Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 63

Challenge Response: God Changed When He Became Man

Here's my response to this week's challenge:

 

Apologetics Class from Credo Courses

Credo Courses (part of Michael Patton’s ministry) just completed work on a 30-session class on Christian apologetics taught by Douglas Groothuis. From the list of sessions, it looks like the topics roughly follow the chapters in his book Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith.

If you’re looking for curriculum for a class at church, for homeschoolers, or for interested friends (start a study group!), this could be a great option. Maybe you could even pair it with readings from his book.

Here’s more about Credo Courses:

Welcome to Credo Courses. We’re devoted to providing the best in Christian education. Our mission is to make accessible the top scholars in the world, teaching on the greatest subjects in the world. Though wide and varied in many respects, all the professors we hire to teach a Credo Course truly believe in what they are teaching and are devoted followers of Jesus Christ.

Imagine learning textual criticism from Dr. Daniel Wallace or taking a course on the resurrection from Dr. Gary Habermas. You may not be able to go to seminary due to time and finances, but now you can watch and listen to the same quality of teaching wherever you are. This is what Credo Courses is all about.

You can go at your own pace. You can have your workbook beside you accomplishing all that it asks, or you can just listen to it while on the treadmill. It’s up to you!

Our courses are accessible to students (high-school and above), individuals, study groups, and university classrooms alike.

Keep an eye on their site to see what apologetics courses come out next. 

Links Mentioned on the 2/10/15 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

Greg's Twitter feed (scroll down to February 9 to see the tweets for "Ask Me Anything")


God, Evolution, and Morality Part 1 (PDF) by Greg Koukl


Transcript of Debate between Greg Koukl and Michael Shermer


The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer


AMP Conference – February 20-21 in Anaheim, CA (use promo code "STR" to get $10 off)


See upcoming events for STR speakers


Greg and Brett are the speakers at ShatterProof Conference – February 21 in Alabaster, AL


Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy by Gary L. Thomas


Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl


The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? by James White


Greg interviews James White on King James Only controversy


The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism by D.A. Carson


The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman


New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide by David Alan Black


The Basics of New Testament Textual Criticism – Free video series by Daniel Wallace on iTunes U


Misquoting Jesus? by Greg Koukl


40 Questions about Creation and Evolution by Kenneth Keathley and Mark Rooker


Never Read a Bible Verse by Greg Koukl


Difficult Passages in the New Testament by Robert H. Stein

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Challenge: God Changed When He Became Man

Here’s this week’s challenge: 

You Christians say that God never changes, but then you say that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. That’s a change! You’re contradicting yourself.

How do you respond to this objection? Tell us what you think in the comments below, then check back on Thursday to see Alan’s response.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Does Baptism Have Regenerative Significance?

Is baptism purely symbolic, or is it necessary to be reborn?

About Those Crusades…

Since the Crusades are back in the news, these excerpts from a 2005 article by Crusade historian Thomas F. Madden will help you brush up on the basics:

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them…. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Madden says there were two central goals of the Crusades: 

The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? … Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ…. 

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth…. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics.

Obviously, there are more complexities involved, so read the rest of Madden’s article for more.

Why Tim Keller Started to Pray

I’ve been reading Tim Keller’s new book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. There was a time in my life when I loved and looked forward to prayer. I’m not sure how it happened, but I drifted away from it, and now, as the struggles of life have made me increasingly aware of my need and my dependence on God, I’ve been trying to rekindle that habit. What a difference communion with God through prayer makes! I’ve known this to be true, both intellectually and experientially, yet I still let my prayer life falter.

In his book, Keller gives a wonderfully motivating illustration of how we should view prayer:

In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. I had to.

In the fall of 1999, I taught a Bible study course on the Psalms. It became clear to me that I was barely scratching the surface of what the Bible commanded and promised regarding prayer. Then came the dark weeks in New York after 9/11, when our whole city sank into a kind of corporate clinical depression, even as it rallied. For my family the shadow was intensified as my wife, Kathy, struggled with the effects of Crohn’s disease. Finally, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

At one point during all this, my wife urged me to do something with her we had never been able to muster the self-discipline to do regularly. She asked me to pray with her every night. Every night. She used an illustration that crystallized her feelings very well. As we remember it, she said something like this:

Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine—a pill every night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No—it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget, you would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray together to God, we’re not going to make it because of all we are facing. I’m certainly not. We have to pray, we can’t let it just slip our minds.

Maybe it was the power of the illustration, maybe it was just the right moment, maybe it was the Spirit of God. Or, most likely of all, it was the Spirit of God using the moment and the clarity of the metaphor. For both of us the penny dropped; we realized the seriousness of the issue, and we admitted that anything that was truly a nonnegotiable necessity was something we could do.

I included Keller’s description of his difficulties at the beginning of that excerpt, but I hesitated to do so. None of us should think we’re in any less dire circumstances just because we don’t have cancer or didn’t go through a terrorist attack. Mundane, ordinary lives are just as in need of the Holy Spirit’s work as anyone with unusual suffering. We need God. Our souls are empty and hungry without Him. Don’t starve yourself!

Anomalies Don’t Necessarily Disprove Christianity

Last week, Biola hosted a panel discussion between William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and John Lennox (moderated by Hugh Hewitt) on the topic of “God, Science, and the Big Questions.”

In response to a question posed to William Lane Craig about the biggest challenge to Christianity from science that Christians need to work on, J.P. Moreland (at 1:23:04) reminded the audience that a theory (scientific, theological, etc.) ought not be rejected just because there’s an anomaly that can’t yet be reconciled with it. Instead, it’s legitimate to take time to work on finding an answer that resolves the alleged contradiction. He referenced the work he’s done on how to evaluate theories in light of anomalies: 

I did a study of how people weigh and change theories, and one of the things I learned is that a theory of any kind—if it’s an economic theory, a scientific theory, it could be a theological theory—will have core commitments that are called the “paradigm carriers.” They’re the key things to the theory…. And then there will be less important commitments that are around the periphery of the theory. 

Now, when does it become reasonable to think that an anomaly on the periphery—a problem—turns out to really be a falsification of the theory, as opposed to an anomaly that we can explain or it’s okay for us to work on it over a while?

Here’s what I think it is: … If the evidence for the central part of the theory is stronger than the evidence that this [anomaly] falsifies the theory, then you are within your intellectual rights to say I don’t have an answer to this yet, but I can’t bring myself to think it falsifies the theory—not because I don’t want to, [but] because we have a ton of evidence for this theory.

He then gives an example of how this has worked for a scientific theory in the past. His ideas on this subject are well worth thinking about, as I think people often misunderstand how to evaluate evidence and anomalies, thinking any anomaly ought to put an end to consideration of the theory (in this case, Christianity). This is simply a misunderstanding of how evidence works.

Dr. Moreland previously wrote about this in an article titled “The Rationality of Belief in Inerrancy.” Here, from my summary of his article, are three principles we ought to keep in mind when developing and evaluating theories:

In forming a theory, you start with the clear cases, not the borderline ones. 

The presence of as yet unexplained anomalies does not necessarily disprove the theory.

No one instance (or even a few) of a class has the power to prove or disprove a theory about that class (even if, taken alone, it would seem to); it's studied as a member of its larger class, in light of the evidence of the other examples of its kind.

One important insight I learned from J. Warner Wallace—who spent his career dealing with evidence—is that evidence is messy. We shouldn’t expect everything to line up perfectly. There will be anomalies or things that will remain unexplained, and yet it’s still reasonable to settle on the conclusion that makes the best sense of all of the evidence as it stands, even with loose ends. The loose ends shouldn’t panic you. 

The whole panel discussion is worth watching.

(You can find the podcast series on creation and evolution Dr. Craig referenced in the discussion here; and specifically, his response to the problem reconciling population genetics with Adam and Eve—the challenge he cited that initiated the conversation about anomalies—can be found in Part 11.)

 

Free Audiobook by R.C. Sproul This Month

At the beginning of every month, you ought to be checking christianaudio.com to see which audiobook they’re offering for free. I would say that at least half the time, it’s a book I want hear. All you have to do to download the book is give them your email address and agree to be on their mailing list (don’t worry, they don’t inundate you with emails). 

This month, they’re offering Everyone’s a Theologian: An Introduction to Systematic Theology by R.C. Sproul. Here’s the description:

Many people react negatively to the word theology, believing that it involves dry, fruitless arguments about minute points of doctrine. Yet as Dr. R.C. Sproul argues, everyone is a theologian. Any time we think about a teaching of the Bible and strive to understand it, we are engaging in theology. Therefore, it is important that we put the Bible's varied teachings together in a systematic fashion, using proper, time-tested methods of interpretation so as to arrive at a theology that is founded on truth. That is precisely what Dr. Sproul does in Everyone's a Theologian: An Introduction to Systematic Theology. This book is anything but a dry discussion of minute points of doctrine. Dr. Sproul, demonstrating his trademark ability to make complex subjects easy to understand, surveys the basic truths of the Christian faith, reminding us once more of what God is like and of what He has done for His people in this world and the next.

The nice thing about christianaudio.com is that along with the free book, they offer similar books at a discount. This month, there are six more audiobooks by R.C. Sproul discounted to only $4.98, including The Holiness of God (the book I recommend more often than any other to people interested in apologetics), Defending Your Faith: An Introduction to Apologetics, and The Consequences of Ideas.

Links Mentioned on the 2/03/15 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

Greg's sermon at Living Oaks Church

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.