The Safety Net of Reason
April 4, 2016 — 1 Corinthians 15:1–11
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you — unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
One aspect that I am so thankful for in my faith is that I am able to love the Lord with my mind as I think about the time period where the bulk of growth happened to the church. I am thankful that during my times of doubt, I am able to fall back on witness of so many people of the events that took place. I am thankful that I believe in a gospel where a person like Paul can exist. I am thankful that it was important to him that he backs up everything that he has been saying about unity with the reality of Christ’s work on the earth.
After a very long span of talking about all the things that Christians need to do in the church of Corinth to maintain order and unity, Paul suddenly gets back to reminding them that he is someone who gets to speak that authority into their church. In reminding believers who they are, he reminds them of who he is.
This gospel that Paul is reminding the believers of is the reason why the words that he had been saying about women, or tongues, or really anything at this point matter. Paul was convinced by Jesus Himself to become one of the followers of the way. Crazy stuff. I love that Paul’s story is one of a unprecedented conversion filled with mystery and fanfare, and yet he appeals to the witnesses of Christ’s resurrection.
Sometimes I fear that we want to run as far as we can to one end of the spectrum to get away from the issues of the other side. It would be very easy for my apologetic to be purely evidence based. I would love to sit down with you and talk your ear off about the historicity of Christ, and the political climate of 1st century AD. A lot of that is honestly down to the fact that I am a huge nerd, and I take that nerdom to my faith a lot. But I think that it is a mistake to tell people that the best way to evangelize is to pile a bunch of facts onto people.
How many of us actually came to faith in a reasoned sort of way — not to say no one has, but many of us came to faith for selfish reasons. I came to faith in order to get out of the consequences of my sin, others fear hell, some want a friend or a community. Many of us are drawn to Christ through selfish reasons, but God is gracious to us that in moments when we forget those reasons we have other ones to fall back on.
We shouldn’t go so far into reasonableness that we forget the mysterious reality of our faith, but we don’t want to be swept up in the mystical nature of our belief that we become unhinged from the day to day nature of Christ actually becoming a human and living in a point of history. Ultimately we should not found our belief in the correctness of our belief. We need to ask ourselves “would I still believe in Christianity if it didn’t line up with what it means to be correct and true?” If that is the case our faith might be overly found on the side of reason with us trusting in facts more than the person of Christ. On the other hand we have to be careful to not be so caught up in the story and wonder and fairy-tale-y feelings that we skip the facts and lose what was going on.
Loving God with our minds means learning and growing and discovering the facts of the story, but it also means having the smarts to realize that the gospel is above our ability to understand it. As we grow in knowledge we should start to hear ourselves say “I don’t know” a lot more, and trusting in God to work it out. At the end of the day, the evidences of our faith should be our safety net, not our foundation.
