Engaging Apologetics: Christianity, Truth, and Secular Challenges

In every generation, in every age competing secular philosophies collide with the truth claims of Christianity, and so through the ages Christian apologists have had to duel as it were with these competing philosophies because Christianity is not a religion so much as it is what we call a life and worldview – that is the content of Christianity defines the meaning of human existence and how this world in which we live is related too the existence of God. [00:00:56]

Christianity's concerned not just about how we worship or how we sing or how we pray, but it's interested in the character of God. It's interested in the question of cosmology – that is how this world is constructed, does this world operate by internal fixed laws that are independent from the power of God or does nature itself depend every moment for its power and operations upon this transcendent God who creates it in the first place? [00:02:06]

One of the things that we enjoy as Christians, having had two thousand years of practice dealing with alternate systems, is that when we are confronted by a new philosophical challenge to the Christian faith where we have to defend ourselves afresh in a new generation we at least have the advantage of two thousand years of reflection on issues that tend to come up over and over and over again in the arena of public debate. [00:03:47]

Again historically the great theologians and apologists of church history have all agreed that all truth is one and that all truth meets at the top, so that what God reveals in the Scripture in the final analysis will not contradict what He reveals to us outside of Scripture in the realm of nature, and conversely if God reveals some truth in nature, that truth that is known through nature will not contradict what is found in the Bible. [00:06:01]

By establishing the authority of the Scripture the last ten percent would include those 10,000 issues that can be dealt with by a careful study of what Scripture says because Scripture, again, tells us something about the origin of man, the origin of the cosmos. It tells us the nature of truth itself. It speaks to us about issues of ethics that we are fiercely divided on – such matters as homosexual behavior, abortion, and the like. [00:07:00]

We have people within the church who disagree on issues of how we regulate marriage and divorce and sexuality and the like – these debates that we're seeing in the newspaper everyday – and the problem is complicated because some people in the church agree that the normative authority to settle these issues is Scripture, while others within the church say, "No, I don't submit to the normative authority of Scripture," so they want to look somewhere else to establish a basis for their truth claims. [00:07:36]

But again the problem is not everybody inside the church, not to mention outside the church, agrees that the Bible is normative. That's why it is imperative that that authority be established early in the whole process of examining truth claims so that you can have an authority that you both submit to; but then the plots thickens when we realize that there are many people in the church who agree that the Bible is the Word of God and are willing to submit to the authority of the Word of God, but they have a vastly different understanding of what the Bible actually teaches. [00:09:15]

And so then all of the questions about what process do you use in discerning what Scripture teaches, the science – what is called the science of hermeneutics or the rule of interpretation. That comes into play when we're dealing with issues of biblical interpretation. [00:10:01]

One of the great disputes that the church has had to deal with throughout history is the deity of Christ, and the question of the deity of Christ is a question that the church wrestled with for the first three hundred years of her existence because the people in the early church were certainly sensitive to the charge that was coming against Christian theology that Christianity was violating a cardinal principle of biblical truth – namely the monotheism that is the hallmark of the Old Testament faith – that historic Judaism clearly declares that God is one; and if we believe in monotheism, how can we attribute deity not only to God the Father, but also to attribute deity to Jesus Christ? [00:14:28]

That's why the church came to the position of the Trinity, of distinguishing among the three persons of the Trinity but saying that the three persons of the Trinity, though they must be distinguished among each other in terms of subsistence or in terms of persona, nevertheless in the Godhead remains a singularity of essence of deity, insisting that God is one in essence, so that though the differences among the persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – are real and important distinctions, those real and important distinctions in the Godhead are not essential distinctions. [00:15:32]

In the Gospel according to St. John, in the prologue, the opening verses of this text, we have an extraordinary affirmation about Christ, which affirmation is so extraordinary that this text more than any other busied the Christian intellectuals of the first three hundred years in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity. John's gospel begins with these words, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life and the life was the light of men." [00:17:16]

The message that Jesus taught regarding His deity was not missed by his contemporaries. It's because they understood what he was saying that they took up stones to kill Him, saying, "This man, being a man, declares Himself to be God". Those are just a few cases where the apologist has to go through the entire New Testament and give the defense for the deity of Christ based upon the testimony of Scripture because remember when we established the authority of Scripture, we began with the Scripture as a basically reliable historically document. [00:23:13]