Christian Empiricism

"O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in Him." Ps. 34:8

Faith as blindness to the facts is a popular idiocy amongst the fashionably skeptical. It is, however, not the way that the Lord described His relationship with His people. "Prove me now," He says (Mal. 3:10); come with your eyes wide open. So Job said, "I have heard of Thee...but now my eye seeth Thee" (Job 42:5), and the Samaritan woman was told by her fellows, "Now we believe, not because of thy saying; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world" (John 4:42). Our faith is not assured by the testimony of the blind and ignorant, but by those who said, "That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you" (I John 1:3a).

We do not believe because we were told to without explanation or evidence. We believe because someone said, "Come and see," and we came and saw the revelation of God as recorded by eye-witnesses. Our holy writ is not mere maxims and creeds. On a spiritual level, it is a conduit of the fiery presence and power of God (Heb. 4:12); but even on a purely physical level, it is still not a book of maxims or creeds. It is a record of those who both saw and heard that which we never did, so that we "might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that [by] believing, ye might have life through His name" (John 20:31). We do not believe in the goodness of God (or anything of God) a priori, nor does God want us to. His command is that we taste with our mouths and see with our eyes and thereby know with our minds.

-Jon Vowell