Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Books & Bibles, Theology, Apologetics, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Religion & Spirituality
Publisher: IVP Books
Published: 2010-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Socrates and Bertha Broadmind stand in a crowded hallway in the Have It Divinity School, between classes.

Bertha Broadmind: Well, Socrates, are you ready for your first Christology class?

Socrates: I am always ready to learn.

Bertha: What do you hope to learn here?

Socrates: Two things, I think-who this Jesus person is and why divine providence brought me here to learn about him.

Bertha: Well, if anybody can teach you that, Professor Fesser should. He's a world-renowned expert in Christology.

Socrates: We are certainly at opposite ends of the hierarchy, then, because I hardly even know what Christology is. By the name, I take it that it is the science of Christ, the rational study of this Jesus person, who is called Christ?

Bertha: That's right. Hey! [Entering classroom, seeing one round table with five students sitting around.] It ... It's going to be a seminar. You'll like that, Socrates. That means you get to ask a lot of questions.

Socrates: I should hope so. Is there any other way to learn? Aren't all of your classes like that?

Bertha: No, most are lectures.

Socrates [profoundly shocked]: Oh, I see. My method has not really caught on very well, then. And I suppose most of your reading is of books rather than of people.

Bertha: What do you mean by "reading people"?

Socrates: Dialog, of course.

Bertha: Oh. Well, we have that, too, but I guess we read mainly books here. What's wrong with books?

Socrates: Oh, nothing's wrong with them. They are a marvelous invention. But I do have two reservations about them.

Bertha: What?

Socrates: One of them I learned from the Egyptian legend about the god Thoth, who gave to the Pharaoh the invention of printing. The Pharaoh was unabashedly grateful, but Thoth warned that what he gave with one hand he took with another.

Bertha: What does that mean?

Socrates: That when we have a.greater external memory, in a book, we have a lesser internal memory in the soul. That books can easily become like parasites, living off the blood of their host, the mind. And the second thing is that they are like corpses rather than like the living in that they always give the same answer back to you whenever you question them. I always preferred to dialog with the living, whose answers are unpredictable, rather than to dialog with the dead.

Bertha: Well, you'll get what you prefer here, all right. These characters all seem to be live ones. [To the six other students, sitting down.] Hi.

Students: Hi.

Professor Fesser [entering]: Good morning. Welcome to my seminar in Christology. I am Professor Fesser, and I would like to hold this class in as informal a way as possible, since I think we are all advanced students and since we seem to have a nice small group of-let's see-seven students, and since all of you are very different, I think, and each of you has something unique to contribute. I like to think of myself more as a facilitator than as a lecturer. This is your class, not mine. So now that I've

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