An atheist, a Taliban leader, and a teenager fighting cancer respond to the Bible.
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"At the heart of one of the most violent regimes the world has known, there was someone who was wanting to read the Bible but had never had the opportunity."
The Bible first made its mark on Amy Orr-Ewing’s life through her then-atheist father. He was told that the only reason he should become a Christian is because it’s true. "But my dad thought religion is about superstition and wish fulfilment - truth and God are opposite categories." He eventually came to change his mind, but he taught Amy that she would have to make up her own.
"Growing up in Britain as a Christian, I was always the only churchgoer in my class at school," Amy says, "there was a tremendous amount of peer pressure to disbelieve."
At 15 years of age, Amy was diagnosed with cancer - an experience that clarified some of her questions about faith, Jesus, and the Bible.
"Here was an opportunity to vocalize what I was feeling. Frustration with God, questions, fear – and then to experience God meeting me in that place", she says. "The God that I was questioning and had an intellectual path to, that overlapped and intersected my own experience … God met me in the pain and suffering of this world."
She would go on to dedicate her life to promoting and defending the Christian faith as an apologist, in some of the most dangerous places on earth. In 1996, for example, she came face to face with a Taliban leader, and handed him a Bible - he took it and said, "I know exactly what this book is. I’ve been praying to God for years that I could read it. Thank you for bringing me this book; I’ll read it every day."
In this episode, Amy Orr-Ewing graciously defends the Christian faith as one of joy, compassion, and hope. Because for her, the Bible is truth for everyone – her atheist father, herself as a teenager fighting cancer, and even for a leader of the Taliban.
"The Bible describes the real world, as we know it, it has this ring of truth. It’s not this religious, mythical bubble that we need to jump into that only makes sense internally if we just close our minds to the real world that we experience."
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Amy Orr-Ewing delivered the 2017 Richard Johnson Lecture in Sydney, ‘Is Christianity Bad News for Women?’ Listen here: http://bit.ly/2nN1UFz
The second part of our conversation with Amy - about the illustrious life of Dorothy L. Sayers, novelist, woman of letters, and public Christian - is available here: http://bit.ly/2qxUyHy
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This episode of Life & Faith was first broadcast on 11 May 2017.