John Lennox on What He Knows at 82

The Russell Moore Show

Russell Moore

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What a renowned 82-year-old Christian mathematician has to say about a life well lived. Watch this conversation on YouTube For decades, Oxford mathematics professor emeritus John Lennox has stood in lecture halls, debate stages, and university classrooms making the case that Christianity is not a retreat from serious thought but an invitation into it. He has debated some of the world’s best-known skeptics, from Richard Dawkins to Christopher Hitchens. He taught mathematics at Oxford. He smuggled Christian teaching behind the Iron Curtain. And now, in his eighties, with his health declining and his world physically growing smaller, he has written a memoir looking back on the strange providences that shaped his life. In his new autobiography, My Story: A spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Professor Lennox reflects on growing up amid sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, actually hearing C. S. Lewis lecture at Cambridge (literally!), being followed by the KGB, and learning over time that saying “I don’t know” can sometimes open deeper doors than feigning certainty. If you’ve ever wondered whether intellectual seriousness and deep Christian conviction can actually coexist alongside tenderness and joy, step into the classroom: the professor is in. Resources mentioned in this episode: My Story: A spiritual and intellectual autobiography- by John Lennox Keep up with Russell: Subscribe to Russell on Substack Sign up for the weekly Moore to the Point newsletter Submit a question for the show at questions@russellmoore.com Subscribe to the Christianity Today Magazine: Special offer for listeners of The Russell Moore Show: Click here for 25% off a subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:39.3	The experiences that God has privileged me to undergo have been nothing short of thrilling for all of my life.
0:49.7	Hello, this is Russell Moore, and this is the Russell Moore Show, brought to you by Christianity Today.
0:55.2	Here, we look for signposts in a strange time by standing fast to what really matters.
1:01.9	Kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism, pilgrimage over partisanship, sanity over cynicism,
1:08.8	witness over winning, and Christ over everything. Today we have a conversation
1:13.5	to do just that.
1:19.6	In 1988, a northern Irish mathematician got on a train West Germany headed across Europe.
1:27.2	There was a young Russian couple sat down next to him,
1:31.0	and across from him a young German student,
1:33.6	and they started to talk about life, about the meaning of life,
1:37.3	about whether anything actually held the universe together,
1:41.4	or if everything is just random chaos.
1:46.4	And as they talked, the mathematician kept being prodded in the back of his mind by a memory. A few weeks earlier, a publisher in
1:53.7	West Germany had given him a Russian Bible. He'd put it in his suitcase and forgotten about it.
	...

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