Mar 16, 2019 | Apologetics
Did you know Jesus was a Jew? That he grew up and lived his entire life among religious Jews? Did you know that this fact is critically important in establishing the credibility and plausibility of the gospel stories? If you don’t, then you may not be familiar with the phrase, psychological apologetics. This is basically how psychological evidence (how people think, what makes sense to them, their conceptual framework) establishes the facts of the gospel narratives. Once you learn about this, it’s impossible to un-see it, and the more your confidence will grow in the historical reliability of what we read in the New Testament (and the Old as well).
(more…)
Mar 10, 2019 | Apologetics
I’m listening to a wonderful series of lectures by pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, Kim Riddlebarger called “Apologetics in a Post-Christian Age.” He argues, persuasively, that the central fact of the apologetics enterprise is the resurrection. If that in fact happened, then everything else follows: Christianity is the true understanding of the nature of reality. If it didn’t, eat, drink, and be merry . . . . The question for Christians, and those not yet but who understand the implications of such an event if it in fact happened: Can we trust the historical accounts and information we find in our Bibles? Most people today think whatever happened, it was 2,000 years ago, so of course we can’t know if it actually happened. These people would be wrong. How can I say that with such certainty?
(more…)
Mar 2, 2019 | Explanatory Power
I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist’s job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased average people would come to see religion and God as increasingly implausible and untenable. It is debatable about when this move toward atheism/materialism (the material is all that exists) started, but it is a supreme irony of history that it really gained momentum when a pious orthodox Catholic French philosopher, Renes Decartes, developed his work of philosophy as a defense against the growing atheism of the 17th century. The details of how this happened are not important for the this post, but once the starting point became man (cogito ergo sum) not God, and epistemology not metaphysics (how we know not what is the nature of reality), the jig was up. The absolute secularism of Western culture we are experiencing with a vengeance in 2019 was inevitable. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the secularists’ party: reality is crashing it!
(more…)
Feb 23, 2019 | Gratitude, Parents and Family
We had the incredible privilege last weekend of enduring the traumatic experience of hosting our daughter’s wedding. Until one actually does such a thing, you have no idea the insanity of such an undertaking, but the blessings and memories among the all the craziness are priceless. You get to spend time with family and friends you rarely see, or haven’t seen for a very long time, and giving your only daughter away to an incredible young man before them is worthy of all the tears. Not to mention that everyone together gets to witness one of the most profound mysteries of human existence: the marriage of one man and one women “till death us do part.” (more…)
Feb 10, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Human nature is one of the most powerful apologetics for the veracity of the Christian faith. What else can explain so well the glory and mess that is humanity, but that man was made perfect in God’s image, a glorious creature capable of the most exquisite heights, who then rebelled and fell into a self-centered morass that brings him lower than the animals. Remember this fundamental fact of human existence: something must explain the conundrum of human nature, or explain it away. As I never tire of telling my children, and anyone else who will listen, if people reject the Christian explanation of things, they must offer an alternative explanation. If they don’t or refuse, they are not to be taken seriously.
(more…)
Recent Comments