Oct 19, 2019 | Apologetics
If you’ve never heard of the The Robe (later made into a movie), I’m delighted you are now. The book played an important role in bringing me to Christ. My grandmother gave me a copy when I was 16, and it captivated me. I just finished reading it again for the fifth or sixth time, and I see again why. What captured my imagination all those years ago was the person of Jesus, and his influence on the people who encountered him. He turned them into better people! When I went to college my dorm room was next to a couple “born-again” Christians, and they asked me a question I had to answer yes to because I’d read The Robe: Would you like to see what the Bible says about who Jesus is? Despite being a bit creeped out by these fanatical Bible-thumpers, I couldn’t say no.
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Sep 28, 2019 | Apologetics
When I first came up with a title for my book four plus years ago I was going call it, Apologetics for Parents: How to keep your kids from becoming “Nones.” Since most Christians don’t know what apologetics is, or what “Nones” are, that wasn’t ideal. Keeping our kids from becoming “Nones,” however, is an increasing challenge in our secular 21st century. Over the past 20 or 30 years the fastest growing segment of the population when asked their religious affiliation chooses “None of the above,” thus the press christened them Nones. A piece in The Atlantic highlights how and why this might be happening. (more…)
Sep 2, 2019 | Apologetics
I wrote recently about a documentary of Korn guitarist Brian Welch’s conversion to Christianity. He had a serious issue with drug addiction, even after his conversion, and some people are accusing him of replacing his addiction to drugs with an addiction to religion. Here is part of his response to these critics he recorded in a Youtube video:
“There’s a supernatural way that you can feel that euphoria and that high and that pleasure, and that comes from the Spirit,” Welch continued. “There’s a scripture in the Bible that says, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived the wonderful things that God has prepared for us,’ or prepared for humans.
“Now, people would say, ‘Why do you believe the Bible? Why do you believe that? Why would you believe some words by men two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years ago?’ It’s because of the next verse, and the next verse says, ‘But God has revealed it and unveiled it to us by his spirit.’”
Those are very good questions that any honest person should ask. Welch gets the answer exactly right, and any good Calvinist, like me, would completely agree. The only reason people believe on and trust in the Lord Jesus is because God has revealed it to them, and enabled them to believe it. He turns the heart of stone to flesh, brings the dead sinful heart to spiritual life. But that’s not all that could, and should be said.
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Aug 24, 2019 | Apologetics
I can’t tell you how many moronic, absolutist, immature, know-it-all atheists I’ve come across in online comments sections who declare with absolute certitude that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, full of metaphorical unicorns and other such unbelievable nonsense. These people, and I’m sure mostly young males, have never bothered to actually read the Bible, only other skeptics like them who haven’t read it either. The problem for such dolts is that the Bible doesn’t read anything like myths and fairy tales, not in the least. In fact it reads like straight ahead history that takes place in real time, in real places, with real people, and real events. History outside of the Bible confirms this again and again. We can take comfort, and have confidence, that our faith is rooted in history, not human wishful thinking and fiction (which didn’t exist in the ancient world).
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Aug 21, 2019 | Apologetics
Not many Christians are familiar with first century Jewish historian Josephus, which is unfortunate. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (the latter rejected purely out of anti-supernatural bias) are the most well-attested facts in all of ancient history. But skeptics insist that because the writers of the Bible, and specifically the gospels, had a religious ax to grind, it cannot be trusted as objectively historical. I’m not sure there is such a thing, but if it can be established that the basic outline of Jesus’ life and death, and the Jewish, Greco-Roman world he inhabited, all existed, then the biblical record becomes incredibly compelling.
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Jul 10, 2019 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power
Too many Christians allow low-simmering doubt into their minds because the dominant Western secular cultural narrative assumes materialism at every point, that is that the material, matter, is all that exists. And, if materialism is true, Christianity is not. In the secular West, we are programmed to be materialists. From our earliest memories media, entertainment, and education are indoctrinating us into a materialist view of reality, as if it were the true nature of reality. It is not, and scientific knowledge is making it more untenable every day. Unfortunately the average Christian in the pew every Sunday doesn’t know this, and doubt easily creeps in: maybe, they think, this Christianity thing is a bunch of hooey. It also is not.
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