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Dominus Illuminatio

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
The more I understood of what the Christian picture of who we are is, the more I realized that that is profoundly compelling. So I started in Oxford one day. I was sitting in the library and realized that my desk that I always sat at was actually in front of the theology section. And so I picked up a book of sermons and I’d never read a sermon before. And to be honest, I knew very little about Christianity. I’d never. Walked into a church earnestly trying to understand anything about Christianity. So I knew very little about it and picked up a book of sermons and reading a sermon called you are accepted was also basically reading a sermon that tapped into the same question I was thinking about, which is who are we as human beings?

Studio – John Dickson

That’s Dr. Sarah Irving Stonebreaker, now a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Western Sydney University. When Sarah first arrived at Cambridge on a scholarship and then later took a job at Oxford, she thought Christians were anti-intellectual. And perhaps that’s what we’ve come to expect. Smart people have no time or headspace for God. They know too much. They think too little. Too deeply for the shallows of theology. Well, today we are talking with people who have witnessed the opposite. Universities like Oxford and Cambridge are melting pots where people can find their beliefs or unbelief turned upside down. Just like Sarah, I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Vaughan Roberts:
Well, here we are on a late spring day in Crushett’s Meadows, and as I look, I can see Christian buildings all around because the university was founded on Christian principles.

Studio – John Dickson

That’s Vaughan Roberts, a prominent British Christian, author and minister at St Ebbs, an Anglican church in the heart of Oxford. We’re in a popular walking spot out the back of the 500-year-old Christ Church College, where part of Harry Potter was filmed.

Vaughan Roberts:
All the colleges were founded by Christians with an absolute conviction. That to all of knowledge flowed from an understanding that God made the world and, uh, should be done for the glory of God. So, interestingly, the, the motto of the University of Oxford is, The Lord is my light, Dominus Illuminatio Mea. Taken, uh, from the Psalms. So, um, it’s a thoroughly Christian place, at least in its, in its background and the architecture. And there are echoes of Christianity all around Oxford. People

John Dickson:
People today though, uh, will associate Oxford with opposition to Christianity. I mean, classically, this is Richard Dawkins University, most famous atheist in the world. Is it like that? Is it now really just opposition to Christianity?

Vaughan Roberts:
I think that’s exaggerated. So Richard Dawkins is obviously based here at Oxford, but you’d, you’d get, you’d meet very few who’d be aggressively convinced atheists. So I think indifference is much more common than, um, strong opposition to Christian faith. I think most people, if I’m honest, I think hardly think about Christianity and don’t have objections, they don’t have an opinion. They don’t see why they need to have an opinion. It’s just not within their mind to think about such things. But if you find people who are objecting strongly, it’s not like when I first was in Oxford 30 years ago, when you’d have a particular objection. Maybe, um, this doesn’t, uh, fit with science. Or, um, what about suffering? Those are not the issues. I think, uh, increasingly we’re getting a clash with what I would call an alternative gospel or worldview, which is really about the individual and that the self is floating free and must be allowed to be floating free and it is a definition of oppression is any worldview not just a religion but any anyone or anything that suggests that an individual is not free to define themselves exactly as they wish and to decide exactly what they want to believe and uh, what their ethics will be. And so any kind of religion, it’s not about Christianity really, any kind of worldview that is held with um, conviction and that includes Christianity and especially any religion is regarded as oppressive to the self. It probably wouldn’t be put like that, but that is the knee-jerk instinct, I think. It’s in the air we breathe. I think despite the myth that, uh, we live in a completely secular society, the reality is that there is a sense of spirituality in the air, and people, whether they’re consciously doing it or not, are asking the big questions. Is there any meaning to life? Uh, is there anything beyond what I can see and examine down a microscope? So there’s that going on, that people are asking, whether subconsciously or very consciously, those questions.

Studio – John Dickson

That was certainly the case for Sarah Irving-Stonebraker. She arrived in Cambridge wanting to become a professional historian, and believing that there was no God.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
I think it was both intellectual and personal. I think it was intellectual because I couldn’t understand what God would offer me as an explanation of anything because I had a very strong sense of who I was. And I think in that sense, therefore, it was personal too, because in knowing and having that strong sense of who I was wanting to be a historian, I had the sense that I knew what life was all about and therefore I didn’t need God to tell me.

Studio – John Dickson

And Sarah thought she was doing pretty well without religion. But something she discovered in Cambridge messed with her head. She learnt from the primary documents of the 17th century, that the first scientists were devout Christians pursuing nature as a kind of act of worship.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
The beginnings of it all started to happen at Cambridge because I was exploring the relationship between early modern scientists and the British Empire. So what that meant was I had to read the work of people we now refer to as the founders of modern science. So these are people like Robert Boyle, who’s credited with the origins of modern chemistry. Robert Hooke, um, Boyle and Hooke are also really important in founding the experimental method. Uh, John Locke, Francis Bacon. And the reason why that started to chip away at my atheism was that the more I read of their work, the more I realized that not only were they men of deep Christian faith, but that their theology was absolutely central to their intellectual work

John Dickson:
But wasn’t the God thing just a given in those days? That everyone was notionally a Christian?

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
Yeah, well, this is what I thought too at first. And so initially I thought, oh, I’m going to dismiss this as a kind of tokenistic thing. But then the more I read, and particularly the more I read their scientific, what we now refer to as their scientific work, the more I realized that no fundamental Christian ideas are at the heart of their work.

Studio – John Dickson

Sarah goes on to talk about the notion of sin. Yes, sin. This was one of the key inspirations for the experimental method. I know that sounds implausible until you read the primary evidence. She in fact reads to me from the preface of Robert Hooke’s 1665 treatise, Micrographia. These first scientists believed that their rational mind, and not just their moral sense, was fallen, corrupted because of sin. Even the smartest humans, which Hooke and Boyle certainly were, can’t simply look at nature and deduce what’s true about it. They have to test their ideas against the real world. And so was born the notion of imperical experiment. For the nerds out there, all of this is laid out in painstaking detail in Peter Harrison’s The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge University Press 2009. Anyway, Sarah’s atheism suffered another major blow when she moved to Oxford on a research fellowship. She found herself sitting under prominent Australian moral philosopher and atheist, Peter Singer, for a series of philosophy lectures.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
Going to those lectures actually sent me, set me a kind of, in a train of reflection, because I left those lectures with a kind of intellectual vertigo in the sense that everything that I believe, as if the ground had been removed from everything that I believed. And the reason for that is, so Singer’s an ethicist, as you know, and Singer in those lectures was dealing with the problem of how we conceive of our duties towards others, and it tapped in, therefore, into the issue of human value.

Studio – John Dickson

Peter Singer has occasionally been dubbed the world’s most influential living philosopher. Born in Australia, he was educated at Melbourne and Oxford Universities before eventually becoming a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He’s the co-author, author, or editor of over 50 books available in 25 languages. Okay, he’s a big deal. He’s especially well known for the ethics of our treatment of animals, and many see him as the father of the modern animal rights movement. But he’s also highly controversial for challenging the Western, he’d say Christian, idea of sanctity of life ethics, which says that every human being is equally and inestimably precious, regardless of their capacities. As an atheist, he thinks that’s mumbo jumbo. And he’s not afraid to say so.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
Now, the reason why that’s a significant issue for an atheist like Singer to grapple with is that once you remove God, you remove any ground for arguing that human life has any inherent value, right? Because if there’s no God who created people, then, and they’re just biologically speaking another animal, then where does their value come from? So Singer presents a series of ethical arguments in those lectures. And I leave thinking, “goodness, this, is not what I believe at all”. I go through a period of having to think very deeply about what I believe, because it’s very clear that because I hold this idea that all human lives are not only inherently precious, but are of equal moral worth, that that’s not the logical outworking of atheism at all.

Studio – John Dickson

The idea that humans hold inherent value is a fundamentally Christian concept. How we got there is a topic for another episode. But basically, it was Judaism and Christianity together that introduced to the world the counterintuitive idea that every person matters and that every person is made in the image of God. How Sarah came to believe this was the case, though she didn’t believe in God, is similar to how many of those without Christian faith come to think pretty much the same thing about human value. Sarah describes it as a kind of cultural osmosis.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
I think today what we assume are basic moral intuitions of reasonable people, for example, the idea that every human life is of equal moral worth. These have come down to us in the West through the Christian tradition, but the nature of secularization over the past few hundred years has meant that those ideas have lost their theological undergirding and have become kind of just part of popular consciousness. Now it’s not as if those ideas aren’t debated, right? Like Peter Singer isn’t the only atheist philosopher who debates those ideas. And indeed, when topics like euthanasia and abortion come up in the public sphere, the notion of what a rights bearing subject is and how that person, on what basis that person has rights, that then those ideas come up. But for the most part, it’s possible in the way, in a Western country like Australia to absorb. The edifice of Christian ideas do it basically through a kind of cultural osmosis and grow up kind of thinking, yeah, all reasonable people believe this simply because we’ve inherited a Christian intellectual tradition, but it’s been kind of secularized and acclimatized to our culture to the extent that we’ve forgotten that it’s Christian.

Studio – John Dickson

So Sarah already has this basic understanding that all human beings are equally and inestimably precious. But then she realizes this is kind of at odds with the atheism she’s hearing from Peter Singer.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
It was really confronting because it put me in the position of ‘What do I actually believe in the first place’? Singer’s approach to it is basically to say, look, if we want to come up with some kind of understanding of where human beings get their worth from, then, and of course we remove God, then we have kind of two options. And Singer goes for the first, which is basically to say, let’s come up with a series of criteria to decide on what basis or says, look, all people are human beings. That’s one thing. But personhood, which would entitle us to certain rights, personhood is something different. So let’s come up with a certain kind of set of criteria that most human beings have that others don’t. And on that basis, we can talk about personhood and therefore rights. So sitting in those lectures, I kind of consider this idea. But then, of course, because I’m studying history, it becomes very apparent very quickly that that is his … that just doesn’t work historically, right? I mean, very few, very few historical cultures have held the notion that all human beings are of equal moral worth. I mean, neither Aristotle nor Plato, like as we were saying, had any of those ideas. Um, even a couple of generations ago in Nazi Germany, there was no sense that every human being was of equal moral worth. So that notion just isn’t borne out by history at all. So it’s also the case of having to bring my historical mind to this and think ‘gosh, what on earth do I believe’? Yeah, it basically sets me the question, well, do I abandon all my moral intuitions or do I think that perhaps my atheism needs to be re-thought? And actually in some ways it might have been easier to abandon my moral intuitions because the more difficult thing, right, is to think, ‘Goodness, maybe a belief system that I’d held quite deeply for a long time might be wrong’. And the other reason is, the other reason I think that I didn’t go down that path is that when I actually started to eventually understand what Christianity was, the story that Christianity presents about who we are and what the world looks like, and who God is and what our problem is, what that explains the brokenness of the world, which is sin. That explanation is far more profound and far more compelling than any atheist answer to the question.

Studio – John Dickson

What is the story Christianity presents and why is it so compelling? Find out after the break.

Break

Studio – John Dickson

We’ve been speaking with Vaughan Roberts, who leads a ministry in the heart of Oxford, and Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, a historian who became a Christian while studying at these great universities. If anything, it’s become popularly accepted that when you go to university, you lose your faith in God because you become too smart. But that wasn’t the case for Sarah, and according to Vaughan Roberts, many other academics who study and work at Oxford, one of the leading universities in the world. In fact, Sarah says that it was while she was at Oxford, she came to an understanding that Christianity’s explanation of the world was far more compelling than the atheist explanation she’d held all her life. What makes it so compelling? Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five minute Jesus, for you. So what is the Christian view of the world? I know some people at this point might say, hang on, you Christians can’t even work out what you believe. You’ve got so many different denominations, you know, get back to me when you can agree on something. I get that. But there is one way of summarizing the Christian view of things. It’s the 83 word summary of the Christian faith called the Apostles Creed and all the brands of Christianity agree on this short statement So it’s a good way to summarize the Christian faith and it basically says three things in three stanzas Something about God the Father something about the Son that’s Jesus and something about the Spirit and I reckon It’s a good way to understand the heart of the Christian faith and how it sort of opens up visions for life. The first thing it says is that I believe in God the father almighty maker of heaven and earth. That may sound like theology 101 but basically it means that God is not A god within the creation. God is the source of heaven and earth, not part of heaven and earth. Many ancient people believed that the gods were actually just like superheroes, super beings, part of the creation. But the Jews and the Christians and the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle knew that there was a source behind the heavens and the earth. And that’s the first idea of Christianity. God isn’t like, I don’t know, a magic wardrobe. sitting in the house of creation somewhere waiting to be found. God is more like the architect. You don’t find the architect in your attic or, you know, in the cupboard. That would be truly creepy. But the house speaks about the architect, the mind of the architect. That’s the first thing Christians believe and what it means is that life is brimming with the significance of a gift from a father, from the source of all things. Stuff isn’t an accident. Human beings are not accidents. They are gifts to each other. They are brimming with significance. And I think what it also means is that it’s possible to offend the giver. This idea of God being the creator of all things, um, underlies the Christian notion of sin. I know that’s a bit of a dumb word nowadays, but basically it means to reject the giver while you’re pursuing the gifts, ignoring the creator, but loving all the created bits. That is the great offense. And hence the massive emphasis in the Apostles Creed on the second item of Christian belief, Jesus Christ. The creed goes on to say that I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. The third day he rose again from the dead and so on. The first thing you notice when you get to this middle stanza of the Apostles Creed is the massive emphasis on Jesus. 56 of the 83 words of this summary of Christianity are all about Jesus. And a huge portion of them focus just on the three days of Jesus death and resurrection. And the reason for that is that it’s in the death and resurrection that human beings find forgiveness from God. We’ve offended the maker by pursuing made things. We’ve ignored the giver while we’ve relished the gifts. But Christ enters the world, dies for us, takes our penalty out of the way, rises again and offers us mercy. The center of the center of Christianity is the death and resurrection of Jesus and this animates life and leads to the entire ethical outlook of the Christian seeking to love others as we’ve been loved. There is a third element of the Christian outlook on life and it’s in the third stanza of the creed. It says, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, Amen. This stanza begins the reference to the third person of the Trinity. Yes, early Christianity believed in a Trinity. And I know that messes with our heads. I wish the maths of God were simpler. Is God one, or is God three? And Christians have the temerity to say Yep, God is three persons, but he is one God. And you know, as much as that is a mathematical problem, it actually answers a profound question about life, reality, relationships. Because who did God love in eternity, prior to the creation of Homo sapiens? Was God only potentially love before he made human beings to love and be loved by? No. So, well, the Trinity says God is eternally a love relationship. One God, but three persons. Father, son, and spirit. And it’s out of this strange but beautiful idea of divine communion that Christianity gets its massive emphasis on community, which is what those next lines of the Creed say about the Holy Catholic Church and the communion of saints. This just means the community that God is creating to reflect his own internal love between the Father and the Son. the sun and the spirit. And this was certainly true in the ancient world when this Apostle’s Creed was composed. Christianity was breathing fresh air of community in a world suffocating under the weight of hierarchy, and inequality, and violence. And we sure saw that in the episode with Professor Teresa Morgan. But the church is still expressing that community, that communion of saints. As we saw with atheist and Labor MP Andrew Lee, who said in episode 5 that the church is a key in Australia to building social capital. The spirit does more than build community though, he breathes life for eternity. That’s why the last lines of the creed are that we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Our culture avoids thought of death. Christianity doesn’t. And Christianity says that the spirit who breathes love and community amongst God’s people now will also breathe life for eternity in the future. That may sound all long-winded, but as a summary of the Christian worldview, I think it’s not bad. It’s three thoughts that undergird the whole thing. The reality of God, the creator, and therefore the value of all created things. The history of Jesus, secondly, who died and rose so we would experience forgiveness and love, and the life of the Spirit now building us into a community and then Resurrecting us for eternity. You can press play now.

Vaughan Roberts:
And actually 30 years ago when I first arrived in Oxford, there was a much bigger Christian fringe. So there were those who were probably used to going to church every now and then, and if pushed, might tick a Church of England box or a Christian box. In a form, but didn’t really know what they believe, and wouldn’t say they were not Christian, but quite unclear. And they might come to church, and very often, when things were explained simply and clearly, they could move quite quickly to committed Christian faith. Now what we’re finding is people are either quite committed Christians, or have had virtually no experience of church at all. And, um, the advantage of that is that they don’t have so many ideas about what Christianity is which used to be it’s boring. It’s old fashioned. It’s dull It’s got nothing to do with me. People don’t have those preconceptions.

Studio – John Dickson

Vaughan Roberts tells me that he’s seen many people studying at Oxford become surprised by what they discover in Christianity. And that’s certainly how it was for Sarah, though it took her a lot longer to actually start reading the Bible.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
I started. In Oxford, one day I was sitting in the library and realized that my desk that I always sat at was actually in front of the theology section. And so I picked up a book of sermons, and I’d never read a sermon before, and to be honest, I knew very little about Christianity. I’d never walked into a church earnestly trying to understand anything about Christianity. So I knew very little about it and picked up a book of sermons. And reading a sermon called, You Are Accepted, was also basically reading a sermon that tapped into the same question I was thinking about, which is, who are we as human beings, what is the human predicament? And in that, that sermon basically gave me a summary of the Christian description of who we are, God’s description of who we are, which is, we’re made in God’s image, everything in the beginning was very good, and we had a perfect relationship with God. But we have profoundly turned away from God. We have profoundly rebelled against God and that sin, and I’d previously as a non, as an atheist, I’d never had any deep understanding of sin. I thought sin was just sort of like a list of things that you might do wrong. But no, I soon learned that actually sin is a profound description of the human heart. And when I looked around myself in the world, I realized that sin was the description of Not only of what I saw in history, but what I saw in the world around me, right? This is the brokenness, this is the injustice, the violence in the human heart, that for all our attempts to build a perfect society historically, we are inclined towards rebelling against God. We are inclined towards sin. And then the Christian story is that God does something about sin, which is that God himself will inhabit Human life will come to be in the world in the form of a human, and that, by the way, in itself is profoundly confronting and even almost offensive, right? Like, who is God to come? What kind of a God would become flesh and inhabit human suffering and die a humiliating death in order to take the punishment for sin for us so that we can be made right with God again? But here’s the other thing. It also explained why it is, as human beings, and why, as an atheist, I was like this, and my friends were like this. We might have been atheists. But there was something about us that yearned for something more than this world. Why else would we appreciate poetry, or art, or beauty, or music, or love, right? Like a biological description of who we are was one thing. But atheism could never explain that yearning, and nor could it explain, for example, the yearning that I had for justice or for human equality. The atheist answer to that problem would have said, that is an accidental outcome of culture and biology. But the Christian answer to that question says, ‘no, that is written on the human heart’. It’s been profoundly messed up by sin, but no, the yearning for justice is written into the human soul. That was a profound description of who humanity was, far more profound than atheism. At first I read sermons for so long because I thought, how do I deal with the Bible? Like there was still some part of me that didn’t want to open the Bible. But eventually I opened a Bible, partly because a friend in America had given me C. S. Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity, in which C.S. Lewis, as you know, goes through as an analogous kind of path from atheism to Christianity, to which the endeavour of the human mind, realising that ‘No, God wants you to use the human mind He gave you to wrestle with Him”.

John Dickson:
C. S. Lewis is perhaps Oxford’s most famous Christian convert. He’s one of the most famous scholars from Oxford of all time. He entered Oxford an avowed atheist in 1917 and he was a star student, earning what’s called a triple first, which means he came first in all three subject areas; English, Classics, and Philosophy. He became a teaching fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1925, still an atheist, but he enjoyed reading Christian authors like George MacDonald, who was a really big deal at the time, though we’ve mostly forgotten about him. He powerfully challenged Lewis’s atheism. “What it actually did to me”, wrote Lewis once, “was to convert Even to baptise my imagination”. G.K. Chesterton was also really influential on Lewis, especially his book The Everlasting Man. By the way, that is a cracking book. Go and chase it down if you can. Several friends of Lewis, including Owen Barfield, a British philosopher, and Neville Cogill, a literary scholar, had become Christians and were talking to Lewis all about it. And soon this club ganging up against his atheism included the great J. R. R. Tolkien, who helped Lewis see the beauty and value of the life of Jesus. You see, Lewis had come to believe in a nebulous God by this stage. Actually, he came to believe on a bus trip up the Heddington Hill in Oxford. A bus I’ve actually caught and, you know, wondered if the magic would fall on me. Anyway, he’s literally going up the bus, hops on the bus, an atheist, and by the time he got up the Heddington Hill, he was sure there was a creator. But he couldn’t quite connect this with Jesus Christ. Until conversations with Tolkien. Within months, Lewis experienced a complete deconstruction of his atheistic philosophy of life. And he was brought into Christianity, he says, “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape”.

“You must picture me alone Mordorland,” he writes “night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.

“That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the trinity term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed. Perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
So, then I opened a Bible, started attending church and being part of a Christian community that I was a, it became clear that that Christian community lived very differently too. They didn’t live like any community I’d ever seen before. They lived for something different. There was something different about them.

Vaughan Roberts:
There’s also a longing for community. And, uh, if in the context of community, They can find people who, uh, are seriously asking those questions. Uh, that’s quite attractive.

Studio – John Dickson

Vaughan is telling me that particularly academics who arrive at his church for the first time are confronted with people who look normal. And often, those normal people turn out to be academics, and they’re not embarrassed by being Christians in academia. And it all has a real effect on visitors.

Vaughan Roberts:
And, uh, we’re finding people coming intrigued that there are young people who seem to be intelligent, who are not weird. Um, who enjoy life and are thoroughly engaged in the whole of life. Uh, who have lots of friends and have a warm community. Who seem to have, at least claim to have answers about big questions of life. And seem to claim to be in touch with God. That’s intriguing to people. There would be those who would say, look, how can someone who’s a serious academic believe that the Bible is reliable and could be taken seriously, and so on. So, that’s a surprise to people, but there are plenty of academics who, um, they’re not switching their brain off. They don’t have, um, brain engaged in their academic discipline, brain switched off when they come to church, and they have very good reasons to believe their faith is rationally grounded. The Bible can be taken very seriously as a historical document, and there are plenty who are not embarrassed about it.

Studio – John Dickson

Sarah didn’t rock up at a church for a long time after she heard Peter Singer talk about the value or lack of value of a human life. There were twists and turns, assessments and reassessments. She moved countries, moved jobs, started mixing with Christians, and saw the Christian community in action among the poor and vulnerable, she said. That’s when it became more than an intellectual exercise. Not less than that exercise, but more than. That’s when it started to confront her.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker:
So intellectually, yes, I assent to this. But then there’s an issue of the human heart, which took just as long for me, which involved me realizing, no, I’ve never want, I’ve for my, most of my life, not wanted God, rebelled against him. And my heart, despite thinking I lived some, you know, upward moral life, upstanding moral life, no, by, by God’s standards, my life isn’t moral at all. If God determines what’s good then I’ve fallen away. And then when I realized that sin was my problem in my heart and that I wanted God, I wanted a relationship with God. I wanted to know God. That’s eventually when I decided to become a Christian.

Studio – John Dickson

In 2017, the Christian Union was banned from Freshers Week at Balliol College. This is the festival that welcomes new students. And according to UK’s Telegraph, the student union had decided that Christian presence during the week where new students arrive was kind of disorienting to these new students and possibly harmful because of Christianity’s bigoted views. But Vaughan Roberts says reports like this that Oxford University is becoming anti Christian. are greatly exaggerated. In fact, Vaughan says, it’s indifference to Christianity, not hostility towards it, that is the greater challenge for a ministry like St Ebb’s at the heart of this academic community. But there are also stories like Sarah’s. Gifted people who arrive at places like Oxford and Cambridge with preconceived ideas about how the world works, who find themselves confronted by the bigger questions of life, and discover that their worldview just can’t cope with it, but Christianity can. We’ve heard it several times now in this season. Christianity deals with the biggest questions. What is the first cause of the universe? Why is rationality built into the laws of everything? What is the value of a human? And how do we live? Christianity’s answers are often found to be more robust and appealing than many of the answers in the contemporary disciplines you could study at a place like Oxford. I know that’s a big claim, but it’s one that many find can be sustained. Those who pursue their intellectual hunches about the Christian worldview often discover more than their intellect bargained for. Sarah, Vaughan, countless others, before C. S. Lewis and long after, find themselves wrestling with the claims of Christianity for years and come out the other side believers.