Crossing the Divide Without Surrendering the Truth
OCCA Summer School, Oxford
July 15, 2026
Presenter: Andrew Sampson
One of the most striking examples of how Jesus engages another person is his conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4. It is much more than a story about evangelism. It is a model for how Christians can cross cultural, religious, personal, and intellectual divides while remaining grounded in both love and truth.
The divide between Jesus and the Samaritan woman was real. They came from communities separated by history, culture, theology, ethnicity, and religious practice. The woman herself immediately recognizes the unusual nature of the encounter: Jesus is a Jewish man speaking openly with a Samaritan woman. Later, their conversation turns to one of the great religious disputes between their peoples, whether God was properly worshiped on Mount Gerizim or in Jerusalem. John 4 confirms that this was the central Samaritan-Jewish dispute over the proper place of worship.
Yet even this significant human divide pales beside the divide Jesus has already crossed.
The One Who Crossed the Greatest Divide
Before thinking about the divides Christians are called to cross, we should remember who Jesus is. Christ crossed the greatest conceivable divide, from heaven to earth, Creator entering creation, God coming to humanity. We did not find our way across that infinite distance to Him. He came to us.
As sheep dependent upon the Shepherd and children dependent upon the Father, we could never make that crossing ourselves. But because Christ crossed the ultimate divide for us, His life becomes the pattern for the smaller divides we are called to cross for others.
Those divides may be religious, political, cultural, racial, intellectual, generational, or personal. The question raised by John 4 is therefore highly relevant to Christians today: What are the implications of following Jesus when we encounter people whose beliefs are fundamentally different from our own?
Jesus shows us that we cannot simply remain safely among people who already think as we do. Sometimes discipleship requires a costly conversation.
The Costly Conversation: Embrace and Confrontation
Two commitments must exist simultaneously in Christian conversation.
The first is embrace. There must be no absence of love. The person in front of us must never become merely an argument to defeat, a theological problem to solve, or a representative of a group we oppose. Jesus begins by engaging a person.
But the second commitment is confrontation with truth. Love does not require Jesus to pretend that all religious claims are equally true. When the woman raises the dispute between Samaritan and Jewish worship, Jesus says plainly:
“You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”
Jesus then moves beyond both Gerizim and Jerusalem, declaring that true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.
This is what might be called the scandal of particularity. Christianity makes a particular claim about a particular person. We must not retreat from the uniqueness of Jesus as the embodiment of truth simply because that claim may be uncomfortable.
This leads to perhaps the most important question in Christian apologetics:
Who is Jesus to you?
Or in the familiar formulation:
What do you think of Christ?
The Christian does not enter these conversations merely to win arguments. The objective is liberation, to participate in Christ's work of bringing people into truth and freedom. The conversation should ultimately create the possibility of an encounter with Jesus himself.
Dignity, Agency, and an Open Heart
There is another essential principle beneath this approach. People generally support conclusions they have participated in reaching. That means dignity and agency matter.
Christian conversation should not be coercive. We are not attempting to intellectually corner someone until they surrender. Instead, we are helping create a space in which another person can honestly examine reality.
The deeper question becomes:
Is my heart open to reality, even if reality unsettles me?
That question applies to both people in the conversation. Christian apologetics requires enough confidence to speak truth and enough humility to remain genuinely attentive to another human being.
From Jesus' conversations, four practices emerge.
Four Ways Jesus Conducts Transformative Conversations
- Jesus Sees Beneath the Question
Jesus does not merely hear the words someone is saying. He sees the person behind them.
Jesus sees you.
Questions rarely exist in isolation. They emerge from experiences, wounds, fears, assumptions, loyalties, hopes, disappointments, and sometimes defenses. The question being asked may therefore be a doorway into something much deeper.
We see this not only with the Samaritan woman but also with Nicodemus. Nicodemus is knowledgeable, respected, and an expert in the religious world around him, yet Jesus moves quickly beneath his intellectual standing to the deeper spiritual reality of his life.
The skilled Christian conversationalist therefore learns to ask: Where is this question coming from?
Sometimes a question represents genuine intellectual curiosity. Sometimes it marks the boundary of a person's experience. Sometimes it is a defense mechanism. Sometimes it is even a trap. Wisdom requires discerning the difference.
- Jesus Reveals the Heart Through Questions
Jesus speaks and asks questions in ways that reveal what lies beneath the surface. To follow His example requires humility because we cannot understand the question unless we are willing to hear the person behind it.
Augustine's famous insight captures something of this human condition: our hearts remain restless until they find their rest in God. Beneath many intellectual questions lie deeper questions of identity, meaning, belonging, guilt, purpose, suffering, and hope.
Jesus exposes those deeper things not in order to harm us, but in order to heal us.
This is why the best answer to a question is sometimes another question.
A clarifying question can do something an immediate argument cannot. It allows the other person to examine the assumptions beneath his or her own thinking. Instead of merely transferring information, the conversation becomes an opportunity for discovery.
- Jesus Reframes Questions That Obscure the Deeper Issue
Sometimes the question we are asked is not the question that most needs answering.
In John 4, the woman asks, in effect, Which location is correct, Gerizim or Jerusalem? Jesus refuses to remain trapped inside those categories. He tells her that a time is coming when worship will not ultimately be defined by either location. The deeper issue is not simply where one worships, but whom one worships and whether that worship is grounded in Spirit and truth.
Jesus does something similar elsewhere when asked about paying taxes to Caesar. His question about the image on the coin leads beyond economics and politics toward a much larger question. If Caesar's image appears on the coin, what bears God's image?
We do.
The question can therefore move from Whose image is on the coin? to Whose image is on you?
Reframing does not evade the original question. It reveals that the original question may sit inside a much larger reality.
Side Note: John Lennox, Lawrence Krauss, and Reframing the Question
The reference in my notes to physicist Lawrence Krauss and John Lennox fits this principle of reframing. Krauss has argued from developments in modern physics, including discussion surrounding the Higgs boson, toward much broader conclusions about God and metaphysics. Lennox challenged that move by pointing out that a scientific discovery can explain an aspect of the physical universe without answering the larger question of God.
For example, after the discovery of the Higgs boson, sometimes popularly called the “God particle,” Krauss argued that the particle might be considered more relevant than God. Lennox responded that this conclusion was not itself a scientific finding. It was a metaphysical interpretation placed upon a scientific finding.
Lennox and Krauss later debated questions including the Big Bang, fine-tuning, purpose, and whether the universe could arise “from nothing.” The important conversational lesson is not merely the content of their disagreement. It is Lennox's willingness to challenge the frame of the question. Explaining a mechanism within the universe is not necessarily the same thing as explaining why the universe exists, why it possesses orderly laws, or whether there is purpose behind it.
This is an important apologetic skill: Do not automatically accept the assumptions embedded within the question you have been asked.
- Jesus Awakens the Imagination
Jesus does more than present propositions. He uses pictures.
Living water.
Bread.
Light.
A shepherd.
A vine.
A lost sheep.
A seed.
A father running toward a lost son.
Why does Jesus communicate through images, symbols, metaphors, stories, and parables?
Because human beings are not merely reasoning machines. We experience reality through imagination as well as intellect. Jesus does not bypass reason, but neither does He limit himself to argument.
With the Samaritan woman, He speaks of living water. The image begins with something completely familiar to her and opens a doorway into something eternal.
This is part of the genius of Jesus' communication. An image can sometimes reach somewhere an argument cannot. It allows someone not merely to understand an idea, but to begin to see a different reality.
More Than Winning an Argument
This may be the most important lesson of all.
Christian apologetics cannot ultimately be reduced to providing better answers than the other person. Christianity is not simply the winning position in an intellectual contest. The destination is not a superior argument.
The destination is an encounter with Christ.
Jesus sees beneath the question. He reveals the heart. He reframes questions that hide deeper realities. He awakens the imagination. And through all four, He continually draws the person beyond the immediate subject toward Himself.
The Samaritan woman's conversation begins with water and moves through ethnicity, personal history, religious controversy, worship, truth, and ultimately the identity of Jesus. At the end of their exchange Jesus tells her that the Messiah she has been waiting for is the very person speaking with her. The woman then goes back to her community, and many Samaritans eventually come to believe.
That progression matters. Jesus does not simply answer her question.
He reveals Himself.
A Model for Our Own Conversations
The challenge for Christians is therefore not simply to become more knowledgeable defenders of Christianity. It is to become more Christlike conversationalists.
We should be willing to cross divides because Christ crossed the greatest divide for us. We should approach others with genuine love without diluting the uniqueness of Jesus. We should respect the dignity and agency of the person in front of us while remaining willing to speak truth that may unsettle both them and us.
And when the difficult question comes, perhaps our first response should not always be, What is the best argument I can give?
Perhaps we should first ask:
What is beneath this question?
What is this person really searching for?
Is there a better question that might reveal the deeper issue?
What image, story, or question might help this person see what an argument alone cannot show?
And ultimately:
How might this conversation help someone encounter Jesus?
Side Note: Simon Edwards
My notes record Simon Edwards describing John Lennox as a “conversational evangelist.” I have not located a published source confirming that exact wording, so I would preserve it as an attribution from the presentation rather than as a documented quotation.
The description is nevertheless consistent with Edwards' own apologetics background. Simon Edwards is an Associate Speaker with OCCA, formerly practiced law in Australia, studied apologetics at OCCA and theology at Oxford, and is the author of The Sanity of Belief: Why Faith Makes Sense. His work focuses particularly on engaging the deep questions of contemporary culture through Christian faith.
The phrase conversational evangelist captures an important distinction running through this entire presentation. The Christian apologist is not merely a debater equipped with answers. He or she is someone prepared to enter another person's world, listen carefully, ask better questions, cross costly divides, tell the truth in love, and ultimately point beyond the argument to Jesus Christ.
