The quiz-show host put the question... and then responded: “Well, yes, Terry had the correct answer... but Barry found the answer offensive so the points go to Barry!”

Stone the crows – what sort of quiz show is that?  Can you even begin to imagine that kind of farcical outcome on a television quiz show?  Of course not!  And yet... isn’t it a fitting parable of what we see happening regularly in our western world today?  In our culture feelings and attitudes so often trump facts.  I think of the many times where activists have ‘cancelled’ a speaker – someone who came to spell out the facts but the activists who took offence put the pressure on so that the speaker was cancelled.

And let’s face it – in the real-live contest between faith and unbelief this is precisely what happens.  Our faith is a faith based on facts.  Jesus was born – fact!  Few people today will dispute that some 2000 years ago there was a man named Jesus of Nazareth.  This Jesus lived a wonderful life as a teacher and miracle worker – fact!  We have four separate reputable accounts of his life and work.  Jesus was executed by crucifixion under the Roman judge Pontius Pilate – fact!  Again, you’ll be hard pressed to find any reputable historian willing deny that.  Jesus arose from the dead on the third day – fact!  When Paul wrote to the new Christians at Corinth he said he could find for them 500 witnesses to the resurrection – well, not quite because a number of those witnesses had died.

So let’s go back to our mythological quiz show.  This time the question is: Who was executed by crucifixion as a criminal but after three days arose from the dead?  Our quiz show host reports: “Well, yes, Terry had the correct answer: Jesus Christ.  However Barry found that answer offensive so the points go to Barry.”  The apostle Paul already had to battle this ‘mythological quiz show’ approach back in his day.  He pointed out that the gospel story was foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews.  It was the case that for those people feelings and attitudes trumped the facts.

It’s interesting that in the New International Version of the Bible the word truth occurs 214 times.  Christianity is a belief-system, a worldview, grounded in facts.  Feelings and attitudes must always be subservient to the facts.  Truth needs to trump feelings.  I mentioned this on one occasion to a small group of young men I was teaching.  One of them was a budding young artist.  He drew for me a picture of a steam train: there was the engine in front, then came the coal-car and that was followed by the caboose – the passenger carriage.  The engine he had labelled ‘facts’; the coal-cart ‘faith’ and the caboose ‘feelings’.  It highlighted the point that it is not our feelings and attitudes that drive the life of the Christian but the facts accepted in faith.  Feelings have a place... but they follow on from the facts – which we have believingly accepted.

Or let me put it another way.  The verb to know occurs 794 times in the NIV Bible and 24 times in that letter to the Corinthians from which I just quoted.  Christians do not just believe something, in the sense that faith is a ‘leap into the dark’ – not quite knowing what is there.  No!  Christians ‘know’ what they believe.  In terms of my young artist friend’s sketch: the engine of facts comes before the coal-cart of faith.

Of course this is totally the opposite of our mythological quiz show.  The world at large, and our western society in particular, mocks and ridicules Christians as a superstitious and gullible bunch of people.  But feelings and attitudes do not trump facts and knowledge.

I must however make one qualification.  Knowledge, in the Bible, is not merely intellectual.  Some years ago I met a man who had grown up in a Christian family in South Africa.  He had regularly attended church most of his life.  When he came to Australia he became closely associated with a man who not only knew about Jesus but who appeared to know him as a person with whom it was possible to have a personal relationship.  That blew him away and he thought about that a lot.  One day the penny dropped.  Of course!  If Jesus lives then we can relate to him personally as Saviour, Lord and Friend.  ‘Fact’, ‘truth’ and ‘knowing’ are now for him a personal relationship with Jesus.

John Westendorp