My friend Greg grew up without rock-and-roll.
“Movies and dancing were out too,” he explained, “as was theology.”
Raised in a strict, King-James-only church that closely followed the teachings of evangelist Jerry Falwell, Greg describes his initial experience with Christianity as one that was “moralistic, reactionary, anti-intellectual, and atheological.”
“It was like drowning in a pool of shallow water,” he said.
So Greg rebelled — not with drugs, sex, or alcohol but with books.
He attended a Christian liberal arts college that, in the early nineties, emphasized engaging culture rather than resisting it. Intense and remarkably intelligent, Greg immediately caught on. He captured the attention of several faculty members, who saw in him the makings of a persuasive and charismatic apologist. He pored over stacks of theology books, asked precocious questions, wrote some impressive papers, and said he came to realize that “thinking was a Christian thing to do.” A couple of degrees later, he was traveling across the country and the world, speaking on everything from bioethics to postmodernism to pluralism.
You never forget the first time you hear Greg speak. People describe it as trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Greg has a way of challenging his listeners to think bigger thoughts about God and the world than they ever dreamed possible. He moves from idea to idea seamlessly, always introducing a new concept just seconds before you think you’ve wrapped your brain around the last one. He knows how to talk to teenagers without being condescending and to seniors without sounding high and mighty.
I first encountered Greg when I was in high school and he spoke to my youth group about the all-encompassing nature of God’s truth, how there is a biblical way to think about everything — from science, to philosophy, to pop culture, to technology. If we prepared ourselves to make a defense on behalf of the gospel, he said, there was no subject or discipline beyond the reach of the Light, no new idea or discovery we needed to fear. With the advantage of access to absolute truth, we had all that we needed to go out and change the world.
I remember that when I came home from youth group that night, my mother asked me what Greg talked about. “I don’t remember exactly,” I said, still struggling to absorb it. “But I think he was right.”
Never quite forgetting that first impression, I decided to spend the summer after my junior year of college working with Greg at an intense, two-week apologetics seminar designed to introduce high school students to the concept of a biblical worldview. By that point, I’d become pretty proficient at making a defense for the gospel myself, so I served as a counselor, charged with guiding a small group of seventeen-year-old girls through the heady material.
I felt anxious to impress Greg and the other leaders at the conference, as well as the eight girls under my tutelage. I felt particularly burdened because some of my girls planned on attending state universities, where, I’d been told, they had a 70 percent chance of losing both their belief in absolute truth and their virginity. My job was to help prepare them to enter a secular, relativistic society knowing what they believed and why they believed it.
During the first few days of the conference, a range of speakers lectured on Darwinism, naturalism, transcendentalism, secularism, pluralism, and host of other isms that I felt comfortable enough discussing with my group. But by the end of the first week, after one speaker had condemned public schools as a lost cause, another denounced global warming as a radical leftist conspiracy, another decried modern art as nothing better than the scribbles of a five-year-old, and another attacked feminism as a threat to the biblical role of women in society, I began to worry that as a public high school graduate with an affinity for baby seals, Jackson Pollock, and pantsuits, I didn’t have a Christian-enough worldview. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with how verses were lifted from the Bible to support political positions like gun rights, strong national defense, capital punishment, and limited intervention in the free market. These seemed more like Republican values than biblical values to me. I waited for Greg to object, but he never did.
It was the first time I wondered if perhaps there is no such thing as one, single biblical worldview, if perhaps there are as many worldviews out there as there are people.
At the conclusion of the seminar, Greg issued a stirring call for action, a charge for students to continue to study and learn, to fearlessly go out and change the world, and to always be ready with an answer in defense of their faith. He was passionate, clear, well studied, and prepared, the embodiment of how American fundamentalism adapted to modernism to become an aggressively intellectual, apologetics-driven counterculture. He was everything William Jennings Bryan failed to be on the witness stand in 1925.
The last time I interacted with Greg, we were engaged in a little email debate about how best to care for America’s poor. These days it seems like he and I disagree on a lot of things: politics, theology, gender roles, environmentalism, economics, and so on. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve disappointed him. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m wrong. But I hope Greg understands that in the same way he had to change to make sense of his faith, so I had to change to make sense of mine.