Scripture Reference: John 20:24-31

“Unless I see . . . I will not believe” (John 20:25). So said Thomas, one of Christ’s twelve disciples, in response to the joyful news of those who had seen their crucified and buried Teacher risen from the dead. Eight days later, as recorded in the gospels, when the disciples once again were all together, Christ appeared “then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.’ And Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’” (John 20:27-29).

Millions of people today think and speak essentially like Thomas, and assume that this is the only correct approach worthy of any rationally thinking person. “Unless I see, I won’t believe.” In our contemporary speech isn’t this the “scientific approach”? But Christ says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” This means that there is, and was, another approach, another standard, another possibility. True, others might say, but that approach is naive and not rational; it’s unscientific; it’s for people who are backward; and since I’m a person of the modern world, “Unless I see, I won’t believe.”

We live in a world of great oversimplification and therefore spiritual poverty. “Scientific” or “Unscientific.” People use words like these all the time as if they were self-evident and self-explanatory, and they use them because everyone else also uses them, without reflection, without debate. In fact, they themselves believe these reductions blindly and simplistically, and so any other approach appears to them as neither serious nor worthy of attention. The question is already decided. But is that really true? I just said that we live in a world of great spiritual poverty. Indeed, if the end result of humanity’s interminable development boils down to this pronouncement, “I won’t believe it till I see it”; if the human race looks upon this as the height of wisdom and reason’s greatest victory, then our world truly is poor, superficial, and most of all, incredibly boring. If I only know what I see, touch, measure and analyze, then how little I really know! The whole world of the human spirit falls by the wayside, all the intuition and profound knowledge that flows not from “I see” or “I touch,” but from “I think” and, most importantly, “I contemplate.”

What falls away is that realm of knowledge which for centuries was rooted not in external, observable experience, but in another human faculty, an amazing and perhaps inexplicable ability that sets human beings apart from everything else and makes them truly unique. Even robots, machines and computers can now touch, handle and manipulate objects; they can make accurate observations, and even make predictions. We know that they actually perform better than human beings in measuring, comparing, making exact observations flawlessly; they are more accurate, more “scientific.”

To Be Continued

¹ Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2 (Norton and Co., 1979).
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
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