Yes or No?: Straight Answers to Tough Questions About Christianity

By Peter Kreeft

The popular Christian apologist Kreeft tackles many of the tough questions of our day concerning Christianity. In a series of imaginative "dialogues", Sal the Seeker and Chris the Christian deal with the profound mysteries of the Gospel. The result is a book that is both engaging and profound, a book that leads readers to initial faith—or to deeper faith.

"The stakes in these dialogues are high. Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul, says Kreeft, and the answer must be "yes" or "no". We can evade the claims of Jesus Christ for a while, but death brings evasion to an end. It is wiser to look at Christianity honestly now.

Yes or No? shows the truth of Jesus' promise that those who sincerely seek the truth shall find it. It is a road map for those who are honestly seeking the truth and a source of greater faith for those how have already found God. It presents the full challenge of the gospel in a way modern men and women can understand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681496375

Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft (PhD, Fordham University) is professor of philosophy at Boston College where he has taught since 1965. A popular lecturer, he has also taught at many other colleges, seminaries and educational institutions in the eastern United States. Kreeft has written more than fifty books, including The Best Things in Life, The Journey, How to Win the Culture War, and Handbook of Christian Apologetics (with Ronald Tacelli).

Book preview

Introduction

YES OR NO? WHAT A TITLE! So black-or-white!

But life presents us with nothing black or white. The title seems unrealistic, irrelevant to life.

Wrong. Life does present us with some things that are black or white. Here are two of them: black and white.

More seriously, here are two more: Heaven and Hell.

Oh, but they’re not part of life, you say. Well, if they aren’t, then Christianity is simply false. The choice for or against God, the choice to believe or not to believe, to hope in God or not to hope, to love or not to love—that choice makes an eternal and infinite difference. That is the stark and wonderful news Christianity brings us. If it is true, it is the most important truth we have ever been told. If it is false, it is the biggest lie we have ever been told. And it is the duty of every honest person to try to find out which it is.

This book is written to help you make the most important choice of your life. The choice is simple, but the reasons for and against it are not.

The choice is simple because it is a choice between saying yes or no to God as we meet him in Jesus. Yes is the simplest word there is.

The reasons for and against Christianity are not simple because Christianity is full of wonderful mysteries which are as far above the power of the human mind to grasp fully as Beethoven or Einstein are far above the power of a clam to grasp.

I do not claim to have proved everything in this book beyond doubt. Doubt is always possible wherever faith is free, just as hate is always possible where love is free. Faith is not the opposite of doubt; faith can include doubt. The opposite of faith is not doubt but indifference, just as the opposite of love is not hate (love can include hate) but indifference.

Pascal, who wrote brilliantly against indifference in his Pensées, said that there are only three kinds of people in the world:

1. those who have sought God and found him;

2. those who have sought him and not yet found him;

3. those who neither seek him nor find him.

Jesus promised, Everyone who seeks, finds. So everyone in the second class winds up in the first class. The great divide, then, is between seekers and non-seekers (the indifferent).

This book is for seekers.

It is called Yes or No? because there are three possible answers to every question: yes, no, and evasion. To some questions, evasion is a possible answer, but not to a marriage proposal. Christianity is God’s marriage proposal to the soul. And death makes evasion impossible.

This book is designed to be used in two different ways:

1. by Pascal’s three types of individuals:

   a.  For those of you who have already refused evasion and sought God and also have found him, this book is to strengthen your faith and help you obey the Bible’s command to be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you;

   b.  For those who have not yet found him and are still seeking, this book is a road map;

   c.  For those who have not yet bothered to seek, this book is an alarm clock: an attempt to wake you up and inveigle you to at least ask the greatest questions in the world, questions about who you are and why you are and what your life means;

2. by classes in religious education.

I teach religion and philosophy in college. I have asked hundreds of students about their religious education in high school, and I have been shocked.

I have been shocked first at the results. It made ex-Christians out of many.

I have been shocked, second, at the textbooks. They are a disaster area. Almost all of them seem to have been written by Job’s three friends, or perhaps by some official in Hell’s hierarchy of demons for the express purpose of boring people away from the Faith. For they were almost always vague and dull, two things Christianity certainly is not. If anyone says Christianity is a crazy, spectacular fairy tale—well, at least that person sees that it is spectacular. But if anyone says it’s dull, he simply hasn’t looked at it. It’s not usually his fault: nobody ever showed him the real thing. He was given platitudes instead, a candle instead of a volcano.

Third, I have been shocked at the attitudes of some of the teachers. Many were good, conscientious people who did their best. But others seemed to be as bored as the students. And many were afraid of questions. That shocked me most. I think a good teacher must love questions. For the only way really to learn an answer is really to ask a question. There is nothing more dead and irrelevant than an answer to a question that has never been asked.

Questions express interest, and will—the will to know. This is infinitely precious, because it is (at least unconsciously) a search for God under his attribute of truth. This is the only honest reason why anyone should ever believe Christianity, or anything else: because it is true. It may also be helpful, comforting, challenging, relevant, responsible, creative, or dozens of other things; but none of those is the first reason why an honest person believes Christianity. They are the bloom on the rose of truth, the icing on the cake of truth. Too many books are all icing.

This book (which is the first in a series) is meant to be different. For one thing, it is written in the form of dialogues, conversations between two people, to encourage the reader to enter the conversation and ask the hard questions, the great questions. They also try to guide the questioner fairly and freely to the answers God has given us in his Word; that is, his Book, and above all his Son. (Both are called the Word of God).

One of the two people in these dialogues, Sal, is not a Christian but is an honest and open-minded questioner (Sal the seeker). The other, Chris, is a Christian who tries to answer Sal’s hard questions. Notice that Sal can be for Sally or Salvatore and Chris can be for Christopher or Christine. You can imagine them as boys, girls, women, or men.

Another way in which this book is meant to be different is that it does not use its readers as guinea pigs to test the latest innovation in theology or psychology. It merely serves up the basics of the Faith that has been the food of Christian souls for nearly 2,000 years. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We need not an instant-processed, fast-food Christianity but the beef, not Christianity-and-water but mere Christianity. (The phrase comes from C. S. Lewis, and so do many of the ideas in this book.) There is plenty of Christianity-and around, especially in the religious education books: Christianity-and-legalism, Christianity-and-modern-psychology, Christianity-and-Marxism, Christianity-and-Capitalism, Christianity and the latest patronizing attempt to sell Christianity to the modern mind by chopping off its unfashionable corners or filling in its mysterious depths.

But you can’t turn back the clock. Modernity and secularism are here to stay.

That’s not what God said. He promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. Why should the world be able to do what Hell itself is unable to do?

And as for turning back the clock, you certainly can! If a clock is keeping the wrong time, the only way to make progress is by turning it back to the true time. Billy Graham was once criticized for turning back the clock 200 years. He replied that if he had done that, he had failed, for he was trying to turn it back 2,000 years.

No idea is put forward in this book because it is old or because it is new, but only because it is true.

One of the questions I asked hundreds of students was: What do you want in a religious education course, or textbook? One of the most frequent answers was: Relevance to my life. I agree with that demand; if a thing makes no difference to your life, why bother with it? But I do not agree with the way most textbooks try to meet that demand. They water Christianity down. They emphasize the easy parts, the parts no one disagrees with, like being mature and responsible and compassionate and loving your neighbor. But we know that already, essential as it is. What more does Christianity tell us? What did God tell us that we didn’t already know?

To make Christianity relevant to our lives, we must first know what Christianity is. Here, then, is some hard thinking about the shocking glory, the startling story that is the greatest story ever told.

Dialogue One

Why Believe?

Sal the Seeker: Where are we?

Chris the Christian: In a book.

Sal: What? What are we doing there?

Chris: We’re characters in a dialogue—a fictional conversation invented by some author.

Sal: What kind of a book is it?

Chris: A book about religion.

Sal: Ugh. Is it as bad as that? We’re really stuck, then.

Chris: But this isn’t like other religion books.

Sal: Why not?

[What is a dialogue?]

Chris: It’s a dialogue. Two points of view are here, not just one.

Sal: Two points of view? What are they?

Chris: You’re one; I’m the other.

Sal: Why?

Chris: The dialogue form is meant to stimulate questioning, exploring, thinking things out for yourself.

Sal: Well, that’s an improvement. Maybe this book will be different. Where did the author get this idea, writing in dialogue form instead of just lecturing or preaching?

Chris: It’s a very old idea. A man named Socrates in ancient Greece invented it. He was our first great philosopher. It’s called the Socratic Method.

Sal: Philosophy? That sounds pretty difficult. Are we going to discuss philosophy?

Chris: No.

Sal: Religion, then?

Chris: No, Christianity.

[The question: What difference Christianity makes]

Sal: What’s the difference?

Chris: That’s what we’re here to find out: What makes Christianity different.

Sal: You know, I don’t believe in all that stuff.

Chris: I know. That’s why you’re here. You and I make a good pair for a dialogue. We’re not the same.

Sal: I wonder about that. I think we are the same in every really important way. We’re both human beings. We both live and die and laugh and cry and love and think. We both have a conscience and a set of values. Isn’t it enough just to be a good person and lead a good life? Isn’t that the most important thing? Can’t you live just as good a life without being a Christian?

Chris: You wonder what difference Christianity makes.

Sal: Yes.

Chris: That depends on what you think Christianity is. If you think it’s just going to church on Sunday and taking a few religion classes, then I agree with you—that alone doesn’t make a tremendous difference. But I think Christianity does make a tremendous difference. So I think there’s a lot more to Christianity than just being in church and religion class.

Sal: Why? Non-Christians can have good values too, and live a good life. You don’t need Christianity to have a conscience, or to love your neighbor.

Chris: I agree.

Sal: So why bother with Christianity then? What will it do for me?

Chris: You would believe it only if it did something for you?

Sal: Why else?

Chris: I think there’s only one honest reason for anyone ever to believe anything.

Sal: What’s that?

[Honesty]

Chris: Because it’s true. Do you think it’s honest to believe something that isn’t true?

Sal: No. . .

Chris: Even if it does you some good?

Sal: I don’t want to believe lies. Santa Claus might do me some good if I believed in him, but I won’t believe in him if he isn’t real. And I think God is like Santa Claus. Believing might make you a better person, but if he isn’t really there, then I don’t want to believe in him.

Chris: Good for you.

Sal: What? I thought you’d criticize me for not believing in God.

Chris: I think you’re wrong about God, but you’re right about honesty. I’ll never say you should believe something that isn’t true just because it will make you good. I believe Christianity because I believe it’s true. It claims to be the truth about God and about us, not just ethical advice about how to live.

Sal: Christianity claims to be the truth, yes. But how do