"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). Apologetics is the work of explaining and defending that hope. Sometimes it means wrestling with suffering; sometimes it means admitting the limits of what our minds can grasp.
These two stories about apologetics, retold in our own words, do both. The first comes from a Scottish preacher who climbed back into his pulpit after his wife's sudden death. The second is a famous thought experiment about a world with only two dimensions. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- When Life Tumbles In: Arthur John Gossip's Sermon of Faith
- The Flatlanders: Faith and the Limits of Our Understanding
When Life Tumbles In: Arthur John Gossip's Sermon of Faith
In 1927, as the story is usually dated, the wife of the Scottish minister Arthur John Gossip died suddenly and without warning. Gossip was a well-known preacher, and his congregation wondered what he would say when he returned to the pulpit, or whether he could say anything at all.
When he did return, at Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen, he preached a sermon with a title that has been remembered ever since: "But When Life Tumbles In, What Then?"
In that sermon, as the illustration retells it, Gossip compared life to an aeroplane in wartime. Picture yourself lying in soft grass on a bright summer day, watching a plane glide smoothly across a clear blue sky, the sun flashing on its wings. Everything is calm and beautiful. Then, without warning, a shot rings out. In front of your eyes the plane is torn apart, and it tumbles out of the sky, a wreck of twisted metal crashing to the earth.
For Gossip, there was only one difference. The shot that brought his life crashing down was the sudden, tragic death of the wife he loved.
He did not pretend to understand it. He told his people honestly that he could not make sense of what had happened. But there was one thing he had come to understand: in the darkest moment of his life, what he needed most was faith.
"You people in the sunshine may believe the faith," he said, as the sermon is often quoted, "but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else." Faith was not a decoration on his life any more. Without it, he had no hope at all.
Takeaway: It is easy to believe on bright days. Faith matters most when life tumbles in. In bad times we need to hold on to God more tightly, not less, because, as Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).
Source: Daniel T. Hans, "God on the Witness Stand", in Christian Life. Sermon title and setting checked against Heartlight; the exact wording of the quotation varies between retellings.
The Flatlanders: Faith and the Limits of Our Understanding
Christians believe some astonishing things about God. They believe God is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They believe Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human. They believe God is closer to us than our own breath, and yet we cannot see him. To many people, these sound less like truths than contradictions.
In 1884 an English headmaster named Edwin A. Abbott published a short book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It was written as a satire and a lesson in geometry, but its central idea has helped many people think about the limits of what we can know about God.
Imagine a group of beings who live in a world of only two dimensions. They have length and width, but no height. Their whole world is like the surface of a sheet of paper, and they are flat shapes living on it. They can move backwards and forwards, left and right, across the page. But they can never move up off the page or down beneath it. They cannot even look up or down, because "up" and "down" mean nothing to them. They have no idea what height is.
Now imagine that you push three fingers down through their paper world. What will the Flatlanders see? Only three separate circles, appearing out of nowhere. They will have no way of knowing that these three circles belong to one single three-dimensional hand.
Or imagine that you lean over to look at them closely, bringing your face just half a centimetre above the surface of the page. You would be nearer to any one of the Flatlanders than two of them standing a centimetre apart would be to each other. And yet they would have no way of knowing that you were there at all.
Or imagine that someone sets the open end of a horseshoe down into their world. All they would see would be two rectangles lying some distance apart. Naturally, they would assume these were two completely separate objects.
They would have no sense that the two shapes belonged to one and the same thing, and no idea at all about what a horseshoe is or what it is for.
So it is with us and God. We live in a world of three dimensions, but God is not limited to our dimensions at all. Things that are obvious and natural to God may seem as mysterious and impossible to us as we would seem to the Flatlanders. The Trinity, the incarnation, a God who is near yet unseen: these may not be contradictions, but glimpses of a reality bigger than our page.
Takeaway: Mystery is not the same as nonsense. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord (Isaiah 55:8–9). Humility about the limits of our understanding is part of an honest faith.
Source: Illustration based on Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884).
Final thoughts
A grieving preacher and a flat world on a page. One story shows that faith is what holds us when life falls apart; the other shows why it is reasonable to trust a God we cannot fully picture. Together they remind us that apologetics is not only about winning arguments. It is about giving a gentle, honest reason for our hope.
Where in your life do you need to trust God beyond what you can see?
More stories you may like:
- Stories About Doubt and the Problem of Evil
- Stories About the Bible, Science and Faith
- Stories About Suffering and Grief
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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