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I’m not saying that people will become Christians
because of the
arguments and evidence. Rather I’m saying that the arguments and
evidence will help to create a culture in which Christian belief
is a reasonable thing. They create an environment in which
people will be open to the gospel. So becoming trained in
apologetics is one way, a vital way, of being salt and light in
American culture today. [18]
Although at a superficial level suffering calls into question
God’s existence, at a deeper level suffering actually
proves God’s
existence. For apart from God, suffering is not really bad. If
the atheist believes that suffering is bad or
ought not to be, then
he’s making moral judgments that are possible only if God
exists. [162]
Jesus of Nazareth is referred to in a range of ancient sources
inside and outside the New Testament, including Christian,
Roman, and Jewish sources. This is really quite extraordinary
when you reflect on how obscure a figure Jesus was. He had at
most a three-year public life as an itinerant Galilean preacher.
Yet we have far more information about Jesus than we do for most
major figures of antiquity. [185]
It would have been wholly un-Jewish, not to say stupid, to
believe that a man was raised from the dead when his body was
known to be still in the grave. Even if the disciples had
preached Jesus’ resurrection despite His occupied tomb, scarcely
anybody else would have believed them. One of the most
remarkable facts about the early Christian belief in Jesus’
resurrection was that it flourished in the very city where Jesus
had been publicly crucified. [221]
To reject Christ is to reject God Himself. And in light of who
God is, this is a sin of infinite gravity and proportion and
therefore plausibly deserves infinite punishment. We should not,
therefore, think of hell primarily as punishment for the array
of sins of finite consequence that we’ve committed, but as the
just penalty for a sin of infinite consequence, namely the
rejection of God Himself. [274]
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