Inspired by the idea that Harvard’s motto was more than a meaningless relic of the past, in 1992 a small group of Christians at the school hosted the university for a weekend of lectures and discussions exploring some of life’s most important questions. Their hope was to restore within the university a space for asking such deep queries, seeking real answers and building community around the search for truth. I’m, at the moment, about six chapters into a book filled with ideas and thoughts of fifteen individuals, scientists, multi-denominational leaders of the Church, and highly degreed professors, most claiming to be believers. This was not a debate. With at least one agnostic in the group, I would label this bunch (N.T. Wright and Tim Keller among them) as being “cautious” in whose voice they followed in their faith. They don’t just “run with the herd”. Within its pages, Rene Descartes is quoted as declaring he would not accept anything as true that he could reasonably doubt. That might be a bit drastic, but consider Dallas Willard’s statement presented in the introduction: “Our beliefs are the rails upon which our lives run. We believe something if we are set to act as if it were so; but if our beliefs are false reality does not adjust to accommodate our errors. A brief but useful characterization of reality is what you run into when you are wrong.” My favorite thus far, though, was provided by Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who observed truth to be “something that more possesses us than we possess it”. Whether his so expressing that idea agrees with my interpretation of it, I cannot say, but it certainly speaks to me of that which the Body of Christ has, for the most part, lost along the way: Jesus, Himself, is the only definitive exactness of truth; and the best any of us can do, in so far as owning it, is to trust neither our head nor our heart more than we do His reins attached to both……
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