Tag Archives: History

Christian Apologetics

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Christians, we have been failing to meet some very basic needs for a very long time. We have forgotten or ignored essential principles and commandments in order to appeal to another Master, whether he be culture, fear, or false peace. I am guilty of this. Most of us are. We are guilty of failing to teach the reasons that we have the hope that is in us. We are guilty of equivocating emotion with spirituality. We are guilty of having blind faith. We are guilty of neglecting the mind. I posit that much of this is from fear. Specifically, the fear that we may be wrong about our hope and that we do not want to encounter the gravity of that realization.

However, I do not believe it is fear alone that causes us to see the mind as an enemy of spirituality. The world in which we live, unchristian as it is, believes it is emotion that is closest to the spiritual realm. This has never been a Christian belief, as we will soon see. However, it has entered like a poison into the flow of information we receive. Like a poison, we consume it along with what is appetizing and yet it ends up killing us from within. It is therefore also ignorance that leads us to this type of thinking.

1st Peter 3:8-22

Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. For,

“Whoever would love life
and see good days
must keep his tongue from evil
and his lips from deceitful speech.
He must turn from evil and do good;
he must seek peace and pursue it.
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous
and his ears are attentive to their prayer,
but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. It is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.

Every last Christian is commanded to give a reason (Greek term on which “Apologetics” is based), for the hope that they have. Our faith is a reasonable one. Our hope is logical. Our God is a God of order. His creation is in many ways empirical. Christians have long known all of these things, but have recently placed less emphasis on them.

Sometimes, reason is even seen as the Enemy. In reality, the real Enemy of God has long endorsed the view that God and Reason are mutually exclusive and that logic is anti-spiritual. It is seen in the paganism of the ancient world. It is seen in a far less honest form in the postmodern era today.

Mark 12:28-30

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

The greatest commandment, the real Golden Rule, is to love God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength. Not with our emotions alone. Not with our minds alone. Not with our physical actions alone. All of these things must be done in unison. We can love (and must love) with our minds if we are to love at all. The mind and the intellectual life is an essential part of our humanity. Spirituality, then, is heart, mind, body, and soul taken together toward the end of loving God. Leave out the emotion and you are unfeeling. Leave out the mind, however, and you are dishonest.

This is a bitter pill for us to take because we have lost a taste for such things that used to be part of our regular diet. Christianity, from a historical perspective, is so full of intelligent, powerful thinkers that you cannot read a single modern work of fiction or nonfiction today that is devoid of ideas that have come from the Christian worldview. Yet most of us Christians, when asked questions like “Why is there suffering if God is good”, or “Why do you trust the authenticity of the Bible”, or “How do you know Jesus existed” or “Why are Christians opposed to science”, we stumble, trip, fumble, and end up not giving a defense but instead giving up ground. We don’t train ourselves, and we don’t train younger generations, and so it becomes readily obvious why so many Christian college students leave their faith the moment someone asks them questions about it.

I have been through the entire process of growing up in a Christian church and family, attending a Bible college, attending a secular university, and having every aspect of my faith challenged by those with honest curiosity and those with malicious intent. I wish I had had more training and I am endlessly thankful for the people who helped educate me during that period. Once I work the details out, I’d like this spring to begin a Christian Apologetics group to meet once or twice a month for an hour or two to cover all of the topics related to defending and believing the Christian view of the world. We live in the first real dark ages the world has seen, and we need to learn to be lights once more.

Post-Christianity or Postmodern Forgetfulness?

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From the (scholarly?) Wikipedia:

Postchristianity is the decline of Christianity, particularly in Europe, Canada and Australia, in the 20th and 21st centuries, considered in terms of postmodernism. It may include personal world views, ideologies, religious movements or societies that are no longer rooted in the language and assumptions of Christianity, at least explicitly, though it had previously been in an environment of ubiquitous Christianity (i.e., Christendom).

For nearly two thousand years, the dominant thought in the Western World has been Christianity. Christianity made sense of a world that the earlier Greek philosophers had tried to describe. Christianity took the stagnating Greek cosmology and natural philosophy and brought it into an era of enlightenment on the basis of God’s continuity and order.

Christianity provided the way forward for philosophy, art, and theology. It gave birth to science, the empirical study of a natural world assumed to be ordered on the basis of the order of God. Christianity provided security, morality, ethics, and more.

And in the past 112 years, we’ve somehow developed societies “no longer rooted” in it? I find that very difficult to believe. It is the same difficulty with which I could see a 90 year old man suddenly forgetting his past by choice in order to embrace a totally different reality for the last 10 years of his life. Whereas the elder may simply be senile, the society is simply ignorant. Forgetful perhaps. After all, we have more important things to worry about here in sophisticated 21st Century Western Civilization. Things like Science™. iPods are Science™. Dawkins is Science™. Contradictory statistical studies for medicine are Science™. Christianity though? Not Science™. Not if you want to fit in, anyway. But we’re not about fitting in here; we’re about historical accuracy, and Postmodernism is a great way to get a society to swap the two goals.

From a blog I frequent:

“The dominant philosophy of the modern age is a deconstruction of, or, to be blunt, a hatred of love of truth. Modern ethics is relativism, the denial that ethics exists; modern aesthetics is subjectivity, the denial that beauty exists; modern logic is polylogism, the denial the man of different races, classes and backgrounds can reason together; modern ontology is materialism, the denial that thoughts (including thoughts about ontology) exist; modern epistemology is empiricism (a theory which by definition can enjoy no empirical support); modern metaphysics is nihilism, the belief that the truth is a formless void on which the human will writes whatever it wills. Modernism hence denies and deconstructs philosophy at every point. And modern theology is a muddy atheism lacking even the fire and dignity of Nietzsche or Celsus.”

Perhaps “Postchristian” is simply a way to distinguish those who are not interested in history.

I’m a Conservative, But What Does That Mean?

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“I was raised in a Christian home”

So begins the testimony of myriad Christians in myriad communities around the world. The same statement could be said about political views.

“I was raised in a Conservative home”

While there are certainly disagreements among people (typically those who are not Christians) about what being a “Christian” actually means, that term is much less likely to cause confusion than “Conservative”. And there is a pretty good reason for this.

Being a “Conservative” or a “Liberal” can mean any number of things in any number of contexts. To be Conservative with nature might be seen as a Liberal view in some cases. To be Liberal with your hospitality might be seen as something that southern Conservative states are known for. The terms have meanings,  but they are pretty general definitions.

As simply as can be stated, a Conservative leans towards preserving the way things are, and a Liberal leans towards changing things. A Conservative’s position, therefore, is more obvious than a Liberal’s (who may have different interpretations of ‘change’). At the same time, Conservatives often never break away from the stereotype that they only wish to preserve the status quo because they are afraid of change.

I’ve heard people define both terms specifically for themselves, but I haven’t done so myself. I’ve stated why I’m a political/social/religious/philosophical Conservative in the past,  but inexplicably I’ve forgotten the crux of the entire message: What does that mean?

Here is my definition.

A Conservative believes the world is as it is because those that preceded them had some sense of right and wrong. Conservatives do not believe the world is perfect, but that it is far better than popular opinion would have it.

A Conservative believes change is neither good nor evil, but certainly not always inevitable. When change comes, the Conservative desires sufficient reason to embrace it. If a case cannot be made that satisfies the Conservative, it will be rejected and opposed. If a case can be made, the Conservative will insist that the change occur gradually, and that it not proceed farther than was intended originally.

A Conservative seeks to preserve what is good and not to reinvent it. A Conservative seeks to trust what has been given them not unquestionably, but respectfully.

A Conservative believes humans have fundamentally always been the same sort of creature. That power corrupts anyone. That work strengthens character. That we must subject our passions to our wills, lest we lose our civilization.

I think that just about does it.

The History of Christianity

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Here’s an exercise: Ask someone when the Bible was written as we have it now. For a book that Christians value so much, it’s amazing how few of us know much about its origin.

The strangest part is that we have access to tons of information. Every day, many of us traverse the internet and look up information on the latest game, a newly announced movie, or the weather for the week. With just as much effort, we could start to learn things about what we say we value more than anything else.

Why don’t we do it? Well, I suspect a lot of it has to do with indifference. Growing up in a Christian community, the priority was to fit in, talk about the topics at hand, and have some emotional experiences. There were some times I really felt God’s presence, but a lot of the time it was just another social gathering. I was indifferent to the tenets of my faith until they were questioned by people around me. We shouldn’t wait that long to start researching our worldviews. Our worldviews should instead be defined by what we spend our time researching!

I’d like to start getting really involved in learning the history myself. To me, it is core to what we believe, but we ignore it so much that you’d think Christianity took a 2000 year vacation from Earth. In the upcoming months, I’ll be researching topics and talking about the more interesting things I come across. Stay tuned!

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Oh, and the answer to the question: About 300AD. It was a gradual process, not everyone always agreed, and the books themselves weren’t written while Christ was alive.