Winning Our Way to a Lost Christian Witness

This week, a Christian friend shared a new claim about an alleged health cure based on an event that never happened. Another shared what the briefest of searches would have revealed was a falsehood about a political foe. The short-term “win” is often a long way from the truth.

The specifics don’t matter, nor which side they affirmed. Neither example, nor the constant stream of such claims, is notable in itself — we’ve all seen the stuff and shared it (or, at least, wanted to). Why? How can we possibly feel good about consuming it or passing it along? Because it bolsters our sense of having chosen the “right” side in our divided culture.

All of us are bombarded with this affirmation porn constantly. And we love it.

This week’s examples of fake cures and political chicanery were brought into relief when a theological observation I posted led to a discussion on the historicity of the Resurrection with several thoughtful skeptics. Discernment looms large in discussing how we weigh the historical evidence for Jesus’s triumph over death, emphasizing the costliness of those momentary “victories.”

Just as the problematic claims above were framed as brave questioning of prevailing narratives, so too is the whole Christian belief system. “Jesus is a troublemaker” and “Jesus is dead and gone” would have had majority support at points, after all.

I am all for questioning convention in pursuit of the genuinely true. The problem is when scorching our opponents matters more than truth. We determine the value of our credibility with every word we share. If we regularly purvey cultural fairytales affirming our preferences, we invite others to see our faith in Jesus as another such yarn.

When Christians share our faith, we depend on God’s Spirit to do the real work. I am never going to manage to argue someone into faith. But we certainly pray our lives are constructive instruments for God’s use, not obstacles He overcomes.

In the Resurrection discussion, one of the skeptics writing in asserted the Christian faith was based on several logical fallacies he listed out. Those philosophical objections implied faith’s foundation was nothing more than a bunch of people making claims and believing them because they wanted to.

Christians have always held that the story of God’s redemption is rooted in truth and in history, not such wish fulfillment. With that in mind, I wrote:

I appreciate your focus on philosophical argumentation and your logical fallacy points are spot on when it comes to establishing philosophical propositions. However, unlike formulating a mathematical theorem, historical examinations are more akin to court cases. To examine if George Washington were ever president of the United States, if an Apollo mission landed on the moon or if Jesus were Resurrected, we must do so via the preponderance of evidence.

You are right to cite the ad populum [appeal to what a lot of people believe] fallacy if my claim were simply that a lot of people believed something [that Jesus was Resurrected or is God]. Likewise, that it were a tautology [circular reasoning] if it were merely “it’s true because people believe it.” Instead, I’m speaking to how we establish credible testimony. As a principle in courts, and in life, we understand there is a difference between abstractly holding a belief and eyewitness testimony — especially when the witness is under duress to deny the thing he or she instead affirms. The costliness of signals has a distilling effect, as we regularly see demonstrated when people change their story when placed in court under threat of perjury.

Thus, in a court, finding more witnesses and witnesses who have closer proximity to an event is a quite reasonable — and often, the only — way of establishing if something is likely to have happened. For your question, the thing worth establishing is either (a) “was Jesus resurrected?” or (b) “did He do miracles?” If either of those can be affirmed, that would lend credence to other things He said, thus dramatically increasing the likelihood of His divinity.

In other words, Christians can and should proclaim that we have credible reason to believe Jesus is alive and is God. But what if we also regularly share as true other things that can’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny?

In a courtroom, if someone is found to be consistently an unreliable witness, his or her testimony is considerably less impactful. So too in life: someone who regularly shares untrue things with us is someone we’ll be hesitant to believe, even when, in fact, the things they say are true.

The person I was corresponding with was convinced Christians believed things about Jesus just because we want them to be true. Reflecting, I was haunted by those baseless things we Christians share concerning other parts of life. “No wonder people think that’s how we approach Jesus, if that’s what we do the rest of the time.”

As a kid, the prizes at the arcade counter seemed immensely valuable as I walked up with prize tickets hard-earned from Skee-Ball. But my winnings were always far less than it had cost my parents for me to play.

Those social posts and water cooler victories feel so good. But how many credibility tokens did those wins cost us?

Trading our reputations, given by the Heavenly Father, for ephemeral wins-at-any-cost in the culture wars comes up hollow. How much better when we spend our credibility pointing people to the only true win: a relationship with Him.

Every president, including Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton, has lied to us. Cable news talking heads and social media influencers regularly misinform and misdirect us, too. You know who doesn’t? God.

We need to be allied with the truth — with God — not some politician or cultural wind.