A brief Introduction:While studying to be a pastor in college I abandoned my faith. In fact, I abandoned everything I thought I believed and rebuilt.
To my own surprise at the time, I found that Christianity was much stronger than I had thought. As I rebuilt my belief system, I realized that there needed to be people out there responding to the questions people have. I had them myself. So, while not continuing on to be a pastor, I have focused on educating people about what Christianity is all about and responding to the various charges and accusations made against it.
There are some obvious challenges to being successful in that capacity, but a big part of it consists not in arguing with atheists and skeptics, but rather in providing Christians with accurate information in the first place to prevent them from leaving the faith in the first place.
Questioning is a very normal and natural part of growing up, and I am convinced that it is not wrong to ask questions of God at any age. God doesn't strike people down. On the other hand, if people are going to reject Christianity, it is my aim to at least make sure they reject the real Christianity and not a false view of it. Also, much heartache can be avoided by educating Christians properly to begin with. My experience has helped me... but it was unnecessary.
Paul said that some plant, some water, and others reap the increase. My job is to go out into the land and move rocks- or break them if necessary- till the land, and struggle through knee deep fertilizer... all in the effort to allow those who come later to plant, water, and reap the harvest. I look forward to the prospects of either serving you as someone who needs to haul rocks out of the field, or as someone who can look at the field, detect problems, and help farmers more effectively plant, water, and reap.
It took a few years after my personal battle with atheism for me to realize the importance of Jesus’ Jewishness in understanding Christianity- and defending it. The character of the Jewish people at that time is well documented by both the Old Testament and extra-biblical sources. Some things about Christianity, or perhaps more precisely, the New Testament, make no sense apart from the Jewish context that it arose in. The brief video presentation below is not an argument for Christianity but rather foundation laying for such an argument. Everyone loves a puzzle! Puzzle me this- how has the Jewish nation managed to remain intact over thousands of years in the face of immense hostility to the point where they were able to emerge in numbers enough to re-claim their ancient stomping grounds? When you’re done with that, how did a people whose devotion to “Hear Oh Israel, The Lord your God is ONE” managed to become the womb for a new world view where God became a man?
It is that time of year again when a holiday becomes the front in a culture battle. I need not give examples- google Dan Barker and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It is not uncommon to find skeptics and secular humanists insinuating with a sneer that belief in God is exactly like belief in Santa Claus, the only difference being that people grow out of belief in Santa Claus. Atheists who think this way have no problem being contemptuous punks because in their mind, given the similarities between the two examples (in their mind), a person who still believes in God exhibits prima facie evidence of being infantile and irrational: exactly the kind of people we need to cull from the population one way or another.
In light of this situation, it is useful to point out that Santa Claus actually is real.
‘Santa Claus’ is the modern expression of the legends originating with a certain, real, person, named Nicholas, or as he came to be known, Saint Nicholas. Do you see it? Saint/Santa? Good ol’ Saint NICK? NiKLAUS? Here is an unsubstantiated account that is accurate as far as it goes and helps lay the background here.
Not as well known, this same St. Nicholas wasn’t a rotund and jolly fellow. At the Council of Nicea c. 325 AD, Jolly Ol’Saint Nick got into a fist fight with one of the Arians and was ejected from the council.
The sign on the door read “Bureau for Decommissioned Facts.” I pushed the door open gingerly, almost sheepishly. My quest to find this heretofore unknown department of the Universal University was not merely a recent one, but one that was given to me and not one that I had initiated. The department chair had taken me aside in the cafeteria, and in a tone that wavered between fatherly affection and patronizing condescension, insisted that I take a trip to Building 51023414, use the elevator to go down to the lowest sub-floor, and learn what could be learned in the BDF.
Naturally, I found the suggestion extremely curious, if only because I had never heard of the BDF and had never noticed a building marked 51023414 before. From some of the remarks made by the department chair I had some inclination to think that this quest was bestowed upon me in relation to a paper that I had recently submitted for publication. It was a paper that I was particularly proud of: bold, ambitious, counter-intuitive, and well-substantiated. Yet here I was, descending into the bowels of an ungodly numbered building as though I were back in high school and being sent to the principal’s office.
I beheld a nondescript sterile-white room. A black desk was in the middle of it, standing in stark contrast to the rest of the décor. A woman I instantly dubbed in my mind the ‘Prune Woman’ stared at me behind thick black-rimmed glasses. An older lady, to put it nicely. She glared at me. “How can I help you, sir?”
“My department chair sent me here,” I offered, not really knowing what else I could say. One of her eyebrows raised in an inquisitive manner.
Everyone loves a good mystery. As I was reading Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass for my review I kept waiting to hear some dramatic attack on the person of Christ and the doctrine of the incarnation. In fact, the series rarely mentions Jesus at all, and certainly never substantively. Several hypotheses occur to me: Perhaps Jesus is in Pullman’s mind the ‘good teacher’ that CS Lewis so forcefully objected to in his Trilemma. Perhaps the failure to incorporate the incarnation in his re-mything has to do with his failure to grasp the basic claims that Christians make about God and consequently does not comprehend the significance of the Incarnation. I would like to know why Pullman failed to speak to the incarnation because the incarnation ought to have been a powerful counter-balance to some of his arguments, suggestions, and insinuations.
Perhaps another kind of example will help show what I mean. It is common among atheistic circles to take jabs at the ‘Absent God’ that Christians are said to believe in. God never shows up in the real world which drives Christians to generate excuses for why that is goes the patronizing line. When Christians attempt to give an answer atheists resort to Invisible Pink Unicorns, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Dragons in the Garage to show what they think of that answer. How could anyone maintain that God is all good when he is all absent, even in the face of horrific manifestations of human wickedness, like the holocaust?
Besides a CP blogger, I am also the Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries. I am proud to announce that our ministry will be hosting its first annual online apologetics conference this May, 2010. […]
