Historical Christ

How Is Ancient Myth-Making Tested? Part 2

2 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 1 we introduced A. N. Sherwin-White’s analysis of myth-making in the ancient near east in his book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Sherwin-White uses the Greek historian Herotodus to test the tempo of myth-making. He concludes:

Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition.

So, what is his evidence?

A revealing example is provided by the story of the murder of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus at the hands of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who became the pattern of all tyrannicides. The true story was that they assassinated Hipparchus in 514 B.C., but the tyranny lasted another four years before the establishment of the Athenian democracy. Popular opinion created a myth to the effect that Harmodius and Aristogeiton destroyed the tyranny and freed Athens. This was current in the mid-fifth century.

The assassination happened in 514 B.C., but by about 450 B.C. there was a story going around that the assassination occurred in 514 B.C. and the tyranny ended in 514 B.C. The second part of the story was false, as the tyranny did not end for four more years. Sherwin-White continues:

Yet Herodotus, writing at that time, and generally taking the popular view of the establishment of the democracy, gives the true version and not the myth about the death of Hipparchus. A generation later the more critical Thucydides was able to uncover a detailed account of exactly what happened on the fatal day in 514 B.C. It would have been natural and easy for Herodotus to give the mythical version. He does not do so because he had a particular interest in a greater figure than Harmodius or Aristogeiton, that is, Cleisthenes, the central person in the establishment of the democracy.

What are we to make of Herodotus and Thucydides accurate re-telling of the events of 514 B.C.?

All this suggests that, however strong the myth-forming tendency, the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail even with a writer like Herodotus, who was naturally predisposed in favour of certain political myths, and whose ethical and literary interests were stronger than his critical faculty. The Thucydidean version is a salutary warning that even a century after a major event it is possible in a relatively small or closed community for a determined inquirer to establish a remarkably detailed account of a major event, by inquiry within the inner circle of the descendants of those concerned with the event itself.

How can we relate this to the Gospel authors?

Not that one imagines that the authors of the Gospels set to work precisely like either Herodotus or Thucydides. But it can be maintained that those who had a passionate interest in the story of Christ, even if their interest in events was parabolical and didactic rather than historical, would not be led by that very fact to pervert and utterly destroy the historical kernel of their material. It can also be suggested that it would be no harder for the Disciples and their immediate successors to uncover detailed narratives of the actions and sayings of Christ within their closed community, than it was for Herodotus and Thucydides to establish the story of the great events of 520-480 B.C.

Notice that Sherwin-White’s conclusion is extremely cautious. He is not saying that it can be shown that every event recorded in the Gospels can be historically corroborated. He is saying, however, that the authors of the Gospels can reasonably be expected to get the historical kernels of Jesus’s life correct.

In my view, since the resurrection is reported in all the Gospels, as well as other books in the New Testament, it is quite fair to say that the resurrection is part of the historical kernel that would not be distorted. If the resurrection is not part of the historical kernel, then nothing is. Therefore, to say that the resurrection narratives are mythical flies directly in the face of Sherwin-White’s analysis.

Historical Christ

How Is Ancient Myth-Making Tested? Part 1

3 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

The stories about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, as reported in the 27 New Testament documents, were all written down within 70 years of Jesus’s death. In fact, most of the documents were written within 50 years of his death. Given that average life expectancy in first century Palestine was around 30 years, this means that, conservatively, most of these documents were written within two generations of Jesus’s death.

Many skeptics of Christianity claim that even 50 years is enough time for myths and legends to completely obscure the central facts around the life of Jesus. Skepticism runs the gamut from “Jesus never existed” to “we know only a few trivial facts about Jesus and nothing more.”

Can we test the rate of myth-making in the ancient near east? Maybe we can. The famous historian A. N. Sherwin-White addressed the issue of whether the central facts around a historical event could be obscured by myth-making in his book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Sherwin-White identifies the work of ancient Greek historian Herodotus as a means to test myth-making. Why Herotodus? Sherwin-White explains:

In his history, written in mid-fifth century B.C., we have a fund of comparable material in the tales of the period of the Persian Wars and the preceding generation. These are retold by Herodotus from forty to seventy years later, after they had been remodeled by at least one generation of oral transmission.

Is if fair to compare Herotodus to the Gospel writers?

The parallel with the authors of the Gospels is by no means so far-fetched as it might seem. Both regard their material with enthusiasm rather than detached criticism. Both are the first to produce a written narrative of great events which they regard as a mighty saga, national or ecclesiastical and esoterical as the case may be. For both their story is the vehicle of a moral or a religious idea which shapes the narrative.

Can modern historians extract accurate historical facts from Herotodus?

The material of Herodotus presents no intractable difficulty to a critical historian. The material has not been transformed out of all recognition under the influence of moral and patriotic fervour, in a period of time as long, if not longer, than can be allowed for the gestation of the form-myths of the synoptic gospels.

How, then, can we use Herotodus to test the tempo of myth-making? We’ll cover that in part 2.

Gay Marriage

Why Are French Citizens Protesting Same-Sex Marriage?

11 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Several weeks ago some 800,000 French citizens took to the streets to protest the legalization of same-sex marriage. How can this be? Aren’t the French emblematic of secular, liberal, European values?

Why are so many of the French opposing same-sex marriage? According to Jim Daly, in his article which describes the protests, the French are arguing that same-sex marriage discriminates against children. Daly reports that the homosexual mayor of Paris has been repeating the popular mantra: “The rights of children trump the right to children.”

Daly adds:

France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, and Louis-Georges Barret, Vice President of the Christian Democratic Party, have suggested that nobody has a right to children. If there was such a right, they argue, it would mean reclassifying children as objects, making them mere pawns.

Daly notes that Jean-Dominique Bunel, a French filmmaker, also opposes legislation to legalize same-sex marriage. Bunel, who was raised by two lesbians, deeply missed the presence of a father. Here are his comments:

I oppose this bill because in the name of a fight against inequalities and discrimination, we would refuse a child one of its most sacred rights, upon which a universal, millennia-old tradition rests, that of being raised by a father and a mother. You see, two rights collide: the right to a child for gays, and the right of a child to a mother and father. The international convention on the rights of the child stipulates in effect that “the highest interest of the child should be a primary consideration” (Article 3, section 1).

It is fascinating to realize that this very same argument has been repeatedly offered by conservative same-sex marriage opponents in the US. At last, liberals and conservatives can both rally around the common cause of children’s rights. Every child has the right to be raised by a father and a mother. Same-sex marriages guarantee that either a mother or a father will be absent in the home. Surely this is unjust.

Religion, Science and God

Is Science Going to End Religion?

2 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common refrain among secularists is that as science advances, the need for religion continues to diminish, and eventually the need will disappear altogether. After all, the argument goes, the only reason religion exists is to answer questions for which science has yet to provide answers. Once all those questions are answered by science, religion serves no useful purpose.

The problem with this argument is that religion answers questions that science can not, in principle, ever answer. This point was brought home to me again as I was reading, of all things, a best-selling business management book called The Future of Management. The authors, Bill Breen and Gary Hamel, make this case persuasively. They begin their argument by noting that

for more than 300 years, commentators have been predicting the end of religious faith. From Auguste Comte to Richard Dawkins, they have argued that faith must inevitably crumble as scientific certitude grows. Yet faith in a divine presence continues to be one of humanity’s great common denominators. While some societies are more overtly religious than others, the majority of human beings share a belief in the transcendental.

There is no doubt about that last point. I would even say the vast majority of human beings that have ever lived shared a belief in the transcendental. So what is the mistake that Comte and Dawkins are making?

The belief that science will one day displace faith is based on a mistaken assumption that religious belief is principally a set of mystical and misguided conjectures about how the natural world works. As the sunlight of scientific discovery breaks through the black night of ignorance, so the thinking goes, these primitive superstitions will evaporate like the dew beneath the summer sun.

If religion is not primarily about explaining the laws of nature, what is it primarily about?

Religious faith is not chiefly concerned with the what, how, and when of natural phenomena. Rather, it is concerned with the why of existence. And while a few scientists may argue that the question of “why” is unanswerable and therefore not worth pursuing, they haven’t yet convinced the rest of humanity to suspend its search for significance.

Several atheists have made that point on the blog. They say that the “why” questions are uninteresting or are never going to be answered, so why worry about them? But as Breen and Hamel explain, the “rest of humanity” does care about these answers, and religion attempts to provide them. As Breen and Hamel explain, religion’s message is that

you are more than protoplasm, more than artfully yet unintentionally arranged stardust. There is a purpose to your existence. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, two sociologists who’ve studied the human foundations of faith, put it simply: “… religious explanations specify the fundamental meaning of life: how we got here and where we are going (if anywhere).” In other words, they provide answers to the eternal question of “why?”

Has religion proved successful? Yes it has.

History provides countless examples of individuals whose quiet, life-affirming faith elicited virtue, spurred charity, and restored broken lives. Scholars have repeatedly found that religious faith enhances self-esteem, improves physical health, and enlarges the capacity of individuals to cope with the traumas of life. Faith has something to teach us about resilience—not because faith itself has survived, but because faith, to the extent it provides individuals with a sense of meaning, helps make people more resilient. . . . Without a narrative that creates drama and meaning, we are listless and rudderless.

I would go on to add that Christianity, specifically, has done more to give meaning to people’s lives than any other religion. It is a force for good unparalleled in the history of the world. As great as science is, it is not even worthy to hold Christianity’s sandals.

Jesus Christ, Religion

Who Can We Worship?

1 Comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In every human institution, there are individuals who are at the top because of their athleticism, charisma, intelligence, personality, or physical appearance. The people who aren’t at the top often look up to those leaders, admire them, and in some cases, worship them.

This phenomena takes place regardless of the particular kind of institution, although some institutions are more prone to instill worship than others. Cults are particularly notorious for having charismatic leaders who are worshiped by the membership. Political parties also seem to regularly spawn worship of their leaders.

Even if there is not outright worship of a leader, followers often excuse or rationalize the bad behavior of their leadership. They argue that just because so and so verbally assaults his co-workers, cheats on his wife, or lies about his professional credentials, we should still respect and admire him. We simply look the other way when our leaders sin.

I want to argue that if you find yourself regularly excusing the immoral actions of your leader, you are doing yourself and your organization a grave disservice.

This point hit home to me recently when I was reading an open letter written by mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Ryan Hall. In this letter, Hall is calling out his friends in the MMA world to stop the hero worship of the MMA fighters and instructors who are at the top of the profession. In these words from the heart, Hall reminds each of us what happens when we keep issuing our leaders a pass:

I understand now that poor character is poor character and there is never any reason to support it, no matter what carrot that person dangles in front of you or threat that person holds over your head. If an individual is willing to blur or even outright ignore the rules of right and wrong, of human decency, on any level, they are highly likely to do the same in other aspects of their life whether I have witnessed them do so yet or not. If they have mistreated others, it’s only a matter of time before my number is called.

What does this have to do with Christianity, you might ask. Well, here it is. Christianity is the only religion, the only major institution, where worship is only directed toward the morally perfect God-Man, Jesus Christ. We do not worship fallible, morally flawed, human beings who let us down time after time.

Jesus’s character is unmatched by any other human, his love for us is unequaled, and his holiness is unsurpassed. As Christians, we never, ever have to worry about our leader embarrassing us. No other human institution on the planet can claim that.

Who can we worship? Jesus the Messiah.

Atheism, Religion

Can Secularists Survive Without Christianity?

10 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Most secularists would laugh at this question, but not one. I ran across an article written a few years ago (thanks to the link provided by J. Warner Wallace) by an atheist,  John D. Steinrucken, that goes beyond acknowledging the debt secularists owes Christianity. He actually castigates those secularists who attack Christianity as irresponsible.

Steinrucken opens the article with this grenade:

Succinctly put: Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

How so? Steinrucken goes on to make his case:

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

Steinrucken challenges secularists to provide a transcendent moral code for our society:

Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large — a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.

Steinrucken admits that most men need God and reminds us that

so many of those who have forsaken the God of their fathers (it has been fashionable to do so) are now reaching for meaning in eastern exotica, new-age mumbo-jumbo, and other attempts to fill the spiritual hole.

He warns of the consequences of rejecting the Christian heritage of the West:

To the extent that Western elites distance themselves from their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage in favor of secular constructs, and as they give deference to a multicultural acceptance that all beliefs are of equal validity, they lose their will to defend against a determined attack from another culture, such as from militant Islam. For having destroyed the ancient faith of their people, they will have found themselves with nothing to defend.

What is Steinrucken’s advice to the atheist elites?

If the elitists of our Western civilization want to survive, then it is incumbent upon them to see to the preservation of the hoary, time-honored faith of the great majority of the people. This means that our elitists should see that their most valued vested interest is the preservation within our culture of Christianity and Judaism.

Steinrucken has recognized what Christians have been pointing out for centuries to those secularists who live amongst us: secularism is parasitic of the  Christian worldview. It incessantly borrows intellectual and moral capital from Christianity without ever admitting it is doing so. At least one secularist finally admits it. Hopefully the rest will come around.

Existence of God, Mormonism, Philosophy, Theology

Why Is the Polytheism of Mormonism False?

13 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the teachings of Mormonism is that God the Father is only one among a multitude of gods. While God the Father is creator and ruler of our world, there are other worlds where other Gods are creators, worlds with which our God the Father has nothing to do. In plain language, this belief is polytheism, or the belief that there exist multiple gods, as opposed to monotheism, which asserts that only one God exists.

So, why is polytheism false and monotheism true? First, Mormons claim to revere the Christian Bible, and the Bible clearly and unequivocally proclaims monotheism. Here is a sampling of passages to illustrate the point:

“In the beginning God [not gods] created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4).

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).

“I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6).

“I am the LORD, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:18).

“ ‘The most important [command],’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” ’ ” (Mark 12:29).

“We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one” (1 Cor. 8:4).

“[There is] one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:6).

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).

Theologian Norman Geisler sums up: “The text could scarcely be clearer: There is one and only one God, as opposed to more than one. The oneness of the Godhead is one of the most fundamental teachings of Scripture. A denial of this truth is a violation of the first commandment.”

Scripture, however, is not the only problem for polytheism. Philosophers and theologians have developed, over the centuries, numerous versions of cosmological arguments that demonstrate, from the existence of finite, contingent beings, the necessary existence of a First Cause of everything. The arguments all lead to a First Cause who necessarily exists, who is infinite (limitless) in being, and who is perfect (not lacking any perfection). This First Cause is God.

Why can’t there be more than one First Cause, more than one infinite and perfect being? First, there cannot be two or more infinite beings. Two or more infinite beings entails the existence of more than an infinite, which is absurd. There cannot be more than an infinite; there cannot be more than the most.

Another way to look at this is that for there to be two beings, there must be a difference between the two of them, but two infinite First Causes would be identical. Because they would be identical, there would actually only be one infinite First Cause, not two.

Second, there cannot be two perfect beings. If there were two perfect beings, then they would have to differ in some way, or else they would be the same. In order to differ, one of them would have to possess some perfection that the other lacked. As Geisler explains, “The one that lacked some perfection would not be absolutely perfect; therefore, there can be only one Being who is absolutely perfect.”

It is clear that both from Scripture and from philosophy, polytheism is false. If any of the cosmological arguments work, they all conclude that an infinite and perfect First Cause exists. There can only be one infinite and perfect First Cause, and that is who Christians call God.

If Mormons want to deny that their God the Father is the First Cause of the universe, deny that he is infinite, and deny that he is perfect, then, in effect, they have abandoned a God that is worthy of worship. Their God is finite and imperfect – hardly a God worth revering.

Philosophy, Science and God

Are Scientists Superhuman?

2 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Those who identify “good science” with the current mainstream practitioners of institutional science seem to think so. Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, sees serious problems with the adulation of scientists in his essay, “The Folly of Scientism.” Hughes points to the core issue with this line of thinking:

The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett explicitly state that most human institutions, including “governments, political parties, churches, firms, NGOs, ethnic associations, families…are hardly epistemically reliable at all.” However, “our grounding assumption is that the specific institutional processes of science have inductively established peculiar epistemic reliability.”

Is this correct, that scientific institutions have escaped the weaknesses of humankind that plague other human institutions? Hughes strongly disagrees:

This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.

Hughes moves on to accuse philosophers who have indulged in scientist worship:

It is something approaching this adulation that seems to underlie the abdication of the philosophers and the rise of the scientists as the authorities of our age on all intellectual questions. Reading the work of Quine, Rudolf Carnap, and other philosophers of the positivist tradition, as well as their more recent successors, one is struck by the aura of hero-worship accorded to science and scientists.

In spite of their idealization of science, the philosophers of this school show surprisingly little interest in science itself — that is, in the results of scientific inquiry and their potential philosophical implications. As a biologist, I must admit to finding Quine’s constant invocation of “nerve-endings” as an all-purpose explanation of human behavior to be embarrassingly simplistic. Especially given Quine’s intellectual commitment to behaviorism, it is surprising yet characteristic that he had little apparent interest in the actual mechanisms by which the nervous system functions.

Does Hughes not believe that the scientific method is reliable? Is he anti-science? Not at all. Read on.

Ross, Ladyman, and Spurrett may be right to assume that science possesses a “peculiar epistemic reliability” that is lacking in other forms of inquiry. But they have taken the strange step of identifying that reliability with the institutions and practitioners of science, rather than with any particular rational, empirical, or methodological criterion that scientists are bound (but often fail) to uphold.

Thus a (largely justifiable) admiration for the work of scientists has led to a peculiar, unjustified role for scientists themselves — so that, increasingly, what is believed by scientists and the public to be “scientific” is simply any claim that is upheld by many scientists, or that is based on language and ideas that sound sufficiently similar to scientific theories.

Hughes is a keen observer of our current culture. Listen to what he is saying: scientists have become the new priests of our time. Whatever comes out of their mouths, we swallow without question. Most of us don’t really understand what they are saying, or whether what they are saying makes any sense. We just parrot what we hear, because, after all, they are scientists, and they must be right.

Philosophy, Science and God

Is Science Defined By What Scientists Do?

5 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Frustrated by an inability to rule out certain “unscientific” ideas (e.g., intelligent design) by using epistemological criteria, some scientists and philosophers simply make the claim that science is what scientists do. Or put another way, science is defined by the institutions that practice science.

Professor of biology Austin L. Hughes, however, believes this way of defining science is fraught with problems. In his essay, “The Folly of Scientism,” he argues the following:

By this criterion, we would differentiate good science from bad science simply by asking which proposals agencies like the National Science Foundation deem worthy of funding, or which papers peer-review committees deem worthy of publication.

So what is the harm in this approach to defining science? Hughes explains:

The problems with this definition of science are myriad. First, it is essentially circular: science simply is what scientists do.

Second, the high confidence in funding and peer-review panels should seem misplaced to anyone who has served on these panels and witnessed the extent to which preconceived notions, personal vendettas, and the like can torpedo even the best proposals. Moreover, simplistically defining science by its institutions is complicated by the ample history of scientific institutions that have been notoriously unreliable.

Can Hughes provide an example of an unreliable scientific institution?

Consider the decades during which Soviet biology was dominated by the ideologically motivated theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics as inconsistent with Marxism and insisted that acquired characteristics could be inherited. An observer who distinguishes good science from bad science “by reference to institutional factors” alone would have difficulty seeing the difference between the unproductive and corrupt genetics in the Soviet Union and the fruitful research of Watson and Crick in 1950s Cambridge.

Can we be certain that there are not sub-disciplines of science in which even today most scientists accept without question theories that will in the future be shown to be as preposterous as Lysenkoism? Many working scientists can surely think of at least one candidate — that is, a theory widely accepted in their field that is almost certainly false, even preposterous.

Yes, Soviet biology was screwed up for a while, but the beauty of science is that it is self-correcting, right? Scientists may get something wrong for a few years, but eventually they get it right, don’t they? Hughes anticipates this objection:

Confronted with such examples, defenders of the institutional approach will often point to the supposedly self-correcting nature of science. Ladyman, Ross, and Spurrett assert that “although scientific progress is far from smooth and linear, it never simply oscillates or goes backwards. Every scientific development influences future science, and it never repeats itself.”

Alas, in the thirty or so years I have been watching, I have observed quite a few scientific sub-fields (such as behavioral ecology) oscillating happily and showing every sign of continuing to do so for the foreseeable future. The history of science provides examples of the eventual discarding of erroneous theories. But we should not be overly confident that such self-correction will inevitably occur, nor that the institutional mechanisms of science will be so robust as to preclude the occurrence of long dark ages in which false theories hold sway.

Hughes is dead on target. I might add that origin of life research also seems to have gone nowhere fast over the last hundred years. Scientists still have no natural explanation for how first life appeared on earth. The dark ages persist for origin of life researchers. As grand as science is, it still has spectacular failures, like any other human undertaking. As long as the institutions of science include human beings, there will continue to be misadventures.

Jesus Christ, Theology

Has God Dealt Justly with the Human Race? Part 3

Leave a comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Picking up from part 2, we continue the narrative of God’s dealings with mankind. Recall that God has sent messengers which his people have killed. What will he do next?

Finally, God says to himself, “They just don’t want to hear from these messengers, so I guess I will go myself.” In the supreme act of condescension, The Creator clothes himself in the flesh of the creature in the form of the eternal Son of God, to try to call the people back to him.

The son arrives on the scene and proceeds to call his people back to him. He begs them to renounce their wicked ways. He calls on them, saying “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God’s messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me.”

This son, who is God incarnate, heals the people and even raises some from the dead. He is sinless, he does not lie, he does not gossip. Never a wicked thought remains in his mind. He is perfect in his humanity. He loves like nobody has ever loved. The people watch him and, eventually, they decide what to do about him.

Their decision: assassination! Before they kill him, they hold a farcical trial where nobody is allowed to defend him. Not only do they kill this perfect son of God, but they ensure that he suffers the fate of a common criminal in one of the most excruciatingly painful means of death that men have ever invented. They nail him to a tree and let him suffocate to death over several hours.

Has God failed yet again to reach his people? Is there no hope for mankind? They have betrayed him, broken his covenants, killed his messengers, and now killed his very son.

But in an incredible act that bespeaks his unparalleled mercy and grace, God, seeing his innocent son murdered, decides that he can still be reunited with his creatures through the death of his son. All that they must do is trust his son as their savior, and he will still receive them into his kingdom. They can still have eternal life if they will only place their faith in his son.

Now I ask you, why should God do this for a rebellious and treasonous race of creatures who have rejected him, tortured and murdered his prophets, and ultimately nailed up his son who was sent to save them? Under what obligation is he? Put yourself in his place. You are dealing with a people who have cursed you, mocked you from the first.

How can anyone say that God is unjust, that he hasn’t provided enough ways to heaven? Given what has happened, why has God provided any way at all? It is unbelievably callous to ask God to provide yet another way. Should he should provide more sons for us to slaughter. Is one savior not enough? Should more innocent “sons of God” be murdered for us? No sane person can answer “yes.”

To question God’s justice is insulting and foolish. Now that you know the whole story, you should never doubt the fairness of God the Father asking us to trust Jesus Christ. Who can ask for more grace? Who can ask for more mercy?

A Christian Apologetics Blog