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01 February 2007
Brief Apologetics Overview. (Not as brief as advertised. Big surprise, coming from me and all.)
Hi everybody. So here's an outline from a talk I'm giving at the UWF IV group this Saturday. Lots of fun, hopefully I wont sound too silly. If it is at all 'intellectually satisfying' at all (oops, I violated my rule on not using pretentious words like 'problematic') its because it's entirely plagiarized. (I guess, if I cited sources, then it's not technically plagiarism. But I think 'plagiarism' has a nice ring to it. By the way, I forgot to mention I'm not an academic. Reference previous discussion on identity and irony.) Anyways, God's smart and I'm dumb, but hopefully He will continue to make me a little less dumb, bit by bit.
1. Apologetics: From the same word as ‘apology.’ Giving an answer.
- Biblical Root: 2 Cor 10:5, We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 1 Pet 3:15, 15But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. 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.
- Giving an answer is not the same as asking the question. The question is ‘will you submit to God’s will for your life.’ It is expressed in the message of the Gospel.
- Often, people set up defenses to protect themselves from that uncomfortable question. They head off the question at the pass, as it were.
- Apologetics are about getting through the defenses to deliver the message of the Gospel. Defenses usually have to come on line before you shut them down. But you need to be ready when they do.
2. Classic Apologetics.
(Truth is real and knowable) + (God exists and created all things) +
(The Gospels are a trustworthy account) = orthodox Christianity.
- Sequential, building blocks of truth, all leading to the God’s fullest revelation of Himself in Christ.
- Almost all intellectual attacks on Christianity go after one of these three pillars.
- The best way to refute a lie is to know the truth. So let’s look at each of these three pillars.
3. Truth is Real and Knowable.
By definition, absolute truth exists. It exists in a form that the human mind can grasp. Even if exhaustive knowledge is impossible, even if human knowledge is influenced by perspective, we can speak meaningfully about truth and about God.
Threat: Postmodernism. Postmodernism basically assumes that all truth is relative. It approaches all ideas like onions: take off all the layers and you are left with nothing. Traditional Christianity approaches all ideas like softballs: take any idea, perfect or fallen, and unwrap all the twine and you will find a core of truth. There are two general ways that postmodernism can be used to attack Christians.
- The social attack: Tolerance as license. ‘Don’t ever tell me what I am doing is wrong.’ Tolerance as co-existence is a great thing. It allows us to put together societies with people who do not always agree on everything, and it allows us to resolve disputes without killing each other. Tolerance as license makes it an expression of pride. ‘I can do whatever I want and you can never say anything about it.’ And in this is its contradiction: tolerance as license is the most intolerant system imaginable. It cannot tolerate any systems with absolute truth claims, which is virtually every other system out there.
- The formal attack: Deconstructivism. You can never prove anything is true. You can only prove that it is false. Therefore, when analyzing anything, you should look for the motives that go into it, not the validity of what is being said. An argument can never be taken on its merits. The problem with this whole line of thought is that it is self contradictory. ‘My only rule is that you cannot write any rules.’ Even more so, apply its own methodology against it, and you find the motivations of the theorists have a lot to do with the theory. If there are no rules, I can do whatever I want. Therefore, Ill make a system of rules that lets me do whatever I want. (Because I want to be God.) Tracing it to its roots, we find a quite old and quite absolute rebellion.
Arguments:
- Self Evident Truths (Philosophy.) Certain things are simply true by definition. Any attempt to refute these things will only result in proving them.
- Consider the statement ‘everything is relative.’ Either the statement is meaningless (everything may be relevant to you, but they may be absolute to me) or it is self-refuting (everything is absolutely relative.) Therefore, absolutes exist is a self evident truth.
- A relative system cannot tolerate absolutes. Therefore, the only way to maintain the system is to prohibit all absolutes, which would, of course, be an absolute prohibition. The whole thing is built on quicksand.
- Next time somebody tells you that ‘everything is relative,’ ask them if everything is absolutely relative. If it is, then everything is absolute. If it isn’t, tell them that relative to you everything is absolute, and you plan on acting accordingly. By their own logic, they have disarmed themselves. They can’t tell you that you’re wrong, and your argument still stands.
- Human Actions. (Behavioral Science.) People act as if their actions have some bearing on reality. Though different cultures lead people to express drives differently, basic universal human drives exist independent of culture.
- All cultures have different kinds of food. But all cultures have some kind of food. When hungry, the standard human action is to seek out food. How they do so is highly culturally dependent. The fact that they do so is not. Similarly, languages are all different. But they all communicate thoughts and ideas about reality from one person to another. The fact that we use words at all implies a coherence to truth.
- Ravi Zacharias describes talking to a Buddhist monk. After the monk got done telling him that ‘everything was just an illusion,’ Zacharias picks up a nearby boiling tea kettle, and prepares to pour it on the head of the monk. The monk says something to the effect of ‘What are you doing?’ Zacharias asks him why the illusion of boiling water falling on his head would bother him. We move out of the way of cars. We don’t stick things in electrical outlets. We act to preserve our existence. Achieving Nirvana is self-critiquing and usually fatal.
- The Fact that We’re Talking About It (Common Sense.) If we’re bothering to have the discussion, then absolute truth must exist. An absolute system can tolerate relative truth within its boundaries, but if everything were relative, we would have no concept of absolute truth at all.
- Imagine boats on the ocean. They can float merrily on their way on the open seas, their positions only existing relative to each other. Boat A is 30 miles from Boat B, and the like. Their positions are all relative to each other, as they are all floating wherever they see fit. But the second one of the boats happens upon land, the position of all of the boats becomes absolute. The land is the absolute, and all the boats are absolutely defined in reference to it. Note that the boats still exist relative to each other, even as they exist absolutely in relation to the land.
- Lewis describes arguments as boats. There are three things we have to consider. First, does the argument make the point it intends; does the boat get to the port it is aiming for? Second, does the argument stay coherent; does the boat stay afloat? Third, and most usually forgotten, is why is the boat there in the first place? If we’re arguing, it must be about something; from nothing, nothing comes. If there is only relative truth, where would we even get the idea of absolute truth? There is nothing within a relative system that would spark the idea of absolutes, yet there are things within an absolute that would give rise to the idea of relative truths. So the fact that we’re having the discussion at all means that there must be some sort of absolute truth.
4. God exists and created all things.
There must be Something that gives rise to all other things. That Something must have will and personality, therefore that Something must be a Someone. That Someone must exist outside of the constraints of the physical universe, therefore He must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Additionally, that Someone desires to know and be known by man, therefore, that Someone is called God. Since He exists before time, He must have created all things. Since He exists outside of time, He must still be involved in the world He created.
Threat: Naturalism. Naturalism in modernity takes the opposite angle from postmodernism in attacking Christianity. Instead of denying the existence of truth, it presents itself as absolute truth and proceeds to deny the truth of Christianity. This attack did not originate with Darwin, but Darwin was modernity’s expression of the old idea of materialism. ‘There is matter and nothing more.’ The Greeks said this, and it too is self-refuting. The statement ‘there is matter and nothing more’ is itself more than matter. It is thought. Accordingly, Evolution never really had much of an answer for consciousness. This attack is generally expressed along two parallel lines: Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s.
- The scientific attack: Evolution. In order to answer the question of origins, naturalism needed a competing mythology. It found it in Darwin’s works, the abiogenesis theory with a new veneer. His acolytes proceeded to rewrite both human history and fossil history in order to fit their model. (entirely fictional yet mandatory reading Inherit the Wind, falsified wand wishful transitional forms, etc.) The entire discussion was framed by the use of a tremendous linguistic sleight of hand, using interchangeably ‘science as methodology’ and ‘science as the religion of progress.’ Carl Sagan was famous for this, who interestingly was not respected as a scientist, and is known for works of fiction and movie adaptations, not for any real research. He pushed a false dichotomy between faith and reason, specifically between religion and science. This dichotomy seemed to pose no problems to the openly Christian founders of most major branches of science. Refer to IVP’s ‘Six Modern Myths’ for more information.
- The philosophical attack: Nihilism. If there is nothing but the material world, nothing but natural selection, then mankind should follow natural selection as its governing dynamic. Nietzsche basically thinks this through. In a universe without God, there is nothing but will to power. Those with power should act as they see fit. The Melian Dialogue re-expressed in colder terms. Generally, Nihilism is too strong a drink to take straight, so it ends up mixed with some sort of populist philosophy. (Refer to Pilgrim’s Regress, C. S. Lewis) Mix it with social Darwinism, and you get fascism by way of eugenics. Mix it with economics, and you get Communism by way of Marx. Through Nietzche, though, modernity undoes itself. The horrors of the line of reasoning show up in his work and his progeny. In the light of the destruction of the world wars, the faith in progress and tremendous arrogance that marked the early 1900s gives way to the realization that progress leads nowhere as well. So the next logical choice was to embrace that nothing. Hence postmodernism.
Arguments:
- Irreducible Complexity (Biology.) Evolution requires a large number of incremental changes over time. However, most systems need to be fully formed if they are to work at all. Therefore, most life systems must have been fully functioning at their inception.
- Think about an airplane. You need about seven systems to work together all at once, or the plane never gets off the ground. Put together landing gear with engines, throw it up in the air, and boom, big mess. Even the most primitive airplane needs to have landing gear, engines, wings, controls, and a pilot, and all at once. And while the system changes over time, most of the changes have to show up in a completed form. A half-completed hydraulic system starts fires, it doesn’t become a complete system.
- The most basic form of life requires eight fully functioning molecular systems, all far more complex than any system on an aircraft. You have to get all eight systems at once, or your aspiring life form is nothing more than dust, and you have to start back at ground zero. No good.
- Even if you already have life, transitional forms still run into the same problems. A half fin/half foot is not very good at being either. Fully formed gills work great. Fully formed lungs work great. Halfway in between, you die. Evolution simply can’t jump the gaps between systems with small changes and random chance. There literally isn’t enough time in the world. Similarities between systems are far better explained by a common Engineer than a common ancestor.
- Cambrian Explosion. (Paleontology.) The nicely branching tree of life that is standard in most High School Bio textbooks is part and parcel to the nice, slow, eventual progression of Evolution. The problem is that it doesn’t much match the fossil record. If the fossil record was a football field (or, even better, a rugby pitch,) we would run 93 yards down the field, finding only bacteria and very simple worms, and those not changing much, if at all. Then, in the space of half of one step, every form of life now known bursts onto the scene, all fully formed as we know them now.
- There were forms of life that came about in the Cambrian Explosion that no longer exist. There are no forms of life that exist now that did not exist then. Therefore, biodiversity is decreasing over time, not increasing as evolution would predict. This also provides additional evidence that there was once a global catastrophe, of the type depicted in the time of Noah.
- Anthropic Principle (Cosmology.) People used to assume that we would find life all over the place, once we started exploring planets. We haven’t found anything like life on any planet we have explored. Instead, what we have found is how tremendously improbable it is that life exists at all. This is further evidence for a Creator.
- Imagine a global lottery. If the odds of winning are one in a million, about six thousand people will win. If you win, you are really lucky, but it isn’t that surprising that somebody wins. Now imagine the odds are one in a trillion, trillion, trillion. Nobody should win with odds like that. If somebody does win, you need to consider the possibility that the lottery was fixed. In fact, at that point, it really is the best answer. Now add fifty zeroes to those odds, and you have the lottery for life in this universe. The lottery was fixed.
- In order to have life, you have to have a planet with exactly the right size orbiting exactly the right kind of star in exactly the right position in the right place in the right kind of galaxy. There’s about twenty more variables you have to get exactly right in order for any sort of life to be even imaginable. Not whether evolution can happen. Whether life can happen at all. The odds end up at 10^121. The most generous estimate of planets in the universe is 10^80. You don’t even come close. 10^41 is far beyond statistically impossible. It takes more faith to believe in those odds than it does to believe someone fixed the lottery.
- The problem only gets worse when you look at it on a universal level. There’s at least thirty variables that have to be exactly right in order for any conception of life to exist at all in this universe. They are precise to a factor of 10^600. Change them at all and everything dies on every planet. And there’s only one universe (that we know of.) So the classic naturalist counterargument is to just up the number of repetitions. Say there’s 10^600 universes and one of them is bound to get it right. The problem is that’s just the gamblers’ fallacy all over again. There is no cumulative luck. Unless our universe is somehow benefiting from the failures of an infinite number of failed universes, then our sample size is one. Even more, if there was a ‘universe creation machine,’ it would probably exhibit tremendous design itself. You can’t explain away an artist by finding his brush. And if the artwork is exquisitely designed, the brush will be as well. That is the problem atheist cosmologists keep running into.
- Ontological Argument (Philosophy.) The fact that we’re here at all is significant. There has to be a sequence of cause and effect that arrives here. We know that sequence can move forwards forever. The problem comes when we try to go backwards. Ancient Hindu theology places the Earth on the back of an elephant. When asked the inevitable question, ‘what holds up that elephant?’ the answer was ‘another elephant,’ and so on. This merely delays the answer, but you can’t push it back forever. If we’re here at all, God must exist.
- The first formulation of this argument is Plato’s Unmoved Mover. Cause links to effect, which in turn becomes another cause with its own effect and so on. All causes and effects link together into a stream of causality, which shapes events. Working forwards, there is no problem. Working backwards, though, you go from effect to cause, and it is elephants upon elephants all the way back. But the chain has to start somewhere. All effects are the result of causes. But to get the whole train moving, there has to be a locomotive. Something must be a cause that is not the effect of another cause. There must be an unmoved mover, that both causes itself and other things. Plato calls this the Unmoved Mover. Aquinas adapts this theory to Christianity and further refines it in his Summa Theologica, determining that God is pure actuality, no potentiality at all. Of course, God told this to Moses well before Aquinas did the math. ’I AM that I AM.’
- The second formulation is the Kalam cosmological argument. It comes from the Islamic world, circa 900 AD, possibly from Averroes. It tells us that negative infinite regress is impossible. Basically, if you ran into someone who told you ‘I’m going to count to infinity… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’ and so on, you could bet that they’ll get bored or tired or die of old age before they get there, but in principle it is a logically coherent statement. Now imagine someone shows up, and says ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1... I just counted backwards from infinity.’ That person is obviously lying. He has nowhere to start. You can’t say ‘infinity, infinity minus one, etc.’ and expect to get back to zero. Infinity keeps moving. You need a fixed point of beginning if you are to get here at all. And we are here, so the universe began. Therefore, Someone began it.
- The last and most fun formulation is Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Think of something good. Like Ice Cream. Now think of something better. True Love, Princess Bride Style. Or Fast Cars. Or whatever. Now think of something better than that. Pretty much, if you keep going you’re going to end up at the Ultimate Good. And that is God. So if anything good exists, and some things are more good than others, then there is going to be a theoretical pinnacle of goodness. That Perfect Good must be God. Therefore, God exists because good exists, and it must have its ontological origin in Him.
5. The Gospels are a Trustworthy Account.
The Gospels describe God’s fullest revelation of Himself to mankind, the birth, life, death and resurrection of His Son. They speak clearly and unequivocally to the fact that a man was born at a specific time and place, claimed to be God in the flesh, died a criminal’s death, and bodily came back from the dead. If truth is knowable, and God exists, then God exists in truth. Since God is beyond death, and man is not, then death is subject to God. Any man who claimed Godhood wrongly would have no power over death, as a God of truth would not acknowledge such falsehood. Therefore, if a man had power over death, then he must be of God. Given that God does not appreciate blasphemy, if a man claimed to be God, and returned from the dead, then He must be God. If a Man was indeed God, then everything He said is truth. And He said the basic truths of Christianity over and over again: sin, repentance, substitutionary atonement, eternal life. In the person of Jesus Christ, as attested to in the Gospels, all the doctrines of Christianity, the creeds and the scripture have their root. If He is who He said He was, His words are inescapable and call all men into account. If the Gospels are true, He is who He said He was.
Threat: Neo-Gnosticism. None of the arguments are really that new. Postmodernism looks a lot like hedonism recycled, modernity looks a lot like materialism recycled. And neo-Gnosticism is just the Gnostics recycled. They make the same basic argument: Jesus never really claimed to be God, and He was a nice guy, but certainly not God. This shows up in so-called ‘quests for the historical Jesus,’ in the ‘Jesus seminar,’ in movies like Stigmata and books like the DaVinci Code. (This may have something to do with the seminar’s flawed methodology and their inability to win real arguments. If you can’t make your points, just go to the media. They’ll buy anything.) Basically, neo-Gnosticism tries to discredit the truth claims of the Gospels, and hence the basic doctrines of Christianity.
- Formal Attack: Jesus Seminar. This generally takes form in recycling some old controversy and calling it new. This often includes some flavor of ‘Jesus slept with Mary Magdalene,’ and incorporates some of the nonsense in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. This is especially strange, given that if some of the weird doctrines contained in that book ‘only men go to heaven, so Mary became a man,’ then Christians would be called misogynist and all sorts of nasty things. I guess you can have your cake and eat it too. Especially if you find a good publisher. A lot of this is just silly conspiracy theories. All these issues were addressed openly by people far closer to the original issues, and their reasoning and results were available for all to see.
- Informal Attack: Jesus was a good teacher. Just not a God. Acknowledging a form of goodness, but not goodness in full, this argument allows people to neutralize Jesus into some pedantic peddler of stale platitudes. But, as C.S. Lewis points out, you can’t neuter the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He was no nice guy. Nice guys don’t say the things He said. And nice guys don’t change lives two thousand years later. God in the flesh does.
Arguments:
- Textual Criticism (Literature/Archaeology.) Josh McDowell’s Apologetics work is largely in the area of textual criticism of the Gospels. In fact, it was the overwhelming weight of evidence in this area that ended up bringing him to Christ. We can say with a very high degree of reliability that we are reading what was written, what was written checks with itself, and checks with external sources. Legendary development shows up in later pseudoepigraphia (like Gospel of Thomas,) but is conspicuously absent in the Biblical account. Furthermore, those who would have known best the veracity of the Gospels died for them, to the man. The only coherent answer is that the Gospels are a true accounting of events.
- First, there is the manuscript evidence. We consider Beowulf to be a rough accounting of the original oral poem. Hundreds of years passed before it was written down, and manuscripts are rare and vary greatly. Thucidides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars is considered a reliable recounting of the original text. The text is derived from eight manuscripts dated generously to 800 years after the writing. Excluding the Bible, the Iliad is the considered possibly the most reliable text from antiquity from a manuscript point of view. There are 650 manuscripts available. There are over 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. They date very close to the writing of the writing of the originals. Additionally, discoveries of new manuscripts only confirm existing manuscripts. Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, confirming OT. Similar discoveries confirm NT. A hundred years of openly hostile manuscript criticism has failed to bring down Scripture. The same could not be said for any other holy text. The telephone game argument simply fails in the face of the evidence.
- Second, the internal coherence of the work. Noting that the four gospels were all written from different authors, they do not contradict each other in any material way. Even if the synoptic gospels (all but John) cite each other as sources, they agree in the places that were not cited. There was an article in Harvard Law Journal, I believe, that analyzed the gospels from a legal point of view. Taking the testimony of the first-hand witnesses recorded, and the expert research of Luke, there would have been a legally airtight case that Christ rose, by any courtroom standard of proof. One even minute, almost irrelevant points of fact, the texts agree. The odds of this happening are extremely improbable, which points to the only real conclusion: the accounts synchronize because they are factual. Truth is coherent. Four witnesses all saw the same thing, and they do not contradict each other.
- Along with this, the idea of Legendary Development. Stories over time become legends. C. S. Lewis addresses this point well. When approached about skeptical NT scholars who called the Bible myth, he asked not how much NT had they read, but how much myth they had read. He responded something to the effect of ‘I am a professor of myth, and the Gospels don’t read like any myth I have ever read.’ Myth and Legendary Development have certain characteristics that develop over time. First, all the good guys are really good, and the bad guys are really bad. The would-be heroes, the apostles, look pretty dumb most of the time. They are hardly heroes, especially during the crucifixion. Second, all the extraneous details disappear. It was not until about two centuries ago that people put irrelevant details into fiction to make it more realistic. The Gospels are filled with seemingly extraneous details, ones that are consistent with the main themes, but largely tangential. This is indicative of a factual account, not a legend. Finally, a legend is retold with some sort of purpose to power, either to support or oppose existing power structures. The Gospels are not a politically revolutionary work, but they are certainly not a political status-quo work. Interestingly, legendary development shows up in all the Gospel of Thomas-type epigraphia, which is consistent with their dates of writing, 200+ years after the events.
- Finally, there is the External Consistency of the work. Comparing the Gospels with the historical records of the time, it checks. Roman records talk about a group following a slave Krestus who, it was claimed, died and rose again. This is too close for coincidence, and indicates that the doctrines of the early church did not dramatically change over time. Josephus discusses the early church, and recounts that the Nazarene sect of Judaism (what Christians were called at the time) believed the same things. Roman records check with the name of a city works administrator in Paul’s epistles. The claims of the Gospel explain the relevant citations better than any other hypothesis.
- The most significant external consistency check is the witness of the martyrs. If anyone would know the Gospels were a fabrication, the apostles certainly would have. Yet, all of them died as if they believed, as attested to by Roman records and other accounts. This would be the most illogical of actions to knowingly die for a lie. Especially to rejoice as they did so. Psychologically, something happens to the apostles between sitting in a room hiding from the Romans and dying horrible deaths joyfully. There is only one explanation: their account was true.
- The Trilemma. (Logic.) C. S. Lewis’ classic trilemma counters the claim that Jesus was just a good teacher. The Gospels depict Jesus claiming to be God. There is no other adequate explanation for His death other than the charge of blasphemy. So clearly He claimed to be God, and was understood to do so by the people of the time. This precludes the ‘good teacher’ hypothesis. He must be a legend, a liar, a lunatic or Lord.
- The first option, legend, can be largely rejected due to the tremendous amount of textual evidence for Jesus’ existence, both in the Gospels and outside of them. Even just using Josephus, you can prove to any reasonable standard that Jesus existed and claimed to be God.
- The next option is liar. A man who claims to be God, yet knows that he is not, is the very devil in hell. (plagiarizing Lewis) Yet, Christ’s moral philosophy is recognized as some of the most beautiful and good in all of history, even by non-Christians. The ‘good teacher’ claim even includes ‘good.’ Nietzsche was one of very few to call Christ anything negative morally, and Nietzsche is not really an example of kind and generous moral philosophy. So liar doesn’t check with the data.
- The next option is lunatic. To plagiarize Lewis again, someone who claims to be God, believes themselves to be God, and is not God, is equivalent to someone who believes themselves to be a poached egg. It would not be the first time a man claimed to be God. Unfortunately for this option, such men do not win arguments with the best scholars and lawyers of their time. Christ’s knowledge and powers of reasoning are still astonishing two thousand years later. This is not the mark of a man who belongs in an asylum.
- So the only remaining option is that He was who He said He was. That He is Lord of Heaven and Earth. The resurrection stands as proof. No other arguments about who He was can stand in the face of an empty tomb. And, once again, the people who would know whether that was true or not died to the man believe that it was (with the exception of John.)
- Gamaliel’s Argument (History.) Gamaliel, teacher of Saul of Tarsus, tells the Sanhedrin that if what the Apostles were doing was of God, then they could not stop it no matter what they did. If it was not of God, it would die out on its own. His argument stands. Christianity would have been stillborn if confronted with the corpse of Christ. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, if the apostles found the wrong tomb, to open up the right one and parade the body through the streets. That was never done, instead the authorities acted more like people trying to hush up a conspiracy. Neither was the faith killed by the Pharisees in Jerusalem, nor was it killed by the executioners of Rome. In the face of tremendous persecution, the church thrived. And two thousand years later, Jesus Christ still changes lives.
- From the viewpoint of history, Christianity should never have made it out of the cradle. Starting as a offshoot faith of a small and relatively insignificant Diaspora, it certainly should not have been able to withstand the attacks of the power structures of the time. It makes sense that Islam’s conversion by taxes and the sword took the Middle East by storm. It makes sense that Mormonism and its pyramid scheme layout prospers in a land of pyramid schemes. It does not make sense that eleven barely literate fishermen and a turncoat preacher overcome the greatest empire in all of history by spilling their own blood. And largely by accident at that. There is no explanation for that other than a miracle. Other than the hand of God. We should not be here. There is no power in the world that explains how these weak jars of clay could do so much in so little time.
- From a very personal viewpoint, Christ still changes lives. He is not some sterile Gautama. People still find Him daily. They encounter Him and He transforms their lives. I’ve seen it, in myself and in others. Dead men inspire, but they do not transform. Christ still transforms the world. He reconciles the irreconcilable. Nobody describes a personal relationship with Buddha, or Zoraster, or Mohammed. People describe Jesus in intimate terms. He is alive and well, and we all stand as evidence of that.
- One’s testimony is often their best apologetic argument. Because it is laced with the power of the Spirit, and it is real and breathing and in front of them.
6. Be a Samurai. There are two ways to fight. You can use the traditional Western style, hacking off limbs until one side wins. Or you can use the Eastern style, where two Samurai would stare at each other for hours, until one blinks, and the other would come in with an instant killing stroke. Samurai prepare, and they stay aware. They never bludgeon. This is the way to do apologetics.
- You are there to love on people. Your primary weapon is the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Apologetics is a counter-stroke, a defensive move.
- In living our faith, we represent the trilemma over and over again. Either we are hideously evil liars, the greatest of all fools, or we are right. The enemy will counter this by trying to make us into well-meaning fools. For this we are instructed to always have an answer ready.
- Therefore, use apologetics to protect weaker brothers and sisters, or to deflect an attack. But after deflecting it, go right back to the primary weapon of love. Preach the Gospel. With words if necessary. But if necessary, make sure you have the words.
7. Further References:
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell.
More than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell.
Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias.
When Skeptics Ask, Norm Geisler.
When Critics Ask, Norm Geisler.
The Case for Christ, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for Faith, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for a Creator, Lee Stroebel.
Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis.
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