Why Doesn't He Make the First Move?

A man posted a question on Facebook and got buried in answers. None of them were any good.

His question was simple. Christians keep telling him that Jesus wants a personal relationship with him. Fine. So why is every step toward that relationship his to take? Why must he seek, trust, humble himself, open his heart, pray into silence, and read his own circumstances as messages, before the other party does anything at all?

He turned it into a video. The comments filled with verses. Someone quoted Romans 5:8 and 1 John 4:19 and told him God had already made the first move. He replied that quoting a book at someone who doesn't grant the book's authority is not evidence of anything, and that we don't even know who wrote 1 John.

He was mostly right. That is the part we need to sit with before we say anything else.

The answer we keep giving is not an answer

Watch what happened in that thread. He asked why the initiative falls on him. The answers were: trust first, seek first, believe first, humble yourself first, take a step first.

Every response placed another requirement on him and none of them addressed the question. He asked why the burden was his, and we answered by adding to the burden.

That is not apologetics. That is a system that cannot be falsified, because every unanswered prayer becomes proof that he didn't seek hard enough. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He is not stupid, and treating the question as hostility rather than as a real question is how we lost the thread in the first place.

If your answer to "why must I move first" is "move harder," you have not defended anything. You have confirmed his diagnosis.

Quoting verses at an unbeliever proves nothing

I want to be careful here, because this cuts against instinct.

The verse is true.

but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 (ESV)

But truth and persuasion are different tools. When you quote Scripture to someone who has already rejected its authority, you are asking him to accept your conclusion as your premise. He is not obligated to do that, and pointing it out is not arrogance on his part. It is basic reasoning.

Scripture is our authority. It is not a shared authority with someone standing outside. Using it as though it were is the circular move he called out, and he was right to call it out.

There is a place for the text. It tells him what we actually claim, which matters, because most people arguing against Christianity are arguing against something they heard in a comment section. But it is not the crowbar.

Two corrections, one of them ours

He said we don't know who wrote 1 John, and swept Romans in with it.

Half of that holds. First John is formally anonymous. The traditional attribution to the apostle John is tradition, not internal claim, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Anonymity is also not the same thing as unreliability, which is a separate argument he skipped past. But on the basic point he had it.

Romans is a different matter. It is one of the seven undisputed Pauline letters, granted by essentially every scholar working in the field, believing or not. That one was a swing and a miss.

Now the correction aimed at us, and this one is more important.

Do not cite the letters of Pilate to Tiberius. They circulate constantly in Christian argument and they are forgeries. The whole Pilate cycle, the Anaphora Pilati, the letter to Herod, all of it is late Christian composition with no trail back to the first century, and every scholar who works on the period knows it, including the conservative ones. The moment you cite it, you have handed the other side a free victory and everything else you said dies with it.

We do not need forged evidence. We have better.

What history actually gives us

Tacitus, writing around 116 AD in Annals 15.44, records that Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Tacitus was a Roman senator with open contempt for the movement. He had no motive to help.

Josephus references the execution in Antiquities 18. The passage carries later Christian editing, but the mainstream position is that an original core is authentic, and Antiquities 20 independently mentions James, the brother of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman is an agnostic. John Dominic Crossan is about as far from orthodox as a scholar gets. Both treat the crucifixion as about as certain as anything in ancient history.

Be precise about what that buys. It gets you a first-century Jewish teacher executed by Rome. It does not get you the resurrection, it does not get you the atonement, and it does not get you a relationship. What it gets you is that the conversation does not start at "a book says so." The disagreement lives further down the road than that, and knowing where it actually lives is worth something.

The real question, named properly

Strip away the comment-section noise and what he asked is a serious philosophical argument. J.L. Schellenberg formalized it in 1993 and it goes roughly like this. A perfectly loving God would want relationship with every person capable of it. Relationship requires belief that the other party exists. Yet people seek honestly and come up empty. So either the God being described is not perfectly loving, or He is not there.

This is not an internet argument. It is one of the two strongest cases against theism in the professional literature, and it deserves better than "seek harder."

The answer with weight in it

Here is the one I find serious.

You can compel belief that someone exists. You cannot compel trust in them.

If what is on offer were merely assent to a proposition, overwhelming public proof would deliver it efficiently. But assent is not the thing being offered. What is offered is trust, allegiance, love, the surrender of a will. Demonstrative proof produces the acknowledgment and cannot produce the surrender. It would fill the world with people who concede a fact and are otherwise unchanged.

Pascal put it as enough light for anyone who wants to see, and enough shadow for anyone who does not.

And on the first move specifically, the video is arguing against a Christianity we invented in comment threads. Our doctrine says the opposite. Prevenient grace is not a private opinion. It is the Wesleyan-Arminian position, it is what Assemblies of God teaches, and it says God moves first, universally, before any human response is possible. The cross is the claim.

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13 (ESV)

Whatever else is true, the initiative is not ours in the doctrine. If he heard otherwise, he heard it from us.

Abraham went up the mountain expecting to come back down

Someone in that thread raised Genesis 22. Why would an omniscient God need to test Abraham if He already knew the result?

Read what Abraham says on the way. He tells the servants to wait, and that both of them will return.

Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you."

Genesis 22:5 (ESV)

Then he tells Isaac that God will provide the lamb.

Abraham said, "God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.

Genesis 22:8 (ESV)

And Hebrews states plainly that Abraham reasoned God could raise the dead.

He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

Hebrews 11:19 (ESV)

That is not a man walking numbly toward filicide. That is a man who expects intervention and climbs anyway. The test was never really "will you kill your son." It was "will you trust that I step in." Abraham had already answered before the knife came up.

Which is the same structure as the question we started with. Trust extended before the outcome is visible, by someone who had reason to expect the outcome.

What I don't have

I am not going to pretend the argument closes.

Thomas got to put his hands in the wounds. Paul got knocked into the dirt on the Damascus road. If overwhelming evidence is genuinely self-defeating, the exceptions need explaining, and I don't have a tidy explanation for why those men got what this man is asking for.

The other objection is simpler and harder. I am certain my wife exists and I love her anyway. Certainty did not crush the relationship. The scale is different with God, and that difference does real work in the argument, but it is not a knockdown and I am not going to sell it as one.

Michael Rea and Paul Moser have gone at this more carefully than I can here, and anyone who finds the question live should read them rather than me.

The part that should bother us

He asked a fair question and got a wall of requirements.

He deserved better, and the reason he did not get it is that we have gotten comfortable answering people who already agree with us. When someone genuinely doesn't, we reach for verses as though volume were the problem, and when that fails we imply the failure is his.

The hiddenness of God is a real difficulty. It is in the Psalms. It is in Job. It is on the cross, in the loudest question anyone ever asked about it. Our own book does not treat divine silence as a slander invented by skeptics. It treats it as an experience of the faithful.

So when a man outside says he has looked and found nothing, the honest answer is not that he looked wrong.

The honest answer is that we know.