I think there’s a popular misconception about religion today that says that religion has nothing really to do with objective knowledge – you know the kind of knowledge that we usually gain through science, careful study or investigation. Instead people tend to think of religion is dealing only with things like our feelings and our conscience or our intuitions. If this is true, if religion is exclusively about what goes on inside of us emotionally or spiritually, then blind faith really is the only option because there’s nothing objective to evaluate.
Now Christianity as it emerges from the New Testament writings offers a very different picture of religious knowledge, one that in no way relies upon blind faith. One of the most striking examples of the Christian approach is found in the New Testament book of first Corinthians where the Apostle Paul says something startling. He insists that if Jesus did not rise from the dead then our faith is worthless. You see in this text Paul forever links the overall truth of Christianity with the physical resurrection of Jesus which is an objective historical event.
The resurrection is not only open to but actually invites careful scrutiny of its factual claims historians, scientists and thinking people of all stripes are invited to weigh the available evidence using the very best methods at their disposal to discover whether or not the claims about Jesus’ resurrection are true. No blind faith here. Instead we have a door wide open to rigorous investigation of the facts upon which Christianity lives or dies.