Dear Ehud,
Thanks for the email, and for the follow-up phone conversation. I think I have a good grasp of your questions now, and of your dilemma, and hope that I can be of some help. I am thankful that your friend Dawson recommended that you contact me—Dawson’s a great one.
If you don’t mind, I would like to repeat back to you a summary of what I heard from you, and then take it from there. If I have misunderstood anything, just let me know. But before we get into it too deep, I would like you to know what I took away from our conversation.
The long and short of it is that you are an agnostic Jew, and over the last year you began considering the claims of Christ seriously, which has landed you in quite a jam. You were brought up in a conservative orthodox home, solid loving family, and with all the stereotypical high achievement expectations. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, you and your parents are close. You respect them very much. You went through Dartmouth, did a stint in the Marines, and are now in graduate school in finance. When it comes to worldview, you kept the faith of your family for the first year of college, but since that time you have run the gamut of options, experimenting as you went. This has included New Age, militant atheism, mind-expanding drug use, life in a commune, and pure hedonism, all of which gradually got old and then settled down into a tepid agnosticism. Although some might consider it a medieval antisemitic trope, please know I am not using it like that . . . and you literally have been a wandering Jew. Not the trope, and not the houseplant, but the fact of wandering has been real.
And the jam is this. You described yourself to me on the phone as quite simply “lost,” but at every stage of your lost wandering, your parents have been thoughtful, kind, accepting, and truly helpful to you. So you have two things going on in your mind. Because of your upbringing, and because of your very active mind, and your strong Jewish identity, you are full to overflowing with questions of your own. But you also know, in the back of your mind, that becoming a Christian is pretty much the only thing that would break your parents’ hearts for good. Sometimes that is in the front of your mind. And they have been so good to you despite your wandering . . . your aimless pilgrimage seems to you like you have abused their kindness over and over again, and it now looks like you were actually on a quest to figure out a way that would really destroy them completely. And the grim prospect is that when you get to that point, you will stop and stay there, to the perpetual grief of the family.
You said that you haven’t mentioned anything about your internal turmoil to your parents, but that you mother has made a couple of nervous remarks, as though she knew what was on your mind, or that something really bad was coming. You said that she can read you really well. Have I described your situation fairly accurately?
And then the final complication you told me about is Dawson’s cousin, Sandi. You said that you had never met anyone like her, that she is wonderful in all kinds of ways . . . but that to you she is simply warm, friendly, and distant. She is a devout Christian, like Dawson, and you felt like that distance was a deliberate and principled decision on her part. She apparently does not want any interfaith chums, and seems more committed to keeping her life uncomplicated than you have been. So in addition to the negative pressures affecting your evaluation of the Christian faith (i.e. the impact on your parents), there is the additional question of the possible positive incentive found in the attractiveness of Sandi. “Tell me more about this Christianity of yours, I’m terribly interested.” We have now thrown into the equation the prospect of mixed motives, pulling you in both directions. But Jesus did not rise from the dead because Sandi is beautiful, and He did not remain in the grave to keep your parents from having to grieve. Have I summarized that dilemma well enough?
Now there are two components to all of this. The first question would be this: did Jesus actually rise from the dead? In short, this question has to do with whether or not the Christian faith is true. Not true in some relativistic postmodern sense (e.g. true for you but not for me), but historically, objectively true. True for everybody. True out there in the world. True in the universe that everyone lives in. George Washington crossed the Delaware at Trenton, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford Theater, and Jesus rose from the dead outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago. The question is whether that third item is true in the same way that the first two are . . . as an objective historical fact, seen by reliable witnesses who wrote it down, and then believed by sensible people. I would suggest that we start with that.
This is because the second component is “what are you going to do about it?” If it is true, then it is time to count the cost. If it is true, and known to be true, you will then discover how committed you are to a life in accordance with what you believe to be true. But all that would be unnecessary if we have decided on objective grounds that none of it is true. Why go through all the turmoil of counting the cost when you do not yet know if coming to Christ will be necessary? If Christ is actually dead and gone, you wouldn’t have to do anything.
Now of course, there needs to be some kind of a priori commitment on your part—not to this particular truth or that one—those are yet to be decided. Rather you do need to decide that you do not intend to live a lie, or on the basis of a lie. That commitment should be articulated to yourself, openly and honestly, because if you do not have that commitment in your soul to begin with, then why bother searching? You can know beforehand that there will be a cost to following the truth, whatever it is, but you don’t need to count the cost down to the last penny until you know it to be true. So there will be time enough for that if you get to that point. When we get there, we can discuss it in detail.
One final thing. There is a difference between friendship and fellowship. I want you to know that I fully expect a friendship to grow up between us as we have this conversation. I also want you to know that the friendship will be unaffected by whatever conclusion you come to. But the fellowship that Christ bestows on His people is limited to those who are in fact His people. If you feel like there is a closed door there, that would probably account for it. And this makes sense if you think about it. The things we will be discussing are not an intellectual game. We will not be playing for counters. The apostle Paul says that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then we are all still in our sins (1 Cor. 15:16). If Christ is still in the grave, then Christians of all men are most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:19). But this is a form of reasoning that can be turned around. If Christ was raised from the dead, who then is most to be pitied?
The claim that Christ rose is not a trivial claim. If it is true, then it affects everything. If it is false, then the idea of Christendom is in ruins. And it is the kind of claim where it is not possible to split the difference. There is no halfway point between risen and dead.
So now you know something of how I would like to approach this. If you are still game, I would love to. have this conversation.
Cordially in Christ,
Douglas Wilson