Why is Christianity right?

for you is that through my you know cursory review of most religions it seems like they all have a common thread of answering the question which seems to plague us all which is what happens to us when we die it's the one question I think that a lot of us have difficulty with because we cannot answer it and so seems like this common thread is it gives us hope for the afterlife something better than what we have right now and it feels like I feel like a lot of religions that what they do is they put forth codes or rules of conduct to help us live a good life so that we can achieve this afterlife and so given this commonality what makes you believe that Christianity is the correct or right religion great question great question and your name is sue keto spell that for me su ke tu su kiddo I think you've asked a very very important question first of all I let me qualify it a little bit and I'm sure you already know that that not all religions talk about an afterlife mainly the monotheistic ones do the pantheistic ones are reincarnation even the reincarnation but in Buddhism and Hinduism is a little different in Hinduism is the transference of identity one into another in a different form but in Buddhism it's not even sure whether it's the identity that strands migrated or just another form of essence that is emerged a worldview is built not on one line of argument a worldview is built on a connected series of arguments and if a world we were just built on one line of argument I think this is a mistake naturalism often makes it'll take sort of one argument that it has in its favor and forget all the myriad other questions that emerge when I look at the person in the work of Jesus Christ this is the most important question I had to ask now granted I asked it in Reverse fashion because I was on a bed of suicide a Bible was brought to me and I prayed a prayer of desperation I grant you that I just had no hope but I was read the verse jesus said because I live you also shall live I just said this is talking about a life that I don't have and maybe this is the life I need and so I prayed that prayer but then I made a prayer commitment right on that bed I was 17 and I said Jesus if you who you claim to be I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth because my goal was truth pragmatically it made sense for me to hang on to a life jacket that was thrown my way but then I began my years and years and years of study when you look at the life of Christ from the prophetic schema of hundreds of years before where he was gonna be born what he was going to do what his name was going to be called how the manner of birth was the manner of life he was going to lead how he was going to die and then the resurrection from the dead the uniqueness about the New Testament or Old Testament Scriptures it's not a single author it's multiple authors as you know sixty-six books 40 different authors have read it and it is interesting that Paul Saul of Tarsus who wrote one third of it came in a reverse fashion to the rest of them the disciples came birth life death resurrection and that's how they found new Jesus not so with Saul who came to be he became Paul he said when he was encountered the risen Christ she said that I may know him the power of the resurrection and the Fellowship of his suffering being made conformable unto his death he started with the resurrection but he said he needed to understand the cross because he came in reverse chronological order but he encountered the risen Christ the conversion of Saul of Tarsus and Thomas especially these true dramatic conversions are powerful witnesses of what happened Saul who was killing them he was sanding standing there watching Stephen being martyred and kept the clothes of those who were stoning him Thomas who said I'm not gonna believe until I see the resurrected Christ myself and he went to India where there are 330 million deities and he went and preached the gospel of Jesus and paid with his own life that kind of dramatic transformation took place not because of just one event but a connected series of events so here's the bottom line a worldview is built around four questions origin meaning morality and Esther origin meaning morality and destiny and there are three trust tests for truth logical consistency empirical adequacy and experiencial relevance logical consistency empirical adequacy and experiencial relevance three tests for four questions and when you take the prophecy of Christ hundreds of years before from his virgin birth you take the purity of his life unmatched totally unmatched till this very day then the death that he promised for the forgiveness of sins and then the resurrection as an Easterner I asked myself this question when Jesus was asked how he was going to demonstrate it if he were a fake he would have said I'm going to spiritually rise again and they would never be able to falsify it but he said I'm bodily going to rise again that is an empirically falsifiable dictum all they would have had to show him was the body and say where is he you said he was going to rise again so it's in the whole schema of the prophetic corpus the hundreds of years the multiple authors pointing towards the same person from his virgin birth to the purity of his life to the death on the cross for forgiveness when he said Father forgive them because they don't know what they are doing and then the resurrection again my four questions are answered correspondingly with truth on specific questions and coherently when all of the questions are put together and answers are given so to me first of all all religions are not the same they are actually they may their people say they're fundamentally the same superficially different actually they are fundamentally different and at best superficially similar and the fundamental difference that you see in Jesus Christ is in his uniqueness and exclusivity of his claim and the embrace that he gives to all humanity the perfection of his life the purity of his life the death and the resurrection to me that coherence of his answers convinces me that he is who he claimed to be and truth by definition is exclusive all truth needs to be exclusive Buddhism claims to be exclusive Hindus and to be exclusive they all have exclusive is exclusivity built into that but in the person of Christ you see the demonstration in his birth life death and resurrection so I say to me I'm convinced that because it go hares and because I have personally verified it in my own life and you can do that do and find that experience in that he is who he claimed to be thank you just to add something that Robby's already mentioned but the the resurrection was particularly key for me in my investigation of this I was studying philosophy it was very important to me not to have to take some blind leap of faith and the fact that there was a publicly verifiable historical claim that I could look into was very very important and if you asked scholars a hundred years ago how did we come up with a Christian myth of the resurrection they would have said well one person told the truth to this person that person told this person that person told this person and a few generations down the line we had a crazy myth of the resurrection since then in the last couple of decades scholarship has really turned around on this question in part because there are a few places in the Bible in particular a passage at the beginning of first Corinthians 15 maybe you can have a look at it later but it's a it's a very early Creed and it lists all of the people and the groups that Jesus appeared to he appeared to individuals and to groups at different times in different places doing many different things and today even the most atheistic critical scholars date that passage that early Creed - almost immediately after Jesus's actual death and supposed resurrection so the legendary development hypothesis has been thrown out of the window what people know now is that there actually were a lot of people the passage says hundreds of people and then it says most of whom are still living almost as if to say go out and ask them yourself there were many people who were utterly convinced they had seen this man Jesus alive and interacting with him after he had died and so that then raises the question what can account for that what can account for this huge historical gap between what should have been the movement ending death of Jesus and then the explosion of Christianity Jews worshipping a man as God unthinkable the Sabbath changed from Saturday to Sunday unthinkable what bridges the gap which is there no matter what you believe that's the question for anyone Christians Britt that gap with the resurrection when I was looking into this as a university student I asked the top two skeptical New Testament scholars at Princeton to meet up for a coffee to talk about this because I said this is what I've just laid out for you this is what I'm seeing here's the big gap and I thought okay Christians fill that gap with the resurrection but surely those who aren't Christians must have equally plausible alternatives and I said to them how do you fill that gap and one of them glanced towards a mass hallucination hypothesis which isn't taken seriously in the literature she wasn't glancing towards it with any conviction either there's simply too much data too many appearances too many people hallucinations are things that happen to individuals not to groups the other one who was historian simply said I'm not interested in that question as a historian there was some sort of assumption that because it was a miraculous claim it was therefore not within the remit of proper history and I've never understood why so for me the resurrection the fact that the fact that you could have arguments that you can consider for that was that blew my mind I just assumed that's an ancient claim that we could just never know whether that happened or not but actually you can look into it and you can look at the facts and then you can ask the question what best explains the facts and the reality is that today in the scholarship the only explanation which is given any degree of credibility is the fact that Jesus actually rose from the dead every other explanation has been completely undermined and so I think it is a rational decision to say that actually happened and then to take that next personal step of praying a prayer like the one that I prayed which was God the Christian God I don't know if I'm talking to anyone but if I am I

Channel: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

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Keywords: Pittsburgh (City/Town/Village), University Of Pittsburgh (College/University), University (Building Function), RZIM, Ravi, Ravi Zacharias, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, apologetics, evangelism, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, Christianity, Christian, Christian Apologetics, philosophy, God, truth, Bible, gospel, Lord, salvation, Vince Vitale, Vince, Oxford, Pitt, live stream, Open Forum, Q&A, OCCA, Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics

Id: o5qJPZySo7A

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2016