Volume 36:Issue 6

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CONTENTS:

04 From the Editor

From the Abstract to the Incarnational: Contending for the Faith in Today’s World

06 Effective Evangelism
What Cops Can Teach Christians about the Critical Use of Language

08 Does the Bible Require Christians to Attend Church?
by Kevin De Young and Jason Helopoulos
Spiritual Discernment/Practical Theology: A growing category in religious publishing these days is the “nones”—people who are into “spirituality” but not “religion,” including professing Christians who do not belong to a church. Is churchless Christianity a viable option or is the need for an article like this merely a sign of the times?

12 The Gun Control Debate: Two Christian Perspectives
by Michael W. Austin and Ron Gleason
Ethical Discernment: Sandy Hook School. The Washington Navy Yard. The Aurora theater. The Sikh temple. Mass murders such as these have been shaking the national composure with alarming regularity, and such random shootings only begin to tell the story of gun-related violence in America. Should current gun laws be strengthened or does the solution lie elsewhere? In this debate, two thoughtful Christians offer differing perspectives on what Scripture, the Second Amendment, and the statistics have to say.

24Alexander Solzhenitsyn Confronts the Grand Inquisitor
by Stephen Mitchell
Literary Apologetics: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (GI) challenges the foundational Christian belief that humans are created in God’s image by denying that they are strong enough to bear the burden of free will. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich and others like him prove the GI wrong.

30God and the “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”
by William Lane Craig
Scientific and Philosophical Apologetics: Mathematical theorist Peter Higgs sits down at his desk and, by pouring over mathematical equations, predicts the existence of a fundamental particle that thirty years later, after millions of dollars and thousands of work hours, experimentalists finally detect. Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained?

36 God Is Love, But Is Love God? Answering the Esoteric Interpretation of 1 John 4
by Elliot MIller
Practical Hermeneutics: Followers of metaphysical, New Age, and Eastern teachings argue that if “God is love,” then He would never punish sinners or require the sacrificial death of His Son to save them. By quoting from the Bible, however, they have opened the door to a discussion of what the Bible meant by that phrase in the first place.

44 The New Nothingness: A Look at Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing
by Dean C. Halverson
Scientific and Philosophical Apologetics: Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, the director of Arizona State University’s Origins Project, will stop at nothing to find a naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe at the time of the Big Bang. This includes defining the “nothing” from which the universe emerged as something physical and assigning to it several attributes traditionally reserved for God.

54 The Myth of Persecution: A Provocative Title, an Overdone Thesis
by Paul L. Maier
Historical Apologetics (A Summary Critique): In The Myth of Persecution Notre Dame scholar Candida Moss argues that the tradition of long, bloody persecutions of Christians by a hostile Roman Empire and the heroic martyrdoms of the faithful have been invented by the church and its historians. There is only one problem with this thesis: the actual historical evidence.

58 Reviews
Justin L. Barrett’s Born Believers…Director Gavin Hood’s Enders’ Game

62 Ask Hank

Don’t All Religions Lead to Heaven? and What Happens to a Person Who Has Never Heard of Jesus