Sunday, February 8, 2009

The Claim and Its Consequence...

"Christ's claim is different from others' claims. He claims to save from sin and its wages, eternal death. Others claim to save from ignorance of morality or lack of mystical enlightenment or social disaster.

Only two reactions are logically possible to Christ's distinctive claim. If it is believed, he cannot be lowered to just one among many human teachers. If it is not believed, he cannot be raised to the level of Buddha or Muhammad, for he claims much more than they do: to save from sin and hell, and to be the only one who does
."

This is lock-step with the idea that Christ is either what he said he was: the only Son of the Living God. Or, he is a great liar, in actuality the most profound liar the world has ever known. Because for 2,000 years he has pulled the wool over the eyes of billions upon billions of people.

What he cannot be is simply a great moral teacher.

A great moral teacher cannot also be a liar, or you have a near contradiction in terms. As Ravi Zacharias has said, the greatest difference between Christ and other so-called prophets, sages, and moralizers is that they came to make bad people good. Christ came to make dead people live.

Modern reductionists try to reduce Christianity and Christ's teachings down to their moral element. (Thomas Jefferson, one of the most famous reductionists, strickened all of Jesus' miracles and supernatural works from the New Testament, and used that as his Bible.)

Christianity however is much more than lessons of morality/immorality, it is the propositional truth given to us that there is a God who is There, and he is not silent, and he sent his Son for the purposes of vicarious atonement. That makes the mere idea of moral/immoral pale in comparison as it should. Christ is the only one who ever claimed to be the exclusive way to Life.

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