Dear Concerned Citizen,

You may have seen Dr. Timothy Johnson reporting on health care issues for Good Morning America, or as a medical expert for World News Tonight, Nightline, or 20/20. Likely you have, since he has been active in national television for over a quarter of a century.

But did you know he was a Christian struggling to understand the truths of the faith?

Unlike many television personalities, Dr. Johnson is a believer, and he is unafraid to articulate his beliefs, even though they may not be evident on the air.

As he relates in his Finding God in the Questions, Johnson grew up in a religious family, and he himself went to seminary before going on to medical school. He has always been a Christian, but one who, because of his scientific training, has something of a skeptical bent.

But for Johnson, being skeptical is part of the human attempt to clarify and deepen belief, not undermine it.

Not surprisingly, his quest to deepen his belief has taken him into the realm of science. The central question for him has been: “Is the world as we know it more likely a result of design (a plan) or chance (an accident)?”

“You will probably not be surprised by my ultimate answer: I find it more plausible to believe that our world is the result of design than to believe it happened by accident.” According to Johnson, though, this plausibility is based on the recent explosion of scientific work being done on the amazing complexity and fine-tuning of our universe in the realm of biology, physics, and astronomy. “For me the most convincing argument that the universe has been ‘designed’ is the extraordinary way it is calibrated to allow for the genesis and continuation of itself.”

Of course, the deepest questions reach all the way to the heart of his faith as a Christian—and having just passed his 65th birthday, Dr. Johnson feels the tug to spend more time exploring these depths.

That brought him to read the Gospels afresh, and he found again the central truths of his Christian faith. These truths were not merely remembered from Johnson’s childhood, but rediscovered anew.

“To put it very bluntly, even though I have been exposed to a wide range of philosophies, role models and cultural patters, I have yet to find one that is more compelling and challenging than the life and teachings of this ancient Jew as presented in the Gospels. Indeed, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth reveals or portrays as fully as is possible within the confines of a human life the spirit of God, the mind of the Creator of the universe. In that sense I affirm the concept of the incarnation, which says that in Jesus we can begin to encounter and understand the otherwise ineffable and elusive reality called God.”

In those Gospels, Johnson found Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, teaching difficult rather than comfortable truths, and calling believers to follow Him on a hard but ultimately rewarding path. (And by ultimately rewarding, Johnson means eternal life.)

That has brought about some rather painful soul-searching.

“What Nancy [Johnson’s wife] and I have not done so far is give until it hurts, not even close….We are contemplating some fairly radical changes, which would included cutting down on the oversupply of luxuries and giving the difference to those in true need. I have a growing conviction that it is not right for me to live as well as I now do.”

This growing conviction is the result of rediscovering Jesus’ severe and startling call to serve others, and to embrace poverty ourselves—a message that Johnson believes he can no longer ignore or downplay.

As painful as the “good news” is, however, Johnson understands that it will bring him even further on “a journey of exploration that will lead to a deeper relationship with the God of creation than would otherwise be possible.”

Part of that exploration brings Johnson to the hardest questions about the presence of evil and suffering. Johnson clearly recognizes that there are natural evils like tornados and diseases that don’t seem to be connected to any moral choices, so that Christians are confronted with the problem of “undeserved suffering.” Johnson offers no definitive answer, but rather finds the “most helpful way to approach this terrible dilemma” is “the age-old exercise of trying to ‘play God’ and come up with an alternative to the world we now have….But every time I try to do so, I end up admitting that I can’t imagine a world any different than the one we know.”

For Johnson, that doesn’t mean that this world is the best of all possible worlds—only the best one that poor human minds can imagine. Ultimately, the problem of evil and suffering can only be resolved in the next world, a world that goes beyond what we can imagine but not beyond what an all-powerful and loving God can create.

Readers will welcome Johnson’s account, but some might wonder whether Christianity is perhaps more morally demanding and more mysterious than he suspects. For example, Johnson downplays the focus of some contemporary Christians on social issues such as abortion because “Jesus says nothing about these matters of society and morals in his portrait of final judgment—or for that matter, in any of his statements as recorded in the Gospels!”

Laying aside for the moment the adequacy of his exegesis of Scripture, such reasoning would lead to evident absurdities. Jesus never said anything in the Gospels about pedophilia, incest, infanticide, cannibalism, or cloning. Certainly, Johnson doesn’t think Jesus condones all that he is not recorded as condemning.

In regard to the depth of the mystery of Jesus as God Incarnate, Johnson is in danger of reducing Jesus to the “merely moral man,” an exemplar of social charity and nothing else. This was, in effect, what occurred as the end result of the social gospel movement of the 19th century. (And it is no accident that Johnson especially admires Albert Schweitzer, who was both the critic and culmination of this movement.) If all there was to Jesus was embodied in Albert Schweitzer, then either Albert Schweitzer was also the son of God, or Jesus was just another son of man.

That having been said, Johnson is to be both commended and encouraged for speaking about his faith so publicly and openly. Would that others in the media would follow the same path.