Introduction The popular Evangelical apologist J. Warner Wallace wrote an article titled What the Earliest Non-Biblical Authors Say About Jesus. Wallace begins by posing the intriguing question: “What would we know about Jesus if we lost every Biblical manuscript on the planet?” Wallace goes on to survey “the accounts of those early Christians who learned directly from the Biblical…
Introduction Natasha Crain is the blogger behind Christian Mom Thoughts (the only “Mommy Blog” that I read regularly – I promise) and the creator of the Facebook group Apologetics for Parents. She is a sharp Christian layperson who holds an MBA in marketing and statistics from UCLA, and does an excellent job of making apologetics accessible and relevant to parents. I was, therefore, excited…
Introduction Many religious groups send out door-to-door missionaries to spread their message. Sometimes they just want to “plant a few seeds” or hand out literature – other times they seek on-the-spot conversion or to start an ongoing “Bible study.” Regardless of one’s ability to define and defend one’s faith, preparing for all the different groups…
Introduction Because all Christian groups believe they were ultimately founded by Jesus Christ, all who wish to be considered legitimate need to explain why they did not exist prior to their (actual) founding date. The gap is usually explained by what I call an “apostasy narrative.” An Christian apostasy narrative is a tale of how the Church…
Introduction Atheistic attacks on Christianity typically focus on philosophical issues concerning theism or evidential attacks on the Bible. The latter, however, plays upon a certain view of Christian theological methodology and ecclesiology that is flawed. These attacks assume that Christianity is relying on the Bible for its existence – which certainly seems fair, as many…
Introduction There are a lot of good arguments for theism / against atheism (like the argument from contingency). There are also some good ones which unfortunately have been misused so often that they have been identified as bad ones (like Pascal’s Wager). Even more unfortunately, there are also some genuinely bad ones (like the argument from the banana), and some of these are…
Introduction Some kind of “apostasy narrative” is required to explain why a group that did not exist for nearly 2,000 years can consider itself the true expression of Christianity. Obviously, if the Church founded by Jesus did not go into apostasy, there would be no excuse to create a new group or “restore” what was “lost.” Unlike…
Introduction I had two young Mormon (LDS / Latter-Day Saint) missionaries come by my house the other day. Although I have had many meetings with Mormon missionaries in the past, this time I wanted to take a different tack than before. I wanted more than a contentious theological response that basically boiled down to “I have beliefs that disagree…
The Apologetics Prism® Introduction Apologetics is the discipline of giving an answer in defense of a position – in this case, it refers to defending the faith (see 1 Pet. 3:15 or Phil.1:16). Although all Christians are commanded to be able to give an answer in defense of what they believe (as any thinking person,…
Introduction Peter Kreeft once noted that, “When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his great Summa Theologica, he could find only two objections to the existence of God, even though he tried to list at least three objections to every one of the thousands of theses he tried to prove in that great work” (Fundamentals of the Faith, p.…
