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Oct. 6, 2022 - Babylon Bee
38:10
C.S. Lewis Expert and Ninja Evangelist | A Bee Interview With Professor Jerry Root

Dr. Jerry Root is a professor emeritus at Wheaton College and has been lecturing about C.S. Lewis for over 41 years. So, he has lots to say about C.S. Lewis' life and work. He also has a mean evangelism game with an unorthodox method: caring about people enough to ask them questions to get to know them. Weird! Check out Dr. Root's books and videos at: https://www.drjerryroot.com/

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Welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
We have a great guest today.
We have Dr. Jerry Root on.
He's an expert on C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.
Yes, yeah.
He's kind of an amazing guy.
He's an evangelist.
He is.
He said he knows your father.
He did say that.
I know about him.
He said, hey, say hi to your father.
Yes, exactly.
Super fascinating guy.
He's, you know, he's an expert on theology and religion.
We had a great conversation about that.
He's an expert on C.S. Lewis.
We talked about that.
And best thing, he has nothing to promote.
You can just watch the interview and enjoy.
Literally said he doesn't like him, he never promotes himself.
So we're going to do the promoting for him.
Yes.
He is great.
And if you haven't read his books, you need to read his books.
Dr. Jerry Root, R-O-O-T.
So we have Dr. Jerry Root here.
Very honored to have you on.
Thank you so much.
You're a C.S. Lewis scholar and a professor emeritus at Wheaton College and a visiting professor at Talbot University, Biola.
We just had Eric Thonna yesterday.
Eric's a very close friend.
Oh, he's such a great guy.
And he's a handsome devil.
He is a handsome guy.
Hey, Jerry is too.
Jerry's a good guy.
Yeah, you're a handsome guy, too.
Every time I meet a bald guy, I tell him, You ought to grow a white beard.
You'll be really handsome.
It balances it out.
Yeah.
In addition to being a C.S. Lewis expert, before we started rolling, he was telling me, he grew up in South Central LA and was telling me about the origin of the bloods and the crypts.
Were you part of that?
I wasn't, but my high school was on the street where it all started.
Oh, wow.
I went to high school with guys that I played football in high school with guys that got free TVs during the Watts riot.
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, a guy was shot in the leg on my street, actually.
Oh, wow.
But the TV thing was good because Color TV had just come out and there was at least an opportunity for us to now watch color TV.
That's cool on a stolen television.
Was it stolen?
Oh, I don't think you don't ask questions.
You just watch the TV.
Well, it's so great to have you on.
We'd love to talk to you about C.S. Lewis and about how you got into C.S. Lewis and why you are who you are.
I want to know more about you.
I grew up, like I said, in LA, and I only read six books before I went to college, not counting comic books.
And when I got to college, I became a Christian at the very beginning of my freshman year.
And I read the Bible through that year, and my mind started to wake up.
And then I wanted to tell the guys I played football with about Jesus, and they're asking me questions I had never even considered before.
God's good and all-powerful.
Why does evil exist in the universe?
That sort of thing.
And I didn't know the answers, but I went to try and find out and I saw a name cropping up in all the literature.
And it was C.S. Lewis.
And my older sister was teaching fifth grade kids.
And she was reading The Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe.
And she told me about that book.
And I went and read the Narnian books and I liked them.
I wanted to find out more about Lewis.
I read Surprise by Joy, his autobiography, where he talks about how he moved from atheism to Christianity.
He talked about being prompted by these deep longings of his heart.
And I knew the longings existentially, but I never had anybody give me a vocabulary for my soul like he did.
So I started reading him voraciously.
I got ready to graduate from college, reading lots of Lewis by that time.
And a man wisely said to me, You do not get an education in college.
And I began to wonder, why was I paying tuition then?
What's this all about?
And he said, no, you lay a foundation for an education and commencement, what we call our graduation exercises, means now you will commence your education.
So build on that foundation.
I go to seminary after that, and I had to write a thesis, and there was no way I was going to write it on the use of the optative mood in the Greek text of Philemon, and that wasn't going to hold me.
So I thought, well, maybe I could write it on C.S. Lewis.
They said, okay.
So I started putting pen to paper at that time.
And then I just started reading him voraciously and started writing about him.
And one of the things that I discovered was that he opens more than wardrobe doors.
And when he would write about a book, I'd want to go read that book.
So my liberal arts education was following Lewis through the world of literature.
So that's how I got to Homer and Plato and Aristotle.
That's how I got to the early church fathers and Athanasius.
That's how I got to Augustine and Boethius and Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, got to Dante, got to Chaucer, my word.
I got to, I'm probably the only ex-PE major who's actually read The Fairy Queen by Edmund Spencer.
And if my old football buddies had seen me reading in praise of Posey by Philip Sidney, they would have thought I lost my mind.
I love those books.
I love them.
And I go back and Lewis, he wrote one book called English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama.
It's a 700-page book.
To write that book, he read every book written in English in the 16th century and every book translated into English in the original language it was written, Italian, French, Latin, and in translation, so that he could be honest and accurate in his judgments of the translation's quality.
I read that book.
I read it many times, and he would refer to a guy like Michael Drayton, for example.
He just referred to him and talked about some of his poetry.
And I go, who is this guy?
So I go read Michael Drayton as a result.
And on and on it goes.
It's been a glorious ride, and I have enjoyed every bit of it.
And if nobody was interested, the result was I've lectured on Lewis now in 79 universities in 19 different countries.
And if nobody was interested, I'd still be all in.
This has been a delight from my soul.
That seems like a long journey.
Seems like a really long journey.
I'm an old guy.
I've had time.
You're a young guy.
You haven't had much time.
It's all happened incrementally.
And apart from his autobiography and the Chronicles of Narnia, what was your journey through C.S. Lewis' own works like?
Did you go in any certain order?
Which ones were you kind of introduced to?
Every time a book would come, I just started reading what was available first.
And every time a new book would come out, his literary executor, Walter Hooper, would start gathering up essays that hadn't been published, but maybe they had been in some obscure literary journal or something.
And he had put them under common cover.
Every time one of those would come up, I'd buy it and just drink it down.
And so that was important.
I read a lot of books about him as well, people who were writing about Lewis.
You started to discover that these books, so many of them, they say the same thing over and over again.
And you can tell the difference between the really good ones and the ones that are not so good.
The good ones will say, or the bad ones will say, Lewis believed this.
And I can tell you what books that person hasn't read yet.
The good ones would say, it would appear from this that Lewis believed this.
What's a good example of that, of something that you've heard people say, Lewis believes this, but you would say no if you, you know, I could tell that they maybe have read some of his Christian apologetics or maybe they've read some of his fiction.
They haven't read his literary criticism where Lewis would clarify what he was really believing about a thing.
Plus, you can look at Lewis and he may believe some things early on, but as you see the development of his thought, you see change.
Like we would expect with anybody.
And so, even when we put together the quotable C.S. Lewis, we tried to put the quotes on particular topics in chronological order so you could see some of that development of his thought.
You know, but a lot of times when people make these absolutized judgments, Lewis believed this.
You have to say there should be probably some nuancing here.
And one other point to make about that, when he wrote English literature in the 16th century, excluding drama, it's one of 73 titles that bear his name.
That book was the century of the Reformation.
He's the only person I know who read thoroughly both sides of the Reformation.
And his judgments are way more nuanced.
And so he makes this statement.
The Catholics thought that the Protestants were antinomian against the law.
The Protestants thought the Catholics were Pelagian, works-oriented, that they'll be justified by works.
And Lewis says both were wrong.
The fact is, you could find an antinomian among the Protestants, and you could find a Pelagian among the Catholics, but you had to bottom fish to find it.
If you want to find out how good your ideas are, go toe-to-toe with the best of the other side, not the worst of the other side.
And another author I got to again through Lewis, Thomas Aquinas, he said, An abuse doesn't nullify a proper use.
If you judge any segment of society by their worst examples, nobody could stand.
We want to, I mean, you can always find bad professors, bad students, bad used car salesmen, bad politicians, bad doctors, and so on.
You want to go with the best of the other side to see how well you're doing and thinking about those issues.
Now, it's interesting that you say that.
I watch, you know, people they make judgments about what Cease Lewis thought about hell, in particular, from something like the Great Divorce.
You know, they're like, well, he has this whole theology laid out about what heaven and hell is.
And Lewis never really was saying that.
He was just kind of what you're saying is he probably was just, you know, he was writing a fictional story to point something out, but he wasn't, he didn't make a definitive statement about his theology of hell in the Great Divorce.
Well, Jared, that's fair.
And the thing is, you'll never judge an author by the liberties they may take in their stories.
They may be trying to make a particular point and they may embellish it with other features.
If we were going to do that, then we're going to make a mess of Jesus' parables, too.
You know, he talks about that one parable of the woman who there was an injustice going against her and she keeps pounding on the judge's door and the judge won't come down.
Then he comes down because she's such an irritation.
And Jesus says, therefore, you should always pray.
Well, if you're going to make an allegory out of that, where every character means something, then the judge would be God.
And Jesus isn't saying that about God.
He's saying about persistence and prayer.
He's trying to teach one point, which is the main idea.
There are deviations from that, but the main idea of the parable.
Jesus uses fiction.
And sometimes he takes liberties in that fiction as he seeks to make a primary point.
Now you go back to hell.
The Great Divorce does reveal some interesting ideas that Lewis has on hell.
I'm actually working on a book on that right now, C.S. Lewis, Hell and the Love of God.
We can talk more about that later if you want.
But Lewis writes about hell in many places.
Many of his essays, he's got a whole chapter on it in the problem of pain.
And he's got lots of things related to the issue of hell.
And even his literary critical work, Preface to Paradise Lost, he talks about hell in that book as well.
There's lots of data to draw from if you want to clarify an understanding of Lewis's view of hell.
Now, do you agree with Lewis on everything or do you have deviations?
Of course not.
And so, but the thing is, I'm not the standard.
So, if I don't agree with him, I may be the one who's wrong here.
So, let's go with that.
But yeah, I don't agree with him on a lot of things.
But boy, he sure fires on a lot of cylinders and far more cylinders than I fire on.
He's a real smart guy, isn't he?
You know, we met, we met one time.
You and I, I don't remember this, but we were up at the book.
Okay, of course, you remember.
Yes, we met outside of the Ponderessi Chapel.
And I asked you about this because I was looking to go further in my education.
And I love C.S. Lewis, and I've read a lot of C.S. Lewis, but I haven't read 72 books.
I think I've read like 37 and a lot of those multiple, a lot of those multiple times.
But you said something really interesting.
You said, well, the way I got into it is I read each of his books about six times.
And then, you know, that's kind of how, can you expand?
Like, how does a person become, how do you get deeper with Lewis for the average person?
Well, I would say, how do you get deeper with any subject?
I've read the Bible once.
I didn't check a box and say, been there, done that.
And it's interesting to me, too, because I think for many people, their university or college education, the way it works today almost inoculates them against learning.
I'll say to somebody, have you ever read Dante?
And they'll say, oh, yeah, I read Dante back when I was in college.
If that means, therefore, I never need to pick him up again.
And I think that you have depths in the book itself objectively.
And then there are depths that hopefully are developing in us so that every time we read a book, we bring more to the reading and we end up drawing more out of it as a result.
So I think that that has something to do with why these things can be more interesting and hold us.
But also with Lewis, his pen is like the narrow end of a funnel.
And the wide end is the result of all of his big reading that he brings to that funnel.
And consequently, then you read what he's written and it opens doors.
Like I said, he opens more than wardrobe doors.
It opens doors to all this other rich literature that's out there.
Reading Lewis and reading him well is itself a liberal arts education.
Now, are you a fast reader?
Because here's the thing.
I'd love to read a book six times, but it's just not going to happen.
You know, like it's like, like I've read books multiple times, but even if I like a book, it's like, oh, I love this book.
And then seven months later, I finish it.
Do you just, are you one of those guys who just buzzes through books?
No, I am a very slow, deliberate reader.
Man.
But like the turtle, you can still win some races.
And I mark my books.
Yeah.
You have to learn what kind of a reader.
And I try to do that.
I take notes and then it just takes even longer.
Yeah, yeah.
It's okay, though.
It's okay.
What I found, I'm a kinetic learner.
My whole body needs to be involved in the learning process.
But as a result, I gain from my eyes.
I read it sort of out loud in my head.
So I gain from my ears and I gain from my body being involved.
I read slow.
I read deliberate.
I read a lot.
My wife reads fast.
Yeah.
She can consume a book so quickly.
Isn't that annoying?
No, it annoys me.
I'm like, oh, you know, because she doesn't remember it.
She doesn't remember what she said.
So what I do is I say to her right after she reads the book, Claudia, tell me about that book.
And it's like a book review.
You read book reviews and you sometimes say, okay, that's an interesting book.
At least I got the grasp of what's going on there.
I don't have time to read every book, but I've got the grasp of that book.
Read another book review and say, that's one I've got to read.
So you dive in there.
But my wife is for me like a book review guy.
So I say to her, tell me about that book.
She tells me, I say, that's interesting.
And I decide I'm not going to read it, but I think I've squeezed all the nectar out of that by hearing what she has to say.
Six months later, she doesn't remember the book, but I remember what she told me about it.
And then six months after that, she hears me referring to that book in a talk and she says, He never read that.
I do that with my wife, too.
She'll read a book, and then I will quote it as if I read it.
Well, it's the old, I don't quote it as if I read it.
Because you're more intellectually honest than I am.
Well, the other thing, too, is with our wives reading these books and helping us, you know, it's like the old gospel hymn, Take My Wife and Let Me Be.
That's good.
That's my favorite hymn.
That's my favorite hymn.
It is, yeah.
Remember when you were a kid, and every time you finished a dish, you'd leave it in the sink and you'd come back later and it was gone.
And then you got to college and you'd leave the dishes in the sink and they weren't gone.
And you got married and finally you left the dishes in the sink and they were gone again.
I don't know what the magic was.
That happens with my laundry.
Yeah.
Finally, my wife got wise to it and she said, You want to see how the magic works?
Clean your own dishes.
That's right.
That's great.
So you started a group, you started a group called the Brotherhood of the Briar at We, right?
So that was, that's your brainchild.
We have 26 daughter groups worldwide now.
Now, I started a, I started one without your approval.
I just want you to know.
You just owe us a bottle of scotch.
That's all.
A bottle of scotch and a nice pipe, right?
Oh, you know, you're good.
We've got nice pipes.
No, that's really good.
So up there, I was just wondering if I could get your approval to start one officially.
I can beat anyone in the world in Domino.
Thank you.
That's good.
So that would be 27 groups now.
That's good.
So you've been to Hume Lake many times.
There's a group that meets up there too.
Yeah, I've been to that one a lot.
Yeah, that's the reason why.
Great group.
It's a great group.
There's actually two in Hong Kong as well.
Oh, wow.
And I was there for the start of each one.
One of them is all millionaires, and the other one is all billionaires.
I want to join that one.
The billionaires don't like the millionaires coming to their group because they always feel like the millionaires are trying to get something from them.
The nice thing about those groups is that the scotch that they serve is unbelievable.
Yeah.
And how did C.S. Lewis feel about billionaires getting into heaven?
Well, I tell you, I don't know where that quote is.
Maybe you could help me and direct me to that book.
Maybe it's a book I haven't read yet.
I've got something to look forward to.
I'm just asking you.
I don't know, Vib.
Well, I think you, I think if I, you know, every once in a while you'll go to somebody and they'll say, well, if Lewis was alive today, what would he say?
Oh, yeah.
And I go, nobody can answer that question.
What they end up doing is using the author like a ventriloquist uses his dummy, and they mediate their own thoughts through the author's idea.
But I'm sure Lewis was happy anybody got into heaven.
There were times when he had former students who came to faith and he had a hand in it and he was very pleased.
Sheldon Von Alkin would be a good example of that.
He was very pleased.
And he had a big influence on people coming to faith.
He even said, most of my books are evangelistic.
Well, we all know about the apologetic books it would be.
And after he wrote Out of the Silent Planet, he wrote to a friend, I've discovered any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the guise of romance, just like other worldviews could be smuggled in to their literature as well.
But when Lewis wrote his literary criticism, even he said in a letter that we don't need more books by Christians about Christianity, we need more books by Christians on other subjects with their Christianity late.
So that it gives an entire worldview understanding that's being expressed at this particular place.
And I think that's great significance.
And so there you go.
He was concerned that people come to know the love of Christ.
Let me just give you this quote, too.
Three weeks before he died, he got a letter from an American girl.
Her name was Ruth.
She was 11 years old.
She had read the Narnian books.
And she wrote to him through the publisher.
And she, if Lewis wouldn't have written her back, it would have been no big deal.
But he took time on his deathbed to write her back.
And he says to her, this great Christian on the threshold of heaven, writing to a young girl on the threshold of her earthly life, if you continue to love Jesus, nothing much will go wrong with you.
And I pray you may always do so.
It's great, isn't it?
You can find that letter at the end of his letters to children.
There's actually a woman, a girl in those collections of letters, the last year of his life.
Her name was Karen, and she received three or four letters from Lewis before he died.
And it's actually the wife of, now I've got a senior moment, you know, he pastors the church in New York, the big church in New York.
Tim Keller.
Keller, Tim Keller's wife.
I was going to say.
Isn't that amazing?
That is amazing.
She was a little girl who wrote to him and she got letters from him.
That is amazing.
Now, he had this evangelistic heart.
He wanted to see people come to Christ.
I feel like you have that as well.
I've heard you speak before on opportunities you've had to share the gospel with people that because of your expertise and your study, like you're able to go into places that not a lot of us will be able to go to.
So you've had experiences where you've been able to share the gospel with some like Oxford Dons and that kind of stuff.
Can you tell us a story?
Tell us an interesting story about that.
You want stories?
They take a little bit of time.
I don't know how this particular medium works.
So you may have to cut me off or something.
But I'll give you two examples that would relate to that.
I was invited to speak at, I've probably spoken, preached at chapels or spoken in lectures at about eight of the different Oxford University colleges.
And one night after speaking at an even song at Hartford College, I was invited by the chaplain to have a high table with the faculty.
So the halls are spectacular.
The most spectacular, of course, is Christchurch.
And you've seen it because in the Harry Potter movies, that's the one where the owls are flying in and out.
That's a real place.
So anyway, Hartford is pretty spectacular.
It's not that spectacular.
Huge paintings of benefactors hanging from the wall.
William Tyndill went there.
John Donne, the poet, went there.
Long tables run the length of the hall, three steps elevated and perpendicular.
The long tables where the students sit is the high table where the faculty sit.
If the students are eating roast beef, the faculty are eating prime rib.
If the students are eating steak, the faculty are eating filet mignon.
Everybody comes dressed in their academic gowns and the meal begins with a Latin prayer and the wine pours freely.
You can cut the pretense with a knife.
As long as you don't take yourself too seriously, it's kind of fun.
And I think those big paintings are making sure that you use a knife, fork, and spoon.
Those guys are looking down on you.
Oh, I saw Harry Potter.
I know how it works.
So there you go.
So anyway, the chaplain introduces me.
I sit down, they had the Latin prayer.
Woman sitting across me taught history there.
And she says, so Jerry, why are you a Christian?
She says it real loud.
So everybody has to pay attention to this.
Somebody told me they thought she was trying to make me the entertainment of that night's dinner.
And I didn't know that.
I just thought she's asking me an honest question.
I'll give her an honest answer.
And I said, well, actually, I'm a Christian.
And I didn't use a philosophical or apologetic argument.
I didn't become a Christian because somebody wowed me with ideas.
I became a Christian because I was overwhelmed by the message of the gospel of grace and the love of God and the forgiveness of God.
And so I told her, I became a Christian because I was aware of all the shortcomings in my life.
I believe in the high ideal of love, but I've had sharp words with people I say I love most in the world.
I believe in justice, but there have been times I've found myself being unfair in my treatment of others.
I didn't set out to be, but realized after the fact I had been.
And I'm aware of these shortcomings and these lapses and these failures and these lack of love in my life that the Bible would classify under sin.
And I was overwhelmed when I heard that the God of the universe loved me unconditionally and forgave me of all of that.
And that's why I became a Christian.
Well, she was taken back by that answer.
I think she was expecting a lively debate, you know.
So she said, well, I could appreciate that, but that's just not my issue.
I said, oh, I think I understand what you're saying.
You see, I became a Christian my first year of college and I didn't become perfect overnight.
That took two or three weeks.
The whole faculty busted up and riporian laughter and she's laughing too.
And I said, your laughter just betrayed you.
She said, what do you mean?
I said, well, you and I just met, so you couldn't understand the nonsense of my last statement by virtue of the incongruity in my life.
But you laughed knowing what I was talking about.
So either your read of history or your read of your own life shows you nobody has it together.
She said, you got me.
I said, I'm not out to get anybody.
I'm not interested in that.
But I said, let me ask you a question then, knowing the incongruities in your own life, what gets you by?
She said, well, I have faith in humanity.
And I said, well, let me ask you a question about that because I want anything that's going to help me.
Have you ever been wounded by another human being before?
She said, of course.
I said, have you ever wounded another human being before?
She said, I suppose so.
She's a little softer on herself.
So consequently, I said, then given the fact that you've been wounded and you've done your fair share of wounding, what gets you by?
How does this faith in humanity work?
And just then the man who sat next to her teaching French there said, how does it work for Christians?
And we spent the rest of the meal talking about the love of God, the grace of God, the forgiveness of God.
And we got to the real heart of the gospel through that environment.
And I don't think I'm clever enough to come up with those answers.
But even Jesus says sometimes you'll be called before magistrates and stuff.
Don't worry about what you're going to say.
The Holy Spirit will give you what you need in that moment.
And I think we can read and be full of our understanding of things.
I think we can have life's experience.
And, you know, Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.
If we're not examining our own life, my experience has been there's plenty who are willing to come in and examine our life for us and show us where we're screwing up.
And if we're listening and we're attentive to real life and we're reading and we're trying to grow, my guess is every new situation that we come into, we can bring a full heart to that situation with the trust that the Holy Spirit's working with us as well.
So I don't want to make it sound like I was some clever guy who figured out how to talk to this woman.
I think God was guiding that discussion.
I've got boatloads of other stories, but I don't know how many more you want.
Yeah, you said you had two.
I'd like to hear another one.
Well, let me give you another one then.
So you've got the issue where you could be in an academic environment, a robust academic environment like Oxford University.
But how about meeting with the common man, meeting with the person on the street, or you just bump into them?
So Wheaton College had a limo program where if you're off as a prof and you're lecturing someplace, you come back, you got to get back to campus for your own lectures.
So this guy picks me up at the airport and he says, I'm taking you to Wheaton College.
What do you do there?
I said, I'm a professor.
So what are you a professor of?
I said, well, my doctorate's in philosophy of religion.
He said, what religion are you?
I said, I'm a Christian.
How about you?
He said, I'm a Muslim.
His name was Hafiz.
So I get in the car and he says to me, So, what's the difference between Christianity and Islam?
And I said, Well, I will defer to you on the matters of Islam.
I've only read about a third of the Quran.
I haven't read it all.
But I know my Bible fairly well.
And I think I could lay out to you some differences.
I said, For example, in Surah 4 in the Quran, it says, You don't believe in a God of Trinity.
We do believe in a God of Trinity.
We don't believe there's one God and three gods, and we don't believe there's one person and three persons.
We believe there's one God eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And the second person has two natures, human and divine.
And this is important for us.
And I think I can underscore for you why it's reasonable and logical as well.
And he says, I'm interested.
So I said, Well, Hafiz, let me ask you three questions: Is God a contingent being or a non-contingent being?
And he said, What do you mean?
So you explain contingency.
You know, if you have a table, it's contingent upon the lumberjack who cut down the tree, the miller who milled the wood to workable size, and the carpenter who built the table according to some designer's plan.
I said, Is God like that?
Or is God non-contingent and eternal and self-existent and always existing?
And he said, No, I believe he's non-contingent.
I said, Hafiz, do you believe he's a God of love?
Second question.
And he said, Yes, you might expect for a Muslim, they would say, I believe he's just or he's merciful or he's good.
But I've had this conversation with at least 200 Muslims.
They always say, Yeah, I believe he's a God of love.
Third question, who's the object of his love?
And he said, We are creation.
And I said, If God needs us to fulfill his nature as love, then he's a contingent being and not a non-contingent being.
And you've got a contradiction in your theology.
Relational attributes in a non-contingent being presuppose that relationship must be necessary in that being.
Hafiz got it.
And he says, I'm tracking with you.
I'm tracking with you.
About 18 times in that conversation, he said that.
And I said, Now, this is really important for us, Hafiz, because at the core of Christian faith, we believe God is a God of love, and that love is intrinsic to his very nature.
And this is important to us too as we understand our relationship with this God, because the Bible makes it clear we're all messed up and we've all fallen short of God.
Created us to have relationship with him, and we are estranged from him because of our own bad acts.
Now, there was an author I referred to to Hafiz named Rudolf Otto.
And this was an author who wrote a book, The Idea of the Holy, that I got to because of C.S. Lewis.
He said it was one of the 10 top books he had read in his life.
And Rudolf Otto, a German philosopher of religion, spent years studying all the great religions and found there were three things that were in common in all of them.
I'm explaining this to Hafiz.
Number one, they all believe in a divine essence.
He calls it the numinous, something that inspires awe and fear.
They may look at it differently if they're an animist, a pantheist, a polytheist, a dualist, a monotheist, or a monotheistic Trinitarian, but they all believe in some transcendent other.
Second, they all believe in a moral law that people fail to keep.
And third, they all believe that the divine essence is the custodian of the moral law.
So if we failed at the moral law, we've offended the divine essence.
Hafiz interrupts immediately.
He says, I believe this.
I believe this.
I believe in the supernatural.
I believe in life after death.
I believe in hell.
And I don't want to go there.
And I said, and then he said, I'm doing the best I know how.
I said, Hafiz, how's that working for you?
And he said, I live in fear.
I said, Hafiz, you don't have to live in fear anymore.
The Bible says perfect love casts out fear, gets back to that love thing we were talking about.
And the thing that makes Christianity different from all the other religions in the world, including Islam, is that Christianity believes that this God, whom we have offended, has not ceased to love us.
And consequently, to set us right with him, rather than us paying the price for our sins, he sent his son to prove his love for us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
And Jesus' death somehow reconciles us to the Father.
As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, Christians believe that somehow Christ's death sets us right with God.
And I said that to him, and he says, that's the most comforting thing I've ever heard in my life.
And I said, well, is there any reason why you wouldn't want to trust Christ right now?
He said, none.
He quickly out loud in that limousine to trust Christ.
And then I said, do you have a Bible?
He said, no.
And I said, well, let me get you.
I said, no, and I'm in the car all the time.
Could you get me a Bible on CD?
And I said, yeah, I will.
And so we did some follow-up with him and so on.
It's kind of fun.
But these things happen all the time.
I have conversations like this every week.
That's amazing.
That's such a good way to explain the gospel.
And it seems like you do such a good job of connecting with people in those conversations too.
You know what, though?
I have to say this to you.
I love novels.
A novelist gives you a narrative thread.
And as a reader, you follow the thread he gives you.
People are far more interesting than novels because they're not a narrative thread.
They're a complex fabric of threads.
And if you talk with a person and find out where they're at, what they're interested in, and so on, and what thread is occupying their attention at that moment, you begin to follow that thread and you'll find some place where the gospel makes its appearance, or at least you can share the gospel in a way that you're not looking, you know, you don't look like you're obnoxious or you're just pounding them over the head with the gospel.
You're sharing the gospel in a way that is relevant to their own experience in life at that hour.
And I think it's fascinating.
People are interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really amazing.
Yeah.
Trying to find that thread, trying to find the connection through conversation.
We have good conversations all the time.
And I think it takes a lot of discernment to know, like, what is that thing?
What's the key?
It seems like the Holy Spirit sort of has to reveal that to you at the time.
Yeah, but I think, too, the Holy Spirit can use your own experience.
I remember once I thought, I need to talk to people about Jesus.
What am I going to do?
So I think, I'll go to a donut shop.
I was a youth pastor at that time.
I'll go to a donut shop.
And I showed up about 10 o'clock.
Nobody's at donut shops at 10 o'clock.
Maybe a cop stopping by for a cup of coffee or something, a coffee break.
If you want to go to a donut shop and meet people, you got to go between six and eight in the morning.
So I started going Tuesday and Thursday mornings, this donut shop.
And I think a person could write a PhD dissertation on the sociological subcultures of donut shops.
Adam?
And I go in there and I sit down.
I sit down.
And there were about five or eight tables and chairs there, some with two chairs, some with four.
And I didn't know what to do.
I had no strategy.
I was stupid, but I had a heart that wanted to share.
And I would see the people come in, the same people every day sat in the same tables.
And this one guy always set off to my right.
He'd come in, get his donut, and come turn his left to my right to this table.
And I'd say hi to him, you know, hi.
And he didn't respond.
And I had no strategy.
I thought I'd read my Greek Bible there and somebody would come up and say, what are you reading?
I'd say it's a Greek Bible.
And they'd sit down and say, oh, yeah, can I ask Jesus in my life?
I mean, no strategy at all.
That doesn't work.
But one day I got caught up reading my Greek Bible and all of a sudden I hear this voice say, can I sit here?
And it was the guy.
This guy looked like Walter Mathow, you know, grumpy old man.
And I looked at him.
I said, sure, you can.
I looked over.
Somebody had come into the donut shop and didn't know the rules.
They were sitting at his table.
He asked if he could sit with me.
And I said, yeah.
I said, what's your name?
He said, Gene.
I said, what do you do for a living?
Gene says, why?
You're writing a book.
And I realized I'd gone too fast.
And I was asking questions.
I didn't have the right to ask him what he did for his living.
But he ended up sitting down.
We had a conversation.
Awkwardly, it started, but every Tuesday, Thursday, he started sitting at my table.
And over a period of months, I found out that he had twice been married, had no clue where his former wives were.
He had twice, he had two kids, didn't have a clue where they were.
Have you ever heard of a deadbeat dad?
This was the guy, and God loves deadbeat dads.
And he was calling me to that donut shop to talk to that guy.
And over nine months' time, Gene became a Christian.
But also over nine months' time, I was learning the art of how to talk to a person in ways that wouldn't be as offensive.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers, they start looking at the beauty and we start talking about the beauty.
And I said, and isn't it great to know who to thank?
This guy says, I'm an atheist.
And I said, I bet I could prove to you in 10 minutes you're not.
And he said, try.
So I said, okay, define atheism for me.
I think you can push him off the cliff.
This has been another edition of the Bee Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you that someone out there knows something about Carmen.
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