Sometimes people wonder if apologetics is really necessary. Well our faith is under attack.
John Dominic Crossan, who is virtually ubiquitous on television, radio, and documentaries, says that that Jesus Christ was never resurrected from the dead and that His body was thrown into shallow grave barely covered with dirt, and eaten by wild dogs who roamed the execution grounds.[1] He also says that when he hears Christian talk about resurrection, he hears hope but not history.[2]
Not only are the attacks on the historical Jesus coming from without, but the attacks are coming from within as well. Rob Bell, one of the liberal emergent church leaders, has said that if Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists found Larry’s tomb and did DNA samples and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing that we would not lose any significant part of our faith, because it is more about how we live.” [3]
Or think about Peter Jennings, he has passed on now, but he was famous in television documentaries for saying that Christians have faith, but reporters have facts. So he perpetuated the Enlightenment’s false dichotomy between faith and reason.[4]
I also recently mentioned James Watson, who is a Nobel Prize winner and also well known as co-discover of the structure of DNA. He said, “Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more significant figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed.[5]
You also have Richard Dawkins who said just last week in The Wall Street Journal, “Evolution is the creator of life… the greatest show on earth, the only game in town…Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip…God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.”[6] He had previously said, “If you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[7]
You also have Karen Armstrong, who fully buys into Darwinian evolution, which by the way is not based on equality but inequality. She asks, “But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled?” What of the “death and racial extinction”? Her answer is that the notion of God like any “good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity”[8] In an arbitrary world controlled by natural selection, even though Darwin was right and we evolved from the primordial slime, and that everything is brain-based chemistry and genetics and is fatalistically determined, for Armstrong it doesn’t matter the Bible is a myth, for it helps you cope with the reality that Darwin unearthed. In her opinion, the Bible is a good psychology book, not true, but it’s a helpful myth.
Now I’ve just scratched the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is a mass of ice looming under the water. If this is all true, that gives us all the more reason to learn how to defend our faith. A great new product we have is Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ, Case for Faith, and Case for a Creator DVDs all in one package. This is absolutely crucial for the modern Christian. It deals with the Historical Jesus, Questions About Our Faith, and the Case for the Intelligent Design of the Universe. I encourage you to get this brand new resource at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-7000-0274.
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[1] John Dominic Crossan as quoted in Richard N. Ostling, “Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple,” Time, 10 January 1994 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,979938,00.html).
[2] See John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (Harpers Collins, 1996) a section in chapter 6 is called Hope is Not History.
[3] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 26.
[4] See for instance the 2000 ABC special, The Search For Jesus or the 2004 ABC special Jesus and Paul the Word and the Witness.
[5] As quoted by Alister McGrath (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mcgrath/Shewsbury%20Darwin%20Festival%202007.pdf) and quoted by Tom Frame in his book, Evolution in The Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia (University of New South Wales Press Ltd, Sydney, Australia, 2009) 2. (http://books.google.com/books?id=VdbZB2yCcsIC&pg=PT9&lpg=PT9&dq=James+Watson+Charles+Darwin+will+eventually+be+seen+as+a+far+more+significant+figure+in+the+history+of+human+thought&source=bl&ots=2Ypm4-doG1&sig=eu8qluxBcvYTZo5NyOO_ioweZ2Y&hl=en&ei=tgy5Srv3FMS_tgeQrcX0Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=James%20Watson&f=false) .
[6] “Man Vs God” with Essays by Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong, The Wall Street Journal 9/12/09 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html#U10156404922R1E)
[7] Dawkins, Richard (1989), “Book Review” (of Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey’s Blueprint), The New York Times, section 7, April 9. This is also quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), p. 9.