Well, another Advent season is upon us, and we all know what that means! If you open Netflix, Disney+, or whatever streaming service you like, you’ll be greeted with a new category on the homepage: Christmas movies.

I love watching Christmas movies, and there are a few favourites that I probably watch every year. One is a beloved classic that I’m sure many of you are familiar with: Miracle on 34th Street (1947). (Spoilers ahead!)

It’s a fun little story about the importance of the intangibles of life, such as wonder, imagination, generosity, and the Christmas spirit. While this is a valuable message, there’s one pesky recurring line that sticks out like a sore thumb: “Faith means believing in something when common sense tells you not to.”

Now, this was in reference to belief in Santa Claus, not God. Even so, it does get applied to God in our culture, and those of us who are advocates of thoughtful Christianity disagree with such a simplistic definition of faith. But the funny thing is, the movie itself proves this definition is wrong and that faith can be quite reasonable.

Faith Properly Defined

Before I explain how this happens, let’s define our terms. The above definition assumes that faith is opposed to reason. If you’re reasonable, you don’t have faith, and if you have faith, you’re not reasonable. The reality is that everyone uses both faculties to some degree. Reason means believing something based on demonstration or evidence, while faith means believing something based on authority. The authority in which you place your faith can be more or less trustworthy just as the evidence which underpins your reasoning can be more or less convincing. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in his famous apologetics work, Mere Christianity:

“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you’ve been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven’t seen it myself. I couldn’t prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so… None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”[1]

We all take some things to be true by faith because we all have certain authorities we deem trustworthy. In fact, if we only believed those things which we could demonstrate ourselves, our pool of knowledge would be incredibly small. But here’s the key: we can demonstrate which authorities are trustworthy based on evidence. If I’m a reasonable person, and I believe some historian or scientist to be trustworthy, it is because that authority has proven his faithfulness to my satisfaction. So it is with faith in God. With this in mind, let’s get back to the movie.

A Court Familiar with Reasonable Faith

In Miracle on 34th Street, a man named Kris Kringle claims to be Santa Claus. A court holds a hearing to determine his sanity, and his defence lawyer decides to prove that he’s telling the truth. The lawyer calls witnesses who agree that Kringle is Santa, but the prosecution argues that’s not good enough. One person’s mere opinion is as good as the next. What the court needs is authoritative proof, like the opinion of an expert witness: someone who has the knowledge and the credibility to establish Kringle’s identity. In other words, the defence needs to appeal to a trusted authority.

Meanwhile, we learn there is a backlog at the nearby post office of letters to Santa. A postal employee reads about Kringle claiming to be Santa and decides to send all the letters to the courthouse. With this, the defence lawyer realizes he’s been given the proof he needs.

No, he’s not able to produce evidence that Kris Kringle owns a magical sleigh pulled by nine reindeer, or that he lives at the North Pole with a village of elves. But he can show that the postal service has declared Kringle to be Santa, and in a court of law, that’s just as good. Before revealing the bags of letters, the defence lawyer argues that no one would dispute the expertise of the postal service. They deliver mail to millions of citizens every day in an efficient and effective manner, so they certainly know who people are and where they live. That is to say, there is a great deal of evidence that they are a relevant and competent authority.

Then he makes the big reveal. Bag after bag filled with letters addressed to Santa are brought into the courtroom, having been sent there by the postal service. The judge renders his verdict, and his wording is noteworthy: “Since the U.S. government declares this man to be Santa Claus, this court will not dispute it. Case dismissed.”

That, my friends, is reasonable faith! The word of the government is such a sure thing to the judge that he considers it conclusive proof. But if the movie was consistent, I suppose the prosecuting attorney should have stood up and said that, because he believes in “common sense,” he doesn’t accept the government’s opinion (or anyone’s for that matter).

But he didn’t say that, because it’s a poor argument. Dismissing the opinion of a competent authority out of hand? That is unreasonable, and not in line with common sense.

An Important Clarification

To be clear, I’m not drawing a parallel between faith in God and in Santa Claus. Rather, I’m drawing a parallel between faith in God and in the postal service.

Nor am I arguing that God’s existence is proven by appealing to authority. Instead, God is proven to be the competent authority by appealing to the evidence (again, like the postal service). Santa Claus is not proven to be any kind of authority in the movie. His existence is established by appealing to competent authority, not direct evidence.

The fact that the argument has anything to do with Santa is purely circumstantial. The court could be putting someone on trial because they claimed to be the Prime Minister of Canada, and the argument would remain the same.

Our Most Trustworthy Authority

So, how can it be reasonable to have faith in God? Because He’s a faithful authority, too, just like the postal service is in the movie. The difference is that you can trust Him even more than you can trust the mail to show up at your door (especially when the post office is on strike):

“God is not man, that he should lie,
or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it?
Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Num. 23:19)

“Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.” (Deut. 7:9)

So, this Christmas season, if someone tries to make light of your faith and compare it to fairy tales, point them to the evidence of God’s faithfulness. He is a proven authority worthy of our trust.

Notes

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperCollins ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1952]), 62.