Socrates, Jesus and Human Search for Truth

My high school conversion to Jesus Christ at the age of seventeen changed my course of life and search for for truth. So viscerally did the Holy Spirit enter me at the regeneration of my soul that my body reverberated with peace. I felt peace and love for people, where suspicion and macho-minded aggressiveness had reigned before.

Love and Peace of Christ

By the end of my senior year, I had led about twenty of my peers to know Christ. The principal of the high school, who had threatened to throw me out for drinking and fighting the year before, now asked me to say the public prayer at the baccalaureate service for my graduating class.

Then came the time of testing. I witnessed, all too glibly I'm sure, to a neighborhood girl four years my senior who had returned for the summer after graduating from the University of Wyoming.

Sarah listened carefully to my personal testimony about what my life had been like before meeting Jesus. How the invitation for him to forgive my sins and enter my heart had brought a turnaround. How the Holy Spirit and the Word of God brought me guidance and inspiration. 

Then it was her time to speak, and speak she did.

"Dan, I'm not at all impressed by your overly dramatic story about some drastic change of character brought about by an invisible being, who we all know died centuries ago. So you're impressed with the ideas of Jesus. Well, what about Socrates, Plato, George Hegel, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sir Bertrand Russell?"

Socrates

I didn't recognize half the names on her impromptu list.

"But Jesus said..." I started to say, before she lifted her hand and flashed a scornful smile.

"Don't tell me about Jesus until you've read the history of Western philosophy and wrestled with the existential questions of humanity. Then I might have some respect for your opinion."

That ended our first date -- at least my feeble attempt at having a first date with a highly educated woman who the next day dropped off on my doorstep a copy of Aldous Huxley's Heaven and Hell, with a note that said, "Happy reading!"

Looking back on that event from my vantage point forty-five years later, I can see the hand of God in our encounter. Christ had nurtured me tenderly the first year of my Christian formation, but with this baptism of criticism Jesus was actually challenging me, as I later discerned, to take a Master's degree in Philosophy.

I specialized in the history of Western philosophy, with a sub-theme of integrating philosophy, humanistic psychology, and Christian theology—all preparation for my life calling as a theologian-psychologist.

My thesis featured a comparison and contrast between the relative truths that Socrates and the philosophers teach and the absolute Truth that Jesus Christ is. 

Jesus Christ: Son of Man and Son of God

I suggested that either a personal-transcendent Creator God reveals and anchors human truth within his Being, or we humans are adrift in a sea of relativity, with no way out but a pitiful death.

I still believe this is the case. And I know I have the advantage of watching the Holy Spirit work in my own life and thousands of others, making real the presence of Jesus in human existence, and directing the life path of those who call upon the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

For more on the integration of theology and psychology that places Jesus at its center, read:

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY:

Where Theology & Psychology Really Meet

Compass Psychotheology