Christian belief is, by nature, a riddle.
First of all, we cannot examine its working; we know of its existence by Scripture.
Secondly, the technical functioning of how to believe clashes with our intuitive ideas about causality and free will.
A few texts illustrate this complexity:
God must draw you (John 6:44).
You are called to believe (Acts 16:31).
Even your believing is His work within you (Philippians 2:13).
If God needs to draw us, and even my belief is caused by Him, how can we be free to choose faith?
If we are called to believe, and it is God who works our will and belief in us, how can we be blamed for not believing?
But, if we are called to believe, who are we to resist this call?
This level of complexity stems from our understanding of causality.
If A is completely caused by B, then A cannot be blamed for anything, since B is responsible for the state of A.
The question we face about Christian faith is this:
Does Christian faith follow this model — where A (our belief) is completely caused by B (God)?
An example from nature
A causing B is a description of how the physical world works. The question is whether the interplay between God and man is of such a physical nature.
God is Spirit. Man has a spirit. Do the computational laws of physics apply to spirits?
An example from love
When person A falls in love with person B, and person A shows his love through action C, what can we say with certainty about whether person B will fall in love in return? Nothing.
We simply don’t know what causes the return of love. What causes person B to love person A back?
Mutual love cannot be predicted, because it is a spiritual matter, and the nature of spirits cannot be observed.
A spirit is simply too complex to be reduced to an algorithm with variables.
Even if we could reduce the mind to an algorithm — so that we could predict love based on all neurons and/or all past behavior — we still wouldn’t know what consciousness or spirit truly is.
In addition, this example is only meant to show the complexity of the interplay between humans.
Christian belief is about the meeting of the divine Spirit with the human spirit.
As Billy Graham states: “We cannot put God in a test tube.”
The Analogy of a Car
To come to faith in Christ is something like being the fuel injector of a car, who is told that if he starts fueling the engine (believing), it is only because the Spirit has stepped on the gas pedal, initiated by the mind of the Driver — God the Father.
Our burning fuel is accepted because Christ cleansed our dirty fuel on the cross, as if He became a soot filter.
The most crucial and hardest step for the fuel injector is to trust, believe, and act — that when giving fuel, the gas pedal has already been pressed by the Spirit, desired by the Father, and that Christ has already cleansed our exhaust.
Although it almost feels blasphemous to reduce a theological theme of such weight and impact into a car analogy,
I have not come across a better example to grasp this theological concept.
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