Faith founded on Fact

This morning was my first class in a thirteen week series on apologetics that I'm teaching to the senior high at my church.  I have to admit that I was fairly nervous seeing as how it's been almost two years since the last time that I had a full series of lessons to teach for which I was creating my own curriculum.  However, the kids seemed to take to the subject matter, and the adult response was good as well. So, I'm hoping that bodes well for the coming weeks (and by God's grace it will).

But that's not actually what I want to post about.

As I was going through my lesson this morning I got to a section where I was describing the uses of apologetics.  One of those was that it was a tool that can be used to strengthen and encourage believers in their faith.  Yes, we can use it to try to convince others, or to refute an argument, but we, as Christians, can strengthen our own positions so that the doubt and fear that can assail us need no longer be a concern.  To prove this point to the teens I asked them, somewhat off the cuff, "How many of you have ever secretly doubted that the Bible is not really God's Word?"  I intended this as a lead in to show that we don't have to have these doubts because we can look at archeology and modern scholarship and see that it is consistent with Scripture and that it can prove that whole of Scripture is true.

The surprise for me came when everyone in the class raised their hand.  Adults, teens, me as well.  And it really hit home that the church has neglected apologetics to the point that even dedicated, adult Christians can have moments of doubt in their faith as to the veracity of Scripture.  So for my own edification, and for the edification of anyone who happens to read this that has ever had their doubts about the Bible being God's Word, lets list out some reasons to have faith in it.

• The Bible was written by a total of 40 authors over a space of approximately 1600 years in three different languages on three different continents by men that had differing levels of education and in vastly different circumstances.  In spite of this it has an internal message that is more consistent than books written by individual authors over the space of a single lifetime.  To illustrate this further lets do a little thought experiment.  Pick a subject, any subject, as long as people have been writing about it for the last, lets say, 500 years.  For our sake lets use human morality.  Now take any 40 authors on this subject and collect their writings into one work.  Now go through and see how many inconsistencies there are in message and theme.
• The Bible has more manuscript evidence to support the consistency of its message and the accuracy of our modern translations than any other ten works from antiquity combined.  For example:

1. The works of Aristotle: 7 available manuscripts with the oldest being 1400 years removed from the original composition date.
2. Plato's Tetralogies: 49 available manuscripts with the oldest being 1300 years removed from the original composition date.
3. Homer's Illiad: Approximately 2200 manuscripts with the oldest being 500 years removed from the original composition date.
4. The New Testament: 5600+ manuscripts available with the oldest being only 90 years removed from the original composition date.

• The Bible has the most accurate transcription rate of any work from antiquity.  As an example lets compare a more recent copy of Isaiah 53 to a copy that came from the Dead Sea Scrolls
1. Of 166 words, only  17 letters are in question
2. Of these: 10 are from differences in spelling and 4 are from differences in conjugation that don't affect the meaning of the passage.
3. The remaining three letters come from the addition of the word light in verse 11 which does not change the meaning of the passage.
4. The rest of the Old Testament holds up just as well in comparison with the percentage of actual changes to the manuscript that could have affected the meaning of a passage being somewhere in the range of .01%.

 That's all for know. Possible more on this next time.

A Word on Apologetics

I've become more and more disturbed by a recent trend in the modern church to disregard apologetics. In an environment in which the goal of the church to is bring people in and to not offend them, apologetics is like the large ugly ogre in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. For to practice apologetics is to risk offending someone by not stepping back from the truth. The church suffers because of this.

Anyone familiar with Answers in Genesis has probably seen the statistic from the book Already Gone in which something like 2/3rds of all teens are leaving the church. They give several reasons for this mass exodus, but one of the most striking is that teens are leaving the church because they are being talked out of their faith because they are unable to defend it.

Is this unsettling to you? It should be.

But there's got to be something other than fearing to offend that is driving this refusal to teach apologetics. I believe, and I say this through personal observation, that part of the problem is that modern Christians have this belief that all of Christianity has be accepted on blind faith.

Luke has this to say in Luke 1:3-4 " It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed

And again in 1 John 5:13 "I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life."

Do you notice a common theme here. Both Luke and John wrote so that believers could know. Not have really good faith, or believe with all their hearts, but to know.


The examples could go on and on. Hebrews was written so that Greek Jews could know that Christ was superior to all else, Paul spoke in such a a way at the Areopagus that all there would know that there is a God in heaven, Paul in Philippians call his ministry as a defense and confirmation of the gospel. At no place in the Bible are we called to blind faith.

We are called to faith founded on fact.

How much more comforting is this than to hope blindly. We can know beyond any doubt that what we must now believe by faith is based upon the facts of history, science, and Scripture.

More on this next time.