Josh McDowell’s book written in the 1990s, from which I am assuming this question stems, searches for conclusive evidence about the Christian faith that ultimately demands one make a decision or declare a verdict. Lee Strobel also made a “case for Christ.” Both individuals identified themselves as skeptics who were overwhelmed by evidence that Jesus was Lord and Savior over lunatic and liar. These are interesting cultural artifacts representing a tight coupling of modernity, evangelicalism, and apologetics.
At their best, their approaches offer glimpses of personal journeys. McDowell and Strobel model an intentional quest to understand the Christian message, which gave them language for understanding themselves and their worlds. Whether one agrees with the methodology, they modeled an honest pursuit and were open to personally changing. Journeys like these take guts and hopefully inspire anyone who lives in ignorant bliss (“I won’t seek so I don’t have to change”) not to stay there.
Therefore, I heartily encourage people seeking to make meaning of their worlds. Further, I invite all to consider that the Christian narrative offers a way of navigating this world that gives people identity, community, and purpose. Christians believe that Jesus has made our journey possible through his life, death, and resurrection, which promise hope and restoration for everything. However, I am not hopeful about “giving evidence that demands a verdict” as a methodology for discovery. Here’s why….
It Over-Simplifies the Transformative Process
Those who believe that convincing evidence alone brings change fail to appreciate the complexity of people. Conversion is hardly a purely cognitive process. There are multiple factors that influence when or why people change (or don’t change). Choices affect—and are affected by—relationships, identity, and aspirations. They bring risks, costs, and pain. Often I find that those who push evidence-demanding verdicts (whether they are altar-calling youth pastors, street evangelists, or over-zealous small group leaders) fail to appreciate what they are asking of others. They want others to make decisions divorced from real-life contexts. We insult people’s existence when we ignore the non-cognitive aspects of the human condition. Demanding evidence risks being narrow, uncompassionate and mystery-less. Gospel and transformation are (thankfully) bigger than this.
It Reinforces Oppressive Relationships
Paulo Friere believed that educating others through what he called a banking system methodology was problematic. Banking assumes that an enlightened one holds the knowledge and banks (or deposits) it into others’ empty minds that simply need to be filled with the right information to produce the right behaviors. Christians often adopt this posture, assuming that they must give the truth to obtuse, ignorant pagans who don’t know anything. Per Friere, this ignores the meaning-making ability each one possesses and reinforces passive learning, which abuses power in an attempt to change and control others.
Oppressive banking is evident in youth ministry. We see it in the way camp counselors try to get adolescents to make a decision. We see it in the way adults bemoan the adolescent biblical illiteracy and assume that the right speaker or curriculum will “get them on fire for God.” Adolescents are not empty vessels, and more evidence rarely changes their behavior. Instead, these practices teach adolescents to accept a faith passively (“I didn’t get anything out of it”) and live compartmentalized lives that go through Christian motions to please adults, while they live their real beliefs elsewhere.
Churches lament that adolescents and emerging adults just don’t “get” the Christian message. Maybe the church’s evidence/verdict and banking system approaches have underestimated young people as image bearers and meaning makers, reinforcing oppressive approaches that alienate rather than welcome. Maybe it’s time for youth workers to discover and nurture image-bearing evidence already present adolescents’ lives rather than trying to discover the right, evidential curriculum.
A More Helpful Way
I have been most helped by the metaphor posed by Christian Smith (cf. Soul Searching: The religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers). He likens faith to a second language. Like any second language, the best way to learn it is to be immersed in a culture where it is spoken. Language is more than words and grammar. It has history, context, and symbol. Similarly, faith is best learned when expressed through language (theology, concepts), situated in day-to-day experiences, integrated within trusted relationships, and tried in safe contexts (family, friendships, faith communities). Like any language, the language of faith takes time to become fluently part of us.
The evidence, then, is not disembodied facts but is connected to and flows from narrative and community. The verdict isn’t a one-time decision from oppressive demands to conformity but daily decisions expressed in life and language as one makes sense of one’s connection with God, others, and world. This messy journey of transformation should challenge youth ministry programs away from evidence-that-demands-a-verdict methodologies and toward contexts where a Christian second language can be tried and eventually spoken by a generation that is more than ready for it.
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I’ll be frank. I’ve never met a Christian who was argued into the kingdom.
Really. I’ve met folks who heard powerful personal testimonies that turned their hearts toward God. I’ve met believers who heard convicting words about sin in their own lives, which led them (sometimes sooner, sometimes later, and not always happily) to bend the knee. I’ve known people who sensed the presence of Jesus in moments of crisis—car accidents, AIDS, drug addiction—and couldn’t ignore him. I’ve known people who broke down during communion or on a mission trip or while reading a novel or in the midst of an orchestral performance or while gazing at a work of art or upon watching a biblical drama. And I’ve known folks who silently observed the holy living of Christians and wanted what the believers had.
But I’ve never known someone who was argued into faith.
I suppose such people exist. Lee Strobel, maybe? Josh McDowell himself? But even the most famous apologist of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis, traced the beginnings of his conversion not to late-night arguments with J.R.R. Tolkien but to a fantasy story he read as a teenager. Lewis wrote, “I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception.”
The author of Phantastes, a Victorian minister named George MacDonald, snuck in Christian meaning through the back door of Lewis’s imagination. And it had far greater effect on Lewis than any reasoned argument for the truth. That’s because all of Lewis’s intellectual defenses were on high alert. The front door was locked, bolted, and double-bolted with all his arguments for atheism. If someone had come knocking with a truckload of evidence, demanding a verdict, Lewis would have laughed and gone to bed.
In addition (or perhaps more honestly?), he wanted nothing to do with what he called the Transcendental Interferer. It didn’t matter that all the reasoned arguments favored Christianity: he just wanted to be left alone to do as he pleased. Trouble is, he left the back door of his imagination unlocked. Oops.
It was many years before he finally surrendered his will and intellect to Jesus; but it was the novel that, in his words, initially “baptized” his imagination and thus launched him on the journey. After his conversion, he went on to write some of the most powerfully imaginative Christian literature of our time—literature which has had a similar effect as Phantastes on many a young heart.
But we youth workers and pastors keep pressing the evidence, demanding a verdict. Instead, shouldn’t we be writing novels?
Yes, one might argue, but Lewis also wrote some of the greatest Christian apologetics of the twentieth century—works that have had an equally huge impact.
True. But impact on whom? On those who are confirmed pagans, naturalists, or atheists? On those with a carefully articulated non-Christian belief system and a robust sense of religious identity? Or has his impact been on those who are nominally Christian, maybe even nominally something else, flummoxed or even swayed by arguments against the faith until they hear calm reasons for it?
I don’t know the answer. But I suspect that most of the people who will be buying Lee Strobel’s new Case for Christ Study Bible are not atheists.
Maybe it depends on what we mean by evidence. Most of the time, in our modern society, it means scientific proof or irrefutable argument. We want archaeological digs to confirm that Noah’s ark really existed. We want the ultimate logical explanation for why someone had to die in order for me to be with God. And this is what we youth workers are trained to supply for our youth. But is that what Christianity offers?
I’m not so sure. What the biblical eyewitnesses saw were miracles. This or that person saw the resurrected Lazarus, watched Jesus calm the sea, put a hand in Jesus’ side. Yet these things cannot be duplicated by scientific experiment. And meanwhile, as Lewis himself said, God’s way of salvation is about as obvious, at first glance, as how babies are made. You mean Mommy and Daddy—what?
Perhaps we’re just supposed to introduce youth to the baby. Or would that be considered evidence?
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As a college student, I had the book Evidence that Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, on my bookshelf. Honestly, though, I never read much of it. I wasn’t someone who needed a lot of proof that God was real or his Bible was believable.
I believed in God because of what I had experienced and because I’d seen God work in my own life and in the lives of other people. I believed in God because of my relationships with people who knew him. Their lives and lifestyles drew me in and convinced me of God’s reality. I wanted what they had; the joy and peace and relationship/friendship with God. Their ability to connect with God as a friend and Father was intriguing to me. I was also convinced by a mission trip to Jamaica, where, at the age of 16, I met people who had next to nothing materially but who had a depth of knowledge and love for God far beyond my own.
Today I believe people need shoe leather, not doctrine. They need to see people live out the kingdom, not just talk about it. Too many people have gotten their image of Christians and God from TV and movies. The Simpsons, South Park, Dogma, etc., just enhance the stereotypes of Christians and do nothing to introduce them to the person of Jesus as found in the Gospels. Also, it seems to me that our media portrays Christians as bigoted, biased, and always “against” things. The stereotype is that we are all anti-people who are constantly fighting and angry about life. As followers of Jesus, we are not seen as positive, helpful, compassionate people.
“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” John 13:34-36 (New Living Translation)
The evidence young people need to see is love, acceptance, and forgiveness. They long to see Jesus lived out in us. And get to know people with a 24/7 faith that lives out the kingdom, serving others in the real world, not just in the church building. Young people today and people who have not grown up in church need to see in order to believe. They must see love practically lived out in us and through us. They are hungry to know people with a 24/7 faith that does what it says.
There is also a need for facts. The evidence needed today is an understanding of how the Bible was put together; how the various documents were chosen to be a part of the canon. They also need facts about the other world religions. Since we live in a pluralistic society, we all need a working knowledge of what other religions believe and practice. Because there are distinct differences as well as important similarities, education can help promote dialogue, not fear—or worse, hate. We definitely need evidence of love, joy, and hope, not fear, anger, and hatred.
People also need evidence that God is actually faithful and personally loving; and that his heart breaks over injustice and suffering. To me, evidence in the twenty-first century is to live in a way that reflects this. It means living out hospitality to friends, neighbors, and strangers; giving time and resources to the needy, not just to the church buildings; caring about each other, the planet, and people who are very different from us.
Some will still want and need hardcore facts and figures in order to believe in God and his Word. Many more will just need to have a relationship with someone who is living out their faith and who is willing to love them where they are on their journey and allow them to experience God’s love firsthand.
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Comments
But I still think evidence that demands a verdict is very important. If not for intial conversion then for one's on going discipleship. If the basis for our faith is the God of the Bible then we need to know we can rely on it. Paul himself says that, "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith" (1 Cor 15:14).
The historicity of Jesus is also important because that is squarely where the so called New Atheists have their guns pointed. They say things that threaten the faith as something stupid and unreasonable. There are only so many times you can hear that before you need to make sure you're not believing something and making sacrifices in vain hope. How easy it is in moments of doubt to doubt our past experiences of God or to reinterpret our feelings of God's presences as a made up emotional high. It's less easy to do that with historical evidence.
So, I guess I just wanted to say I understand your point, that it might not be the thing that converts the majority of people, though I do know of at least one person who has been converted through Strobel's work, but evidence of the Christian faith is still vitally important to our on going journey.
Keep up the great work. I enjoy reading the points of view on this site
God bless