The stories of

TECHNICAL TIM and INTUITIVE IAN

One University, two very different Christian students…

Meet TECHNICAL TIM

Technical Tim is studying Chemistry at the University of Utopia. He was academically successful at school, where - like all children today - he was trained to think in a 'scientific' way. From an early age he was shown the importance of arranging facts in structured, common-sense schemes. In mathematics and science lessons he was taught how both the abstract and the material features of the world seem to work according to fixed principles and simple systems (the 'Newtonian' universe). He grew up to expect most things to fit into a plan. Thinking in this scientific way is still very important for Technical Tim as he meets all the day-to-day challenges of the modern world.

During his first term at Utopia, Tim was invited (by a second-year girl he quite liked) to go on a short course run by a lively Christian group. Here he was startled and enthused by the way everything they said about the Bible and the Christian faith seemed to make sense.

Technical Tim had never really considered the possibility that the Bible could be the actual 'Word of God', but his new friends clearly believed this and pointed out passages in the Bible itself which seemed to add a certain logic to their claims. They said that the Bible's reliability was also supported by the corroboration of its factual content with 'firm evidence' which historians and archaeologists had brought to light. "The Bible is no ordinary book", they said, reminding Tim of its undisputed importance within Western civilisation.

It became increasingly clear to Tim's rational mind that, if there is a God, then it is reasonable to suppose that He would want to communicate with the people he created in some kind of direct manner - and what better way than through the written word. What is more, many events 'accurately predicted' in the Old Testament were, it seemed, perfectly 'fulfilled' by historical events from later on and recorded in the New Testament. This helped to clinch it. After all, there was no point in having a religious faith unless it all fitted together and made sense, and no point in believing in a wavering God or an inconsistent Bible.

Technical Tim (who was from a good school where justice and punishment were competently administered) also saw the logic of the way his Christian friends explained why Jesus died: "God is supremely just, humanity sinned and deserved to be punished. But, in his love for sinful humanity, God had dealt out the punishment on his own innocent son, Jesus Christ, thus letting all of humanity [including Tim] off the hook". This all seemed to add up in a way that Tim had never thought of before (especially after his Christian friends made him aware of just how sinful and inadequate a person he actually was, and that sinful people deserved to be punished).

Tim had never heard the case for Christianity put in a way which sounded so clear and convincing. He wavered a bit over the fact that Genesis accounts of creation contradicted what he had previously understood about the 'big bang', the age of the earth and evolution, but his Christian friends (one of the cleverest actually believed the '6-day' account) assured him that in due course he would be able to resolve this problem to his own satisfaction, and gave him some pamphlets to read.

Meet Intuitive Ian

Intuitive Ian went to the same school as Technical Tim and was also a high achiever. He had received an identical education to Tim, at least up until the VIth Form. At A-Level Ian read Arts subjects and also went to the University of Utopia, in his case to study English and Philosophy.

Intuitive Ian's 'conversion' (if we can call it that) came earlier and was a bit different. It wasn't a conversion to Christianity, but a conversion to a broader way of thinking. As time went on Ian began to realise that a lot of things in the world are more 'provisional' than he had first thought, and much remained unexplained. He began to accept that 'truth' is subjective is well as objective: in other words, something you had to work out within yourself rather than something that was 'proved' by science (and so on) outside. ‘Truth’ and ‘fact’, it seemed, are not necessarily one and the same thing. Ian was even beginning to wonder whether there was such a thing as truth at all!

After reading the novels of Thomas Hardy, Intuitive Ian also wondered whether there was really any 'higher' justice in the world: so many innocent people seemed to be suffering relentlessly through absolutely no fault of their own. Ian had always been taught that God was just, but now he was beginning to have some serious doubts.

Through doing A-Levels in Arts subjects Intuitive Ian had learned that 'post enlightenment thought' (the logical way most of us think today) is not the only way of thinking, but one of a succession of ways which have unfolded over the span of western history. Ian had also heard about how society nowadays is sometimes described as 'post-modern', and that in the 21st Century world all of us have a range of options to pursue as we undertake our own searches for truth and understanding.

Interestingly enough, one of Ian's A-Level subjects had been Religious Studies, and he had 'done' John's Gospel. Having looked at this book in some depth he was now quite convinced that it was very much a piece of literature of its own time, with teachings which were pertinent to its original readers, even if they were not all accurate records of what Jesus actually said. Ian had also been introduced to the concept of Biblical typology, the process whereby early Christian authors used images and aspects of stories mined out of the Old Testament in order to highlight and embellish beliefs about Jesus which they were expressing through the books of the New Testament: Jesus' death in John's gospel, for example, was described in such a way as to conjure up the imagery of the Old Testament Passover sacrifice. That is why John's version was so different from the ones in the other three gospels.

Understanding Bible teaching in this way meant that Ian had never felt obliged to accept that some of the odder things he read about in the New Testament (or, indeed, other parts of the Bible) were necessarily factually true. That was quite liberating: although he wasn't a scientist, he certainly didn't believe that the universe was made in six days!

So Intuitive Ian did not expect things to be 'cut and dried'. On arriving at University he intended to struggle and grapple with subjects and issues, and wanted to write essays which left no stone unturned. He enjoyed having arguments with his lecturers, and they found him interesting.

Intuitive Ian, who had been loosely involved with his local church at home, found a group on campus where he met similar people who enjoyed discussing things openly. Christian teaching and claims were judged in the light of up-to-date knowledge and experience. As a result, some teachings were found to be lacking, whilst others were found to be deeper and richer than anybody had ever realised before. Members of Intuitive Ian's group were excited about the things they were discussing.

At the same time they became increasingly alarmed by the 'black and white', non-negotiable position adopted by some other Christian groups at Utopia, groups with whom they had tried to engage in dialogue. In particular, Ian and Tim now found it very difficult to get on, especially when Tim told Ian that he should stay away from the girl who lived in the room next door because she was attending Buddhist meditation classes, and that her company would be 'unhelpful' to Ian. Tim told Ian that it would be wrong to go with her to a meeting about Buddhism, quoting John 3.16-17 and saying that this meant that it was always dangerous to listen to people from other faiths.

Ian challenged the John quotation, saying that Jesus probably never said it because the words were likely to have been a product of John's early Christian 'sectarian' community. Tim was unappreciative of this observation, and suggested that by rejecting one thing that the Bible said, Ian was effectively rejecting everything the Bible said, including the resurrection of Jesus. Ian didn't really think that was the case, but he held his peace.

These two descriptions are a caricature of how 'scientists' can to be attracted by a version of the Christian faith which is characterised by the following expressions: 'propositional', 'didactic', 'black and white', 'objectively true', and 'non-negotiable'. Meanwhile their ‘artistic’ counterparts may be content to leave more room exploration and intuition, flexibility and subjective reflection.

To get some more value out the Technical Tim's and Intuitive Ian's experiences

we will end with some simple reflections…

Tim's Christian faith had some basic intellectual weaknesses. As a scientist he should have known that the Universe we inhabit is not as 'Newtonian' as people have, for a long time, thought. Old rules and principles of science are now being challenged by new areas of enquiry like Quantum Physics. Creation, it seems, is 'fuzzy at the edges'. God the Creator has not given us a universe which is 'orderly' in the way that we once believed. 'Reason' is only one of a range of tools we need to use in order to try to understand God and the creation. More generally, a greater awareness of the history of Western thought (particularly since the enlightenment) would have enabled Tim to challenge the way that some of the essentials of the Christian faith were being presented to him.

Tim's scientific way of thinking was betrayed by the fact that he used the 'slippery slope' argument against Ian when Ian suggested that part of John's gospel may not be factually true. Tim said, effectively, "if you don't believe that such-and-such a verse in the bible is true, then you are saying that none of it is true". This sounds logical on the face of it, but all Ian did was suggest that we apply a particular critical technique to a particular problem with a particular verse in the Bible. People who take the Bible seriously have to do that all the time. The same approach can affirm and amplify other aspects of the Bible's teaching - if we are honest we need to accept that there is no shortage of problem-passages in the Bible.

Although the 'slippery slope' argument is commonly used by Christians who like to see things in 'black and white' terms, this kind of whitewash does not, in the end, do us any favours. The Bible most definitely needs academic as well as spiritual attention, and students may need to be warned away from churches and Christian teachers who deny this.

Leading on from this, Tim the scientist knew that theories, hypotheses and assertions are only ever as good as the evidence upon which they are based. He should have looked far more closely at the substance of the convincing-sounding claims which were being made on behalf of the Bible: What have the archaeologists really discovered? Does the 'fulfilment of prophecy' in the New Testament reflect the facts of history or is it partly a literary device? As books, the Bible and Tim's laboratory manuals are worlds apart, and need to be appreciated and understood in very different ways - 'Biblical truth' and 'factual truth' are often entirely different (though often overlapping) concepts. In particular, Tim should have been aware of the difference between argument (which involves the weighing up of competing cases) and polemic (the powerful one-sided presentation of a single viewpoint).

Finally, Tim should have challenged the flawed logic of the so-called 'Calvinistic Doctrine of Atonement' (why Jesus died). John Calvin was a lawyer (hence the justice and punishment idiom), but obviously not a very good one: if he had been he would have seen the difficulty. If God is so fundamentally just, then why punish an innocent man? As well as being unappealing, Calvin's doctrine is scarcely Biblical. The New Testament (through its various authors) offers a great diversity of interpretations of Jesus' death, all of which enrich our own attempts to grapple with this central mystery of the Christian Gospel.

The stories of Technical Tim and Intuitive Ian should help Christian students to relate to one another. There is no point, on the whole, in wasting time debating the 'truth' or otherwise of individual Bible verses or the authority particular biblical teachings. What really matters is being aware of the fact that different people have different ways of apprehending religious truth. It all depends how you think, and this can change as you develop as a person.

Instead, our discussions and debates should centre around the history of thought, the value of the subjective and intuitive aspects of religion, the history of the Bible itself, the nature and development of doctrine, the nature of prayer (there is more than one way of doing it) and, most profoundly, how God really works in the Universe.

Last modified: Fri Sep 15 11:51:55 2000

S.C.E.Laird <scel@kent.ac.uk>