Videos

This seven-part series examines three of the most difficult and debated chapters in Paul's epistle to the Romans, and through them seeks to discover the true heart of God.

Romans 9:1-5

What is apologetics? In short, it is giving good reasons and evidence to believe that Christianity is true. Apologetics focuses on some big questions about the truth of Christianity such as the following: Does God exist? Who was Jesus? How do we know Jesus was God? Is the Bible even historically reliable? Questions like these often appear front and center in our culture where skepticism of religious claims is the norm. The lectures below can help prepare you to address these questions in a Biblical manner, giving a "defense for the hope that you have" in Christ "with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). Follow along with Adam’s Introduction to Apologetics class to learn about the good reasons and evidence for God, Jesus, and the truth of the Scriptures.

Some skeptics will articulate an objection to Christianity by raising the problem of religious language. They will allege that, even if there were a God, since He is such an infinite and transcendent being, our language would be inadequate to describe Him, and thus all our talk about Him is meaningless. There are three main responses that have been offered to this. One response says that language referring to God is univocal; that is, when we use words to describe an infinite God, they have the exact same meanings as in other finite contexts. In other words, there is no problem with religious language. Another response claims that religious language is equivocal, which means that our language can’t actually describe God because an infinite God always transcends the ability of finite language to describe Him. However, on the equivocal position, our religious language is not completely meaningless, as it can describe certain aspects of God or our experience of God. A third response is that our religious language is analogous such that it has some connection to what God is like and can describe Him using comparisons and similarities. Some adopt a hybrid position that the language itself is univocally defined but analogously applied to both finite humans and an infinite God.

Sometimes human free will is a problem skeptics raise against the existence of God. This objection is usually presented similarly to this version by Nelson Pike: (1) If God exists, then He has infallible foreknowledge. (2) If God has infallible foreknowledge, then humans can’t have free will. (3) But humans do have free will, so (4) therefore God must not exist. Several solutions have been proposed to answer this objection to God. One such solution is called “Open Theism,” and it rejects premise 1 and says that God does not have infallible foreknowledge of free human choices. This response falls outside the bounds of orthodox historical Christian thinking. Another solution that rejects premise 1 focuses on the idea that God exists outside of time and therefore His knowledge is not foreknowledge but is rather timeless. A third solution called Okhamism rejects premise 2 by saying that future free choices cause God’s knowledge even though they happen chronologically after God has that knowledge. A fourth solution called Compatibilism rejects premise 3 by claiming that human beings do not have free will in an absolute sense. Many Calvinists and Reformed theologians take this position. Finally, another solution is Molinism, named after Luis de Molina, which rejects premise 2. Molinism claims that God can have “middle knowledge”; in other words, He can foreknow what all humans would freely do in any set of circumstances.

Does the Bible condone the use of apologetics? The intuition found in the first cause, design, and moral arguments for the existence of God seem to be affirmed in Romans 1 and 2. Many cultures concluded that a supreme being exists based on general revelation alone, and this is not a coincidence. This is confirmed by Paul’s speech in Acts 17. Arguing that Jesus is God is also confirmed by the Bible when Jesus tells people to use a “miracle test” and look at His miracles to know if He is really God. In the Old Testament, God gives Moses miracles to prove a message was given to him by God. Moses said to test claims to have messages from God by evaluating the evidence, and the Bible affirms that we should use historical investigation to see if its claims are true. However, some Christians still object to the use of apologetics. Modern philosophy has influenced the church to separate faith from reason and look down on reason and think of faith as uncertainty. Thomas Aquinas used faith and reason together and did particularly well in balancing general and special revelation properly. It can be said that philosophy is the study of general revelation and theology is the study of special revelation. Many verses that Christians use to try to say that the Bible opposes using reason to ascertain truth are not interpreted properly in context. Yes, the Bible is both self-sufficient and self-authenticating, but we must be careful about what we conclude from the meaning of those terms.

How do we know what is a message from God and what isn’t? We know by miracles, which authenticate that something is really from God. There were three unique time periods when many miracles took place, and these were the times that major parts of the Bible were being written: the time of Moses, the time of the prophets, and the time of Jesus and the apostles. There is good historical evidence that the apostles did miracles to back up their claims, so the New Testament should include the books that the apostles said were from God. The early church did the historical research necessary to conclude that the 27 books in the New Testament were really messages from God and that books like the so-called "Gospel of Thomas" were not. Early church councils like the Council of Nicaea didn’t make the Bible; they merely verified which books were really affirmed by the apostles. An apostle’s affirmation of a book was more important than its authorship, because not all books (Mark, Luke, Hebrews) were written by an apostle. For the Old Testament, we can look at the development of the Hebrew canon and what Jesus and the apostles affirmed to determine what books should be in the Old Testament. There is disagreement among Christians about the “apocryphal” or “deuterocanonical” books. Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept some of them while Protestants reject all of them. Even though we disagree on this, if God exists and Jesus is God, then Christianity is true, even if we’ve made minor mistakes about which books should be included in the Bible.

What reasons and evidence do we have to believe that the Bible is really from God? Our main source of evidence for this is that those people who wrote the Bible, who had messages from God, were able to do miracles to prove or authenticate that their messages were from God. Jesus and His disciples claimed that the Old and New Testaments were from God, and then they did authenticating miracles to back up those claims. However, the Bible is a collection of documents written by human beings, not by God Himself. The doctrine of inspiration tells us how God used human beings to communicate His messages. Even though the Bible is from God, there are two senses in which it can be considered true: it can be true for all major historical events but may have small errors with minor details, or it can be completely correct in all details. This latter sense is called the doctrine of inerrancy, the claim that the Bible contains no errors. Christians believe the Bible is inerrant because God inspired the text of Scripture, and God cannot lie. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was written in order to explain what Christians do and don’t mean when they speak about the Bible being inerrant. However, even if we’re wrong about inerrancy, Christianity would still be true, because God still exists and Jesus is still God, even if the Bible contained some minor errors.

Anybody can claim to be God, but how do we know Jesus really was God? One of the ways we can know this, of course, is that He did miracles. That is probably the strongest piece of evidence we have for claiming that Jesus is God, but there are other pieces of evidence that can support this conclusion. Jesus is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, moral teachers. According to the historical sources we have about Him, Jesus seems to have lived up to the moral standards He taught. Jesus is one of the most, if not the most, influential persons in all of world history, and He accomplished this by merely being a poor, itinerant teacher for three years. Jesus also fulfilled many prophecies about a coming Messiah which we can confirm were written hundreds of years before He lived. Two of the most outstanding of these are the Messianic prophecies from Daniel 9 and Isaiah 53. Finally, Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Paul says that our entire Christian faith depends on Jesus’ resurrection. It is the key miracle which validates Jesus’ claim to be God. One of the ways to demonstrate Jesus’ resurrection is to use the “Minimal Facts Argument,” which puts forward Jesus’ resurrection as the best explanation of the well-attested historical facts about Jesus that many critical scholars affirm.