Letters from a Skeptic

Summary:

Dr. Gregory Boyd is a professor of theology at Bethel College. He attended such universities as the University of Minnesota, Yale Divinity School, and Princeton Theological Seminary. As well as being a professor he is a preaching pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has authored three books and several articles. This particular book is a dialogue between he and his father, Edward Boyd. Edward lives in Florida and worked for 35 years in sales management. He has six kids, 15 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.

Gregory attempted for years to try and convert his father to Christianity without any success. About the time he felt like giving up on his father, he felt the Holy Spirit leading him to go one more mile. That last mile ended up in his father accepting Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, and thus resulted in the publishing of their correspondence.

It all started with the first letter from Gregory when his father was 70 years old. Gregory simply asked his father if he would take part in talking through some of the issues he had with Christianity. Edward agreed and so the journey began. Much to the surprise of Gregory, his father, very agnostic, had many very deep hard to answer questions. These questions ranged from questions about so-called “Christians,” to questions about God, questions about Jesus, questions about the Christian life, and the why he should believe in all of this nonsense. As soon as Gregory would reply and answer his father’s questions, he would receive another letter full of good questions.

This went on for three years and the progression of the book showed very clearly God working on Edward, until the end of the book when he invited Christ into his heart and accepting Him as Lord and Savior at the young age of 73.

Evaluation:

I found the questions from Edward to very tough, and I was extremely satisfied with Gregory’s answers to them. He seemed to be very humble in the fact that he admittedly did not have all the answers, but very confident in his beliefs and understanding of the evidence favoring Christianity.

For the most part I really appreciated Gregory’s answers and found them to be very insightful, as well as theologically correct. I liked his defense of God when Edward blamed Him for all the evil in the world. I also like how he explained the freedom that God has chosen to give each of us, and that that very freedom, which was given so that true love could exist, must also bear with it the possibility of evil. Gregory said in one of his responses “If we have the potential to oppress or slay millions, it’s because we also have the potential to liberate and love millions.” I thought Gregory did an exceptional job of explaining salvation to his father as well. He gave great evidence that the Bible was, in fact, true and reliable. I, personally, was very pleased with the apologetic effort of Dr. Boyd.

There were just a couple of things that, I did not necessarily disagree with, but that definitely challenged my way of thinking. The first is about God’s omniscience. In Terry Bowland’s Romans class, while discussing Calvinism, we went over this a little bit. My understanding of what Dr. Bowland believes (I am sure he would explain it better) is that God does know the future. He knows everything.