Evidence For The Faith
Before I leave my house, I engage in a ritual of sorts. I pat each of my pockets, feeling my wallet, phone, and keys. It isn’t until I actually touch them that I am confident I have them. Even though it’s common to say “Seeing is believing,” touch is the most important sense we use […]
The old proverb “God is in the details” means that it’s in the small and seemingly insignificant minutiae of an event that we see the truth and intent behind it. (This why graduate students painstakingly work their way through five-inch-thick books in the stacks of the university library!) There are certain details—the color of the […]
It has almost assumed the status of “a truth beyond reasonable doubt” in Christendom that the Gospel of John is the most theological of all the Gospels.1 What is not argued, however, is that the Gospel of John is also the most apologetical of all the Gospels. It is literally stuffed from stem to stern, […]
There once was a man who claimed to be in possession of a lost painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Upon hearing this claim, the curator of a prestigious museum asked him if it had ever been appraised. “No,” said the man. “No one outside my family has ever seen the portrait, but all of us […]
It has been over a decade since Richard Bauckham’s critically acclaimed book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses was first published. Last spring, Eerdmans released a new edition with three completely new chapters, a new preface and an updated bibliography. In his foreword to this second edition, Cambridge scholar Simon Gathercole acknowledges the importance of Bauckham’s original […]
During a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I noticed the small number of travelers in the airport. When I asked about this, I received quite different accounts about why: from moving major airline hubs to other airports to post-9/11 woes. Doing a little research, I discovered that all of these versions were crucial parts of the […]
While delivering an address at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, Richard Lucas, the longtime pastor of St. Helen’s Bishopgate Church in London, England, once said that the phrase “and he also made the stars” at the end of Genesis 1:16 was perhaps the greatest throwaway line in all of Scripture. Having God’s galaxies-creating act […]
“RELIGION . . . IS THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE.”1 Karl Marx’s well-known maxim illustrates a disturbing reality: Too often religion merely makes people feel better about themselves. Some say that religion is no more than a placebo, a deceptively ineffectual medicine, meant to fool the patient into having hope where no real hope exists. […]
One of the hardest parts of apologetics is speaking in such a way that people who disagree with you want to interact with you. Far too often, apologists find themselves reaching those already in the choir. The choir gets excited, but few new members join. The result is an echo chamber full of very convinced […]
Near-death experience stories are neither to be discounted as total fabrication nor recalibrated as a final apologetic for the Christian case for heaven. The little-known secret—to those who have studied the matter and the numerous who have not—is that near-death experience stories have been around as long as humans have been telling stories. Once while […]
Why is the resurrection of Jesus so important? After all, it’s not when our sins are paid for. That was the work Jesus did two days earlier on the cross. And the resurrection is not when Christ’s perfect obedience is credited to us so we can stand before God. That work was also done by […]
1. Biased Sources Those who wrote the NT documents were "believers" and therefore biased. These texts are not historical documents but articles of faith. Rebuttal Everyone is biased. A lawyer building a case is biased in favor of his client, but that does not invalidate the evidence. What accounts for the particular "faith" of these […]
In his book After Heaven, Robert Wuthnow says the watchword of Americans today is spiritual. People say, ‘I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious. I am searching for spiritual reality, but I don’t expect to find it in religious institutions or sets of dogmas.’ What Wuthnow articulates so well here is Americans’ combined rejection of the […]
David Limbaugh’s recent best-selling book, Jesus on Trial, had at least three things in its favor before I ever cracked the cover. First, the title showed an obvious interest in legal apologetics. With ‘trial,’ ‘lawyer,’ and ‘truth’ in the title, my legal chops were salivating (full disclosure, I happen to be a trial lawyer). Second, […]
The story of the excavation of Jericho, the site of Joshua's famous battle, has long symbolized the tensions that can arise between archaeological explorations and faithful readings of the Bible. The story begins at the dawn of the twentieth century, when some European scholars first undertook a formal scientific excavation of the site. Perhaps not […]
