September 5, 2019
Would you still be a Christian if there was a heaven, but no hell?
Imagine for a moment that God set up reality differently, such that people could be as bad as they wanted without any risk of eternal punishment. When you die, you simply cease to exist. However, if you follow Jesus, heaven still awaits you. Would you still follow Jesus? Be honest. I encourage you to take five minutes to reflect on this question before reading on below.
August 19, 2019
Evangelism is scary for many people, including myself. Many Christians find it difficult to start a discussion on spiritual things. Others fear that they’ll be pummeled with objections to the faith that they don’t know how to answer. Many fear rejection. As a result, we’ve invented new methods of “evangelism” that don’t require us to actually talk to anyone. I’m thinking of “friendship evangelism” and “love evangelism” in particular.
The premise of friendship evangelism (also known as relationship evangelism or lifestyle evangelism) is that people will be attracted to your way of living (your holy behavior, your happiness, how you treat others, etc.), prompting them to ask you what your secret is, and predisposing them to become a Christian. At that point, you share the gospel with them.
June 7, 2019
Theists argue that God is the best explanation for objective moral truths. Atheists typically appeal to the Euthyphro Dilemma (ED) to show that God cannot be the foundation for morality. The ED asks whether something is good only because God wills it as such, or if God wills something because it is good. If something is good only because God considers it good, then goodness seems arbitrary and relative to God’s desires. If He had so chosen, murder could have been right and truth-telling could have been wrong. On the other hand, if God wills the good because it is inherently good, then goodness would be a standard that exists outside of God. He is subject to the moral law just as we are.
So either goodness is arbitrary or it is independent of God. Either God arbitrarily declares what is good or He recognizes what is good based on some standard outside of Himself. If the good is an arbitrary expression of God’s will, then the good is subjective rather than objective. While God may serve as the foundation for His subjective morality, He cannot serve as the foundation for objective moral truths. On the other hand, if God wills something because He recognizes it is objectively good, then something other than God is the standard of objective moral truths. He may inform us of those moral truths, but they do not depend on God for their existence.
May 13, 2019
When something bad happens, it’s common for people to offer the encouragement that “everything happens for a reason.” Is it really true, however, that everything that happens, happens for a reason? To answer that question we need to explore what we mean by “everything,” “for” and “reason.”
Let’s start with “reason.” What do we mean when we say something happens for a reason? It means there is some intelligible and discernible relationship between two events, and that this relationship was purposed by an intelligent agent. For example, the reason I give money to the checker at the grocery store is because I want to buy food. There is a rationality to my action that links the events of giving money and receiving food. One is done for the reason of the other. In a similar manner, there is a discernible and intelligible relationship between bad and good events in our lives that was purposed by God.
May 13, 2019
We tend to define backsliding as a believer reverting to a life dominated by sin, but I think a better definition of backsliding is simply when we lose spiritual ground that we had achieved previously.
April 21, 2019
The resurrection of Jesus is central to the Christian faith, but why does it matter? Why think of it as just another of many miraculous/supernatural events? Why not see it as a mere historical oddity? Why does it matter so much to Christianity? What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead?
Here are just a few reasons it is significant:
April 21, 2019
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was the central message of the early church and the basis of Christian hope. But why should we believe that a man was raised from the dead 2000 years ago when we were not there to witness it, and when our uniform experience says that dead people always stay dead? While many people think the resurrection of Jesus is something you either choose to believe or choose to reject based on your personal religious tastes, the fact of the matter is that there are good, objective, historical reasons to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
Historians must do two things: establish the historical facts, and then find the best explanation for those facts. When it comes to the life of Jesus, the primary source material for the historian is the New Testament (NT) gospels and Paul’s writings because they include the testimony of early disciples who witnessed the events in question or knew those who did, and they provide the most detail about Jesus’ life.
