Thought of the Day 05.21.10

Confined together in a van for an entire week, it was inevitable that the Evangelical Christians and their Jewish tour guide would have conversations about salvation and Jesus. What I found fascinating was the sense of frustration once people realized that this Jew knew everything they knew about Jesus and yet didn’t accept Him as Lord.

Their impulse, of course, was to provide arguments to persuade him of the truth of Christianity. I thought this was a mistake, since I thought it fairly likely that in leading Evangelicals on tours for 30 years, he might have had such conversations before. Eventually, it dawned on the apologists that here was a man who knew everything they knew and still refused to believe in the way they did.

This was understandably distressing. After all, if someone else could hold all those beliefs and not come to the same conclusion, how valid can that conclusion be? One must either become suspicious of the conclusion itself or else of the idea that it can be successfully reached by the mechanism of mere rational argument.