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.

Some of the Most Amazing Things Said...

...were said whenever Jesus's antagonists tried to stump him, or force him into an uncompromising dilemma.

When the Pharisees asked Jesus whether the adulteress should be stoned, they thought they had him in a box. If Christ told them to stone her, he would've looked not like the compassionate, forgiving teacher, but someone with a cruel bent. Had Christ said not to stone the adulteress, Christ would then look permissive and indulgent. However, Jesus gave an answer that is now so recognizable that it has lost its profundity in our pop culture.

"When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up, and said to them, 'If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her'." (John 8:7). Jesus gave the most unlikely of answers, and made clear that judgment was God's, and God's alone. This story shows the forgiving nature of God. It also shows that God is a just God. There will be judgment, but there will be forgiveness for those that seek and those that accept it.

This goes for everyone. Judgment of others is not ours, but God's.

"Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned, forgive, and ye shall be forgiven."

"Isn't it true that the drunkard will boast of his charity, the immoral man is thankful he's not a thief, and the profane swearer flatters himself that he never lies." -- Ravi Zacharias

A Few Problems with the Atheistic Worldview

1. There is no possibility of an objective moral law because there is no possibility of a moral lawgiver. Without God to give the moral law, there is no room for an objective moral law. The only possibilities of a moral law become subjective, and relativistic--which amounts to no moral law at all. But, this doesn't coincide with what we know of ourselves as people. People think in terms of antithesis (right and wrong, black and white, yes and no), and when people attempt to defend the position of relativism, they are forced to base their reasoning on antithesis. (e.g., Relativism is right, absolutism is wrong.)

2. Atheism offers no meaning for life. The atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre understood that if finite man had no infinite reference point, then finite man has no meaning, and there is no consequence or meaning to anything he does. Life is, under this philosophy, "absurd." It has no meaning. Theism offers an anchor for finite man to compare his life, his actions, and their consequences to a constant, immutable source: God. God gives life meaning.

3. Atheism cannot explain the genesis of the Universe. To believe atheism is to believe that all we know: matter, energy, motion, everything came from nothing. Nothing means absolutely nothing. Nothingness. Something cannot come from nothing. This is a philosophical problem for atheism, and atheism has no answer for this. Even if Darwinism were true, that doesn't explain what caused Darwinism.

4. Atheism has no concept of divine retribution, or just desserts. As it happens sometimes, bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. A theistic view allows that a wrongdoer will get his just desserts in the after-life. Atheism does not offer this.

5. If atheism is true, we have to explain how we as personal beings came from an impersonal Godless universe. Atheism has no coherent answer to this.

6. Atheism causes its leading advocates to viscerally hate a God they don't believe exists.

As Ravi Zacharias frequently propounds, only the Christian worldview sufficiently and coherently answers the questions of origin, condition, meaning, and destiny.

Quick Passage from Genesis in Space and Time

I found a particular passage in Genesis in Space and Time not so much interesting as consistent with some other things I have come across. I'm quoting now:

• Among contemporary philosophers Martin Heidegger in his later writings suggested a sort of space-time fall. He said that prior to Aristotle, the pre-Socratic Greeks thought in a different way. Then when Aristotle introduced the concept of rationality and logic, there was an epistemological fall. His notion, of course, had no moral overtones at all, but it is intriguing that Heidegger came to realize that philosophy cannot explain reality if it begins with the notion that the world is normal. This the Bible has taught, but the Bible's explanation for the present abnormal world is in a moral Fall by a significant man, a fall which has changed the external flow of history as no epistemological fall could do.

What I find interesting here is not the content of what Heidegger thought, but instead the fact that later in life he came to some realizations that more closely represent Biblical reality than ever before. Sure, it is a completely different type of Fall; a Fall in the realm of knowledge and the ability to know as opposed to a moral Fall, but it is a Fall nonetheless.

No close nexus here, but what happened to Sartre is also somewhat revealing. Sartre spent his life explaining the absurdity of life and the world. He spent a life of total atheistic hedonism writing his perverted worldly philosophy, and rejecting the concept of God. Sure enough, on his death bed (and I unfortunately can't find anything on this, but have heard Ravi Zacharias talk it) Sartre renounced his atheism, and professed a belief in a God. It is highly unlikely Sartre came to belief in the Christian God on his death bed, but the fact that on his last days he came to believe in a God at all is significant.

What I also remember from hearing Zacharias talk about this is that he was so steadfast and absolute in his atheism before that point, that when he proclaimed a belief in God, his mistress thought he had lost his mind.

And, whether or not he requested it or asked for it, on his deathbed, Catholic priests performed an unction on/for Oscar Wilde.

Hume's Test Failed Itself...

David Hume, a Scottish skeptic from the 18th century, is credited to this day by many atheists and freethinkers as a really smart dude who drove the nails into the coffin of Christianity.

I've read this in D'Souza's book What's So Great About Christianity, and I've also heard Ravi Zacharias talk about this, and I got a laugh both times.

One of David Hume's popular philosophical statements was "If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school of metaphysics, let us ask these questions

• Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or reasoning?
  
• Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence?

If the answer to both is "no," commit it to the flames for it can be nothing but sophistry and illusion."

He is saying, take a book in your hands and ask if it is being mathematically reasoned through, if it isn't--commit it to the flames. Or, if a statement isn't mathematical or scientific it is sophistry and illusion.

But, Hume's statement is a philosophical test for meaning that fails its own test. His statement does not contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or reasoning, nor does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence.

What Happens When You Take God Out of The Equation but Still Attempt to Answer the Tough Questions?

In my opinion, and from what I have read of him, Jean Paul Sartre was as perverted a thinker as Nietzsche ever was--and far more damaging in that he was more subtle and appeared less insane. Sartre was a french philosopher/atheist existentialist (1905-1980) who to his credit attempted to answer life's biggest questions such as origin/meaning/condition/destiny, but was only able to deduce that life was "absurd."

Sartre's philosophy, which can be found his in his more popular books Nausea and Being and Nothingness, was really nothing more than nihilism which led to a belief that life and the universe were "absurd." A pessimistic hedonist, Sartre "philosophized" that there was no order to the universe, no meaning to experience, nothing to life or man, just one big smoldering heap of nothingness and absurdity. I find it hard to believe that such a line of thought can pass as philosophy and get pawned off on university students today.

Although Sartre believed that rationally the universe was "absurd," humans were still under an obligation to "authenticate" oneself. (I'm confused as to why a person is under obligation when life is nothingness...) And, you can "authenticate" yourself by an act of the will. That idea while a little nebulous in its own right is not completely bizarre and devoid of sense until you delve a bit further into what passes as "authenticating" oneself. Essentially, since the universe and EVERYTHING in it is absurd, and has no content or meaning, all attempts to authenticate oneself are completely equal. Therefore, followed to its logical conclusion, there was no right or wrong, good or bad, only "authenticating oneself by an act of the will." So, it wouldn't matter whether you spend every day of your life collecting roadside litter, dedicate yourself to removing landmines from the Earth, helping the elderly, or molesting children, beating the elderly, or engaging in general mayhem and serial murder: all acts are acts of the will and a successful completion of self-authentication.

Isn't it hard to wrap your mind around such thought? How can people of such towering genius come to believe such Godless, insane stuff?

The funniest thing about Sartre was that he was not able to even come close to putting his own philosophy into practice. Sartre dabbled in politics later in his life (which, if all is equal there can be no good or bad politics), and later signed the Algerian Manifesto making himself a moral declaration.

Jean Paul Sartre is further proof that the only philosophy or worldview that can answer life's four toughest questions--origin/meaning/condition/destiny--is Christianity. As Zacharias says, Christianity is the only worldview that can answer all four with coherency and stand up in its own right in doing so. Other philosophies and religion will be able to answer one or two, but will fall apart when attempting to answer all four. People like Sartre take the really really really hard way out when the answers and truth (which is what they are all after) is right there for them, and end up living a life of absurdity themself.

Evil and Unjust Suffering as Evidence of the Non-existence of God.

I had meant to summarize this from RZ's book Beyond Opinion sometime ago, but had forgotten. He gives a couple of forceful arguments countering the atheist line that the presence of evil and unjust suffering is evidence against the existence of God. To be sure unjust suffering is a quandary that that can be tough to handle and understand even for the orthodox Christian, but there are logical arguments from both the existential and intellectual side.

The evidential argument given by atheists for the non-existence of God typically runs

• there is evil in the world
• if there were a God, he would have done something about it
• nothing has been done about it
  
• therefore, there is no God

From this there are two approaches the theist can take--and keep in mind the third point by the atheist is hardly self-evident--in refuting such the evidential argument against God.

Approach #1

• Yes, there is evil in this world
• If there is evil, there must be good (a problem the atheist has to explain).
• if there is good and evil, there must be a moral law on which to judge between good and evil
• if there is a moral law, there must be a moral lawgiver
• for the theist, this points to God.

This argument, in my opinion, has a much stronger foundation than approach #2 because the atheist is operating from a Christian presupposition without even knowing it. Specifically, that there is antithesis (right and wrong, good and bad) from which to judge, and without the existence of a God there is no sufficient ontological foundation (or starting point) from which to derive evil and non-evil.

However, approach #2 is another good approach and uses the concept of free-will, or a conception of liberty that allows us to do as we wish.

• there is evil in the world
• there is also the reality of freedom to choose; and where there is freedom to choose, evil will always be a possibility
• in fact, concepts of love and goodness are unexplainable unless there is freedom to choose
• since love is the supreme ethic, its possibility necessitates freedom
• where there is freedom, there will be the possibility of evil
• this is precisely the paradigm of creation by God in the Bible
• Therefore the biblical model of a loving God, who creates for the possibility of the supreme god, may be defended on reasonable and existentially persuasive grounds

Again, I prefer approach #1 to the above argument typically given from atheists because they are starting from Christian presupposition. They could easily argue that they don't need Christianity to have morality, and they are correct that atheists could have the same integrity, and more than a theist; however, they still are unable to find a point aside from God to which explain the existence of good/bad, moral/immoral, benevolence/evil.

The God Who Is There--Ch.1 Summary -- "The Line of Despair"

I finished the God Who Is There last night, and as tempted as I was to go on to something else, I decided to read it again because I believe it was this book that largely set a tone for Christian apologetics today. Schaeffer died in '84, and I'm not sure what year the book was written in, but many of the things I read in this book, I hear echoed in the lectures and sermons of Ravi Zacharias. And, to RZ's credit, he says that any and all apologetics starts with Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis.

This book was included in Volume 1 Book 1 of "The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer" and the subtitle for Volume 1 is "A Christian View of Philosophy and Culture." I'm going to summarize the book chapter by chapter, starting today with Chapter One, "The Gulf Is Fixed."
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Schaeffer says that the present chasm between the generations has been brought out by a total change in the concept of truth.

Above the "Line of Despair" (which he dates in the U.S. between 1913-1940) everyone in society today would understand, work, and talk from the same presuppositions* which were the Christian's own presuppositions.

The most important and basic presupposition that American society worked from was that there were such things as absolutes (which finds its opposite in "relativism"). They accepted the possibility of an absolute in the area of Being (or knowledge), and in the area of morals. Therefore, because they accepted the possibility of absolutes, though people might have disagreed as to what these were, nevertheless, they could reason together on the classical basis of antithesis**. People above the line of despair (or before 1913-1940) took for granted that if anything was true, its opposite was false. (i.e., A is A, and A is not non-A). But it was later when society went under the line of despair that people began thinking in terms of relativity which leads to a culture and society of "anything goes," or "everything is permitted."

The upshot is that historic Christianity stands on a basis of antithesis (i.e., absolutes), and that without that antithesis historic Christianity is meaningless. And as antithesis dwindled and people did not operate from traditional presuppositions, they became intolerant and irreverent towards the messageo f Christian antithesis (or absolutes). Ultimately, we are left with an apathetic culture that is not sympathetic to the concept of Orthodox Christianity.

The Line of Despair and Expansion

Schaeffer spends most of his time in Chapter One explaining cultural malaise, how it happened, and the way in which it spread.

First, the line of despair spread geographically. It started in Germany, spread outwards throughout the continent, then toward England and later towards the United States. (Schaeffer dates the "line of despair" as being crossed in Europe about 50 years before that of the United States).

Secondly, the line of despair expanded throughout society from the real intellectual to the more educated, down to the workers, reaching the middle class last of all.

Thirdly, it spread across disciplines. In almost chronological fashion it started with the academic discipline of Philosophy; Art; Music; General Culture; Theology.

If Christians try to talk to people as though they were above the line when in reality they are this side of it, we will only beat the air.

Unity and Disunity in Rationalism.

The unity in non-Christian thought can be called "rationalism," or "humanism." This is the system whereby men and women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rationally to build out from themselves, having only Man as their integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning and value.
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*Presupposition-- a belief or theory which is accepted before the next step in logic is developed. Such a prior postulate often consciously or unconsciously affects the way a person subsequently reasons.
**Antithesis-- direct opposition of contrast between two things. (As in "joy" which is the antithesis of "sorrow.")
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Opinion: Not to be lost in the summary of chapter 1 is Schaeffer's belief that if the Evangelical and Orthodox Christian church had only seen the "line of despair" coming prior to 1913 (which he later explains that date) presuppositional apologetics could have saved the day in the United States. Instead, intelligentsia embraced non-Christian thought as the Orthodox church was unprepared to defend the Christian faith as they hadn't sured up their presuppositional apologetics, and simply took it for granted that people would always operate from the starting assumption of absolutes and not relativism. Once the social intellectual, and moral rebellion occurred it was too late.

The upshot of all this is the public perception that Christianity is not for the "thinking man," and reason and faith are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, the Church still today doesn't appeal to the intellect to equip the next generation of believers, but only appeals to the emotional senses in worship service etc.

The later generations who suffered were those who were being taught at home by their parents or others above the "line of despair," and went to school and studied with classmates and professors who taught and thought below the "line of despair." Many were ill-equipped to engage their unbelieving or hostile adversaries, and were convinced their Christianity was not for the educated, and as Ravi Zacharias frequently says that the Church has lost an entire generation of believers.

I'll try to summarize Ch. 2 tomorrow "The First Step in the Line of Despair: Philosophy."

"Good" People

I am going to (as I have started it) write a substantial post on the topic of "good" people, but I don't currently have time to finish it.

However, here are a few paragraphs from Ravi Zacharias' latest book "Beyond Opinion."

This part of the book was no doubt written in a Christian Apologetics book because of the widely held but fallacious belief that "good" people (as we understand "good") go to Heaven, and all that is required to go to Heaven is being a "good" person.

What Makes You Think You Are Good?

This is a very difficult and almost painful thing to say, but the simple truth is that there are no good people. I know that we often think of ourselves as being good people, especially when we compare ourselves to other people whom we do not like. Someone came to Jesus once and said, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 8:18). What he was saying was, "You're a good person. You're obviously going to heaven. What must I do? Tell me, good teacher, what are the good things that I must do so I can go too? How do I attain eternal life?" Jesus looked at him and said, "Why do you call me good?" And then he added, "No one is good but God alone." Think about this: if you have to be good to go to heaven and only God is good, who is going? God and . . . no one else. In other words, Jesus is saying "Your application to join the trinity has been reused."

Now, sometimes we find this type of statement offensive, but if you are reading this and you really believe that you're perfect, there's only one solution to that predicament: you need to get married. If you are married, then you need to start listening! We need to be honest with ourselves. We may try to be good, but we know that we are who Jesus said we are: sinners.
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This isn't a hard concept to grasp as soon as you realize that the standard is God, and only God is good, and thus we cannot be good because we are sinful.

And the words came from Jesus. This isn't man-made doctrine, this is Christ-given truth. We can't rely on believing that we are "good," and expect to walk through the Pearlie Gates.