Lord Jesus on throne depicted in stained glass window. By perlphoto
By Jason Heron, OlbSB
For several reasons, Christianity is obsessed with truth. First, we believe Jesus is the truth about the Creator of the universe. If you want to know what the Creator is like, you need to know the truth, who is Jesus.
Second, we believe Jesus died and rose again. From the beginning of our story, people have responded to this claim with a very understandable, “Yeah. Right.” So, from the beginning, Christians have been defending the truth of Jesus’ resurrection against our neighbors’ skepticism.
Third, Christians believe that knowing and loving Jesus is the path to eternal bliss in communion with the Trinity. So, given that we want others to enjoy this bliss, we are rightly concerned with introducing others to the truth, who is Jesus. This is the good news we are supposed to be spreading.
To be clear, it has always been challenging to introduce others to Jesus. There isn’t some magical time in history where non-Christians first heard about a carpenter who rose from the dead and thought, Okay. That checks out. I’m in. Rather, in every generation, Christians face the same daunting task of evangelization: the good news is very good; but it’s also hard to believe.
In the U.S. in 2026, part of the challenge of introducing others to Jesus has to do with the way we think about knowing true things. We have become so good at harnessing the forces of the universe that we have kind of fooled ourselves into thinking that the only true stuff you can know comes to us through the tools of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It seems to many of us that everything else has to be a matter of opinion and preference.
So, even though in the past it was already difficult to believe that Jesus is the truth, now it’s even more challenging. STEM cannot measure love, justice, sin, sacrifice, the meaning of life, the possibility of life after death or anything else related to Jesus and the people who claimed to witness his Resurrection. So, if you want to believe all that stuff, that’s fine. But that’s all it is: belief. It’s not knowledge. It’s not truth. It’s not fact.
In such an environment, what can we say about our conviction that Jesus is who the Apostles said he is? What can we say about our belief that Jesus is, not simply interesting and compassionate, but the truth about the universe?
I teach college students, and when we talk about this problem, I ask them to imagine an app that would sync with a bracelet that could somehow measure my wife’s love for me. I could put it on her wrist while she sleeps and get the hard data I need to really give me the truth about whether she means what she says when she tells me she loves me. Over time, I could watch her love for me ebb and flow, and I could compile an accurate map of how her love for me works. When does she love me like she did when we were first dating? When does she love me like she did when we found out she was pregnant? When does she love me like she did when we were in the midst of our worst fight?
Would this be a reasonable way to find the answer to my question about the truth of her love for me? So far, only one student has ever thought this was a good idea. And he only thought so because he could imagine making millions of dollars. But the rest of my students quickly recognize that deploying this app and bracelet on my wife would be an irrational way to find out if she loves me. They recognize that it would be irrational because the appropriate tool for finding the answer is my trust in her when she tells me she loves me. The rational thing to do is to have faith in her words. In other words, it would be irrational to use the tools of STEM, even if those tools are considered rational in other applications.
Put differently, the question I want answered tells me a lot about the method I should use to find the answer. If I want to know the dimensions of my desk, its size and shape tell me that a tape measure would be a good tool for finding the answer. But if I want to know the dimensions of the earth, its size and shape tell me that a tape measure would be a poor tool.
I think the same way about my faith in the truth who is Jesus. It would be a mistake—a moment of irrationality—to use a tape measure to help me find the answer. Those tools are for the physical world of things. But questions about love, justice, goodness and beauty require a different set of tools: faith, hope and the sort of vulnerable love Jesus himself offers to us.
If we want to know the truth of Jesus, there’s not much to measure. The rational way to discover if he is the truth is to try loving him. For 2,000 years, this has been the most successful form of evangelization. Non-Christians have observed Christians trying to love Jesus, and they have had the beautiful intuition: Maybe he loves me, too.
