Mar 9, 2017 | Apologetics
Most Americans do not believe that the Bible gives us reliable history, let alone a divinely inspired authoritative history we can trust for the salvation of our souls. Most Christians do believe they can trust Scripture, but few know why. This is unfortunate because in the history of the Church there has never been so many solid, scholarly, easy to understand resources available for Christians to defend that trust.
One issue that is a popular target for skeptics of the New Testament is the idea of canon, which means “a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine.” Critics of the New Testament insist that what we find in our Bible was the result of a power play by early Church Fathers. What’s at stake is the authority of what we find in our Bible. The goal of skeptics who attack our canon is to undermine that authority by claiming it’s formation was no more than some Shakespearean tragedy.
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Feb 17, 2017 | Apologetics
The more I read the Old Testament, the more amazed I am that a people could be proud of such a book. I’m currently reading through Jeremiah, a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah that was shortly to be destroyed by the Babylonians as God’s judgment for their sin. The northern kingdom of Israel endured God’s judgment, having been conquered by the Assyrians, a hundred years earlier
Jeremiah weeps for his people because, as he says, “they are all adulterers, a crowd of unfaithful people.” Images of sexual infidelity are woven all throughout the prophets’ writings as they declare the Lord’s judgment upon his people. They prostitute themselves to false gods who are worthless idols in whom they think they will find their salvation and fulfillment.
What kind of people (the Hebrews/Jews) would write a book about their history that is so unrelentingly negative? I would argue people who are writing history that really happened! We can have confidence that this is so because of the criterion of embarrassment. Human nature is such that we are loathe to reveal embarrassing information about ourselves. We even lie in the face of facts that are less than flattering to us.
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Jan 27, 2017 | Apologetics
I can imagine you thinking at this moment, What kind of person would ask such a stupid question! Hang with me, and you’ll realize it’s not such a stupid question after all.
In my previous post I shared an Alice in Wonderland adventure I had with a postmodernist. As always in such encounters, one thinks of things one could of or should have said afterward. At one point I shifted the conversation to something called the moral argument. Simply stated, this means that the best explanation for morality, the sense that all human beings have of right and wrong and justice, can best be explained by the existence of a personal God. The postmodernist is a relativist, meaning morality is whatever an individual person or culture thinks it is. For them, there is no objective standard of right and wrong which exists outside of their own feelings or perceptions. By happy happenstance I was able to share a perfect example of postmodern relativism just this morning with my son. (more…)
Jan 9, 2017 | Apologetics
In my previous two posts I wrote about how death in a movie contributes to a secular plausibility structure, and how death lends more credibility to Christianity than atheism/materialism. In this post I want to explain what death is from a Christian perspective, and where it came from.
According to Christianity, death is an aberration. It’s not the way things were supposed to be, and all human beings know this regardless of their beliefs. In Genesis 1 we read that God created the world very good, and Adam and Eve had the run of the place, it was all theirs. Except, that is, one tree. Would Adam (Eve wasn’t around yet) trust and obey his Creator:
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
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Dec 18, 2015 | Apologetics
Came across this piece today, “A Christmas question: Are the Gospels more reliable than scholars once thought?” And the answer is a resounding yes! The Gospels, and the Bible in general, have been under attack since forever, but especially since German Higher Criticism in the 19th Century, which a priori ruled out any supernatural input to the biblical text. Secular critics presuppose the Bible is a completely human document, so can’t come to the text in anything approaching objective analysis. Yet just like in science, the more that is learned the more credible the biblical sources become.
There are many resources to build a foundation of confidence in the biblical text, but a couple that are worth having easy access to are Michael J. Kruger’s website, Canon Foder. Another scholar to be aware of is Daniel B. Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, the purpose of which is digitizing all known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament via digital photographs.
Christians have an embarrassment of riches in all kinds of apologetics resources today, and it is well worth building confidence in the book we stake our life and eternity on. God has made that abundantly possible.
Oct 25, 2015 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power, Plausibility
We live in a secular age, at least in the West, in which the dominion of science for all the good it has done has essentially replaced God for many people who find religion untenable. If “Science” says it, people believe it, few questions asked. In a little discussion with a co-worker recently the issue of religion came up, and being the consistent agnostic she is she said, “I’ll stick with science.” I guess she thinks science can answer the questions and address the issues religion and philosophy address. It can’t. She obviously hasn’t thought deeply about any of this. No surprise. Most Americans don’t.
Many atheists misuse the authority of science as a battering ram against belief in God, as if science itself makes belief in God a relic of a bygone era of simplistic faith. One reason they do this is because they define faith in a perversely self-serving way. Faith, which for them only applies to religious belief, is either believing something when evidence is lacking, or believing something we know is not true. If that is what faith actually is, I wouldn’t be religious either! (more…)
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