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“My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.” – Don Miller, Blue Like Jazz.

It’s been said that there’s more evidence for the existence of the person of Jesus than there was for Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great. I don’t know if that’s really true, or how one would measure that, but when I pointed that quote out to a skeptic, he said it doesn’t matter because Alexander the Great didn’t ask us to follow him. Jesus just needed more proof.

At first, I was taken aback. That seemed like a really compelling argument. I’ve thought about it a lot, and in the years since then, I’ve come to realize that it’s only compelling on the surface.

Here’s why: most people admit that the person of Jesus as depicted in the Bible, whether real or fictional, whether God or prophet or ordinary man, is fundamentally a good person. Things like the “Golden Rule”, and “Turning the Other Cheek”, and “Love Your Enemies” are all things that came from Jesus, and it’s because of these counter-intuitive (and counter-cultural) radical ideas of love that makes Jesus pretty well universally respected and admired even if we his followers do a pretty terrible job of following his instructions. As Gandhi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.”

And, really, with those ideas, why wouldn’t you want to follow Jesus? These ideas really resonate the world over in a wide spectrum of differing cultural, ethnic, and religious values. There is something inherent in all of us that find the teachings of Jesus very compelling. He’s the counter-cultural hero we all wish we could be.

So, what’s the risk in following his example? If you believe that these ideas are fundamentally good, would improve your life and maybe even the world, why not follow in the footsteps of Jesus?

What issue is proof? What does it matter if he was really God? What does it matter if he never even existed? What does it matter if he never rose from the dead and is dust now? Would any of this change the truth or the power of turning the other cheek? Of the golden rule?

Here’s the thing, if you can agree that the teachings are worthwhile, that they’re worth following, what else matters?

I’m absolutely convinced that I would be a better person by following the examples and teaching of Jesus. And I think our world would be that much better if everyone else did too. It literally brings tears to my eyes to think of where I could be, where we all could be, if we followed the simple truths in Jesus’ life.

And so that is where I am. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely convinced that Jesus is alive, risen from the dead as the prophets foretold, God in flesh.

But even if I’m completely mistaken, and it’s all one big lie, following the same teachings still makes a tremendous amount of sense. So that’s how I approach it.

This reminds me of another encounter with someone not entirely convinced that Christianity is true. He went to the Old Testament and was appalled at the things that God had done, and one particular issue was that he couldn’t fathom a loving God that commanded homosexuals to death. How could Jesus be God with this going on the background? How could this all possibly be true?

Well, the fundamental problem is that this is inconsistent skepticism. The distance between what happened in Leviticus and what happened with Jesus in the Gospels spans thousands of years. Dozens of changes in the Israelite legal systems, a number of stints of in captivity under a foreign king, a national split and all kinds of other religious and national changes over all those thousands of years. We Christians believe that there is a God, and his hand was at work through all of that. We believe that the guy that wrote Leviticus was guided by the same perfect Hand that guided the writings of all the other books of the Old and New Testaments.

But if I didn’t tell you that, you wouldn’t have even thought to think that Jesus and Leviticus were necessarily connected in any sort of meaningful way. Just like all other claims, it could be true, or it could be false. What happens if it turns out that Leviticus is wrong, but Jesus is right? If you’re being inconsistently skeptical, you’ve thrown out the good that Jesus has done with what’s wrong. So my advice was to be consistent about everything, by being skeptical about everything. It’s not a take it or leave it package.

Ultimately, we as Christians like to make faith a package deal. “We believe this about Jesus, this about God, this about the Bible, this about infant baptism, and this about music in church and if you can’t agree with all of that, well I’m sorry, but you’re just not a Christian.” Whole denominations have splintered off over the issue of what kind of music to play in church!

What strikes me most about the relationship between Jesus and his followers was that there was no package deal. When Jesus was first starting out his ministry, he went to a bunch of seemingly random ordinary people and literally told them to “Follow me.” That’s it. No long lectures about the Sabbath day, nothing about the role of infant baptism, or music or any of this other stuff we let get in the way of what’s really important. What’s really important is Jesus. Will you follow Him?

That’s the important question. If you decide he is not real, that the Gospels are bunk, that there never was and never will be a Jesus, nothing else really matters, does it?

Faith is not a package deal. There’s no long lectures on theology, no checklists that you should believe this, that and the other. You either follow or you don’t.

And that’s where I’ve ultimately landed on all these issues of theology and does God exist, does he not exist, whatever. Ultimately that debate is no longer interesting or captivating to me. What captures my attention, what really gets me thinking nowadays is how to best follow Jesus.

If he’s there, if he really exists and if you are truly following him the best that you can, everything else will fall into place.

If he’s not there, if he really didn’t exist, but you follow his teachings and principles and examples the best that you can, what’s the worst that can happen? You’ll make the world a slightly better place? Sounds like a fair trade-off to me.

That’s why I’m a Christian, a Jesus follower.