I Had No Answer for Him

It took about twenty minutes and it was, he has to admit, beautifully done.

The man across the table was not aggressive. He was courteous and quick and clearly enjoying himself, and he moved through it in stages, and every stage was reasonable, and at each point our reader could feel that something was wrong with it and could not say what.

By the end there was a small silence, and somebody changed the subject kindly, and the evening went on.

He drove home doing the thing everybody does. Constructing the reply. Finding the flaw at the third stage, which he is fairly sure is there, about twenty-five minutes too late to be any use to anybody.

That was a fortnight ago. And what has settled since is not embarrassment. It is something colder: a quiet suspicion that the reason he had no answer is that there is no answer, and that he has been believing something for twenty years that a stranger dismantled over coffee in the time it takes to boil a kettle twice.

That is your table. That is your drive home. And I want to speak to that, because there is a line from a man in prison that puts the whole thing on a different footing.

Whom, not what

Paul is at the end, in custody, writing to Timothy, and he says something with a very deliberate word in it.

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

I know whom I have believed.

Not what. He does not say I know what I have believed, which would put the whole thing in the category of propositions to be defended. He names a Person, and the knowing is the kind you have of somebody rather than the kind you have of an argument.

That is not a retreat from thinking. Paul argued for a living. It is a statement about where the foundation actually sits, and it sits somewhere an opponent cannot take by being quicker than you at a table.

You know Somebody, and that did not change a fortnight ago. Not a position you failed to hold. A Person you have not stopped knowing. The written word puts the ground in a whom rather than a what, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has been reconstructing an argument on a motorway.

Now let me say something about the man across the table, because a fortnight has begun to make him into an adversary.

He was enjoying an exercise he is very good at. He did not go there to damage you. He is quick, and quickness is a real gift, and he would be surprised and probably sorry to hear that his evening cost you a fortnight.

You have no adversary in that dining room. The written word never makes your footing depend on out-arguing a guest. The Holy Spirit is at work in that man exactly as He is in you, and there is no side of that table He is sitting on.

And now the actual conclusion you have drawn, which is the thing worth taking apart.

I could not answer, therefore there is no answer. Put like that, you can already see it. You could not answer at half past ten after two glasses of water and a long day, against somebody who has run that argument fifty times and had it word perfect. Nothing about your silence surveyed the field.

You are not the measure of what can be said. I am persuaded that he is able, and the ability is His rather than yours. The Holy Spirit did not lose anything at that table, and He was not embarrassed by the silence.