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Toward a Faith in Jesus: My Pivotal Moment

I’m in my 70’s as I write this. As I look back on my life, I see a lot of wasted motion in it…and especially so when it comes to Jesus and faith. What I’m going to describe below, however, was not wasted motion. It was the most pivotal moment of my life. All the wasted motion came before and after. (But don’t worry about me; I’m wasting less motion now than I used to.)

I was raised in a Roman Catholic family, so I first heard about Jesus early in life. I went to parochial school and was an altar boy, so I was hearing about him often, too. This was during the years that Latin masses were changing to English, so I had a choice between old school and new school approaches to religion, but neither could hold my attention for long.

By the time I reached my teenage years, my parents had put me in public school and I was avoiding church. I wasn’t so much turning away from Jesus as I was turning away from a system that included him, for that system also included all sorts of other shadowy figures, rules, and rituals that I could not understand or explain. I had simply accepted that system as a child because I was spending so much time in it: weekdays in parochial school which included daily mass, confession at the church on Saturday, and mass again on Sunday. That’s seven days a week! As I grew older, however, I outgrew Catholicism as I had outgrown Santa Claus. I became, like the vast majority of my fellow baby boomers, fully immersed in the secular culture promoted by television, movies, magazines, and books. I never came to embrace atheism, but felt very comfortable with the idea of agnosticism. Secularism’s rule that religion, if it deserved a place in our lives at all, should be kept private suited me just fine.

Fast forward to my 20’s. After acquiring a college education, then a wife, then a child, and then a mortgage, I left the security of a corporate job to start my own company. Looking around to make my first hire, I sought out a high-school classmate I hadn’t seen in years and invited him to meet me for lunch. We hadn’t been seated for too long in the restaurant before he started telling me that he had recently “come to know Jesus” and “become a born-again Christian.” My secular heart sank, and I felt nauseous. If the Catholic church made Jesus too mysterious, evangelical Christians made Him too “in your face.” I was polite with my friend, but made it clear that I, like the vast majority of reasonable people, believed the Bible was “subject to interpretation” and that it was therefore impossible for anyone to speak definitively on its behalf. I was, of course, expressing a typically agnostic point of view: “Who can really know?” Simultaneously, I was offended that he was violating the fundamental rule of our secular society: “You’re not supposed to talk about Jesus Christ in a public place” (unless, of course, you’re legitimately upset and need to curse). My friend pressed on with evangelistic fervor despite my pushback…and back and forth we respectfully and cordially went, neither of us giving any ground to the other.

I thought the discussion would be over when the meal concluded, because I wasn’t going to bring it up again and I certainly wasn’t going to offer a job to a Jesus freak. However, a few days later, he stopped by my office and dropped off a few of his Christian books for me to read. (Fortunately, I wasn’t in the office when he dropped them by so I didn’t have to endure another conversational standoff.) I felt a duty to skim his books but not to read them thoroughly. I didn’t expect to be favorably impressed; and I saw no way they could change my mind about anything we had discussed. Neither the titles nor authors were familiar to me, but much to my surprise, when flipping through the pages of one of the books, I stumbled across an interesting paragraph about Jesus. It stopped me dead in my tracks. Here is the paragraph:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity, p.55-56, The MacMillan Company, 1943.

I had no idea at the time that this was a famous paragraph from a renowned literary critic, best-selling novelist, and former atheist. All I knew was that the paragraph’s logic was compelling, and made even more effective by the dry humor of the line “man who says he is a poached egg.” The writer had gotten my attention.

The paragraph didn’t convince me that Jesus was who this writer and my high school friend said he was, but it did shake my faith in agnosticism enough that I decided I needed to learn more about Jesus before I could go on dismissing him as unknowable and the Bible as too “subject to interpretation” to be useful. I needed to find a refutation to this paragraph and my hope became to find it in the Bible itself – which I had never read in all my years of Catholicism and secularism put together. All I’d ever heard from it was bits and pieces. I resolved that I would read the Bible for myself, find in it confirmation that it was “subject to interpretation,” and then quote chapter and verse to anyone else who tried to preach Jesus to me.

I have since learned that this paragraph actually has a name. It is called “The Trilemma” and it is familiar to Christians and atheists who argue with each other. It is so named because it poses a logical dilemma for the unbeliever, but with three possibilities instead of two: “Lunatic, Liar, or Lord.” C. S. Lewis did not invent the idea. Versions of it have been found at least as far back as the mid-19th century, but the C. S. Lewis version is one the most widely known today. Knowing nothing of its fame, I was nonetheless an example the Trilemma’s power to make someone think. And if someone is actually willing to think about it, it’s undeniable that indifference to the things Jesus said about himself was an inappropriate response. The only appropriate responses were the three Lewis gave. My hope was a vain one – that reading the Bible for myself would reveal that we cannot be sure that Jesus made extravagant claims about himself.

As I look back on the entirety of my life, being confronted with this paragraph was the most pivotal moment of all my moments on earth, even though I had no idea of its importance at the time. I still didn’t think I was going to be converted; I only thought that I was going to have to read the whole Bible for myself to see exactly where and how these fellows were getting it wrong.

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