Apologetics & True Conversion

Someone sent a quote last night in response to a controversy between science and Christianity where I work. It was worth passing along, and I think you will see why apologetics, in the end, cannot effect true conversion. Now I hope that someone can tell me which of A.W. Tozer’s writings this comes from:

If you have to be reasoned into Christianity, some wise fellow can reason you out of it! If you come to Christ by a flash of the Holy Ghost so that by intuition you know that you are God’s child, you know it by the text but you also know it by the inner light, the inner illumination of the Spirit, and no one can ever reason you out of it.

When I was a young man I read most of the books on atheism. I had my Bible and a hymnbook and a few other books, including Andrew Murray and Thomas a Kempis, and I got myself educated as well as I could by reading books. I read the philosophy of all the great minds – and many of those men did not believe in God, you know – and they didn’t believe in Christ. I remember reading White’s Warfare of Science with Christianity, and if any man can read that and still say he is saved, he isn’t saved by his reading, he is saved by the Holy Ghost within him telling him that he is saved!

Actually, many of those philosophers and thinkers would take away all my “reasons” and reduce me to palpitating ignorance. On the basis of human reason, they would make a man just get down and walk out and toss his Bible on a shelf and say, “There goes another one!”

Do you know what I would do after I would read a chapter or two and find arguments that I could not possibly defeat? I would get down on my knees and with tears I would thank God with joy that no matter what the books said, “I know Thee, my Savior and my Lord!”

I didn’t have it in my head – I had it in my heart. There is a great difference, you see. If we have it in our heads, then philosophy may be of some help to us; but if we have it in our hearts, there is not much that philosophy can do except stand aside reverently, hat in hand, and say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”