Why I Am a Christian
An Analytical Testimony
This will be less of a narrative history of my journey toward Christendom, and more a list of the reasons informing my decision to become a Christian at all. These are reasons for my particular knowing of Christianity to be true, and as a result, they may not be sufficient or appropriate as reasons for showing Christianity to be true to others. As such, this is not a protracted argument in favor of Christianity in itself, but as you will see, there will be arguments.
Why do this? There are many who think that Christianity is not rational. No reasonable person could ever be a Christian, they say. I think this attitude is mistaken. I think I have perfectly good reasons for being a Christian, and for not being something else. That is what I will try to demonstrate here.
With that out of the way, here are some of the reasons why I am a Christian:
1. The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit
The Lord Christ said, “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is, in a very real sense, the wind of my soul, and this should not be surprising, since the word comes directly from the Latin spiritus, which means “ a breathing.” The Breath of Life dwells in me, and I am His temple.
When I became a Christian, I lost the ability to feel empty. That does not mean I have never been depressed as a Christian (I have). What it does mean is that, even when I have plunged down into the deepest depths of despair, and even when I felt like my heart was being poured out like an offering, there was always a still, small voice whispering to me, assuring me that there was something even more real than my suffering, and it was worth living for.
The Holy Spirit is a constant source of reassurance and authentication that I have not thrown away my life on a lie. The atheist might say, “You are deluding yourself with wish fulfillment. You claim that you feel the presence of the Holy Spirit because you need your belief to be true.” Of course, there is no way I can demonstrate (scientifically at least) that I have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, but that is of no concern to me. The Holy Spirit is just like the wind. You cannot see it, and even meteorologists cannot totally predict its movements, but you know it is there because you can feel its effects. You cannot feel the wind where there is no wind. You cannot feel the Spirit when He does not live in you. Well, I can feel Him, and that is enough for me.
2. The Witness of the Apostles
The Apostolic Witness, in one sense, is quite simple: “We have seen that Jesus, who was dead, is now alive, and thus is Lord.” I am of course referring to the eye witness testimony of the original twelve apostles of Jesus: Simon Peter, Andrew, James the Greater, John, Philip, Bartholomew/Nathaniel, Thomas, Matthew/Levi, James the Lesser, Thaddaeus/Judas, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot (who betrayed Jesus and was replaced by Matthias). These men claimed to have witnessed a risen Jesus after watching Him die not even a week ago, and that Jesus appeared to them with a body, not as a spirit or simply appearing in a vision. I believe their testimony is credible.
Now, one apostle did not witness this post-resurrection appearance: Thomas. Moreover, he did not even believe the apostles when they told him that they had seen the risen Jesus. In fact, Thomas made a demand that I have seen many non-believers make: unless Jesus appeared to him, personally, and and proved that He was alive and was God, he would not believe. Thomas did not believe the apostolic witness, as many today do not. However, eight days later, Jesus did appear to Thomas, and showed Thomas the wounds that He sustained while on the cross. At this point, Thomas believed, and Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” Jesus is telling Thomas that the apostolic witness was enough for him, and that he was wrong to doubt the eye-witness testimony of ten men with whom he had lived and traveled for three years.
For my part, I see no reason to doubt the apostolic witness unless I am given evidence that their witness is not reliable. According to John’s gospel, “many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” What John is saying is that the testimony of the apostles is sufficient for belief in the resurrection and divinity of Jesus, regardless of the fact that he could have written about additional signs. Those extra signs are unnecessary. Jesus does not have to appear to every person in every generation and personally authenticate His resurrection to each one of us. God is not at our beck and call.
I happen to agree with John.
3. The Conversion of Saul of Tarsus
Saul of Tarsus was a Roman Jew who was a student of the Gamaliel, a brilliant Pharisee and legal scholar. He was involved in a very intense persecution of Christians shortly after Christianity spread outside of Jerusalem. Then, almost out of the blue, Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Apostle, the same Paul who wrote half of the New Testament and first preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the non-Jews.
How could this happen?
The the Book of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that, on his way to persecute Jews in Damascus, Saul was blinded by a brilliant light from heaven, and he and his companions heard the voice of Jesus ask Saul why he was persecuting Him. Later, the Lord sent Saul to a Christian named Ananias. Ananias prayed for Saul, and Saul regained his sight, was baptized as a Christian, and was filled with the Holy Spirit. After that, he began to preach that Jesus Christ was the risen Lord and the Son of God, not with his Jewish name of Saul, but with his Roman name: Paul.
Now, even if you don’t believe Paul actually had a divine vision, the fact remains the same: Paul went from wanting to kill Christians to becoming a Christian himself. This was such a dramatic 180-degree turn that even his fellow Jews were shocked and amazed by it. They even plotted to kill him, just as Paul had plotted to kill Christians. This tells me that Paul sincerely believed that Jesus Christ was God and that Christianity was true, and believed it so fiercely that he was even willing to die for it. Men don’t completely change their entire belief system for no reason, and they certainly don’t risk even their very lives for it unless they really strongly believe it.
The conversion of Saul of Tarsus to Paul the Apostle is one reason why I am a Christian. His conviction and his willingness to lay his life on the line for a belief he once persecuted is deeply influential to me. It tells me he is not the sort of person to change beliefs based on convenience or abandon beliefs to avoid inconvenience. Well, that is the sort of person I want to be. I wish to imitate Paul, and Paul wished to imitate Christ. You can see where this is going…
4. The Message of the Gospel
The Gospel in its most succinct form may be found in 1 Corinthians 15:22, which reads as follows: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.” The Bible has what I think is a quite radical message if we’re honest with ourselves: mankind is degenerate, wicked, and corrupted. This corruption is behind all misery and death in the world, and it is often called “sin.” However, God provided a way to cure us of our wickedness and free us from sin and death. This provision came to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born of the Virgin Mary, performed many miracles in testament of His divinity and status as Savior of the world, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried, and rose from the dead three days later, thus abolishing sin and death for all time.
The idea that God loved not just humanity in general, but me personally, and that He sent His Son to die for me, so that I could be freed from my sins and live forever with Him is an idea so irresistible that if there is even a one-in-a-million chance that the Gospel message is true, it is worth pursuing relentlessly. If there is even a sliver of a hope that I can be perfected and become immortal, I’m going to do whatever it takes to obtain that destiny for myself. Of course, the Gospel message is that Jesus has already done all that for me.
In return, He has my undying loyalty.
5. My Awareness of My Own Wickedness
No one is more keenly aware of my own shortcomings than I am. I am my own harshest critic. I am deeply troubled by all the ways in which my mind, body, and spirit have been corrupted by sin. I am also vividly aware of my own mortality, which in turn brings to mind all the ways in which my limited time on earth has been squandered by my many mistakes over the years. This naturally led me to form the belief that I am to become less sick, I need a doctor. To become less wicked, I need a savior.
If I was just thrown into this world without any hope for a new life, I’d have given myself over to despair a long time ago. In truth, I probably would not be alive today if I did not have hope that I could be rescued from myself. I want to make it very clear at this point that I am only speaking for myself here. Many non-Christians do not have this daily brush with despair in the way that I am describing. All I am saying is that if it were not for my Christian faith, I would likely be extremely depressed or dead, because I would not have any hope that I could actually become a better person and then stay that way.
But, as it happens, I have become someone that I am actually okay with being, and I no longer feel enslaved by my own evil. I do still miss the mark on occasions, and some days are worse than others. The difference is that my awareness of my own wickedness only serves now to keep me humble, rather than keep me in a perpetual cycle of self-hated. In one sense, thanks to Jesus, my wickedness has been taken from me, and the wickedness I see now is only a shadow, or a vapor, something that Christ chips away at every day. The wickedness is being melted down into gold. The burning pain is not guilt, but the fires of purification. My awareness of my wickedness led me to believe I needed a savior, and my belief that I needed a savior let me to seek out salvation, and salvation is what I found, in Christ Jesus.
“Accordingly, before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. ‘For thy foot,’ it is said, ‘will not stumble, if thou refer to what is good, whether belonging to the Greeks or to us, to Providence.’ For God is the cause of all good things; but of some primarily, as of the Old and New Testament; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind,’ as the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.”
— Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata Bk. 1.V
6. The Principle of Mentalism
My studies have taken me to some very fascinating places. Around 2014 or 2015, I encountered the wacky world of quantum physics, and through some careful philosophical investigation and application of the things I was learning about physics, I came to reject the belief that the material world is all that there is. In fact, I now believe that there is no such thing as matter as matter.
To clarify, I do believe that matter exists. I am really typing all of this out on a real keyboard on a real computer at my real desk in my real house. What I do not believe is that matter is a separate, fundamental, irreducible substance that is totally distinct from the mind. Rather, I believe that matter is constructed by the mind, or that matter emerges from the mind. As such, I believe that the universe (i.e. all of material existence) is the product of consciousness.
This raises an important question: who or what thought up the universe, then? The universe had to have come from somewhere, and it cannot be anything physical, temporal, or spacial, otherwise it would be part of the universe rather than whatever created the universe. My research into the nature of the physical world has led me to believe that the entire universe was created by a sort of “cosmic consciousness” which sustains the universe’s being through intentional, conscious attention. This means that the universe is the product of conscious desire: someone wants the universe to exist, and thus, someone loves that the universe (and everything in it) exists.
Well, I think we can just call this cosmic mind “God.”
7. The Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
I’ll make a deal with you. If you can show me the bones of Christ, I will stop being a Christian. Of course, I am being a bit cheeky, because I do not believe it is possible for you to show me the bones of Christ. I do not believe Christ’s bones are anywhere on earth, because as the angel at the tomb said: “He is not here. He is risen!”
The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the ultimate reason why I am a Christian. Jesus was, by all accounts, a nobody. He was the son of a carpenter in a backwater province of the least important part of the Roman Empire. He had this absurd claim that He was the Son of God and that He was going to deliver the entire world from sin and death. He died the death of a criminal and a traitor, in disgrace.
Then He stopped being dead, and everything changed.
See, it’s that claim Jesus made about being God that really caused my Christian faith to condense. Sure, anyone can claim to be God, but not everyone who claims to be God comes back to life after being nailed to a cross and hung up to asphyxiate for hours on end. People do not rise from the dead. This is not a thing that happens. That is why it is such a big deal that, as a matter of history, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. If Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, then His claim to divinity is vindicated. Liars, lunatics, jokers, and frauds stay dead when they die. Men stay dead when they die. If someone dies and then gets up three days later…well, that’s no mere man.
So, naturally, the historical reality of Jesus being alive and not dead is a pretty strong reason for why I am a Christian. He said He was God, and then did exactly what a God would do if He were killed: He shrugged it off and went about His business. How can I not call Him “Lord” and “God” when He killed death itself? What else could I possibly do? To do otherwise, I would have to see His bones, to see that He really is dead after all, and that He is still dead, after all. But, of course, I highly doubt that will happen.
This concludes my article on why I am a Christian. I do have other reasons, evidence, and arguments, but these are all worthy of their own dedicated writings. If you do not find this article particularly persuasive, that’s alright. That’s not the purpose of this writing. My goal was only to give reasons, and reasons I have given, and I honestly think they are good reasons.
Thank you for reading, and may God bless you.
You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.