10: What is Enough to Believe?

In this episode John and Gregg examine the notion that Jesus dying on the cross should prompt people to love God and embrace Christianity as a result. Specifically, is Christ’s death a motivation for loving God and is the matter presented this way in the Bible?

John tells how Christians in the past have speculated that his lack of satisfaction with Christianity is due to something that John is failing to do–that John needs to get the ball rolling. Gregg instead focuses on Jesus’ life and death as historically indicating how God loves us and has initiated a love relationship with us.  Yet he also considers how love, by its very nature, is experienced and “understood” relationally.

In essence, from Gregg’s perspective Jesus’ death must strike you as real (and so be believable) AND God’s love has to become real in our own existence (as something that you experience).  So Gregg summarizes relationship with God as primarily concerning an experience of love and a reality of truth.

We go on to discuss the nature of love and the nature of experience, commenting on the ideas of testimony, what “counts” as enough evidence of God’s love, and what might be ways or modes of knowing or experiencing God.  In the end, John considers that remaining open to God is perhaps the best stance he can adopt relative to experiencing God’s love.

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