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In this book, you lay out three broad families of faiths that try to answer these questions.

Today's world has an incredible diversity of faith. There's sort of a million and one faiths, philosophies, worldviews, ideologies. Pick your word. So some people say, that's far too many for me to check out, and they just feel confused and overwhelmed. But there are actually only so many families of faiths. While there are tremendous differences, they have a family resemblance because they go back to the same view of what's the ultimate source of reality.

The first is Eastern. And they can be Buddhists or Hindus or New Agers, but they all go back to the same view of ultimate reality: an impersonal ground of being—what the philosophers call the undifferentiated impersonal. The second huge family of faiths is the Secularist. Their view of ultimate reality is chance plus time plus matter. As one American humanist puts it, we human beings are living in a world which didn't have us in mind. The third big family of faiths is the Biblical: Jewish and Christian. They both go back to the same view of ultimate reality, an infinite personal God, whose made us in his image, and so on, and everything flows from that.

A lot of people say, if you get down to the common core of religions, they're all the same. But there is no common core. There are huge differences, and they make a huge difference.

Near the end of your book you tell some stories that indicate that people on such a search actually need to be heartened with the realization that the Hound of heaven is searching for them. This isn't a one-way street.

No, you can see that as a terribly recurring theme in the earlier stages. We're looking, we're examining, we're seeking, we're doing it all. And suddenly at the last stage—and a person is never more themselves than when they make that commitment of faith—suddenly then you realize though we were searching, we've been found. We've been arrested. C. S. Lewis's wife put it, "God came in."

But Lewis reacted to God coming in not with joy, but with …

… with horror. There was no word in his book that made him more upset than the word interference. The idea that he was not in total control of his life, or not captain in his own ship horrified him. And I suppose he had to bow, so he was a reluctant, dejected convert.

Which is why so many people who say they're on journey ultimately don't find the fulfillment in God. Lewis was coming face-to-face with the vestiges of his own secularism, his "I do it my way." And that's very much where a lot of seekers are today.

And there's always two things at the end. You always still have a choice. You either fall on your knees or turn on your heels. Or to put it more carefully philosophically, either we try and shape the truth to our desires and go our way, or we shape our desires to the truth and bow and go God's way.

The journey towards faith in Christ is not the end. It's the beginning of the journey that leads us all the way home. But from then onwards it's a pilgrim's progress, as Bunyan put it. In other words, as Christians we never think we've arrived. We're on the road, but we do know the One who's the Way, the Truth and the Life. But not until we see him and the Father face-to-face and arrive home do we complete the journey. Until our deaths, it's still a journey. We've got to finish well.

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July (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46