Master 209: Questions about Christianity, Part 1 of 10.

Introduction.

One of the Sunday school teachers at the church where I attend recently sent an e-mail to a number of the leaders in which she expressed some concerns about church members' grasp of a Christian worldview. She, quite correctly, pointed out that this is an extremely important issue. Many Christians are not able to square their ideological and doctrinal commitments with the things that are widely represented as facts and reality in our world. Many try to resolve (or dissolve) this conflict by relegating Christianity to the realm of faith, but that solution only ends up undermining the very thing they are trying to preserve. People's actual lives are guided by what they take to be real--by what they have to deal with--and cutting off the substance of Christian beliefs and doctrines from that realm of the real can only undermine its force and significance in our lives.

Indeed, I suspect that many Christians are haunted by the nagging idea that if one were to carefully and critically evaluate the major claims of Christianity, one would find that there really is nothing to them and that they do constitute only an incoherent mass of dogmatically-held notions. As a consequence, they avoid critical examination. And as a result of that, their commitment to and confidence in the claims of Christianity is undermined and ends up playing little or no role in their actual lives.

This is a problem not only for men and women who have been Christians for a long time. It is also emerges as a serious problem when we consider what is involved in raising up children in a broadly secular world. What they believe is real and are told is real and experience as real may be quite different from what Christianity says is real. Are there good reasons to take the claims of Christianity seriously?

In the e-mail that this teacher distributed, she listed nine questions that she has actually been asked by her 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. What I am going to do, in this series of blog entries, (and what I encourage you to do as well) is consider what sort of answers I (you) would give. There was a time, especially during my high school years, when I explored the rationality and intellectual viability of many key Christian claims. I came to the conclusion that the claims of Christianity do reflect reality as it really is. But as I've stepped back from that active search, I recognize that the answers that I got have become less readily available to me. They're not at the front of my mind and I might not be able to offer them if confronted with a question on the spot.

What about you? Can you articulate a set of good reasons for your faith? For your commitment to Jesus Christ? To the teachings of the Bible? Take a look at these nine questions and consider how you would answer them. Of course you might offer a slightly different answer, depending on whether you were talking to a 4th grader or a college graduate. But think about the basic kinds of reasons that you would appeal to and that ground your faith.

I'll look at each of these questions in turn and try to give helpful answers.

1. I still don't understand how I can know that God is real?
2. Why is Christianity right and all other religions wrong?
3. How do you know that something you can't see is real?
4. If Jesus and God were the same, how come people could see Jesus but not God?
5. How can scientists prove the Big Bang?
6. It seems mean that God would only give Man one chance. Why is everyone punished?
7. Why would God create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil if it would bring sin into the world?
8. How do we know that we're not wrong and everyone else is right?
9. How do we know that the Bible isn't just other people's ideas? How do we know it's from God?

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.