Authenticating our Faith

Last week, Brad posted a link to an interesting discussion that started over a critique of believers often circular reasoning in arguing for the faith. As so many unconvinced people will say, “please don't quote Scripture to prove Christianity to me.”

It is true that the Scriptures have excellent historical witnesses, and textually speaking we can vouch for what the Evangelists wrote with more certainty than we can, for example, say what William Shakespeare wrote. With that in mind, along with other ancient authorities, we can argue for the existence of a man named Jesus and a kingdom named Israel. What we can never do is prove that Jesus is God incarnate or that Israel was God's chosen people using that methodology.

As I have said before, Calvin and Barth both understood this quite well, and emphasized grounding Scriptural authority in God's revelation to us through the Holy Spirit. Christianity is ultimately a relational faith — it springs from God's relationship with us — and so we ought to place our foundation squarely there.

While rational grounding is good and necessary, and relational grounding cannot prove an iota to someone who has never felt the presence of God, the latter is the only grounding that can provide a reason to believe the extent of Christianity. Perhaps we are embarrassed of this grounding and that is why we constantly seek to prove Scripture (and Christianity in general) with Scripture, but let's get over the embarrassment and admit it: our faith comes from God reaching out to us. Any other basis simply won't work.

If we admitted that, would we have any annoyed atheists tired of circular reasoning? Likely not — perhaps they could even understand why we believe what we believe a bit better.