I said something in my previous post that might have seemed harsh, but I believe it was completely true. In relation to questions related to inerrancy and the authority of scripture, I wrote, “Skeptics haggle over questions of historicity and science so they can avoid dealing with the God revealed therein, who they hope doesn’t exist.”
My point is that very few people reject Christianity primarily for intellectual reasons; they do so for emotional reasons and look for intellectual justification after the fact: “Well, science has pretty much proven that God doesn’t exist, right?” Therefore, if someone like me—whose tendency is to “live inside my head”—imagines that I will dazzle skeptics with my most well-reasoned, well-articulated arguments for the Christian faith, I will be disappointed.
Dr. Glenn Peoples, a theologian and apologist from New Zealand, picks up this theme in his latest podcast and goes much further with it.
In the Bible, in the Old Testament as well as the New, the rejection or denial of God’s sovereignty, or goodness, or worthiness of worship is always associated, not with intellectual slowness or stupidity, but with immorality, with wrongdoing. Listen to what the psalmist said in Psalm 14, verse 1: ‘The fool says in his heart there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good.’ You see the immediate leap there from the rejection of God to the embracing of evil. Ephesians chapter 4, St. Paul has some things to say along a similar line…
Now you might be thinking, That kind of sounds like propaganda: People who aren’t believers are bad, and you don’t want to be bad, so you should be a believer. That’s not really the point. I’m bad, too! On a bad day I’m really bad!… The fact is that human beings tend to rationalize. We’ll find ourselves justifying, defending, and eventually just liking the outlook on life in terms of metaphysics, religion, and so on, that suits the way that we wish to live. And this may override the fact that there may or may not be good intellectual reasons to accept or reject the view in question.
You find yourself wanting to live a certain way, all of a sudden you start thinking, ‘Uh, maybe this Christian faith isn’t true. Maybe these arguments that people have been using against it, maybe they’re quite good! Wouldn’t that be convenient?'”
Peoples goes on to back up this biblical insight with contemporary research and data.
Peoples is hardly alone in drawing a connection between our lifestyle choices and our acceptance or rejection of Christian faith. At a recent conference, Timothy Keller raised some eyebrows by making a similar point:
Drawing on his experience in urban, culture-shaping Manhattan, Keller responded that one of the biggest obstacles to repentance for revival in the Church is the basic fact that almost all singles outside the Church and a majority inside the Church are sleeping with each other. In other words, good old-fashioned fornication…
Others might not be surprised at the sheer amount of fornication but might still be asking, “Sex? Really? That’s the big hang-up? What about intellectual objections from science, or post-modern philosophy, or the church’s history of violence, or our consumerism and greed?”
Those are all there, absolutely, but just ask any college pastor and they’ll tell you the same thing. Just as C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity all those years ago, there are few of Christianity’s teachings more offensive, unpalatable, and likely to drive people away from hearing the Gospel than its sex ethic. Many college students and young adults don’t want to turn to God, or at least not the kind of solid God you find in the Gospel, because He has opinions on sex we find restrictive…
Keller illustrated the point by talking about a tactic, one that he admittedly said was almost too cruel to use, that an old college pastor associate of his used when catching up with college students who were home from school. He’d ask them to grab coffee with him to catch up on life. When he’d come to the state of their spiritual lives, they’d often hem and haw, talking about the difficulties and doubts now that they’d taken a little philosophy, or maybe a science class or two, and how it all started to shake the foundations. At that point, he’d look at them and ask one question, “So who have you been sleeping with?” Shocked, their faces would inevitably fall and say something along the lines of, “How did you know?” or a real conversation would ensue. Keller pointed out that it’s a pretty easy bet that when you have a kid coming home with questions about evolution or philosophy, or some such issue, the prior issue is a troubled conscience. Honestly, as a Millennial and college director myself, I’ve seen it with a number of my friends and students—the Bible unsurprisingly starts to become a lot more “doubtful” for some of them once they’d had sex.