What If the Gospel Wasn't True"

As a teacher I love it when students ask me good questions. It shows they are engaged and wanting to learn more. This doesn’t always happen during my Gospel outreach conversations, but I really appreciate when it does, such as with a young man named Ralph, whose curious questions extended our conversation for over an hour.

I don’t always know the answers to difficult questions, and have learned to just be honest about it and admit my struggles. One question Ralph asked me was difficult to answer, but in the weeks since our conversation I’ve heard a good analogy that helps me explain it.

Ralph asked me what I would do if I was to come across irrefutable evidence that invalidated my faith. I think this is a hard question because in order to show people the Gospel, we also want to show that we are rational human beings who consider the evidence and don’t deny reality. I didn’t want to come across as a crazy lunatic.

The answer to this question, I now think, comes in the difference between “knowing” the truth of the Gospel, and “showing” it to be true. Just because we “know” something to be true by personal experience, doesn’t mean we can “show” that truth to others.

Here’s the analogy that helps explain this. Suppose you were to be accused of a crime you absolutely know you didn’t commit. In fact, you weren’t anywhere near the scene of the crime so it couldn’t even be some sort of mental lapse. Yet, evidence is produced and repeated by the media that “proves” you did it, and it seems the whole world is against you. The evidence is so solid that you wouldn’t know how to debunk it, and you are left defenseless in the face of the charges against you.

Would you, then, throw up your hands and admit to a crime that you know you didn’t commit? You “know” you didn’t commit the crime, but you can’t “show” you didn’t commit it.

That, I think, is the place many Christians find themselves when it come to defending the truths of the Gospel. They may have experienced its truths on a personal level, but are unaware that theirs is an historical, reasonable faith. They know it to be true, but can’t show this truth to others. They feel powerless against a secular culture that actively seeks to refute the truths of Christianity and to gaslight those who believe them, making them think they are being unsophisticated, irrational or just plain crazy.

In answer to Ralph’s hypothetical question - “What would I do in the face of irrefutable evidence against Christianity?” - I would have to say that even though I would then have to admit that I didn’t know how to defend it – that I couldn’t show it’s truth - I would nonetheless continue to know it is true for me personally.

The Bible tells us we are to walk by faith, not by sight. I believe it is a very reasonable faith, but if for some reason it had to be a blind faith, then so be it. Here I stand.