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 is 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 mind 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.

Elephant reaction to tsunami lends credence to theory of animals possessing a "sixth sense"

"In a It’s been widely reported by Reuters News Agency that a group of 8 elephants providing rides for tourists on Khao Lak Beach helped to save over a dozen people from the deadly tsunami. The handlers describe the elephants trumpeting in an unprecedented way at the time of the earthquake and again just before the wave hit the shore. Reports describe elephants charging up the hill with tourists on their backs while other elephants broke free of their chains in order to run uphill.

Along the way, the handlers were able to command the elephants to help save tourists on foot running away from the wave. Some of the elephants picked people up with their trunks and threw them onto their backs carrying them to safety on higher ground.

Currently a group of 6 elephants recently cast in the epic film Alexander are helping crews uncover victims and move debris from the tragic scene of last week’s unprecedented disaster.

Featured letter from tothesource reader

Reading this article really made the problem of pain a bit more personal. I’ve spent much of what short life I’ve lived (25yrs) attempting to answer this question—particularly after my uncle was killed in a tornado on Good Friday about 8 years ago. But stepping back and looking on all my theorizing and research, it’s almost as if by attempting to answer the question through logic and reasoning, maybe I didn’t do myself and my own pain justice. Instead I allowed my own modern mind to put human intelligence above faith.

Too often our human need for “understanding” steps in and elbows out the perfect opportunity for growth in our faith. Instead of trusting in God to make it “Well with my soul” we wrestle with what we perceive as a flaw in God’s character or logic. We don’t trust that He might have some greater plan or that He didn’t mess things up when He set things in motion. We think we know better or that we could have created things better, but we don’t take into consideration the purpose of our lives and all of creation. We make everything personal and forget that we are just one part of something so much greater than all of us.

After all, we’re not the only one’s who’ve experienced this pain and grief—I wonder what God must have felt sacrificing Himself on a Cross for a world of His children who nailed Him to a tree like some criminal. And yet, even examining this we see that in doing so, they were only fulfilling what must be. In His pain and death He accomplished the victory, and without these there would have been no resurrection.

While I’m confident and find peace with my logical answer, I know the Truth can only finally be found at the foot of the Cross. - J. C. H.

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.