Apologetics - Sharing Your Faith

101 Series - 02/09/21

What is Apologetics?

A: The theory and practice of defending Christianity.

How do you defend Christianity?

Answering objections

Responding to heterodoxy

Demonstrating knowledge of Theological systems

Provide evidence for the faith & Defuse doubts

Exploring presuppositions

(Quote)

At the end of the day, Revelation can only come from God, not human reason.

What we are achieving by using apologetics is essentially “planting seeds of truth.

Answering objections

Don’t major on the minors!

What beliefs and behaviors are morally mandated for all believers?

One person considers one day more sacred than another. (Saturday/Sunday)

One person eats meat, another abstains

Each person isn’t wrong for being convinced in his or her mind that these things are important.

The matters where Christians can safely disagree are labeled adiaphora or “indifferent Things.”

Not indifferent in the view that these things don’t matter, in fact these things can be very important to a believer, but these are “disputable matters” and they will not keep a person from “inheriting the kingdom of God”.

So what is an “indisputable matter”?

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an indisputable matter: This is a bedrock/foundational truth and the gospel falls apart and doesn’t make sense if this isn’t foundational in your faith.

1 Corinthians 15:12–23 NLT

But tell me this—since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man. Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life. But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised as the first of the harvest; then all who belong to Christ will be raised when he comes back.

2. Responding to heterodoxy

The word heterodox is used to describe something that is not orthodox. Heterodoxy is the collective term for opinions or doctrines that vary from orthodoxy, i.e., the official position. Heterodoxy differs from the orthodox view of the church, but the church is not infallible, and something heterodox is not automatically heretical or wrong. At times, heterodox views are more biblical than the prevailing orthodox view.

This would be an argument that comes from a strictly religious point-of-view.

“You can only get into heaven if you do these tasks” (evangelize door-to-door, go on a 2 year missions trip, fall under this specific denomination, etc.)

Jesus Himself preached heterodox views. The religious leaders of His time taught that full adherence to the Law was possible by self-righteous self-effort. It was a religion devoid of mercy, grace, or dependence on God, and Jesus spoke against it (Matthew 9:13). In fact, Jesus opposed the Pharisees and scribes at every turn, preaching against their understanding of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1–8), decrying their additions to the Word of God (Mark 7:7), calling them “blind guides” (Matthew 23:24), and even proclaiming “woes” on them for their stubborn false teaching (Luke 11).

3. demonstrating knowledge of Theological systems

This is the conversation you will most likely have in an education setting. (On a school campus)

This is the argument of FAITH and REASON.

Let’s start with REASON.

Reason generally is understood as the principles for logical challenge, whether intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or religious.

This is something that can logically make sense based upon historical reasons. Or something that can be actively demonstrated.

FAITH, on the other hand, involves a stance toward some claim that is not, at least presently, demonstrable by reason. So faith is a kind of attitude of trust. And because of that, it is ordinarily understood to involve an act of will or a commitment on the part of the believer.

Systematic Theology is necessary to defend the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Apologetics, or the “defense of the faith,” is bound up with systematic theology and, apart from it, we won’t fulfill our calling to proclaim Christ and defend the truth of gospel grace (Titus 1:9; 1 Pet. 3:15–16).

Systematic theology isn’t optional for Christians. Everyone has a systematic theology, whether they acknowledge it or not, and everyone’s theology practically affects their lives for good or ill.

Subjective vs. Objective Morality (google Relativism)

95% of everybody you ask will tell you that morality is subjective. (meaning that whats right for one person maybe wrong for another and vis versa)

But if you ask them if slavery is wrong, what will there answer be? Of course it’s wrong.

Well then, that fact in itself proves that left to himself man can’t determine what right and wrong is. Because there are still people in this world who think slavery is fine.

Then there has to be an origin from which we derive what right and wrong is. And if man fails to keep consistency on what IS right and wrong, then that distinction must come from somewhere else.

4. Provide evidence for the faith & Defuse doubts

So there’s not enough evidence to be coercive(enough to turn someone to faith by force). But is there enough evidence for faith to be rational? Of course there is! The traditional arguments for the existence of God and the evidences of Christianity are not coercive, but they are certainly sufficient to make Christian belief rational.

The Existence of God

(1) The evidence for the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe points to the creation of the universe out of nothing. Not just matter and energy, but physical space and time themselves come into existence at the Big Bang. In the words of the British physicist P.C.W. Davies, "the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself."

But how can the universe come into existence out of nothing? This is a philosophical, not a scientific question. Out of nothing, nothing comes. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen gives this illustration:

Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang ... and you ask me, 'What made that bang?’ and I reply, ‘Nothing, it just happened.’ You wouldn’t accept that. In fact you would find my reply quite unintelligible.

Well, what’s true of the little bang is also true of the Big Bang. It must have been caused. From the very nature of the case, this cause would have to be uncaused, immaterial, changeless, timeless, and enormously powerful.

(2) Moreover, the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to this cause’s being a personal, intelligent mind. During the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that the initial conditions present in the Big Bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defies human comprehension. For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball. British physicist P.C.W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least. He also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang's low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of 1 out of 10 to the power of 10 to the 123 power. There is no physical reason why these quantities have the values they do. The inference to an intelligent Designer of the cosmos seems far more rational than the atheistic hypothesis of chance.

2. What about belief in a Christian God?

a. Jesus has become a stormcenter of controversy today, as radical scholars like those in the so-called Jesus Seminar have said that only 20% of Jesus’s recorded words were authentic. When you check out the evidence, however, a much different picture emerges than the one painted by the radical critics. Today the majority of New Testament scholars agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God Himself, that he claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come, and that he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as signs of that fact. According to the German theologian Horst George Pöhlmann:

Today there is virtually a consensus ... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. [There is no third way.]

Thus, Jesus either was who he claimed to be, or he was a blasphemous megalomaniac, which seems utterly implausible.

b. But there’s more. For we have dramatic confirmation of the validity of Jesus’s radical claims about himself, namely, his resurrection from the dead. Again, in the second half of this century, there has been a dramatic reversal of scholarship on this issue. Back in the thirties and forties, gospel-events like the discovery of Jesus’s empty tomb were widely regarded as legendary and as an embarrassment for the Christian faith. Similarly, Jesus’s appearances alive after his death were widely taken to be hallucinations induced by the disciples’ faith in Jesus. This scepticism concerning the resurrection also peaked in the late 1960’s and then began rapidly to recede.

But the majority of critics agree:

(1) that after his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth was interred in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, (2) that the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers on Sunday morning, (3) that various individuals and groups of people on multiple occasions and under different circumstances saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and (4) that the original disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection was not a result of their faith in him or of wishful thinking, but that, on the contrary, their faith was the result of their having come to believe in this resurrection.

These are the facts. The question is, how do you explain them?

Here the skeptic faces a desperate situation. A few years ago there was a debate on the resurrection with a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who had written his doctoral dissertation on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. He did not deny the facts of Jesus' honorable burial, the empty tomb, his resurrection appearances, or the origin of the disciples’ faith. Rather his only way to try to explain them away was by a new theory. So he argued that Jesus must have had an unknown, identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth, and who showed up in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’s body, and then showed himself to the disciples, leading them to mistakenly infer that Jesus rose from the dead.; this example is instructive because it shows to what desperate lengths the skeptic has to go to avoid the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the evidence is so good that one of the world's leading Jewish theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead.

Again, much more deserves to be said about this, but I think that again enough has been shared to show that the Christian is rational in believing Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be.

So while the evidence is not enough to coerce you if your heart is closed, it is enough to ground faith rationally if you are willing to look at it with an open mind and an open heart.

5. Exploring presuppositions

What is a presupposition?

Presupposition: to suppose or assume beforehand; take for granted in advance.

This is when someone comes into a conversation basing their argument on the foundation of an assumption. Whether that be ignorance, miseducation or lack of education.

example: My mom told me that Jesus never existed and that Christianity is a way for “The Church” to control people and take their money.