Confident Faith
I love apologetics, so when I happened into a Christian bookstore today I was happy to see a new apologetics book on the bestseller list.
I was even more happy to see it came from Mark Mittelberg, an author I’m very familiar with. he went to my church and I was his son’s small group leader.
It seems to me he finally put to paper an idea he has been talking about for a good long time. It’s a pretty seminal idea, and one I’m a pretty big fan of. I’m not however a fan of couching good ideas in 150 pages of kinda okay stuff, and then selling the lot for 25 bucks rather than simply sharing the goods. So I’m going to share with you Mark’s Big Idea here on the blog today. If you want to learn more, click the cover and it’ll take you to his amazon.
Mark presents a rational faith, one that is well evidenced as being like the picture at left (or the cover of his new book) Arrows represent arguments. Some are bigger, some are smaller some are closer, some are further away. So maybe that big straight one at the top is evidence for the resurrection, then off to the sides you have some big classical arguments, combined with some anecdotal evidence. They all point in the same direction so we know we have a good, rational position.
For many of us though, the Christian life doesn’t feel that way. Maybe we used to think it looked like the picture above, but lately it feels like the picture at right. We don’t have all the answers, everything it not neat and clean. There are some evidences or arguments for faith, but there are big questions in the way that could mean anything, and worse yet, some evidence we have seen seems to point in totally different directions. Maybe that one at the bottom there is evidence for evolution and the “?” above it is the age of the earth. In those cases, the point Mittelburg would make, is that you are still in a rational position. to stay where you had been. You need to research more, and not less, because the evidence should all point to something, but invalidating a few of the reasons for a belief is not the same as undermining the whole thing. So many people seem to have a crisis of faith at this point and it’s just not justified.
The only time it’s rational to leave Christianity and join something else, Or leave something else and join Christianity for that matter. Is when your belief and evidence system starts to look like below. Everything that used to seem to point to one thing is actually pointing to a different thing, new evidence arises pointing there, and what is left to justify your old belief is dubious at best, with a lot of questions left unanswered.
Where are your arrows pointing today?