It’s a good point that different people benefit from different things. I think I am mostly just turned off by the people who make it their mission in life to fight with atheists. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deconverted fundamentalists who have taken their black and white thinking and need to be right about everything to the other team and are happy to engage these attempts to prove the other side is stupid. I am embarrassed by this and that it gets called “defending the faith.” I do know there are more gracious ways of defending the rationality of Christian belief, I have just mostly witnessed the “God’s not Dead” variety.
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The grounds of [true] belief in God is the experience of God: God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report.
I agree. I would add that we need wisdom about where and when to tell our stories. In my early days of being a believer I openly told about answers to my prayers in a net discussion forum (there were such already in 1980’s) as evidence that God hears our prayers and acts. The comments I got were anything but believing.
For example, when I told that a snake bit me and the rapidly swelling hand was healed immediately when I commanded my hand to be healed in the name of Jesus Christ (childish faith, possibly even to the point of foolishness), the only comment I got was that the snake was not deadly so it was not a serious bite.
Nowadays I try to think before telling such stories. They may encourage people who believe in God but do not convince those who do not believe. For me, a single case would not be much more than a lucky coincidence but after experiencing tens of such ‘lucky coincidences’, it would be very hard to deny that God hears our prayers and answers. In the case of the snake bite, that a rapidly swelling hand returns to normal at the exact moment when I prayed is a bit too much to be classified as ‘a lucky coincidence’.
By the way, a practical tip: when you pray something like a healing, keep your eyes open. Watching how God heals rapidly a physically obvious injury is really impressive. I have not seen many such cases, the snake bite was perhaps the visually most impressive, but every case is awesome.
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I’m glad you made this post, because I was thinking of starting a similar topic about the role of emotion, logic, and the Holy Spirit in evangelism (though I would not consider myself an evangelist).
I think there needs to be a combination or balance of personal experience and reason, and for different people the balance can be quite different. But even for someone like myself (who I consider to be on the more “rational” end of the spectrum), it was putting this in practice (volunteering) along with books that really spoke to me. Besides the gospels, Gregory Boyle’s “Tattoos on the Heart,” Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”
Still, intellectual apologetics are important (or at least were important to me) for making sure all the stuff I thought I was experiencing was actually true and not just wishful thinking, a delusion, etc.
A few other notes:
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Approaching apologetics with a “debating” stance (as a battle to “win”) will likely not have the intended effect. People will become defensive and may even double down on their beliefs. I’ve read a few things from hostage negotiators about diffusing tense conversations or situations and perhaps there is something many Christians can learn from these. Greg Koukl’s book Tactics talks about this and while I disagree with him on a few things I think the main point he makes is a good one.
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Many “atheists” we encounter online (I’m specifically referring to the “New Atheist” types, such as the type Stephen Bond denounces in his famous rant/blog “Why I Am No Longer a Skeptic”), despite their demand for evidence, are not honestly looking for it. Few have questioned their (basically positivist) epistemology and instead align themselves with a community that gives them a sense of worth by appealing to “scientific consensus,” plus easy targets to bash on, which include Christians along with flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc. I no longer engage with these kinds of people because it is not worth my time; seeing this nonsense is why I left a philosophy forum I previously frequented, and have never encountered anything of the sort here.
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I also want to add that I find the narrative of people leaving Christianity very important as well (perhaps more important). This is especially true when we can see that their intellectual reasons are often not strong, but it would in no way make sense to criticize their reasons for leaving without listening to them as a person first (rather than as a disembodied set of propositions). Many have experiences that I admit would really cause me to question God, or at least the church/Christianity as a whole. Many of them are hurting and perhaps the worst thing we could do is start attacking them or making them feel inadequate or wrong.
Even if their intellectual reasons for leaving Christianity are poor, the experiences and emotions they have it around are perfectly legitimate and worth listening to as Christians. It’s not always easy to hear criticism but it helps us grow, become more compassionate, and do better.
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Very good point about listening to the stories of people leaving and not approaching them as wanting arguments.
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I never fight with atheists really and find it mostly pointless myself since I don’t think there is evidence outside of faith for Christianity or any religious belief. So I think the faith is not any different from Hinduism than Buddhism or Christianity. My focus has always been that faith does not mean illogical as much as it’s the logical conclusion.
I’m not certain what God Is not Dead means. I know it’s a movie and I think I saw part of it but don’t remember anything and ever seen the second one. But I always think debating is the wrong answer to sharing the gospel to unbelievers. There can be pushback but should not be a debate.
I just focus on why Christianity is not evil and why to follow Christ is not the same as being stupid. Most of the time it’s with atheist leaning agnostics and it’s more of damage control than arguing. Despite most of us being saturated in things like evolutionary creationism I still meet people who has never even thought there was anything other than some random cultish movement that accepted both. Echo chambers are the biggest enemy to Christianity nowadays.
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It’s a cheesy Christian movie that glorifies the imagined scenario of many Christians where the kid who has learned all the great Christian arguments puts their stupid atheist professor in his place in front of the class and everyone just wants to get saved, check mate atheists!
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And yet, for some of us, there’s this:
John 20:29 ESV
Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
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Which some of us read as an allusion to the forthcoming self-evident work of the Holy Spirit. The NT has quite a few passages that talk about this internal testimony. I haven’t put together a list, or seen one that I can recall, but I’d guess there are a half dozen references. 1 John refers to it as an anointing by which we all have knowledge. Saving knowledge of who Jesus is.
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I see faith in Jesus as the result of work of the Holy Spirit. How it comes about is not the same for everyone and rarely dramatic. In Surprised by Joy Lewis talked about walking between classes one day as a student (I think) and by the time he reached his destination he had gone from disbelieving in God to believing. That is a work of the Holy Spirit.
I suppose one could call that an experience, but the only evidence of the experience is faith.
As a Christian who has endured a lifetime of tacit and overt condemnation from fellow believers who don’t understand what they call an “intellectual faith,” I will not yield on this. We don’t all experience life in Christ the same way. Faith in Jesus is the evidence I need and the evidence required, and that is it.
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- Then there’s @GutsickGibbon, may her kind increase and prosper!
- @jammycakes, I invite your attention to the foregoing links if you’re not aware of them already, because she’s “cracking”, as they say on your side of “the pond” if I’m not mistaken.
The emotional, “born again” style of conversion experience, sometimes accompanied by convulsions, came along late in Christian history with the “Great Awakening.” Whatever floats your boat, but nobody should decide it’s the only authentic approach.
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Her video about the ark encounter was fantastic.
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- My horse doesn’t run fast enough or far enough to keep up with or follow her as close as I would like but invariably she is veritable “Joan of Arc”, AND she has a Youtube channel.
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I found this quote from Surprised by Joy:
You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England
What stands out for me is the sight of the unrelenting approach of Him.
Kind of neat how it compares to the presence Keener felt after being witnessed to by the laughably incompetent evangelists, or Worthen meeting the Lord while worshipping in a megachurch.
Indeed our eyes are opened in such a stunning array of possibilities… even when Jesus spits in the dust, miracles happen.
To pull my thoughts back to the original direction I had in mind, when I wrote my response to the claim Dale quoted:
Jesus tells us differently.
Jesus blessed those of us who believe without seeing and experiencing him. For those like me, the “experience” we have of God is imperceptable and results in true faith in Jesus. That is all there is to report. We have faith.
That’s it.
(I see Lewis does not support me as I had thought. Ah well. I will not rely on him for back up in this case. )
Then again, backup is not needed.
To stipulate that “the grounds of true belief (or whatever kind is not true) in God is the experience of God” is overreach. And condemning of those of us with true belief who came by it in entirely undramatic ways.
Do we love him? Then we will follow his commands. We don’t need to worry wether we had a particular experience.
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Condemning? I don’t see anybody doing that here.
No, I read it as a blessing that we believe without having him here for us to physically see and touch his scars. Like you said, how that happens can be different, even quite different, from one person to the next.
Oh… I think I see where you are reading condemnation in the quote Dale is sharing:
The grounds of [true] belief in God is the experience of God: God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report.
Well, that can easily be flipped around, in that you experience God in worship. You must love him, even as Jesus commanded.
How can you experience what you do not believe in?
The first step is to deide the possibility exists. For some that is a step too far.
Richard
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