The following program is a presentation of Grace Communion International
and Grace Communion Seminary and is made possible by generous donations from viewers like you.
On this episode of You're Included, Dr. Alister McGrath discusses his journey into the study
of science and theology, his discovery of C.S. Lewis,
and various issues facing the church today.
Our host is Dr. Gary Deddo.
Alister, it's good to have you with us today.
Well, it's great to be here.
You have a very unusual background in both science and in theology.
There's not a lot of people who have that kind of background, but can you tell us maybe
a little bit about how those two things came together for you?
Sure.
Yes. I began in high school, studying sciences, and that was my first love, really.
My future was obviously going to be in science and, at that time, I thought science entailed atheism.
So, for me, science/atheism went together.
Then I went up to Oxford University, studied chemistry,
and I went onto the doctorate in molecular biophysics.
Then something else happened, which was while I was at Oxford, I discovered Christianity.
This whole question of how I held together Christian faith and natural sciences really
became very, very important.
So, I decided if I was going to do this properly, I would have to do some degrees in theology as well.
That's really how I transitioned from the natural sciences to theology, although of
course I tried to keep the two of them together.
All right.
Why do you think you thought science was an objection to Christian faith?
I can go with two things.
One was that it just seemed to me that science offered an explanation for everything.
A kind of reductive explanation, which mean that it gobbled up the space that God might occupy.
Also, I felt religion was terribly old-fashioned.
That who in their right mind would believe in this stuff?
I took the view that people who believed in God were mad, or bad, or sad, or possibly all three.
I didn't want to be like that.
It's both intellectual and cultural.
I see.
I know somewhere along the way you took an interest in the theology and writings
of Thomas F. Torrance.
Can you tell me how that came about?
One of the things that really I was trying to find was someone who would help me think
through how I might relate science and theology.
What I was looking for, I suppose, was some kind of role model,
someone who personally had integrated these.
I found several good people who had integrated science and the Christian faith,
but not necessarily science/Christian theology.
And in June of 1976, I think it was,
I came across Tom Torrance's book, Theological Science, and devoured it.
It was very, very exciting.
As I began to read this, I discovered he was someone who had thought this whole thing through
and really gave me an intellectual framework to make sense of the relationship between
theology and science.
I think what happened there really was that Torrance had actually gave me a mental map.
In other words, a way of thinking about things that really allowed me to see legitimate,
interesting ways of holding science and Christian theology, and really mapped out how I might
develop my own thinking on this whole matter.
All right.
I know many people consider that science and Christian faith are at odds,
or any belief in God, there's kind of been some talk about a war between this.
Obviously, you saw past that.
Was there some key insight that helped you recognize there's not a war?
Somehow, the writings of Torrance were helping you sort this out.
I think it's a cliché there's a war between science and faith.
It's terribly out-of-date.
Scholarship has moved on massively, but it still lingers in the media,
who haven't yet caught up with the literature.
I think Torrance really showed me that if you saw them in the right intellectual context,
then there was no question of them being at war.
If anything, they complimented each other.
For in many ways, Torrance was saying if you see them in the right way, they give you a
mental map, which allows you to position them and actually enable them to have a very positive,
constructive, and fruitful conversation.
That really is what Torrance helped me to discover.
Yes. Well, that's wonderful because I do know I run into people who are still stuck in the past.
Now, I know some of your interests as well.
You've written quite a number of books.
Some of them have to do with just addressing not so much the science and faith,
but just the theology and faith and helping people grow in their faith.
Of course, you have a textbook on Introduction to Christian Theology.
What's important there and why have you written these books?
When I was transitioning from natural science to theology, studying theology at Oxford,
having come to it from natural sciences, I found it very difficult.
I was switching from the sciences to the humanities.
I was entering into a new discipline.
I found it very, very difficult to actually pick it up.
I thought, "I'm sure I can learn from this difficulty.
If only there was a textbook that might help with this."
Because all the textbooks I read were useless.
They assumed far too much on the part of their readers.
I decided that one day, if the occasion emerged, I'd try and write a book which would have
helped me discover theology.
Because I had a very, very steep learning curve and I thought, "I'm sure there are many
others who are having this experience as well."
So, I thought, "Supposing I write a theological textbook which begins at ground zero, assumes
absolutely no previous knowledge of Christian theology, and gradually introduces them,"
which is what I needed myself.
I thought maybe my own experience could help others do the same.
I think I see education, helping others discover theology, really very, very exciting.
Because, in effect, I'm saying, "Look, I've discovered this. This is really wonderful.
Can I help you discover it as well?"
And so, my own pain, if you like, has been somebody else's gain
because it means it's easier for them after that.
Right.
I think another obstacle that I've found that people run into is the dichotomy between head and heart.
They've said there's a gap between the head and the heart.
I think that's generated some negative idea about theology and what it's good for.
But it seems to me there's another gap that isn't really there, but so many people assume it is.
How do you address the head/heart gap?
I think that's a real issue and certainly there's a real danger that theology is seen
as very cerebral or very dry, very academic.
Almost as if it has no connection with the vibrant life of faith or, indeed, Christian worship.
I think one of things you have to try and do, it's said, when theology is done properly,
it doesn't simply inform you.
It creates a vision of God.
It makes you want to respond in prayer and in worship.
In other words, it brings together the head and the heart, even though it is focusing
on trying to make sense of the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
For me, if you like, it's about intellectual engagement without in any way losing that
essentially-relational activity of loving God, wanting to praise God, and so forth.
It's a danger. You're quite right.
It's very, very easy to see theology as simply as an obsession with words, losing any connection
with the life of faith, with evangelism, with worship, and so on.
That's a risk that doesn't need to be like that.
I think the challenge, really, is to make sure that theology nourishes both head and heart.
How do you go about that?
In your books, how did you approach it differently to overcome that problem?
I think the way I approach it is to say that you need to think of God as being so radiant,
so majestic, that we cannot possibly hope to do justice of Him.
You're very grateful you can make so much sense of God and things of faith,
and that's why it leads to theology.
On the other hand, the fact that He is so immense, overwhelming, that naturally leads you to worship
because you realize, "These things are so wonderful I can't put them into words,"
so the appropriate response is to get down on your knees and pray and worship.
I think holding those two perspectives together, actually, stops them falling apart.
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Yes, so James Torrance, who I studied with, used to emphasize, he said,
"We need to talk about who God is.
God's character.
Not just whether He exists or abstract concepts, but the nature and character."
It sounds like you're saying something similar to that, getting at the majesty and the glory of God;
the character of God, not just abstract descriptions of his attributes or things like
that that don't really help people see head and heart together.
I think that's right.
I think theology does it's job best when it makes people want to worship God.
Do you think Christian teaching today in the church, are there any particular topics or
theological themes that you think are undeveloped or misunderstood?
I know you did quite a bit of work early on on the issue of justification.
That's a very detailed study that I'm sure you found helpful.
Perhaps that's a theme, you think, or is there some area that you see Christians are missing it
and we might need to review this and bring this back?
Yes, that's a really interesting question.
I think there's a general point to make first and that is that I do worry that Christians
have less inherited knowledge of their faith.
Than might have been the case a generation or two beforehand.
Maybe we need to say that perhaps across the board, there's a need really for Christians
to develop their understanding of their faith, perhaps through catechesis or something like that.
But I'm sure there are areas where there are lots of misunderstandings.
The doctrine of the Trinity is a very good example.
I think many Christians are nervous about that because they say,
"Hey, one is three. That's bad mathematics, you know? Where does that take us?"
And so they almost hold back from engagement because they're frightened that if they open this
can of worms, they'll find all sorts of stuff there they'll want.
Of course, if they do it properly, they will be excited and so forth.
But justification is a very good example.
Most Christians, I think to give a very simple example, misunderstand what justification by faith is.
They think it means that,
"If I start believing in God, I am justified." And that's not quite what it means.
In fact, it's not what it means at all.
You really, I think, need to go back quite a long way.
But for me, I think, every Christian is on a journey of discovery.
That actually, if you like, the creeds of Christianity give us a framework for discovery.
They say, "Here is the landscape of faith.
You probably know that little bit very well, but there's more to discover.
Please engage and discover."
I think that we really need to encourage to discover their whole realm of faith, because
very often they know little bits very well, but the rest remains undiscovered.
Yes. Right.
I know you've written a little book based on the Apostles' Creed as well.
It seems like that's what you've attempted to do in that book a little bit, right?
Open up the whole of the Christian faith.
You mentioned a misunderstanding about the justification.
Could you give us a short, brief definition?
Well for Luther, who I agree with on this occasion, what justification by faith means is not that,
"I choose to believe in God and as a result, God says oh you are justified."
It's much more. That, "Even the faith I have by which I embrace God is God's gracious gift to me."
It's very much about God reaching His hand out towards me, not me reaching my hand out towards Him.
It's this wonderful idea of God, in effect, providing all we need.
That's such an important emphasis because we very often feel that there are certain
things that we need to achieve in order to be right with God.
Luther is saying, "No, no. God does it."
In effect, we need to trust God and get on in the knowledge that that relationship with Him is secure.
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
I know some have raised ... The question: "So are you saying that we're justified by
our belief in the doctrine of itself?
Of course, that's not where we want to go.
It's not where we want to go at all.
If I could a phrase, that's justification by words rather than justification by faith.
Yes. Right.
Now, I know you've had some interest in C.S. Lewis.
So, tell us about that.
How did you encounter Lewis and what have you taken away from him?
Well, I was born in Belfast.
Actually, Lewis was born in Belfast as well.
Interestingly, when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, I always thought Lewis was English.
It was one of those things I had never really made that connection, but I didn't read him.
What happened was when I discovered Christianity, I began to ask all kinds of hard questions.
My friends got fed up and eventually one of them said to me,
"Look, why don't you read C.S. Lewis."
So I said, "Oh, well, okay."
I went and bought my first ever book by C.S. Lewis, in 1974 I think it was,
and thought, "This is good," and bought more books by C.S. Lewis and thought,
"These are good."
And kept on reading them.
Actually, I began almost a lifelong relationship with C.S. Lewis because he is so good.
He's so clear.
He is very, very good at explaining things well.
The other thing I find is that when you read Lewis the first time, you see some things.
When you come back to the same work later, there's something else you missed.
In effect, it's a journey of discovery.
I wrote a biography of him recently to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death.
I think one of the things I discovered is that in researching that biography, I actually
came to appreciate the man all the more simply because I began to discover more of him as
a man, as a deeply-flawed, damaged human being who nonetheless achieved remarkable things.
I think that certainly gave me hope for myself.
Right. Yes, yes.
I've actually had a similar experience as well.
Now, Lewis is known as an apologist.
I think he was more than that, but a lot of people concentrate on his apologetics and things like that.
Now, I know of course you have an interest in apologetics as well.
Do you approach that task, that ministry in a similar way, or
do you approach it a little bit differently than Lewis did?
I'm sure there are differences between me and Lewis, but I think the similarity between
Lewis and myself is we're both atheists who became Christians and know why we did it.
In other words, we've inhabited another place and we understand the patterns of thought
in that place.
We've moved to a different place and know why we made that transition.
Now we're both well-placed to be able to say to people who are still in this place of unbelief,
"Here are some problems you have and actually here are some things about Christianity you
probably haven't grasped."
For me, apologetics comes very naturally.
It's about me trying to set out some of the reasons that brought me to faith, but also
I think engaging with some of the questions our culture is asking.
For example, Richard Dawkins and others are saying,
"Well, you can't believe anything you can't prove.
That just right, isn't it?"
And so, I take great pleasure in exposing all his hidden beliefs that are unjustified,
trying to make the point that actually we do believe an awful lot of things that cannot be proven
and yet we have good reason for thinking are right.
For me, apologetics really is very important to support the cultural defense of the Christian faith.
Also, going back to a point we were talking about earlier, I was just suggesting to you
maybe people don't know their faith as well as they should.
But actually, all of us probably has to have some kind of apologetic ministry, trying to explain
what Christianity is, and also why it makes so much sense.
Right. Yes.
As you've interacted with people who are outside the church and outside the Christian faith,
is there a general sense of what those outside the church and Christian faith don't get and
what perhaps Christians need to be aware of, and sensitive to, and address first?
Yeah, are we missing the boat in some ways?
Where would we focus conversations with those who aren't in the church?
I think there are a lot of very important points here.
One is, I think, an awful lot of people just don't see what the point of belief in God is.
And I think that's a very important point,
but I think that believing in God means believing
there's some extra item in the universe like an extra planet orbiting the sun.
It may be there, but makes no difference.
Or why get so excited about that?
I think what you have to try and do is something like discovering meaning or being loved.
It's something that's not simply cognitive, but relational.
It's something that changes life.
I think trying to bring out the fact that belief in God is about
discovering what life is all about, I think that's very, very important.
Moving on from that, I think a lot of people outside the church are deeply puzzled as to
why people should believe in God at all.
I think that very often we have to say, "Look, there are some very good reasons for this,"
and try to set out what some of these are.
Very often, people are not being hostile when they say, "We can't see why you believe in God."
They're actually curious and inquisitive.
I think it's important to tell your own personal story, which is, "Look, here is how I discovered faith,
or here is how I grew in my faith, or here is how I was in a household faith
and discovered its inner meaning," and so on.
It's very important to tell those stories and help people grasp that actually believing
in God is not just about one extra item in your mental inventory, but it is much more
about having discovered what life is all about and that's a course for celebration.
It gives you a big picture of life, which helps you figure out how to behave, how to live,
and of course how to hope, which is very important.
That seems to put ahead arguments for the existence of God or abstract proofs.
You're talking about something that talks about relevance, and meaning, and significance,
because I know some apologetics sounds pretty arid in a line of argument and things like that.
So it sounds like you're talking about a little bit different approach.
I think that's right.
I think that Pascal, many years ago, said, "You should try and make people wish that
there were a God and then show them that there is."
I think the danger is very often we start off by saying,
"Let me tell you why there is a God."
And people aren't interested in the question.
You've got to, in effect, make them want to ask the question because this sounds interesting.
Right. Right.
Now you do a lot of speaking and things.
I suppose there's a mix of Christians and non-believers in the audience and all that.
What have you learned from that in that context?
Are there certain questions that regularly come up?
Yeah, what's that been like?
Well, I think it's a wonderful experience because very often people will want to ask questions.
What I've noticed is that very often some timid person will put up their hand and say
something like, "Well, you know, what difference does Christian faith make," or something like that.
You become aware there a lot of other people who wished they'd asked the question, but hadn't.
Actually, very often when you're talking to a large audience, people are anonymous.
In effect, you can say some things and you're not saying to any specific individual,
and so it's actually easier for people to hear them.
But it's a great privilege to be able to talk about the difference that faith makes to people
and trying to explain what some key Christian ideas mean.
Very often, the response I get from people is,
"Now we get it. We see what this is all about."
That is so exciting when that happens.
It almost never a penny drops or a light gets turned on.
Very often, I think what gets the most response from people is simply when I talk about my
own transition from atheism to faith, why I did it and the difference it makes.
Because, actually, people begin to realize this isn't just about some mental adjustment.
It's about something that really changes your life and gives you hope and meaning and so on.
So, I find that really very exciting.
I'm so glad I'm able to do this kind of thing.
Yes. That's right.
Now, I know you've entered into formal debates with individuals.
A couple of what we refer to as the new atheists: Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens,
and such.
I viewed a couple of these up on YouTube.
What was that like to be with them?
That's a quite extraordinary event, I thought.
They were quite extraordinary events and I had the feeling that this was like people
talking past each other.
It was almost as if there wasn't really all that much engagement.
They were almost like set pieces.
While I was really interested, it was very often that the debate was invariably,
"What is the problem in believing in God," and it was very, very difficult to, in effect,
get the new atheists to talk about what their proposed alternative was.
In other words, if you don't believe in God, then what is your basis for morality?
Certainly, Christopher Hitchens, on that particular issue when pressed on that will say,
"Well, I don't really know."
In effect, "I just believe certain things and I don't see the need to give it a reason for them."
What I think it's very important to do is to have these civil debates, if only to show
that answers can be given to the questions these people are asking.
I don't think the debates necessarily are very productive, but it's very important they
take place and that, in effect, faith is shown to be able to stand up to some of these interrogations
and actually make some good points in response.
Right.
It sounds like your approach in these debates was not to win the debate, but to have a conversation,
and to listen, and show responses.
Yes, civil debate.
Sometimes debates don't go in that direction.
No, they don't.
I think that what I followed myself doing really is talking to Richard Dawkins, or Christopher
Hitchens, or Daniel Dennett, but actually really talking through them to an audience beyond
and trying to say, "Look, we're going to get excited about this.
They're going to be angry about it.
It's a very simple, but very important question, which is what are the reasons for believing in God
and the difference it makes?"
Trying to get people to see that actually there was some really important questions here,
which were being hijacked in the name of a very aggressive atheist agenda, but good
answers could be given to the questions being asked.
In my conversations with people, sometimes it seems the defensive questions and attacks
on Christianity in all, are actually there's other often personal issues, backgrounds,
bad experiences, and things like that that don't necessarily get brought up, but their
responses seem so personal and so full of energy and even vitriol, right?
It seems to me if you don't recognize that, if you just think it's an intellectual problem,
that we're missing the boat, especially in a personal situation of having a conversation
and dealing with them as full human beings.
You're right, not just brains or ideas.
Did some of that come out in some of these interviews?
Very much so.
I think very often, particularly very angry atheists, have a personal history.
It's not an intellectual issue at all.
Very often, for example, a parent may have died and they've been very angry with God
for allowing that to happen.
Or they may have had a bad experience in the church.
Or they may feel that, as Richard Dawkins does, that Christianity tells lies.
Of course, that's a very bad thing to do.
You are, in effect, dealing with people who are, in effect, deeply committed for non-intellectual
reasons to atheism.
That means that when you start to probe, they become extremely defensive because it's not
simply a question of whether there's a God or not.
It's about my personal history or my personal integrity being called into question.
Very often, the anger you find in the new atheism actually reflects a history.
You're quite right.
We need to be aware of that, but at the same time, you have to say that we cannot be trapped
by our personal histories.
These are big questions.
Somehow, we need to break free from our personal histories to think about these things.
Yes. Yes.
That whole dimension doesn't necessarily make the task easier.
It makes it more complex and more personal.
Yeah, I always find prayer is essential for these kinds of breakthroughs.
Now, another question that I'm interested in ... Now, this is the big picture where
you've dealt with the personal, but now on the larger things.
Largely, I don't know if you think of the Western culture - Europe, North America -
being post-Christian.
One of my questions has been is how did we get here?
What happened?
Now, I know you've studied intellectual history and all that.
What do you think about the big picture?
Why is it that Western culture is largely leaving behind the Christian faith as a whole,
especially the intellectual leadership?
The cultural leadership seems especially - I mean, there still is faith around,
certainly churches are still there - but in terms of the direction of the culture, what do you
think about that and how did we get where we are?
Are we just going to be on this post-Christian decline?
What do you think about that, the larger picture?
Well, that's a really big question, isn't it?
I think there are a number of things going on here.
One is, I think, a very significant distrust of institutions.
And inevitably, that means Christian churches are objects of suspicion.
And so one of the things you notice is in our culture, there's a shift towards wanting to talk about spirituality.
Spirituality, if you like, is non-institutional religion.
It's a personal thing.
I think that's something we're going to have to think about.
That actually if people are suspicious of institutions, it does mean that bishops or
church leaders will not be well-received because they're seen as institutionally-linked.
What we do need to do almost is rediscover the early Christian detachment from power,
from institutional structures, and try and see if we can bring that into our way of thinking.
I think that's one very important element of this.
But there's something else, as well, and this is in at least one study of
this whole process of erosion of faith.
I suggest that one of the difficulties is that parents did not take trouble to pass
their faith onto their children.
In effect, just saying, "You decide what you want to do."
I think that there is an issue there about how Christian organizations, how Christian churches
in effect think about the transmission of faith to the next generation.
We seem to have failed on that.
I think that's something we need to come back to.
The third thing I think we need to come back to is this.
I think that perhaps we have failed to understand the imaginative, the moral, the esthetic vision
that Christianity contains within itself.
We've not helped people to see why it is so exciting and so important.
I think that has resulted that people find themselves having walked away from Christianity
never really understanding what it is.
There's a real concern for me there that we need to really try and re-unpack the riches
of the Christian faith so people can see it.
I think another point which I would make here, in just wrapping this little section up, is
I think also a lot of Christians tend to be quite defensive about this.
That does create a perception in the culture that in a kind of way, they're on the losing side.
I think we are on the losing side.
I think that we have failed to play our cards properly.
I think one of things perhaps we need to go back to is take our packs out
and be able to look at all the cards and say,
"These are wonderful cards - why aren't we playing them properly,"
and begin to rethink how we present the Christian faith, how we teach it,
how in effect we live it out.
Those are big questions, I know, but it does seem to me that we really do need to come
back to them.
All right.
Well, make some suggestions.
We talked about the problem, but how would you approach it, especially this
esthetic and imaginative?
How would we even start taking this new path that you're suggesting?
I think in Western culture there are many who are overwhelmed by the beauty of nature,
or who love good literature, or who go to visit art galleries.
These are all people who, in effect, are looking for something significant or looking for something deeper,
but might not necessarily think of making any connection with the Christian faith.
I think what we need to try and do is work at how we can reconnect Christianity with
groups of people who we seemed to have disenfranchised.
For me, that means we're going to need people who are able to talk about Christianity and the arts,
who are able to talk about Christianity and literature, who are able to say,
"Look, this will bring an even greater richness to what you're doing."
It's about really trying to build those bridges and no one person can do that.
What we need, in effect, is for Christians who are scientists, who are artists, who are musicians,
who are whatever, to say, "I need intentionally to build bridges between my faith
and the professional communities I'm engaging with."
I think that's something very, very important, but it can be done.
We almost need to think of this as a calling.
In the past, you might have thought of a calling towards a ministry.
Maybe there's a calling to be a bridge person between the faith and particular interest groups.
All right. Well, thank you so much.
Well, it's been wonderful talking to you.
You've been watching You're Included,
a production of Grace Communion International.
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