Thank you to Outreach Ministries for featuring Why I Still Believe
Here’s an excerpt:
Perhaps one of the more difficult problems with my questioning was that my doubt was directed toward a person, and I was basically unaware of it. My doubt had beginnings in distrust of people, human persons who professed allegiance and submission to another kind of person. In hindsight, I can see that my distrust of Christians had transferred to distrust of Jesus. I had experienced poor relationships, authoritarian leadership, and anti-intellectualism from the outset of my commitment to a local church body. I had very little Christian relational influence upon which to model my relational trust of God. It’s like people who can’t believe in God the Father because they themselves experienced a bad father. (Ironically, I had a good father, who generally didn’t mention God unless he was telling a particularly funny joke.) However, if asked, I would have told you that I was interested solely in discovering what was true. Unlike “those” people who had grown up in church, I had no background in Christianity, no commitments I had to uphold. I could see with the dry light of objectivity.
Can you see my hubris? What a mess! I do believe that, in whatever way was available to me, I went looking for the truth about God. Yet I tend to think that when I’m investigating an issue, such as belief in God, I’m going to look at things for “just the facts.” For instance, when I initially grappled with the question of Jesus’ resurrection, I treated the whole endeavor as an academic research project. Well, the facts suggest that either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not rise from the dead. Logically, both cannot be true. So I’m going to have to go with the hypothesis with the most explanatory power … wherever the data leads.
I had such an idealistic view of my endeavor. Curiously, I didn’t carefully think through that it wasn’t an abstract idea or impersonal hypothesis that I was investigating, but a person. At the end of my investigation, if I believed that God was real, I wasn’t just faced with accepting a set of facts but a real person. Why does that matter? Because not only did I wonder whether belief in Jesus was merited, but I still had a lingering distrust of people, and Jesus is a person.