I recall a freshman philosophy class where the professor challenged us with this question: How do you know that anything is real? I was surprised to learn that philosophers have been debating for centuries how—or even if—we can know whether a thing is real or not, God included. But for Christians this question isn’t academic; neither can we be agnostic about the answer. “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day” (2 Tim. 1:12). By entrusting ourselves to God, we are staking our very lives on God being real!
With so much at stake, some Christians seek to prove that God is real by appealing to scientific evidence, philosophical arguments, or personal experience. There’s merit to this. The Bible itself teaches that creation around us and conscience within us show that the invisible God is real and present in what we see and feel (Rom. 1:20). Our Reformed tradition has welcomed these sorts of appeals, but at the same time it underscores that to confidently know that God is real (and to know him as great and good) is God’s gift to us, one we grasp through faith. In fact, it’s because God’s reality is “revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” as John Calvin put it (Institutes 3.2.11), that we can be more sure of God’s reality than if we were to rely merely on shifting scientific evidence, disputable philosophical arguments, or our feelings. “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom. 8:15-16).
At the same time, to know that God is real is not always easy. The intellectual climate in the West over the past few hundred years has left all of us assuming a thing is real only when we can see it or touch it. Such prejudice buffers us from the God who is real yet intangible and invisible. The small group I led on campus this past year wrestled with this as we worked through C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters. This book imagines a series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his student on how best to undermine Christians’ faith. In one letter, Screwtape recounts how one day the rock-hard atheism of the man under his ‘care’ began to crumble as the book he was reading opened him to the mysterious presence of God. Screwtape quickly nudged the man out the door to get some lunch.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true.
Never, insists Screwtape to his underling, let a person “ask what he means by ‘real.’”
I’m grateful that my professor challenged us with that very question. Because it is such an overwhelming presumption of our age that what is real is only what we can see and touch, we need to pray often for faith to know what is truly real. I pray regularly through John Baillie’s wonderful A Diary of Private Prayer, and perhaps you’ll find this petition of his as helpful as I do:
O eternal God, although I cannot see you with my eyes or touch you with my hands, give me today a clear conviction of your reality and power. Do not let me go into my work believing only in the world of sense and time, but give me grace to understand that the world I cannot see or touch is the most real world of all.
About the Author
Todd Statham is the Christian Reformed chaplain at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) and a research fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge.
