Good News Quote #34

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

One last unit in that army of cultural stereotypes fighting against people who think too much is what I call the "God makes no sense" move. My students make this move a lot. They say things like "I can't explain it, it must be God" or "It makes absolutely no sense, you just have to believe it" or "Faith means you have to let yourself believe in something crazy and illogical that you can't understand." These are the cliches of people who have taken to heart the warning that they'd better not think too much. It looks to me like they're trying to preserve their faith by not even admitting to themselves that they have questions about it.


And this is sad. It treats Christian faith as if it were make-believe. If you're a child trying to hang on to your belief in Santa Claus, then you really do need to keep yourself from thinking about it too much. Critical thinking really will kill your faith in Santa Claus. But the Christian faith is true, so it can stand up to serious questioning.

Good News Quote #15

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

But then -- we might want to ask -- how do we know the Spirit is working within us at all? Like many "how do you know?" questions, this turns out to be a very modern obsession, which often results in our searching our own hearts instead of searching the Scriptures. The biblical answer to questions about how we know God keeps coming back to God's word and especially his promise. There is a promise of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures (Gal. 3:14; see also Acts 2:38). If we think that's not good enough, then we'll end up having to look to ourselves for an answer. So the more anxious we are, the less we trust God's word, and the more likely we are to try looking into our own hearts to find the Holy Spirit.


But honestly, God's word is good enough. It is hard for us sinners to trust it -- we would much rather see things for ourselves than trust what God has to say, even about himself -- but trusting God's word is what faith does, and faith is how we know who God really is.