Ever since the first Veritas Forum at Harvard in 1992, InterVarsity chapters have been co-sponsoring them on campuses around the country. As the Veritas Forum website explains, professors and other experts from various disciplines address life issues that are of most interest to college students, including “What if Jesus Christ were true?”
Veritas Forum events were held in New York City last February, at Columbia University and at New York University. During the Forum at Columbia, at a worldview panel entitled “Three Perspectives on Life,” a religion major named Miriam had the following conversation with Professor Philip Kitcher, Columbia University Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Contemporary Civilization, the panelist representing a secular humanist worldview:
Miriam: What would you tell someone whose intellect agrees with the secular humanist position but whose conscience, emotions, and imagination have a dire craving for a religious world view?
Prof. Kitcher: What is it that you desire from religion?
Miriam: The ability to pray for a sick friend. The confidence to believe again in the God whose love and providence I have felt so intimately in my life.
Prof. Kitcher: You don’t need these things since you now know them to be based on false beliefs. Offer tangible support to your sick friend, and let your intellect guide you. Everything you need is in secular humanism.
Miriam is a typical student at Columbia University: a young woman who seeks truth. She walked away from that conversation with Prof. Kitcher more determined than ever to find truth. By the end of the Veritas Forum, she found Jesus, realizing that He is the Truth. Here is her story:
I was educated in Jewish day schools and in fifth grade became committed to the observance of Rabbinic Jewish law. My favorite subjects were math and Talmud. In high school, the intellectual foundation for my Orthodox beliefs started to fall apart. At the same time, my source of spiritual inspiration came from reading books by C. S. Lewis and from writing poetry. Though I was still very committed to the study and practice of Jewish law, I was equally engaged in constructing my own religious philosophy that would include a place for Gentiles. I was also spiritually experimenting with the morality and faith I had discovered in Lewis’ writings.
Reading the Book of Matthew for a freshman seminar brought the story of Jesus to my attention for the first time. After initially evaluating Jesus as a Jewish prophet, I read more of Lewis’ theology in order to understand the Christian claim about his divinity. After much prayer and reflection, I put my faith in God’s incarnation as Jesus Christ. I trusted that God’s redemptive work through Christ would cure my moral lapses and perfect me in the ways I couldn’t perfect myself.
Thanks to this new faith, I experienced a change of heart that quite surprised me. Deep compassion entered my relationships, especially toward the poor and homeless; my prayer life soared, filling me with constant joy; temptations I had long struggled with disappeared. On campus, I remained attached to the Orthodox Jewish community while seeking out Christian fellowship and exploring different Christian denominations.
Despite the effects of Christ on my life, a few months later my Christological theology, being insufficiently nuanced, suffered a devastating crisis which forced me to abandon my faith in Christ’s divinity. Internally broken, I struggled for a year to redefine my religious identity. I switched from Orthodox to Conservative Judaism, finding the latter more intellectually consistent and philosophically open. Embracing fully the academic study of religious texts, I slowly exchanged all my spiritual convictions for symbolic constructs, while remaining attached to Jewish practice for the sake of community and tradition.
The spiritual void within me kept longing for Christ’s loving presence but my Jewish theology, as well as my general skepticism, made faith in a Christ who wasn’t God seem either idolatrous or foolish. On Yom Kippur Eve I promised the Biblical God, whom I accepted only as a symbol, not to go to church or pray in Jesus’ name for at least a year. A few weeks later, I realized I could no longer endure without an actual God whom I could praise and adore.
After sincere prayer, God restored my faith in him and began to guide once more my spiritual quest. After a month of introspection, I succumbed to my longing for Christ and violated the promises I had made on Yom Kippur Eve. Through studying the New Testament in a college setting, through doing charity knowingly inspired by Christ’s love, through befriending intelligent and ethical Christians, I became convinced that my religious identity, both as a Jew and as a human being must include Jesus in some way. Yet while my heart increasingly rejoiced in Christ’s growing nearness, my recurrent skepticism prevented me from intellectual acquiescence to the truth of the Christian story. I thought I could accept Jesus merely as a moral hero, religious symbol, and perhaps a vague spiritual force, and yet gain the benefits of his transforming love.
The night after the second Veritas Forum, God’s offer of the covenant in Christ’s blood became overwhelmingly clear to me, and I finally embraced it both in heart and mind. Two things stood out about Dr. William Dembski during his debate with an evolutionary chemist: 1) The intellectual rigor with which he approached his scientific theory, including his honest admission that “there is a leap of faith from the Designer of the Intelligent Design Theory to the God of a theistic faith like Christianity.”
2) The humility and sincerity of his Christian faith, which illuminated his whole demeanor.
Together, these two facts suggested to me the possibility of being an intellectually honest scientist while at the same time having true confidence in the transforming and regenerating faith of Christ. Not only does faith in my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ renew and refine my relationship with God, strengthen my ethical commitments, and fill me with daily gratitude and joy, but this faith also has given me a truly fulfilled Jewish identity. As part of Messianic Israel, I now can accept Christian Gentiles, both theologically and practically, as heirs of God’s kingdom and members of my spiritual family.
Reprinted from InterVarsity In View: New York City
Columbia Spectator article on Veritas Forum
