I should preface this review with a bit of biography; some who have been reading me for a while are already familiar with it, and others have gotten bits of it, because I’ve grown more comfortable sharing over the years. I grew up in an extremely religious Pentecostal sect; left it somewhere between age 20 & 21; was a zealous secular humanist for 3-4 years, became obsessed with meaning and living a ‘good life’, and by age 27 was a practicing Christian within the Episcopal tradition. I have remained there since, though in practice and belief I am now much closer to a traditional Catholic than your average Episcopalian, pope aside. Given this, I am sure a reader might understand why I might find a man writing about his conversion from practical agnosticism to Christianity somewhat interesting.

Taking Religion Seriously is a chronicle of Murray’s journey from effective agnosticism to a tacit embrace of Christianity — tacit because he believes in it, but not in a ‘set the world on fire’ kind of way. His is an intellectual, reading journey: he shares the books he’s read that have shaped this thinking, and cautions readers that he is no authority. He simply asks that readers consider his history of thought, look at the books he’s read, and draw their own conclusions. (He believes he has found ‘evidence that demands a verdict’, you might say.) His early story is like many: he was raised in belief and came from it in college, thinking that intelligent people simply didn’t take religious claims seriously. From here, the story is a little more complex: Murray writes that it’s very easy for us to impose a tidy narrative after the fact, when changes in beliefs as lived are in fact much more messy. Having changed worldviews at least twice in my several decades on this Earth, I can readily agree with that — because I have tried first to explain my departure from Pentecostalism to secularism to family and friends, and then to explain my departure from secularism to belief to myself.

Murray opens with scientific concerns, particularly the peculiar fitness that our universe has for life, and the improbability of physical laws not only allowing for a stable universe, but one stable enough to engender life. He is also skeptical of strict materialism, arguing that studies into psychic abilities, near-death experiences, and ‘terminal lucidity'( a new term for me, I will admit) indicate that there is more to a human being — to any one given person — than simply brain activity. He then begins transitioning into other arguments, like Lewis’ argument from moral law, and interesting textual studies of the Gospels that argue for their being attempts to capture historical fact, not simply tell an enchanting story. He shares arguments he’s read that the synoptic Gospels were written earlier than 20th century scholarship has admitted, and introduces a new-to-me concept called “undesigned coincidences” in which minor details from one account support details from another account — like Jesus giving disciples nicknames in one Gospel that seem random until details from another Gospel are taken into account. In concluding, he recaps what he’s written and tries to anticipate some criticism like ‘God of the gaps’ being applied to his first chapter.

I found this a very interesting book, but I have to admit that reading it as a believer was an odd experience. It felt like Murray had put the cart before the horse, that Jesus didn’t matter so much as textual studies and the limits of scientific enterprise. This may owe to the way I came round to accepting Christianity, which was highly personal and admittedly subjective, but just as real to me as the wet and crashing waves of the ocean that have mesmerized me in the past. My reading of this makes me believe that Murray takes seriously the existence of souls, and of a transcendent moral order that nearly all human cultures have perceived and created religions around. I can even believe he believes in the Gospel accounts, miracles included — but at the same time, his approach to Jesus feels like approaching a museum exhibit or something. There’s reverence, but no connection and no presence.

This was an interesting work, one honestly written, I think. It’s not a conversion story per se, but a straightforward account of a man whose reading journey led him to live up to the title — to take religion seriously. He does not say if he has incorporated things like religious praxis in his life, though his wife is a devout Quaker and watching her spiritual growth over the decades they’ve been together was one motivation for him in investigating religion’s claims more seriously. He was seeing something in her he could not dismiss, even if his own faith remains — as he says ‘arid’. It’s his honesty that gives this book a unique appeal, I think. I imagine its ideal audience is Christians who are uneasy about factual claims of the faith, or perhaps people who are spiritual seekers and are curious. As much as I appreciated Murray’s views on the historicity of the Gospels, some of which were new approaches to me, I couldn’t escape the sense that all this was just air without having had a serious religious encounter. Perhaps it’s appropriate that Murray uses the absurd and flaccid “BCE/CE” convention for his dates: he has not had a road-to-Damascus moment that divides his life into two parts — before Christ and in the year of our Lord.

Quotations

I blame it on Beethoven, who was the exemplar of the rebellious, ill-tempered genius who breaks old rules and is contemptuous of his audience’s preferences. He acted as if he were God’s gift to humanity. As it happens, he was. The problem is that subsequent generations of artists who weren’t gifts from God emulated him.

Undesigned coincidences correspond to what happens in real life when different eyewitnesses describe an event. If the witnesses are concentrating on reporting what they recall rather than constructing a story, they will often give a detail that seems inexplicable on its own but makes sense when put alongside the testimony of another witness who reported another, complementary detail. Thus, for example, Mark (3:17) mentions parenthetically that Jesus nicknamed the brothers James and John “Sons of Thunder”—an odd choice for a nickname. But not so odd when you read Luke (9:52–56), which records an incident in which a village of Samaritans refuses to receive Jesus. James and John ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Mark records that Jesus gave them a nickname (I like to think of Jesus laughing when he did it), and Luke coincidentally gives the reason for it.