‘My Problem Was Not With Grief With a Capital G. My Problem Was That Eric Was Dead.’

Nicholas Wolterstorff is among the most prominent Christian philosophers of the 20th century. I learned of him when I read his deeply affecting, searingly honest book, “Lament for a Son,” an expression of his profound grief in the aftermath of the death of his 25-year-old son, Eric, in a mountain-climbing accident. “To the most agonizing question I have ever been asked,” Mr. Wolterstorff wrote, “I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.”

I spoke to Mr. Wolterstorff, a professor emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale, about his journey of faith, the strongest philosophical case for and against Christianity, what evangelicals have gotten wrong about politics, how he came to care about justice and what it means to own grief redemptively. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is part of a series of interviews I am doing that explore the world of faith.

1. The Most Powerful Case Against (and for) Christianity

How important has philosophy been in your journey toward belief in God? Has your mastery of philosophy made your journey to the Christian faith easier or harder or both?

Let me begin my answer to that question by explaining how I got into philosophy. I was a student at Calvin College, and in those days, everybody was required to take at least one course in philosophy. So I took that course — I didn’t know anything about philosophy — at the beginning of my sophomore year. We were 30 minutes into the course, and I felt hooked. I thought: I have no idea whether I’ll be any good at this stuff, but if I am, this is it.

So philosophy grabbed me; I didn’t grab it. I ask myself, and people ask me: Well, what did your professor say in those first 30 minutes? I have no memory whatsoever. In my philosophical career at Calvin, the way philosophy was taught was not, as it’s often taught, as problems. My professors were convinced that what happens in philosophy was that people, human beings with diverse worldviews, articulate philosophical issues. And so when we went through ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy, it was not a set of problems but what worldview, what understanding of humanity in the world and God and the transcendent was coming through here?

And that understanding of philosophy has remained with me ever since.

When I went to Harvard as a grad student in 1953, there was a philosophical movement called logical positivism, which was all the rage, and the positivists all thought that the future of humanity depended on science. They wanted to distinguish and demean metaphysics and religion. So they proposed what was called the verifiability criterion — according to which supposedly scientific statements made sense. Metaphysical and religious statements made no sense. A lot of my fellow students were grabbed by that, and it was extremely popular. But I’d been taught at Calvin that worldviews are coming to expression here, and it was clear to me that the worldview here was that the road of the future is science. I couldn’t believe that for a minute.