Less and Less Like a Judge at a Flower Show

Dear Ehud,

Thanks for your reply, and all your questions were on the nose. The point you made about dealing up front with the family issue at some level made sense to me, but there is still a sense in which we can only cross that bridge when we come to it. Let me explain what I mean.

In my previous letter, I said that if we conclude that Jesus did rise from the dead, thus vindicating the Christian claim that He is the Messiah of Israel, a decision would have to be made at that time concerning what you were going to do about it. At that point, all the issues would be laid out on the table in front of you with a terrifying clarity. That is what I was referring to in my last letter.

But there is another sense in which you have to deal with that question now, at least to a certain extent. If you know enough about your own constitution and personality and situation to be able to say that you would not become a Christian at that point, even if you had been convinced that Jesus was raised, my encouragement to you would be for you to begin the intellectual dishonesty now. Gathering more light to sin against would in no way make your situation better. If you already know that you are not going to dig when you find the location of the treasure, then why bother walking up the mountain to get there? Why carry the shovel all that way?

The Christian faith is a serious and demanding religion, one that cannot be approached in a whatever sort of way. If you know for a fact that you would not take that final step, then it makes no sense whatever to take the first one. You should save your breath for cooling your porridge.

But on the other hand, if you know what you should do if you came to that conclusion, and you hope that you would do it, although you are entirely unsure about where you might summon the strength to do it . . . well, that’s a different matter. You would actually then be at the point where you could cry out to God for that strength. So that is what I was referring to. That is the sense in which we should wait until we get there.

That would be the time where you would need to count the cost fully, which Jesus was very explicit that His disciples would always need to do. That reality is baked into all of this.

And He was very clear that this cost, this cross, might very well involve close members of your family. His words are not at all ambiguous.

In the parallel passage in Matthew (Matt. 10:37) we can tell that Jesus did not mean that we were supposed to entertain malice in our hearts toward our parents—the fifth commandment remains in the Decalogue in the new covenant, after all. We know this because He says in Matthew that whoever loves his father or mother “more than me” is not worthy to be a disciple. In other words, our love for the truth, and our love for the one who is the personal foundation of all Truth, is so fierce that all our other loves pale in comparison.

But there is another gospel twist to this. Your parents are the most important relationship in your life right now. When you were experimenting with those other intellectual toys and fads, you had other relationships that you thought could rival your relationship with your parents, but they all blew up, including those two crazy ex-girlfriends. And your parents have been constant, and they are number one to you right now. If you were to come to Christ, He insists upon taking that primary place, which means that your parents would then be necessarily demoted.

The twist is this. You would find, now that you are in fellowship with the one who represents the very love of God to us, you are in a better position to love your “lesser loves” rightly. And this means that you would love your parents more with them at #2 than you were able to do before when they were #1.

And this would be absolutely necessary, because you would need to be loving them far more than before in order deal with and overcome the hurt they would feel over you becoming a Christian. You would be in a position to deal with this, I think, because of how you described their likely reaction to me. They would be “grieved beyond words,” but they would not cut you off or disown you. You know this from how they responded to the conversion of one of your cousins eight years ago. What this means is that they would be in a position to see and feel how much more you are honoring them as your parents. They would know about their demotion, but they would experience it as a promotion.

So back to the top. If the idea of becoming a Christian is not a live prospect before you, then I would urge you to stay away from the question. To pursue it as a form of intellectual entertainment would be to prostitute the purpose of our reason. Chesterton says somewhere that the purpose of an open mind is the same as that of an open mouth. It is meant to close on something. In other words, this is a conversation with a decision waiting for you at the end of it.

What I want to do in our exchanges is to present you with various evidences and proofs from the Word of God, beginning with the Old Testament. But as I said in the previous letter, we are not playing for counters, and this is a point that has to do with the very nature of proof.

When I seek to prove something to you, as I will be starting to do in my next letter, I will be presenting arguments to you. The mental image you might have of this would be me in the position of an attorney arguing a case, and with you as the judge, determining whether my arguments hold water or not. And that is certainly the way it will appear at the start. But after a certain point, the real nature of proof will start to become more and more evident. To prove something is to create a moral obligation on the part of the one hearing the proof.

And that means that it is likely that at some point in our interactions, your mental picture of what we are doing will change. You will feel less and less like a judge at a flower show, making determinations about who and who will not get the blue ribbon, and more and more like a prisoner in the dock, on trial for his life. I can promise you a certain level of discomfort, in other words.

So I am eager to begin, if you are still game. Just let me know.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson