Summer Reading: John Lennox, My Story

This is the second in a little summer blog series on what I’ve been reading. This week’s book is My Story by John Lennox, which just came out in May of this year. I have to admit I’m a little bit late to the John Lennox party: he’s over 80 years old already and I’ve only just now started to get to know him! If you’ve never heard of him, he is a Northern Irish mathematician who ended his career teaching at Oxford. In other words, he was pretty good at what he did. That skill opened up all kinds of doors for him to testify about his Christian faith in unlikely places. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he traveled often to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a mathematician, speaking at mathematics conferences, while also hosting talks about how science and faith are not actually in conflict with each other. In the 2000s, he publicly debated people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens about the truth of Christian faith, giving Christian faith intellectual credibility in the age of the “New Atheists”. Even now, Lennox is receiving opportunities to share his unique perspective to large audiences- his interview with Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO podcast has almost 3 million views on YouTube.

What has struck me in both that interview and this autobiography is how compelling a witness Lennox is. He’s obviously brilliant, being one of the smartest people in the world and a leading academic. At the same time, he’s also deeply committed to his evangelical Christian faith, a faith that upholds the inspiration of the Scriptures and the exclusivity of Christ. He speaks and writes with humility but also with passionate conviction. He does his math and science to the best of his ability, glorifying God with his work, while also boldly sharing the Gospel and leading others to eternal glory. It’s not one or the other of these things, it’s both/and. I love how the stories Lennox tells consistently point to how God is the one who works in hearts and orchestrates encounters with Him through His human servants. As one reviewer on the back cover says, reading this autobiography is a bit like reading a modern day version of the New Testament book of Acts. Lennox has made himself available to the Lord, and the Lord has used his life to draw many people to Himself. This is easily the most interesting, encouraging, inspiring autobiography of a mathematician you’ll ever come across.

Here are some quotes from the book that especially stand out to me, especially in relation to how we share our faith with others:

• about the religious tension between Catholics and Protestants in his home of Northern Ireland: ”the effect of using physical weapons to defend Christ and his message is to cut people’s ears off, not so much physically as metaphorically, so that they simply cannot hear the message…I have spent a lot of time in the ear-repair business!” (11)
• “there is a God-shaped space in everyone, and therefore I expect people to be searching for the truth, even if they do not recognise that that is what they are doing.” (46)
• "I was told as a teenager that if I wanted people to find my faith interesting, I would need to be interested not only in them but also in as many different things as possible to avoid being labelled a bore.” (49)
• "the first question someone asks, or the first point they make, may have nothing at all to do with the real issues that bother them.” (52)
• "in Athens and everywhere else, Paul used his reason and trusted God. The danger is that any of us can fall into the trap of trusting our reason and using God when we get stuck.” (81)
• responding to a debate opponent who said that they didn’t believe in God because science helps us understand how the universe works without needing a “God of the gaps”: “I presume that on the basis of his own stated logic, our politician friend here would stop believing in a watchmaker once he discovered how a watch works!” (228)
• "we do not need to think, as some people do, that Christians have to be able to answer every question. No one can. There are many mysteries, even in the natural world, where no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming.” (294)
• in debate with Christopher Hitchens about getting rid of religion because of violence in history: “his suggestion that we should abolish religion because of its abuses was about as intelligent as suggesting we should abolish science to get rid of napalm, or abolish money to get rid of greed” (309)
• addressing the problem of suffering in the world: “the answer that Christianity gives is not a set of propositions or a philosophical analysis of the problem. It is a Person who suffered, and he did so not merely to show solidarity with us in our suffering. It went far deeper than that. The unique claim of Christianity is that on the cross Jesus suffered something very much worse than crucifixion: he suffered to atone for our sins.” (358)

There’s a lot more gold in the book, but I’ll leave it at that and say that I am now a big John Lennox fan and think you should be too! We thank God for men like this who He has given special gifts and unique opportunities to, and who faithfully testify to Christ’s salvation.