Category Archives: News

News

William Lane Craig lectures on the historical Jesus at Columbia University

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One of the other software engineers at work is always finding interesting sermons and lectures to listen to. On Friday afternoon, things were a bit slow, so she messaged me a lecture featuring Dr. William Lane Craig, talking on “Who Was Jesus?” at Columbia University. I wanted to encourage her, so I put it on to listen as well. I liked it so much, I wrote out a summary below to go with it.

Here is the lecture:

Description:

Dr. William Lane Craig unpacks questions surrounding Jesus’ resurrection and the historical accuracy of the biblical claims.  Columbia University, 2009.

And my outline:

Different views of Jesus:

  • Jewish view of Jesus
  • Muslim view of Jesus
  • skeptical historian view of Jesus
  • what did Jesus think about himself?
  • Jesus didn’t write anything of his own
  • best sources are the records of Jesus followers
  • problem: how do we know these records are accurate
  • maybe stories of Jesus’ divinity emerged over time

New tools from the Renaissance:

  • historiography
  • textual criticism
  • investigate Jesus as a historical figure
  • same tools are used for other historical figures

Sources:

  • Christian
  • Jewish
  • Roman
  • Many more sources than other figures of antiquity

External sources:

  • confirm what the gospels say, but don’t say anything new

Treating the Bible as a collection of ancient documents

  • not using the Bible to prove the Bible is divine
  • just treating the books as historical documents

New Testament

  • a collection of the earliest documents
  • much later documents about Jesus not included
  • later documents not written by eyewitnesses

Skeptical scholars:

  • ignore the earliest sources
  • focus on the later sources
  • result is a more radical left-friendly Jesus

Burden of proof

  • are the gospels assumed reliable until proven unreliable?
  • are the gospels assumed unreliable until proven reliable?

Five reasons to assume the New Testament is reliable

1. Insufficient time for legendary influences to erase the historical core

  • the gap between the events and the sources is much shorter than other comparable sources
  • Greek and Roman sources are at least 1-2 generations from the events they record
  • Gospels written down and circulated within first generation after the events they record
  • the eyewitnesses were alive at the time they were written down

2. Gospels are not the same genre as folk tales or urban legends

  • Gospels talk about real people who actually lived
  • Gospels talk about real places excavated by archaeologists

3. Oral tradition in first century Jewish society

  • Jewish culture valued reliable transmission of religious tradition
  • Memorization of long passages and entire books

4. Restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus

  • The apostles and other eyewitnesses could correct embellishments

5. Gospel writers make testable statements that are found to be true

  • Luke is the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts
  • In Acts, Luke accompanies with the eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus
  • Acts contains many historical details accurate to the times and places he writes about
  • Luke’s gospel is in accord with archaeological discoveries made since

It’s reasonable to accept the general reliability of the Gospels, unless they are found unreliable

Historical basis for facets of Jesus

1. Unique Son of God

  • historical critics claim that the divinity of Jesus developed over time
  • why would monotheistic Jews contradict their monotheism by inventing a divine Jesus?
  • the only reasonsable answer is that Jesus claimed divinity for himself
  • His followers accepted it because Jesus provided reasons to believe
  • Mark 12:1-8
    Earliest gospel reveals Jesus’ self-understanding as God’s “only beloved son”
  • Matthew 11:27
    “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” This story is also in Luke. Source is “Q”, an early set of traditions common to Matthew and Luke
  • Mark 13:32
    Jesus sees himself as above humans and angels, but subordinate to God the Father

Why would anyone take Jesus seriously, unless he was able to provide evidence?

2. Jesus’ miracles

  • Jesus’ miracle stories are in all four sources
  • The only reason to reject them is because of a philosophical bias against the supernatural

3. Trial and crucifixion

  • Crucifixion narrative is in the Gospels, Paul’s letters, Acts
  • Also confirmed by Josephus and Roman historians
  • Historians across the ideological spectrum affirm the crucifixion

Why was Jesus crucified?

  • Doesn’t fit with the skeptical view that Jesus was uncontroversial and had few followers

4. Jesus’ resurrection

  • Jesus resurrection is the best explanation for historical facts accepted by diverse majority of historians
  1. Burial location known to friends and enemies, and corpse would refute the resurrection
  2. Tomb was found empty by a group of Jesus’ women followers
  3. Post-mortem appearances to individuals and groups, friends, skeptics and enemies
  4. Original disciples became convinced that Jesus rose from dead counter to their own interests
  • The facts are accepted by a majority of scholars across the ideological spectrum
  • Dr. Craig’s debate with a scholar who invented an unknown, identical twin brother who was separated from Jesus at birth
  • Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide affirms the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event

Then there is a period of question and answer, which I did not find useful, because the questions seemed to be more about the needs and feelings of Christians, rather than about the facts presented by Dr. Craig, or about how these facts survive in debates on university campuses. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

It never hurts to listen to William Lane Craig. If you listen enough, you can remember his points when you get the opportunity. In college, all of my friends at Crusade could do his opening speech from his debates on God’s existence from memory.

News

Dr. Tim Stratton on the Apologetics 315 podcast to discuss free will and divine sovereignty

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I really enjoyed this interview of Dr. Stratton from the Apologetics 315 podcast. I’ve had non-Christians in previous workplaces raise the problem of free will vs divine sovereignty. After all, they say, how can humans be responsible for their choices if God is all-powerful? If God is all-powerful, then surely he must control everything, and there’s no space for free will. Right?

The episode can be heard here.

Here is the show description:

In this episode, Brian Auten and Chad Gross interview Tim Stratton of Free Thinking Ministries. They discuss the topic of Molinism as it relates to God’s sovereignty, human free will, and why it matters. Tim’s book on the subject is Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism: A Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Philosophical Analysis.

1:03 – Intro to Tim Stratton
1:41 – Why Molinism on the podcast?
3:20 – Welcome to Tim Stratton
3:54 – How Tim became a Christian
9:37 – God as a maximally great being
10:43 – Tim’s dissertation
11:18 – What does Tim find compelling about Molinism?
12:42 – The Mere Molinism Facebook group
16:14 – What is the problem that Molinism is trying to solve?
22:47 – How to briefly summarize Molinism?
23:41 – Defining terms: Middle knowledge and counterfactuals
31:39 – Scriptures that affirm counterfactuals / middle knowledge
41:53 – Why us the term “mere” Molinism?
46:22 – Can Molinism be applied to salvation?
48:21 – Does this chess analogy work?
52:10 – Objection: Molinism is not derived from scripture
58:23 – Objection: Who cares? That’s just for scholars and theologians
1:02:45 – How Molinism saved Tim’s marriage
1:06:20 – Where to find Tim’s resources

Tim Stratton’s reconciliation of divine sovereignty and free will is interesting to me. He keeps God as the sole initiator of salvation. And that’s good. But it also makes sure that human who resist God’s leading are responsible for their choice to resist God, and that’s also good. We want salvation to be 100% by faith alone in Christ alone. But we don’t want God to be the cause of people not being saved. On Stratton’s view, God wants everyone to be saved. If anyone is saved, it’s because God did ALL THE WORK to lead them and secure their salvation with the death of Jesus on the cross. But, on Stratton’s view, humans do get a choice – the choice to trust God or not. And so, if a person is not saved, then it’s their fault – not God’s.

If you hear this challenge from non-Christians, be sure to listen to the podcast. You can find a written version of his argument on his web site, Free Thinking Ministries.

News

The seven fatal flaws of moral relativism

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Moral relativism is the view that moral values and moral duties do not exist in reality, but only exist as opinions in people’s minds. When you ask a moral relativist where the belief that stealing is wrong comes from, he may tell you that it is his opinion, or that it is the opinion of most people in his society. But he cannot tell you that stealing is wrong independent of what people think, because morality (on moral relativism) is just personal preference.

So what’s wrong with it?

I found this list of the seven flaws of moral relativism at the Salvo magazine web site.

Here’s the summary:

  1. Moral relativists can’t accuse others of wrongdoing.
  2. Relativists can’t complain about the problem of evil.
  3. Relativists can’t place blame or accept praise.
  4. Relativists can’t make charges of unfairness or injustice.
  5. Relativists can’t improve their morality.
  6. Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions.
  7. Relativists can’t promote the obligation of tolerance.

Here’s my favorite flaw of relativism (#6):

Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions. What’s there to talk about? If morals are entirely relative and all views are equal, then no way of thinking is better than another. No moral position can be judged as adequate or deficient, unreasonable, acceptable, or even barbaric. If ethical disputes make sense only when morals are objective, then relativism can only be consistently lived out in silence. For this reason, it is rare to meet a rational and consistent relativist, as most are quick to impose their own moral rules like “It’s wrong to push your own morality on others”. This puts relativists in an untenable position – if they speak up about moral issues, they surrender their relativism; if they do not speak up, they surrender their humanity. If the notion of moral discourse makes sense intuitively, then moral relativism is false.

I sometimes get a lot of flack from atheists who complain that I don’t let them make any moral statements without asking them first to ground morality on their worldview. And that’s because on atheism morality IS NOT rationally grounded, so they can’t answer. In an accidental universe, you can only describe people’s personal preferences or social customs, that vary by time and place. It’s all arbitrary – like having discussions about what food is best or what clothing is best. The answer is always going to be “it depends”. It depends on the person who is speaking because it’s a subjective claim, not an objective claim. There is no objective way we ought to behave.

So, practically speaking, everyone has to decide whether right and wrong are real – objectively real. If they are objectively real, that means that there is a right way for human beings to behave, and a wrong way for human beings to behave. It means that things that are really objectively wrong like rape are wrong for all times and all places, regardless of what individuals and societies might think of it. In order to rationally ground that kind of morality, you have to have a foundation for it – a cosmic Designer who decides for all times and places what the conduct of his creatures ought to be. And then our moral duties are duties that are owed to this Designer. It is like playing football or playing a boardgame – the person who invents the game decides the rules. But if there is no designer of the game, then there are no rules.

Without a designer of the universe, the question of how we ought to act is decided by people in different times and different places. It’s arbitrary and variable, and therefore it doesn’t do the job of prescribing behavior authoritatively. It’s very important not to get involved in any serious endeavor with another person or persons if they don’t have a sense of right and wrong being absolute and fixed. A belief in objective moral values is a necessary pre-requisite for integrity.