The New Atheism, the insanely popular movement that in the 2000s made celebrities of many atheists, has all but collapsed. Christopher Hitchens is dead. Sam Harris has become a figure of fun. Daniel Dennett has retreated behind his beard and his study door. Lesser-known figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali now claim they’re Christian. And then there’s Richard Dawkins.
How does Christmas answer four of the most important questions that anybody can ask?
A few weekends ago I was with friends in Oxford and we took a wander along Addison’s Walk, a pretty tree-lined footpath that rambles beside the River Cherwell. It’s a walk steeped in spiritual history for it was on an evening stroll here in 1931 that C. S. Lewis had a deep conversation with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson which helped him take a massive leap forward toward Christianity.
Lewis had become a believer in god two years earlier, after a decades-long journey from atheism. He had been driven in part by the realisation that all that he loved—art, music, beauty, culture, truth—made no sense on atheism. A growing realisation that he wasn’t so much seeking god as being pursued, led to the dramatic moment:
In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most reluctant convert in all England.[1]
It shows how much Christians have canonised St. Lewis of Oxford that we often quote that story with excitement (“Look how the great atheist fell!”) without appreciating that Lewis’s initial conversion is a bit insipid. It took the later conversation with Tolkien and Dyson to help complete his spiritual journey. Lewis wrote:
I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.[2]
I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s unconventional and circuitous road to faith when I read with shock the recent announcement that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a Christian.[3] If you’re unaware of Ali, she is a public intellectual, author and women’s right’s activist, but also famous as a fiery atheist, former Muslim and later fierce critic of Islam, her criticism driven by the hatred and violence she had seen both in her first-hand experiences as well in as Islam’s core texts.[4]
How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An IdiotLearn how to have natural conversations with your friends and family about your faith. Discover four key questions that invite people into engaging discussions about what matters most in life.
How to Talk about Jesus without Looking like an Idiot explores why you don’t need to be afraid or uncomfortable, the four questions that help people open up, the five steps to respond to tough questions, and how to effortlessly bring faith into a conversation. It doesn’t need to be awkward. Everyday conversations that open the door to evangelism can be painless and natural. Let me help you find easy ways to talk about the true meaning of life and learn how to share the gospel with your neighbours, friends, and family.
The book is now available in the USA and Canada; it launches in the UK on 8 August. You can order (or pre-order) it below or if you support Solas, the evangelism organisation I lead, we’ll send you a free copy as a gift! (So if you’re in the UK, you don’t have to wait until August!) If you’re not already a Solas supporter, sign up today and we can send you a free copy as a thank you — again, ahead of the release date! You can also read a free sample.
USA:
Canada:
UK (pre-order, release date 8 August 2023):
Australia (pre-order):
Download chapter 1 (and the table of contents and foreword by Lee Strobel) as a PDF.
I’m delighted that How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot is also available as an audiobook (narrated by me!):
You can also read How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot as an e-book:
Twenty years on, I can still remember the palpable sense of excitement as we sat in the packed cinema, the house lights dimmed, and the title card for The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on the screen. A cheer arose from the wildly enthusiastic audience (who had queued for several hours to get into this first screening) as the words of Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett) solemnly intoned: “The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”[1]
A couple of years ago, some good friends of ours suffered a devastating house fire. They woke at 3am to the smell of smoke, discovered a kitchen blaze that had already spread to the lounge and the hall, and so they grabbed their kids, the cat, two guinea pigs, and (at the insistence of their six-year-old) a glass tank containing three stick insects, and fled to the safety of a neighbour’s house, from where they called the fire brigade. By the time two fire tenders had arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing, it was too late—the fire had taken hold and although the hoses dosed the flames, almost everything was destroyed. “We lost virtually every possession,” our friends said afterwards, “but at least nobody was hurt. Not even a stick insect was left behind.”
On Monday 19th September I gathered with a small group of family and friends to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We were not alone—almost four billion people globally watched the service from Westminster Abbey.
I found the funeral profoundly moving but although there was sadness, the service was not in the slightest way depressing, for the Queen’s funeral was deeply and thoroughly Christian, saturated throughout with a message of joy and hope, the good news that for the follower of Jesus, death is not the end. As the final hymn that the Queen herself had chosen proclaimed:
Finish then thy new creation,
pure and spotless let us be;
let us see thy great salvation,
perfectly restored in thee,
changed from glory into glory
till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise!
But not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted:
Not everybody was so impressed by that message of hope in the face of death. Whilst the funeral was still in progress, journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt tweeted:
A strong contender for the four most well-known words in the English language must arguably be: “Once upon a time …” Whether we are children or adults, we love stories; indeed our love of stories is something uniquely human. From the earliest recorded cave paintings to the most modern movie, across time, country, and culture, humans are a storytelling species.
As a child, I loved nothing better than to lose myself in a novel. Now I am a parent, I’ve passed on this love to my children—they don’t care (that) much for television, but their rooms are lined with books. Shortly before writing these words, I was curled up in bed with my six-year old son reading him the first volume of the brilliant Wingfeather Saga; there were mighty protests of “Dad! Just one more chapter!” when I closed the book.
Some stories are here today and gone tomorrow, but others become classics, retold to generation after generation. When a story is first written, it’s hard to tell whether it will become a classic but I would suggest that one thing most of the great stories, the classic tales, all have in common is they are built around a common theme: the triumph of good over evil.
In 1948, C. S. Lewis wrote this profound little essay, “On Living in An Atomic Age”. Just five pages long, it seems incredibly timely — and as challenging (and encouraging) as it was when it was first written. Here’s the opening …
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
… you can download the entire essay here.
I have a confession to make. I love James Bond films. I love all of them. I even enjoyed Quantum of Solace, which in the eyes of some fans would condemn me to the outer darkness of cinema hell. Thus I was overjoyed when the twenty-fifth Bond movie, No Time To Die, long-delayed due to COVID, premiered last autumn and I rushed to book tickets faster than you could say “shaken, not stirred”.
Bond movie titles are an artform in themselves, ranging from the sublime (The World is Not Enough) to the slightly bonkers (Octopussy). The title of the latest episode, No Time To Die, is—on one level—a reference to the fact this is actor Daniel Craig’s last outing as the eponymous spy, before he is replaced by a fresh face. It’s no time to die: so Bond will live on in a new incarnation.
For the rest of us who are not multi-faced secret agents, however, life is more brutal: there will, for each of us, be a time to die. Death is the great leveller: no matter your race, gender, politics, or bank balance, all of us will eventually meet our end. Although our culture desperately tries to distract us from thinking about this, events like the pandemic bring us face to face with the spectre of our own mortality.
After the release of No Time to Die, movie critics busied themselves writing about how Daniel Craig’s era as James Bond will be remembered. And death raises for us that same question of remembrance. How will we be remembered when we are gone? A few years ago I attended the funeral of a cousin who had died tragically young. It was a secular service and the officiant closed by saying “Jonathan will live on forever in our memories”. But that isn’t true. We will be forgotten.
Last summer we took the kids to visit their grandparents and my mother showed me an old photo she had found in the attic. A grainy black-and-white image from the 1880s, it showed some long-dead relatives. “I know a couple of their names,” she said, “but the others …” Eventually we won’t be remembered.
If we live in a godless universe, that’s the fate awaiting all of us: gone; forgotten; extinct. No wonder that atheist writer Julian Barnes titled his book about death Nothing to Be Afraid of. For nothing is very much something to fear because if oblivion is our final destination, that also entails that nothing we do now makes any ultimate difference.
But what if atheism isn’t true? If Christianity is true, then there is a God who had you in mind before the world began; a God who calls you by name; a God who offers you—in and through Jesus—an eternity with him.
If there is no God, then there is no time to die and death is to be dreaded. But if the God who revealed himself to us through Jesus is real then we need not fear death. For Jesus said: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” For those who trust in Jesus, tomorrow never dies.
(This article originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper).
