Apologetics Missions Trip - Videos

In preparation for our upcoming Apologetics Missions Trip to U.C. Berkeley, we had Brett Kunkle come out and pretend to be an atheist at our last Come Reason class.  Brett did a great job, as always and demonstrated how necessary it is to be prepared to defend your faith with gentleness and respect. (1 Peter 3:15)

This is why we're taking a group of people on the trip--to train them and help them be better equipped to do just that. Here are some videos to show you what you can expect on the trip. If you would like to go, there are still some spots left.  Download this flyer and turn it in!

The Berkeley Mission: Conversational Surveys

The Berkeley Mission: Atheist Dialogs

Becoming an Effective Apologist by Forgetting All You Know

Apologetics is an interesting discipline. To be properly equipped, we spend years in study, learning theology, philosophy, worldview, ethic, reason, argumentation, and science.  I continue to read books and articles by both classic authors (Plato, Pascal, Augustine,  Aquinas, etc.) and popular authors today—both  Christian and non-Christian. We take seriously the command that we should study to show ourselves approved (2 Tim.  2:15) and that we should "always be ready to make a defense" (1 Pet. 3:15). But as important as all that preparation is, I think it's equally important to know how to chuck it all and a recent experience I had solidified that concept to me.

A few weeks ago I engaged in a conversation with a man who was seeking to know God. "John" said he was seeking to know the evidence for God's existence.  He told me he "was desperate to believe" that God is real. After a few minutes of conversation, I learned some facts about John: he claims to be agnostic, he's read Bart Ehrman and feels his arguments are strong, he feels the problem of evil argues against the existence of God.  John holds a PhD in Philosophy.

Given that John has an expertise in philosophy, I began to engage him in the arguments for God's existence – how the Bible cannot be considered circular given that it isn't one source but a collection of 66 different books written by many authors over a 1500 year period, how the Kalam shows that everything that has a beginning must have a cause, how moral theory shows that for evil to exist we must have an absolute standard against which to measure what counter with others. However, with each exchange John was becoming more combative and entrenched in his position.

I couldn't figure out at first why he was becoming so argumentative.  He had originally sounded so desperate to find out reasons to know that God is there, but the more I provided, the more he fought me. It was at this point that God opened my eyes to something - my approach was all wrong. John was a trained philosopher since most of that training was from an atheistic perspective, he had been trained to think about philosophy in a particular way.  In arguing with him intellectually, he would merely fall back on what he had learned and react almost as a reflex.  The more I engaged philosophically, the more he was unplugging from weighing the evidence.  Instead he reacting with stock responses that he was taught.

It was at this point that I asked him, “Wait, you came to me and said you want to believe.  What about your desire?” When I switched from head issues to heart issues, his tone and demeanor immediately changed and he basically said "Yes, please pray for me.  I want to believe but my heart and my mind are disconnected."  And this is where true communication began to happen.

You see, many people need to understand reasons why their objections against God are not valid, so we should know those reasons. However, by only engaging people intellectually, you limit the ways God can reach individuals.  I got to pray with this man -an agnostic  - who had all the answers to arguments for the existence of Go d except one, he could feel God’s presence pulling on his heart.

It’s important for the apologist to understand that we must not rely on only our arguments as our sole apologetic.  The real motivation here is to allow people to see the truth – that God exists and that Jesus offers salvation. If we confine ourselves to only head knowledge, we may miss the most powerful evidence for God’s reality we have - the self-attesting witness of the Holy Spirit. When I pushed hard on answering intellectual objections with John, it entrenched him more deeply in his agnosticism.  In holding a PhD, he didn’t want to be shown his extensive years of study have lead to wrong conclusions. But he couldn’t deny that there was a yearning to know God. In forgetting my head knowledge for a bit, I was able to at least talk to him about how he feels and I was able to pray that God would continue to make himself real to John, as I still pray.

Next time you have a witnessing opportunity, think a minute before you answer.  See where the person you’re talking with has needs.  Meet him or her there.  Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is to stop being smart and start feeling.

Belief is About Truth

I recently saw Inception, which was good movie that opens the door to many questions. One of those is the question of changing people's beliefs.  Can we change someone else's beliefs?  Absolutely and we do it all the time in a myriad of ways answers Ophelia Benson. Writing in U.K.'s The Guardian, She states:

"We're offered potential beliefs all the time, in news reports and advertising and conversation. We don't accept them all; we reject some, we doubt others, and even those we accept we may be prepared to change or reject if we learn more. We know perfectly well – or if we don't, we should – that it's not sensible to believe everything that turns up."

But she says there's an even more important question we must ask - how do we test the beliefs we hold?

The important issue isn't how we acquire a belief so much as how we test it, question it, evaluate it. Belief isn't a straight yes or no thing, or at least it shouldn't be. Once we're past childhood (and assuming we've had a decent education), we should know better than to believe whatever we're told.

Benson says that people treat religious beliefs as the exception to this rule.  Maybe some (or possibly most) people do. However, I do agree that it shouldn't be so. Being rational means holding onto true beliefs. And Christianity has always been a faith that challenges both its adherents and its skeptics to put it to the truth test. For examples of this, we can look to the New Testament.

Paul instructed the Thessalonian church to "examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good."(1 Thess 5:21) And in 1 Corinthians 15 - the oldest passage of the New Testament - Paul writes that if Jesus did not rise from the dead (as a real fact of history), then the Christian faith is worthless, we are deceived of God, and to be pitied above everyone else!

Christians shouldn't be afraid to face questions that ask about the truth of the Christian faith. We do a disservice to the believer and the seeker when we say that we shouldn't question faith. This doesn't mean we need to engage in any off the wall objection that someone thought of - people will many times be motivated not by a search for truth but simply want to waste your time. We should be willing to talk with those who have honest questions and show the reasons for Christianity. Christianity is not merely a belief - it is a true belief and we need to get that message out to the church and the world.

Image courtesy Mike Grauer Jr and Licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License.

Vacation Apologetics - Talking Across Borders

On Wednesday after visiting Virginia City, we drove through the Sierra Nevadas to Yosemite, beginning on the Pony Express route, which ran from 1860 to 1861.  It's been pretty interesting to see that without planning we are more or less keeping our trip in chronological order so far - the ancient Puebloans (700 AD), the first settlement of Utah (1840's-1850s), Virginia City and the discovery of gold (1859), and now the Pony Express. Yosemite was established as a national park in 1890, so it fits well.

After spending the day at the park and taking in all the indescribable scenery, we come back to the hotel on Thursday and let the kids swim. During this trip, I've noticed quite a few international tourists coming to the view the American sites. Sitting in the spa, I strike up a conversation with a man visiting California from the Lake Geneva area of Switzerland. Since I'm from Southern California, he asks about the beaches and the water, thinking it's as cold as the beaches in San Francisco.

Speaking the Same Language

Now, when talking with people from Europe, I try to be sensitive to their understanding, so I try to convert distances and temperatures to their metric equivalents before answering. I tell the man, the water temp is about 20 degrees in SoCal (approx 68-70 Fahrenheit). I feel that by converting to Celsius or kilometers, it just makes the conversation more comfortable, just as you would appreciate a person in France letting you know that you have 200 miles until your hotel instead of 320 kilometers.

This lesson is also applicable when sharing our faith. Too many times we lapse into "Christian-speak" and start talking about the need to be born again and the glorious gospel without realizing that the person listening might be loading those words with completely different meanings. For example, to be born again in the Mormon church means that you have been baptized & confirmed into the Mormon church. We can use the words "good news" for the gospel, since that's what it means.  Explaining our terms in language others can grasp will help much in our communication efforts.

Missing Our Heritage

As we continued our conversation, I had noted that the man was from the French-speaking portion of Switzerland.  So I asked him if he was familiar with Francis Schaeffer.  Schaeffer was a prominent Christian thinker, philosopher and apologist who developed a Christian ministry called L'Abri in the foothills near Lake Geneva in the 1960s and 70s. Unfortunately, the man was unfamiliar with him, which surprised me a bit since he lived in the same general area as Schaeffer did.  "What a shame" I thought, "to not even be exposed to such a powerful thinker when he is so close. You're missing out on an important movement in your own backyard."  Then I started wondering how true this is for so many Christians.

Christianity has the greatest intellectual capital of any faith - with thinkers such as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, and Leibnitz; thinkers who are so powerful even the most secular university students of philosophy must spend many hours studying them. We have today's lions of Christianity:  J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga and others who are defending the faith and moving the ball forward against its most vociferous detractors even now and yet most Christians have never heard of any of them! We are just as guilty by ignoring our spiritual heritage!

The New Atheist movement has been making a lot of noise and getting a lot of press.  In reality, the arguments they offer are not new at all - Christians have answered them hundreds of years ago. But the Devil preys on people's ignorance and will repackage an old lie to make it sound new and different. We need to be aware and not neglect the rich heritage we have as Christians. If you are interested in learning more, I recommend starting off with Love Your God with All Your Mind by J.P. Moreland, which is a good primer to the study of Christian thought in general For a more detailed look at the great thinkers of Christianity, you should read A History of Christian Thought by Jonathan Hill. And if you want to see today’s great apologists in person, I recommend checking out this year's EPS Apologetics Conference in Atlanta Georgia.

Vacation Apologetics - Throwing Away Silver While Searching for Gold

When I was a kid, my family visited Virginia City, Nevada and I never forgot it. So, it’s no surprise that I wanted to take my family there as we continued our tour of the Southwest. (If you’ve missed any of the previous blogs about this trip, you can read them all here.) For those of you who may not know, Virginia City is the site of the biggest and richest mining strike in the history of the United States. What became known as the Comstock Lode produced over 300 million dollars worth of precious metals in its 50 year history.

What always stuck with me was the story of how Silver City got its name. After gold was discovered in the Nevada hills, prospectors and miners came looking for riches. As the surface gold ran out and they began mining the hillsides, they would run afoul of a heavy black mineral that would clog their rockers and continue to make it difficult to extract the gold. Cursing the stuff, they wanted nothing more than to rid themselves of it, so when some of the townspeople asked to use the cast-offs from mining to pave their streets the miners quickly obliged. Only after someone took a sample of the stuff to an assey office in California did they find out the stuff they were discarding was almost pure silver! As our tour guide said, "You can bet that those streets were ripped up a whole lot faster than they were laid down!"

I think of that story a lot and the lessons it teaches. How many times in our Bible reading do we look for those familiar stories with easy to recognize morals, and just trudge through the rest of the chapters trying to get to the end? Do we "discard" books like Hosea or Philemon because they’re perhaps a little difficult to comprehend or apply at first? What riches we’re throwing away! If a book is a bit difficult, buy a good commentary or two and set it in your mind that you are going to mine these scriptures for all their worth. Without a little effort on the part of an inquisitive individual who stopped and asked "what exactly are we throwing away?" the Comstock Lode would have never been the valuable success story it was. Dig into these pages – you know, the ones where the gold leaf is still sticking together – and you will find new treasures and a better understanding of God and His ways.