I was driving back from an airshow with an SUV full of WWII
veterans when I was asked outright: “Marcus, what religion are you, anyway?”
I never know how to answer that.
It’s honestly asked, yet it tends to invite misunderstanding
and judgment. No matter what you answer, you’re bound to get stuffed into a
box.
I say “honestly asked,” because when I interviewed the veterans
for
We Who Are Alive & Remain, we
talked about everything imaginable—fear, killings, nightmares, marriage, and,
yes, religion and politics.
Very few of the veterans wanted to discuss politics at
length (except Lt. Buck Compton—he could talk politics all day).
Yet all the men—without exception—wanted to discuss matters
of faith. I guess when you get to be their age you can’t help but wrestle with
life’s biggest questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we
going when we die?
The men’s answers ranged all over the place. Several said Catholic.
Shifty Powers was a Baptist. Lt. Roy Gates had conquered a drinking problem
through A.A., (an organization that leans on a higher power), yet said he was a
staunch atheist.
How did I answer?
I grew up in a world where religion and questioning mixed
together. My father was a minister; my mother a journalist. So I grew up
believing in God, yet asking him all the hard questions I could.
No matter how religious someone grows up, there comes a time
in everybody’s life where he needs to make his belief system his own, apart
from his parents’ faith. For me that happened in college and graduate school. I
studied theology and journalism myself—not so much to get a job, but because I
wanted to grapple with life’s hard questions.
I began to read the books of men such as
Dr. J.P. Moreland
and
Dr. William Lane Craig—clear-minded, intellectual giants who had not only
studied theology and philosophy, but also chemistry, mathematics, and science.
Through the
Kalam Cosmological Argument, they laid out a
logical case for what they termed “a personal, infinite, first cause” for the
universe. In other words, God, plausibly, and even mathematically, could very
well exist.
But this other part of my religious upbringing, this Jesus Christ,
was a much trickier horse to bet on.
A nice enough guy, that Jesus. A good leader. And he surely
captured the attention of the crowds.
But to form a whole world-view around him?
Seemed a little overboard.
From the perspective of textual criticism, there was strong
evidence to conclude that the accounts written about Jesus were accurately
reported. Still, there was this one thing Jesus said about himself that was
difficult to accept.
Jesus said:
“I am the way, the
truth, and the life,
And no one can get to
God except through me.”
That was a bold statement for a mere leader to make. Too
bold perhaps. For some time I needed to wrestle with its implications.
I mean, can you imagine any of today’s influential leaders
saying the same things about themselves? What if Bill Gates said that about
himself? Or Bono? Or President Obama? What kind of reaction would that provoke?
Or think of it this way. Through books, I am an influential leader.
What if I said …
“Hey everybody, guess
what?
Me, Marcus
Brotherton: I am THE way.
I’m the sum total of
all truth.
And no one can get to
God except through reading Shifty’s War.”
You’d think I was a lunatic—on the level with someone who
claims he’s a box of breakfast cereal.
And I’d be a liar too. Because none of that’s true about me.
Therefore, I concluded, there was no way that Jesus, if he
was simply a good teacher, could justifiably make those statements about
himself.
That Jesus was a crazy liar.
Hmm.
Unless—and this is what I gradually came to accept, and this
is how I answered the question in the SUV—there was one more option.
He was telling the truth.
Question: What do you think about Jesus?
Noted author and lecturer Josh McDowell reportedly spent
60 hours preparing to give the commencement address at his son's graduation at
a California university in 1998. 
