SPROUL: There’s a real sense, I think, that every Christian is a missionary. If we go back to the New Testament, and we see in the book of Acts, that when persecution arose in Jerusalem we read that all of the Christians were scattered except the apostles.
And those who were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Gospel. That is the way the Christian church was born—not simply with the ministry of the clergy or the apostles or even of the deacons but it was the rank and file Christians that took the Gospel wherever they went in the ancient world.
But in our church today we make a distinction, don’t we, between a professional missionary and a layman who is not a missionary? But in Biblical categories every Christian, in a sense, is a missionary, because every Christian is called to participate in the mission that Christ has given to the church.
Well when I look at what we do with missionaries before we send them into a foreign country what do we have them do? We don’t just select a missionary, put them on an airplane, have them arrive in Timbuktu or someplace like that and say “ok, do your thing.”
Before a missionary can go to the foreign field that the person has to undergo in-depth study of the culture to which they are going. They have to learn the language; they have to learn the customs; they have to be able
To understand the way people think and the way they behave in the land to which they are sent as missionaries. Now let’s assume that you are missionaries to the United States. What’s your preparation? It’s not enough simply to know the Gospel, to know the content of Scriptures, the subject
Matter that you want to communicate and bear witness to your culture. It is also very important that you understand the culture in which you are acting out your role as a missionary. So that’s the purpose of this series of lectures.
It’s to try to get a handle on the culture as it now presents itself to us as Christians. I think it would be a dreadful mistake to assume that the American culture is predominantly a Christian culture. Certainly we live in a nation that has had an enormous influence from the church and
From Judeo-Christian value systems. It’s not that our country is pagan. Our country has been strongly influenced by Christianity. Some have said that we have been influenced in the degree that people are influenced when they receive a shot of inoculation to prevent a disease that you put a minor dose of the
Disease in the inoculation so that they have just enough of it to be immune to the real thing. And some have maintained that that’s what has happened here in the American culture, that we’ve had just enough Christianity impacting our society as to make us immune from the real thing.
There’s a sense, as I said, in which our nation is not pagan. Paganism is a pre-Christian situation. It’s a situation that exists where the Gospel and the light of the Gospel has never been manifest in a particular environment, but that’s not true about America.
Ours is what I call a “secular” environment, a “secular” society. And the secularization of the American culture is a post-Christian phenomenon, not a pre-Christian—”pre-Christian” is pagan; “post-Christian” is secularized. Now, I think it’s also important for us to understand that our culture is, and has been, a melting pot.
We don’t live in a culture that is monolithic. What is monolithic? A monolithic culture is a culture where only one definable worldview or value system is operating, and there’s kind of a uniformity as you find in some nations.
You go, for example, into Red China and you see a uniform system of thought that everybody is supposed to embrace—it’s taught in the schools, it’s advertised in posters, and even the uniformity comes down to literal uniforms. People dress in the same way as there is this enforced conformity, but that’s not been the
American ideal. The American ideal has been—we are a melting pot, so that there are all kinds of different beliefs and philosophies competing for acceptance within our society and within our culture. And if a Christian is going to be able to communicate to this culture, he has to be
Aware at least of the dominant systems that are operating within our culture. As I said, we’re not monolithic but the term that we use is pluralistic, and we’ll have a separate study, a separate lecture, just on pluralism. But the various schools of thought that are most dominant, I believe, in our culture today
Include the ones that I’m about to put up here on the blackboard, and we’re going to look at each one of those individually in the lectures to come. First of all, there is the influence of what we call humanism.
As I say, we will a separate lecture defining the content and the perspective of humanism. Secondly, there is the influence of existentialism. How many of you think that you could give a good definition of existentialism? How many of you have never heard the word existentialism? All right, just a couple.
Most of you have at least heard the term existentialism, but it’s one of those terms that we hear bandied about in the culture but very few people are able to give concrete definition—we will have a separate lecture on existentialism.
A third “ism” that has had a tremendous impact on our culture that most laymen have never heard of is the “ism” called positivism. How many of you have never heard of positivism? See, there’s some more here, more than have never heard of existentialism.
And also, there’s the influence of a very ancient perspective or philosophy that we call hedonism. How many of you have never heard of hedonism? How many of you have heard of hedonism? You have … You have heard of that. Ok, all right.
And then there is, as I said, pluralism and relativism … And there’s one other “ism” that I’m going to incorporate up above with positivism which we call pragmatism, which is a distinctly American life and worldview. All right, let’s see how many I have there—five—humanism, existentialism, positivism, pragmatism, hedonism,
And pluralism and its corollary relativism. All right, those are going to be the systems of thought or philosophical perspectives that we will be examining in this brief course. But what I’m looking for today is this: is there an overarching, generic, holistic philosophy
Or value system that would in some sense incorporate all of these? It’s been said that no society can survive, no civilization can function without some unifying philosophical perspective. Even if you have all different kinds of views competing, there must be some kind of overarching
Atmosphere or environment that makes it possible even for these to coexist in a given society. And when the historians and the philosophers seek the common term, the common basic generic lowest common denominator that incorporates features of all of these, usually the term
That we hear is the term secularism, and that’s what I want to look at in the time that we have left today. Let me do my handiwork here with the eraser and we’ll start again with this word: secularism.
Obviously, when we see that word, we see that we have a root and a suffix. And my favorite method of teaching is to do word studies and break these concepts down into its constituent parts so that we can get a hold of them. There’s the word “secular,” and then there’s the suffix.
Now let’s start at the back and work our way forward. Anytime we see this three-letter suffix, “ism,” what do we see? What do we find? What’s it saying? What’s it do to the word? You’re allowed to answer my question, you know. What does it do? What does “ism” do to a word?
AUDIENCE: It makes it a state of being. SPROUL: It makes it a state of being. Little bit more than that. AUDIENCE: A philosophy. SPROUL: A philosophy, a system of thought. What we call a “veltunchung,” a way of looking at the world, a view of the world, a value system.
It’s one thing—how many of you believe in humans? And think that being human is a good thing? It’s one thing to be human; it’s another thing to be a humanist—that is one who embraces humanism. We all exist, but we’re not all existentialists, are we?
You put that “ism”, existentialism, on the end of the root for existence and you’re talking now about a philosophical system, a whole way of looking at things. You want to be practical, but does that make you a pragmatist? Of course not.
All right, so we see that the suffix “ism” takes the root and elevates it to the level of a philosophical system. Now the word “secular” is a perfectly good and positive word in the Christian’s vocabulary. Historically the church has always had a good view of that which was regarded as being secular.
I’m thinking in terms of the whole of the history of the church. In the Middle Ages, for example, men were ordained to a specific role in the priesthood that was called the secular priesthood, because those were men who had offices that took them
Out of the arena, or the institution, of the church to minister out in the world where they were specific needs that needed the healing touch of the church, or the priestly mission of the church. There’s a sense in which I was ordained as a secular clergyman, because I was ordained
To the teaching ministry, not to an ecclesiastical office within a local congregation. So I was commissioned to go to the university and to be a teacher out in the world, if you will, in the secular world that can be distinguished to some degree by that sphere that we’ve set
Apart and called the church, or the sacred realm. But so often in Christians’ minds the distinction between sacred and secular is the distinction between the good and the bad, but that’s not the way it was meant to be in the development of church history. It was simply a different sphere of operation. Ok?
Now the word secular has its origins and its roots in the Latin, in the Latin language. It comes from the Latin word “saeculum,” which means—Do we have any Latin scholars in here? What does the Latin word “saeculum” mean? What’s its translation?—It means the word “saeculum” means in the original Latin “world.” Ok?
I said a secular priest is one who ministers in the world. What does the Latin word “mundus” mean? Anybody know? “World.” Remember Athanasius? St. Athanasius, what was on his tombstone? “Athanasius Contra Mundum”—Athanasius against what? The world. All right, so that “mundus” also means world.
Well both words mean the same thing in the original Latin, what was the difference? Well, the people in the ancient world understood that as human beings they lived in time and in space. We still talk that way, don’t we?
That our life is spatial; it’s geographical; there is a certain “whereness” to my life. I live here. I am here; I’m not somewhere else. And there is also a time frame in which I live. Jesus talked about this place or this generation—this age. Ok? The present age.
So in the Latin the word for this world, thinking in terms of time is “saeculum,” and the word for this world in terms of space is “mundus.” Now what in the world, what in the “mundus” or the “saeculum” does this have to do with our culture?
Well “saeculum” or the secular had to do literally with this time, this world in the present time. The secular realm is this world in this world, in the present time. Now what happens to the word secular when you add the “ism”?
The basic overarching theme of secularism is this: That all of reality, all of life, every human value, every human activity must be understood in light of and judged by the value or the norm of this present time. Where’s the point of conflict between secularism and Christianity? Can you see it coming?
The New Testament Scriptures, the Biblical worldview is always concerned about long-range considerations. The Bible teaches us that we were created for eternity that the heart of the New Testament message is that Christ has come to give us life, a life that wells up into what?—eternal life.
And that at the very beginning of our understanding of the world we read in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning,” what? “God created the heavens and the earth.” So that if we look at the earth and we see that it has a beginning in space and time,
But before there is even a world, if I can use the term “before,” there is One who transcends the world; One who stands above the world; One is outside of the restrictions of this space and time order that we call the world—namely, God.
“In the beginning God …” And we as part of the most core dimension of the Christian faith, we believe in a transcendent God—a God out there, a God who is beyond the confines of this planet. A God who is transcendent and a God who is what?—eternal, and that all judgments that
God makes, all things that He does are done from the perspective of what?—of the eternal. Now in philosophy we call that that God considers everything “subspecies aeternitatis.” Now that’s just a fancy Latin phrase for a very simple idea that means that God considers
Everything under, “sub” means under, under the species or the “auspices,” the auspices, or from the perspective of the eternal. In fact, the admonition and the rebuke that Christ brings to this world is that men are only thinking short term; they’re thinking in terms of the now and only the now instead
Of the future consequences of their behavior—long term. And Jesus says that He comes from above; He descends from the eternal realm. And He calls the Christian to live his life in light of eternity, and that his values are to be measured by transcendent norms of eternal significance.
I have a column that you know of in “Tabletalk,” our magazine, and what’s the byline, what’s the title of the column? “Right Now Counts…” what? “Forever.” Why do I choose that byline? Just to be cute? I did it because I said if there’s only one message that I can give to my generation,
And I can say the same message over and over and over again until people begin to think about it, it’s that. That’s the one voice that I want to scream from the streets—right now counts forever. What you do now has eternal significance.
And I did that consciously aware of the fact that we are being pressed upon by every side from the philosophy of the secularist who says, bottom line, right now counts for what?—right now. There is no eternity; there is no eternal perspective.
You’ve heard it said a jillion times “there are no absolutes;” there are no abiding principles by which human life is to be judged, is to be embraced, is to be evaluated. All reality is restricted or limited to the now. We see it in different phraseology in theology.
We’ve seen an attempt in twentieth century theology to produce a secularized gospel. Remember the Death of God movement? One of the most important books that came out of the Death of God movement by Dr. Van Buren was called the “Secular Meaning of the Gospel,” in which he talked in terms of synthesizing
Classical Christianity with the philosophy of secularism. But how can you do that without declaring the death of God? And you see the death of God, in the terms of the loss of transcendence, the loss of the eternal, means for you the death of man—because it means that history has no transcendent
Goal, no eternal purpose, that the meaning of your life is summed up in the words on the tombstone—born 1925; died 1985—that’s it. You have a terminal point, a beginning and an ending with no ultimate significance. This is called the theology or the philosophy of the “hic et nunc”—”the here and the now.”
Do you have to go to the library and get a dusty tome of philosophy, a heavy weighty treatise on moral philosophy to be exposed to these ideas? Where else do you see it? AUDIENCE: The media’s full of it. SPROUL: The media is full of it.
You know my favorite illustration of it is the beer advertisement: “You only go around life once, so do it with gusto.” And you see the guy out in the sailboat and this wind is blowing his hair and the salt spray is splashing at his face, and he’s having a fantastic time right now.
Ok? Pepsi calls it what? “The now generation.” Do it now. Do it now, because the message that comes through—you better get it now, because there is no tomorrow ultimately. Now we’re going to consider hedonism later, but one of the themes of the Epicureans who
Were hedonists in antiquity, one of … the bottom line of their philosophy was, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die.” Contrast that with Jesus. “Lay up treasures in heaven.” Think in terms of eternity, long-range implications.
Do you see this touches us most heavily, not simply in how we handle our bank accounts or how we speculate philosophically, but it touches us at the level of how we invest our lives, because life is an investment?
And the question that modern man has to answer is he going to invest his life for short-term benefits or for long-term gain? And every time you are faced with a moral decision, the temptation to do something now that may have harmful after effects, you are caught up in the tension and the conflict
Between two worldviews right now. Do you live for the present? Or do we live for eternity? Because, again, at the core of our Biblical understanding of life and of our moral behavior is that there are actions and that every action not only has a cause but it also has what?—a
Result or a consequence. And the consequence takes us to tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. What did Shakespeare say? “Creeps at its petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.” But for the Christian there is no last syllable of recorded time.
Our lives are forever, but beyond the secular or the “saeculum” there is the eternal. And that’s what the Christian faith is all about. Why should a person be worried about salvation in terms of personal redemption if there is no eternal dimension? What is the mission of the church if secularism is correct?
Why should we be concerned about redemption of individuals? All we can really do—and churches get into this—all we can really do, is minimize pain and suffering for a season. We can never really offer ultimate answers to the human predicament, because for the
Secularist there is no ultimate answer because there is no ultimate realm. This side of eternity is the exclusive sphere of human activity. It’s not by accident, as we will see, that for the most part those who buy into secularism, who are thinking people, ultimately embrace a philosophy of despair.
And that despair, it’ll manifest itself in a host of ways—escapism, through drugs, alcohol, and other forms of behavior to dull the senses from the message that is being proclaimed and being screamed from every corner of our culture—There is no tomorrow ultimately.
It is a philosophy of despair, and it is right now competing for men’s minds in the United States of America. What we’re going to look at in the weeks to come are the constituent elements that make up secularism—humanism, you’ve heard of secular humanism, there’s also secularistic
Existentialism, positivism, and those different philosophies may be in the collision course with each other but they all embrace one common point; namely, the denial of the transcendent and of the eternal. Look for it in your culture. Be aware of it when you see it.
For we need to understand the world in which we live.
– I think gods in Buddhist fart. – I’m Sara, and I am 10 years old. – I’m four and I’m Tobie. – By law, I am Jewish, but I don’t know if I necessarily believe in it. – I believe in Buddhism. – I believe in God.
– For me, it’s a really big maybe. Part of me believes in God a lot, and part of me definitely doesn’t. Because maybe there is someone upstairs, making great things happen and sprinkling magic on the world. And then you see such bad stuff happen and you see kids get cancer,
You doubt or you question God. – We have this thing called Guanyin, it’s kind of like God, but it’s like Chinese. – In my religion, we call him Allah. – He helps people. – God is love. – I think God has a sweet, soft voice.
– I think he would sound like, “Hi” (laughs). – I think since he’s lived so long, it’s kind of washed out, “I should make “good things happen to the world.” This sounds so creepy, like a horror movie. – I think it sounds loud. He sounds like really kind, I think. “Well hello” (laughs).
– You can see him on the ground on his legs and on his feet. – I think God is in the sky. – I pray to the Guanyin to bring us good luck and support my family. – Usually what I wish for, I’d like to spend time with my mom all day.
– I wanna have confidence in God, if they control all of us, I wanna have confidence that I don’t need to pray and tell them to do it. I think they should make great things happen and really prevent the really bad, terrible things.
– One time I went outside and I prayed to God so I could have flowers. – If there is a God, what is it? What do they look like? – God looks like a person. – Maybe God’s a woman or maybe God doesn’t identify as a gender. – They’re usually gold or white.
– I think God will have green eyes. – Why do we always think of him wearing a hoodie? – I’m drawing him clothes, I don’t really know if he has clothes because I can’t draw him naked. – He’s wearing his masculine God t-shirt. Gotta put that God on there.
– Put some jewelry on his head. – He’s in his hoodie so we’re not gonna be able to see his hair, guys. I don’t think he has hair, I think it’s hard to keep having hair if you’ve been alive for this many millions of years. He’s kinda self-conscious about not having hair.
– This one’s shaped like a monkey. – I just would hope that he would look like a regular person. – God is a big head on legs (laughs). – His hands are very long and big. – I now how to make hands, really. Like this circle, because my hands are circles, see?
– I don’t think he looks like anyone I know. – I think he wears those swag green pants, very cool green pants, make him a little more colorful. He’s got those sick Nikes on. – He has a beard. – He has orange hair and green eyes (laughs).
– He’s big and he always sits down. – He looks kinda funny. – He has a blue shirt and blue pants, and very hairy arms. – I just would like you to think of God, a man or a woman or whatever you want to think of God as, happiness.
You should have big smile when you think of God. And wearing those, those sick Nikes, you know. – Thank you for letting me be in this world. – The world goes around because all these different people have different beliefs in God, and I love that, but I don’t think
That their beliefs should cause wars. This could be somewhat fiction. This could be somewhat man-made. I love that everyone has a different view of God and different beliefs in God, but I don’t think it should cause so much commodity or war, I really don’t.
– Hey, Unsolved is on a new channel, and now your part. – [Together] Subscribe here. – That was my part.
Welcome to “Real Truth. Real Quick.” My name is Rick Smith. I’m here with Todd Wagner. How you doing Todd? Hello buddy! Hello friends! Well listen. So this question came to my mind recently. I was watching the one of the interface services for a new president
And it just got me thinking, “How should a Christian responded to interfaith activities and we are, you know, different religions are together?” Yeah. So whenever somebody asks me a question like that I want to say first of all explain interfaith activity. Ok? Everything I do with a non believer
Is an interfaith activity. So Jesus was known as a friend of sinners but he was never known as a companion of sinners. So “A friend speaks the truth at all times, a friend loves somebody for who they are and who they want them to be, and a
Friend is going to spur you on to love and good deeds, and is going to give you an open rebuke,” Proverbs 27 says “as opposed to deceitful kiss.” So everything I do in one sense with non-believers is an interfaith activity. I’ll partner with anybody who wants to
Get involved to advance what is good and just and right and true no matter what the basis for their motivation is. If they want to stand for the dignity of life I don’t care if they’re a Muslim, I don’t care if they’re Mormon, I don’t care if you’re an atheist, but they
Believe in the dignity of human life I’m going to stand with. So if somebody is against human trafficking and child sex slavery and that kind of craziness and they want to do justice and love kindness with me I’ll partner with them all day long. I don’t care if they want to walk humbly
With the Lord as it relates to that good and just cause. I care deeply about whether or not they know the Lord because God takes no delight in the death of the wicked. Ok? And uh or the fool who doesn’t believe that he is the Lord God
But I can separate those two things. I can partner with you towards good and I can talk to you about what is ultimately good. Rick I signed this thing called the Manhattan Declaration but before I did I was talking to my friend Chuck Colson who had
Asked me to be one of the original signers about some of the language we use because it talks about Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical believers or brothers. I feel like there needed to be a clarity and distinction between the fact that we’re not saying that Orthodox and Catholic and
Evangelicals all believe the same thing. We have very different views still on the issue of justification but there are things that we can stand on. So we agree on marriage, we agree on the dignity of human life, we agree on religious liberty, so I gladly stand with
Them and look at the differencse between us are much more nuanced than that we had Mormons and Muslims and others sign that. So it was specific to those but we tried to bring some clarity about people who have Catholic belief, Evangelical belief, and Orthodox belief, we stand together on these things.
Now when you get to just a basic service that we’re trying to co-exist and we should coexist. Alright? “We should do good to all men” Galatian says “but especially to those of the household of faith.” We have to be very careful when we worship God that
Were worshiping the God of the bible. We did a “Real Truth. Real Quick.” on “The Shack” and some people said “When I read the book ‘The Shack’ I felt a lot closer to God.” And I said “Well what God did you feel closer to? God as you rightly understand him or
God as you made him out to be based on reading ‘The Shack’?” And the same thing I would say to other people who go “I want to pray to God.” I always want to know you know what you mean by God. So if I’ve got a friend who’s Arab and uses the Arabic
Word for Lord, which is Allah or God, and he means the God of the scriptures when he uses the word Allah in a prayer probably no problem if I’m talking to an Arab or a person is an American who’s embraced Islam and they use the Arabic word for
God I’ve got to make sure that I don’t think that we’re worshiping and pursuing the same God. And so that’s a completely different God and I don’t want to confuse people. One of the things that we want to make very clear is that Jesus, two different times, says things that appear to be
Contradictory. In Matthew 12 when he’s talking to the Pharisees he says “If you’re not with me you’re against me.” In Luke 9 talking to his disciples he says “Hey if they are not against us they’re for us.” And those are two very different things. What he’s saying the Pharisees is “Hey
Look at me. You’re not about what I’m about. Which is the advancement of how men can be reconciled to God through the Messiah, through the son of god, which is who I am and you’re denying that.” To the disciples Jesus said “Look, if they are not against you there for you. There were
People that were doing the work of casting demons out of people that weren’t a part of that specific little band.” Jesus says “Let them alone. They are not against you.” Ok? So they’re accomplishing good even they want to part of that little band. Paul mentions this in Philippians
Chapter 1. He says “There’s some that preach the gospel out of selfish ambition. There’s others that do it out of love.” He said “I’m just glad to preaching the gospel.” So what I tell people all the time is I’ll lift up Jesus with anybody. I will not encourage you to follow Jesus with
Anybody. I’ve been on some platforms with some guys that have very different understanding about some specifics of the character the Spirit then I do. And one of the things I’d love to say is “Listen, hey we disagree on some issues of some importance here but we agree on these
Other issues”. And you’ve got to be discerning about just because we’re both speaking the same platform that doesn’t mean we agree on all things I’m not endorsing every bit of that person’s worldview. This is even within not just interfaith activities but interdenominational opportunities. And so you’ve got to be discerning. Ecumenicalism,
In the sense that hey there’s a lot of different roads that all go up the same mountain that end in the top. That’s heresy. Ok? And so you must be discerning. I think it always is helpful to provide clarity and if all we did is do things for people
Who agree with us in every jot and tittle, we’re not going to do very many things with very many people. Ok? So stay humble, be clear. Make sure that is best you’re able that you don’t lend the confusion, that you’re endorsing an idea which is unbiblical, which is all
Paths lead to God. And I would have to say that with every opportunity one by one and I’m as specific as clear as I can about who I am when I’m involved in any kind of effort either for social good or certainly for appealing to God.
Let me ask you this question. So let’s say you’re out there in your maybe you work for a company that has an interfaith service. Have you ever been part of an interface service where other not denomination but other faiths are praying and then what do you do
During that time? Do you pray with them? Do you close your eyes and bow your head? What do you do in that situation? Yeah. Listen, men are going to seek God as best they’re able to understand and what I don’t ever want to do is be a part of
Something that is going to compromise who I am or what I believe. And if somebody would ever ask me, “We want you to come. We want you to back off. Who you are?” I’m going to say “Listen I’ll come and be around you but I’m not going to
Not be who I am. You asked me to be a part because I believe that Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life.” And so I I think that’s important. I can’t in any way participate in something that is going to make other people think I don’t
Think that’s a big deal because I’m a servant of Christ and the steward of the mystery of God. And so don’t ask me to come there not be a servant of Christ. So if I’m around places where I haven’t been asked to participate in lead and somebody’s
Praying to a god that I have the scripture, Ill pray for people that are listening. That God would break through that, Ill pray for the folks who are actually praying to a false god. That God would reveal himself to them in a very vivid way. And if I’m ever in a
Position where I prayed after that person it’s going to take extreme discernment and as much clarity as I can when I’m offering prayer to make sure that folks understand who I am and that I don’t do anything to add further to their confusion. It takes a lot of wisdom, a lot of
Discernment. Sometimes you’re thrust into stuff you can’t avoid and you do your best you can. So be discerning and be prayerful at all times. Awesome, Thanks Todd! Alright, well hey. Thank you for checking this episode out and we will see you next week on another episode of “Real Truth. Real Quick.”
Two thousand years ago, the angel Gabriel brought a rather unusual message to a little girl named Mary: Behold, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and you will conceive a child, even though you have had no relations with a man. Proving, as they say, that abstinence is 99.9999999 percent effective.
The belief Mary gave birth to Jesus as a virgin is not, nor has it ever been, a controversial topic in Christendom. It fulfills a prophecy found in the book of Isaiah, and Christians accepted it from the very beginning. The idea that she REMAINED a virgin, however… now that is up for debate.
Why do Catholics argue for her perpetual virginity and when did this belief develop? This is Catholicism in Focus. As with most things in our faith, the first place we want to look to answer our question is the Bible itself. Although not the ONLY source of God’s truth, it is a pretty important foundation.
Which… is unfortunate for Catholics in this case… as the Bible isn’t much help. The best we can say about the perpetual nature of Mary’s virginity, based on the Bible, is that the Bible doesn’t say much. It definitively speaks of her virginity in conceiving of Jesus, and then remains silent
On any other domestic events in Mary’s life. Scripture doesn’t definitively negate the idea. It does, however, offer some contrary evidence, as Protestants like to point out. In each of the synoptic Gospels, there is a pericope in which Jesus, speaking to the
Crowds, is informed, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they wish to see you.” Jesus of course spiritualizes the situation, saying that those who do the will of his father are his mother and brothers and sisters, and that’s great for us as a moral lesson, but
It does present a practical problem for take on Mary: clearly, the disciple didn’t mean this spiritually, but literally. He was speaking of Jesus’ actual flesh and blood. The same can be seen in the Gospel of John, the Acts of the Apostles, and St. Paul’s
First letter to the Corinthians and to the Galatians, as each reference the brothers of Jesus. Clearly, Jesus had some biological relatives, and the Catholic Church doesn’t negate that. We just don’t accept that these children are the offspring of Mary.
When we look to the actual description of these so called “brothers” of Jesus, it’s important to note that no one is ever described as “the son of Mary.” Whereas family lineage is common in other places in the Gospels, as in the sons of Zebedee, these brothers are given no further detail.
Of course, this assumes that the word “brother” actually means what we mean, which is not a guarantee. In the semitic world, calling someone a “brother” could be a catch-all for many types of relationships from step-brother to cousin even to uncle.
In the Book of Genesis, for example, Abraham uses the Hebrew word for “brother” to greet Lot, even though he is in fact his uncle. As if that weren’t ambiguous enough, we see in the Gospel of Matthew that two of his
Disciples, James and Joseph, are at one point referred to as his brothers, but are later described as the sons of a different Mary entirely. All of this helps to understand the scene from John 19 in which Jesus entrusts his mother to the Beloved disciple while on the cross.
If the Mary, the Mother of Jesus, did have other children, Jesus would have had no need to make sure that his mother was cared for after his death, and this scene would make little sense. For many in the early Church, passages referring to Jesus’ siblings posed no problem to the
Belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary because many understood them to be children of Joseph before he betrothed Mary, or, in all likelihood, children from another marriage. Given the world at the time, there is no reason to believe that Joseph couldn’t have had other wives and a much larger family.
In fact, an early Christian source says just that. In the Protoevangelium of James, a partial Gospel written around 120 AD, we read Now, is this a canonical source, binding on all the faithful? Of course not.
It was not deemed authentic enough to be included in the Bible and so we must be wary of taking any of its words as dogmatic truth. What it is, though, is early evidence of a developing popular belief: if it was important
Enough to be written down in the early second century, it means that there was already a strong oral tradition and popular devotion among the people a generation earlier. Over the next two centuries, the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary took root
Throughout all of Christendom, developing a strong devotional following in both East and West. Some like Tertullian and Helvidius argued against it, but the vast majority of Church leaders, people like Origen, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Pope Leo, Jerome, and Augustine, all defended it.
And trust me—if you can get Jerome and Augustine to be on the same side of something, that’s saying something. They … did not exactly get along. Eventually, the teaching was so well-established among the leaders of the Church with dissenting opinions only coming from minority, heretical voices, that the Second Council of Constantine
In 553 definitively referred to Mary as “ever-virgin” and the Lateran Council of 649 further cemented the teaching’s place in Catholic theology: Clearly, this teaching was well rooted in the ancient Church. But it also persisted. What’s probably most interesting about this topic is not that the belief has existed basically
Since the beginning, it’s that it continued unchallenged even through the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. While many Protestants today do not accept this teaching, all of the major reformers did. Martin Luther, sermons on John. Ulrich Zwingli, Corpus Reformatorum. John Wesley, Letter to a Roman Catholic.
Calvin didn’t even think it was a controversial question: In one commentary, he wrote, Unfortunately, many people do raise this question today, and I guess you can understand why. Scripture does not explicitly state that Mary remained a virgin. If you are a biblical literalist and sola-scriptura rigorist, that’s the ballgame.
But really, that’s precisely why scripture can’t be the only source of truth. It’s why we believe that Christ founded the Church, that the Holy Spirit continues to guide it, so that when questions like this arise a generation after the Gospels were
Written, and the faithful maintain that same belief even through the Reformation, we can know of it’s truth. It may not be spelled out in the Bible, but when Basil, Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Wesley can all agree on something… there might be something to it.
Well, we know He’s the Savior of the world because there’s only one Savior for the world. The world has only one Savior but we also know the atonement is limited. We all know that, right? The atonement is limited because people go to hell.
Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and I will say to them, ‘Depart from Me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.'” Jesus talked more about hell then He did about heaven.
We know that hell is a reality, and we know people go there and perish forever. So we all believe in a limited atonement, right? Not everybody’s going to be saved. You either believe in a limited atonement, or you believe in a universal atonement, and
If you believe in a universal atonement, to be logically consistent, then there’s no hell and no one will be in hell. Everyone will be in heaven. If you’re going to affirm an unlimited atonement, then you really are going to end up as a universalist,
Because if He actually died for the whole world then the whole world is saved. So, we don’t, we can’t go there because there is a hell and it’s full of people, in fact, most people. So the atonement is limited. Then the question is, who limits it?
Do we limit it or does God limit it? And the answer to that question biblically is crystal clear. God limited it. He limited it to the elect. Either God determined whom He would save and take the glory or God just threw atonement
Out there as some nebulous option and hoped some people would grab hold of it and become a part of His redeeming purpose. The Bible does not allow for that. So, you just need to remind yourself you believe in a limited atonement. Now, you ask the question, are men sovereign or is God sovereign?
JONES: This second lecture will deal with one of the powerful influences on our culture today, namely I’m looking at the rise and demise of secular humanism. I think it’s important that we understand today’s culture. And I really am so happy that there are young people listening to me because while some
Of you my age will say, “You’re saying what exactly what I understand and have lived through.” Sometimes our young people have difficulty figuring out what’s happening because they have not lived through this kind of thing. So I address them in particular.
And to understand our culture, we need to see that there are two fundamental ideologies that I will show at the end of my lectures possibly are really the same because they’re Oneist, namely secular humanism and revive paganism. They’re very different but at the end of the day, they are in their fundamental orientations
Of the world — Oneist. You know when I first came in 1964, I mention how amazed I was to see Christian America. And the other thing that amazed me was how much people lived in fear of communism. There were commies behind every bush.
And of course the McCarthy investigation of communist agents was just finished and many on the left poopooed that but it’s actually been shown that there were many communist agents in America during that time. But we were worried because this godless system of communism or Marxism was spreading throughout
The world in this sort of a domino effect from the Soviet Union to China, to Korea, to Vietnam, to Cuba. And you know the ’60s revolution was very much a revolution against the Vietnam War whose motivation of course was to oppose communism.
So we have radicals who still actually now have power who were part of those refusing to denounce communism which is sort of interesting. So the threat in the ’60s was not a religious threat but a nonreligious materialism in its various forms. In its political form of course — atheistic Marxism.
But it is also had an intellectual form called secular humanism and that was something that we all realized and perhaps still realize as a fundamental opponent of the Christian faith. Humanism was celebrated in the Renaissance just before the Reformation as the rediscovery
Of the value of the individual human being and his reason over against the power of the church. And many of us have seen the importance of that movement and of course it’s easy to describe the work of Martin Luther as an expression, in a certain sense, of that humanistic understanding
Of the importance of the individual. But of course, like most things, its good parts can be turned to bad. And what you have you see is, from the intelligent use of individual reason which has produced the incredible successes of Western culture through science and technology.
So, that one day human beings would walk on the moon; this kind of thinking became more and more enamored of its own power and felt that it was the only way of relating to the world — that human reason was the source of truth.
And belief in a world created by God and of reason created by God was dismissed as religious superstition and myth. And so for modern man — religion had to go, and this is why we have known and recognized that secular humanism is a massive attack on Christianity.
So from the 18th Century on what’s called “The Enlightenment” — “the age of light” if you like; this view of reason as the ultimate source of authority for human existence developed in a powerful way. Optimism in what mankind could produce, its capacities to bring about a better world took
The minds of intellectuals by storm and of course invaded the university. So that, so many of our intellectuals bought into this system. Bringing about if you like this vision of a kingdom of man on earth, you can already see how Oneist that is, right?
If it’s simply depending on human beings to put the world together, it is a form of Oneism. It was known as the religion of humanism and it was particularly expressed by the French Revolution. I spent eighteen years in France, so I love the French but I see their weaknesses too.
In 1789, the Paris revolutionaries built an altar to the goddess ‘Reason’ in Notre Dame Cathedral, can you believe that? There was an altar right in the center of that incredible medieval church and they celebrated to goddess ‘Reason’. The French philosopher who was part of this French Revolution — Voltaire, was fundamentally anti-Christian.
He was a friend by the way of Benjamin Franklin, who himself was a very conflicted man because some of you know that Benjamin Franklin was fascinated by George Whitfield and helped pay for some of his campaign.
And yet he was also a friend of Voltaire, one of the leading atheists of the 18th Century. Voltaire came up with the famous phrase “écrasez l’infâme,” — “Crush that vile unspeakable thing.” This became the battle cry of The Enlightenment, but it was actually Christianity that was the vile and unspeakable thing.
And so there were thousands of heads of priests and so on that were separated from their bodies through the French Revolution. The Emperor Napoleon asked Pierre-Simon Laplace, — the great French scientist if he believed in God; he was reputed to have said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
This is a movement, a very powerful movement in the West, and as western history develops in the 18th and 19th Centuries, you find leading intellectuals actually predicting the end of religion. In the 21st Century, we should be seeing the end of religion according to these predictions.
Ludwig Feuerbach called Christianity a “delusion,” “a gigantic human projection.” You remember Karl Marx described religion as “the opiate of the people,” the sign of a wrongly ordered society. “Man,” said Marx, “is the supreme divinity.” By the way, another expression Oneism.
But these people didn’t want to be called religious by the way; they weren’t religious, they were rational. Of course why did they believe in their own rationality, that was a faith statement by the way. Friedrich Nietzsche declared “Gott ist tot,” “God is dead.”
The tradition of Christianity was now being buried by these leading philosophers. Sigmund Freud in his book “The Future of an Illusion” speaks about religion in particularism his own Judaism as a “mass delusion, a collective neurosis which enshrines our infantile longing.”
He actually describes it as a serious pathological condition from which one needed to be healed. Really massive anti-religious mindset going on amongst the intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries. And that continues to this day in 1976, Richard Dawkins, one of the new atheists, in his book
“The Selfish Gene,” describes faith, quote, “as a kind of mental illness.” So here we have this rationalistic approach to eliminate faith and religion as a form of illness. And of course we saw this kind of thinking invade the church; that’s what liberalism is, you see.
Liberalism is the adaptation of the world’s kind of thinking and trying to make it Christian, that’s what liberals have done all through the ages since the beginning. Christianity, beginning with the Gnostics, who were the original liberals who tried to take pagan notions of the mystery religions and make them Christian.
So that’s the mechanism that liberals use. And when I was studying New Testament at Harvard, of course that was the great goal — to reinterpret the New Testament by demythologizing the supernatural. Demythologizing means taking away the myths and getting to the heart which really the
Heart was sort of a sense of one’s own existential being faced with nothingness; that was the real meaning of Christianity in the New Testament. So there was no miracles and certainly no resurrection of Jesus. And then of course, the mainline churches buy into this kind of thinking.
But of course, someone has said, “If you marry the spirit of the age, you will soon be a widower.” And we’ve seen mainline churches going down in their effect in our culture. And Liberalism thus defined the Gospel as mere social work, and saw Jesus only as an
Example not as a divine Savior, that was myth of course you see, so myth had to go. The Gospel was redefined in terms of Marxist politics. Liberation theology became all the rage, and Jesus was little more than a cake of 20th century revolutionary theory.
On a different level, the secular humanists were greatly influenced by Darwin, who would effectively eliminated belief in “God the Creator,” and proposed in place of “God the Creator” the idea of an unguided and impersonal process of natural selection.
Life came about by mere chance, and man was seen as the result of purposelessness and a mere natural process, that did not have him in mind by the way, and so we are really the result of chance.
It’s incredible to see how far people can go with that as an explanation for the incredible beauty and power of what we represent as human beings. The way our bodies have put together. The way our minds can function. There’s no valid explanation of this in secular humanism and yet so many liberal thinkers
Adopted it. Science was the only way of knowing anything about anything. And so, there was a belief that religion would disappear. When I came to the states in the ’60s, I was asked to read books on ‘the death of God’.
And this was all the rage and we were sort of told that this was the proof (and I wasn’t at an evangelical school and I don’t really blame my professors for seeing it this way, I saw it that way) that the death of God was the proof of the success of secular humanism.
That man no longer needed God as a hypothesis, he was now fine on his own. The final triumph then of secular humanism is to declare in America in the ’70s that God had died. Secular humanism had won. Now in a certain sense, these predictions have come true.
We’re seeing the decline of the Christian faith in the population as a whole. No longer are many people influenced by a Christian way of thinking and I don’t think we should hide our eyes from that. And in that sense we’ve seen the decline of attachment to the Christian faith.
Now, this is a massive change. People no longer actually believe in God the Creator and so they can do anything they want to, but that was not always the case. In 1890, the Supreme Court in United States defined religion as “one’s view of one’s relation
To his Creator, to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character and obedience to His will.” That was the statement of the Supreme Court in 1890. There was no other definition of God but of a personal transcendent creator.
But thanks in many ways to secular humanism, this is no longer the case in public discourse. So what is ‘secularism’ or secular humanism? Let me give you a simple definition, it comes in various names. As an intellectual discipline, it is known as “philosophical materialism,” that matter is ultimate. That’s the philosophy of materialism. As a religious expression, it is called ‘Atheism’, the faith belief that there is no God. There’s no — you can’t prove that rationally, right? So an atheist has to be in some sense a religious believer.
As a political form, it is practiced as ‘Marxism’ and various forms of socialism. And for many people, it’s simply a default way of thinking of living without any notion that God exists. That’s probably the way most people practice this kind of thinking.
But in all these expressions of secularism, it’s a consistent rejection as a mere ancient superstition, a sort of a holdover from the Middle Ages and we must refuse that kind of mythology if we want to really do our world good. Now, this kind of a view still dominates the western universities.
Some of you young people that go to schools around here will confirm that your professors — many of them believe in this kind of rationalism or secular humanism. However, this is not the whole story. Just as these philosophers of the 19th and early 20th century were predicting the end
Of the withering away of religion in a kind of ironic turn of events. We are now seeing the withering away of secular humanism, did you realize that? You probably don’t always see it, but this is happening and many people are talking about it.
And the withering away of secular humanism, (oh let me just say it) the proof is, how many people now say, “I’m spiritual but not religious?” In other words, they are making a claim to spirituality which doesn’t fit with secular humanism, right? — That’s superstition. Any kind of faith is superstition.
Well, the reasons why this movement of secular humanism is on the decline and indeed is withering away, is that while it was so optimistic and full of self-confidence; secular humanism produced two devastating World Wars that produced the death of millions. In some of its socialistic expressions it became totalitarian fascism.
And some of its great leader was Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot that produced the murder of countless millions, in the name of secular humanism. That doesn’t give a movement too many honors. And of course from that — you have wild industrialization, ecological disasters; but as I was indicating
Earlier, one of the real problems is that many people have begun to feel that without some kind of spirituality they can’t exist in this world. And that’s what secular humanism does; it leaves us with a soulless materialism without any sense of a meaning in a spiritual way of thinking.
And so secular humanism produced a profound sense of alienation from the rest of the universe. So we human beings, you see, are isolated in this massive cosmos, and we have no real relationship with the outside and so we have a profound sense of alienation. Have you met people like that?
They are looking for a sense of wholeness. “W-H.” (I didn’t say holiness, I said whole-ness) they want to belong somehow to more than a mere physical. But there is another reason why secular humanism is in decline. It is severely weak as a philosophical system. What do I mean by that?
Well, you see, to be a secular humanist, you have to believe in the validity of human reason. But in order to believe in human reason, you have to presuppose it. So to demonstrate that, you have to presuppose it. So it’s a perfectly circular way of thinking, does that make sense?
In order to prove reason, you have to presuppose it. And to presuppose it, that’s a faith statement that the world is rational. You don’t have all the information, right? You don’t sit outside of the cosmos and look down, ‘Oh yeah, that’s rational’. You have to presuppose that.
And some scholars have realized that this is not a ground for establishing secular humanism. The postmodern critique of secular humanism which argued that all major ideas are simply human notions and they are not scientific or philosophical, included the critique of secular humanism oddly.
So postmodernism — the thinkers of whom were probably the sons and daughters of secular humanist turns around and eats up their parents. There are two reasons really why secular humanism is on the decline. The first, is it really cannot stand against true biblical theism.
The conversion of Antony Flew — the great atheist is an example of that. He stated this, “It is simply inconceivable that any material matrix or field can generate agents who think and act. Matter cannot produce conceptions and perceptions such a world has to originate in the living source, a mind.”
The greatest atheist of the 20th century finally has to admit that secularism cannot justify the human mind. Isn’t that beautiful? But then, finally, there’s a new way of thinking. It is the thinking of this new spirituality. David Miller, who was a professor at Syracuse University, and was one of the ‘death of God’
Theologians actually said, “At the death of God, you will see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.” That’s not secular humanism. That’s a justification of a belief in all the gods. What did Miller know that we didn’t know as we read him in the ’70s?
Well, he was a devout follower of Carl Jung. And that will be the subject of my next lecture. Thank you.
As we said in the introduction the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of Christianity without it all of Christianity is a lie in a false religion but unlike most miracle claims Christians claim there is good historical evidence for the resurrection so what is this evidence and how can we
Use it we already went over the basic underlying philosophy in the introduction and pointed out that we already gave natural theology arguments for God’s existence argued the New Testament documents are reliable and established miracles are not impossible however as we noted in the introduction we will not assume the New Testament
Documents are inspired or even accurate in every detail instead we will only argue from facts that are agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars and have good evidence to infer they are true this means even if the rest of the New Testament is a fabrication it will
Not show these facts are false since even many skeptical scholars doubt the historicity of the entire New Testament but at least agree these facts are true so now with this as our underlying foundation we can begin to look at the historical evidence and see if it infers a resurrection first two underlying
Facts about the death of Jesus it is almost unanimously agreed that Jesus died by crucifixion just outside of Jerusalem sceptical scholar John Dominic Crossan says this is as sure as anything historical can ever be sceptical scholar EP Sanders lists this as one of the most indisputable facts about Jesus’s life so
There is no question for historians whether or not Jesus died by crucifixion second it is widely agreed that Jesus was buried in nearby tomb the evidence for this is pretty overwhelming we have multiple attestation from early sources like Paul and mark and Josephus agrees crucified victims were allowed to receive a proper burial
Jewish law demanded that even foreigners and criminals had to be buried we have archaeological evidence for this as well the burial count of Jesus also meets the criteria of embarrassment since they had to admit they could not afford their own tomb to bury Jesus but had to you
Kim of a member of the court who had just executed him there are just too many facts would support the burial of Jesus only a few skeptical scholars in the Jesus Seminar deny this but the majority does not and we’ll come back to this later and discuss it more but both
Of these facts could still be true and Jesus would still be dead in the grave the real question is what happened next what caused the events which followed and led to the rise of Christianity from a small backwater province in Rome there have been a wide variety of theories
That have been proposed in order to explain what took place three days after Jesus was buried and this video will cover the four most popular in general theories to see which best fits the data the first theory is the mythic theory this is probably the most popular among
Laymen sceptics it argues that all the events in miracle claims of Jesus were made up at a later time and were not made up by early eyewitnesses the disciples never claimed Jesus rose from the dead and was only made up by later Christians the second is like the mythic
Theory but it is called the conspiracy theory historical evidence that justices probably the earliest competing theory offered to challenge the resurrection account it says that the disciples made up the story of Jesus rising from the dead and simply lied about it all for their own gain third we’ll look at the hallucination
Theory which comes in many variations and it’s probably the most popular among skeptical New Testament scholars it basically says that after Jesus died the disciples were grief-stricken and had hallucinations or visions that Jesus had arisen from the dead and that propelled them to think he was alive again and
Finally we’ll compare these two the resurrection theory which is that Jesus actually did rise from the dead and the disciples believed it because they witnessed it so let’s look at the facts and see if any of these theories can fully explain the data the first piece is something that is accepted by almost
Unanimous scholarship which is that after Jesus died his disciples said he appeared to them again alive there is not a lot of doubt among scholars that the disciples believed this had happened Bart Ehrman says I don’t doubt at all that some disciples claimed this Paul writing about 25 years later indicates
That this is what they claimed and I don’t think he is making it up EP sander says it is an equally secure fact that Jesus disciples saw him in what sense is not certain after his death thereafter his followers saw him the reason for this is because it has multiple attestation in various
Sources including Josephus and there is no way to explain the rise of Christianity if this did not happen something had to happen which compelled the disciples to begin the world’s largest religion with seemingly nothing well people claim may see all sorts of things so why should we take the claims
Of the disciples seriously how do we know their testimony is reliable and they were not simply making the appearances up well in our previous series we’ve already established a new Testament it’s very early and reliable in what it reports so there is plenty of evidence their testimony is reliable but
Putting that aside we should at least evaluate when eyewitness testimony is unreliable for instance when events happen quickly or over a period of a few seconds it is hard to retain memory of an event or when people go out looking for what they want to find people that are desperately
Desiring to find Bigfoot will sometimes fool themselves into thinking they found something or when the participants are all strangers like during a bank robbery it is hard to retain memory when you were around unfamiliar people and last it is hard to retain memory if there was a weapon involved for the simple reason
That everyone is focused on the weapon and not anything else however if we examine the resurrection reports none of these seem to be a factor there is certainly not a weapon involved and it is not with strangers the disciples are familiar with each other and who they are witnessing they believe had risen
The disciples were also not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead all the accounts embarrassingly report that the disciples had misunderstood the Scriptures in what Jesus had claimed and they did not expect him to come back and the reports do not seem to happen quickly but over a period of time where
Jesus would eat and drink with him and engage in conversations or give them instructions even if you could write off the Gospels and acts as later myths we still have preserved for us early creeds and oral sermons handed down which report these as well so the reports on the surface level do
Not match circumstances that create unreliable testimony as EP Sanders admits they definitely experienced something which doesn’t bode well for the conspiracy theory so what if these accounts which is made up at a later date well this seems to be rejected by most scholars since Paul preserved for
Us an early Creed in first Corinthians 15 which is a list of witnesses that Jesus was said to have appeared to they include Peter the rest of the disciples a group of five hundred at once then James and then all the Apostles most scholars believe this list of witnesses
In the Creed goes back to within three years of Pentecost the reasons for this are simply overwhelming it is formed in a mnemonic structure and with parallelism and it is less than fifty words and all this seems to meaning was an early Creed for katha sizing new Christians it was something easy to
Learn and memorize Paul also says of the Corinthians I delivered to you when I received this is a rabbinic statement for a teacher passing on something to his students so it had to have come from the disciples themselves very early on before they could teach it to Paul the
Creed also calls Peter Cephas and not by his name Peter Cephas was an early name for him only later on was he called Peter and it has an independent tradition that is not contingent on the Gospels such as the appearance to James in the independent appearance to Peter Geritol Collins says
That he doesn’t know of any New Testament scholar who dates the Creed after the mid 40s so all the evidence suggested is very early and this means the reports of appearances are very early on as well that rules out the mythic theory what about the hallucination theory well the problem is
The appearances happen in group settings even in the early Crete and group hallucinations are exceptionally rare and because of this there was not a lot of scientific literature to explain them in a private email with scholar Michael Kona psychologist dr. Gary sabzi says I have surveyed the professional literature peer-reviewed journal
Articles and books written by psychologists psychiatrists and other relevant health care professionals during the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination an event for which there is more than one person purportedly sharing in a vision or other sensory perceptions
Where there was clearly no referent so there is not a lot of scientific evidence group hallucinations can happen peer-reviewed work on hallucinations also reports that they most often manifests in one sensory mode such as auditory or visual and then multimode hallucinations are exceptionally rare yet the appearances of Jesus contain at
Least both of these elements making the hallucination theory exceptionally improbable for an elucidation to explain the appearances you would have to say that the disciples are all each having a rare multi-mode hallucination that they are all agreeing Jesus is doing certain things like eating and drinking and giving them the exact same instructions
And this would need to have happened multiple times not just once even if you could write off the Gospels and acts as later myths we still have the early Creed preserved in 1st Corinthians 15 in other early sermons preserved in acts which report that Jesus ate and drank
With the disciples CH Dodd notes the speeches and acts seem very early because they lack influence from Pauline theology or vocabulary they contain a high degree of Semitism meaning they were likely originally Aramaic and they lack resemblance to the original written elements of Acts and Luke meaning they
Likely predate acts and seemed to be very early Aramaic speeches so the reports are very early and appear in group settings multi-sensory and over a period of time in hallucinations with these elements are so improvable it would have to be a miracle to cause one let alone several but what about the
Power of suggestion sometimes one person can cause others around them to he’ll loosen eight the same thing through the power of suggestion such as people in a lifeboat where one thinks they see a ship in the distance and they all think they see the same ship in anomalistic psychology a study of extraordinary
Phenomenon behavior and experience authors Lucy and Jones are at some of the very little literature on group hallucinations and theorize that if there is an expectation emotional excitement and people having been informed beforehand that a group hallucination may be possible it is also believed they will vary in what is
There’s a and Jones site an event from 1917 where 70,000 people said they witnessed a public miracle however the reports varied although the children reportedly saw the Virgin the crowd at least many of them witnessed a color phenomenon in which the son in the shape of a fiery disc
Began to move and approached the earth however Zeus nee and Jones also had to conclude with the final answer to these questions has yet to be obtained so they still maintain a scientific explanation has yet to explain collective hallucinations however even if they could it is interesting how their
Criteria doesn’t fit the resurrection appearances expectation and excitement were definitely not present the narratives embarrassingly portray the disciples as cowardly running for their lives after Jesus was crucified they even doubted the report of the women and when they first saw Jesus they were frightened which shows they were not
Excited and didn’t understand what was going on second it is interesting that if the appearances of Jesus were hallucinations then they do not for the criteria of varying drastically between reports all report a bodily resurrection of Jesus where he looks sort of like himself but also slightly different and
His body has new powers that do not have before as William Lane Craig says the fact remains that there is not a single instance in the case books exhibiting the diversity involved and the post-mortem appearances of Jesus but the biggest problem with the hallucination theory is this even if you discount the
Gospels is unreliable one still is to account for the early Christians preaching bodily resurrection and not a spiritual appearance the first Christians were very familiar with visions and claim to actually have some in acts 12 when the servant girl finds Peter at the gate she runs a tell
Everyone and they tell her the appearance she had with just an angel so the Christians firmly understood what visions and spiritual experiences were yet they never interpreted the appearances of Christ as just spiritual visions they firmly believed it was a bodily appearance and that is what they preached from the beginning as even
Sceptical scholar curlew Daman agrees so since the appearances were in group settings multi-sensory do not vary or were interpreted to be spiritual but always physical there was no expectation or excitement for them the hallucination theory cannot account for these appearances so what about the conspiracy theory well despite the early facts we
Mentioned about how the resurrection appearances do not match factors that make testimony unreliable it would be hard to explain how the Christians could hold together such a radical conspiracy with over 500 people involved before Christ was crucified they couldn’t even keep Judas from betraying them however
If all we have to go on is the appearances themselves and no other piece of data we have to accept that this theory could at least tentatively account for the reports of appearances even though it seems like a stretch so I don’t see any reason why the conspiracy
Theory could not account for this piece of data if especially there was no more data to go over finally the resurrection theory can account for this since if Jesus did rise from the dead reporting his physical appearance makes perfect sense the next piece of data is appearances to skeptics it is almost
Unanimously accepted that James and the brothers of Jesus were not his followers during his crucifixion it is also unanimously accepted that Paul was an enemy of the church originally in a later convert the reason for this is Paul admits it himself and cites an early Creed in Galatians 1 22
To 23 he who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy if we add the account and acts we have multiple attestation and it meets the criteria of embarrassment since Paul reports it himself that he was once the enemy and was in the wrong
The same goes for the conversion of James it is clear in the early material Paul the leader of the Jerusalem church was none other than James the brother of Jesus however all the evidence suggests that James did not believe his brother was the Christ during jesus’s ministry the Gospels embarrassingly report that
The Brothers of Jesus were skeptical of him no early Christian would dare attack a prominent leader in the church by claiming he was once jesus’s enemy James was also not listed as one present at the cross and Jesus surrendered his mother over to the Beloved Disciple
But why not his own brothers if they were in the Christian ranks this is why most scholars accept James and his brothers or early skeptics and only converted after the crucifixion so what happened that turned these enemies into believers well the mythic theory is a hard time explaining this since Paul was very
Early on writing and quoting a Creed about his own conversion also mentioning the changes in early skeptic would not have been made up as no Christian would dare to dishonor shame her lie about one of their own leaders in such a terrible way so this fact would not have been
Made up later on yet it is clear James was the early leader of the Jerusalem church as Paul and Josephus record could James and Paul of lied the question must be asked why on earth would they have done that the early church was a small persecuted and
Hated minority with a messiah who is just shamefully crucified as a criminal it was too poor to even afford their own tomb Jesus had dishonored the family and James has already opposed to him why would James suddenly feel the need to make up an appearance of Jesus’s resurrection if there was nothing to
Gain and only shame and dishonor to suddenly reverse but claim his brother was Lord after he had already mocked him openly to do such a thing would make no sense Paul also had no reason to try this he was at the top of his game a prominent leader on the rise and making
A name for himself while he persecuted the church he had everything going for him and suddenly he has an urge to leave all that and join the persecuted minority he had already hated such a sudden conversion he knew to be a lie would take a miracle in itself of nothing else
So what have they both hallucinating well adding more hallucinations to this theory begins to multiply its assumptions and causes it to lack parsimony it is even harder to explain since neither them were grieving that Jesus had died especially Paul who hated the church James may have been in grief
For his brother but he didn’t believe he was the Lord and would never have expected or even considered a physical resurrection says a dying rising Messiah was not part of second temple Judaism beliefs as scholar Michael ocona says James and his brothers would have regarded their dead brother as a heretic
Rather than rushed to Jerusalem and be caught up in the group ecstasy it seems more likely that Jesus’s execution as a criminal on a blasphemer would have supported their continual unbelief rather their conversion the plausibility of Paul having hallucination is even far lower than James since hallucinations usually happened for people who are
Expecting them and grieving over the death of the loved one neither of these would have been the case for Paul nor would a mere vision have caused his sudden conversion as we said earlier the early church knew what visions were and if Paul simply had a
Dream he would have called it a dream and moved on a hallucination would be very improbable as the cause of Paul’s sudden conversion however the Christian theory can easily explain the conversion and appearance to skeptics if Jesus really did rise and appear to them that would be enough to
Cause their miraculous conversion now we have surveyed the appearances but that is only half the battle since we cannot interview them personally today or perform a psychoanalysis but what we can do is look at the surrounding facts that accompany these appearances for us today and see which theory is the most
Plausible for them so now it’s time to fill in the gaps first up the expectation of the gospel to the surrounding world the message of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins may sound loving and warm to us but to the ancient world a culture that thrived
On honor and status such a message would be nothing but disgusting and horrendous Walter bear said the enemies of Christianity always refer to this gracefulness of the death of Jesus with great emphasis and malicious pleasure a God or son of God dying on a cross that
Was enough to put paid to the new religion david de silva knows the same thing in his work christianity was founded on a premise that should have failed from the moment it began the christians preach to the Gentiles to worship a man that was shamefully executed on the cross not only that but
A Jew of all people who the Romans looked down upon but even more than that a Jew who was a carpenter which it was also a position that was looked down upon Cicero said that such an occupation was vulgar and compared to slavery on top of that they preach physical
Resurrection to the Roman world which was detested by most pagans who thought the purpose of death was to escape the evil material universe and make it to the spiritual realm yet the Christians taught the Jewish idea that heaven would be the restoration in eternal Kingdom on earth which was not something
Pagans hoped for but even more the Christians place ethical demands on the new converts that would have shocked most pagans no temple prostitution or even extramarital affairs morality was radically challenged by the Christians that flew in the face of most pagans as they Sylvan knows the message about this
Christ was incompatible with the most deeply rooted religious ideology of the Gentile world as well as with the most recent message propagated in the Roman Imperial ideology this is seen in how the Christian opponents like Kelsey’s attacked Christianity he attacked Christians for worshipping a God who
Could not beat the Romans or even escape from the cross Justin Martyr had to respond to these attacks because pagans were calling the Christians mad for putting a crucified man next to the eternal God the Jews also thought the message of Christ was embarrassing they’re supposed Messiah was shamefully
Crucified and murdered by the Roman enemy the Messiah was expected to be a conqueror who would defeat Rome and restore the Kingdom of Israel Jesus was shamed and disgraced to follow him was to give up on the Jewish idealization of a conquering Messiah and a restored Israel on top of that Jesus
Was from Galilee and Nazareth of all places areas were looked down upon by the Jews his father was not known to them so he had a shady family history which the Jews were not keen to forget everything the Christian stood for was working against them they had better
Have good evidence and truly thought Jesus had been raised because the odds were completely against them on every front as NT Wright says Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false this being so knowing the expectation the gospel would have no group of conspirators
Would ever have made it their core doctrine if you’re going to make up a message the gain of following you want to make up something that is appealing and will work to your advantage not something that was expected to fail so the conspiracy theory could not explain
Why the Christians would make up such a story neither can the hallucination theory as we said before the crucifixion of Jesus is almost unanimously accepted by scholars as well as the fact that Jesus did it advocate lie ethical loads so unless the entire population of Jerusalem hallucinating Jesus’s crucifixion and message this
Would not be something that Christians were fallen to believing hallucinations also usually happen to grieving people as a psychological way to comfort themselves you would not hallucinate things to believe that would cause you more trouble and grief so the hallucination theory cannot explain what the disciples would preach
An utterly embarrassing message in a way to win converts and again as we’ve already noted the disciples and early church knew what visions were yet they preached the physical resurrection as part of the gospel not a spiritual vindication it would have been easier for their Gentile audience and even
Jewish audience who didn’t expect a resurrection to happen until the end of time to preach a spiritual assumption over a physical return and transformation hallucinations would have inferred this not a reanimation of the body since we know crucifixion was preached early the mythic Theory cannot explain
This either it would also fail for the same reasons the conspiracy theory does but all this fits perfectly with the resurrection theory this is what was preached by Christians because this is how it happened and they preached this embarrassing message because it was true the next factor look at is the low
Status of women in the ancient world it is unanimously accepted that in the ancient world the testimony of women was not to be trusted but let not the testimony of women be admitted on account of the levity and boldness of their sex any evidence which a woman
Gives is not valid to offer let the words of the law be burned rather than given to women there is a whole host of other sources we could look at which shows women were believed to be less trustworthy than men the ancient world was very clear the testimony of women
Was not to be trusted now take that and marvel at the fact that in the Gospels the women are the first and primary witnesses to the empty tomb this fact was utterly embarrassing for the early church first they admit they didn’t even trust the testimony of the women then
All the early sermons found in acts and the epistles always skip over the fact of the women were the first to discover the tomb that doesn’t contradict the Gospels but they tend to stay on this matter in order to make their early case because women were not deemed
To be credible witnesses yet when they write down the accounts of how it happened they cannot leave this fact out because they played such a key role discovering the empty tomb this is a serious claim because as Richard baulkham says in these stories women are given priority by God as recipients of
Revelation and thereby the role of mediators of that revelation to men the Gospels claimed the women were an intricate part of the revelation of God and the first key eyewitnesses to the resurrection thereby making their testimony necessary and telling how the empty tomb was found for an ancient
Writer this was not something you would ever make up Cal says even uses to try to discredit Christianity who claimed the entire argument for the empty tomb rested on the testimony of women NT Wright says as historians we are obliged to comment that if these stories have
Been made up five years later let alone thirty forty or fifty years later they would never have had Mary Magdalene in this role put Mary there is from the point of view of Christian apologists wanting to explain to a skeptical audience that Jesus really did rise from
The dead like shooting themselves in the foot but to us as historians this kind of thing is gold dust the early Christians would never never have made this up so the mythic theory or the conspiracy theory lacks any explanatory power with this one as Michael okona says even if the disciples
Had fled Jerusalem Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus may have been better candidates than women for discovering the empty tomb what about the hallucination theory it is difficult to say if the hallucination theory could fit with this one if all we have to go on is this fact I suppose you could say
Someone had a crazy dream and thought women discovered the empty tomb before anyone else but why they weren’t expecting it in multiple sources seem to agree this is how it happened plus it was such an embarrassing fact that everyone involved would have wanted to make sure it actually happened and
That it was not a dream or a subjective vision so will allow this one to pass just to be fair but there was really no reason why one would hallucinate this since it was not comforting or expected to happen but even though it lacks explanatory power will allow to tentatively pass
Until we can evaluate the evidence for the empty tomb and finally the Christian theory has no problem explaining this because the writers were reporting how it happened and of course because God is no respecter of persons and there is neither male nor female for we are all
One in Christ next fact the immediate proclamation in Jerusalem the majority of scholars could not deny that the resurrection was first preached in Jerusalem all the evidence leads to Jerusalem as being the home base and happening very early on such as the development of early Christian Creed’s and how all the sources suggest
Jerusalem is where Christianity began Tacitus mentions off the cuff that Christianity began in Judea and spread from there in one of Paul’s early epistles he mentions off the cuff that the Apostles are still preaching in Jerusalem now why does this matter well when we look at the importance of time
And when you proclaim a miracle that fact can make a serious impact as James siren said the Apostles proclaim the resurrection at Pentecost when Jerusalem expected the spread of the report and endeavored to prevent it well the eyes of their enemies were yet sparkling with rage and madness
While Calvary was yet died with the blood they had spilt there do imposters take such measures would they not have waited till the fury of the Jews had been appeased till judges and public officers had been changed until people had been less attentive to their dispositions if the evidence was not in
Their favor it would have made sense for the early church to go elsewhere as cults often do cult leaders ran up their followers and take them away from civilization or to a different area from the place where you can be disproven even with Mormonism Joseph Smith’s led his people away from New York
But the disciples walked right up to the Sanhedrin and said you crucified your Messiah and he has been raised now these people are either crazy or they are absolutely convinced they are right so the conspiracy theory has no hope of explaining this if you’re an impostor
You go off to Spain or India and proclaim your miracle not in Jerusalem where they have the evidence then motive and the means to debunk you since we know the resurrection was proclaimed early on and it was in Jerusalem it is hard to say that the mythic theory can
Explain this either this was not something we can say with developed later if the created first Corinthians 15 is roughly dated within three years of Pentecost that means there were Christians right there on Jerusalem developing this which set a foundational belief for Christians to be able to
Memorize so there is no reason to think it was developed later on or far off elsewhere so the mythic theory cannot explain this fact either but what about the hallucination theory well if all we have to go on is this fact I suppose a miraculous hallucination could convince
The disciples to preach the resurrection immediately in Jerusalem but it is still doubtful because hallucinations or visions don’t really imply a physical resurrection or do they fit with group hallucinations as we discussed earlier but it is possible if all we have is this fact alone so just in case we miss
Something we’ll allow this one to pass but the resurrection theory explains this with the most ease because if Jesus was resurrected of course the disciples had the boldness to proclaim the resurrection God would have been on their side and all the evidence would have been in their favor
Next fact the voluntary suffering of disciples and witnesses this is an important fact we cannot ignore multiple attestation from Christian and non-christian sources testifies that the early witnesses of the risen Christ were persecuted martyred for their faith Tacitus and Suetonius mention events and Josephus as well who even tells us how
James was martyred in Jerusalem first belief Jesus was the Risen Messiah Paul also admits to intense persecution early on in fact his scholars like NT right note 2nd Corinthians was written as a response to the Corinthians who asked Paul to provide some evidence of good fortune to show God was on his side
Asian people believed like some still today that if you were suffering persecution it was evidence you were being punished by God and needed to turn from your ways Paul responded with the opposite despite the cultural norms and it was meant to challenge their beliefs of how God worked a later Epistle from
Clement of rome talked of how Paul and Peter were martyred in Rome for their faith and axor course how the early witnesses were persecuted and murdered the evidence for this is multiple attested so what some people may say people die for their faith all the time why are the
Christians any different people will and have often died for things that were false but they don’t tend to die for something they know to be false we’re not talking about Christians who were martyred but the founders of Christianity who were murdered these men and women did not die just for faith but
Something they claim to have seen with their own eyes the root meaning of the word martyr is witness over time we’ve expanded the word to mean anyone who dies for their beliefs but originally they referred to someone who was a witness of an event and died for his
Truth the disciples didn’t just die for their beliefs they died for events they claimed had happened and knew very well they were true are made up fliers make lousy martyrs when you have nothing to gain it doesn’t make sense to make up or hold to a theory that is going to get
You nothing and the Apostles were not getting a whole lot out of their new religion they were constantly facing persecution from the Jews and threats of death nor do they become wealthy from what they were doing they were doing it because they were insane than one of the
Cult following they did some things that didn’t make any sense like establishing churches in other regions which it did not have total control over Paul moved from city to city raising up believers and then moving on you’re trying to establish a cult in a controlled group
Of people you do as cults do you gather your followers remove them from society where there’s a threat they’ll be pulled away by reality and you keep them very close to keep them brainwashed the Apostles didn’t do that they stayed in populated cities and left their new
Churches to go start more churches in other cities which leaves your followers vulnerable to corruption and if we read the epistles that is exactly what happened the Apostles had to revisit them and write letters to correct them constantly so it doesn’t seem like there was anything to gain from starting
Christianity unless it was an elaborate plan to be martyred so the conspiracy theory is hopeless in explaining this one the mythic theory doesn’t work either because the voluntary suffering has multiple attestation and even from secular authors and there is nothing that challenges that the disciples were
Persecuted or that many of them died for the events there port it is true if the disciples hallucinate the whole thing that it is possible they would be willing to take it to the grave but it would have to be a wild miraculous hallucination to utterly convince them of it and as we
Have seen such hallucinations are very improbable but it is slightly slightly slightly possible if the resurrection theory is true then this fact makes perfect sense the disciples were willing to suffer because Jesus was resurrected and it was better to deny men than to deny God who they witnessed with their own eyes
Final fact the existence of the empty tomb Gary Habermas has surveyed the material written by scholars on the resurrection and it’s found that 75% of them accept that tomb was found empty on Easter morning for example skeptical scholar Jacob Cramer says by far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the
Biblical statements concerning the empty tomb the evidence for this is simply overwhelming however some scholars like John Dominic Crossan do not think Jesus was buried in a tomb but thrown in a trench for dogs to eat because the Romans who not have a lot of proper burial for criminals but such a theory
Flies in the face of a mountain of evidence first Dale Alison who is skeptical of physical resurrection points out the word in the cretan 1st Corinthians 15 for bury would rarely be used for dumping of criminals in a trench for dogs to eat so the earliest
Account of the burial of Jesus would be incompatible with Crossing’s argument we also have multiple attestation crucified victims were buried and two different sources say Jesus was buried we also have archaeological evidence a crucified victim received a proper burial and there was no reason to think the Romans
Would not have allowed this practice they were certainly okay with allowing other Jewish practices to go on in Jerusalem that’s just temple worship which they detest it because it meant a rejection of Roman gods they allowed to juice a conductor on trials have their own temple guards keep the Sabbath and so forth
There is no reason they would not have allowed this as well and it fits with archaeological and textual evidence Jesus’s burial not only has multiple attestation but it meets the criteria of embarrassment since they say he was buried in the tomb of a Sanhedrin member which would have been dishonouring for
His followers such a group had just their lorry and now they needed the Bama tune for him from one of its own members to the public this would have looked pretty humiliating and the fact that they mentioned he was in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea means the tomb was
Public knowledge and its whereabouts were known so the public at any time would have known about it and could have readily debunked it if the tomb was not empty but the account of the empty tomb is also embarrassing because it was discovered by women and we have already
Discussed this is not something you would have made up Matthew also mentions the competing theory that the disciples stole the body this is odd because why would Matthew want to mention the competing theory which could possibly start up doubt among the people he was trying to convert Justin Martyr writing
Later has to respond to this theory because it was the official story Jews were telling people which is an interesting admission because it says the body could not be found if the Sanhedrin still at the body they could have had Gentiles bring it out for them
And show the tomb was never empty but the Christians never had to respond to this charge so both sides agreed the body was missing finally we have the Nazareth inscription a stone found in the area and it has written on it an imperial decree from around 41 ad which
Says that the penalty for grave robbing was death which is interesting because it is very severe for how Romans punished thieving the Romans would not normally give such a high penalty for stealing something but this will make sense with the rise of Christianity and what Suetonius tells us in Rome there
Were riots among the Jews on accounts of Christus which was a common Roman mispronunciation of Christ and eventually Claudius expelled all the Jews because of it if some Jews in Rome were preaching Christ was resurrected and riots resulted from it and the tomb was not empty there would be no need for
An imperial decree because they could just produce the body but because the only alternative explanation was the body was missing because it was stolen Rome’s only option would be to issue a decree to try to combat the accounts of a missing body if there was a body then
Rome could have just dispelled the riots with the body and not have to indirectly admit the body when missing so it appears to be that from all sides the body was missing away there’s no evidence the empty tomb was just a fabrication and this is why most scholars today accept that tomb was
Found empty all the evidence simply favours it so if the body was stolen who did it would Rome of course not because they would not have cared how about the Jewish leaders why would they they wanted Jesus crucified shamed buried and forgotten the last thing they wanted was
Suspicion of him coming back to life of course the Sanhedrin claimed it was the disciples but that is unlikely their rabbi had just been crucified and a movement was dispersed in shamed they were in fear the Jewish authorities would come after them as well there is
No reason to think they would have been in the position to steal a body and create a mass hoax second if they had stolen the body there is little reason to think they would have reported the theory that Jewish leaders were spreading if it was true the last thing
They would have wanted would help spread the rumor they had stolen the body and if they had stolen the body they would not have reported to their shame and dishonor that they had not believed the reports of the women when they found the empty tomb nor would they have
Embarrassingly reported that they had not understood that Jesus had predicted his rise these were very embarrassing and shameful things to report later Christians would not have made this up and attack the honor and authority of their leaders nor would have the disciples unless they wanted to shame
Themselves and most of all where would they have taken the body a common overlooked fact is that this was Passover and the city was flooded with pilgrims they would have been seen and they would have been caught it would have been very hard to pull off especially getting the body out of the
Sanhedrin section of town so for the conspiracy theory to work you need to deposit the disciples were in fear for their lives yet somehow decided to steal the body and faked a resurrection even though none of them were expecting that then they managed to get the body out of
The Sanhedrin section of town where the tombs were and hide it in an overcrowded City the entire theory becomes overwhelmingly unlikely the hallucination theory doesn’t work either did the entire population of Jerusalem hallucinate so the theory it was not really discovered empty fails as well what about the mythic theory so I’ve
Tried to claim the empty tomb was made up later because it is not specifically mentioned in the Creed Paul gives us in first Corinthians well this just ignores the amount of evidence we already gave and that the empty tomb and physical resurrection are both mentioned in the early passion
Narrative found in mark but most of all it overlooks what the Korean first Corinthians says it says that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures he was buried and raised it is pretty obvious that what was buried
Is what was raised and therefore the tomb would have been empty as NT Wright says the fact that the empty tomb itself so prominent the Gospel accounts does not appear to be specifically mentioned in this passage is not significant the mention here of buried and raised no
More need to be amplified in that way then one would need to amplify the statement I walk down the street with the qualification on my feet so the mythic theory fails here as well but there is one theory they can’t account for all the data it is the theory that
Jesus was raised and vindicated by God no other Theory out there can account for all the data the mythic theory fails because we only argued from facts that we know are early and could not have been made up the conspiracy theory could not account for the quality of the
Testimonies of the disciples the empty tomb herwise skeptics would join a small persecuted minority the hallucination theory could only work if you posit some pretty miraculous hallucinations to cause the disciples to change their idea skeptics to convert and posit crazy ideas no one was expecting or looking
For it has to posit such a wild hallucination it would take a miracle itself only the theory that was reported can account for all the data because of that it has explanatory scope because they can explain all the data with the least amount of effort it has explanatory power it provides
Illumination as well which means it can explain other areas of history like the rise of Christianity and the belief in physical resurrection in fact this means three pieces of the criteria are filled that historians use when judging an historical hypothesis behan mccullough who has outlined the criterion for weighing historical theories accepts the
Resurrection hypothesis meets these three things better than any other hypothesis but claims it fails the other two pieces of criteria this Christian hypothesis is of greater explanatory scope and power than other hypotheses which try to account for the relevant evidence but it is less plausible and more ad hoc than
They are so McCullough accepts the resurrection meets three out of five of the criteria for historical investigation but fails the other two however there have been replies to challenge this dr. Travis Campbell has why is the resurrection theory ad-hoc to be ad hoc according to McCullough means a number
Of new suppositions are made by hypothesis that are not already implied in existing knowledge so the hypothesis adds extra assumptions in order to explain the data that is not already present but dr. Campbell points out the resurrection theory only adds one extra assumption not multiple it is difficult
To see why the resurrection hypothesis is extraordinarily ad hoc it requires only one new supposition that God exists surely rival hypotheses require many new suppositions the hallucination theory requires we say group hallucinations plus multi-sensory experiences happened on multiple occasions and that they were so powerful that the disciples took it
To their death preaching something that only brought in poverty and turmoil as well as a crazy Mass City hallucination that there was an empty tomb the conspiracy theory wants us to believe a bunch of frightened followers of Jesus stole a body in secret in an overcrowded
City to makeup up the story they were not expecting or was not in line with Jewish messianic expectations in order to get themselves murdered and that some of the skeptics decided to join their poor persecuted movement for no reason at all the mythic theory expects us to believe an extra assumption for each
Fact that it was actually made up later in spite of hard evidence these facts were very early and unlikely made up the resurrection theory only wants us to add the assumption that God exists which is not @ha if we combine the resurrection argument with other arguments we’ve already presented which infer theism
Since we’ve already argued for theism the resurrection hypothesis would hardly be ad hoc as dr. Campbell says moreover for the person who is already a theist the resurrection hypothesis does not even introduced a new supposition of God’s existence since that is already implied by existing knowledge so the resurrection hypothesis cannot be said
To be ad ha simply by a virtue of the number of suppositions it introduces what about plausibility a historical theory is plausible if other areas are known with confidence and suggests the same theory yours is suggesting so if other things suggests the same conclusion is your theory that would make your theory
Plausible and in line with other beliefs but as we’ve already suggested why would the resurrection theory not be plausible if we have other arguments to infer theism as William Lane Craig says only if the naturalist has good reasons to think that God’s existence is implausible or is intervention in the
World implausible could he justifiably regard the resurrection hypothesis as implausible so if one insists on assuming naturalism is true and leaves no reason for theism as a possibility then they can say the resurrection theory is implausible but that is arguing from a presupposition and not being open to evidence regardless of how
One feels about it and we can say that in conjunction with other arguments the resurrection hypothesis is not ad hoc nor is it implausible has already been shown God exists thus we can see why Anthony flue was bold enough to say the resurrection has more evidence than any
Other miracle claim the resurrection is the only theory that can explain all the data and it can do it while not being at hawk or implausible the evidence infers that God has acted in the world to raise Jesus from the dead as Paulo Frederickson admitted they must have
Seen something in all the evidence favors that what they saw was the risen Savior
-We’re about to start my initiation ritual, into the “Luciferian” religion. -I saw him, an angel, he was enormous, with seven wings. I’m organizing an army of Lucifer’s children. What would be the ultimate goal of this army? To confront them. -Who, you wonder? -The grand whore. -The grand whore, you mean Catholic church?
We bring this man before you. LUCIFER’S TEMPLE Hi, I’m Andrés Páramo. We’re really close to what is called the Luciferian Temple, Seeds of Light, led by a guy called Victor Damian Rozo. Hello friends from Latin America, I’m Victor Damian Rozo Villareal. Founder of the Association, Luciferian Temple, Seeds of Light.
We came here to interview him and to do a satanic initiation ritual. And to also see what people think about this and what their opinions are regarding this phenomenon. Until now he hasn’t revealed himself. Some girls that entered that place came out mentally insane. The way they adore Lucifer by sacrificing innocent animals,
Killing them in such a cruel way so they can drink their blood and idolizing Lucifer’s image. We’re carrying out some legal proceedings, not because of the religion they practice but because they don’t have the legal requirements to construct their building. They’re going to be fined
$64 million pesos. He has to pay it if not they’ll demolish the place. Even the police have visited but they didn’t find anyone in there. The devil for us is a negative thing, a symbol of all bad things like, no values We haven’t done anything here because we haven’t found anything
But we will keep our doors closed if we do. The people we interviewed at Quimbaya square all had the same opinion about Victor Damian and his temple. They all rejected the idea and were afraid of it so they kept the emergence of this Luciferian religion at a cautious distance.
A different story emerged when we traveled to his farm. Alberto Trujillo, a neighbor who worked for him doing many things, took us on a ride, recounting a kinder, more humane side of Lucifer’s son. -Yes, I’m his driver. He’ll ask me to go and buy materials for him since he’s sick.
-Yeah, and do you live close to him? Our properties are close to each other. -Yeah, and what do you think about the temple? Nothing, everyone has the right to do their own thing. -Even if it’s Satanic? -Yes. -And if he’s the devil, he’s just as bad. Yes or no? -Yes.
He’s evil so we have to take care of ourselves. -Well, what about Damian? -What do you think about him? -No, he’s very professional. -Very professional. -Hail Mary, for sure. -He just built that temple about a year ago. -And nothing has happened? No, nothing has happened. -Nobody has gone there? No, no.
-And don’t you find that a bit weird? A temple where nothing happens? Some people say that they use it to film horror movies. So they made that space to film horror movies. about vampires. The ranch has two houses, two swimming pools, a couple of German Shepherds, and finally, in the distance,
The construction of a building with inverted crosses. From the outside, the temple looks deserted, abandoned and totally private. And for being a church, it doesn’t really feel welcoming. -Victor or Hector? -Victor is more of an alias. But my real name is Hector Londoño Villegas. Victor Damián Rozo is more of a personality.
-So, Hector, please tell us what this space is about? On this side we have a shield, “Satanas Rae”, with an inverted cross on the shield, which represents the rebellion, a worldwide rejection of religion, of Christianity. And why do you reject Catholicism? Because of their history and what they have done to us.
Because of what they represent, this huge scam that they’ve embroiled us in for thousands of years. This is a Luciferian shield. It represents good and evil. And what is the evil part? Evil for us does not exist. Got it? What’s important to us is your character and behavior.
If you do good things than you’re going to have a good life. It all depends on your behavior. As followers of Lucifer, we do not believe in evil as something that’s imposed on us. If you do this, you’re bad. That having sex with your neighbor’s wife is bad. No.
We don’t believe in that. To make a pact with the devil is to change your doctrine, change your religion. To make a pact with the devil is nothing else but to embrace him and accept him. I wanted to deliver this message and grab the people’s attention in a certain way.
My goal here on Earth is to gather souls for him. So I had to send a message since people know him like this. So, I had to do something like a marketing campaign. Hello friends from Latin America. I am Victor Damian Rozo Villareal. Lucifer’s representative here on earth.
And, founder of Lucifer’s Temple, Seeds of Light. The only Luciferian temple in the world. Don’t let yourself be fooled! Don’t you let them take your money anymore. Don’t let them scam you. If they do, you’re gullible. Don’t be fooled! This is Victor Damian Rozo, the founder of the Luciferian Temple, Seeds of Light.
-Tell me, where are you from? -I come from a very spiritual family. From witch doctors and sorcerers. My mother was a renown spiritist. My grandfather too, he healed and cursed as he wished. I stared studying this when I was in school. I remember I used to get my books and a Ouija board,
And I would go study. I would go to the bathroom and I began playing with the Ouija board there. I explored new things. And as I got older I started to work as a spiritist. As a sorcerer. Like what your mom did? Exactly. But, it was a side job
Because before this, I used to do random jobs. I use to be a normal person, working in shoe warehouses, selling clothes. -All day? -All day. But when was the moment where you decided to work for Lucifer, and nothing else? In a dream, I saw him, he was an enormous angel,
And he told me that he had big plans for me. He told me, you are the chosen one. Got it. I chose you to gather my children. We have to organize the army of the children of Lucifer. What would that army’s goal be? We would confront them. Who, you wonder? The great whore.
The great whore? The Catholic church? Yes, the Catholic church. I’m here on earth, sent by my father, Lucifer. I was sent by him, to gather souls. To gather souls, devoted followers for Lucifer. For our amazing God, I am the chosen one. -We’re in front of La Crónica building,
One of the most important and established newspapers in this region. In there, Oliver Gomez is waiting for us. A journalist that has been following Lucifer’s son very closely. Among other things, he has reported that this guy hasn’t traveled around the world, but has actually photoshopped himself into these pictures.
So let’s hear what he has to say. I found out about him from a report that I wrote about a person that has no legs. -Why do you do this? Because it’s easier for me to receive what I need from the devil than with God. And I hope that Mr. Damian helps me.
What tangible things has Lucifer given to you, what do you have now? Right now, I have some money saved, a car, and my health. He has given me what I dreamed of, and I have more dreams that he’s going to help come true for me.
But then he told me that it was a lie. It was a scam, he received money to do that. And that guy ended up scamming him as well. Journalistically speaking, what do you think was the most serious thing? His false advertising. You can’t play with people’s hopes and dreams.
We seen his videos on the internet, I think he’s deleted them all but fortunately we downloaded one of them and we uploaded it to our platform. We saw a powerful, rich man telling people that they could get all these material things Just as he did with the handicapped man,
The man with no legs, who’s asks for help in southern part of the city. This was all a lie. So lying to people and playing with their dreams is the worst thing about Damian Rozo, or whatever his name is. He’s destroying people’s dreams.
Hello, friends from a Latin America. This is Victor Damian Rozo. The founder of the Luciferian Temple, Seeds of Light. Your temple. The benefits are clear and obvious. You’ll leave your sadness behind. Rebel against the regime and start worshipping Satan, the true god, Lucifer.
Are you tired of looking for God and answers that you can’t find? Contact me, from anywhere in the world. I’ll tell you how you can be a true believer and make a pact with Lucifer. My name is Victor Damian Rozo Villarreal. Dare to do it! Let yourself be surprised.
As night fell, we came back to Victor Damian’s farmhouse to see him in action. To see how far or close we were to the possible manifestation of this serious religion. We are about to start my initiation ritual into the Luciferian religion. Victor Damian is anxiously awaiting, but I think I’m more anxious.
There are some of his followers. He’s wearing a red tunic the rest of them are wearing black tunics. and they’re about to dress me up to convert me into a believer. We’ll see what happens tonight. We’re gathered here, once again to venerate the name of our father, Lucifer.
We need a lot of discipline and consistency. In the name of our father, Lucifer, the God we worship, please, let’s “hit a home run” as they colloquially say. King of Earth. Planetary King. Before you, Lucifer, is this man. Open up his eyes. He’s here before you, God of freedom.
God of love, God of the universe. Oh, Lucifer. We present this man before you. Praying for you. I curse the presence of that false God they taught us to adore. I curse the presence of that God that I used to follow. Your revenge is my revenge. Your power is my power.
Your light is my light. Your goodness is my goodness. You taught me the true meaning of goodness. Your gave me freedom, you gave me power. Your gave me a true reason to live. For eternity, our eternal celestial father, we stand before you, Lucifer. My soul evokes your presence.
Our souls are longing for the end of times. The day when we will finally fight at your side. The day of the final battle, when we will be victorious. Glory to you, Father Lucifer. Repeat after me: -Before you. -Before you. -Powerful God of freedom. -Powerful God of freedom. -Powerful Lucifer. -Powerful Lucifer.
-God of the Universe. -God of the Universe. -God of freedom. -God of freedom. -God of love. -God of love. -God of power. -God of power. -God of richness. -God of richness. -I come before you. -I come before you. -Here we are. -Here we are. -In your temple. -In your temple.
-Looking for. -Looking for. -The path. -The path. -That leads me. -That leads me. -To you. -To you. -It is for you to judge, not me. The Luciferian ceremony has come to an end. One of the thousand ceremonies that have taken place here at the Luciferian Temple, Seeds of Light.
How did feel me throughout the ritual? You were very relaxed, very calm and curious. What about what we did in the temple, like making me go down on my knees What was that for exactly? That was an invocation to our father, Lucifer.
But it all depends on him, he knows if you really want it. I feel that you really don’t want to be a Luciferian. That’s what I believe. I think that your beliefs are different. I don’t know what your beliefs are, but I respect them.
But I don’t think you’re really interested in being a Luciferian. Now it depends on him, if he decides to accept you. The ceremony has come to an end. It was intense. It seems now that Lucifer is going to decide if I’ll be a part of his reign. We’ll see tomorrow how I feel.
-We are back in Montenegro Quindío, the day after the ceremony. We were left with some doubts yesterday. Everything went too fast. I’d like to know how this place usually works. Victor Damián is really charming. I found him fascinating during the interview.
He’s very kind, recieved us openly and he put on a good show. The ceremony was incredible, but there were some details that disappointed me a little bit. His cellphone kept ringing throughout the ceremony. He paid his followers. We have an audio recording
Where he told them he’ll give them a certain amount of money for their time. -How much for you? $10 pesos? -$11 pesos. -$11 pesos? -Fine, $11 pesos. -May God bless you, my son. That man has $50 pesos for each one of you. Arrange it with him.
Guys, please head out fast. Hurry up! Hurry up! Oh! This is what I love the most about parties. These are the tunics that the believers used. Today we found them in the swimming pool, in a very visible place. We also found the cross thrown over there.
The cross they used to purify me yesterday is now laying here at the entrance. All the things that we found the next day after the ceremony make me doubt the faith that Lucifer’s son has in his father. However, that doesn’t take away from his charisma when speaking about
The subject, or the grandiosity of the ceremony he conducted. There’s no doubt that this guy knows how to put on a show. What’s the purpose of forgiveness, if they keep cheating on people? If they keep subjugating them? If they keep taking people to churches
So they can take away the little money they have. While they continue to get richer and richer, and the people get poorer. Don’t close your eyes during the day, and say, “It must be nighttime since I only see darkness.” No! Dare to join us, and you will be surprised.
Well when we say that Jesus is God, we have to be very careful to qualify what we mean by that. We mean, when we say that Jesus is God, that Jesus has a divine nature, but He also has a human nature. Obviously, His human nature is not a part of His deity.
It’s a manifestation of His humanity. Now you have two problems when we deal with the whole question of the Trinity and the incarnation. The classic explanation or formulation for the Trinity is this, that God is one in essence, but three in person.
That is, the three persons of the Godhead — the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And they are all, as one essence, fully God, co-eternal and co-substantial in terms of their power and dignity and their being. But in the incarnation, you have just the opposite.
Instead of one essence and three persons, you have one person with two essences or two natures, and those two natures are the divine and the human. And we have to be very careful not to confuse the divine and the human natures of Jesus
Because if we do that, what we end up with is a deified human or a humanized deity, which in and of Himself is neither really human or divine. And the church has had to wrestle with that in past ages, and that’s why they’re very
Careful to distinguish between the two natures of the human and the divine. And so, when we say that Jesus was God, we don’t mean that the whole of Jesus was divine, because the human nature was not divine.
But He had a divine nature, and that’s what we’re saying when we say Jesus is God we’re saying that He is God incarnate, God united with a human nature. I hope that helps you.
SPROUL: Now, when we talk about Jesus receiving what you call “the substance” from His mother, the Virgin Mary, of course we’re talking about His human nature. And because we’re talking about His deriving His human nature from His mother, you would
Think that that human nature would pass along, as it is the case with every other human being, all of the ramifications of original sin. Now, that raises all kinds of theological questions that touch upon it. One of the oldest theological questions is the question of how the soul, for example,
Is transmitted from parents to their children. And the two schools of thought of that are called “creationism” and “traducianism.” Traducianism says that the whole person, body and soul, is transmitted from the parents to their progeny through the natural process of birth.
Others argue, which is called “creationism,” that every time a human being is born, that person is a brand new creation by the immediate and direct power of God’s creativity. And so it’s not a matter of transmitting human nature by natural processes.
Now the reason I say that this question you’ve raised touches on the dispute over creationism and traducianism is that if you’re a creationist, you have no problem with having a human nature coming from the mother of Jesus, yet at the same time being born without original sin
If it’s a direct and immediate act of divine creation. If you’re a traducianist, on the other hand, where you see the body and soul being transmitted through the natural process, then the question that you raise becomes a more difficult problem. However, others have argued, and particularly historically in the Roman Catholic Church
That the reason for the virgin birth and to bypass the male was not because they believe that original sin was transmitted by the male rather than the female, but rather that the miraculous dimension of Jesus’ birth being a virgin birth was partly designed by God
To interrupt the normal transmission of human nature from parents to their children in order to make it possible for a human being post-Adam to be born without original sin. Now in the mystery of the incarnation, we don’t know exactly what process God used to make that so in the birth of Jesus.
We do know, as the Scriptures teach us, that He was made like us in every respect except one, namely without sin and without original sin. Some have argued against that saying if Jesus didn’t have original sin, He wasn’t truly human.
But of course, the problem with that is this, that Adam before the fall was truly human, and we in our glorified state in heaven without sin then will still be human. So that original sin is not an inherent necessity for humanness.
So we know theologically that God could have this child born through the virgin birth from His mother and bypassing the normal process of original sin. WEBB: R.C., I’m just curious, did some of the earliest church councils wrestle with that question? SPROUL: Well yes, they did.
And of course, early on there was a debate and a dispute over from whence Jesus’ divine nature came? And Mary was called “theotokos”, the mother of God, but not in the sense that Jesus derived His divine nature from His mother, but only to point out that the One that she bore and
That she nurtured as His mother was God incarnate.
