Fourth article in the series “With Good Reason”
by Keith Bassham
Working through this apologetics series, it is helpful to keep a few things in mind. The first is an assumption I have stated in several different ways, and that is, apologetics and evangelism go hand in hand. Remember in the first installment I called attention to 1 Peter 3:15: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear,” and I wrote, “There is the starting point for apologetics…. My goal is not to prove I am a skilled debater, or that I have many facts at my fingertips, but to demonstrate that Christ is Lord.” I wanted to place a tool for personal witness into the hands of the ordinary reader of this magazine, with the additional hope that the tool would also bolster personal faith. In this Easter season, hope associated with the resurrection of Christ should be bold and on display.
The second thing to remember, and something else I said in the first article, is that apologetics does not replace faith with proof. I wrote, “Rather it is more about removing roadblocks to faith so that the unbeliever may respond to the gospel. One who comes to God must believe that He is (Hebrews 11:6).” But it could be that the unbeliever may choose not to believe despite all our efforts. If that is the case then perhaps the best we can do is to bring a person to admit that if he or she continues to reject Christianity, it is on grounds other than reason and intellectual objections. Continued rejection of the truth after that point indicates something else is the problem.
The third thing to keep in mind is that in these brief pages, we cannot possibly cover all the problems and solutions, all the objections and answers, all the questions and proofs — it is simply not possible. However, there are more exhaustive resources, and I have named some, and others will be pointed out. More important, though, is the knowledge that apologetics did not begin in the last couple of centuries as a response to modern scientific skepticism. Some of the earliest Christian literature was apologetics and scholarly defense of the faith against both secular and religious enemies of Christianity. In other words, apologetics is ongoing, and not everyone will cover every possible issue, but there are no intellectually insurmountable problems.
This may surprise your friend at work who is certain the Bible is full of errors and contradictions, or the neighbor down the street who cannot possibly believe what he has heard about the God of the Old Testament, or the person who wrote the letter to the editor about those Christians who can bend the Bible’s teaching to say whatever they want. All these attitudes reflect a suspicion that the Bible cannot be trusted to convey truth in any objective sense.
Because Christianity rests its case so completely in the truthfulness of the Bible, we have to take note of a couple of things. One, the truthfulness of the Bible is a flash point, a highly visible target, for Christianity’s detractors, and two, it is crucial that we answer those detractors. If the Bible is not true, and if the information we find in it is not trustworthy, we are in serious trouble.
Let’s begin thinking about how to defend the Bible’s trustworthiness by laying a few foundation stones first. Let’s say someone asks you, “How do you know the Bible is true?” I think we need to ask a broader question first: “How do we know anything?” Now, there is no way we can engage in a long and technical discussion on the subject of epistemology, but we can establish a few points. There are commonly agreed upon objective standards based on observation, examination, experimentation, establishing witnesses, and so on. If the Easter story never really happened, if it was only a legend or a hopeful allegory, then we have no right to believe any of it. Either Jesus lived or he did not. Either he was executed or he was not. Either he rose from the grave or he did not.
However, a fairly common assumption, even among those who should know better, is that the Bible is not intended to convey the kinds of truth that can be tested in this way. It is a very subtle way to dismiss the Bible’s claims and at the same time appear to embrace a certain spirituality.
Consider this letter to the editor published a few years ago in response to a controversial position taken by a local pastor:
Several letters have been published regarding [the pastor’s] views and arguments for and against the…doctrine. Those opposed to [the pastor’s] beliefs usually try to defend their positions by quoting passages from the Christian Bible.
Matters of religious faith are just that, faith. They will never be proven to human beings, so I just say believe what you want and live your life accordingly. Do not criticize or try to prove a different faith wrong, because it cannot be done.
Any religion can make claims based on their bibles and texts. It solves or proves nothing to argue matters of faith because we will never know the answer. I think this was God’s plan all along.
Tulsa World, January 18, 2006
Apparently, this letter writer believes there is no objective truth in the Bible at all, and he or she goes on to make the amazing claim that in matters of faith you cannot know anything for certain, and that somehow God is pleased with this condition.
I use this example rather than a classical “the Bible is full of contradictions and errors” approach first because I am convinced the letter writer’s is the most common type of attitude you will confront today unless you are debating the truthfulness of the Bible for money in front of audiences.
Why is that? It has to do with the word postmodernism, the attitude that says objective truth is a slippery thing, if you will permit me to do some oversimplification. Postmodernism does have some twists and turns, and it can take some complications on board, but at the end we are left with the notion that as you move from person to person, and from region to region, and from category to category, virtually any position can be called truth. Likewise, upon hearing a declaration that God created the heavens and the earth, or that the Red Sea parted, or that Jesus was virgin born, a postmodern person can say, “That’s simply a matter of faith. No one can know such a thing.”
But who would submit to surgery under such terms? Would you buy a house knowing the contractor had used postmodern theory to build the foundation? No, we know the human heart has four valves and not three. I would want to know that my surgeon knew and understood that. And we know that building foundations must withstand geologic pressures and motion. I would want my builder to be familiar with those facts, facts that can be known.
So we are back again to the question, “How do you know the Bible is true?” After all, to your questioning friend, it may just look like you took a leap of faith.
Christian philosopher and apologist Francis Schaeffer used a story about Alpine mountain climbing in his lecture on different types of faith. In the story, a group climbing in the Alps is trapped on an icy rock surface when a dense fog immobilizes them. The guide keeps the climbers moving for warmth’s sake until they reach an edge of the ice. The sun has gone down, and they can move no further. One of the climbers asks, “What would happen if I dropped over the edge and landed on a ledge below?” Their guide says, “I suppose you might make it until morning when someone could come to you.” So, without knowing what may or may not be below, and with no good indication of his immediate future, the climber drops off the edge into the fog.
That, Schaeffer says, would be what we call a leap of faith.
But suppose, he goes on, when the group stops at the edge, instead of considering a leap into the dark, they hear a voice calling to them from the fog. The speaker says he is a native of these mountains, standing on a ridge near their location, and he knows every foot of the rocky hillside. He tells them there is a ledge just a few feet directly under them, and that if they hang over the edge where they are standing and drop down to that ledge, they will survive until morning, and he would then come to their rescue when it is safe to do so.
The lost climbers probably would not go over the edge at once, but they should rather ask questions. Who is the speaker? Does his name match the names of local families? Does the sound of his voice communicate age and knowledge? Can he verify details already known by the climbers? Though the situation is desperate, survival will depend on the adequacy and sufficiency of the unseen speaker’s answers. Finally, having done due diligence and being convinced by the speaker in the fog, they hang over the edge and drop to the ledge below, where they are safe until morning.
Schaeffer says the action of dropping over the edge based on information and reasonable answers to reasonable questions represents faith as well, but faith of a different kind. It is this second type of faith you have to be thinking about when you are considering the trustworthiness of the Bible.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Do you remember the bumper sticker we spoke of back in the first article: God said it; I believe it; that settles it? The truth is, God and the Bible invite a certain amount of questioning. We often speak of the faith of Abraham, especially concerning the command God gave Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). We picture the old patriarch with his son ascending the mountain where, according to the command, the father is to kill the son. God, of course, steps in at the last moment and saves Isaac, but we misunderstand Abraham’s obedient faith if we think of it as a leap into the dark. Abraham’s actions on this day come after a long relationship, and many promises and commands, and missteps and corrections. Abraham’s faith is informed by what he already knows about God, and for him, God had already answered the hard questions.
The story itself is locked in time and space. You and I can visit the sites where the episode occurred. Archeologists and historians, while not always unanimous in their details and conclusions, have shown again and again that the people and place names mentioned in the Bible were there when and where they were supposed to be. These are the voices calling out to us from the fog, reassuring us that our faith is well placed.
Suppose Paul the Apostle had a squishy take on religion when the subject of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came up. Can you imagine him saying something like, “Well, you know, I just think that Jesus lives in my heart, and that’s my truth. You, of course, may have a different view, and I can respect that.”
No. According to Paul, Jesus died and was buried and rose again in real history: “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5).
Don’t miss that last phrase. It does not read, “And his presence was felt,” or “And the disciples were moved by his life and death,” or “And he continually abides with us in spirit.”
It says, “And he was seen…”
Francis Schaeffer notes the gravity of that phrase. He wrote, “On the basis of biblical Christianity a rational discussion and consideration can take place, because it is fixed in the stuff of history. When Paul was asked whether Jesus was raised from the dead, he gave a completely nonreligious answer, in the twentieth-century sense. He said: ‘There are almost 500 living witnesses; go and ask them!’ This is the faith that involves the whole man, including his reason; it does not ask for a belief into the void.” (Schaeffer, The God Who is There)
As for more specific answers to objections you may encounter, I will take them up in the next article, but let me deal just a bit more on this knowing question.
C. S. Lewis participated in some debates at Oxford, in the 1940s, about Christianity, and of those debates he wrote “we…discovered that the weight of the skeptical attack did not always come where we expected it; our opponents had to correct what seemed to us their almost bottomless ignorance of the Faith they supposed themselves to be rejecting.”
Some people challenging your faith think they have some fairly solid objections, when in fact they often have a more crumbly basis, or an outright misunderstanding planted by a past experience, and these objections quickly fall when examined.
The average Bible-rejecting person does not know, for instance, that the Bible has more manuscript evidence by far than any ancient book, or that the so-called “banned books of the Bible” were well-known and rejected by Christian churches long before any official councils decided which books really were the Bible. Not knowing this, a person may have false views of the Bible, and often, when pressed, an objection will more probably turn out to be a belief rather than a fact.
In any case, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” (John 14:6) and in His prayer in Gethsemane, “thy word is truth” (John 17:17). As He is the truth, and God’s Word is truth, He (and we) have nothing to fear from honest inquiry. You can trust that Word, with good reason.