This is great:
The earliest and most fundamental Christian confession was this: “Jesus is Lord.” And one of the Apostle Paul’s earliest and most influential letters makes the following bold epistemological claim: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).
I fundamentally believe, as Blaise Pascal did, that there are plenty of good reasons to believe in the Christian faith–plenty, and sufficient. I also believe with Pascal, however, that there are reasons adequate also to disbelieve.
Those latter reasons, however, do not exonerate anyone. Why? Because faith is a gift, yes, not an accomplishment or natural outcome of reasoning. But it is a gift that God stands ready to give to anyone who wants it.
Those that do not want it, therefore, do not get it. And they cannot therefore justify their disbelief even by pointing to the impossibility of proving Christian doctrine to be true by the light of natural human reason. For the offer stands–to Richard Dawkins, to Christopher Hitchens, to you, and to me: faith is a gift (a “grace”) God is ready to give to anyone who asks (Ephesians 2:4-10).
Faith is always the exercise of trust beyond what we think we know, beyond what we think we’re sure of. Does that mean we have to choose between our brains and our beliefs? No, but it means we must not let our brains circumscribe our beliefs. We don’t understand electricity, but we use it. We don’t understand light (wave? particle? both? how does that work?), but we are glad for it. We don’t know everything about our business partners or surgeons or spouses, but we trust them with our livelihoods and lives. Likewise, we have good reasons to believe Christian teaching, so we should.
But we can’t believe that Christian teaching–it’s just too strange, and huge, and demanding!–unless God grants us that power to believe. And for that reason, at the last, I am not unsympathetic with Dawkins, Hitchens, and the rest.
Quite the contrary:
I pray for them, and hope they will eventually receive the gift of faith as well…
…as I pray God will strengthen my faith, too.