They Are Not Asking For The Argument

He can do the whole thing in about eleven minutes if you let him.

The historical reliability of the manuscripts. The problem of evil, both the logical form and the evidential form, with the free will defense set out properly. The fine tuning constants. The empty tomb and the four competing explanations for it and why three of them fall over.

He is not a fool and it is not shallow. He has read the serious people on both sides. He can steelman the other position better than most people who hold it, and he takes a genuine pleasure in doing so.

He is fifty three and he has been building this for about twenty five years.

Here is the thing. In twenty five years, he has used maybe four percent of it.

Not because people are hostile. Because nobody asks. His brother in law has never asked. The men at his club have never asked. His daughter's boyfriend, who does not believe anything and is entirely pleasant about it, has never asked.

What people actually say to him, when anything at all comes up, is small and slippery and personal. "I could not believe in a God who let that happen." "My mum was religious and she was not a kind woman." "I would like to, honestly. I just do not."

And every single time, he can feel the machinery start up. He can feel eleven minutes of prepared material lift its head, and he can feel himself begin to select a route through it, and by the time he has selected, the person has moved on, or the conversation has, or the moment has gone soft.

He has a magnificent case. He has never once been asked to make it.

The servant of the Lord must not strive

Paul writes an instruction to a young man who is clearly good at arguing and clearly enjoying it, and it is one of the bluntest things in the letters.

And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient.2 Timothy 2:24

Take that in your chair. You are permitted to say almost nothing and be doing this right. The word says the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, and it is the Holy Spirit who convinces, which no brief has ever done.

Must not strive. It is a wrestling word. It means contend, fight, dispute for the win.

And look at what replaces it. Gentle to all. Apt to teach, which is readiness, not eagerness. Patient, which is a word about time, and about being willing to wait longer than a conversation.

Nothing in that verse says the truth does not matter, and nothing in it says stop studying. The instruction is aimed at the posture, and the posture is where your twenty five years has quietly gone wrong.

So take this in your chair, and know it is not my correction, it is what is written: you are already permitted to say almost nothing and still be doing this properly. His word says the servant of the Lord must not strive but be gentle unto all men, and it is the Holy Spirit who convinces a person, which He has never once delegated to an argument, however good.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who was an Oxford man, a fellow of a college, a formidably precise thinker who could have spent his whole life in that world and been admired in it.

He went and stood in a field instead.

And what he found at the pit heads and in the prisons and the market squares was that the people in front of him were not holding a position. They were holding a life. They had not rejected an argument, because nobody had ever put one to them, and they would not have cared if somebody had.

So he did not argue with them. He told them what God had done, plainly, and he asked them questions, and he built rooms of six people where the question asked out loud was how it stood with them.

He kept his learning. He never once threw it away and he wrote and edited for fifty years. He simply stopped bringing a case to people who were not in court.

Your brother in law is not in court. Nobody at your club is in court. They are all standing in their own lives holding something heavy, and you have been carrying a beautifully prepared brief past them for a quarter of a century.