Read PART 1 and PART 2

"I'd guessed all wrong about him," Theophilus said. It took me a moment to read the expression on his face. He'd never looked humble before.

"How were you wrong?"

"Well — I wasn't completely wrong," he said. The humble look faded a little. "If a person lives as though God doesn't exist, he will find it difficult to believe that He does. I wasn't wrong about that."

"And your student —"

"Not my student. My correspondent."

"Your correspondent had already told you that he'd been trying to live that way."

"Yes."

"So why was it so wrong to conclude that this was why he was finding it so difficult to believe in God?"

"My advice wasn't exactly wrong, Budziszewski. It was late. He had already had been trying to live that way."

"You said he hadn't been."

"What I mean is that he'd already reformed his way of life. Living as though there is no God hadn't worked for him, so he'd already changed course on his own. He wrote to me, 'I've been sincerely trying to "live as if" for quite some time now.'"

"Did you believe him?"

"Yes."

"And did it help? Now that he had gone back to living as though there is a God, was he finding it easier to that there is, in fact, a God?"

"No. He was back where he had been before he'd begun living as though there is no God."

"So you'd guessed doubly wrong. First, your advice was late, and second, it didn't work."

Theophilus looked as though he had tasted something sour. "Yes. I had done precisely no good at all. 'God hasn't answered any of my prayers,' he said, 'at least not the way I expect him to. And He never seems to be involved with this relationship.'"

"No wonder he was discouraged."

"I tell you," Theophilus said, "I was discouraged. The young man was suffering. He wrote to me, 'I think God is just a convenient way for people to give their life meaning, just to feel comfortable with life.' And yet there were rays of hope. It wasn't just meaning that he wanted."

"No?"

"No. In the same letter he wrote, 'I don't feel comfortable living without God and wonder.' Without wonder, Budziszewski. Isn't that interesting? He didn't just want glib answers to all his questions. He was longing for — what would you say?"

"For — for the questions themselves?" I knew I was reaching.

"No. He didn't want glib questions any more than glib answers. I think he meant he was longing for the inarticulate awe that lies in back of the questions. Doubt had taken that away."

"Didn't anything help him?"

"Yes. He said that his pastor had told him a personal story about God speaking to him, and that helped him."

"But not enough."

Theophilus shrugged. "How much is enough? Just because we don't see a seed spring up into a bush, should we say that it wasn't really planted? That kind of seed can lie dormant for years."

I admitted that he was right. "So what happened next?"

"He came back around to the same old question that he'd started with — about whether we can trust the Bible."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him that I do consider the biblical account trustworthy, but that the case for God's existence doesn't rest solely on the Bible. In fact, the Bible isn't particularly interested in proving that there is a God. It assumes that we already know that. What it tells us is who God is."

I agreed. "In fact, the Bible points outside of itself."

"Right. Creation itself testifies to the Creator. I said that we could talk more about that sort of thing if he wished. I also told him that when people find the Bible's account of God unbelievable, the reason is often that they are reading it the wrong way — they are bringing unbelievable assumptions to it. So if he would tell me what seemed unbelievable to him about the biblical account, we could also start there."

"So you were giving him two options, eh? You could discuss with him either the general arguments for God's existence, apart from the Bible, or else what he found unbelievable about the Bible itself. Did he choose Plan One or Plan Two?"

"That's the funny thing," he answered. "Neither. I didn't hear from him for weeks, and when I did, he didn't refer to my previous message at all. It was almost as though he hadn't received it. He just wanted to tell me that he was still struggling."

"That's a puzzle, Theo."

"It is a puzzle — and you'll notice that it has at least two possible solutions."

"I follow you. Either your previous message had missed the mark so badly that he had forgotten it — or else it had hit the mark so exactly that he was avoiding it."

"Just what I thought."

"So did you remind him of it?"

"I was about to. Then it came over me in a flash."

"What did?"

"That I'd been barking up the wrong tree."

"What tree?"

"The solution had been under my nose ever since his very first email message, and I'd been overlooking it."

"Theophilus, will you stop mixing metaphors and just tell me what you mean?"

"What? Oh, sorry, Budziszewski. The easiest way to tell you is just to read out my letter to him."

"Must you?"

"Shush." He fiddled with his keyboard. "Here it is. Just listen. 'A recurring theme in your letters,'" he read, "'is that because of your misery, you are trying to force yourself to believe in God. I am coming to think this is the root of your trouble. One of the lovely things about the mind is that it is designed to reject all reasons for belief except the truth. If we tell it, "You must believe this whether it is true or not," it rebels and says "over my dead body." If we reply, "But if you don't believe you will be unhappy," it says "You're threatening me. I see that in order to preserve my independence in the face of your threats, I must refuse to believe." The more you threaten it, "Believe or else!", the more it defies you by refusing to believe.'"

Theophilus paused and looked at me. "Now that you've begun," I told him, "you might as well go on."

"'I am on the side of the mind,'" he read. "'If there is to be any possibility of belief, then you must stop trying to force yourself to believe. If you are to have any possibility of peace, then you must desire the truth more than you desire peace. You must want nothing else but to find the truth about God, and believe that whatever it is. Of course I believe that He is real. But you cannot make yourself believe just because you want to believe it; you can only believe because you find it to be really true.'"

Impatiently, I gestured to keep going.

He cleared his throat and continued. "'You may think "But you're wrong about the mind — people do believe things just because they want to believe them. Why can't I do that too?" It's true that some people manage to force themselves to believe things just because they want to believe them, but that kind of belief is always on the surface. Consciously they are telling themselves "I do believe this, yes, I do" but deep down their minds are saying "No, it's a lie, I don't!" They haven't forced their minds to stop rebelling; they have only driven the rebellion underground.'

"Read, read."

Self-consciously, he continued "'That way lies insanity. It's not better; it's worse. Don't wish that you could do that. Be glad that you can't. Be glad that your mind is rebelling openly, not secretly.'"

"Theo," I said, "all that is plausible, but it's just diagnosis. What was your prescription?"

"I told him that to end his mind's rebellion, he had to make friends with it again. That he had to stop trying to force it to act against its nature. That he had to accept its demand to believe only what it found to be true."

"Sounds a little as though you were suggesting that he stop trying to find out whether God is real."

"Oh, no. In a way, I was suggesting the opposite, because I had come to suspect that he hadn't even begun trying to find out whether God is real. He was reading the right books, but for the wrong reasons. He thought he was asking 'Is He real?', but in fact he was asking, 'How can I make myself believe that He is?' I told him that nothing is less like the desire for truth than trying to force ourselves to believe something whether it's true or not.'"

"Well, that sounds all right. Was that all?"

"Pretty much. I said I'd continue to pray for him, and I asked what he thought. That's about it."

"What was his answer?"

"He said he thought I was right."

I smiled. "So finally you were right about something."

"Apparently I was. He said that the main reason he'd been agonizing over the God question wasn't that he wanted to know the truth, but just that he didn't like what he believed. He promised to start seeking truth just because it was truth."

"Bravo for him!"

"I wanted to cheer too. He said he was afraid, but that he would just have to trust that God wouldn't let him fool himself into believing what was false."

"So already a little bit of trust was coming back to him."

"I thought so," said Theophilus." He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and began to polish his spectacles. "It took me rather a long time to make any progress with this fellow, wouldn't you say?"

"I would."

"One might even say, a much longer time than it should have."

"One might indeed."

"Even now we don't know the end of the story."

"Quite so."

He looked up craftily from his polishing. "You see what this proves, don't you?"

"About the young man?"

"No."

"About faith?"

"No."

"About apologetics?"

"No, no. About these absurd dialogues you write, that make me look like such a know-it-all."

Coming out of nowhere like that, the remark took me by surprise. "I'd forgotten that we had even been talking about my dialogues, Theo. What about them?"

"Why, it's just this —" He paused, holding his spectacles to the sunlight.

"— that but for the grace of God —" He paused again, inspected his spectacles closely, and, satisfied, replaced them on his nose. Turning to me with a mild smile, he finished his sentence.

"— I'm clueless."