Bethinking 5/6: William Lane Craig on Secularism & Islam (The Apologetic Task)

thank you very much well I certainly hope that your appetite for the study of apologetics has been wetted by this conference we have only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg this Saturday there's so much more to learn to study to master and I hope that this conference will have been a stimulus for further study for you I want to close out the lectures of this conference by talking about the challenge that lies before us and the crucial role that apologetics will play in the life of the church in meeting this challenge as the 21st century unfolds the Christian Church in Western Europe in general and in the UK in particular finds itself in spiritual crisis the church faces overwhelming challenges to which if we're brutally honest she does not seem to be equal the sober observer cannot help but wonder if we are not observing with our own eyes the eclipses of Christianity in Europe the church faces challenges both on the left and on the right which threaten her very existence how she responds to those challenges will determine the shape of European and British culture for centuries to come on the left the church faces the challenge of secularism secularism is the product of scientific naturalism the view that all that exists are the entities that are postulated by our best theories of physics namely the contents of the space-time universe and any abstract objects like numbers that you might feel that you are constrained to include on this view there are no immaterial souls nor supernatural entities that transcend the world of physical objects in particular God not exist and thus theological statements if they're not merely expressions of personal tastes or sentiment are uniformly false on such a few religious belief if it is anything more than merely the expression of aesthetic experience is a sort of delusion secularism then is a non religious view of the world which flows out of scientific naturalism the 20th century witnessed the triumph of secularism in Western Europe although the majority of Europeans still retain a nominal affiliation with Christianity about only 10 percent are practicing believers and less than half of those are evangelical in their theology the most significant trend in European religious affiliation during the 20th century has been the growth of those who are classed as non-religious it went from effectively zero percent of the population in 1900 to about twenty-two percent by the end of the 20th century specifically in the UK the percentage of the population classed as non-religious went from almost nothing in 1900 to 34% of the population today in England 84% of the population never darkens the doorway of a church during the course of the year only 6% attend church on a regular basis secularism has become the dominant force in the culture of the United Kingdom and in Western Europe in general shaping its intellectual outlook its cultural values and its mores now why is this important to those of us who are Christians well simply because the gospel is never heard in isolation the gospel is always heard against the backdrop of the cultural milieu in which a person was born and raised a person who was raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as a viable intellectual option will display an openness to the gospel that a person who is thoroughly secularized will not for the secular person you may as well tell him to believe in leprechauns or fairies as in Jesus Christ it will appear that absurd to him this is why a sea grayling when invited to participate in a debate with me during this reasonable faith tour declined to do so saying he would prefer to debate the existence of water nymphs or fairies as opposed to the existence of God this condescending attitude is meant to express the lack of credibility in the eyes of a secular person of the existence of God if the trend of increasing secularization is to be significantly reversed then the worldview of scientific naturalism which undergirds secularism must be challenged head-on if we do not do this if the prevailing culture remains secular in its outlook then any renewal movements within the church or evangelism will prove it best to be merely local and short-lived the great Princeton theologian J Gresham machen in his article Christianity and culture rightly warned false ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel we may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion now the University will be the key fear of influence here the single most important cultural institution shaping Western society is the University it is at the University that our future political leaders are journalists our judges our teachers our business executives will be trained it is at the university that they will formulate or more probably simply absorb the world view that will then shape their lives and thinking and since these people are the opinion makers and the leaders who shape society the world view that they imbibe at the university will be the worldview that shapes our society if we change the university we change society through those who shape society if the Christian world and life view can be restored to a place of prominence and respect at the university it will have a leavening effect throughout society and culture now this is not as impossible as it may seem in fact we are living at a time in world history when philosophy is experiencing a veritable Renaissance of Christian thinking which is a revitalizing natural theology we are living at a time moreover when science is more open to the existence of a creator and designer of the cosmos than at any time in recent memory and we are living at a time when biblical criticism has embarked upon a renewed quest of the historical Jesus which treats the Gospels seriously as sources historically for the life of Jesus and which is confirmed the main outline of the portrait of Jesus presented in the Gospels we are well poised in to help reshape British and European culture in such a way as to regain lost ground so that the gospel can once again be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women it is part of the task of Christian apologetics to help to create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking people now I can imagine that some of you are thinking but don't we live in a postmodern culture in which these appeals to traditional apologetic arguments are no longer effective since post modernists reject the traditional canons of logic rationality and truth rational arguments for the truth of Christianity no longer work rather in today's culture we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it in my opinion this sort of thinking could not be more mistaken it is based upon a drastic Mis analysis of contemporary Western culture the idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth in fact a postmodern culture is an impossibility it would be utterly unlivable nobody nobody is a post modernist when it comes to reading the labels on a bottle of medicine or a box of rat poison if you got a headache you better believe the texts have objective meaning people are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science technology and medicine rather they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics but you see that's not post-modernism that's modernism that's just all line verification ISM and positivism which held that if you can't prove something by the means of empirical science then it's just a matter of personal taste and emotive expression we live in a cultural milieu which remains at its heart deeply modernist in fact I think that post-modernism is one of the craftiest deceptions that Satan has yet devised modernism is dead he tells us don't worry about it just forget about it modernism is dead and buried meanwhile modernism pretending to be dead comes back round again dressed in the fancy new costume of post-modernism your old arguments and evidences are no longer effective against this new challenger we're told forget them just lay them aside just share your narrative and so Satan deceives us into voluntarily laying aside our best weapons of logic and evidence thereby ensuring secularism triumphs over us if we adopt this suicidal course of action then the consequences for the Christian Church in the next generation will be catastrophic Christianity will be reduced to just one more voice in a cacophony of competing voices each sharing its own narrative while scientific naturalism delivers to us the objective truth about reality and shape society's view of how the world really is and as for the idea that people in our culture are no longer responsive to or interested in rational arguments and evidence for Christianity well nothing could be farther from the truth if I might be permitted to speak from my own personal experience for over 25 years now I've been speaking and debating evangelistically on university campuses in North America and Europe I share the gospel in the context of presenting an intellectual defence of the Christian faith and I always close my talks with a lengthy time of Q&A with the students and during all those years virtually no one has ever stood up and said your arguments are based on Western chauvinistic standards of logic and rationality or if express some other sort of post modernist sentiment this almost never happens I find that if you approach the question on a rational level than people respond to it on a rational level I found debates to be an especially attractive forum for university evangelism where is a few score or maybe a couple hundred will come out and hear me give a campus talk several hundred or even thousands of students will come out to hear a debate where both sides of the issue can be fairly presented on a level playing field for example on my previous UK speaking trip I participated in a dialogue at the Oxford University theological society on the historicity of Jesus resurrection with Professor John muddy montasser of New Testament studies at Oxford and my student host advised me that the event usually only draws about 20 people at these meetings and so he said if 30 show up I wasn't allowed to be disappointed in the attendance well some 300 students absolutely jammed the overly small room to hear this dialogue and the rest just had to be turned away during the Q&A time that followed certain students did challenge my views but others really went after professor muddy Minh it was an exhilarating evening of dialogue with these students which ended with thunderous applause a couple of days later I was at the Oxford Union debating a/c grayling on the proposition belief in God makes sense in light of tsunamis both the main floor as well as the gallery was filled with students and to my surprise grayling was as docile as a lamb he just couldn't defend his views at all successfully the whole debate was conducted in a an academic spirit of collegiality and good humor and again as the moderator brought the evening to a close the chamber just rang with loud and sustained applause from the students but I don't need to talk about the past this week has been a week of remarkable meetings on British campuses dialoguing and debating the Christian faith Monday night my debate with philosophers Stephen law at Central Hall in Westminster drew over 1,700 people who came to hear the question does God exist being debated two days later at the Cambridge debating Union I held a debate with the philosopher Arif Achmed and British Humanist Association spokesman Andrew cops inand was partnered with Peter Williams in that debate the president of the debating society told us before we had the debate that usually the chamber which holds around 400 people is half empty for these debating society events and so he wasn't sure how many would come well that night not only was the chamber complete filled as well as the gallery but people spilled over into to overflow rooms and even into the bar where they could watch the debate on closed-circuit television some 750 cambridge university students came out to hear the debate that night on the existence of god and then last night what an evening at the University of Birmingham the philosophy society note this wasn't an event put on by Christian groups on campus the philosophy society invited me to debate you an Oxford University Professor Peter Milliken in the Great Hall of the University when I walked into this auditorium it was awesome in its grandeur just a great hall with a huge organ at the back and beautiful shields decorating the ceiling and the floor laid out for around a thousand places and I thought how will they ever feel even half of this place well as 7:30 neared more and more people kept streaming in through the back until the entire hall was filled with students and laymen wanting to hear the evidence discussed for and against the existence of God and again when the evening came to a close the applause was just thunderous and sustained as people manifested their deep appreciation for hearing a rational cordial discussion of these issues so don't be deceived into thinking that people in our culture are no longer interested in the evidence for Christianity precisely the opposite is true it is vitally important that we forge a culture in which the gospel can be heard as a living option for thinking people and apologetics will be front and center in helping to bring about that result but if the church faces the challenge of secularism on the Left she also faces a daunting Challenge on the right from Islam and I'm not talking here about Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism which threatens weapon Western democracy rather I'm talking about the challenge of normal moderate peaceful Islam for Islam while accepting the existence of God nevertheless rejects the deity and atoning death of Jesus Christ and so espouses a fundamentally different doctrine of salvation than Christianity Islam is thus an alternative form of theism which challenges the very heart of the Christian worldview indeed Islam is the only world religion which has arisen in conscious rejection of the Christian faith according to Islam Jesus though virgin born was no more than a human prophet it follows that the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are false Islam also denies the fact of Jesus crucifixion and hence his atoning death for our sins as well as his resurrection from the dead it denies salvation by grace through faith the Quran teaches that if you believe and do righteous deeds then God will forgive you and give you what you have earned plus a bonus it advises he whose good deeds lie heavy in the scales shall dwell in bliss but he whose deeds are light the abyss shall be his home surah 101 7 to 10 Islam is thus deeply opposed to the Christian worldview in central respects Islam has in the twentieth century made significant advances in Europe and the UK it is now the second largest religion after Christianity and influence exceeds even its actual numbers one cannot help but wonder where Europe will be in another 100 years if the present trends continue will it as some observers have feared become vulcanized with countries like Austria remaining staunchly Catholic and other nations like France being effectively neutralized by their large Muslim minorities where will the UK be in a hundred years will Christianity become an insignificant and enfeebled minority religion secularism lacks the spiritual substance for dealing effectively with Islam secularism has left a spiritual vacuum at the heart of Europe which Islam is now poised to fill without a vibrant Christianity to meet Islam's challenge secularism can only respond with draconian political measures which threaten civil liberties and a free society for example we see this happening already in France where in the name of life's yzma or secularism the state has banned the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in public schools as Islam continues to grow the danger is that secular authorities impotent to halt its advance will become ever more heavy-handed and repressive what is needed instead is a strong vibrant widely shared religious faith that finds no attraction in Islam but is on the contrary burdened to share spiritual truth with Muslim friends and neighbors my fear is that the church is basically asleep at the switch when it comes to dealing with the challenge posed by Islam whether out of intimidation or political correctness the church has not spoken clearly enough on this subject such silence I think represents nothing less than a lack of love for our Muslim acquaintances if we really believe what we say we believe as Christians then how can we not share with Muslims the life-giving message of the gospel of Christ and again apologetics will be vital in commending our faith to Muslims this isn't difficult to do the Coggins denial of Jesus crucifixion not to mention his resurrection is an Achilles heel of Islam for it is the one historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth that is universally acknowledged among historical critical scholars in the words of Robert funk the chairman of the Jesus Seminar the crucifixion of Jesus is one indisputable fact about Jesus Muslim exegesis are reduced to defending desperate hypotheses to explain away the evidence like the theory that somebody else whom God made to look like Jesus was crucified in his place and this just is to admit that the historical evidence does support Jesus crucifixion and that this conclusion can be avoided only by resorting to metaphysical hypotheses you might as well say that despite all of the evidence to the contrary Queen Elizabeth is not really the Queen of England but just somebody who God made to look like her now again Islam can be justifiably criticized for its morally inadequate concept of God one of the things that surprised me most when I began to study Islam as a theological graduate student in Germany was all of the people whom the Quran says God does not love this fact is emphasized repeatedly and consistently like a drumbeat throughout the pages of the Quran just listen to the following passages God loves not the unbelievers God loves not evildoers God loves not the proud God loves not transgressors God loves not the prodigal God loves not the treacherous God is an enemy to unbelievers over and over and over again the Quran declares that God does not love the very people that the Bible says God loves so much that he said His only Son to die for them according to the Quran God's love is reserved only for those who earn it it says in surah 1995 to those who believe and do righteousness God will assign love so the Quran assures us of God's love for the god-fearing and the good doers but he has no love for sinners and unbelievers and thus in the Islamic conception God is not all loving his love is partial and has to be earned the Muslim God loves only those who first love him his loved us Rises no higher than the sort of love that Jesus said even tax collectors and sinners exhibit the Islamic conception of God is therefore morally deficient faced with the challenge of a false theism the church must not remain silent when the Apostle Paul was confronted with another gospel in Galatia he opposed it unflinchingly regardless of what people thought he demanded am I now seeking human approval or God's approval or am I trying to please people if I were still pleasing people I would not be a servant of Christ Islam is another gospel it presents a distorted view of God an inaccurate picture of the historical Jesus and a false view of salvation the church has something better to offer a holy yet loving Heavenly Father a savior who voluntarily lays down his life for mine and the free gift of salvation and eternal life through faith in Christ in conclusion then the church in Britain faces apparently overwhelming challenges on both the left and the right but as Paul has said God has equipped us with weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left bearing in mind as Paul says that we are not carrying on a worldly war for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds he says we destroy arguments and every powered obstacle to the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ 2nd Corinthians 10:5 Christian apologetics will be vital to successfully meeting these challenges that confront us thank you very much for that dynamite I think they've put a fire in our bellies there thank you so much we have some time for you to ask questions now for you to come to the microphones again and to ask your question about this last lecture if you could try and keep your comments and questions to this lecture specific material we'll have time for other questions in the panel discussion later on you sir why do you think the judeo-christian West has become secularized in a way that the Islamic Middle East hasn't you know this has been a question that has puzzled me so much and I wish I knew the answer but I'm not a sociologist I mean clearly in the West we are the stepchild of the Enlightenment which is the movement in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries in which the monarchy and the church were thrown off in the name of free thought and human reason at the cathedral and Notre Dame during the Enlightenment a woman dressed in the costume of Reason was paraded through the city of Paris and elevated on the altar in the Cathedral of Notre Dame reason human reason unbridled by authority of either state or Church became the god of the Enlightenment and we are living I think in the shadow of the Enlightenment that is what modernism is and as I said I think our culture remains deeply modernist but it puzzles me especially why in Britain secularism should have risen so dramatically since 1900 I could understand this on the continent where the first and the second world war had just ravaged the continent but Britain being delivered from Nazism and National Socialism having won the war you would think there would be an outpouring of thankfulness to God for for having preserved Britain in the face of this incredible threat of National Socialism in Germany and yet the society has been increasingly increasingly secular and and what's also puzzling about this is that Britain has this magnificent intellectual tradition in this country from William Paley and Joseph Butler right down to scholars of the the present day one one thinks why hasn't this had more influence why doesn't this trickle down to popular culture I spoke to the warden at Tyndale house in Cambridge some time ago about this and he said oh it's not the Intelligencia in Great Britain that lacks faith in Christ he says it's the working-classes he says what happens is that people are separated off so early in the educational system or who don't go on to university but while christianity is well represented among the intellectual elites he says it's the masses the uneducated masses that so often are unacquainted with the evidence for Christian faith I don't know if that's true I'm not a sociologist I'm not British but I share with you what he shared with me this is an intriguing and important question because if we can perhaps identify the sources of secularization that will make it easier to counteract them but I am baffled and and puzzled by why this should be so thank you thank you dr. Craig a disorder to check where you come from with a god that loves sinners and yet in the Bible that says multiple times he hates sinners not just hate sin that does actually hate sinners compared to the God of Islam where he does not love sinners where do you uh-huh I think that if you look at passages throughout the Bible there are almost no passages and when it which it says that God hates sinners there are a couple of poetic passages in the Psalms but very very few and these are completely outweighed by the massive number of texts that affirm God's love for sinners affirm his love for the world and the whole plan of Christian salvation which is done on behalf of believers so the overwhelming evidence in the Bible is that God loves sinners and cares for them and these other passages would be poetic or or non-literal and completely outweighed by these other passages and as an open-minded person either could the same be the case with the Quran could it be that these are just poetic poetic expressions of God's hatred of sin the problem is that there's no place in the Quran no outweighing texts that affirm that God does love sinners and unbelievers the texts are unanimous that God is an enemy to unbelievers that he doesn't love them that he only loves those who love him and do righteous deeds and then he will give them love so the whole concept of the love of God in Islam and in Christianity i think is just radically different in Christianity God's love is unconditional Universal and unearned whereas in Islam it is conditional it is partial and it needs to be earned so I say that not as a polemicist but just as an honest exegete I think there there's just this world of difference between the two concepts thank you so do you think it wise for Christians to to refer to Muhammad's deity as God is low because many Muslims when evangelizing the use the word God yeah but anyway Shahada they refer to Allah they use all kinds of solitude you know to make people believe in the religion for another final thing I mean gibreel for example is completely different to April that we know from the Bible but they can make it seem as if we're talking about the same things well if you want to whenever used talk about God in Muslim theology you could refer to him as Allah as a sort of proper name and talk about what is the Islamic conception of Allah for example but I'm told that the Arabic New Testament that is used by Christians uses Allah as the word for God in in the Arabic New Testament so that the word itself is neutral and just is God and and in a case like that what we would just insist is what I said today that we as Christians have a radically different concept of God than the concept of God in Islam and I think that would be an equally accurate way of putting the matter thank you for the question you said dr. Craig could you speak to the different aspects of jihad and how it relates to the life of Muhammad right one of the interesting things when you read the qur'an is that violence is enjoined as a means of propagating the faith that the Quran actually commands violence as a means of propagating Islam in the ninth surah of the Quran a passage that's written very late in Muhammad's life just a couple years before he died he tells them lie in ambush for the unbelievers attacked them assault them wherever they are and and bring them into submission and he's talking there about pagans that as the unbelievers but then it goes on to say also to attack the people of the book that is to say Jews and Christians and to utterly subdue them until they convert or pay alms out of the hand and our submissive and Mohammed died before these commands could be carried out but his successors then carried out these commands they attacked Persia and then Jerusalem fell Assyria fell Egypt fell and then right across North Africa as these commands were carried out and so Muslim theology divides the world into two houses the dark Al Harb and the dark al Islam that is to say the house of peace or the house of Submission rather and this would be the countries and nations of the world that are submitted to Islam the dark al Islam the house of submission and the Darb the house of war and that's the way they look at these nations of the world that are not yet submitted to Islam and that's why these Islamic fundamentalists are so radically opposed to these dictators like Mubarak and Hussein and Gaddafi because they have adopted a Western model of governance in which the government is separated from religion in Islam there is no separation of church and state that is a Western idea in Islam everything is to be brought into submission to the Muslim faith including the banking system the culture the government everything and so Islamic fundamentalists are deeply opposed to these secular Arab or Muslim countries and states and want to see them overthrown so I do think that as I read the Quran violence and the use of war is a part of the means of evangelization that Islam uses to spread it and that is in fact historically how it has been spread thank you please could you ask your question okay thank you very much a bit related to the previous version you addressed the problems of the left and on the right yes I mean as Christians I mean are we gonna deal with the left the same way we deal with the right ie Islam I mean and I would want to follow on in saying for example Jesus is addressing the Quran today degree that would find it a bit blasphemous and if we challenge Muhammad to the same degree will according so how are we going to challenge yeah I don't think we should challenge Muhammad I see no reason to get people's backs up by challenging their prophet or D writing him or or castigating him Jesus is the issue Jesus is the stumbling block he's the the stumbling block over which people fall when it comes to Christianity and so what we need to do is to focus on who is the historical Jesus and therefore I think our approach to the challenges on the right and the left is very much the same the approach is the same it is through rational argumentation and debate and so when I participate in debates with Muslim apologists and theologians which I've often done I will focus upon the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the evidence for his crucifixion and resurrection because if that is right then Islam is ipso facto false and we don't assume that the Bible is an inspired text or the Quran is an inspired text we examine these documents historically as Gary Habermas described and when you do so the the New Testament is obviously a superior historical source for the life of Jesus because it was written in the first generation after the events by people who were actually there whereas the Quran was written 600 years later by a man living in Arabia who had no independent source of information for Jesus apart from the New Testament some no historian or historical scholar treats the Quran seriously as a source of historical information for the life of Jesus it's the New Testament sources that are the primary documents so I think the approach is very much the same we don't need to get into theological critiques of Muhammad or even the Quran just talk about Jesus and who he was and the same historical apologetics for the resurrection that you use with the secularists you can use with your Muslim friend to try to convince him that Jesus was more than a mere prophet having having Amin out of following questions that having made that case and your friend turns to and says so ok I grant you that the case for Jesus being somebody who is the center of reality and being God and essentially grants an overwhelming core of the beliefs of Christian commitment how would you then help that person to move into a living loving relationship with Jesus I guess I would invite him to pray with me repent of his sins and give his life to Jesus Christ and ask God for spiritual cleansing and forgiveness to be born again by the inner regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and then if he will make that commitment with you then begin to meet with him privately to disciple him in growing in his relationship and in time he will probably gather the courage to make a public profession but I would work with him privately I think to help disciple him in his new faith thank you your question sir hi yeah this is going back to the engaging the land yes I'm quite la saint MIT post-modernism is the offspring of vermin and naturalism so the Darwinism will lead personalism in a nutshell if Darwinism is true there's no such thing as truth post-modernism but the reason I mention is if you could form a question well ok is there any mileage in highlighting that link the post-modernism is a smoke of the fire of naturalism I don't think so as I understand post-modernism it's a reaction to modernism it's a rejection of the Enlightenment it's saying we are now going to move beyond the Enlightenment by rejecting the traditional canons of logic rationality and truth in favor of a kind of observer created reality where each one of us creates his own reality and so they might be willing to say yes in your reality God exists your reality includes God but not my reality and we live in different realities and there is no objective truth about the world that's what I understand the real dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist to affirm so I think here we need to take our stand with the objective canons of logic and evidence and truth and try to show that that kind of a view is just incoherent it's unaffordable for the question and if I might just very quickly say as an evangelistic strategy to I think it's very unwise to attack Darwinism people are so deeply wedded to Darwinism we shouldn't make them jump through the hoop of becoming creationists in order to become Christians let them become Christians and believe in Darwinism and the theory of evolution if they change their minds later fine but my evangelistic strategy is to set the bar as low as you can make it as is possible to become a Christian there very few things you need to believe to be a Christian you've got to believe that God exists that Jesus Christ is divine that he died for your sins and rose from the dead and that you will be saved by grace through placing your faith in his atoning death and really that's about it you know there's not a whole lot more you don't have to believe in creationism and things like I'm talking about evangelistic strategy which is what I thought you were speaking to certainly we need our theorists to be working on all of these sorts of questions I absolutely but I'm speaking to you now in this room in doing evangelism I would encourage you not to try to argue with unbelievers about Darwinism I think that's just a non-starter they're so deeply wedded to it that you ought to just leave it aside it's it's get them to Christ first and then worry about these other tangential issues that are secondary thank you who's that I'd like to ask question about violence really was it's an issue that seems to be quite prevalent within the area that I move and you were talking about the world wars and the interim periods and the drop-off of faith I mean initially there was a growth before it dropped off it was in the 60s human love seemed to be predominant over God's love God had failed and therefore the human love was the answer to all our problems in the world all you need is love yeah how we address this issue of violence it seems to be something that you know how does God show his love when there's so much violence is the issue that I'm constantly coming up again you know apart from obviously Christ's death on the cross and his profound love that will show through that how else can we address it it's evangelists boy as a philosopher I'm not really qualified to address that kind of a question frankly I think that's more of a social question obviously Christians ought to be peacemakers and ought to be supporting efforts I think to foster freedom and to stop violence against women and children and and so forth but my work as a philosopher is more theoretical as opposed to pragmatic and so I'm really not the person to ask I guess about how would Christians effectively work against violence in our society I certainly think we should be argument across between the concept that God has therefore failed because violence is still prevalent is it human kindness without the violence themselves well don't don't you think that it's that if the world would accept the ethics of Jesus the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount then violence would be largely curtailed in the world it's it's through a rejection of the ethic of Jesus that violence is so prevalent in the world so we should always point people back to Jesus Jesus would not have been a guard at Auschwitz Jesus would not have been a criminal we point people to Jesus and his ethic which is I think so elevated and so attractive that it would be the antidote to violence if people would follow it and I just wanted to find out what's the best way of letting churches and church leaders should know that apologetics rather than introducing doubt to until you believe is this something that this is a very good question let me say what I think is the wrong approach the wrong approach is to go to your pastor and demand that he begin to offer apologetics and get involved and so forth your pastor is so busy and so harried that the last thing in the world he needs is another responsibility to take on he won't do it instead what you do is you volunteer as a layman to say pastor I'd like to teach a Sunday School class or an evening Bible study or something that sort in dealing with answering tough objections to Christianity or I'd like to do a book study and take people through on guard would you give me your sanction to do that and and I'll tell your pastor will fall down and call you blessed because he wants volunteer he wants lay people to take the leadership and take some of the burden off his shoulders and that's what I've done in our home church where Jan and I attend I just began teaching this class called defenders on apologetics and over the years it's just grown and grown and we have now a very large class meeting in our church where people come to hear the Christian doctrine an apologetics taught and what's fun is that people will even come from other churches though from the Catholic Church the Methodist Church they'll go to services there to worship then they've come over to our church to go to this Sunday Bible class and defenders and hear doctrine apologetics because there's nobody at their churches that are teaching these kind of things so I would encourage you as a layperson to take the lead on these issues and network with other interested persons and begin to do this kind of thing yourself and I think that's the best way to introduce this into the local church context I suppose a bit of fear another favor the concern is making sure that churches or sons judges see the importance of it rather than something that could lead people down a wrong path or cause people to start worrying or doubting based on the difficult judges yeah I think what you might do is talk to the pastor when you go in and share with him some of the stats that I think Gary Habermas mentioned about the number of Christian students who lose their faith when they go off to university and become unbelievers and and the statistic about how the church is being devastated by the loss of its youth and the apologetics can be one of the means of sustaining faith in our teenage and twenty-something age group and maybe if you think he won't be convinced bring one such person with you bring somebody along who say has lost had lost his faith and has now come back to Christ through the study of apologetics oh I just thought of another way you could do this say you don't feel qualified to teach such a class on our website at reasonable faith org these defenders classes that I described they're all podcast so you can just download these and and then listen to them together and then have a class discussion afterwards you don't even need to teach the class I'll teach it for you and then and then you have a discussion people are already doing this that we get emails from people in Germany and other places around the world I said we loved listening to defenders class and we even have our own class where we just listen to this material they said we feel like we're part of the class we feel like we know Cindy and Stephen Colbert and these other people who asked questions because the class discussion is all included so availing yourself of these resources that's what they're there for great thank you mm-hmm so if you could try and get bill to come over and cook as well with your questions oh great Youssef please thank you and sorry to bring in down one more time a problem I always had was with Romans five where Paul goes into quadrant bit of detail on the origin of sin how sin entered a human race through Adam and Christ 200 tables as the second Adam and so forth if Adam wasn't a real historical figure I don't know if that's just done right or not but if he wasn't ready to start the figure out then how can we say with certainty that Christ is the second Adam if there was no first out well you couldn't say it in a literal sense it would have to be purely symbolic if you don't believe in a historical Adam you would have to say that Christ is the second Adam in the sense that he reverses the the fall and sin and death and so forth and while I affirm the historical Adam the existence of Jesus of Nazareth and his death on the cross and resurrection doesn't stand or fall with the historicity of these ancient Hebrew narratives I mean even if they were symbolic or even mythological on an unsympathetic view that wouldn't do anything to undermine the historical credibility of the Gospels as sources for the life of Jesus as Gary Habermas described so I think that you're right it would you you couldn't interpret in a literal way it would have to become just sort of a theological symbol that he would be the second Adam I'm afraid that's the last person that time sorry okay well thank you very much yeah thank you please give I think it's worth expressing to bill how deeply inspired and courage we are that he's given this time to come and do this do this tour of the UK it's an incredible service it's an inspiring thing and it should I hope inspire each of us to use our gifts in the particular way that we find we can use apologetics in our lives I'm Rita s Williams I'm at this end of the line and that's featured Jay Williams and here's at that end of the line we have a plethora of questions from you and we've got about 15 minutes so I'm going to try and pick some of the but sort of broader themes and hopefully pull some of the threads together what we've been doing here together today you

Channel: ReasonableFaithTour

Views: 33,657

Rating: 4.7274723 out of 5

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, Tour, apologetics, bethinking, conference, Christianity, God, atheism, theism, UK, church, secularism, apologetic task, Islam, postmodernism, delusion, Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, debate, Damaris, Premier Chirstian Radio, UCCF, Koran, Qu'uarn, Muhammad, Jesus, enlightenment, scientism, modernism, evangelism, Defenders, podcast, Bible, New Atheism, New Testament, evidence, Muslim, university, Christ, history, crucifixion, England, attend, challenge, arguments, Paul, Darwin, Creationism

Id: Wt6XN0jYMNM

Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2013