Strobel: Accepting Christ was just the first step in a lifelong progressive journey, with minefields along the way. Doubts are inevitable. Question is: Are we drawn closer to God by the experience, or pushed away by doubts?
Charles Templeton – Billy Graham’s friend for over 50 years and fellow evangelist until he lost his faith.
1940s Youth for Christ phenomenon. Came to doubt his faith.
Teen conversion. “I lacked the theological training to support my beliefs. I wanted to believe. But slowly my mind and reason began to challenge and refute the core of my deepest convictions.” The reliability of the Bible, the deity of Christ and a loving God – all fell away.
“I could no longer try to persuade people of something I no longer believed. I had no money and I’d lose those wonderful friends I made in the ministry. But I had no real choice.”
Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith: Charles Templeton. Final Book
Common Objections: 2 rhetorical quetions
1) In a world with thousands of religions, why is Jesus the only way to salvation? Only we have it right?
2) How could a loving God create a world with so much evil and suffering?
Jesus answered, “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.”
Paul says it bluntly, “There is no other name under heaven given among men, by which you may be saved. For there is salvation in no other.” – such an insufferable presumption says Templeton.
Blatant arrogance, says Templeton. Still one of the biggest objections to Christianity.
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” – There’s one way to God. He’s been saying this throughout his Ministry
Ben Witherington III
Ben Witherington – “Before Jesus came along, no one was claiming to be the exclusive manifestation of God on earth. This was shocking then even among 1st century Jews. Got him crucified. Surprising he even lasted three years!”
The claim that Jesus is the only way will stir up rancor. But the question is: is that claim true?
Popular ethos: All religions teach basically the same thing and as a result there are many ways to salvation.
Answer: The major religions teach many of the same surface teachings. But when you get to the core of those religions, they are radically contradictory. Buddha was an agnostic about the existence of any God and a major strain of Buddhism doubts the existence of anything, much less a God.
Hinduism posits 330 million Gods. Muslims believe in a God and believe it is the greatest blasphemy to believe in the Trinity. They cannot all be right. They could all be wrong, but they can’t all be right because they contradict one another.
Christians say he’s Messiah, Jews say he’s not.
On the big issues, they’re very very different. They can’t all be true
Blaise Pascal
All religious believers of any religion share something in common: A deep yearning. What Pascal called, ‘A God-shaped vacuum in the heart which cannot be filled by any created thing.’
No matter where you go, humans have a sense that they are not right with the universe. They sense their guilt, alienation, separation from God. They seek purpose in life.
Christianity offers a concrete solution to a genuine problem. And it doesn’t candy or sugar coat it. It identifies it for what it is.
“There is no one righteous person not even one. All have turned away…”
Humanity’s fundamental need: All separated from God by our sin. God’s morality is perfect. And so is his justice. Thus, this separation should last for eternity. But there’s hope: Out of love, he reached down with a rescue effort. Not just some teachings on how to be nice to each other. God became a man himself to communicate in the clearest form possible his message AND to create a sacrificial provision or pardon for man’s crimes against God.
Jesus is the one mediator between God and man that can be man standing in the presence of God and fully human, standing among men. He’s the only God-man who can fulfill that role of bring reconciliation to a broken relationship.
He took the penalty of crimes upon himself. Not only does God come down to man, but he gives him a free pardon for his crimes.
The solution is not in making man better with good teachings, the solution is grace.
It is a gift of God, not by works, so no one can boast.
The doctrine of Grace is unique to Christianity. Grace means that there is nothing we can do to qualify ourselves for salvation. Our moral behavior over a lifetime doesn’t cut it. Grace is a gift. It is something that can never be earned.
The grace of God – When God loves us with his Spirit, with his Son – this isn’t something that we have earned. It isn’t because we’ve twisted his arm. It’s because he loves us lavishly and wants to make his presence known in our lives.
Greg Koukl - Stand to Reason
Greg Koukl – God isn’t looking at religions as a series of clubs. He sees a desperately wicked society that needs rescuing and he gives us a pardon. And this is why Jesus is the only way, because he is the only one that solves the problem.
Suppose I knew there was only one necessary and sufficient means of solving the human condition – we need no other and please don’t send 1500 avatars, none of which can do the job. Jesus, is one time for all. He’s the only sufficient and necessary means by which we may be saved.
Uniqueness of JC is magnified when we compare him to other leaders. No one claimed to be the direct way to God. Buddha no, Mo didn’t. Take Buddha out and you still have teachings of Buddhism or the Prophet and you still have the supremacy of Allah, but if you take JC out of Christianity, you no longer have Christianity. Because Christianity is not based on the teachings of Jesus. It is rather, the person of Jesus that is critical.
If you boil him down to bunch of Thou Shalts and Nots, you’ve trivialized Jesus. Because his claims were not just you need to behave better. His claims were that God is breaking into human history through himself and coming to change us. The Gospel good news is that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand through the teachings of Jesus and if you don’t accept that, all the ethical teaching in the world isn’t going to help you. You have to respond to the good news about Jesus who has come into this world.
CS Lewis – JC great moral teacher? “A man who said what Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil of hell. Either he was or is the Son of God, or a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, or kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord. But let us not come to him with any patronizing nonsense and call him a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
N.T.Wright
NT Wright: “When someone says JC was just a great moral teacher, that’s rather like saying Mozart wrote some pretty tunes. Respond, “Yes, he did write some pretty tunes but if that’s all you can hear in his music then you need to sit down and learn what those symphonies are all about. And saying that Jesus is just a great moral teacher is a disinfecting him so that we can have him on our terms, rather than on the terms in which he presented himself. You can’t grasp him that way. That’s like saying the only bit of Mozart I’m going to accept is the bit I can whistle on my way home from the pub. Best of luck to you!”
Go back to the historical documents and his claims to deity
The 4 Gospels leave no doubt he believed he was deity. So can we believe Jesus? Older docs than any doc for any religious leader. JC fulfilled prophecies – centuries before he was born. Miracles. He was resurrected.
The early followers gave their martyr lives not because of a sincere belief, but for something they saw with their eyes and touched with their own hands.
Paul – eyewitness – If JC did not come back, our faith is worthless. Sets Christianity up to be testable. You can look at evidence. You can examine it.
Wright – I’m convinced it happened and that it is unique in basing itself entirely on the historical event of the Resurrection.
Arrogance is an easy charge because some Christians are arrogant. The thing about arrogance is, if everything we have is gift of grace through Jesus Christ, we have nothing to be arrogant about! It isn’t that we’ve got it all together, it’s that somewhere God’s got it all together and we are privileged to be a small part of that. And as long as we keep that perspective, we cut the roots out of the arrogance charge with humble but clear witness to the truth.
Christianity has been defined as one beggar telling another beggar how to find bread. We found salvation and now we just want to pass that information on. And because JC lived a sinless life, JC is the only one qualified to pay the penalty and bring us to God and that is why when he says he’s the way, we can trust him with humble and grateful hearts.
God and Evil: If there is a God, why is there so much evil???
Templeton thinks it’s obvious there cannot be a loving God.
EVERYONE has to deal with the problem of evil from the perspective of their worldview? Which worldview has the best resources to deal with the problem within the context of itself? And here I think Christianity excels.
Naturalists say evil is an illusion though suffering exists.
God exists
God is All Good, All Knowing and All Loving
Appears to be a conflict
We don’t have exhaustive knowledge of what these terms mean.
God is All-Powerful. Bible is clear there are things he cannot do. Ex. God cannot swear by a name greater than himself (Hebrews 6:13) God CANNOT lie
Lewis: Can a mortal ask questions that God cannot answer, Yes, God cannot tell you what colour a mile is. God can do anything power can do, but we don’t mean God can do something that defies the laws of Logic and are contradictory.
Everything God created was good. Gave us free will and capacity to make moral choices. We can be bad and good. Possibility for
C.S.Lewis
great evil and potential for great good. It’s our greatest blessing and curse. With free choice, he may foreknow what they’ll do, but he can’t fore determine what they do because that will violate free will.
It’s been argued that because God created humans with free will, then he is ultimately responsible for evil. God created evil. But, from a Biblical perspective, is that even possible? No, evil is not a thing. God created as it’s supposed to be. But human freedom corrupted it. Evil is a lack of goodness. It is goodness spoiled. You can have good without evil. But you can’t have evil without good. So evil was not a direct creation of God, rather it was the result of humans exercising their free will.
So why did God just not create a world of free will in the first place? That way, evil and suffering wouldn’t exist either. God could have made us marionettes. God wanted a race of tested individuals that would choose to love him. As soon as it’s forced, it’s not love anymore. It made creating humans with free will a good thing, because it gave them the opportunity to express genuine love that is not coerced. An intimate relationship with him and with one another.
1600 – Augustine – God would not allow evil unless he could bring good out of it.
Real love rescues from all pain? Nope. We let kids experience pain in some degree. We have good reason sometimes. A greater good is in view. And we can remember horrible suffering but it made us stronger, even though we didn’t understand it at the time. Growth through suffering..
What is crucial to remember is that God has done something about the evil in the world. Jesus of Nazareth has already solved it. Through his blood, mankind can live forever in the Kingdom, reconciled with the Father. It is up to us, whether we will seek out that life line.
Subscribe to my blog