A collection of articles for serving our neighbors as Jesus served us.
Have you been studying apologetics for a while? Perhaps you’ve read Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig and dug into a few books by C.S. Lewis. Armed with this new and exciting knowledge, you’re fired up about Jesus, the evidence and reasons for God, and looking for someone who is willing to listen!
This is a recurring temptation.
Do you feel like you’re always on the defensive about Christianity? There’s the Crusades, Westboro is probably inappropriately protesting something, and a prominent Christian leader has likely said something your friends think is wrong. And even once you get past the stereotypes, it takes a lot of hard work to intelligently share the gospel with your secular, skeptical friends.
But what about atheism? Though it has been persistently marketed to us as a worldview that stands for reason and science, the truth is that the atheistic worldview is riddled with contradictions and outlandish claims. And because most secular people haven’t studied why atheism is true, an excellent evangelistic strategy for you and your church is to understand these five challenges for atheism.
Are you tired of trying to define yourself?
There is enormous pressure to define yourself well. What is your personal brand on social media? Or are you simply invisible and irrelevant to the global, hyper-connected world?
How do you define yourself based upon your job? Your net worth? Your neighborhood? Your family? Your health? Your looks?
We all have different ways of defining ourselves. (I usually choose the standards that make me look the best).
All of these subtle pressures to define ourselves can exhaust us. In the midst of such pressure, one option is to look in the mirror and keep saying, as Al Franken’s Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smalley famously did, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”
Have you ever heard of experiential learning? From ropes courses to trust falls, or hearing a ‘what is the meaning of life?’ talk while standing in a cemetery, the point of experiential learning exercises is to give participants a richer, multi-dimensional encounter that leads to new and lasting insight.
But did you know that there’s a powerful way to bring experiential learning into everyday conversations?
Today I want to introduce you to what I call “The Jabberwocky Method.” You practice The Jabberwocky Method whenever you deliberately practice a nonsensical idea that the other person is asserting makes complete sense.
Do you ever feel overwhelmed about defending the truth of Christianity? It seems like there’s a lot of information to remember! Philosophy is complicated. Sometimes apologetics feels like math (with apologies to my readers who find math easy and enjoyable).
In my cultural context, the default, assumed position is that atheism is true and Christianity is false. So everyone assumes the burden of proof is on me to show otherwise. That makes my job a lot harder.
Having read widely and deeply on these subjects for over a decade, I think atheism faces tremendous intellectual and existential challenges and is very likely false. And I think Christianity can be demonstrated as true from philosophical, historical, and existential considerations.
Do you love your skeptical neighbors?
Its a question I don’t hear very often, but one that Christians need to regularly ask one another. According to some studies, up to 20% of Americans are not religious. The level of skepticism varies around the world, but if you live in a cultural context where many people have doubts about God, you need to ask the question: do you love your skeptical neighbors? And a closely related question: does your church love people with doubts, questions, and different beliefs?
What does it mean to love our skeptical neighbors? To figure that out, first we need to think about why and how we love our neighbors in general. And then we can think more clearly about what it means to love our skeptical neighbors.
As a Christian, I have been the recipient of some really bad attempts at evangelism.
One of the most puzzling was a fairly long airplane ride. I don’t recall talking to the person next to me at all – perhaps we each read a book, did Sudoku puzzles, or flipped through the SkyMall brochure to make fun of the amusing products for sale (like an Alien Flying Saucer Statue – seriously).
Anyways, after we landed, she stood up, got her bag from the overhead bin, dropped an evangelistic tract into my lap, and then walked off the plan without saying a word. I suppose I looked like I really needed salvation. So why didn’t she at least introduce herself?
Do you ever feel like you have to have all the answers for your skeptical friends? Here’s the problem: it is way, way easier to ask a hard question than to give a good answer. In the space of five minutes someone can ask twenty incredibly difficult questions: how can we know anything at all? Maybe the Bible was altered by a group of powerful religious leaders – prove me wrong! How do you know Jesus is God? What about the violence in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile faith and science? What is your opinion on evolution? Doesn’t the Bible contradict itself? And on and on it can go…
In this post I am going to teach you a process that will let you answer your friends’ questions. Seriously. You can do this.
Before we begin, though, we need to recognize a more general point. Whenever we decide to learn something new, there’s a three-step process:
When it comes to apologetics, I have talked to hundreds of people who buy into #1. “Yes, apologetics is a skill worth learning. It would be amazing to be able to answer my friends’ questions. I would really like to be able to do that.”
On February 1, Purdue University, in partnership with Biola University, hosted a debate between Dr. Alex Rosenberg and Dr. William Lane Craig, on the topic “Is Faith in God Reasonable?” You can already find audio of the debate and a summary of the debate online. The video can be watched at the bottom of this post.
I think there are a few valuable lessons from the debate:
Throughout the debate, Dr. Rosenberg presented a wide variety of terrible arguments.