Doubt and the Cross

Mark 15:16-39

            Last night we encountered what true humanity looks like. It looks like Jesus praying to God to remove from his lips the cup of suffering; it looks like vulnerability, humility, and grace. It looks not like strength as we so often imagine it, but instead it looks like the power of giving up power—a power that does not seem at first like it is power at all.

            Now, today, we encounter what happens when a person is fully human: He gets crucified. On the cross Jesus shows that greatness looks like failure. It is shouting to the heavens, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s all the things that make us question God in similar words. “Is your God in Belgium?” an atheist asks mockingly on Facebook. Is our God with victims of genocide? Is our God in the streets of Chicago riddled with gun violence? Is our God with car crash victims whose only fault was an icy road or a drunk driver? Is our God with those who have cancer… a miscarriage… Alzheimer’s? Is our God anywhere at all?

            Today is the day that can either confirm those assumptions or challenge them, because this Good Friday is about the God who meets us first and foremost not in life’s victories but in life’s crushing defeats. This is the God of the cross. It’s not a very attractive God on the surface, but it’s the only one who really stands up to criticism because it’s the only one real enough to meet us in despair—where we truly need it. This is the God who points to death and says, “I’ve been there.” I’ve been there. This God is found in our failures far more surely than in our victories, because it is there that we discover our utter dependence. This is the God, who we know in Jesus Christ, who shouts from upon the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen--nothing else matters.

Matthew 4:1-17

“If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.” - Jaroslav Pelikan.

            I had someone come up to me this week with an article and wanted my opinion of it. First off, I should say that these requests are always very difficult because A) I don’t know everything, B) I usually need a good deal of time to think about new ideas, and C) if it’s an article that’s gotten a lot of attention it’s usually because it’s particularly brazen, because, in this age, brazen will get you attention. Everybody and their mother is writing a blog these days; what gets hits is being brazen, attacking particularly people or views; doing the kind of thing that I, personally, don’t want to respond to at all.

            So, anyway, this particular article was written by a group called “Jews for Judaism” and it is entitled, “Why Jesus is NOT the Jewish Messiah.” This requires a lot of context. First, this is a group who is writing against “Jews for Jesus” which is another, sort-of-kind-of Jewish but also sort-of-kind-of Christian group. They are writing against this group because Jews for Jesus likes to proselytize Jews—meaning they like to go around and tell Jews they should essentially become Christians. So, naturally, “Jews for Judaism” doesn’t much care for that. Secondly, this article is obviously not representative of all of Judaism anymore than something that I write is representative of all Christians. There are plenty of Christians who would openly disagree with much of what I say. We have a big tent. It’s the same with Judaism. In fact, their tent might be even bigger than ours because they have ethnic components as well as religious. So, this article does not mean all, or even most, or even many, Jewish people feel this way. It’s one stance in response to another.

            OK, have I done enough couching of what I’m about to say? Probably not but let’s go for it anyway.

The Thomas in all of us: Searching for faith in a proof-driven world

Scripture: John 20:19-31

           There may be no character in scripture who elicits such polar reactions as Thomas. Maligned as the doubter by many and defended as the truest disciple by others, he is a walking paradox. While most of the disciples are fairly anonymous—seriously, tell me a story about Bartholomew—Thomas is known for his stunning acts of faith but, more often, for this critical moment in John’s Gospel where his belief is dependent on proof.

            The conflicting opinions on Thomas are summed up nicely in an exchange from the 2006 movie, The Da Vinci Code. If you’ve never seen The Da Vinci Code, well, first of all, just don’t; it’s a conspiracy theory laden story that takes about ten steps too far into fiction while pretending to be actually plausible. But putting that aside, the typical exchange between characters in The Da Vinci Code goes something like this: Character A brings up a biblical character, a piece of art or artifact, or an historical event, then Character B spouts some stereotype about that character/artifact/event, allowing Character A to chastise Character B and assert that their simple understanding is really an elaborate hoax perpetuated by groups C, D, and E for purpose F in order to accomplish G, given criteria H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, and P. At which time, Character B blindly accepts Character A’s analysis as flawless and the story moves forward.

            The fact that The Da Vinci Code topped the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks says some sad things about humanity, but that’s maybe another issue (and, if you’re looking for a little hope for humanity, the one book that outsold it in 2003 was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

            More on point, in one of these exchanges in The Da Vinci Code the two characters are talking about Thomas. Naturally, Character B wastes no time jumping to the stereotype, saying, “Oh, you mean the doubter,” and, predictably, Character A becomes agitated that Character B does not know Thomas’ whole story, at which point I have a brief moment of hope that perhaps we will learn something useful from The Da Vinci Code. But—alas—it is not to be, because instead of talking about the interesting Thomas who shows signs of faith earlier in John’s Gospel, suggesting that there is more going on in this story than simple doubt, Character A instead goes off on a typical wild tangent about the church’s cover up of the Gospel of Thomas, which in his estimation was Thomas’ true legacy. I don’t remember what happens next, because I think every time I have watched this scene I have turned the channel in disgust.

Why we rarely go to church: Pascal's Wager for the modern world

A quote passed through my Facebook feed earlier today that read like this, "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't // Than to live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is."

This is not exactly a new idea. In the 17th century, the mathematician, philosopher and physicist, Blaise Pascal, basically made the same claim, albeit far more philosophically and far less poetically. He argued for God's existence based on the logic of gain and loss in an argument famously known as Pascal's Wager. Here is his logic, quoted from his work, Pensées, first published in 1669.

1. "God is, or He is not"
2. A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
4. You must wager. (It's not optional.)
5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

My philosophy professor in undergrad explained the wager in a chart that looked something like this:

The breaking of bread and the road of life

Text: Luke 24:13-35

             This week a professor mine from Augustana shared an opinion piece on Facebook, which had been printed in the New York Times and was about the Catholic Church and modern apologetics. My professor pointed out a line where the author said, “Traditional apologetics has started with metaphysical arguments for God’s existence.” Now, that was a lot of big words—and I hated when my seminary professors would say things like that and not explain them—so I’m not going to do that to you. In layman’s terms the author was claiming that defenses of the faith (what we call “apologetics”) have traditionally started by first arguing for the existence of God. At first blush that makes a lot of sense; it’s very scientific; it doesn’t assume anything, least of all that there is a God of the universe. But what if I told you that the idea of starting by proving God is a completely modern notion that would have seemed absolutely strange to almost anybody not born in the last four hundred years?

Faith, science, academic cred, and other things keeping us from learning from one another

Occasionally, I touch on the dialogue, discussion, and debate surrounding science and faith, but that probably underscores how much time I spend thinking about it. It really is at the crux of what I enjoy reading and pondering on long, cold Minnesota days. This has come across in a couple of my posts in the last year--most notably on the subject of monarchs and the questions of how versus why and in a piece on the my confirmation students' polarization on the question of scripture and evolution--but I have written far more on other subjects during that time, and I suppose it's mostly because I have a hard time putting words to the problem. The language available to discuss the relationship between faith and science is narrow and generally unhelpful, so I continue to ponder how it is that we go on from here.

from http://www.universetoday.com/74724/where-are-stars-born/

However, there comes a point when one must say something in an attempt to approach some kind of more expansive truth. So this is my newest attempt, borne out of a confirmation discussion I will be having with our ninth-graders today. This is neither comprehensive nor final; it is only a drop in the ocean of a question that is many-layered and breeds more contempt between parties than is necessary or prudent. I still believe that people of faith and people of science need each other in this messed-up world--even if their respective philosophies do not. Here's why:

Turning the "Do you know the Lord?" question upside-down.

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34

            “I wish he knew the Lord.”

            Have you ever heard somebody say that? Or some variation on that? It usually comes with a hint of disdain. She doesn’t know the Lord… tsk-tsk. Often this is the kind of thing mourned at funerals: “It’s just too bad he didn’t know the Lord.” And OK, I get it. We are reassured when others believe as strongly as us in the same God as us, and that reassurance has a lot to do with our assurance about their salvation, but let’s not go crazy here. Do any of us really know the Lord?

            Well… no… and yes. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that we know the Lord. All of Israel knew the Lord, because they were His people and HHe was their God. This is the new covenant that God speaks through Jeremiah. Earlier in the Bible God gave Moses a covenant, but it had a teensy-weensy little problem which was that it required Israel to obey, and Israel was really awful at obeying. Seriously, it was about ten minutes after they were freed from Egypt when they started worshiping golden calves and asking to go back into slavery. The new covenant that Jeremiah brings, however, had nothing to do with the capability of the people to obey. God says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” (Jer 31:33b).

            In the New Testament this covenant is expanded in Paul’s writings to include not just Jews but we-Gentiles as well, and so the promise for each and every one of you is that you will know the Lord. We are all a chosen people—not a choosing people. Maybe the most insidious evil in the Christian Church—and believe me, there are a few—is this whole dividing of in and out, deciding who is worthy of God’s kingdom and who is not. Guess what? You’re not worthy. Jeremiah makes the fretting over whether a person knows the Lord moot, because what matters is not that we know the Lord but that God knows us. Only in God knowing us will we know God in return, and that will have nothing to do with our faithfulness or godliness.

            Martin Luther got this. Some of you had to memorize the explanations to the Apostles’ Creed when you went through Confirmation—and for those of you who did, you might want to remind our Confirmation kids how lucky they are to not have to do that—but for those of you who did, you might even remember the explanation to the 3^rd article. OK, it might be expecting a bit much to remember something from thirty or forty or sixty years ago when you often don’t remember where you left your car keys, so I’ll refresh you. Martin Luther explains that the 3^rd Article of the Apostles’ Creed (the one that begins “I believe in the Holy Spirit”) means this: “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him…” He goes on to say that belief comes from the Holy Spirit; you cannot believe on your own. You cannot know the Lord and follow the law of your own will-power and strength. The nay-sayers who grumble about so-and-so not knowing the Lord are not only judging their neighbors; they are putting themselves in a place where only God can be.

            This is about more than judgment. There’s that little proverb we all know—“Judge not lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). (You can tell it’s good because we still quote it in Old English) But Jeremiah’s message and Martin Luther’s explanation provoke a deeper question than whether we should judge; they ask us: Why should we not judge? Not only because God is the only judge that counts, but also because nobody comes to know the Lord by their own wisdom. Jeremiah wants to make this perfectly clear: this is not about you.

            This thread can be traced throughout the whole book of Jeremiah. In today’s other readings King Jehoiakim is burning the letters of the scroll from Jeremiah’s prophecy, which is a little surreal because we can only assume that he is burning the very book of Jeremiah from which we are reading, and if it is the book of Jeremiah that the king is burning then we can understand why he doesn’t care for the prophecy, because so much of it is judgment. Of the fifty-two chapters in the book of Jeremiah only four (ch. 30-33) talk primarily about hope for the future. Jeremiah’s primary message is judgment against the kingdom that has abandoned God’s laws.

            So, this is a strange juxtaposition. Jeremiah brought a message of judgment because the people forgot God, but he also came with this fantastic message of a new covenant that does not depend on our godliness. Either Jeremiah is schizophrenic, which you realize--if you read all of Jeremiah--may be a possibility, or God’s rules simply do not look like human rules.

            Personally, I think Jeremiah is a pretty darn good prophet for our era in history, because our world is obsessed with knowing God. In religious circles, we have people who want to know when you were saved—like literally the moment—as if we convert from sinfulness to sainthood in a blink. There is this train of thought among some Christians that if you cannot give an exact date and time of your salvation then how will you know that it happened at all? They parse who knows God and who doesn’t as if the effort is ours to make rather than God’s to give. On the other side of the coin we have people in anti-religious circles who write off Christians—and peoples of all faiths—until they meet academic criteria; until, for example, they publish a peer reviewed scientific article proving God’s existence. They, too, set guidelines for what is in and what is out.

            Friends, this world needs Jeremiah. We need someone to tell us that God knows us, warts and all, and so, we know God. It doesn’t need to be in a moment of conversion. It certainly isn’t because of our intense study of God. It is that Holy Spirit and it is Jesus Christ who are the reason for our knowledge of God, and that is what we celebrate this Christ the King Sunday.

Yeah, but prove it, says the world. Prove it! says Newsweek and the scientific journals. Prove it! say Christians to one another, because apparently in God’s eyes it matters more whether you are Lutheran or Catholic or Covenant or Pentecostal than it does whether you are sharing the good news. Prove it! we say. And God says, “OK, you really don’t get it, do you? This is not a true/false test. You will be my people. I will be your God. End of story. The rest of your lives are simply responses to that reality.” You see, part of the reason why judgment is such a big deal for Jeremiah is because we inevitably ignore the truth that is in us, and when we ignore that truth we ask the question behind all our misgivings: “Prove it!”

            We become like Pontius Pilate, who represents the powers of this world, when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) in that iconic passage from the Gospel of John.

            The irony of the question is staring Pilate in the face. John’s Gospel doesn’t even do the courtesy of giving Pilate an answer because it is so obvious. Truth is Jesus. Not a concept, as Pilate believes, but a person—the very person standing in front of him. He cannot recognize truth when it is staring him in the face. Moreover, truth is not knowing Christ, as people today would have you believe; it is Christ. All we can ever do is respond, like the centurion in Mark’s Gospel who points to the cross and says, “Surely this man is the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). He knew the truth. It wasn’t because he accepted Jesus into his heart; it was because he experienced truth in the flesh. He knew God because God knew him. So we know God—the God who has chosen us to be his people—because God has written it on our hearts. Your acceptance of that promise is almost irrelevant.

Our job, then, starts with not judging, but not just because it is something that fits on a bumper sticker. Our task is to move from judgment to proclamation. Stop parsing who is in or out. Stop looking at our neighbor and wondering, “Does she know God?” Instead, talk to that person and say, “God knows you.” Our task is to get off of our thrones and admit that it’s not because we are so smart or so brilliant or so worthy or so perfect that we know God; we know God because in spite of our unworthiness, in spite of the pain we often cause, and in spite of our lack of knowledge, God knows us.

There is no in and out. There is only Christ the King.

Thanks be to God.

Big Questions: A Sermon on 1 John 1-2:2

I have a friend who was preparing to move back to his hometown of Minneapolis after college and a long trip abroad when he sent me a message asking for some advice. Now, this was not the normal moving questions—where’s a good place to eat, do you people up there really eat lutefisk—none of that. You see, my friend is Mormon, and he was preparing to come back to the Twin Cities with his Mormon family who had never lived anywhere but Utah. He had spent time doing mission work in Russia, finishing up school and, before returning home, he wanted to know some things about Lutherans, because, well, there’s a lot of us in Minnesota. Particularly, he wanted to know about salvation. 

What do Lutherans believe about salvation?

I told him we believe that we are saved by grace through faith apart from works of the law. We believe that Christ gives us the gift of faith in baptism, so we baptize infants, as well as adults, as a sign that it is not our will that matters but God’s will for us.

My friend read what I wrote carefully and responded with the question I have so often heard: “So… what’s the bare minimum that a person must do to achieve salvation?”

Isn’t that the question? In fact, it’s such a great question that I’m going to let it simmer for a minute, and turn to 1 John to find an answer. And 1 John 1-2:2 suggest two things.

1) We tend to do the wrong things

2) It would be nice if we didn’t do the wrong things, but when we do we have a God willing to forgive us.

I quote, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all….[and] if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:5, 7a).

Apparently, what we do matters. We can stumble through the darkness of this life, but it is an existence apart from God, not knowing God; in fact, denying God. Life without God is dark and sinister; we recognize people who live in that place, without hope not just for a future beyond this life but also for anything much to come of their time on earth. Depression and despair separate us from the light of the world. Somehow we have to find what it means to live life through Jesus-colored glasses.

So, I return to my friend’s question, “What’s the minimum a person has to do to know that they are saved?” I responded, in good Lutheran fashion, that we Lutherans dislike the word “do” when it comes to salvation; we don’t believe that we do anything, but it is Christ who does the saving work through us. I say that a lot—and honestly, I believe it very strongly—but I can see the worry my friend has with this approach. Why, then, are we here at all? What is the purpose of life if not to find salvation through Jesus Christ? It seems like a loving God would just skip this whole life on earth and push the divine fast-forward button and shoot us into heaven, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. These are the real questions, aren’t they? But 1 John also offers a peak at the answer.  

Why are we here?

We’re here to discover what it means to walk in the light, to find fellowship with one another, to discover our own unworthiness (what we often call “sin”), and then to discover that we have an Advocate in Christ Jesus who is going to save us nonetheless.

But it’s more than that. When God created the world he created everything

“good”—I hope you remember this from the creation story, after every day God saw that each and every created thing was good. We went and messed all that up, but underneath our patina of unworthiness there is something in our nature that was created good. I believe we’re here on this planet because it is fundamentally “good”—even if our experience of it is often not. All of creation is broken, but it is all subject to Christ. Therefore, all of creation is dying, but when Christ died a funny thing happened. Three days later, he came back.

Resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith. One of the Confirmation students on their sermon notes from last week asked me the following question:

“If Christ was resurrected does that mean we will be resurrected, too?”  

Yes! That is the big picture. Paul writes in Romans, “If we are united with Christ in a death like his, surely we will also be united with him in a resurrection like his” (6:5). We spend a lot of time trying to escape this world, trying to search out heaven as if it is some distant and foreign place, when heaven lies right before our eyes; always an instant in front of us. When we walk in the light we walk in that reality; in that knowledge. See, walking in the darkness is not only an image for doing bad things; it is also—I think, primarily—an image for a life with no greater purpose.

I was once asked by another friend—an atheist:

"Why do you believe in God?" 

When most people ask this question I tell them something about Jesus, but I knew he had heard that before, and his question was not about faith but about reason. So I answered differently. Hardly even thinking about it, I said, “I believe in God because of my sin; because I believe that things in this world matter and I’m not worthy to fix them.”

Somehow, I had stumbled on exactly 1 John’s point. The only way you can believe in Christ is to believe that you are not worthy. We try to make ourselves into God, but we only end up walking in darkness, trying desperately to believe that we are the perfect people we wish ourselves to be. But as 1 John reminds us, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1:8).

OK, let’s say you believe that much—and I realize that may sometimes be a stretch—but humor me for a minute. Let’s say you honestly believe that you are an imperfect person who cannot justify yourself apart from the grace of God. Let’s say you believe that Christ died on a cross for you and rose again on the third day. Let’s say you believe that God died to save all created things from a life without purpose; he did this not just for you, but your brothers and sisters, your friends and family, the people down the street, men and women and children throughout the country and the world who you will never meet and never know existed. Let’s say all this is true. Then let’s return to the big question of life's purpose--the question my Mormon friend asked, 

“Why do we live here at all? Why doesn’t Jesus just skip straight to the resurrection without the pain and suffering of this life?”

To this question we finally have a great, biblical answer. God’s will is always that we see things how they truly are. That’s what it means to walk in the light. It means to see that underneath all the suffering that we experience in this world there is something that God created and called “good,” and that all things called good are worthy of being resurrected; so worthy that in fact that in the end they will be resurrected with Christ into a life where the patina of sin will be washed away.

The God of history... today.

What happened?

It might seem like an easy question, but behind its initial simplicity there is a tangled web that ensnares us often even without our knowing it. I would hazard to say that this is the question that religious individuals underestimate more than any other, because it is the question that non-religious individuals value above all others. Herein lies the problem. The religious person, out of a deep-seated faith tradition, is bound to give a creedal answer to an historical question. Then, the non-religious person will give a retort out of a modern understanding of history. They will follow by arguing in different languages, each claiming ultimate superiority--the theist on the grounds of divine authority and the atheist on the grounds of historical record. Both are trying to say what happened but both fail to acknowledge that the other is speaking quite a different language.

Today I find myself troubled by the seemingly boundless ability of religious individuals to throw the question under the bus. We do this when we say things like "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it"--the kind of blunt creed that most mainline Christians can laugh at. But we also give up the question when we act as if God cannot work through means that are visible and immediate. Even mainline Christians seem incapable of separating the question--what happened?--from historical events, like the creation story, the crucifixion and resurrection, or modern accounts of miracles. And as such we end up backing ourselves into a corner where God is only active in the most unlikely of circumstances. I believe God is active in those moments in history, but I would have a hard time justifying that if I didn't also believe that God is active here--today. Christian traditions have failed to acknowledge, let alone convey, the presence of God here and now. We focus on the miraculous in spite of God's overwhelming presence in the mundane.

There's a great interview that Louis C K gave on the Conan O'Brien show where he talks about how everything's amazing and nobody's happy. I can think of no better commentary on how we talk about God. Everything is amazing. Seriously, so much of life is insanely wonderful and we hardly stop to think about it. All of this is a great testimony to God. In modern times we've somehow managed to take God out of all of that by focusing on what sets God apart from the descriptive language that we use everyday. We focus on the contentious question of what happened historically in all sorts of critical moments of witness, all the while implicitly granting that nothing in the present matters; that God is somehow an active force only in the distant past and the unforeseeable future. Then, we wonder why Joe Bag-a-Donuts in the pew every Sunday has no ability to articulate where or how God is active in his life.

So, for the God-believers among us, I have some simple advice. Give up on the arguments about the past; not because you can't win them (though it would behoove us to wonder what "winning" such an argument would look like) and not because they aren't important, but because they aren't fruitful. Instead, begin to think about the blessings that you have and the grace of God that is visible everyday of your life. Then the question--what happened?--will begin to move out of the distant past and right into the stories of your life. It will live with you, as you live into it. The answers you give will no longer sound like creedal obligation but grace-drenched proclamation, and finally, God will not be an abstract question but a concrete reality.

So, what happened?

God's Irrational Existence

A friend and I were having a Facebook debate that turned into a skype debate over an article in the Huffington Post by David Lose, entitled "Is the Bible True?" Dr. Lose essentially makes the case that it is possible to read the Bible not just as historical fact, as fundamentalist Christianity does, or as non-historical moral-ism, as some of liberal Christians do. His point is essentially the same one that Dr. Throntveit brings up time and again: Both sides are asking the wrong question of scripture, namely, "Did it happen?"

Now, this is where my friend comes in. We've had many discussions like this before over these topics. He is an atheist and I'm a seminarian, so it's sort of what we do. But anyway, in this particular case, he found it hard to believe that a Lutheran pastor could, with any integrity, preach from the Bible after admitting that it is propaganda.

When we talked tonight, we were discussing "truth." I argued that, for Christians, historical truth is secondary to our belief that Jesus Christ embodies truth; i.e., truth is not a concept but a person. His stance was that Dr. Lose was trying to hold both historical and moral truth in tension, and that it just wasn't working. Hmm... I thought about that some and realized after the conversation that maybe this isn't an issue with truth. Or rather, maybe truth is the subject of the debate, but the grounds are actually the problem. And the grounds for the discussion is reason.

My friend is going to argue, no matter the question, from a perspective steeped in rationality. He's going to say (I think I can put words in his mouth here) that it is irrational to believe in God, and that the Bible does not stand up to reason. And in this regard, he is actually quite true.

Here's the problem: Christians don't believe by reason. In fact, Christianity distrusts every hint of reason. The very effort of trying to reason Christ is fraught with sin (putting ourselves before God). We believe not because of reason, but because of proclamation: the Word given to us through the Holy Spirit, particularly in the sacraments. And reason plays no part in this. In fact, it may very well be a downright detriment to faith--the old Adam hanging on, tempted to reach for the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Does that mean that Christians can never be rational? About many things, yes we can be. In fact, systematic theology uses primarily reason, but that is only when God's existence is made a matter of faith in the first place. About God's existence, I have a tough time seeing reason playing a role.

I'm sure my friend won't like this reasoning, because, in fact, it isn't reasoning at all. If the grounds for the discussion of God's existence are reason alone, I come weaponless. Philosophers like Alan Plantinga might  try to argue for God's existence on these terms, but I wonder if that isn't a faulty endeavor. Methodists, in line with the Wesleyan quadrilateral, want to hang on to reason as a means of believing in God, but I tend to see that in practice as sensible interpretation rather than philosophical dialectic.

So, is the Bible true? Yes, but only because I believe in God's promises in the first place. It's a wholly irrational viewpoint. But here's the thing: that isn't my concern, because I'm not out to convince but to proclaim. I'm not going to win people to my viewpoint, but "preach Christ: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23).