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With Randy Newman
184 Plays3 days ago
Though we might not like to admit it, all of us struggle with doubts in our Christian walk. And for those who don't yet have a faith, doubt can feel like an insurmountable obstacle to truly embracing Christ. So whether we are helping others on their journey, or treading the path ourselves, safely navigating the terrains of doubt can be a challenge.
Our friend Randy Newman recorded this interview with us just before he passed away earlier this year. He wrote about doubts in his final book, Questioning Faith: Indirect Journeys of Belief through Terrains of Doubt.
Randy Newman (1956-2024) was senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute. He was formerly on staff with Cru, ministering in and near Washington, DC. He authored several books, including Questioning Evangelism, Unlikely Converts and Mere Evangelism. He has contributed a number of articles to the Solas website. Randy went home to be with the Lord in May 2024.
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Transcript
Introduction to Randy Newman Tribute
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Speaker
Welcome to a special episode of Pep Talk. A few months ago, we recorded an episode with our friend Randy Newman, known to many people through his books. Randy went to be with the Lord in May, so we've held back on releasing this episode until now. Until his death, Randy Newman, so many things that Randy did. He was a dear friend as well as a huge influence on me. He was a senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at
Randy Newman’s Influence and Works
00:00:25
Speaker
the C.S. Lewis Institute. He talks at many seminaries and Bible colleges and conferences. Many people here in the UK know him through his work with Christianity Explored. He also served for 30 years with Campus Crusade for Christ and University Evangelism. He helped establish Connection Points, a ministry to help Christians engage people's hearts the way that Jesus did. And he's written many, many books, the ones that I think most people will be aware of. He wrote Questioning Evangelism, wonderful guide to just having natural conversations about Christ. He also wrote Corner Conversations. He wrote Bringing the Gospel Home. He wrote a book on engaging with Jewish people.
Discussing 'Questioning Faith'
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Speaker
Randy came from a Jewish family and had a real heart for that community. He wrote more recently, Unlikely Converts, Improbable Stories of Faith and What They Teach Us About Evangelism, based on his deep interviews with many people who'd come to faith through Christ in different ways. And then Mere Evangelism, which is also a wonderful book, Lessons in Evangelism from C.S. Lewis. And his most recent book, not long before he died, Questioning Faith, Indirect Journeys of Belief Through Terrains of Doubt. And if you look him up online, Randy wrote over the years, I guess probably hundreds of articles about evangelism and other ways that our lives intertwine with God's creation. He was also a scholar. He held that very lightly. You wouldn't always know that he had studied very deeply. He had both an MDiv and a PhD in intercultural studies and was also a family man and loved by so many people. Randy went home to be with Lord in May 2024. I still miss him immensely. It was due to have seen him this year, but of course that will now not happen. But we recorded this interview. And so, Christy, I'll let you introduce it because I think it was you and Gavin who did it, right? That's right. So now, if you'd like to join us and listen to me and Gavin Matthews interview Randy. Well, hello again, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast from Solas. We're here every fortnight to encourage you and help you to share your faith in Jesus with a world that desperately needs to hear the good news about him and to find hope in a world which is broken. I'm Gavin Matthews from Solas, and I'm joined my co-presenter Christy Mayer from the other end of the country.
Exploring Doubt and Faith
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Speaker
How are you Christy? I'm doing very well Gavin, it's great to be with you. This is I think only the second podcast we've co-presented, is that right? Second one, yeah I know, it's such a joy. We don't often get to talk to one another and with our guests do we? I am so delighted to introduce Randy Newman to you again. I know that people who are in touch with Solus will be well aware of Randy because he's been on webinars with us and previous podcasts, and his writing appears on various parts of our website. He's the author of several books, which have been very significant for us at Solus, starting off with Questioning Evangelism. Without questioning evangelism, I don't think that so much of the work we've done would have happened. It's a groundbreaking, formative book for a lot of the ways we go about sharing our faith. We also looked at Unlikely Converts, another book from which you gave us some fantastic stories from the website. And we'll put a link into the show notes to that. Mere Evangelism, I did a webinar with you about that book under lockdown, all about the work of C.S. Lewis and what he teaches us about evangelism. But the new book you've got out is called Questioning Faith, and it's subtitled Indirect Journeys of Belief Through Terrains of Doubt. Tell us a little about what this book is and why you've written a book which talks about doubt. Yeah, well, it's great to be with you. Thanks so much for the chance to be on here. You know, for so many times when I've been training or teaching about evangelism, I talk about pre-evangelism, the importance of having, you know, prior conversations that lead people to say, hmm, maybe I should even think about this. And so I decided to write a pre-evangelistic book. I decided to write a book for skeptics, doubters, non-Christians who have honest questions. I also wrote it for Christians so they could learn how they could interact with people with doubts and questions. So that's what this book is. Sometimes I tell people, you know, there's a whole lot of people that we know who for them, you know, do you want to become a Christian? Their answer is no, absolutely not. No. And we want to try to get them to yes. And for a lot of them, they need to go through this middle ground called maybe. They need to move from no to maybe before they get to yes. And so I wrote a book to try to help people move from no to maybe. Maybe there is something to this. Or maybe I need to be honest with myself and realize that I'm coming at this issue with a whole mix of motives. Or maybe I can still have some doubts. Maybe I don't have to be absolutely 100% certain, maybe just a high level of confidence. And so those were the kinds of stories and questions I wanted to write. And I decided to do it by telling people's stories because I just found all these stories in people that I talked to. And they were such great stories. Some of them are just crazy, certainly unpredictable. And I thought people need to hear these stories because I think that there are a lot of people who will hear these stories and sort of latch on and go, oh, wait a minute, that sounds like me. That sounds like the kind of question I have. So that's what I was trying to do in the book. And I hope it succeeds. We'll see. It's a little too soon, but I hope it catches on. Randy, I'm sure it will. I literally have a copy of it downstairs, which came in the post the other day. So thank you ever so much for it. You mentioned that one of the joys of writing it is being able to kind of highlight and showcase a number of stories from a number of different people. Is there one that stands out to you in particular?
Maintaining Faith Amidst Suffering
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Well, let me first tell you that for a long time, I gave the material of this book as a talk. I would speak on college campuses or different places. And the way I did it was I just presented ideas. I would say, okay, here's, I would say, here's five things for you to consider. The first thing is we all approach this with a bunch of different mixed motives. And I would tell some illustrations and stories. And I pitched this idea to a publisher because I want to write it. And he said, well, that sounds like a really great talk, but a really lousy book. He said, a book works just the opposite. You You don't, don't make the point and then illustrate in a book. You tell stories. And then you draw these mini conclusions. So that was just flipping the way I was doing it. I'm like, okay. So that's what I did in there. Is there a story that stands out? Well, the very first one, I just think there's a funny aspect to it. It's a guy, his name is Alex. None of the names are real. Well, I have a whole bunch of famous people that I talk about, like Christopher Hitchens and David Foster Wallace. So I use their real names, but the other people who are not famous, I change their names. So Alex was this young guy who grew up in a Christian home, a very sort of anti-intellectual, fundamentalist Christian home. He just thought Christianity was stupid and full of hypocrites. And so he became an atheist by reading Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens converted him to atheism. And then he loved Hitchens. He devoured everything the guy wrote. He watched him on YouTube. And then he started noticing that Hitchens would make these statements about morality and what morality should be and the way we should behave. And he started wondering, where's Hitchens getting this from? Should we should behave? If there's no God and there are no absolutes, why is he talking about as if there's some sort of common morality that everybody knows? And lots of people criticized Hitchens for that, and he never really responded very well. And this guy, Alex, got really messed up by this and started reading the Bible and started studying the Bible and meeting with other Christians. And he became a Christian. And what he said was Christopher Hitchens converted him twice. Converted him from some sort of belief to atheism and then from atheism to Christianity. He even wrote Christopher Hitchens a thank you note for helping find Jesus. Did he get a reply? He did not get a reply. Oh, shame. And Hitchin's life is tragic. I mean, he was famous and he was funny and people thought he was a brilliant writer, but underneath there was an ache and a pain. So I tell his story because it's very, very painful and disturbing. We need to hear both of those kinds of stories. So in most chapters, I tried to pair up stories, you know, one like Alex's and one like. Before you told the story of Alex, you kind of dropped in this thought that there's this kind of difference between disbelief, doubt and certainty in faith. So how certain are you? How certain do we need to be? How much faith do we need? You know, we talk about the gospel being saved by faith. Well, how much faith do you need? And we were chatting before we went on air and saying that, you know, if we were saved by works, it would be easy to measure, you know, I've tithed my cumin or whatever, or prayed for so many hours, but saved by faith. Well, how much faith do we actually need? Well, the short answer is what Jesus said, it needs to be a mustard seed, which is pretty tiny. So the
Christianity's Approach to Pain and Sin
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Speaker
key thing I was trying to say in that chapter, I just think there are a lot of people who feel like I have to be 100% certain or I can't believe. If I have even a smidgen of doubt, well, no, I can't be a Christian. And I don't know where they get that idea from. It's not from the Bible. It's probably from a very arrogant belief of what our human intellect is capable of. So I don't know if that came out of the Enlightenment or just some very arrogant secular thinking. But I want to say to people, I don't think I'm ever 100% certain. It's never 100%. For me, I waffle somewhere in the 90s. I mean, it's a very high level of confidence. So I'm not talking about 20%. And it's not even 30. It's very high up there. But it's never 100%. And for me, that's liberating. For me, that's, oh, yeah, I do still have questions and doubts. And by the way, if there's a chart or something, I dip down below 90 when really difficult, disturbing, evil things happen in the world. So when there's a tsunami or a hurricane, in particular, the things that perhaps mess me up the most is when a natural disaster happens and some people's lives are completely ruined. They're killed. And on the other side of the street, it's almost as if nothing happened. How is this possible? 50 feet apart from each other. How is it that, you know, this car got into this accident at this moment, but this car just drove right past and never got touched? I mean, there's a seeming randomness to suffering that's deeply disturbing to me. And if I felt like, okay, I have got to get 100% certainty answer, I never would get it. What I do have is a very, very high level of really beautiful confidence because of what Jesus did on the cross, because of his overcoming death, and because of that I have, not hope for, have eternal life. So that just puts it into the realm of a very high level of confidence. No, it's not absolute certainty. That's okay. That's so refreshing to hear, Randy. Particularly, I think, in cultures that really prize certainty, you know, to hear high level of confidence, as you say, that is really liberating. Just briefly, how do you go about navigating that kind of pain? You know, when you drop below the 90, what brings you back up again? And maybe it doesn't. But how do you go about wandering through that? Well, I have to go back to what I do know with a very, very, very high level of confidence. And I go back to Jesus. I go back to what he said, what he did, the very high level of assurance that we have that he really did rise from the dead. You know, I came to faith out of a Jewish background. And so I didn't grow up with any kind of belief in Jesus whatsoever. And when I was about 20 years old in the university and friends started encouraging me to read the New Testament and to check out Jesus, for a Jewish person to come to faith, there's this very, very big barrier. And it's, hey, if I believe this, I'm going to get a whole lot of grief from my Jewish parents and my Jewish grandparents and my Jewish relatives and the Jewish community. And I mean, there's a real tight community-ness nature of the Jewish community, especially for me. I was growing up in the 1950s. My parents, my father fought in World War II, sort of living in the shadow of the Holocaust. So it's like, if I believe this, I'm going to be considered a traitor. I'm joining the Nazi party, or so it felt. No, I wasn't. But from a Jewish mindset, Christians, well, everybody who's not Jewish is Christian, or maybe they're Muslim. But if they're European, they're Christian.
Concluding Reflections on Faith and Doubt
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Speaker
So that's, you know, the fundamentalist, that's Billy Graham, that's Adolf Hitler, they're all Christian. So for me, I had to really, really wrestle and dig in and do deep study of, did this guy Jesus really fulfill these prophecies? Did he really say those things that are recorded in the New Testament? Did he really rise from the dead? And I got convinced that, yes, these things really did happen. So when I have moments or episodes of doubt, that's where I go back to. And I say, okay, all right, here's a whole bunch of stuff I don't know. Here's a bunch of stuff I do know. And the stuff that I do know outweighs those things. There's still problems over here. And I still wrestle. You know, I wrote a whole chapter in this book about the problem of evil. And it all wrapped around a friend of mine who died. He died at a very young age. He died at age 35. And when I was writing that chapter, even though I was writing it with a story of confidence and joy, my friend Greg is now with Jesus. He has a new life, a new body, a new heart. I still cried like a baby. And I'm choking back tears right now. Every time I think about him, the other day I had a pretty loud crying spell with God, like, I can't believe he's gone. So these are not simplistic things, but the confidence that we have that Jesus rose from the dead, that he grants us eternal life, that news is so good, it outweighs the doubts. It doesn't eliminate the doubts, but it outweighs them. I really like the part of the book in which you look at the ways in which different worldviews try and handle the question of suffering. And you conclude that the Christian redemptive view doesn't answer every question, but is the best view that we have, the most coherent way of handling the question of the problem of pain. Yeah. Yeah. And coherence is a very important part of that. But another part of that is people usually address this topic about pain and suffering with the why question. Why does a good God allow evil and suffering? And that's part of it. That's a very important part of it, but it's not the whole of it. There's also a whole collection of how questions. How do we get through it? How do we find strength in the midst of it? How do we find joy in the midst of it? And we need answers to both the why questions and the how questions. And it's in the how questions that I think the Christian message outshines all the others. There are people confined to wheelchairs who sing and have joy. How in the world does that happen? There are people who have faced and are facing excruciating pain, and yet they tell you there is a hope and a joy in the midst of that. There's no other perspective that can come close to that. So again, I still have unanswered questions, but the answers that I do have to the why question and the how questions tips the scales for me dramatically in favor of the gospel. I mean, you mentioned, Randy, the pain and brokenness of life and underscoring that is something that we as Christians are very familiar with, sin. And this is something that you talk about in your book through different stories and particularly through Susan's story. You talk about sin and how important that is. I mean, could you share a little bit about that, you know, with us? What about Susan's story? We'd love to hear more. Oh, man, it was such a delight for me to meet her and to hear her story. So I wanted to write a chapter about different religions because a very common belief people have in our world is that, well, different religions, they're not really all that different. They're all basically saying the same thing. Well, that view is usually promoted by people who don't necessarily hold to any one particular view. You just dig into the different views just a little bit and you go, wait a minute. These are very different. There's one writer that I quote in there, Stephen Prothero. He's a professor of comparative religions. And he himself says he's not religious, doesn't hold any one view. He says, but the common view is that all these different religions are different roads up the same mountain. He says, they're not even on the same mountain. They're not roads up the same. They're not even on the same planet. They're just asking completely different questions. But again, that's sort of a theoretical, philosophical thing. In the conversation I had with Susan, where it came down to was Christianity deals with the issue of guilt completely differently than other faiths and other religion. And for her in particular, she was deeply steeped in kind of a New Age mysticism and meditation. I mean, she ran workshops. She was pretty high up in a leadership position of training people in different techniques of meditation. And it was doing all sorts of good things for her, like lowering her blood pressure and giving her a sense of peace and calm. But there was this nagging thing underneath because she knew she was guilty of some very, very evil sin. She said she had done a number of things in her life that they were just wrong. They did horrible, evil effects to other human beings. And I mean, she gave me quite a list that had my eyes popping. And people would say to her, well, the solution is you just need to rethink about that. You just need to recalibrate that and see that not as sin, that's a Christian category. You need to put it in a different category. It was a life-affirming experience. And the more they talked, the more guilty she felt because she said, no, this was wrong. It was evil. I did some things to my own body and I did some things to other people. It was just wrong. And so she would keep asking her gurus or leaders, you know, how do we handle sin? And they would look at her like she was speaking another language or like, we don't deal with that topic. And when a friend of her started talking to her about Jesus, who she just thought, well, he's just another guru. Let me add him to my list. Well, she started reading what this guru Jesus said, and he talked a whole lot about sin and forgiveness, and his death on the cross would put an end to people's guilt. She thought, that's what I need. So for her, it was salvation in the very fullest sense of the word. For the first time, I mean, she'd been practicing these techniques for 20 years. But when she became a Christian and received Christ, she experienced a forgiveness and a freedom and a joy that nothing else in her life could have ever done. And the, I mean, I was interviewing her at one point, like kind of like the way we are, you know, on a Zoom kind of thing on the screen. I mean, she was like, like jumping off the screen. She was just, this is just just the the, most it amazing thing in the world. She was like effervescent. So Christianity is different than those other religions in that at its core is the payment for sin, not the denial of sin or the minimizing of sin or the reframing about sin. It's the payment and therefore deliverance from sin. And it was electrifying for her. That's wonderful. And what an amazing way to draw this to a conclusion, because our time has gone just like that. I think we could talk for another hour. You could tell us more and more stories. I just resonate so much with the Susan story, actually, because as John Newton said, I'm a great sinner, but I have a great savior. And that's the joy of the gospel that we have to share. So thank you for sharing that. There is loads more in the book. I thoroughly recommend the book. I spent some of this week with it. Just tremendous. Really exciting, encouraging, stimulating reading. So I highly recommend you get hold of Questioning Faith by Randy Newman. Indirect Journeys of Belief Through Terrains of Doubt. Wonderful reading. So thank you for joining us, Randy.