Faith Like Claus

Secular college students don’t give their Christian peers a second thought because this generation has taken upon itself the existential, anti-intellectual kind of “faith” and is thus unequipped to answer the questions of average, college-aged unbelievers.

Since when has God required us to believe, confess, or proclaim something we don’t know or understand? Faith moved from the realm of saving knowledge to that of mystical, intangible existentialism soon after the Enlightenment, and the church (in America) became drunk with that spirit. The Christian should be the one with the hard, profound, and life-changing questions and answers, not the one avoiding such questions and answers.

And since when does God ask us to believe that which is illogical? Since when is the object of our faith inexplicable or unknowable? That belief is “taking a leap of faith” is a rather new idea in Christianity. This is the idea that faith is believing in something that doesn’t make sense and has no reasonable evidence to support it; belief requires the person to make an intellectual, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. “leap”.

Both of these ideas are products of modern and post-modern presuppositions and are incompatible with historic Christianity. The gospel and the Scriptures are so reasonable, and their evidence so convincing, that when they are properly investigated and explained they convert people.

The reason college-aged students are not coming back to the churches they grew up in is because their churches did not equip them to face and answer opposition. Kids aren’t stupid, they learn when you teach them. If you teach a 7-year-old about the judgment of God and salvation in Christ by using the story of the Flood, they will learn and understand and be less susceptible when challenged by it as being an unscientific or unhistorical fact. But when you just tell them the story as if it were a fable, what else are they going to believe? Such college-students, when their inherited “faith” is challenged, probably feel exactly the same way they did when they learned that Santa Clause isn’t real.

God designed mankind and the gospel so that his word would give faith and life to those who hear it. His word is truth, this truth is knowable and tangible, and Jesus is this Truth. Truth is calling all people who hear his words to change their minds and believe; he’s not calling all people to forsake their God-given abilities to think and reason and believe a bunch of non-sense.

In reality, there are so few unanswerable objections to Christianity and the Bible that unbelievers shouldn’t have a reason (outside of their truth-suppressing unrighteousness) not to believe the good news of salvation by grace through faith because of the electing love of God in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus.