Making Good People Wish the Gospel is True

(Spoiler alert) I think Christianity is true and reasonable to believe. But I also think the case for Christianity is actually a lot better than that. That is, it is true, good and it is beautiful. Indeed, I find the Christian gospel quite attractive. It can be a significant stumbling block for belief if one finds Christianity (or what they take to be Christianity) unattractive. So this is an important issue.

Believing but not caring

There are many truths we believe quite reasonably but we don’t do anything about them. We all know we should exercise regularly and eat healthily. For most of us, there’s no reason to spend any time trying to convince us that we should regularly exercise and eat well. We are not unconvinced.

But many of us (feeling convicted here) don’t do much about this. Going to the gym…getting in a run…eating those vegetables…not eating that fourth slice of pizza, etc. As my kids used to say, “that’s yuck”!

A completely healthy lifestyle is unattractive to many of us. To adopt this lifestyle, it must come to be an attractive option and unfortunately it sometimes takes serious health concerns for us to begin to see these behaviors as the more attractive options than our bad habits.

Christianity must be attractive to accept it

Christianity must also come to be attractive for people to want it to be so. Pascal put it this way:

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.

(Pensées, 187)

Notice that Pascal doesn’t think it is either merely true and reasonable or beautiful and attractive. He sees these as interwoven in the Christian claims. But it seems we often spend most of our time trying to convince people that Christianity is true without showing that it is attractive, and that good people should wish it to be true.

The Attractiveness of the Christian gospel

How is the gospel attractive? Well, one may spend their entire life reflecting on the gospel and not exhaust its beauty. But let me point you to a few aspects. 

1. The gospel makes sense of our brokenness. The gospel is good news, but it’s only good news in light of some really bad news. What’s the bad news? It’s that we are all deeply flawed.

Why is this beautiful? Our sin and fallenness is ugly, but this aspect of the gospel is beautiful because there is no earning God’s favor or love. We may try to clean up our lives, but we can only, as they say, arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, we can tidy things up a bit, at least on the deck. But those flaws causing you to sink are deep and beyond our ability to repair. The gospel understands our true nature, as Pascal says.

Here’s a beautiful thing: you don’t have to repair yourself first in coming to the gospel. The gospel takes us just as we are with all of the flaws, attractions, addictions and the ugliness of our lives.

2. The gospel involves the loving sacrifice of God in the flesh on our behalf.

There’s no greater condescension than this. Conceptually, this is as big as it gets. God, the greatest conceivable being, who possesses all perfections, who is righteousness itself, dies a criminal’s death. Paul says that Christ became sin (2 Cor 5:21)!! There’s nothing imaginably bigger than this. And this is done for us!

3. The gospel promises our true good. 

Jesus defeats death in rising from the dead. The promise we have is that, in our resurrection, we will be made whole and rightly related to God. We take our proper place in reality. We can stop trying to control and manipulate the world to meet our needs. We will be in the presence of God where we know him and will be fully known (1 Cor 13:12).

The closest thing to compare this with on earth is marriage. Imagine a perfect marriage. In this marriage, the spouses love and serve each other perfectly. They cheer each other on in every pursuit. They stimulate each other to grow as people and work through every conceivable blindspot, etc. It’s a marriage of all and only joy and richness.

Sounds like heaven, right? Well, that’s the point. It is heaven or at least a glimpse of it. Heaven will only be better since it is not a marriage of two finite humans but a union that is borderline absurd; a union between finite humans and an infinite God.

A good person should wish this is true

Even if these things are false, I think we should see them as beautiful. They are powerfully moving and deeply captivating claims. In short, you should wish they are true. And if you do, let’s then have a conversation about the reasons to think they are also true and rational to believe.