I had barely sat down with Ryan at the café where we were meeting before we were discussing his doubts about faith. He launched very quickly into a series of statements that called into question the faith of his parents.
I patiently listened as a very smart student presented his case for why faith is completely illogical. As he finished, Ryan looked at me as if to say, “OK, I’m done. Now you can serve up your warmed over case-for-Christ stuff, but we both know it won’t be satisfying.”
I looked at Ryan and smiled. “You are totally right,” I said. “Christianity is completely irrational. In fact, that is actually why I am a believer.”
Typically, when I am talking to students such as Ryan, this is where I usually get the double take. Ryan was no different.
For the next hour, I didn’t preach, present facts or argue. I made three simple statements and spent the rest of our time answering his questions:
• Christianity is irrational.
• Reason is not what we think it is.
• The fact that faith doesn’t make sense is what makes it true.
Ryan was hooked; we made plans to meet again.
Because sound bytes by celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have trickled down to the YouTube world of our students, so many youth leaders feel it is important to establish the intellectual credibility of the faith when presenting the gospel. In doing so, they may enter into argumentative ping-pong matches that just turn students off to Christianity.
What I have discovered is that you can go a lot further with students and the gospel by agreeing rather than arguing. Evangelism can make great strides if we put an arm around our skeptical students and say something such as, “I agree, faith is irrational; now let me tell you about it.”
Christianity Is Irrational
Let’s adapt a non-believer’s perspective on our faith for a moment. Consider some of the most foundational truths of the faith as if you were someone who never had heard these things before.
God is an eternal being with no beginning or end, who hovered over a chaotic void, and used nothing except His voice to bring everything that we see into existence. This God had a Son who entered into space and time in a small village in the Middle East in the form of a baby. This baby grew into an adult who was fully God and fully man.
We don’t need to go any further. These three articles of faith alone violate some of the most basic principles of logic, and this is exactly where we ramp up arguments to convince unbelievers that somehow it all makes sense, which we don’t need to do.
If reason were the last word on what is true, we’d have a problem; but it isn’t. It turns out that our students are not as in love with logic as we are.
Reason Is Not What We Think It Is
Many of us seem to subscribe to the assumption that human reason is something handed to us from on high, that logic and rationality are the unassailable means by which we evaluate what is true and not true about the universe.
Well-meaning Christians try to present the proof of Christian faith. They think if faith doesn’t pass the test of reason, then it must be dumped; but that is not true. For a variety of reasons we forget that reason is something constructed within our minds; it is made up. This is literally why we say something makes sense—because logic is made, not discovered.
When we think of logic, we think we are talking about facts. “It’s in the numbers,” we might say if we consider something inarguable; but think about it: Our entire system of counting is based on 10 digits. Why? Because we have 10 fingers. Math was not revealed from the heavens or discovered in a formula. Some guy started counting on his fingers a long time ago and organized a very clever system of value based on 10 digits.
Inarguable? Hardly. It is a pattern of understanding connected to who we are as humans.
Time is the same way. Do you think someone crawled into some ancient cave and uncovered the holy truth about time? No, the unit of time called a second is pure invention—about the span of a heartbeat. Same thing with a meter—about the length of a common stride. Same with the liter—about the size of a wine bottle.
Every scientific measurement you can think of is the product of something we have created. Science as we know it is just a projected pattern of our humanity.
The human brain likes these patterns. It likes to make sense of things. It is the reason why you cn rd ths sntnce evn wth sme of the vwels mssng. We bring order to things as a part of being human. The stuff we can make sense of is logical; and the stuff we can’t, we call myth.
Of course this is why reason is misleading. Just because it doesn’t fit into the patterns we invented doesn’t mean it can’t be real. Come on, we’re smarter than that.
What if the stuff that we can’t make sense of really just lies outside our capability to make sense of it? In fact, what if the fact that we can’t make sense of it is what makes it true?
Faith’s Lack of Logic Is What Makes It True
Contrast the irrationality of our faith with the rationality of another religion. Take Karma for example. Karma makes perfect sense. You get what you deserve. If you do good things, you get good things; if you do evil, you get evil. I know this is a simple version, but essentially Karma adds up logically.
Now consider grace, perhaps the oddest theological concept in the history of religion. Not only do you get more than what you deserve, you were able to receive it even when you wanted nothing to do with God. None of this is instinctual. It is not human. It is why people have struggled to be Christian for millennia.
Could this be the product of a human mind? No, it is Christianity’s inability to make sense that screams its divine origin. Why would we try to flatten it to fit within the world of sense and reason? Let it shine in all of its bizarre glory when you sit down with your skeptics. This is how it was done from the beginning of the church.
The Roots of Irrational Faith
It is obvious the early Christians were intent on relating their experience with the risen Christ regardless of how it was received.
The early Christians knew the “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom,” but they decided they would proclaim “Christ crucified” (
This, of course, was a serious Hellenistic no-no. For Greeks, bodies were the prison-house of the soul. To say that God came among us in the flesh was sure to get a door slammed in your face.
In spite of this cultural no-no, John’s Gospel opens with a pronouncement that Jesus was flesh. I love that. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (
John’s boldness reveals his allegiance to something higher than Greek wisdom. He chose not to argue with the logicians, just to relate his story.
This commitment to personal experience in the face of opposition is refreshing. Instead of worrying about establishing credibility, the young faith community stayed true to what it had lived through. The believers proclaimed the resurrected Christ regardless of its seeming irrationality.
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he embraces the ridiculousness of the gospel. With apparent bravado, Paul is saying, “Yeah, that’s right, this is nonsense…to you.” His pride in the oddness of the gospel spills over with his questions to the Greeks:
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe (
Paul reveals two things in these verses. First, it is foolish. “Fine, you win. What I believe is absurd. Now let me tell you what happened.” Paul was not taking the position that only the rational is real; in fact, the opposite may be true.
Paul was an educated man who could have taken great pride in his ability to explain theological and philosophical difficulties, but he does not parade his academic accomplishments; in fact he is surprisingly humble.
A Different Tome
I find that when we give up our notions of a rational gospel message, we align ourselves more closely with the tone Paul adopted when he addressed the people of Corinth:
“When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power” (
Contrary to the rational world of Hellenism, Paul purposefully sidesteps proofs for his arguments and resolves only to relate his personal experience. When Paul spoke of only knowing about Christ and His crucifixion, he was demonstrating the foundation of the truth—the Person of Jesus. The Greeks saw this as foolishness.
The foundation of Paul’s theology was the Person of Christ, and he knew that human reason was incapable of conveying that.
Lets face it: For too long we have been bogged down in an attempt to establish the intellectual legitimacy of the Christian faith. Has this pursuit taken us from the original mission and mandate of the church—namely, to proclaim truth rather than reshaping it?
In my book No Argument for God, I am asking us to return to a faith that is OK in its absurdity. What young people want is a faith that is greater than logic and louder than argument. It is why God didn’t send us a proof text, he sent us a paradox: His Son.
High school student ministries pastor at LCBC a multi-site church in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He also teaches at Lancaster Bible College and Evangelical Seminary. This article is adapted from his book, No Argument for God: Going Beyond Reason in Conversations About Faith (IVP). You can read and see more at NoArgumentForGod.com or interact with him at NoArgumentForGod.blogspot.com.
