Tips for Sharing Your Faith: #3 – Give them enough rope

I've been gathering several tips for Christians to better share and defend their faith when talking with those who hold to different beliefs. If you've missed any of the other posts, you can read them all here.

One of the biggest errors Christians make in faith conversations is they think they are the ones who have to do all of the defending. I've heard from so many Christians how they would be talking with a skeptic who would shoot off about four or five objections to the faith, like "how can you really believe a man rose from the dead, " "How can you know the Bible is from God," or "What makes you think your interpretation is true?" In many of these situations, the Christian will try to answer every objection thrown at him only to find that the objector has many more waiting in the wings.

Sometimes objections are simply thrown out as stall tactics, something I will talk about next time. However, more often it's a signal that the person is desperately trying to hold onto his or her own belief by undercutting yours. But real dialogue doesn't work that way. I have always held that the reason-giving game goes two ways. If someone wants to know why you think the Christian worldview makes sense, you may answer, but then you have every right to ask them about the problems within their own worldview.

Make sure they know what they're talking about

Napoleon has been quoted as saying "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." When you begin to ask questions, you may be surprised to find that the skeptic doesn't know quite as much about his own beliefs as he thinks. As an example, columnist Thomas Sowell tells of a time where he asked the simple question of "what do you mean by that" and it completely unraveled his challenger:

As someone who has taught at several colleges, I am all too painfully aware of the erosion of thinking over the years. But even after leaving the classroom, I have continued to encounter the same mindlessness everywhere. For example, an environmentalist to whom I presented certain facts responded by saying, "But, they're raping the planet!"

"What specifically does that mean?" I asked.

He was as speechless as someone who had just played the ace of trumps and was then told it was not enough to win.1

When in conversations, you should always make sure the other person can define their terms appropriately. "What do you mean by that?" is a very powerful question that asks the skeptic to go beyond trite or repackaged objection. It also helps you see if they truly have understood the issues involved. It cuts down on misinterpretation, as well. Many times what they mean when they say words that can carry a technical meaning and what we hear can be two different things. Mormons will freely admit there is one god – but they mean one god for them. Clearing up these types of confusion can be a big step forward.

Look for self-refuting statements

Beyond misdefinitions, another key to showing the problems with other worldviews is to identify positions that the skeptic holds that contradict each other. In other words, there are certain positions that cannot possibly both be true at the same time.

Sometimes you can even find contradictions even in single statements. These kinds of statements are known as self-refuting or self-defeating statements. A self-refuting statement is one that is so broad it actually cuts its own legs out from underneath itself. A classic example would be someone saying something like "I cannot say one sentence in English." Obviously, that statement is itself a sentence in English so it cannot possibly be true.

Here are some other self-refuting statements that are common when talking about faith, as well as follow-up questions you can give:

• "There is no such thing as absolute truth." Ask "is it absolutely true that there is no such thing as absolute truth?"
• "The only real truth is that which can be proven by science" Ask "Can you tell me what kind of science you have performed to find that out? What experiments did you perform that gave the result of ‘any truth not proven by science is false.'"
• "You shouldn't push your morality on others." Ask "Are you saying it is morally wrong to push one's morality on another person? Is that your moral position? Why are you trying to push that on me?"

There are many other ways to approach self-refuting statements. I've written a bit about other self-refuting positions here and here. But the big takeaway here is to make sure that you aren't only playing defense in your faith-talks with others. One of the biggest advantages you have as a Christian is the Christian worldview is both externally and internally coherent and it provides a better explanation of the world that other belief systems.

It is not only Christians have to account for and justify their beliefs; everyone does. The reason-giving game goes both ways. So probe a bit and see if you can uncover the other person's confusion about their beliefs. You might be surprised at what you find.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

References

1. Sowell, Thomas. "Using The Church Burnings To Scapegoat Conservatives." The Seattle Times. The Seattle Times, 26 June 1996. Web. 14 Nov. 2014. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960626&slug=2336335.
Image courtesy Frits Ahlefeldt and licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationa1.

Tips for Sharing Your Faith: #2 – Listen to People

One of the things that irritates me more and more these days is the push for "suggestive selling" at fast food restaurants. Whenever I pull up to a drive-thru, I've usually looked at the menu and I know what I want to order. But when the attendant comes on the speaker she or she first pummels me with asking if I'd enjoy whatever their new special item is. This causes me to regroup for a second and recall my original order. Sometimes even as I'm ordering, they ask "what size would you like" or "would you like to add a XXX for only $1.49?" They will talk right over me when I'm in the middle of an order! I've even had attendants miss my drink order because they were too busy following their script.

I understand that fast food chains want to introduce new options that I may not be aware of, and I understand that some cash registers require the options to be noted in a certain order, but talking over customers while they are trying to order is still terrible customer service. Customers can choose many different restaurants; they're the ones with the money and they should feel like the cashier cares enough to get their order right before offering any add-ons.

Learning to Listen

The same is true when sharing your faith. Yesterday, I began a series of tips to help Christians better share and defend their faith. I said in that article that asking questions is crucial to being an effective ambassador for Christ. When I was first starting out in apologetics, I know that one of my bad habits was to talk with people and as they brought up a certain point, I would try to muster my responses while they were still talking. I was looking at apologetics like a tennis match: if he drops back, I'll rush the net, if he moves to the left, I'll aim for the right.

But this is exactly the wrong way to go about having a conversation! You aren't conversing with another person when you are strategizing instead of listening. Just like the over-zealous cashier in the example above, then you starts planning your responses while the other person is still speaking, your mind isn't focused on what they're saying and you aren't really hearing them. For someone who isn't just trying to fight but really wants answers, this is off-putting and rude. They may not wish to talk about these things with you a second time if they think all you're interested is talking about your position regardless of what they say.

The Second Grade Class Photo Approach

This is why I encourage you to use the "Second Grade Class Photo" approach. Do you remember those awkward class photos that your entire class used to take in elementary school? You know, the ones with the rows of children and the teachers standing on either side. When the school photos were developed and passed back to the students, what's the very first thing you did? You looked for yourself in that picture! That's human nature; we care about how we look or how we are perceived.

When engaging other in conversation, you can use that knowledge to help make sure the other person feels heard and knows you're listening. As I said last time, start by simply asking a lot of questions. I always ask "tell me, why did you come to believe this position?" That's a key question and can take your conversation in a completely different direction. As you ask more questions, you may begin to see that they hold contradictory positions on certain things. This is where tactics like the Columbo tactic can be handy.

Repeat their argument back to them

The Class Photo technique accomplishes a few things. First, it makes the person you're talking with feel important. I've always been told I'm a great conversationalist when the topic is about that person. Secondly, it informs you of their beliefs.  But just as importantly, it makes sure you aren't mischaracterizing their position. We should never offer straw men of someone else's position. The best way to guard against that is to listen and ask if you've understood them correctly. You should be able to repeat the argument back to that person and have them say "Yes, that's what I mean."

Lastly, you should be looking for the main idea or concept that drives their belief. There is usually one real issue underlying a specific position. It could be their not wanting to answer to a god, a woman who is saddled with guilt over her abortion, or simply that they don't understand the historic Christian position. Whatever it is, ask questions like "and why do you hold that view" or "Do you think this is one of the more important reasons you believe in X? If not, what would you say is an important reason?" Many times the issue isn't intellectual but emotional, and finding that out will make for a very different conversation. So, let's learn to listen.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

Tips for Sharing Your Faith: #1 - Slow Down!

I don't think it's too hard to realize that in our secular culture, Christians have faced more and more resistance to their beliefs. Sharing one's faith can be difficult when others seem so antagonistic to it, but there are ways that we as Christians can be more effective in standing up for what we believe and sharing it with others.

In Matthew 11:16 Jesus said "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (ESV). Such a picture shows the adversarial nature that the Christian worldview faces. So, to be wise, we want to make sure we are planning on how to be more effective in having intelligent conversations. It's with that in mind that I want to offer eight tips for sharing and defending your faith to others. These techniques are ones I use all the time and they have been proven to be effective in real-world encounters with others. I'll spend the next couple of weeks going through each, so be sure to come back every day and follow the entire thread.

Many times Christians want to get to the "punch line" too soon!

The first tip is a crucial one because it's a mistake I see Christians make all the time: they go too fast. I've seen so many people who are talking with non-believers and they will jump straight from the question of "Are you a Christian?" to "You must recognize you're a sinner and Jesus came to save you." That's a big leap for someone who isn't familiar with the Christian concepts of the fallen nature of man or redemption. Heck, the person may not believe in the Bible, or that Jesus was even a real person! Christians can be too anxious to "get to the Gospel" when significant groundwork may need to be laid first.

So, my first tip is simply slow down. When Paul visited the synagogues during his missionary journeys, we see that he would sometimes spend weeks discussing why Jesus is the Messiah, and those people already accepted the ideas of God, the Old Testament Scripture, their sinfulness, and the need for a Messiah to come. The Christian today doesn't know if the one with whom they're speaking holds to any of those things.

It's hard to change beliefs

Remember that when you are discussing Christianity with another, what you are really doing is asking that person to change his or her beliefs. As I've written before, that's not an easy task. No one can force themselves to believe anything. Beliefs change only through the exposure to new evidence or experiences or seeing a contradiction in the belief itself. That means it takes time and purpose to provide new ideas and explore existing beliefs the other person holds.  Before you launch into a case for your own view, here are a few questions you should ask yourself to make sure you properly understand the other person's position:

• What does this person actually believe?  Do I have it right?
  
• Why do they believe that way?  Is this an emotional rather than intellectual position?
• What do they know and what are they assuming?

This means that apologetics and evangelism starts by asking questions instead of making statements. Once you can answer each of the questions above, you should be able to build a better foundation for your arguments.

To see all the posts in this series, click here.

The Difference Between God Being Understandable and Illogical

I recently received a question from a Ethan, who had read my article answering the question "Who Created God?" Ethan wasn't satisfied with my answer that God is a being who is eternal; he has no beginning. He wrote:

How can you say that it is reasonable that something has existed for eternity? Existence for eternity is incomprehensible; just as incomprehensible as something coming from nothing.

What Ethan failed to understand is that there's a difference between something being fully understandable, such as an eternally existing being, and something being logically incoherent, such as something coming from nothing. There are a lot of things we don't fully understand yet we accept as true. For example, there are certain properties of quantum mechanics that just don't seem to make sense to us, but when we use the calculations based on those principles, they produces very accurate results. Because we don't know all there is to know about quantum laws, it is understandable that we would find things mysterious, yet we trust the results because they are reliable.

The second class of ideas, those that are logically incoherent, are completely different. These are things that are not simply misunderstood, but impossible to ever achieve because they violate the laws of logic. For example, if I were to ask if the number two smells worse than the number four, you would immediately tell me that such a question is preposterous. Numbers are abstract object, they aren't physical and scent is a physical characteristic. To try to compare physical characteristics of non-physical entities is simply silly. It cannot work. This is known as a category error in logic.

Similarly, to say a something came from a nothing is to endow the nothingness with the power of creation. But, just like the numbers issue, you have a problem. Nothing by definition has zero properties. IT cannot create because it doesn't have the property of creative ability. Nothing simply means "no thing". That's why the idea of "out of nothing nothing comes" has been recognized as true as long as it has.

Since we as human beings have always existed inside time and we all have a beginning, the idea of an eternal being is definitely a hard one to wrap one's mind around. But an eternal being isn't any more incoherent than the numbers two and four being eternally even. There we never a time where two or four could ever be considered indivisible by two. God's eternal existence isn't a contradiction, it simply is a bigger idea than we can fully comprehend.

One last point. Since we know that something cannot come from nothing, and the universe is a something that indeed have a beginning, then that should tell you at the very minimum there has to be something else out there and that something needs to be eternal. Whatever begins to exist must have some type of cause for its existence. So, if an eternally exiting thing is impossible, then the universe itself can not have existed from eternity past. Therefore, Ethan is now faced with a real dilemma: where did the universe come from?

Building Faith Muscles in Your Kids

Last week, I got to have a nice conversation with my eighteen year old son about some different things that's been on his mind. He told me that he's been mulling over concepts of predestination and free will, and reading up on the subject.  We discussed the Calvinist and Arminian models as well as Molinism. We also talked about the nature and purpose of salvation and touched on creation models.

Some of you may think that because I'm an apologist, our family has "theology hour" or some such thing.  That would work about as well in my home full of teenage boys as it would in yours. However, there are a few things you can do to nurture the faith of your children.

1. Realize that It's Their Faith You Want to Develop

I think it's natural that people want the best for their children. In affluent cultures such as ours, that desire sometimes gets mistranslated, though. As parents we can mistake providing a safe, loving home for our kids into providing a care-free area for them to grow up where every difficulty is eliminated or marginalized as much as possible.

Probably the most important principle I can offer is this first one: your desire is not to give your kids your faith, but to have them develop a strong faith of their own. This is key. Teenagers are naturally inclined to seek out meaningful lives. They actually want to understand their world and do things that are important. But our kids don't yet have the experience to know how to go about understanding the world. They're like a young hockey player who has some raw talent, but who doesn't know what it takes to make it in professional athletics.

Your job as parent is to train them. You can't simply tell them what to believe, you have to ask them what they think in a certain situation. You have to let them understand the basics of Christianity then ask them how they would express it. This means drawing their attention to big topics.

One way you can do that is to use movies to point out different worldviews.  For example, my family may go watch the latest superhero action movie. The movie is a lot of fun, but I also try to draw attention to the values the film is promoting. Listen to their ideas of why this hero is so cool and ask why would they want to be like him or her. Ask a lot of questions! The more you explore their point of view, the more they will see where their beliefs may be inadequate. Just as a young athlete must get acquainted with the rules of the game and know the mechanics of moving  on ice skates, so the young Christian must learn to stand upon those things he or she believes. We are to train our children in the way they should go; we shouldn't try to carry them there.

2. Faith Requires Exercise to Grow Stronger

Next, don't shun tough questions that they have or difficult situations in which they're placed. We have a tendency as parents to want to "helicopter" our kids out of uncomfortable or difficult situations. But doing so actually impedes their growth. Faith is like a muscle; in order to make is stronger, one must use it.

This is again just like developing an athlete. You would never take a person who only played in a neighborhood league and force them to face the professionals. Athletes grow by joining leagues where the level of play is higher than they're used to, but where they can be coached and receive additional instruction on how to improve. As they grow, they're own style and skill come to the fore.

One way I help youth ministries do this is by leading different apologetics missions trips to places like Salt Lake City, Utah or Berkeley, CA. We take kids out of their comfortable environment and train them how to interact with students on a college campus who do not share their Christian beliefs. They get to dialogue with atheists or others and they then can see how those views compare to their own. All the while, we are training the students and talking with them after every encounter.

The problem is if we don't let our kids struggle just a bit with tough questions or with objections to their faith, they will never learn that what they believe is actually able to withstand the pressure. I've talked with many people who in college lost their faith. It wasn't because they thought the objections to Christianity were too difficult to overcome. Instead, they concluded that, since their parents and pastors told them to just ignore those "troublemakers" with tough questions that Christianity didn't really care about the truth at all. Since they had never faced someone antagonistic to their beliefs before, they never knew that Christianity could handle to toughest shots thrown at it.

Our kids can do amazing things. They are truly interested in forming their beliefs, but that formation requires them to have some experience with those beliefs. Help them grow into mature Christians by allowing them to explore their faith and be challenged every once in a while. The conversations that result may surprise you!