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July 10 - July 31, 2019
God uses my weakness and inadequacy not only to build my character, but also to manifest his strength and grace to me and through me.
Christianity properly understood and applied leads to life characterized by kindness, love, generosity, and relationship as God originally intended.
“Dawkins writes nothing about the great religious communities founded for the express purpose of building schools for the free education of the poor. Nothing about the thousands of monastic lives dedicated to the delicate and exhausting labor of copying by hand the great manuscripts of the past … during which there were no printing presses. Nothing about the founding of the Vatican Library and its importance for the genesis of nearly a dozen modern sciences. Nothing of the faithful who have made so many crucial discoveries in science, medicine, and technology. Yet on these matters a word or
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history reveals that the darkness of the human heart can find expression in any worldview.
we want to highlight two of the significant ways in which Christianity, far from poisoning everything, has literally changed the world.
Christianity introduced charity to the world, as well as an eleva...
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“The impious Galileans [his word for Christians] support not only their own poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”
They actually viewed the great epidemic of 260 as an opportunity to love people.
Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead…. The best of our brothers lost their life in this manner, a number of
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Now note how the pagan responded: The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape.
Lest one accuse Dionysus of fabricating the pagan response to make Christians look good, the Greek historian Thucydides describes similar responses of desertion by those in his day when a plague struck Athens in 431 B.C.9 Additionally, Plato thought that the poor who became sick should be left to die.
Christians were instrumental in outlawing infanticide in the middle of the fourth century.
This heinous practice existed in virtually every ancient civilization, as well as in the more advanced Greco-Roman world. It was even recommended as legitimate state policy by both Plato and Aristotle.
The unwanted children not killed immediately following birth (usually girls) were often abandoned and left to die. Christians would literally pick them up off the streets and adopt them.
Women did not fair much better in Rome, as indicated by the following laws.
Christian missionaries pressured the Chinese government to abolish foot binding in 1912.
In 1829 the English outlawed the Indian practice of suttee, in which widows were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, because of Christianity’s teaching regarding widows and women.
The Hebrew word “helper” is also used of members of the Trinity.
In a similar fashion, gender and family relationships as they play out in the narratives of the Old Testament are also broken and corrupted by sin and complicated by other sociological pressures.
Social historian Alvin Schmidt observes, “Neither Christ nor the early Christians ever preached outright revolution.
Compassion International.
“Christian ideals have permeated society until non-Christians, who claim to live a ‘decent life’ without religion, have forgotten the origin of the very content and context of their ‘decency.’”
Dave Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry
Actually, major studies have shown that being religious is actually good for your health.
Also, it has been empirically shown that religious people, specifically church-attending, evangelical Christians, are the most generous Americans with their money.
Is the record perfect? Of course not, a fact explained by the Christian worldview itself, which recognizes the sinfulness of humanity.
positive contributions of the biblical worldview, including the development of modern science, technology, economics, limited government, concepts of universal human rights (including property rights, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery), and belief in the dignity of work.
Why Jesus Instead of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Christianity is not a code for living or a philosophy of religion; rather it is rooted in real events of history. To some this is scandalous, because it means that the truth of Christianity is bound up with the truth of certain historical facts, such that if those facts should be disproved, so would Christianity. But at the same time, this makes Christianity unique because, unlike most other world religions, we now have a means of verifying its truth by historical evidence.
To doubt the existence of Jesus is pretty remarkable because Jesus’ death by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans is one of the most well-established facts in all of ancient history.
ARE THE NEW TESTAMENT GOSPELS RELIABLE HISTORY?
New Testament historian Ben Witherington observes, “The most the historian can establish about events in the past is a good probability one way or another that this or that event did or did not happen. There ...
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Now this doesn’t mean that we should become historical skeptics, only that we should ha...
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One objection to the Gospels is that appealing to them is an example of circular reasoning.
These writers didn’t sit down in a room somewhere and decide that they needed to get their story straight and write the Bible.
So the Christian is not guilty of special pleading here or using the Bible to prove the Bible.
Another objection is that the Gospel writers were biased.
Wouldn’t Jesus’ followers have had a theological axe to grind? If by this someone means that the disciples had convictions about the identity and teachings of Jesus, then yes, they were biased. But so is every ...
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The important question is whether being an advocate for a certain point of view necessarily renders that person incapable of reco...
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“If an American wrote a history of the United States, would that history necessarily be unreliable or distorted? Or more pointedly, some of the most important accounts of the Nazi Holocaust have been composed by Jews. Does this fact render them inaccurate? On the contrary, those passionately interested in the events are often the most meticulous in recording them. To c...
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While he was doing more than just reporting the facts, Luke has also been shown to be a first-rate historian.
The conclusion historians are willing to draw concerning the Gospels depends in large part on what presuppositions they bring to their investigation.
Beyond that point, the decision as to how far a scholar is willing to accept the record they offer is likely to be influenced more by his openness to a “supernaturalist” world-view than by strictly historical considerations.
In many cases, a rejection of this “supernaturalist” worldview or bias against the possibility of miracles is to blame for a person’s skepticism of the Gospels. We have already seen in chapter 3 that it is not warranted to reject the possibility of miracles a priori (i.e., before examining the evidence).9 A more reasonable approach would involve employing an “open” historical-critical method and making an inference to the best explanation.
Oral tradition is often caricatured as crude storytelling along the lines of the telephone game we all played as kids. This is an inaccurate picture to say the least.
He further notes that modern skeptics of testimony find themselves in an awkward position because “it is also a rather neglected fact that all history … relies on testimony.”
These oral texts were later embedded in written texts.15
Despite claims by some contemporary scholars (e.g., Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels) that there were lots of alternative Christianities and so it is hard to know which one is the “true” one, the fact remains that later Gnosticism was clearly inconsistent with the earliest teaching and beliefs of Christianity. See Darrell L. Bock, The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities
DID EARLY CHRISTIANITY BORROW FROM PAGAN MYTHOLOGY?
This view originated with the “history of religions school” in the late nineteenth century.20
