The First Question of Christian Apologetics: "Is It True?"

NOTE: This is the second part of a series on the three big questions of Christian apologetics: (1) Is Christianity true? (2) Is Christianity good? and (3) Is Christianity meaningful? You can find the introduction to this series here.

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I often wonder, if someone reads a post that I wrote, who is reading it and why. This post, in particular, is about the evidence for the Christian faith. It's about how we can be confident that God exists; that the Bible is true; that Jesus of Nazareth truly walked the earth in our place; and that his death on a cross and his bodily resurrection has really opened up the way of salvation and hope for all those who place their trust in him. If you're here, maybe you're questioning that belief. Or maybe, you're here because you've recently started to question your unbelief, and you're digging in and doing some exploring. Maybe you're here because you want some help with telling someone else about the evidence for the Christian faith. Whatever your particular reason is for reading this, I'm thankful that you're here, and I hope you feel like this post helps you where you're at. Send me a note if it does.

METHOD: HELPING PEOPLE GET TO THE NEXT STEP

I think that contact, single-conversation evangelism is where we often see the supernatural happen. God can move in a heart and take a person all the way from resistance to rescue in the space of one conversation. When that happens, it's a sight to behold! I pray for those moments regularly. However, I don't think that people regularly move from skepticism to faith in one conversation, and trying to make that happen could be one reason why so much Christian evangelism is ineffective. Many people have complicated, tangled webs of resistance and doubt and alternate ways of seeing things, and for this reason often the best way to use evidence of the Christian faith is to simply help people move a little closer to Christianity than they were before. What follows is my attempt to create a road-map to which evidences might help someone most where they are at. I hope this helps you as you either carry out your own personal journey or work to help someone else get closer to Jesus.

STEP ONE: FROM ATHEIST TO DEIST

If you are speaking to someone who is an atheist, your first goal is probably not going to be to convince them that the Bible teaches that Jesus is God and that he has died for our sins and will return bodily to judge the living and the dead. The reason for this is that before we can talk about how someone can know that Jesus is God, the other person has to be willing to entertain the idea that God exists. An atheist might know that Christians believe in Jesus, and the truth of the Bible, and lots of other things, but they are hung up on the question of how we can know that there is a God in the first place. With that goal in mind, I think I could open an ATHEIST up to the idea that if the history of the universe goes backward eternally (I usually do this by asking, "what do you think came before the Big Bang?") then there might be something that always existed. And if this thing moves on its own without being moved by something before it, then it has a will of its own. And if it brought the whole universe into being, then it's all-powerful or so close as to make no difference--and pretty soon we are talking about God. Arguments for intelligent design or the fine-tuning of the universe point out that if the universe operates by mathematical principles then that suggest a level of order and engineering which suggest a Designer. These arguments serve to ask a person who says there is no God whether they're being totally reasonable in discounting God. Once someone acknowledges the existence of God, it's entirely reasonable to explore whether God would want something to do with us, and that question takes us to the next step.

STEP TWO: FROM DEIST TO THEIST

If someone does allow for God to exist, but they are a DEIST who says God is not personally involved in our lives, I think I could continue to try to open them up from there. (Or if you're reading this and that's you, I'd like to suggest a couple of things to think about.) For example, the existence of morality and consciousness shows that we all have a divinely-impressed law on our hearts that goes way beyond self-preservation, or the betterment of our own group. Although some have tried to argue to the contrary, I don't think that self-sacrificial morality is an evolutionary feature because it doesn't lead to us improving our chances of passing on our genes. It often leads us to make choices for the good of others that prevent us from passing on genes, especially when the person whose good we are concerned with is outside of our own community. This powerful moral consciousness is something that suggests that God not only exists, but that he is personally concerned with our lives and has given us a moral code to help us live our lives in accordance with his will. And I don't think that applies just to this life. Arguments for the existence of the soul such as the study of Near Death Experiences, which have been included in some prestigious medical journals, and which even non-religious researchers describe as "evidence of something... more", could also demonstrate that not only has God made us but that he has made us with the ability to enjoy relationship with him beyond death. Accounts of miracles and attempts to scientifically measure their veracity have also gained interest, in ways that still invite outlets like The New York Times to wonder. Evidence for the existence of miracles, if it bears the weight of investigation, obviously opens us up to the possibility that not only does God exist, but he is actively interested and involved in the lives of human beings. Once someone acknowledges that God exists and that it seems like he wants to have a relationship with us, then it's reasonable to push a little further and look at whether there's any evidence that he's revealed himself to humans before.

STEP THREE: FROM THEIST TO ABRAHAMIC

Of course, there are plenty of people who are theists who believe in the existence of a real, personal God who is interested in their lives. They just don't happen to be convinced of the truth of the Bible. Maybe they have heard that it has been discounted, or that there are too many problems or contradictions in it for it to be true. But maybe a THEIST (a person who believes in a God who is personally involved in our lives, but is not necessarily a Christian) would be surprised and interested to hear that there is quite a bit of corroborating evidence for the Bible in the field of archaeology. They might also be surprised, and interested, to hear that there are many good reasons for acknowledging the antiquity of the documents that make up the Bible relative to the events that they describe, both from the New Testament and from the Old Testament. The findings of source criticism can also help to show that as old as these documents are, they can clearly be shown to build on still-earlier sources that are even closer to (or contemporaneous with) the events recorded. There are other arguments for the Bible's trustworthiness too, among which we can include historical fulfillment of prophecy (for example, Daniel's prediction of the rise of successive empires, once the antiquity of Daniel's writing is established) and the self-authentication of Scripture where it is shown to be well ahead of the times in which it was written, in various aspects. If the Bible can be shown to be a uniquely trustworthy source of revelation from God, then it's worthwhile to explore what it has to say about Jesus.

STEP FOUR: FROM ABRAHAMIC TO CHRISTIAN

Someone who is a member of one of the Abrahamic faiths believes that God has truthfully revealed himself through Scripture (at least through the Old Testament, but also often the New Testament). Christianity is commonly considered part of this grouping, but in this case I'm using the term to distinguish the other groups under this umbrella from Christianity. This ABRAHAMIC group includes Jewish and Muslim people, but also includes those who are Rastafarian, Baha'i, Mormon, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on. Often a central claim made by these groups is that mainstream Christianity arises from some mistaken divergence from either the Old Testament or from Jesus' true original message. To someone of this belief, I might first appeal to arguments for the antiquity and reliability of the documents that we have, to show that Scripture has not been added to or tampered with, and that we indeed have what was originally written. Then, I would appeal to Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament. Much of my preaching as a pastor actually focuses on showing how the Old Testament consistently points to Jesus in unmistakable ways. In particular, the work of Christian Old Testament scholars like Michael Rydelnik and Ian Vaillancourt go a long way towards showing that Jesus is the true point of the Old Testament Scriptures. Once I showed Jesus from the Old Testament, I would also borrow from historical Jesus research to show that the Gospels can be used as good sources about the life of Jesus, even by those who don't fully trust in their inerrancy or inspiration. There is a great deal of biblical and non-biblical information about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and the work of scholars is very helpful here. The results of this research also tend to cut against attempts to radically re-cast Jesus' identity by fringe groups (i.e. that he preached Islam, or that he is really the Apostle Paul, or that he married Mary Magdalene and escaped to France, all of which are actual claims that people have made). Another helpful tool for demonstrating the reliability of the Gospels as containing eyewitness testimony about Jesus is the argument from undesigned coincidences. This argument recognizes that in many places throughout the Gospels, there is evidence of independent accounts of shared events which happen to overlap in detail in seemingly unintentional ways, fitting together like puzzle pieces. This matches up with how the incidental details of two people's story of their trip to a restaurant might lock together with many incidental details overlapping or explaining one another. I would also reference the various historical arguments for the resurrection. If the historical Jesus research demonstrates his existence, and the Gospels faithfully preserve the claims and the actions of Jesus, then the evidence for the resurrection acts as a divine stamp of authenticity on all that Jesus ever did and all that he ever claimed about himself. And finally, I would appeal to the argument from the early church witnesses. Some of the earliest church fathers outside of the New Testament, like Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, are so early that they seem to have known the apostles personally. They can confirm what was widely held to be true about Jesus by the apostles and by the church in the very first century, long before the time of Constantine when many argue that Christianity was co-opted or altered from its original form. If Jesus lived like the Gospels say he did, and he claimed what they say he claimed, and he was resurrected from death to prove those claims, and the whole early church believed in him beginning at the time soon after his crucifixion, then it makes it incredibly likely that the Christian message about Jesus is how God has revealed himself to us.

WHAT'S NEXT?

So far, that's been quite a journey! At each stage, depending where people are at, this post provides a sort of map that details at which point one of the evidences for Christianity might prove most helpful for people who are seeking to know more about Jesus. But what about all of the other religious options that are out there? And how can we know anything at all? That's for the next post.

Cheers,

-Pastor Sean