Introduction

There are two types of travelers. Travelers of the first type have only a general idea of their path and like to make discoveries during the journey, use signs, ask for directions there, and even lose their way. Representatives of the second type of travelers want to know in advance what path awaits them, where a rural road will turn into a large highway, how long each part of the voyage will take, and so on.

About the same can be said about people who go to concerts. Some prefer to be directly affected by the music itself, so that they can ride its waves, not knowing where they will be in a minute. Others like to study the programs in advance in order to know about everything in advance and keep the whole picture in mind while they listen to individual musical numbers.

The same classification applies to readers. Some people may skip the introduction to start right from the first chapter. The latter will want to understand in advance where we are going and when what music will be played there. It is for such people that this introduction is written.

I set out to describe Christianity in general terms with the intention of presenting its attractiveness to people living outside the faith, and explaining its essence to Christians themselves. It's an incredible task, and I don't pretend to cover the whole story—or even to answer all the questions that are usually covered in books of this kind. I have only tried to give this theme a certain form, as a result of which three main parts of the book have emerged.

First, I intend to consider four phenomena that concern modern man: the desire for justice, the search for spirituality, the thirst for relationships, and the enjoyment of beauty. I suppose that each of these phenomena points to something outside itself, although it does not give answers to the question of what this strange and wonderful place is. Each such topic is like the echo of a voice, the vague but exciting sound of someone's conversation around the corner of the house when we do not see the speaker. This is where the name of the first part comes from: "Echoes of the Voice". The four chapters of this movement are similar to the first movement of a symphony: there are musical themes that a good listener tries to remember and keep in mind while listening to the second and third movements, where other melodies will sound, which, when encountered with the first themes, will generate "echoes" of various kinds. In other words, in the first part I raise questions that I will then discuss, step by step and not always directly, at least in part, in the following chapters. I ask the reader to be patient when, as he reads the next two parts, he expects to grasp the unity and inner relationships of this book.

The second part is devoted to how Christians understand God. They believe that God, as revealed in Jesus' life, called Israel to mediate and carry out God's plan for the deliverance and reconstruction of His creation. Therefore, one chapter (chapter 6) will be devoted to the history and hopes of ancient Israel, then two chapters to Jesus, and two to the Holy Spirit. Gradually, as we read this part, we will see that the voice we listened to in the first part becomes recognizable when we think of God the Creator wanting to bring order to his world, the man named Jesus who heralded the coming of God's kingdom, died on the cross, and rose from the dead, and the Spirit who, like a mighty wind, permeates this world and the lives of individuals.

This naturally brings us to the third part, where I want to show what the life of a disciple of Jesus is like, filled with the power of the Spirit and, above all, participating in the realization of the plan of this Creator God. The themes of worship, prayer, and Scripture will lead us to the question of the "church," in which we see not a building, much less an organization, but a union of all those who believe in the God revealed by Jesus and who seek to follow that God.

In particular, I intend to talk about what the church is for. People don't follow Jesus just to be guaranteed to go to a better world after they die. Our future after death is extremely important, but the nature of Christian hope is such that it directly affects our present life. This allows us to look with new eyes at various things, in particular at prayer and the behavior of a Christian. And this, in turn, makes it possible at the end of the book to recall again the "echoes of the voice" of the first part, where it will no longer sound as an indirect testimony to God, whom we can try to know, but as an essential element of the Christian vocation to work for the Kingdom in our world.

I worked with great enthusiasm on this book, and this is largely due to the fact that it directly affects my life – this can be said about every page of it. All my life I have been a Christian who participates in worship, prays, and reads the Bible (although I often misunderstood or misunderstood it, but nevertheless held on to it), so in fact I began to live with the third part of this book. My professional life has been largely devoted to the historical and theological study of Jesus, but I have tried to follow him in my personal life, so this multifaceted search is reflected in the second part. But at the same time, I became more and more aware of the importance and interest of the topics of the first part: for example, if you will allow me to give you the most obvious example, the more you know about Jesus, the more you understand God's fervent desire to correct our world. And at some point, I realized that the things that my study of the life of Jesus had pointed out to me—what I call "echoes of the voice" in Part I—were also questions that our postmodern post-Christian world, which is now becoming more and more of a post-secular world, cannot dismiss. For our world, these "echoes" are a strange indication of what stands beyond the horizon of modern culture and what it does not know.

I have tried not to distinguish between the diverse Christian traditions, but rather to say that they are all united. It is not an "Anglican" or "Catholic" or "Orthodox" book, but I hope it is simply Christian. I also tried to speak as directly and clearly as possible, so that the reader who first encountered these topics would not get lost in the jungle of technical terms. Being a Christian in the modern world is, of course, not easy at all. But there are times when it is necessary to try to say the essence of Christianity in the simplest words, and I believe that now is exactly the moment. Between the creation of the first draft of the book and its preparation for publication, I was lucky enough to experience a joyful moment: I had my first two grandchildren. I dedicate this book to Joseph and Ella-Ruth in the hope (for which I pray) that their generation will hear the voice whose echoes we will speak of in Part One, recognize Jesus, to whom Part II is dedicated, and begin to live for the new creation that we will discuss in Part III.

Part I