INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY
No one can call himself
truly educated without some acquaintance with the Bible which has had, and
still has, such a profound impact on world thought. However, just here we might
meet an objection. We might meet someone who says he doesn’t believe in God so
why bother. Why should he be interested in what it says, telling us he lives
his life without acknowledging any god whatever. We really can’t convince him
to pick up the good book if he says he doesn’t believe in God. But perhaps we
can persuade him to read it out of intellectual curiosity, after all he reads
the daily newspaper and doesn’t believe everything written on it. And one thing
more. Our unbelieving friend claims he doesn’t believe in any god. The
statement might be intellectually sincere but practically arguable. The weight
of human experience over centuries of history is against this claim. It all
depends on what you mean by God. Multitudes of people all down the ages have
decided with the Philosopher Nietsche that “God is dead” and decided to banish
from their minds all belief in the One True God. But honestly, they have to pay
a price for this intellectual conviction, for thereafter, they have found it
practically impossible to live either intellectually or emotionally in a
completely godless world. Deliberately or subconsciously they have filled the
vacuum left by the dismissal of the One True God with all kinds of substitute
gods. Over the course of history people had made gods and goddesses and even
made “chance” or “fate” as a god. The ancient Greeks did it.
So to this unbelieving
friend, he will certainly not commit intellectual suicide if he picks up the
Bible and begin to read the greatest
book of all time. If he reads abstruse poetry or absurdist plays, why not the
Bible? I did, and it turned around my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment