Christianity is a very historical religion – it makes specific claims that are open to testing.
But C. S. Lewis made the point that we hate sin but love the sinner all the time – in our own lives. In other words, when we’re judging ourselves, we always love the sinner despite our sin. We accept ourselves, even though we might not always like our behavior.
He hadn’t changed since I had seen him a few years earlier. With his close-cropped black beard, angular features, and riveting gaze, Craig still looks the role of a serious scholar. He speaks in cogent sentences, never losing his train of thought, always working through an answer methodically, point by point, fact by fact.
We have to ask, Why is there no other first-century Jew who has millions of followers today? Why isn’t there a John the Baptist movement? Why, of all first-century figures, including the Roman emperors, is Jesus still worshiped today, while the others have crumbled into the dust of history?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there’s no other materialistic explanation.
One night I got a call from the church’s senior pastor, Bill Hybels. “I heard a nasty rumor about you,” he said. I was taken aback. “Like what?” “That you’re working at the church sixty or seventy hours a week. That you’re there late into the night and all day Sunday.” To be honest, I swelled with pride. That’s right, I wanted to say. I’m the hardest working member of the staff. Finally, it’s time for some recognition and thanks – if not directly from God, then from my pastor.
Yes, in Christianity, the gap that our sin creates between us and God is simply insurmountable. Trying to cross it is like jumping off the Newport Beach pier and trying to leap to Hawaii,” he said, gesturing in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean.
The insights that freed Jud were similar to the ones that led to my own recovery from spiritual workaholism after being confronted by my boss years ago. I came to realize that God didn’t love me because I made myself valuable through service; on the contrary, I was valuable because I was loved by God. I could stop working like a slave to justify myself; I just needed to recognize – and celebrate – my adoption as God’s child.
Science and faith are not at war. When scientific evidence and biblical teaching are correctly interpreted, they can and do support each other. I’d say to anyone who doubts that: investigate the evidence yourself.
Anchoring our hope to Christ means we live with a confident expectation that he will therefore fulfill his promises to us.
God is the God of do-overs, and that should give us great hope. We really can be absolved of our past.
Pride is the mother hen under which all other sins are hatched,’ says C. S. Lewis.
To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn’t have that much faith.
Pain and suffering are frequently the means by which we become motivated to finally surrender to God and to seek the cure of Christ.
I believe all suffering contains at least the opportunity for good,” came his response, “but not everyone actualizes that potential. Not all of us learn and benefit from suffering; that’s where free will comes in. One prisoner in a concentration camp will react quite differently from another, because of the choice each one makes to respond to the environment.
To Jesus she already is somebody. Like the loving father of the prodigal son, Jesus is frantically scanning the horizon, watching for Madonna to return to him. He’s absolutely convinced that she’s so valuable that she’s worth dying for. ‘Greater love has no one than this,’ said Jesus in John 15:13, ‘that one lay down his life for his friends.’ That’s what He did for her on the cross!
We can’t treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it.
I raised my hand to stop him. “Whoa – here’s where skeptics have a field day,” I told him. “The gospels tell us he began to sweat blood at this point. Now, c’mon, isn’t that just a product of some overactive imaginations? Doesn’t that call into question the accuracy of the gospel writers?” Unfazed, Metherell shook his head. “Not at all,” he replied. “This is a known medical condition called hematidrosis. It’s not very common, but it is associated with a high degree of psychological stress.
But your love goes beyond that. You can know all these things about your wife and not be in love with her and put your trust in her, but you do. So the decision goes beyond the evidence, yet it is there also on the basis of the evidence. So it is with falling in love with Jesus. To have a relationship with Jesus Christ goes beyond just knowing the historical facts about him, yet it’s rooted in the historical facts about him.
An equal-opportunity phenomenon, the World Wide Web doesn’t discriminate between sober-minded scholars and delusional crackpots, leaving visitors without a reliable filter to determine what’s trustworthy and what’s not.
Historians usually operate with the burden of proof on the historian to prove falsity or unreliability, since people are generally not compulsive liars. Without that assumption we’d know very little about ancient history.