Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ

by Peter Kreeft

God sent not only a few special prophets like Moses to one special people but also the universal inner prophet of reason and conscience to all people.

The medievals loved to say that God wrote two books: nature and Scripture. And since he is the author of both books, and since this Teacher never contradicts himself, these two books never contradict each other.

Not all the truths of faith can be proved by reason, but all arguments against the truths of faith...

The story in this book is an oft-repeated one. It has three stages: Reason's quest for Truth, Reason's surprising discovery that ultimate Truth requires Faith, and Reason's happy discovery that this Faith is more rational than anything Reason had ever discovered before.

Socrates: You say you control nature now? Bertha: Yes. Much more than in the past, anyway. Socrates: Tell me, what would you say of this case. Imagine a chariot drawn by four headstrong horses. I suppose you could just as well use one of those car things of yours as an example. Now imagine a small child at the reins. At the child's slightest touch the horses obey. The child controls the horses, and the horses control the chariot. But what controls the child? Suppose the child is as blind and as headstrong as the horses. Suppose he does not control himself, does not control his own control. Would you say then that he is in control of the chariot? Bertha: Are you saying that's an image of our world? Socrates: I'm asking. Do you control your control? Are you a people with great self-control? Bertha: No. I think we're a very violent people. Socrates: Then the chariot of your society is in danger.

If you agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, then you must indeed. You must be prepared to give a reason for the faith that is in you.

Perhaps, the truth is not that ignorance is the cause of evil, but that evil is the cause of ignorance, of willfully ignoring the truth-truths like the medical evidence about candy bars and the biblical evidence about divine punishment.

Flatland: I'm not claiming knowledge of metaphysics, just knowledge of science. Science has made the gods gratuitous. Socrates: And therefore they do not exist? How could you know that, unless you also know that whatever is gratuitous does not exist? But surely that is not only a thing you cannot know, it is also a thing that is not true. Many gratituous things exist, such as grace, or beauty, or generosity, or excess facial hair, or perhaps this very argument.

Oh, I see. We have to interpret a book in light of the author's beliefs, and criticize it in light of our own.

Bertha: I think we should have an open mind at all times. Socrates: And having an open mind means always seeking? Bertha: Yes. Socrates: Then all that you seek is more seeking, rather than finding. For you never want to lack an open mind, and an open mind means seeking. But if you do not seek in order to find, then you do not really seek, do you? There is nothing to seek for.

And if religion is manmade, it would be reasonable that all religions be fundamentally equal in being human, and finite, and mixtures of good and bad. But if religion is God-made, it would be reasonable that other religions, human religions, be unequal to the one God made, because human things are unequal to divine things.

If we can never know how things really are, outside our society's conditioning process, then does it not follow that we can never criticize that conditioning and that society, and thus we become pure status quo conservatives.

Oh. So you are saying, in other words, that God's will and the intrinsic goodness of certain deeds are not related to each other as efficient cause and effect, in either of the two possible ways: either, as Euthyphro thought, that the goodness of the deed is the effect of the will of God, or, as you thought, that the will of God is the effect of the goodness of the deed, but rather that both of these two things are effects of the same common cause, God's own nature. Is that what you say, Socrates?

If it is not for himself that he wills, since he needs nothing, it must be for us that he wills. In other words, purely unselfish love, a kind of love I wonder whether it is possible for us mortals to have at all, since we are creatures full of needs and in time. We need at least a future; only a God who is not in time and change does not.

For what I met when I read this book was not an essence, or a concept, or a nature, but a person.

Fesser: Are you defending fanaticism, Socrates? Socrates: No. Fesser: What, then? Socrates: Something more like marriage. In-loveness. Fidelity. Fesser: And what do you think you see around you instead? Socrates: Scholarship. Teachers and students playing at a game, like children playing safari while there is a real lion lurking in their own front yard.

Fesser [stiffly]: I've spent my career on this book. But there are many different ways to interpret it. You're just being hermeneutically unsophisticated. Socrates: May I ask you an unsophisticated question? Fesser: Certainly. Socrates: Do you believe Jesus really rose from the tomb or not?

It is true. It happened. It may be myth, but it is myth become fact. It may be an archetype, but it incarnated itself in history. You see, I had already known the basic outline of the myth. In a sense I learned nothing new from your New Testament. In another sense, everything was new. It was in a new place, the earth rather than the heavens of eternal, archetypal truth. It was as if a story that I had always heard in vague whispers suddenly took the utterly clear and solid form of happening. Myths do not happen; they simply are. Try to imagine what you would feel if you actually met in your world one of your fairy tales come true, exactly-no, much more exactly than in the tale. That is what I found when I read this book.