Apologetics Conclusion

I’m now going to attempt to conclude my thoughts on the topic of apologetics. We have given good evidence that a Supreme Being which we call God is in fact real. We have theorized that if He is real more than likely He has in His own way revealed Himself in some way. We have further postulated that this revelation has been going on from the beginning and that if there is a revelation we should see evidence of it from the past. We have laid out several reason why the Christian Gospel could be the source of this revelation, and have looked at it more closely. We see that there is evidence that the historical written record of the events is an accurate depiction from eye witnesses of the events surrounding the life, death and resurrection of a man called Jesus of Nazareth. We have not one or two of these independent accounts but four, which remarkably agree in all but the smallest details (and even those discrepancies can be explained). These eye witnesses tell a story that by all accounts would be accurately described as a complete fairy tale or fantasy. The problem with this is that this is not a “Once upon a time” type of story. These events are firmly grounded in the history of the world, and they began a little over two thousand years ago and have dramatically impacted that history. Virtually everything we know about Jesus is derived from these four sources. Any so called scholar who has criticized the content of these four sources is doing so out of pure speculation and their own presuppositions not out of any real contrary evidence. Given the story of the gospel and its apparent reliability, what do we do with the man called Jesus Christ and further what do we do with the Gospel message itself. If anyone has really read the four gospels one cannot come to an honest conclusion that this was merely a good teacher. No one who did the things he did and said the things he said could be considered this. He quite simply claimed to be God, and was killed by the leading religious authorities of the time because of this. Therefore Jesus Christ was either an abject liar, a complete lunatic or he was who he said he was. There have been various books that have expounded on these topics in more detail, most notably Lewis’ Mere Christianity. I will not go further than this except to say that there is very good argument that Jesus was in fact who he said he was, and in fact backed up this claim by raising from the dead. The question for the past two thousand years has been: “Who do you say that I am?” If you haven’t guessed by now I believe that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of the living God.

I will not for now write further on the topic of apologetics. I just wanted to give a brief foundational summary of my views on Christianity before I build upon that foundation. I will admit that I have not given this adequate attention and have left some holes in my arguments that one could probably drive truck through and it will probably leave some with more questions, but Christian apologetics is quite frankly not my thing. If you have questions feel free to post and I will attempt to respond, but you would probably do well to read up on the topic. A good start is reading Mere Christianity by Lewis or Orthodoxy and Everlasting Man by GK Chesterton. In the future I will be dealing more with the general history of the church and attempting to answer the questions of what is this thing is that is called the Bible, where it came from and how I believe we can correctly interpret it, as well as a related question of how then shall we live in light of the gospel in the areas of government, individual, church and family. In other words from here on it will be more interesting to Christians than non-Christians. In any event I hope you come back.