Answering the Hard Questions About Faith Without Bluffing

It usually happens at a tailgate, or in a truck, or standing in somebody's garage at 10 p.m. after the kids have gone to bed. A guy you've known for years says something like, "So you actually believe all that?" He's not hostile. He's curious, and a little surprised he asked.

You have about nine seconds before the silence gets weird.

Most men handle that moment badly in one of two directions. Either you go quiet and change the subject, and he learns your faith is something you'd rather not discuss. Or you overcorrect, launch into a fourteen-minute download of half-remembered arguments from a podcast, and he learns your faith is something to avoid bringing up. Both outcomes close the same door.

There's a third way, and it doesn't require a degree. It requires you to be honest at a level most conversations never reach.

He's not asking philosophy, he's asking you

The single biggest mistake is treating the question as a debate prompt when it's actually a personal one. When a man asks "do you really believe a guy rose from the dead," nine times out of ten he's not requesting a lecture on first-century burial practice. He's asking what kind of person you're and whether you've thought about it at all.

So answer at the size of the question. Two or three sentences. Then stop talking.

"Yeah. I do. I looked into it pretty hard in my twenties because I wanted an excuse not to, and the thing I couldn't get around was that the people who claimed to see him all died broke and beaten instead of taking it back." That's it. That's a complete answer. If he wants more, he'll ask, and now you're in a conversation instead of a presentation.

The instinct to fill silence with more words is the enemy here. Let him talk. A man who asks a real question wants a turn.

"I don't know" is a complete sentence

Nobody tells you this, so hear it now. You're allowed to say you don't know.

When somebody asks why God allowed a specific child to die of a specific disease, the worst thing you can do is produce an answer. You don't have one. Neither does your pastor, and if he hands you a tidy one, be careful with it.

The Book of Job runs forty-two chapters and the man never gets his question answered. God shows up and asks Job about wild goats and ostriches and the storehouses of snow, and somehow that's enough. The text is honest about what it won't explain. Be at least as honest as the text.

What you can say: "I don't know why. I know what I do with it, which is that I don't think this is how it was supposed to be, and I don't think it stays this way." You're not conceding the argument. You're refusing to insult a grieving man with a paragraph.

Pick two things and know them cold

You can't be ready for everything. You can be ready for the two questions you personally get asked most, and for most men that's suffering and hypocrisy.

Spend an hour on each. Not a weekend seminar. An hour, with a pen, writing down what you actually think in your own words. If you can't write it plainly, you don't believe it yet, you've just heard it.

On hypocrisy, the answer is easier than men expect, because the accusation is true. Christians behave badly. Some of them have done real damage to real people, and pretending otherwise makes you look dishonest about something the guy across from you can plainly see. Say the true thing: "You're right, and it's worse than you know, and the book we read is unusually blunt about it. King David was an adulterer and a murderer and he's the hero of half the Old Testament. That's not a bug we're hiding. It's the whole premise. The church isn't a museum of good men."

That answer lands because it costs you something. People can tell.

Don't try to win

There's a verse most guys have heard swung around like a bat, 1 Peter 3:15, about always being prepared to give a reason for the hope in you. The part that gets skipped is the second half of the sentence: do it with gentleness and respect.

Winning an argument with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving has a conversion rate of roughly zero, and it costs you every future conversation. He will remember exactly how you made him feel in front of his wife. He won't remember your third point.

Try this instead. When you disagree, ask one clarifying question before you respond. "When you say the Bible's been changed, what do you mean, like translation, or like somebody rewrote it?" Half the time the objection dissolves on its own, because he inherited it from somewhere and has never had to say it out loud. And you've shown him you're listening rather than loading.

Also, know when to stop. "That's a good question and I'm going to get it wrong if I try to answer it right now. Let me think about it." Then actually think about it, and bring it back up in two weeks. That follow-up does more than any answer you could have improvised.

When it's your own kid

Different rules. Your eight-year-old asking where dinosaurs fit, or your fifteen-year-old asking if you've ever doubted, isn't the same conversation.

With kids, the temptation is to protect the faith by protecting them from the question. Don't. The child who learns that certain questions make Dad tense will take those questions somewhere else, and he'll take them somewhere else at nineteen, in a dorm, with nobody who loves him in the room.

Say "that's a great question." Mean it. Then give an honest answer at his level, and be willing to say "I've wondered about that too." Your teenager finding out you have wrestled with this isn't a crack in the foundation. It's the first time he's seen the foundation.

When the guy asking is you

Sometimes it's 2 a.m., nobody's asking anything, and you're lying there wondering if you've built your whole life on something you can't prove.

There's a man in Mark's gospel whose son is sick and who says to Jesus, "I believe; help my unbelief." Both halves, one sentence, no embarrassment. That prayer is in the book because it's a normal prayer.

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith. Indifference is. The man staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. arguing with God is doing something the guy who never thinks about it isn't doing.

Go to church tired and unconvinced. Keep showing up. The belief usually catches up somewhere around the second verse of a hymn you've sung four hundred times, when you're not watching for it.