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Christian Network

Rational discourse on historical proof for the Resurrection and other supernatural events in the life of Christ is of limited value in effecting most conversions. More often what changes lives is a visceral experience of the love of God through his Son. If you ask most Christians why they became children of God they will tell you that the reality of Jesus’ love for them became experientially authentic at a certain moment in their lives. In other words they had a personal encounter with him that forever changed everything.

When Saul was knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus it was not a rational defense of the historicity of the gospel accounts that laid him low, both literally and spiritually. The actual presence of the glorified Son of God did that. While it may be true that you must know certain empirical facts about Jesus in order to fully believe in him this proclamation leaves us shaking our heads over accounts of biblically illiterate people on foreign mission fields that recognized Christ for who he was because they had had a encounter with him before missionaries ever cracked the Bible in front of them. When the missionaries finally do teach what the scripture says about Jesus these pagans finally recognize the identity of the One who came to them, sometimes years before his Western representatives did.

Today many Evangelicals are fixated on the rise of Post-Modernism in the first world. They see it as an entirely evil philosophy that denies all objective truth. The anti-Post-Modernist’s among us will often say that rational, scientific proofs of the absolute truth of the Bible are being abandoned wholesale by a bunch of relativistic philosophers bent on de-legitimizing Christianity. While there is certainly some truth in this charge it is a mistake to assume that the people proffering it are themselves coming from a truly biblical position. In my experience the standard bearers of the war against Post-modernism are usually just as captive to Enlightenment Modernism as their opponents are to contemporary Post-Modernism.

The cardinal assumption of the Modernists was that everything is knowable and accessible by empirical scientific inquiry. The cognitive aspects of human knowledge were virtually deified by the Enlightenment. The mystical and experiential was dismissed as just so much superstition. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not present day apologists for a purely rational approach to the mysteries of Christianity are offspring of the Enlightenment, a period that caused a huge rejection of supernatural theism by millions of people in the West. This is, to say the least, ironic.

The Hebraic view of God, and thus the most biblical (as ancient Hebrews, under divine guidance, wrote the Bible) recognizes the inscrutable nature of God and his work in the universe. The Hebraic view is much more interested in experiencing a personal, relational knowledge of God himself than in trying to dissect divine history in the name of systematic theology. We might do well to recognize that some of the Post-Modern stress on experience is closer to the zeitgeist of those who authored the Bible after they had very personal, very powerful encounters with the Lord of the Universe.

The reason this matters is because human beings in the industrialized, computerized world of the 21^st Century are yearning for something besides scientific evidence to fill Pascal’s "God-shaped Hole". More accurately they are yearning for Someone. We need to introduce them to the God of immediate experience, not just of historical fact, if we hope to lead them away from the "-isms", whatever they may be, that distract from the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. We who presume to evangelize must allow God to touch hearts through our witness for it is our heart that most desperately needs to be captured and transformed by our Savior. In this transformation our hearts usually lead. Our brains follow later.