal across music, art and literature. For example, the French existentialist and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre famously remarked: “There comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, ‘Is that all there is?’”

DRAGONS: THE IMAGINATION

We’ve thought about owls: people for whom arguments are very significant. And we’ve considered elephants: those who will more likely move when we appeal to the heart. But there’s another type of person—one who is suspicious of such approaches and ready to resist them. Lewis was aware of them and wrote this:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.14

Lewis is playing with the idea that stories can do things that arguments—or even appeals to the heart and emotions—can’t do. Indeed, what happens if you try an appeal to the heart but the person simply doesn’t feel it? The answer is to try an approach via the imagination.

This is one reason why Lewis pivoted to writing stories, books like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy. It’s also why (despite disavowing allegory) Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is so powerful as a pointer to the gospel. Look at the way it explores themes like evil and the corruption of the heart, of sacrifice and redemption, and of rescue and salvation all through the lens of a story. Indeed, as Tolkien himself acknowledged in a letter to a friend:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision … the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.15

Indeed, I think it’s possible to take any story and look for gospel connections—not least because as Tolkien argues in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories, there is a sense in which all stories are in some ways an echo of the ‘one true story’. So if Christians can learn to begin with the stories our friends are watching and reading and gently ask “have you ever wondered what’s going on in this story?”, fascinating things can happen.16

Another way to do this is with your testimony—the story of how you became a Christian (and why you remain one); or, if you’re a spiritually curious seeker, the story of your journey so far can intrigue and engage people. These things are powerful because they’re a story, a narrative; and humans are wired to find stories compelling.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

We’ve been exploring why C. S. Lewis was so influential: because, like very few Christian writers or thinkers since, he was so powerfully able to appeal to the mind, to the heart, and to the imagination.

And by the way, those three approaches don’t need to be separate; sometimes it’s a case of combining them over time with the same person—a bit like Lewis himself came to faith through arguments, through emotion, and through the imagination, as friends shared the good news of Jesus in those ways with him and he put the pieces together.

I’m reminded, too, of what Lewis said:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.17

In other words, if Christianity is true, then that truth sheds light on everything. On arguments and philosophy; on the heart, emotion, and existential longings; and on our imaginations, the way we’re wired for story and narrative and to instinctively search for direction and purpose to the universe and to life.

Just like a toolkit needs more than just a hammer, so our conversational toolkit needs a variety of tools and Lewis has modelled for us three powerful ones: appeals to the heart, the mind, and the imagination.

So for those of us who are Christians, let us thank the Lord for C. S. Lewis and then, with those tools in our toolbox, head out and engage those the Lord brings across our paths: whether they be owls, elephants, or dragons!

While for those of you who are still exploring the road to faith, let me encourage you to take a fresh (or even a first) look at C. S. Lewis. Get hold of a copy of Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Cosmic Trilogy. As you read them, I trust that your mind, imagination, and heart may be stirred up, as you catch a glimpse, through their pages, of something good, beautiful, and true.

Is something shifting beneath the surface of Western culture? In this wide-ranging conversation with Premier Unbelievable’s Luke Martin, I explore why so many people are now asking different questions: about hope, loneliness, meaning, and what it actually means to be human.

We talk about beauty and music as unexpected doorways to faith, why even Richard Dawkins now calls himself a “cultural Christian,” and whether the old stories that once held our world together are quietly slipping away. We also dig into one of the biggest questions of our moment: as AI grows more powerful by the month, why does it still show not the faintest spark of consciousness—and what might that tell us about the human soul?

Whether you’d call yourself a believer, a skeptic, or just curious, this is a conversation that takes the hard questions seriously while suggesting the air might be fresher in one particular direction.

Most of us want others to think well of us. We want to believe that our friends, neighbours, and colleagues consider us decent people, not that they secretly think we’re untrustworthy or obnoxious. We hope that when our backs are turned, people are singing our praises, instead of warning others not to come within a mile of us.

This natural desire for people to think well of us is why we work hard at being nice, friendly, and polite. It explains the rise of virtue signalling (ensuring that our friends know that we support all the correct causes and are on The Right Side of History^TM). And it’s the reason many of us carefully polish our social media feeds, so that the digital shop window to our souls gives the right impression. As the journalist Stephen Marche put it:

Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.1

One reason we do this is because we live in an increasingly judgemental society, with forgiveness a long-forgotten virtue. The nineteenth-century atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche, predicted the rise of societies where, although the concept of God had all but been rejected, religious ideas like judgement would be retained (just shorn of any notion of forgiveness or redemption). That prediction describes our twenty-first-century world well; and so ensuring people think we are good is just basic self-preservation.

But have you ever wondered if there’s more to being a good person than that? Most of us, I suspect, like to imagine that were we offered the chance to do something wicked with absolutely no chance of getting caught (steal a million pounds, cheat on a loved one, kick an annoying puppy, buy a Justin Bieber album), we wouldn’t do it. We like to believe that our decency is more than just performative.

But can we be sure? After all, modern history shows how normal human beings can be truly monstrous given the right circumstances: many of the atrocities of the Third Reich, for example, were carried out by ordinary people who would go home to their families each evening after a day of torturing and murdering. As the film director Stanley Kubrick once commented, talking about his movie The Shining:

There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.2

Or think of it this way: if an app was invented that allowed anybody to see every thought you’ve ever had, every word you’ve ever uttered, and every deed you’ve ever done—how many of us would give the login code to our friends? To our spouse or partner? To our beloved 83-year-old grandmother? There may not be a grinning Jack Nicholson lurking in our personal shadows, but there are probably a few skeletons.

Can you really know if, overall, you’re a good person or a bad person?

One way might be to decide for yourself. Get up in the morning, look in the mirror, stand up straight with your shoulders back, and boldly proclaim, ‘I’m a good person!’ But the problem is that if you get to invent the criteria for your own goodness, then it’s pretty meaningless. In the same way that if I get to draw the bullseye around the arrow after I’ve fired it, then of course I can claim to be an Olympic-level archer. Overall, this is just a recipe for pride and smugness (or for numbing guilt if your tendency is to rate yourself down rather than up).

What about letting society decide? We could see whether we’re good or bad based on how we measure up to our culture’s standards. But then societies can be very, very wrong. Look at historical monstrosities such as slavery (practised by every society in the past). Or the Victorians and their disturbing habit of sending children up chimneys and down mines. You can guarantee that our own society has its own moral blind spots which will remain undiagnosed until future generations look back on us and say: ‘They did what?!?’

So are we at an impasse? Or is there a way forward? One helpful way we answer the question of whether something is good or bad is by thinking about its purpose. Consider the humble toaster, for instance. Suppose I try to use my toaster for drying socks and, in so doing, it catches fire. Does that make it a bad toaster? Of course not. We determine whether a toaster is a good toaster by how well it toasts bread, bagels, and crumpets; by whether it does well what it was designed to do.

So what about human beings—is there anything we were designed to do? Is there any purpose to humanity? If Christianity is true, then it tells us we were designed for something: to encounter God, to love him, and as we are transformed by that relationship, for it to affect how we relate to others. If Christianity is true, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ become words with real meaning—we have God’s good purposes and intent for our lives an objective standard against which to measure ourselves.

But, if evolution is the only game in town, if we are biology and just biology, then we have a problem—one illustrated by Oxford professor C.S. Lewis in his satirical ‘Hymn to Evolution’:

Lead us, evolution, lead us,
Up the future’s endless stair,
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair!
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us, nobody knows where.3

If evolution is all that is going on, then there’s nothing we are supposed to be; we are simply one point on the graph of the endless march of evolution. Behind us lies a trail of ancestors all the way back to the primordial soup; ahead of us lies—well, we have no way of knowing. And in such a world, the question of whether we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ becomes meaningless.

The thought that God’s purpose for our lives is the standard to assess ourselves by, is both philosophically coherent and intellectually satisfying. It can, however, be personally devastating when we realise that in many ways we have fallen short of the ideal. Of course, most of us can point to some things in our lives that seem to fit well with the notion that we have a God-given purpose. But who in all honesty can say they have consistently ‘loved their neighbour as they love themselves’?—to cite Jesus’s famous command.

In Jesus’s view however, God isn’t simply the one who sets the standard; he’s also the one who forgives and rescues us when we fall short of it. As Nietzsche predicted would happen, our society has lost the art of forgiveness. Thankfully God hasn’t.

This essay was originally published as a chapter in the book Have You Ever Wondered: Finding the Everyday Clues to Meaning, Purpose & Spirituality. If you’re curious about faith, God, and Jesus—or have friends who are—it’s a gentle, warm, and engaging book for seekers and searchers. Find out more about it here—or read on to find how to get the ebook version as a gift from me.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please do consider subscribing. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution.

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And if you become a paid subscriber (or already are) and would like the ebook version of Have You Ever Wondered? as a gift, drop me a message in Substack and I’ll send you a copy as a thank you for financially supporting my work.

Later this year, I am teaming up with my friend and fellow author Michael Ots to write a new book together. With a working title of 60 Questions (we said ‘working title’ 😂), it will feature dozens of short chapters, each tackling a common question about faith, spirituality, God, the Bible, Jesus and more. Each chapter will also have a QR code linking to a video where we dig into the question a bit deeper, too.

But we need your help!

What questions should we tackle? What are the burning questions that you or your friends have that you think we should address?

If you’re willing to take a couple of minutes to submit a question (or more than one if you like) here:

As a thank you, we’ll enter you into a prize draw featuring £200 worth of prizes ranging from book tokens to signed copies of our previous books. Plus, everyone who submits a question will get a special discount on the book once it releases in summer 2027

Thanks for your help!

Andy and Michael

PS: While you’re here, do have a look around the blog and why not consider a free subscription so you get new essays/resources (one a week) sent to you …

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I am an avid tea drinker. I drink tea by the gallon and my wife jokes that when I die, rather than donate my body to medical research, she’ll offer my ashes to the Tetley Tea Company. I could quit chocolate; I could renounce ice cream; but it would take a miracle to persuade me to give up tea. And speaking of the miraculous, I think that the humble cup of tea contains a clue to understanding miracles.

There is a lot of confusion about miracles and a lot of nonsense talked about the miraculous. Not least, the common assumption that in the twenty-first century, in the age of computers, particle accelerators, and heated WiFi-enabled toilet seats, no sensible person can believe in things like miracles and the supernatural; rather they’re for the gullible, the religious, and the Bible-addled.

But what if I told you that the Bible doesn’t believe in the supernatural either?

“I thought you were a Christian philosopher!” I can hear some of you protest. To which I reply (after a swig of tea): “Indeed I am; and that’s precisely why I’m a little bit dubious about words like ‘supernatural’.”

What I mean is this: nowhere does the Bible teach that you can divide the world in two, into a ‘supernatural’ bit that God is responsible for and a ‘natural’ bit that more or less does its own thing. Rather the Bible explains that God sustains everything. Every atom, every particle, every law of physics only exists because God upholds it.

This is a much bigger view of God than many people (including many Christians) have ever stopped to consider. Plus if you are an atheist, it is also a little ironic, because if you want to lob God out of the window and insist that the only things that exist are molecules and matter, you’re missing the fact that those things are only here in the first place because God created them and gives them their continued existence. Saying “I reject God and the miraculous because of science” is a little like saying “I dismiss the existence of authors because of words, letters, and punctuation marks.”

In other words, far from science being independent of God, science is only possible because God is actively, deeply, and personally involved with the world, sustaining it and giving it existence moment by moment. This is actually quite obvious when you think about it because for all the talk about science being all-powerful and able to answer everything, science can’t even explain its own deepest foundations.

For example, consider the question: why is there something rather than nothing? When you have a universe full of stuff, science does a very good job explaining why that stuff behaves the way it does. But as to why stuff exists in the first place, science can say nothing at all. (Just as the rules of cricket can explain what’s happening when England triumphs over Australia,1 but the rules cannot explain the existence of the game of cricket itself).

Incidentally, this leads to another of those nice little ironies with which philosophy is littered. Namely that all of us have to believe in miracles, by which I mean things-that-science-alone-cannot-explain. If you are an atheist and want to believe that the universe came from nothing, you’re welcome to do so; but at least admit what you’re doing. You’ve simply substituted belief in things like the virgin birth of Jesus for belief in the virgin birth of the universe.

It seems that we cannot escape miracles—if by ‘miracle’ you mean something that the laws of physics cannot explain, whether that is the origin of the universe or something apparently far more mundane, like mathematics and why science can’t work without it.

Quite why maths and science fit so well together has long been a head-scratcher. The puzzle was most famously pointed out in 1960 by the Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner, in an article called ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’. In it, Wigner explores how remarkably odd it is that maths and physics fit together with such uncanny (and useful) precision.

Why is that odd? Well, if there is no God and mathematics is just a human creation, then numbers were merely something invented by Mesopotamian goat-herders sometime around the second millennium BC to keep track of their goats. So how on earth is it that numbers can describe the curvature of space-time or the behaviour of black holes? Either those goat-herders got really lucky, or something bigger is going on.

Where do we go with all of this? Well, maybe it is helpful to reflect that trying to play off ‘God’ and ‘science’ or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ misses something very important, namely that there can be different levels of explanation. Which brings us back to where we started: with the humble cup of tea.

Sitting on my desk as I write is a steaming mug of English Breakfast tea. What is it doing here? A physicist might talk about how electrons and protons form atoms, from which all material things (including tea) are made. A chemist might use little plastic balls to model how molecules work, or explain the Brownian Motion of the particles in my cup whilst a biologist might opine about the evolutionary history of the tea plant. All those are good (if slightly nerdy) answers to the question “Why is this tea here?”

But what if you simply asked me? In which case, I’d look at you, laugh, and say “the tea exists because I need something to dunk my Jammie Dodger biscuit2 into as part of my mid-morning snack”.

Does my explanation contradict those of the scientists? No, it’s just a different level of explanation and it illustrates something very important: that there are scientific explanations but there are also personal explanations. The laws of science tell us what will happen unless somebody personally intervenes: drop a ball, and it will fall in accordance with Newton’s Second Law of Motion. But reach out your hand and catch the ball and that law no longer applies. You have personally intervened in the universe.

So now the question arises: if humans can intervene and act personally in the world, what about God? Clearly if God exists, he can. So perhaps the question isn’t can he, but has he? And this is where Christianity is fascinating because the whole Christian faith is founded on the historical claim that God intervened at one point in history in particular—in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (for which there is tremendous historical evidence).

But if God can (and has) acted in history, that raises the next and more important question: what are you going to do about it? As I often remind my sceptical friends, miracles can do many things, but they can’t prevent somebody refusing to consider the evidence. Why not start with a fresh cup of tea and an honest look at the Gospels and their story of the life, death—and resurrection—of Jesus.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please do consider subscribing. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution.

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An interview I did for BBC Radio Jersey a few weeks ago on why so many young people are thinking about faith, God, and Christianity again.

There’s no written transcript, so use the audio button above to listen.

For more on this, especially when it comes to Islam, check out my article ‘Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?’

Footprints in the Sand

One night, a man had a dream. He dreamt that he was walking across a beautiful, deserted beach. Seagulls wheeled overhead, waves crashed against the white sands, and the wind blew gently in his hair.

As he strolled across the damp sand, the sky began to darken. The sun faded, the clouds scudded away, and above his head, a million stars began to glitter like pinpricks in the tarpaulin of reality.

Suddenly scenes from his life began to appear, one after another in rapid succession. Each scene faded as quickly as it had come.

Soon the wind began to pick up while overhead the stars flared into supernovae and galaxies themselves burned and died. Before long, the sky was jet black and all that lit the beach was a pale sickly light, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing because nothing was the only thing to be seen.

But then, in the distance, just visible against the eery darkness of the sky, a robed figure appeared, casually strolling along the sands as if out for an evening walk.

The man hurried to catch up with him.

“Excuse me, sir,” he shouted over the howling of the wind, “would you mind waiting for me.”

The cowled figure paused, leaning on what appeared to be a wooden walking stick.

The man caught up with the stranger, then turned to look back across the sands he had been walking across for the past few hours.

“That’s odd,” he said. “I’d expected to see …”

“EXPECTED TO SEE?” said a voice like granite slabs grinding together.

“Er … well, footprints? Isn’t this the point in the dream where I look back and see two sets of footprints, except at the point in my life where things were toughest, which is when you say: ‘My son, those are the times I carried you.’”

There was an awkward silence.

“THIS MAY NOT BE THE MOTIVATIONAL POSTER YOU WERE LOOKING FOR,” said the robed figure, throwing back his cowl to reveal the smooth, white form of a grinning skull. It might have reminded you of a billiard ball, if billiard balls had perfect teeth and eye sockets with small flames in them.

“Are you … are you … Death?” asked the man timidly.

“I AM HE,” said Death. “I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THE SCYTHE WAS A CLUE.”

The man stared. It hadn’t been a walking stick after all.

“I DID TRY AN ELECTRIC STRIMMER ONCE,” remarked Death, conversationally, “IT’S GOOD TO MODERNISE. BUT THE LOOK WASN’T RIGHT.”

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“The Death? I mean, the grim reaper, the harvester of souls, the destroyer of worlds?”

“I PREFER TO THINK OF MYSELF MORE AS A SNAPPER-UP OF INCONSIDERED TRIFLES,” said Death.

“What do you mean, ‘inconsidered trifles’?”

“WELL,” said Death, scratching his head with a bony digit. It sounded like the finger of fate being dragged across the blackboard of reality. “ABOUT THOSE MISSING FOOTPRINTS …”

“So I’m … dead? Not just … asleep?”

“SLEEP? AS IN PERCHANCE TO DREAM. OR, IN YOUR CASE, PERCHANCE TO DIE OF A HEART ATTACK AT 3AM.” Death offered out a paper bag full of sweets. “JELLY BABY?”

The man shook his head and looked back across the empty sands. There was nothing to show he had ever walked that way.

“Did my life really leave no trace?” the man asked, plaintively.

“NONE. NADA. ZILCH. OTHER SYNONYMS ARE AVAILABLE IF YOU WISH.”

“But my friends, my family, surely they must have remembered me?”

“HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE WORD ‘AEON’?” asked Death.

“Aeon?”

“‘AEON’,” repeated Death. “FROM THE LATIN ‘AEON’. WHICH MEANS: ‘AEON’. IT’S A LONG TIME. YOU WERE REMEMBERED—BRIEFLY. BUT THEN THEY DIED. THEIR DESCENDANTS DIED. HUMANITY DIED. NOW THERE IS JUST ME. DEATH. THE LAST WORD.”

“But that seems unfair,” protested the man, “death—I mean, you—can’t be the end. What about justice?”

“THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST US. AND YOU NOT FOR MUCH LONGER, YOU’RE ALREADY FADING.”

The man looked at his arm; it was indeed slightly translucent.

“I can see the sand through it!” he cried in alarm.

“WOULD IT INTEREST YOU TO KNOW THAT WHITE SAND LIKE THIS IS LARGELY THE POWDERED SHELLS AND SKELETONS OF WHAT WERE ONCE LIVING CREATURES?”

“This is no time for trivia!”

“I HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. LITERALLY AND METAPHORICALLY,” said Death. “WHEREAS YOU HAVE ABOUT 30 SECONDS.”

“But are you saying that life—my life, human life, all life—is pointless and worthless and was just for—just for this,” the man cried, sweeping his hand across the empty beach and the void of the sky.

“YES.”

The man was scrabbling desperately for any lifeline now. “What if I said I don’t believe in you? I’ve no time for God and all that religious stuff.”

“GOD?” said Death. He tipped his head on one side, thoughtfully, as the flame in his eye sockets grew a darker red. “THERE I CAN’T HELP YOU,” he said. “FINAL OBLIVION IS MY DEPARTMENT. THAT AND TAXES.”

“Was that a joke?”

“PROBABLY. YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED I AM ALWAYS GRINNING.”

There was a long silence.

“Is it too late for a death bed conversion?” pleaded the man.

“I DON’T HAVE A BED,” said Death. “I TRIED ONE ONCE BUT I JUST LAY THERE, FULLY AWAKE, AS AGES ROSE AND FELL AROUND ME.”

“This feels all wrong,” said the man, beginning to weep. “I mean—I’d always told my friends that when it came to death, there was nothing to be afraid of.”

There was a final, even longer, silence, before Death spoke one last time:

“NOTHING IS PRECISELY THE THING TO BE AFRAID OF.”

~ + ~

Author’s Note

I owe a nod of thanks to Mary Stevenson (the most likely author of the original Footprints in the Sand poem) as well to Terry Pratchett (from whom I borrowed Death’s use of capitals). I must also tip my hat to Andy Kind, who has a version of this same idea in his brilliant book of short stories A Blanket of Embers. I’d been playing around with subverting the Footprints poem for years (as I have a natural aversion to inspirational posters). When I saw what Andy did with it (and I think his version is even darker than mine) I knew I had to finally put pen to paper.

And if you’re thinking: “Wow, this story was bleak!” then here’s a thought: short stories written by Christians don’t always need to have happy endings. Sometimes a bleak or dystopian ending can be as powerful—and perhaps our natural instinct to protest “It shouldn’t be like this!” is a clue to a bigger story.

If you’d like to explore that bigger story, do check out my book, Have You Ever Wondered? More on that here …

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you for your support!

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Many Western countries are now very pluralistic, with many of our major cities incredibly culturally and religiously diverse. That religious diversity is growing rapidly and is especially apparent when it comes to Islam: the number of Muslims in the UK is currently at 4 million (6%) and could potentially rise to around 13 million (17%) in 25 years’ time.1

To deal with that diversity, many Western cultures try to champion the idea that all the world’s religions are essentially the same. For example, when comparative religion is taught in places like schools, it’s often done in a way that implies the world’s major faiths are virtually identical, just the names are changed: e.g. Muslims go to mosque, Christians go to church; Muslims have the Qur’an, Christians have the Bible; Muslims follow Muhammad, Christians follow Jesus.

The assumption is that all religious people are talking about the same thing, just in different ways.

Enter the Elephant

There’s a 2,500-year-old Indian folk tale that’s often told to illustrate this very point. It tells how four blind men were shown into a room in which there was an elephant. The first blind man grabbed hold of the tail. “Aha! An elephant is like a rope,” he declared. The second blind man hugged the elephant’s leg. “No, you’re wrong,” he retorted, “an elephant is like a tree.” The third blind man felt the elephant’s trunk and laughed: “You two are mad! The elephant is more like a snake.” The fourth blind man stumbled into the side of the mighty beast: “You’re all wrong,” he chuckled. “An elephant is actually like a wall.”

You get the idea of the story. Each blind man was right in his own way; each had a small grasp on the truth. However, their mistake was assuming they were right and their friends wrong: instead, everybody was right. In the same way, it is sometimes suggested, religions are perhaps like this. Each religion has a small grasp on an aspect of what God is like—and if only they could recognise they only had part of the truth, then there would be peace and tolerance.

But there are several problems with the story. First, it assumes the thing it wants to prove, namely that everybody is talking about the same thing. Retell the story and have each blind man feeling his way around a different animal, and the parable collapses.

But even more tricky than that, consider this. Who is the most arrogant person in the story? It’s not any of the blind men. It’s the person telling the story. By my very telling of the story, I’m claiming that only I can see the whole picture and that everybody else in the story is blind. The irony is astonishing: a story often told to illustrate the arrogance of exclusive religious truth claims turns out to be the utter height of arrogance itself.

The Problem with Words

I think a lot of the confusion in this area that’s led people to suggest the world’s religions are similar has been caused by the fact that people use the same words in different ways. It’s thus assumed that when Muslims talk about “god” and Christians talk about “god”, we mean the same thing by that word.

I lived for six years in Canada and that taught me that words do not always mean the same thing for different people. For example, to my Canadian friends, “pants” means not underwear, but trousers—a fact that caused a lot of confusion. I remember our immigration lawyer saying to us as we entered his office, “Forgive me for not standing up to greet you, but I’m not wearing pants today”—by which we later discovered he meant he was wearing tennis shorts.

Likewise, when Muslims and Christians say they believe in “one god”, we need to stop and listen carefully, not assume “Aha! This means the same thing.” After all, if I say I believe in one British Prime Minister and it’s Keir Starmer, and my friend Sam says he believes in one Prime Minister and it’s Mickey Mouse, we clearly both believe in one Prime Minister, but we differ about their identity.

Or if we spoke to a Marxist and a Capitalist and asked them: “Do you believe in economics?” and both said “Yes”, we’d be mistaken if we said “Marxism and Capitalism are the same” on that basis.

The Bible, the Qur’an, and God

A few years ago I decided to do a piece of research to explore this more deeply and I later wrote a book based on that work. I thought it would be interesting to compare what the Bible and the Qur’an have to say about the nature of God. Sure, both the Christian scriptures and the Muslim scriptures assume there is one God. But what is that God like?

I was very surprised to discover some huge differences. There are four major characteristics of God according to the Bible and those characteristics are either ignored, or outright contradicted by the Qur’an, which has a very different understanding of God.

Let’s explore them briefly one by one.

God is Relational

The first characteristic of God in the Bible is that God is relational. This is the thrust of the whole story of the Bible, from the opening pages to the very last chapter. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we read of how God was to be found, walking and talking in the garden with Adam and Eve. God walks and talks with Abraham (Genesis 17-18), speaks to Moses face to face “as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11), and, indeed God speaks with his people throughout the Old Testament. In the New Testament, God steps into history in the person of Jesus. And, at the close of the Bible, we are told that in heaven, the age to come:

The dwelling of God will be with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. (Revelation 21:3-4)

The Bible uses highly relational language to describe God. He is described as a father, as a friend. He is the relational God—and the Bible’s call is for people to be in relationship with him.

For the Qur’an, on the other hand, there is no such relationship to be had with Allah. Allah, the god of the Qur’an, is distant and transcendent—and nowhere does the Qur’an invite its readers to enter into a relationship with him. According to the Qur’an, Allah did not walk and talk in the garden with Adam and Eve. He is not present with his people in heaven. And he did not take on flesh in the person of Jesus. The only “relationship” that exists between humans and Allah according to the Qur’an is that of master and servant—certainly not Father.

Indeed, in the Qur’an, in Sura 112, once described by Muhammad as so significant that reciting it is equivalent to reciting a third of the Qur’an, the Qur’an strongly declares that Allah is not a father and that Allah has no son:

He (Allah) has not begotten, and has not been begotten. (Q. 112:3)

Summarising this crucial difference from the Bible, the influential Muslim philosopher, Shabbir Akhtar, wrote:

Muslims do not see God as their father … Men are servants of a just master; they cannot, in orthodox Islam, typically attain any greater degree of intimacy with their creator.2

God Can Be Known

The second major characteristic of God in the Bible is that God can be known. This flows in some way out of God’s relationality, because it’s only possible to have a relationship with somebody if they are willing to make themselves known.

If a new person moves into the house next door to yours and being a friendly person, you decide you’d like to get to know them. However, it turns out they’re incredibly shy: they work from home, order their groceries online, never come out of their house, keep their curtains drawn and never answer the door—well, any kind of relationship would be impossible because they refuse to make themselves known.

And the same is true of God. According to the Bible, God is a God who makes himself known. From beginning to end, the Bible tells the story of a God who reveals not just his commands but his character, his very self. For example, in Exodus 3, in the story of the burning bush, God speaks personally with Moses, revealing his personal name—Yahweh, “I am”. Ultimately the biblical theme of God revealing himself is seen in the person of Jesus, who tells his disciples in John 14:9 that “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.

Again, this is utterly different from how the Qur’an describes Allah, who does not reveal himself in this way or allow himself to be known personally—nowhere does the Qur’an ever invite its readers to know Allah.

Indeed, it’s remarkable how in qur’anic theology, even Muhammad did not have Allah reveal the Qur’an to him personally, but through an intermediary—the angel Gabriel. A huge contrast with the Bible, where time and time again, God speaks with his prophets and his people face to face, such as the powerful encounter that Moses has at the burning bush or on Mt. Sinai.

Listen to Muslim scholar Isma’il al-Furuqi unpack this:

Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will … Allah does not reveal himself to anyone … that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam.3

God is Love

The third major characteristic of God according to the Bible is that God is a God of love. The Bible is very clear that one of God’s primary characteristics is love. The theme of God’s love is summed up in the amazing verse in 1 John 4:16—“God is love”. Love is not something the God of the Bible does, but something he is. Indeed, Christians love and serve a God who is Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and so at the heart of who God is lies a loving relationship.

When we turn to the Qur’an and its depiction of God, we see something very different. Nowhere are we told that Allah is love—indeed, because he is not triune, it would be impossible for him to be loving unless he first created something to love.

For unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is very reticent about talking of Allah and love. In fact the main Arabic word for love, aḥabba, is used with Allah as the subject of the verb just 42 times and of those occurrences, 23 are negative,4 the Qur’an describing the kind of people Allah does not love. For example:

Allah loves not the unbelievers. (Q. 3:32)

Allah loves not the prodigal. (Q. 6:141)5

The other 19 occurrences are conditional,6 the Qur’an describing the behaviour required to earn Allah’s love:

Surely God loves the doers of good. (Q. 3:148)

God loves those who fight in His way, (drawn up) in lines (for battle) as if they were a solid building. (Q. 61:4)

The Qur’an simply has no conception of Allah offering anything remotely like an unconditional love to humanity. As the Pakistani scholar, Daud Rahbar bluntly put it:

[T]here is not a single verse in the Qur’an that speaks of God’s unconditional love for mankind … [Its verses] do not say that God loves all men.7

God has Suffered

And finally to the fourth characteristic of God according to the Bible, namely that God has suffered.

One of the crucial things about love is that it cannot simply be spoken about; rather it must be demonstrated. Love needs to be shown in action, not just verbalised, not least because a major aspect of genuine love is that it is costly. If you truly love another person, you are willing to give of yourself to help them; and if they are hurting, you will grieve and suffer when they suffer.

And the love of the God of the Bible is demonstrated in what he has done to deal with the sin and shame that separate us from him. The Bible tells us that God grieves for his people, grieves over their sin, rebellion and unfaithfulness. And that ultimately, through Jesus and the cross, God paid the price to deal with our brokenness—as Isaiah 53:4 tells us, God “took up our pain and carried our sorrows”.

This is quite different from the Qur’an’s understanding of God. The god of the Qur’an is not a god who suffers—Allah feels no grief as a result of our sins or pain or suffering. Allah in the Qur’an certainly gets angry at sin; and that anger is expressed in wrath and judgment. But there is no heart response and nothing done by the qur’anic god to deal with the problem of sin. As Muslim theologian, Muhammad-al-Burkawi puts it:

Allah can annihilate the universe if it seems good to Him and recreate it in an instant. He receives neither profit nor loss from whatever happens. If all infidels became believers and all the wicked pious He would gain nothing. And if all believers became infidels it would not cause Him loss.8

Indeed, according to qur’anic theology, everybody must carry the weight of their own sin, hoping that on the day of judgement their good deeds outweigh their bad. As the Qur’an puts it in Surah 17:15:

No bearer of sin can bear the sin of another.9

… although fascinatingly, this hints at the idea that maybe a sinless one could bear another’s sins. In Christianity and in Jesus, whom both Muslims and Christians affirm as sinless, Christians believe that has happened.

The Heart of the Difference

As we have looked at the Bible, the Qur’an, and what Muslim theologians have to say, we have seen that there are some big differences between Islam and Christianity on this most important of questions: what is God like?

As the Australian linguist and qur’anic scholar, Mark Durie, writes:

Once we stray beyond what is implied straightforwardly from the idea of one all-powerful creator God, the Qur’an and the Bible diverge considerably.10

The Bible and the Qur’an have radically different views of the nature, character, and identity of God and those differences make a difference. Trying to ignore or paper over them risks grossly misrepresenting both the Qur’an and the Bible.

Living with Differences

But if there are major differences between the world’s major faiths, doesn’t that have implications for how we relate well together? I think it’s this fear that drives silly stories like the blind men and the elephant: some people assume that if we don’t all believe the same thing, we can’t build communities or societies.

But that’s clearly wrong. It’s surely possible to be friends with people and disagree over things (I’ve had many Muslim friends over the years as I’ve worked in academia). Or on a lighter note, I’ve been married to my wife for 25 years and we still disagree about many things: our marriage is all the stronger for us having strong views that don’t always align.

What we need to do—as individuals and societies—is learn to disagree well. Our schools and workplaces claim to really value diversity: so let’s lean into that and enjoy the fact we don’t all think the same. As the African theologian Lamin Sanneh, one of my favourite writers, put it:

[People are] often confused by the view that difference is threatening, fanatical, harmful, and negative while uniform agreement is sound, inclusive, and enlightened. If that were true, we would all be condemned to sameness, uniformity, and conformity.11

And let’s learn to listen well and to ask good questions. Four questions I’ve long found helpful for discussing and bringing out differences (and similarities) in beliefs are:

• Do you think there’s a God and if so, what is God like?

• What do you think human beings are?

• What’s gone wrong with the world?

• What’s the solution?

And lastly, don’t be afraid to examine the evidence—and to examine your own beliefs critically and be willing to explore those of others. Ultimately that’s why I’m a Christian, despite having studied Islam in depth for 25 years and taught academic philosophy and looked hard at atheism. It’s been a long journey wading through the evidence—but for me, I’m convinced where it points.

After all, as the great philosopher Socrates himself is reported to have said: the unexamined life is not worth living. That’s true of the religious life as much as the secular one.

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you.

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And if you become a paid subscriber (or already are)—and would like a free ebook version of my full book on this subject, Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God? (this essay was based on one chapter), drop me a message in Substack and I’ll send you a copy as a thank you for financially supporting my work.

In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the detective-ghost-horror-who-dunnit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic by the British comedy writer Douglas Adams, the eponymous private investigator, Dirk Gently, has had a major falling out with his secretary, Janice, who is preparing to storm out of the office in a rage:

She retrieved her last pot of nail varnish and tried to slam the drawer shut. A fat dictionary sitting upright in the drawer prevented it from closing. She tried to slam the drawer again, without success. She picked up the book, ripped out a clump of pages and replaced it. This time she was able to slam the drawer with ease.1

A few days later, faced with a client to whom some events have occurred that are, quite literally, completely and utterly impossible, Dirk happily remarks:

“Luckily, you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as ‘impossible’ in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “everything between ‘herring’ and ‘marmalade’ appears to be missing.”2

If I could remove just one word from the dictionary it wouldn’t be ‘impossible’, nor ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis’ and especially not ‘marmalade’, despite having once lived for six years in Dundee where I became tired of hearing the legend about its invention.3 No, if I could remove just one word from the dictionary, it would be the word ‘tolerance’.

I dislike the word ‘tolerance’, dislike it with a vengeance. Why? Well, quite simply, tolerance has become the virtue of our age, the last virtue standing in fact, as the classical virtues have fallen more quickly than a row of dominos on a massage chair. Prudence, temperance, courage, and justice—apart from the last one, which we’ve redefined to mean using the socially approved hashtags on social media—our culture wouldn’t recognise these if it bumped into them in the street.

But tolerance. Tolerance is everywhere: we must tolerate other people, tolerate those who are different to us, never criticise, never question, never disagree, and certainly never—absolutely never—tell somebody else that we think we’re right and they’re wrong. Tolerance, all hail tolerance.

Well, I’ve had enough. I can no longer (pardon the pun) tolerate tolerance. Why? Well, my first issue with ‘tolerance’ is that it’s a deeply disrespectful word. Think about the kind of things we usually tolerate. We tolerate the cat, when it deposits half a dead mouse on the front door mat and claws the sofa for the third time in a week. When he was small, I would tolerate my son when, acting on his latent artistic tendencies, he would decide to emulate Banksy on the lounge wall using, bless him, a permanent marker he somehow found, even though my wife and I were convinced we’d locked those down with the same kind of security protocols usually reserved for nuclear warheads or goat cheese. In other words, we tolerate things that are misbehaving, things that don’t measure up, things that are a little bit beneath us: animals, young children, politicians.

On the other hand, when you encounter an adult who thinks differently to you, who sees the world in a different way, who (heaven forbid!) disagrees with you, I’d suggest ‘tolerance’ should be your Verb of Last Resort. What about instead listening, talking, or dialoguing with them? In short, treating them as an equal, rather than as your inferior.

But there’s a further problem with ‘tolerance’, in that it’s a ready made license to ignore those who are different to us. Rather than talk to people, engage people, listen to them, we just dismiss them with an offhand, “Oh, that’s just the Muslims …” And whilst we pat ourselves on the back with warm thoughts of how tolerant we are, we are all the while deeply dehumanising people. Sure, we may not have thrown a half-brick at somebody, or said angry things about them on social media: but we have ignored them, airbrushed them out of our circle of concern, and we’ve done it with a sneer of superiority.

Tolerance? None of us want to be tolerated. If you’re still not convinced, I put it to you that you don’t want other people to tolerate you. Rather you want to be listened to. You want to be taken seriously. To be heard. You want other people to consider your views, even if they disagree, to treat you like an adult, to understand you. Nobody just wants to be tolerated.

The Christian basis for treating people as truly human, as loving and listening even to those who are radically different to us, who are even disagreeable or unlikeable, lies at the heart of the gospel. For the good news about Jesus and the cross tells us that God didn’t merely tolerate us. He could have done: he could have looked at the mess we’ve made of our lives, our world—His world, given to us as a good and wonderful gift—God could have looked at what we’ve done, shrugged, tolerated us, and walked away.

But God didn’t step away. Rather, in the person of Jesus, he stepped in. In Jesus, God gave everything for us, even while we were his enemies, even whilst we deserved nothing better than condemnation, let alone toleration. God demonstrated his love for us in that we were still rebels, bullies, and oppressors, Jesus Christ died for us.4

You see, a final problem with tolerance is it’s cheap. Dirt cheap. It costs nothing to look down on people, to sigh with a sneer, or to walk on by and not give people a second glance. Tolerance is cheap. But by contrast, love is expense, love is pricy, love always costs the one who gives it.

I’m incredibly grateful that God didn’t tolerate us but instead he loved us and did so in a way that was costly. And Christians—those who’ve realised that they’ve no grounds to be superior and to look down on others, but need the forgiveness and help that God offers through Jesus—Christians are called to show the same love to others that Jesus showed to them. Especially to those who are difficult, different or disagreeable. As the New Testament, in Ephesians 5:1-2 puts it:

Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

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I hugely enjoyed filming this six-part documentary about the big questions:

• Is there a God?

• Why is there suffering and pain?

• Has science buried God?

• Which religion is true?

• Is the Bible trustworthy?

• Who was Jesus?

The film crew and I travelled to multiple countries and spoke to experts from a range of backgrounds, from atheism to Islam to Christianity. The result is a series that’s accessible, fast-moving, but also dives deeply into the questions.

Find out more about the series and buy the other episodes (or watch trailers for them) at:

https://burningquestions.ca

I have a naturally mischievous streak and one of the things I occasionally enjoy is gently poking students with the sharpened end of a question to get a reaction. This can easily be done with the aid of a whiteboard and a marker pen. I draw a large circle on the whiteboard and say to the class something like: “This circle represents the entire set of genomes of every living thing on planet Earth. Everything is here, from whales to whelks, ants to antelopes, bacteria to bats, hippopotami to humans.”

Now I ask the class a further question: “Raise your hand if you do not believe in human rights?” Rarely will a hand go up (peer pressure can be a wonderful thing, unless one is addressing the Sociopath Society). “Excellent!” say I, taking my pen and drawing a second, much smaller circle, within the bigger circle. “Now what those of you who believe in human rights are saying is that anybody who lives inside your smaller circle, whose genome is ‘human’, enjoys a special set of rights that inhabitants of the bigger circle do not. Agree?”

Again, rarely will anyone protest.

“Wonderful,” I enthuse, rubbing my hands together in anticipation of what is about to follow. “So here’s the problem. Along comes the white supremacist, armed with a marker pen of his own, and he draws a much tinier circle within your small circle and says, ‘No, only those who are white and European enjoy full rights. Any other races do not.’ See the problem? You have drawn a circle, he has drawn a circle, you have both arbitrarily drawn circles. So tell me: why is your circle acceptable (even laudable, as we give awards to people who defend human rights) but the circle drawn by the racist is not?”

Usually, there is a stunned silence at this point.

“I’m glad you see the problem,” I continue brightly, “after all, even New Atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who has opined widely on ethics and human rights, recognises there is a major problem here. Let me quote you what he says.” And then I read this:

The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals—intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on—will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and women with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community.1

Now at this point you may be fretting that I am being unfair on my poor cohort of students, that this is just some philosophical game designed to make them look foolish. Far from it. This is crucially important, because human rights are a fundamental right—upon them stands our entire framework of ethics, our legal system, and international law. If human beings have inherent dignity and inalienable rights, then that means we cannot, for instance, treat people as means rather than ends, nor subject them to mistreatment or abuse, nor discriminate against them on the basis of gender, race, ability, or religion.

If.

That simple two-letter conjunction is crucial. Throughout history, there have been many examples of occasions where attempts have been made to narrow the circle, to exclude certain groups from the community of human rights. For example, in 1857 an African-American slave named Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom. The case made it to the US Supreme Court who ruled against Scott, the Justices stating that:

The question is simply this: can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?

We think … not, and that they [Africans] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.2

One reads a passage like that 170 years on and winces with embarrassment at how our ancestors behaved. Yet the problem remains: all the Justices did in that ruling was to draw a circle—simply a slightly smaller circle than the one that most of us today, when we talk about “human rights”, would draw. But they are circles nonetheless.

How do we navigate through these exceedingly choppy waters? Well, things are simpler than they seem, in that there are only three choices.

The first choice is to conclude that human rights simply do not exist. We live in a culture that is increasingly scientistic, where that which is “true” is determined by what we can test or prove in the laboratory. On such a view, there is no conceivable experiment of physics, chemistry or biology that could prove human rights—we may know which part of the human genome codes for haemoglobin, but which codes for inherent dignity?

If you cannot quite stomach that degree of reductionism, you could fudge it slightly and conclude that things like rights, ethics, and morals are merely a useful fiction, a trick played on us by evolution. Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse writes:

[C]onsidered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, it [ethics, rights, etc.] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’, they think they are referring above and beyond themselves … Nevertheless, to a Darwinian evolutionist it can be seen that such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and has no being beyond or without this.3

A moment’s thought reveals this to be highly problematic: on this view, there is nothing actually wrong with murder, rape, or racism—rather our disquiet about them is purely a function of our desire to successfully reproduce and raise young. (There’s also the uncomfortable corollary that if rape or racism could be shown to aid survival and reproduction, presumably they become the ‘right’ thing to do).

That way madness lies. What about the second option? Well, the second route is to acknowledge that human rights exist, but they are inexplicable: they just are. We cannot explain them; one simply has to take them as a given. Perhaps the Human Rights Fairy magically appears, immediately after a baby is born, waves her sparkly wand, and poof! The new infant now has inherent dignity and inalienable rights. This may sound like a caricature, but it is effectively the position that many people in the West have adopted. They believe passionately in the idea of human rights, but have not the foggiest idea how to ground them.

If the first option leads to madness, the second leads to peril. You see, we keenly desire to affirm sentiments such as Thomas Jefferson’s, enshrined in the US Constitution—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”—but we have no basis for them whatsoever. We have become, as C. S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, “men without chests”, unable to connect our high ideals with our passions and instincts.4

Why is this perilous? For this reason: if human rights have no foundation, then it makes it all the easier for governments (as in the Dred Scott decision), majorities, experts, or specialists to begin determining who does and who does not have rights and what those rights are. But how do they choose and what criteria do they apply? Happiness (but whose?) Preservation of the species? (But why should humanity be preserved?) Posterity? (But who knows what future generations will make of us). This route seems to lead directly to the gulag and the concentration camp.

I said there were three options. To dismiss human rights as a fiction (useful or not), to see them as real but unexplainable—so what is the third? The third option is to consider where those who first articulated the idea of human rights grounded them.

One of the earliest thinkers to speak of rights was the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest, Francisco Suarez, whose 1610 essay On the Laws argued that human beings have rights because they have been endowed with them by their Creator, as the Bible makes clear time and again. If human beings are God’s special creation, if they are not mere collections of atoms, lumbering biological robots blindly following their DNA’s instructions to reproduce, then that gives an excellent grounding for human rights. Suarez’s essay influenced John Locke, who influenced Thomas Jefferson, who built this idea right into the heart of the US Constitution.5

And so, to return to my class of students, I leave them with this thought. If you wish to have human rights, if you want to be able to say that racism, or sexism, or any other injustice is wrong, you need to bring God back into the discussion. Don’t take my word for it—read atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, who correctly observed:

If you abandon the Christian faith, at the same time you are pulling the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. This morality is very far from self-evident: this point needs highlighting time and again … Christianity is a system, a synoptic and complete view of things. If you break off one of its principal concepts, the belief in God, then you shatter the whole thing: you have nothing necessary left between your fingers.6

How then do we hold onto human rights in the face of those who would deny them, governments who would restrict them, or experts who would redefine them away, abolishing humankind in the process? Only by rooting them firmly in the image of God in which each one of us is made.7 As G. K. Chesterton once remarked, human beings are equal in the way that pennies are all alike: we may all be different (some pennies are bright, others are dull, some are old, some are new) but all are equally valuable because and only because each bears the image of the King.8

If you found this piece helpful, thought-provoking, curiosity-sparking or in other ways useful, please consider subscribing. It helps me keep my writing free for those who can’t afford to make a contribution. Thank you.

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