Francis Schaeffer's Absolute Limits Bible Believing Christians Cannot Compromise.

In his book The Church Before the Watching World, Francis Schaeffer set forth some limits that orthodox, Bible-believing Christians cannot compromise, and cannot cross. He speaks of two types of concepts: 1) Intrinsic Concepts; and 2) those concepts that are true only after the Fall.

Intrinsic Concepts: things as true before the Fall as after the Fall.

• God exists and He is free. Christianity does not have a deterministic system. God did not create because He had to. God does not need the creation, the way the creation needs him. God is a personal God, but he had personal relationship and communication on the high order of the Trinity. "The persons of the Trinity loved each other and communicated with each other before the creation of all things. God exists, and He did not need to create." (168)

• "You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being." (Revelations 4:11)

• God created out of nothing, and the infinity of the Judeo-Christian, personal God is of such a nature that when He created He did not need to put chance back of Himself.
  

• The Persons of the Trinity must be kept distinct. There is true unity and diversity, not behind God but in God. This is ontologically true of the Trinity before the creation of all else.
  

  "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." (John 17:24). "Let us make man in our own image." (Gen. 1:26)

• God has a character, and His holiness is part of His character. God's holiness involves moral content. Some thing conform to His nature, and some things do not.

  Of course, this has tremendous ramifications, for the fact that God is holy means something to the individual and it means something to the group. It demands holiness in our personal life and holiness in the church in both life and doctrine. . . . And yet we fall off the opposite cliff if we forget that God is love. (p173).
  

The Absolute Limits which are true only after the Fall.

• The HISTORIC SPACE-TIME NATURE OF THE FALL (emphasis mine).

  Orthodox Christians believe in the brute fact of the historic, space-time Fall. The historic Fall is not an interpretation; it is a brute fact. There is no room for hermeneutics here, if by hermeneutics we mean explaining away the bruge factness of the Fall. That there was a Fall is not an upper-story statement--that is, it is not in this sense a "theological" or "religious" statement. Rather, it is a historic, space-time, brute fact, propositional statement. (p174).
  

• Christ's death and resurrection are historic, space-time brute facts that have already occurred, and the second coming of Christ is a historic, space-time brute fact that will occur in the future. (p174).

• We must reject the concept of subjectivity with regard to these historical events; but we must also realize that these brute facts are not just theological abstractions or bare propositions. They are to have meaning in our present lives, and they are to be acted upon in our present lives. There is no Christian doctrine that does not have meaning in the existential, moment-by-moment life. (p175)
  

• Justification must not be confused with sanctification

• Justification is once-for-all, and this justification is not to be confused with the moment-by-moment Christian life. Justification is once-for-all, and yet if there are no signs of such a moment-by-moment Christian life, we must question whether or not there has ever been justification. (p176)
  

• There is such a thing as absolute right and absolute wrong in systems.

Do We Really Believe God Is There?

"Suppose we awoke tomorrow morning and we opened our Bibles and found two things had been taken out, not as the liberals would take them out, but really out. Suppose God ahd taken them out. the first item missing was the real empowering of the Holy Spirit, and the second item the reality of prayer. Consequently, following the dictates of Scipture, we would begin to love on the basis of this new Bible in which there was nothing about the power of prayer. Let me ask you something: what difference would there be from the way we acted yesterday? Do we really believe God is there? If we do, we live differently."

-Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (p40)

The Prayer of the Skeptic

"God, I don't know whether you exist or not, but if you do, please show me who you are."

If you say that prayer, mean it, are intellectually honest with the data, and morally honest with yourself, you will not have to coldly and forcibly "believe as a matter of policy" as Dawkins would suggest. (The God Delusion, p130).

Rather, the Spirit of Jesus Christ will take care of the rest.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened." (Mt 7:8-8).

The Divinity of Jesus Christ, part 1

I'm currently read/studying, studying/reading The Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli. One section of the book that I've found particularly compelling is on the divinity of Christ. I'm going to try to summarize best I can the chapter of the book a little each day until I've gotten it all down. Kreeft asserts that all the data except the Christian alternative has been shown to be false, and that the divinity of Jesus Christ is the only reasonable explanation. This compared to the attempted explanations of liar, lunatic, myth, guru, as well as various conspiracy theories regarding the apostles, and early Christian Church.

Note: I'm only going to cite something else if it is something from a different book, and I'll make my opinion known, so that all you are reading is the information provided from Kreeft and Tacelli

Part 1 -- The Claims Made by Jesus and the Claims Made by Others About Jesus.

The questions and problems of Jesus' identity emerge from the data. The data being the four Gospels--which tells us the claims he made about himself and, the claims others made about him.

1 Corinthians 12:3, authored by Apostle Paul -- Therefore I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus be cursed," and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit.

Philippians 2:11, authored by Apostle Paul -- and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Matthew 11:27, authored by Matthew -- "All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Mark 12:6, authored by John Mark -- "He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, 'They will respect my son.'"

Mark 13:32, authored by John Mark -- "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Mark, 14:61-62, authored by John Mark -- But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" "I am," said Jesus. "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

Luke 10:22, authored by Luke -- "All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Luke 22:70, authored by Luke -- They all asked, "Are you then the Son of God?" He replied, "You are right in saying I am."

John 10:30, authored by John -- "I and the Father are one."

John 14:9, authored by John -- Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing the work."

For further scripture see: Tit 2:13l 1 Jn 5:20; Rom 9:5; Jn 1:1; Col 1:15-20; Jn 1:1; Phil 2:6, Heb 13:8; Heb 7:26; Jn 8:46; 2 Cor 5:21; Mk 2:5-12; Lk 24:45-47; Acts 10:43; 1 Jn 1:5-9; Jn 8:58; 1 Tim 6:15; Rev 17:14; Jn 10:30; Jn 12:45; Jn 14:8-10; Jn 10:37-38; Jn 14:25-26; 16:7-15; Mt 3:17; Mt 17:5; Jn 8:18; 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 3:16; Jn 5:39-40; Jn 20:30-31; Mk 8:31; Lk 9:21-22; Lk 9:21-22; Lk 12:49-53; Lk 22:35-37; Lk 24:1-7; Jn 3:11-14; Jn 6:63-64; Jn 13:1-11; Jn 14:27-29; Jn 18:1-4; Jn 19:26-30; Lk 6:1-5.

The data is the foundation for the divinity of Christ, or the assertion that Christ is divine. Many people will take a shortcut and say they do not believe that Christ is God because they don't believe the Scriptures themselves, or the authors of the Sciptures, or that they were revised, etc. etc. etc. Kreeft gets to that later in the section of the chapter, and I will get to it in a later post.

Tomorow I will try to get part 2 up and it will be about the importance of the issue, and the difficulty of the doctrine.

Clearing Something Up...

I recently realized this post could be taken wrongly by some people.

Specifically, I could foresee the charge that I was "encouraging people to read atheist philosophers and atheist literature."

Actually, I was . . .

I firmly believe that there is absolutely nothing to fear from atheists or their literature. If a person is on a quest to find the answers to life's toughest question hopefully they will feel their head with some of everything. If a person with intellectual honesty endeavors to find the Truth , it is my belief that Christianity will triumph over any other worldview--especially atheism.

Both sides in this battle deserve a fair look. As Peter Kreeft said, Christianity is reasonable but it is not obvious.

If it were obvious intellectual giants such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, Shaw, Russell, Franklin, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Freud and Skinner would not have rejected it--amongst many others.

And if it were not reasonable other heavyweights such as Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Luther, Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Dante, Lewis, Chesterton, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tolkien, da Vinci, and Michelangelo would not have embraced it.

And as NYU Philosophy professor Thomas Nagel said "I'm not comforted by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people that I know are religious believers."

There is absolutely no reason for Christians to not be confident in their Christian faith and worldview. If the atheists could have discredited Christianity they would have already done so. If the unbelievers from Jesus' own day could have come up with his body after the ascension they would have (they had the motive and the means). The Bible has time and again withstood the test against the critic; there is more manuscript evidence for the Bible than for any other ancient text or document--Homer's great works don't even come close. There is no reason at all for the Christian to shirk or fear.

While Christianity may not be obvious, it is the Truth, and those who seek in earnest and in good faith will find what they are looking for.

Pope Benedict, Bible, Faith.

I don't have to be a Catholic to really appreciate this Pope. God Bless this Pope and may his reign last many years for the good of the world.
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Luther would have been amazed at the efforts of the Vatican today to put the Bible back into the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. . .

Last week, briefly passing through Rome, my wife and I stood in an empty St Peter's Square, where the chairs were still laid out for the 20,000 who had attended the pope's weekly public audience on the Wednesday before. On our return to Holland, we read in the newspaper what the faithful had been told that day. The headline read: Pope quotes Luther: Sola Fide. Luther, the pope had told his audience, had been right to insist in sola fide, that a believer was justified by faith alone!

Disagreement over this doctrine had been at the heart of the Reformation in the 16th century, splitting Christianity in western Europe. Yet, said the pope, it was indeed biblical to say, as did Luther, that it was the faith of a Christian, not his works, that saved him. Such faith however could not be separated from love for God and for neighbour, he qualified. Paul wrote about this balance in his letters, especially the letter to the Philippians, he added.

Full Article Here. Must Read.
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This is lock-step with the basic Christian belief that being "good" does not merit salvation. The reality is, as hard as it is to swallow, there are no "good" people, in the sense that there are no "innocent" people. And "goodness" is a very nebulous standard. Who is good? And, what should be considered "good"? Ghandi? His works? Mother Teresa? Her charity? The Salvation Army volunteer? Are you for helping some lady across the street? Is Richard Dawkins for his promotion of science? Don't laugh, science is a good thing in and of itself.

How would we ever know? We couldn't.

Knowing that we could not attain salvation on the basis of our own works as a result of the Fall, God sent his Son down to us. So while we could not reach up to Him, he solved the problem by reaching down to us.

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

No One Spoke Like Christ Did...

. . . before or since.

Nobody spoke as boldly, or as authoritatively. "The Father, in fact, judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all people will honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him." (John 5:22-23).

No historical figure other than Christ ever claimed to be "the light of the world." (John 8:12). And, only Christ spoke of himself as the sufficient redeemer. "If you continue in My word . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31). Most importantly, Jesus Christ is the only person who ever spoke of himself as the God-man. "Have courage! It is I [AM]." (Mark 6:50). The singular, exclusive path to eternal communion with God. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:16). John 14:16 does not leave a lot of wiggle room for liberal neo-orthodoxy which holds all people receive eternal life, or that it is sufficient if you are a "good" person.

Not even in the Quran is Islam's prophet Mohammed given the divine status of a God-man. In the Quran, it is Jesus, not Mohammed who has the ability to raise the dead, and it is in the Quran that Christ was born of a virgin. In the Quran, Mohammed never claimed to be anything other than a man, and never claimed to be able to redeem anyone, not even himself.

Buddha never spoke of himself as God, as a matter of fact, Buddha did not even believe in a Creator God. In the strict sense, Buddha was an atheist.

And Jesus Christ spoke prophetically of his mission on Earth. "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." (John 10:16). In the temple when asked by the powerbrokers for a sign of his authority from Heaven, Jesus spoke in a way that did not become clear until after his death. "Destroy this sanctuary, and I will raise it up in three days." Therefore the Jews said, "This sanctuary took 46 years to build, and will You raise it up in three days?" (John 2:19-20).

And Jesus spoke with a message of warning that flies in the face of post-modern culture and an attitude of inconsequential choice and action. “Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it." (Matthew 7:14).

Jesus Christ is the most unique figure in our Earth's history. Nobody has had his influence that is right now growing and getting stronger. Accept Him or reject Him, nobody can ignore him.

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.

Day.

The meaning of the term "day" as used in Biblical Creation is a source of debate. Some Biblical literalists believe that God literally created the Earth in 7 24-hour blocks of time.

Others take a more liberal approach, and probably the only reasonable approach as we study scripture and Genesis closely.

Sources for this post are Genesis in Space and Time (which is about the flow of Biblical history) and The Beginning of Wisdom (graciously recommended by a good friend).

Francis A. Schaeffer in Genesis in Space and Time says that the term day as related to creation must be held with openness. He uses the King James version of the Bible, and then colloquializes (totally not a word) the language.

• In Genesis 5:2 we read: "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created." As it is clear that Adam and Eve were not created simultaneously, day in Genesis 5:2 does not mean a period of 24 hours.
  

Schaeffer explains that the term day used in Hebrew could denote an era just as it can in English. (e.g., Back in my day). He then goes on to say

• the simple fact is that day in Hebrew (just as in English) is usedd in three separate senses, to mean: (1) twenty-four hours, (2) the period of light during the twenty-four hours, and (3) an indeterminate period of time.
  

Finally, Schaeffer makes the point that this is not a thing that can really be debated because there are no clearly defined terms upon which to debate. But it seems self-evident, unless you are gung ho on a literal interpretation of the Bible--which some are--that day in this sense doesn't mean a 24 hour period.

A point made obvious in Leon Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom which I think closes the issue to any debate whatsoever is found by a direct reading of the scripture:

• And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day. (Gen 1:3-5). (This was on the First Day).
  

And then...

• And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from teh night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and says and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights--the greater light to goern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. (This was on the Fourth Day).
  

So... we had light before we had stars. The Sun is a star. We had light before we had the Sun. On the third day we even had vegetation before we had the Sun. The main point though is that we mark the times and our days in relation to the Sun. If we had a First Day, a Second Day, and a Third Day all before we had the Sun, this would seem to definitively mean that the term day means something other than a 24 hour period.

I realize this is not a major point of curiosity or contention to most people, but this certainly does re-work the way we think about the Creation story altogether, a not insignificant implication in this is the age of the Earth. But New Earthers vs. Old Earthers is another debate for another day.

Hereafter

This book is as engrossing a read as you will find anywhere on Christianity, theology, etc. Even if Christianity and theology isn't a topic that piques your curiosity, this book is a page turner.

I've linked up to a $3 copy of it on Amazon, and I highly recommend it. Randy Alcorn studied every page of the Bible for exactly what it says, and what is fair and unfair to expect about the Christian heaven.

He talks about issues such as:

Wouldn't Heaven be really boring?
Would there be sports? How would there be a loser?
Where is Heaven?
Will we feel pain in Heaven?
Will there be sex in Heaven?
What will food be like?
Will we be married?
What if a relative isn't there?
Will we have continuity between earthly knowledge and heavenly knowledge or will there be discontinuity?
What will we wear?
Is it actually a place? Like New York City is a place?
Isn't it just a state of mind?

There are far, far more interesting topics and questions than this in the book, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who might want to read the book. One thing the author encourages the reader to do is lose the temporal earthly perspective, and have an eternal perspective. It is a very difficult thing to do until you have read this.

Note: Some of the answers in this book are very surprising...

I Never Understood Animal Rights Folks

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

• So God created man in His own image;
• He created him in the image of God;
• He created them male and female.

God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on teh earth." God also said, "Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree whose fruit contains seed. This food will be for you, for all the wildlife of the earth, for every bird of the sky, and for every creature that crawls on the earth--everything having the breath of life in it. I have given every green plant for food." (Gen 1:26-30).
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I never read that (or any other biblical passage) and got the impression that the beasts of the Earth merited, in God's eyes, the place of mankind.

I bring this up because I got in an e-mail discussion with a Christian PETA member the other night, a guy I knew from Ann Arbor.

On our side of infinity, we do have more in common with the animals than with God. Both humans and the beasts are finite, and God being infinite, he will remain to Be while we will die an earthly death, and later get on the plus side of infinity (standing outside of time).

But, God obviously thought we were worth more than the beasts because he instilled many things such as virtue, reasoning tools et al. that are uniquely attributable to man and not beast.
That is because we are made in God's image--we are God's image bearers. Therefore, on the personality side of the line, we have more in common with God than with the beasts of the Earth, and are worth far more in His sight. We have souls, can accept Christ's perfect sacrifice as redemption, can carry out the Great Commission, etc. Animals do not have the same kind of soul; they don't have a soul in the image of God.

Animals as far as I can tell are limited, and weren't given what we were. That's why I, myself, never could agree with PETA. I don't see beasts === humans. However, if by animal rights they mean a right for the animals not to suffer, then I am totally on board with that, but many nut job PETA people want HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ANIMALS! That is a perfect contradiction in terms.

Human rights presupposes a human. And animals are not human.

Biblical Reliability

This is a rarity. Two posts in one day. I came across an article in my Apologetics Study Bible that I have to transcribe word for word into this blog. There is so much doubt, cynicism, and skeptical agnosticism based upon the Bible that some of it has to be addressed whenever possible. Some of the primary questions it seems skeptics have are 1) is the Bible reliable? (Is it how it was originally meant to be); and 2) is it a political document? (Did the early Church arbitrarily decide what gospels to include in the New Testament?) The answers are "yes" and "no," and there is plenty of literature out there to sufficiently and authoritatively answer both questions, but for now I want to transcribe this article out of my Study Bible. (**If you are interested in a Bible that answers questions as you read, this bible--linked above--is for you. Interspersed every 2-3 pages is an article by a different theologian or apologist and makes for an addictive read.**)
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Has the Bible Been Accurately Copied Down Through the Centuries? by Norman E. Geisler

The Bible is the most accurately transmitted book from the ancient world. No other ancient book has as many, as early, or more accurately copied manuscripts.

Old Testament

Old Testament ("OT") manuscript reliability is based on three factors: their abundance, dating, and accuracy. Most works from antiquity survive on only a handful of manuscripts: only 7 for Plato, 8 for Thucydides, 8 for herodotus, 10 for Caesar's Gallic Wars, and 20 for Tacitus. Only the works of Demosthenes and Homer number into the hundreds. Yet even before 1890 a scholar named Giovanni de Rossi published 731 OT manuscripts. Since that time some 10,000 OT manuscripts were found in the Cairo Geniza, and in 1947 the Dead Sea caves as Qumran produced over 600 OT manuscripts.

Further, the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing at least fragments of all OT books except Esther, all date from before the end of the first century A.D. and some to the third century B.C. The Nash Papyrus is dated between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D.

The manuscripts' accuracy is known from internal and external evidence. (1) It is well known that Jewish scribal reverence for Scripture led to its careful transmission. (2) Examination of duplicate passages (e.g., Pss 14 and 53) show parallel transmission. (3) The early Greek translation of the OT, the Septuagint, substantially agrees with the Hebrew manuscripts. (4) Comparison of the Samaritan Pentateuch with the same biblical books preserved within the Jewish tradition shows soem close similarity. (5) The Dead Sea scrolls provide manuscripts dating a thousand years earlier than most used to establish the Hebrew text.

Comparative studies reveal word-for-word identity in 95 percent of the text. Minor variants consist mostly of slips of the pen or spelling. Only 13 small changes were discovered in the entire Dead Sea Scrolls copy of Isaiah, eight of which were known from other ancient sources. After 1,000 years of copying, there were no changes in meaning and almost no changes in wording!

New Testament

The reliability of the NT is established because the number, date, and accuracy of its manuscripts enable reconstruction of the original text with more precision than any other ancient text. The number of NT manuscripts is overwhelming (almost 5,700 Greek manuscripts) compared with the typical book from antiquity (about 7 to 10 manuscripts; Homer's Iliad has the most at 643 manuscripts). The NT is simply the best textually supported book from the ancient world.

The earliest undisputed NT manuscript is from the John Rylands Papyrus, dated between A.D. 117 and 138. Whole books (e.g., those contained in the Bodmer Papyri) are available from around the year 200. And most of the NT, including all the Gospels, is available in the Chester Beatty Papyri manuscripts, dating to about 250. Noted British manuscript scholar Sir Frederick Kenyon wrote, "The interval then between the dates or original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed." Thus both "the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the NT may be regarded as firmly established." No other ancient book has as small a time gap between composition and earliest manuscript copies as the NT.

Not only are there more and earlier NT manuscripts, but also they were more accurately copied than other ancient texts. The NT scholar and Princeton professor Bruce Metzger made a comparison of the NT with the Iliad of Homer and the Mahabharata of Hinduism. He found the text of the latter to represent only 90 percent of the original (with 10 percent textual corruption), the Iliad to be 95 percent pure, and only half of 1 percent of the NT text to remain in doubt. The Greek scholar A.T. Robertson estimated that NT textual concerns have to do with only a "thousandth part of the entire text," placing the accuracy of the NT text at 99.9 percent--the b est known for any book from the ancient world. Sir Frederick Kenyon noted that "the number of manuscripts of the NT, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the older writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or the other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world."

In summary, the vast number, early dates, and unmatched accuracy of the OT and NT manuscript copies establish the Bible's reliability well beyond that of any other ancient book. Its substantial message has been undiminished through the centuries, and its accuracy on even minor details has been confirmed. Thus the Bible we hold in our hands today is a highly trustworthy copy of the original that came from the pends of the prophets and apostles.

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"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.

Introduction

The word apologetics comes from the word apologia ("in defense of"). Generally, and perhaps generically speaking, Christian apologetics as a discipline focuses on presenting a rational basis for the Christian faith by showing that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive, defending the faith against objections, and showing the unrivaled coherency of the Christian worldview.

The first Christian apologist, Paul of Tarsus told the early Christian church to "...always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have..." (1 Pet 3:15)

This blog will be an attempt to do just that, and dedicated to Christian apologetics, theology, and other such material topically related.

At times I will put down my own thoughts, but more often I will probably summarize significant things I have discovered, or find interesting while studying apologetics. There won't be rhyme, reason, or pattern as to what sub-categories within apologetics I am going to study and write about; it will probably just flow with what I am reading about at the time.

This is an expansive, complex, and controversial discipline with many different approaches, perspectives, and opinions as to its proper aim and function. This will be a learning experience but as a passion of mine, I aim to learn all I can about Christian apologetics, and hopefully this blog will help that happen.