Article
Belief
Books
Comment
5 min read

Bear Grylls: Why I'm retelling the greatest story ever told

Why the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling

Bear is an adventurer, writer, and broadcaster.

A wet-looking Bear Grylls looks at the camera.
Bear Grylls.

As a young teenager, whenever I came across stories about Jesus, he seemed to be about peace, kindness, sacrifice, freedom and affirmation. Everybody he encountered – rich, poor, sick, healthy – seemed to walk away with their life changed. It made me want to learn more about him.  

It wasn’t religion I was after – as a teenager I wasn’t exactly hungry for more rules and restrictions – but I did like the sound of the freedom and empowerment that seemed to come from being around this guy. What I didn’t know was how it would truly change me from the inside out. 

Having a Christian faith can be difficult to articulate, but I know I have the light of the Almighty within me. At times I have ignored it and tried to live without it. But my heart is restless when I try to live on my strength alone. I am not too proud to admit that I need my Saviour within me. 

And it’s easy to be cynical about faith, but I have realised that doubts are ok. That’s part of it all. To seek truth and choose faith is courageous. Life and the wild have taught me that the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling one. 

I’ve witnessed the gift God gives us change so many lives over the years. None of us deserves it. I certainly don’t. If anything, I am more aware than ever how often I have failed, yet still I am forgiven. That’s why Christ turned everything on its head. His forgiveness is free because he has paid the price. He took our place on the cross. He died to set us free. No wonder they call it the greatest story ever told. 

The story I have written in my new book is His story, Jesus’ own story, told from the perspective of the first eyewit­nesses. I deliberately stuck closely to the accounts recorded in the four gospels, though some dialogue and other details have been added for context and flow. But not a single word of Jesus has been changed from the original accounts in the New Testament. I have used different English translations to capture his words depending on the context. 

In writing a book like this, I also wanted to be authentic to the original setting and to avoid anglicised names that are over-familiar to many of us. The region in which Yeshua (Jesus) lived was complicated and remains contested to this day. Greek and Latin were the dominant languages throughout the Roman Empire at that time. Yeshua himself was Jewish and would have read the Scriptures in Hebrew. However, as a Galilean, Yeshua’s everyday language would have been Aramaic. The Gospels beautifully preserve some of Jesus’ most intimate words in Aramaic.  

So I’ve used a mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic names for people and places to reflect the social context of Yeshua’s time.  

As we have just passed Easter, here is a small section from the book when a small selection of Yeshua’s followers saw him ascend into heaven, ahead of that great Pentecost Sunday.  

WHEN forty days had passed since he first appeared in the garden, Yeshua made his final appearance to us. One moment we were alone, then there he was among us, again. He said nothing about this being the last physical visitation that he would make. With hindsight, I should have known. 

He led us out of the house, down through the city gates and along the valley, up beyond Gad Smane and into the hills towards Beth ’Anya. The journey we had done so many times together. 

When we reached the top of this small hill, called Tura Zita, the Mount of Olives, Yeshua turned and stopped. He reached out his hands to us and held on tight to each of us in turn. Andreas asked him, ‘Master, are you going to restore your kingdom now? Is this the time?’ 

Yeshua told them that God’s own Spirit would come to them. ‘Dates and times. They are not for you to know. But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. You will be my witnesses. You will tell people everywhere about me – in Yerushalayim, in the rest of Yehuda, in Samaria, and in every part of the world.’ 

His arms were now raised above him, and his eyes closed. His head lifted up to the heavens. Suddenly, the light around him started to change. And a brightness began to shine out from him. A brightness that was almost impossible to look at. Then a cloud began to form around him. A cloud that circled him and slowly began to lift Yeshua off the ground. 

We all stood there, holding each other, and we watched our friend – the Master, the Lord, the Messiah – slowly disappear among the cloud until he was gone. There was no fanfare. No grand goodbye. Just that swirling cloud around him as he was raised higher and higher. 

And then, just like that, Yeshua was gone.  

We were left staring up into the clouds above. 

As we stood there, suddenly two angels appeared beside us.  

‘You Galileans! Why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky?’ 

We all looked at each other in awed surprise. But with no paralysing fear anymore. 

How strange, I thought, that this is no longer strange. 

Then one of the angels spoke: ‘This very Yeshua who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.’ 

 

Join Bear for an exclusive event in London on the evening of 18 June where he’ll share more about his faith and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

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Article
Assisted dying
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Politics
5 min read

Holding an opposing view is not 'imposing' belief on the assisted dying debate

Opposing interventions from believers on dishonesty grounds is a sinister development in public debate

Nick is an author and Senior Fellow at Theos,a think tank.

A graphic shows a gallery of people with religious symbols on their clothing.

“There are some who oppose this crucial reform,” Esther Rantzen wrote recently of MPs who dared to opposed Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life private member’s bill. “Many of them have undeclared personal religious beliefs…  [do] they have the right to impose them on patients like me, who do not share them?” 

This is a peculiarly common argument for those who support the right to Assisted Dying, which is surprising as it would be hard to come up with a less coherent case against religion in public life. The idea that elected MPs engaged in parliamentary debate are “imposing” their will on other people is odd. The idea that MPs have undeclared personal religious beliefs is strange too. I think it’s fair to say that most people know that Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim or Tim Farron is a Christian, and for those that don’t know that but do have access to Google, it takes less than five seconds to find out the religious beliefs of an MP. 

Perhaps most tellingly, however, why is it that we should be alert to – read wary of – MPs religious beliefs? Do the non-religious not have beliefs of which we should be cognizant? If my MP is motivated by a philosophy of relentless, Peter Singer-like utilitarianism or vague, incoherent secular humanism I’d like to know. 

In truth, Rantzen’s intervention in this debate, like that of a number of others – Lord Falconer, Simon Jenkins, Humanists UK, etc. – is part of a recent and rather dispiriting attempt to de facto exclude religious contribution to public debates by accusing them of being dishonest. 

To be clear, secular voices have long tried to exclude religious ones, but the tactics change. Back in the New Atheist heyday of the early twenty first century, all you needed to do was splutter something about sky fairies or Bronze Age beliefs or mind viruses to close down any sort of religious intervention. If, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, faith was one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate, no sensible parliament could possibly want to heed what faith had to say. 

Even back then, however, there were subtler arguments against faith, which usually came in the form of semi-digested Rawslian political liberalism, and demanded the religious participation in public debate had to obey the strictures of “public reasoning”, using logic and language that “all reasonable people” will understand. 

There are quite a few holes in this particular away of thinking (who are “reasonable people” anyway?) but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad one to follow. It is quite right and proper, if only as a matter of pragmatism, to speak in terms that your opponents will get, just as it is right and proper, as a matter of courtesy, to be open about what ultimately motivates you. 

And so that is what religious figures – MPs, leaders, institutions – do. Having read through pretty much all their contributions to the assisted dying debate, in parliament and beyond, I can testify that not many people, on either side of the debate, quote scripture or invoke papal teaching as a way of persuading, let alone commanding, others. (As it happens, parliamentarians haven’t really done that since the 1650s, but that’s another story).  

Rather, they argue in terms of policy and principles. They talk about the risk of legislative slippage, of changing attitudes to the vulnerable, of the need for better palliative care, of existing pressures on the NHS, etc. This is quite right and proper. As James Cleverly remarked in the Common debate in November, “We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill”. And so that is what they did. 

Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak? 

In effect, religious public figures, whether or not their beliefs are “declared”, do what they have (rightly) been asked to do by those who have appointed themselves as gatekeepers for our public debate. And so this has forced the usual suspects to pivot in their argument. No longer able to dismiss religious contributions for what they say (“don’t quote the Bible at me!”) they are now compelled to dismiss them for what they don’t say. Hence, the trope that has become popular among such campaigners – “you are not being honest about your real motivations”. 

A new report from the think tank Theos, entitled, How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: religion and the assisted dying debate, unpacks the various objections that have been levelled at the religious contribution to the debate, and then systematically dismantles them.

Some of these objections are old school in the extreme.  

Religious belief is too intellectually inadequate or disfiguring for debates of this nature. 

Religion is insufficiently willing to adapt and compromise for politics.  

Faith is ill-fitted or even inadmissible in a secular polity or culture.  

But the report majors on the newer objection, so clearly displayed by Esther Rantzen, what we might call “dishonesty” objection, that religious contributors are fundamentally dishonest about their motivations and objectives. 

In truth, this is no stronger than the more tried and tested objections, and it displays a serious, possibly intentional, misunderstanding of what a religious argument actually is. To quote the political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, such secular campaigners “present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant simplicity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin [and] with this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life.” 

Contemporary arguments against religion in public life are slightly more sophisticated than Waldron’s caricature here, but not much. The idea that religio should be “declared” as a competing interest, so as to stop religious participants in debate from being “dishonest” is every bit as sinister, against both the letter and the spirit of plural, liberal democracy. Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?  

As the assisted dying debate returns to parliament for the final push, there will be much animated debate. That is quite right and proper. A democracy needs vigorous and honest argument. But part of that honesty involves opening the doors of debate to everyone, and not subtly trying to exclude those with whom you disagree on the spurious grounds that they are being dishonest.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief