Alex Forrest

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Geisler on Apologetics

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Here’s something we sometimes overlook when we think about apologetics:

“Nietzsche said that God is dead… So for the last century, we’ve been living under the shadow of the death of God in the culture. And when God dies, all truth dies. If you don’t have an absolute moral lawgiver, you can’t have any moral laws. When God dies, all truth dies and all meaning dies. So in this culture, the church is faced with reestablishing that there is absolute truth, absolute meaning, absolute morals, and that the opposite of true is false. We have to do more apologetics today than ever before.”

— Norm Geisler, as quoted by Josh McDowell in the forward to To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, edited by Francis Beckwith et. al.

Unlike previous generations in this country, ours can no longer assume that people operate from the same basic cognitive framework – the same basic ideas about morality, the nature of truth, the existence of God, etc.

The role of apologetics is to present the Christian worldview and demonstrate, as best we can, how and why it is true.

And it is, to borrow a phrase from Francis Schaeffer, true truth. Schaeffer talked about what we call apologetics as “pre-evangelism,” an important and often necessary enterprise that helps lay the foundation for the gospel. As Geisler points out, the need for such engagement with people in our culture is great.

The Historicity of the Christmas Story

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When I mention the Christmas story, I’m not talking about Santa Claus – I agree with my friend Rick when he says he’s never really been a big fan of the big guy. Me either… with apologies to those of you who are.

In writing about the historicity of the Christmas story, I am referring to the account provided in Luke 2 (and Matthew 1 for that matter) about the virgin birth of Christ. To many, that story is about as true as the story of Santa. It’s a nice, sweet story for kids, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

But if that’s the case, then we (by “we” I mean human beings in general, and you and I specifically) are absolutely without hope, and our faith is a sham. If Jesus was not born, if Immanuel (God with us) is just a philosophical concept not anchored in reality (space/time history), then there is no recompense for sin.

I say this because we know that sin is real – we can see it everywhere (watched the news lately) and we know it exists in our own hearts. We have a deep-seated sense that things are not the way they were meant to be. And we are hopeless in and of ourselves – the best we can hope for is the the answer provided by Existentialism: we can arbitrarily create our own meaning, all the while recognizing that it’s a facade.

Or we can retreat into Hedonism – the endless and mindless pursuit of pleasure, idly trying to spend our meaningless days on temporary pleasures. But deep down we know that the answers and solution cannot come from ourselves.

The Christmas story is essentially God’s answer to the human dilemma.

It is a divine invasion of the status quo, a divine D-Day attack on the powers of darkness that enslave this world.

It is a declaration of war, a war that brings freedom to those who cast their lots with the child in the manger – with God Himself. In your Christmas celebrations, don’t forget that the baby is not still a baby (an innocuous image we can handle), but is the Shepherd King who brings freedom to sinners.

But if none of this is really real, then we are stuck. So it matters that the story is true, that it really happened, despite what the world (or liberal scholarship) says – everything depends on it. So I point you to Dr. Mohler’s blog. Dr. Al Mohler (president of Southern Seminary and a leading evangelical theologian and spokesperson), has a series of blog posts about the historical reality of the virgin birth that are worth reading and considering.

Antony Flew

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Antony Flew is making a major splash in the philosophical world.

Flew, a highly regarded British philosopher, has been one of the leading proponents of atheism for several decades. He has changed his mind, saying he now believes in God.

Unfortunately, he does not believe in a God of revelation; now describing himself as a Deist. (Deism, as Flew himself describes it, believes that “while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.”) Flew is “open” to the idea of revelation, however, so perhaps his prilgrimage will continue.

What changed his mind? Apparently the work being done in Intelligent Design. (More on Intelligent Design can be found here.) As the evidence against evolution and for design mounts, honest atheists like Flew are forced to reconsider their positions.

Here is a shorter article summarizing the issue. For a detailed discussion, you can read Flew’s interview with Christian philosopher Gary Habermas in the forthcoming issue of Philosophia Christi – the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. The interview is available on-line here.

Encountering Religious Pluralism

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I have to prepare to lead discussion on Encountering Religious Pluralism, by Harold Netland this week in a seminar. So far so good – it is definitely worth reading.

The second chapter in particular was very good. Netland argues against the common claim that pluralism is the result of postmodernity, and in so doing presents a pretty good case for doing away with the whole paradigm that says postmodernity is completely antithetical to modernity. Instead, he argues that postmodern thinkers have much in common with the skepticism and empiricism of the Enlightenment, and bear a resemblance to the romantics of the nineteenth century. Interesting case.

Religious pluralism is the name given to the idea that all religions are expressions of truth in their own way, and there is not one privileged with the possession of exclusive truth. In other words, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. all have some truth and their adherents are welcomed by God. What I’ve given is a pretty good popular expression of pluralism. There are also very academically rigorous defenses of the position, the most notable being that of John Hick.

Anyway, this is one of THE issues for the Church to grapple with in coming years. It already is an issue, of course, but will only become bigger and bigger as the world shrinks and our society becomes increasingly multi-cultural.

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