The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his Complete Letters (1868-1871) wrote:

If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

Just know that if you remain with Christ, you also remain with the truth.  Jesus said, “I am the truth” (John 14:6).  That quote though makes it sound like something other than the truth is the main factor leading to saving faith.  Others might echo the sentiment of Dostoyevsky, especially when one considers their methodology.

Three Categories

I will divide into three categories of argument or evidence for or vindication of the gospel message unto salvation.  This answers, why should I believe the gospel?

Listening to professing conversion testimonies through my whole life, I heard different reasons for someone receiving the gospel.  When I listen to apologists talk alone or in conversations with skeptics, I have heard them give varied reasons people will receive the gospel.  People state epistemic, moral, and aesthetic arguments, evidence, or vindication.  Thought leaders express these three, ranking them for their impact.  People include them in their testimonies or salvation stories.

Epistemic

An epistemic presentation or epistemic preaching gives knowledge or information, makes intellectual arguments, trying to persuade the mind of a skeptic or lost person.  This would include exegesis of scripture, using the Bible for elucidation of and authority for truth.  It connects everything to history and will even show the compatibility of the scriptural account with history, science, archaeology, everything in the real world.

Moral

A moral presentation or preaching relies on the goodness of someone in the life of the skeptic or lost person.  The moral quality of a friend, acquaintance, co-worker, or family member impacts him or her to the degree that they acquiesce to that influence.  A person with a wrecked life sees this as the only way out.  Maybe he sees it as the path away from drugs, obesity, alcohol or other harmful addictions.  Perhaps he witnesses the quality and diligence of the efforts of a co-worker, making a moral impression upon him.

Aesthetic

An aesthetic presentation or preaching relies on the beauty or emotional effects of a personal testimony, a moving story, a fearful threat or warning, or just well-told, expressive anecdotes.  It also may be the feeling of community or comradery of a group of individuals, how they get along, show friendship and solidarity, and experience satisfaction in all that.

Compelling Argument

Skeptics

Many skeptics would say that Christianity or the Bible doesn’t present compelling epistemic argument to persuade them.  It does not provide enough knowledge to give up their present life to follow Jesus Christ.  It is harder to believe that a man rose from the dead than to believe that men lied and said he rose from the dead, when he really didn’t.  Even if they don’t possess great reasons for not believing the gospel account, they don’t have enough good ones either.

I heard one skeptic, still a skeptic though, report a frightening dream.  He was on an airplane.  The plane was crashing and in a semi-conscious state, he prayed to God for deliverance.  When he woke up, it shook him.  In his heart of hearts, despite his skepticism, he acknowledged the innate instinct or impulse to look to God for salvation.

Dostoyevsky

The profession of Dostoyevsky relates to either a moral or aesthetic urge or compulsion.  Online Britannica gives some context to his quote that began this article:

In 1847 Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He eventually joined a related, secret group devoted to revolution and illegal propaganda. It appears that Dostoyevsky did not sympathize (as others did) with egalitarian communism and terrorism but was motivated by his strong disapproval of serfdom. On April 23, 1849, he and the other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were arrested.

Dostoyevsky spent eight months in prison until, on December 22, the prisoners were led without warning to the Semyonovsky Square. There a sentence of death by firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three prisoners were led out to be shot first. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered and a messenger arrived with the information that the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment.

Dostoyevsky passed several minutes in the full conviction that he was about to die, and in his novels characters repeatedly imagine the state of mind of a man approaching execution. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, offers several extended descriptions of this sort, which readers knew carried special authority because the author of the novel had gone through the terrible experience. The mock execution led Dostoyevsky to appreciate the very process of life as an incomparable gift and, in contrast to the prevailing determinist and materialist thinking of the intelligentsia, to value freedom, integrity, and individual responsibility all the more strongly.

1 Corinthians 1:  Greek External Evidence and Jewish Experiences

I expressed here in other articles that men offer their reasons for not believing for which Paul accounts in 1 Corinthians 1.  He says, Greeks seek after wisdom, Jews seek after signs.  You could say that Greeks want intellectual arguments, something akin to their arguments in the Greek city states.  They want external evidence.

Jews seek after signs.  They tended in that day toward wanting further experiential proof.  Something needed to move them in a personal way to prove reality.  Even after the ten plagues in Egypt, most of the Jews still balked at listening to Moses and following what He said, that God told him to say.  Scripture indicates that experience is not a basis of faith.

Faith Comes By Hearing the Word of God

The Bible provides the authority for what men need for salvation.  In a simple way, it’s Romans 10:17:  “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”  God will use the testimony of others, what they say and do.  He might use a bad dream, smiting someone in his inner consciousness.  God moves people with overwhelming beauty.

Hebrews 11:6 says that a person requires believing that God is a rewarder.  Along these lines, Romans 2:4 says the goodness of God leads someone to repentance.  Someone won’t receive Christ unless he thinks he’s better off with Christ as the Captain of his life.

Scripture does more than an epistemic presentation or preaching.  It targets the mind, no doubt, but it reaches further than that.  It affects the rebellion of a person in His will.  Romans 1 says men know God (Rom 1:19).  They suppress the truth though (1:18, hold the truth in unrighteousness).  Their perverse natures rebel.

I believe scripture indicates in many places that the rebellion relates to human will or pride.  People want their own way.  They will choose their own way against their own self-interest.  Men make choices that doom them, which they make so that they can stay in charge.

The Reach of Scripture

Jesus starts the sermon on the mount with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3).  A person must understand his own spiritual poverty, that he is not the master of his own fate.  He can’t even get what he really wants on his own.  He doesn’t have anything to get there.  That humility doesn’t just occur.  God works in a person through His Word.

When Hebrews 4:12 says that the Word of God is powerful to divide soul and spirit, that goes further than the mind.  The soul includes emotion and will.  God works in an epistemic, moral, and aesthetic way, all three.  However, it must start with the mind.  Someone must believe the gospel is true.  God sanctifies through the truth.

Even with the moving of personal testimony and some stirring of emotions, everyone must receive the truth, which starts with the mind.  For a person to believe, he must understand the gospel.  More occurs through the gospel than just the intellectual, but that must occur.

Today I see the emotional or experiential calls for salvation as the biggest problem in evangelicalism.  Evangelicals think more about what people will like or how they feel.  They do not want to tell the whole truth, because people won’t like it.  God saves people through the truth, not by leaving out the hard parts.  Jesus never did that.  Let’s do what Jesus did and then all of His apostles.

Cohesion

Agreement

The moral and the aesthetic must agree with the epistemic, but salvation centers on the epistemic.  All the events of the gospel happened.  Jesus is Savior.  He is Lord.  It doesn’t matter how you feel about it.

Moral and aesthetic presentation must cohere with the truth.  You cannot separate truth from goodness and beauty.  People get their view of God very often if not the most often from the aesthetic.  If the aesthetic contradicts the epistemic, someone will get the wrong God.  He will imagine a different God than presented by scripture.  This keeps him from salvation.  Even if he receives this god, it isn’t God.

Effect

A good moral example alone doesn’t save someone, but a bad one can hinder or repel salvation though.  This includes a lascivious lifestyle presented as a product of the grace of God.  Furthermore, regarding aesthetics, someone gets a wrong understanding of God from false worship music.  He associates God with lust and worldliness.  The right music doesn’t save, but wrong music, false worship, hinders or repels salvation.

The moral and aesthetic are important, but we must focus on the epistemic.  Give the whole plan of salvation.  Target the understanding.  Don’t attempt to persuade with emotions and experiences.  Use your stories to illuminate the truth to persuade in the mind.  Scripture and the Holy Spirit will take care of the rest.