A parable:
Once there was a man who had functioned well for his entire life–totally normal and basically successful, in fact. His wife and children, his house, everything was in order. And he loved the people in his life. But after about 15 years of marriage and family, he began to develop a peculiar trait. He began to question how trustworthy his memory was. At first he did it privately, to himself, then to his family members in passing conversation, then to the whole family. It began to dominate meal times. Soon he was openly (in the front yard, out in public) expressing doubt about whether he had ever really wedded his wife, whether he had witnessed the births of his children, purchased his house, interviewed for his job. He scoffed at the idea that he could know if these things had happened. After all, it was so long ago. Not only that, but certainly nothing like a wedding ceremony with his wife or the physical birth of his children had happened any time recently. And those pictures she kept showing him–of course she had vested interest in convincing him it all had happened. How could any of that be trusted? He came to use this one rule for determining what had actually happened in his life: If he could see it happen on that very day, then he could be sure that it had happened in the past. It only seemed reasonable to him: who would believe in something you couldn’t prove had happened, by seeing it happen right in front of you so you could be sure that it really had happened, or even could happen?
What’s the point of this parable? It’s typical in our day for the reaction to Christian testimony about God (his goodness, for example), or about what God has done in Christ (the resurrection, for example) to be met with the assumption that these are just opinions we choose to hold, for no other reason than that we like them. Often it’s like we’re talking to the man in the parable while he assumes his wife believes she married him because it feels good to her to believe that.
But Christians don’t hold any of their beliefs because they like the way it feels. These aren’t whims or fantasies we’re working with here. Christians have come to see that they stand in the long line of a history–our basic message is something happened! In fact, our message is even more than that–a whole bunch of things have happened! For thousands of years, God has spoken to people, acted, moved water, air and earth, won battles, raised dead people to life, pulled nations out of slavery, saved little babies, heard prayer, kept promises, foretold the future…and then, the Son of God came and looked out of human eyes, spoke with a human mouth, healed crowds, let his body be killed, raised it up to new life, and ascended into the sky with a promise to return!
In other words, we hold the beliefs we do about God because of a whole history of events (events which happened in our world, in our history) in which God has personally proven his character to us. He didn’t have to. But he did it anyway.
When people doubt this history, it doesn’t prove a thing about whether or not the events happened. If they haven’t personally seen a resurrection, that doesn’t say anything about whether the event could or did happen. It only reveals their personal experience.
And so, we don’t need to listen to people who scoff at our ideas about God, or our witness to what he’s done in the world, when their only objection is how long ago it all seems to them and how unlike their daily experience the stories are. Living after something happened doesn’t change what happened before. Distance in time from an event doesn’t transform the event into fantasy.
We wouldn’t trust a man with no long-term memory to tell us about his life. Neither should we trust one collective Man with a tragically bad memory.
