Rapid Fire – Part 1
Philosophy
I stumbled on an old, yellowed document in my drawer in the recording studio at the STR office recently. It listed 83 challenges that come up frequently for believers that many Christians don’t know how to respond to when confronted with them.
As I looked over the list, though, it occurred to me that many of those challenges required only a simple response that could easily be learned by Christians who want to be ready for them. Consequently, I’ve decided to devote a few issues of Solid Ground to answering some of those concerns, giving my responses as if I were fielding them in a “rapid-fire” challenge session with skeptics.
Some of my answers may surprise you. Here they are, in no particular order...
“It’s wrong to judge others.”
Well, that depends.
Yes, Jesus does say in Matthew 7:1, “Do not judge.” It’s one of the few passages skeptics seem convinced is genuinely inspired since they cite it so often against Christians. The problem for the challenger is that Jesus doesn’t stop with those three words. He qualifies his command.
Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” and behold, the log is your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:3–5)
In this passage, Jesus does not condemn all judgments. Indeed, his own directive is a moral judgment—as is the skeptic’s scolding that we shouldn’t judge. Rather, Jesus is taking issue with a certain kind of arrogant condescension characteristic of religious leaders of that time. They were quick with criticism for minor offenses, yet their own lives were steeped in vice. To Jesus, this was nothing more than rank hypocrisy.
A judgment is an assessment. Sometimes it’s entirely proper to render an assessment on behavior, especially wicked conduct. Jesus himself regularly upbraided the people for their evil (e.g., John 7:7, Matt. 23:13–33). Sometimes it’s right for us to do so, as well. In those cases, Jesus would approve.
In short, Jesus is not condemning all judgments. Rather, he’s instructing on how to judge properly. In his own words, “Judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24).
“Does faith save?”
No, it doesn’t. Faith itself accomplishes nothing.
The notion that faith saves is a common misconception among Protestants, but it’s easily rectified with an illustration. Imagine venturing out on a frozen lake with full faith and confidence that the surface will bear your weight. Will that profound belief alone keep you safe? No. If you’ve stepped out on thin ice, you’re heading for a cold soaking no matter how unshakable your conviction is.
The world is filled with people overflowing with unwavering religious belief. Yet their confidence will be useless if that which they’ve trusted in has no ability to save them. They’ve strayed onto thin ice.
Faith by itself, no matter how strong, cannot rectify false hope. It benefits nothing. As I have written elsewhere, “If we are reaching out with the hand of faith to grasp a fantasy, then there will be no one there to rescue us, no matter how strong or sincere our faith is.”[1]
Though sola fide—“faith alone”—is part of the bedrock of our Christian confession, its point is to distinguish trust in Christ from personal merit. Works don’t rescue us; Jesus does. “Sola fide” reminds us that faith is the lone means of connecting to the redeemer who gathers us to himself and saves us. When we rely on Jesus rather than our own efforts, we find safety. He does for us what we could never do for ourselves. Jesus is thick ice.
To be most precise, then, we should say that Jesus saves us, not our faith, but he saves us through our faith. Our salvation is not grounded on our faith. It is grounded on the capable rescuer in whom we place our trust.
“You can’t legislate morality.”
If morality is not the basis for the proper use of legislative power, then what is? Personal whim? The interests of the elite? The private preferences of those in power? The fact is that morality is the only thing we can justifiably legislate.
Aristotle observed that all law rests upon the necessary foundation of morality. Legitimate legislation enlists the power of government to advance the common good. Law not based on morality is tyranny.
Note the preamble of the US Constitution—the legal document establishing the mechanism for proper legislative action for our national community. It’s thick with moral intention:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Of course, not every moral good can be legislated. It would not be possible for governments to compel every virtue and prohibit and punish every vice. Nevertheless, every law that is enacted must be intended as a vehicle for moral purpose, or else it is illicit.
“An acorn is not an oak. Therefore, a fetus is not a human being.”
Prolifers frequently encounter this canard. It’s an attempt to parry their case that abortion is morally inexcusable because it takes the life of an innocent human being. I call it a canard because it’s erroneous and misleading.
The error becomes obvious when you ask a simple question: If an acorn is not an oak, then what is it? It’s a seed, of course. Yes, but what kind of seed? An oak seed, obviously. In other words, an acorn is an oak in the seed stage, its sprout is an oak in the sapling stage, and the full-grown tree is an oak in the mature stage. An oak goes through different stages of development over time, to be sure, but it remains what it is—an oak—from beginning to end.
The same insight applies to a fetus. What kind of fetus is it? It’s a human fetus. That individual human will progress from fetal stage to newborn stage to adolescent stage to adult stage, yet it remains the same individual human being from beginning to end—from conception to adulthood. Every living thing looks different at different stages of its development, yet it still remains itself throughout the process.
All this claim amounts to is that earlier stages of the development of a living thing are not the same as later stages of the development of that living thing. Simply put, an infant is not an adult. This is true, of course, but it’s a trivial observation that’s irrelevant to the question of the humanity of a fetus.
Terms like zygote, embryo, fetus, etc., are purely human inventions marking general stages of biological development. Embryology—and common sense—tells us that the very same individual is present at each stage, regardless of the arbitrary terms we use to distinguish the stages.
“All views have equal value, and none should be considered better than another.”
This is a claim about opposing views and how we should treat them. The claim is that we should treat all views as equally meritorious.
Here’s my question: Is this claim a view? Of course it is. The claim, then, applies to itself just as much as it does to views that compete with it.
Surprisingly, the challenger is offering a view that he thinks is superior to the opposite notion that some views have more merit than others. Fair enough. The moment he does, though, he falls on his own sword since the view he’s advancing is equally deadly to itself.
For a challenger to be consistent in advancing the view that all views have equal value and none should be considered better than another, he would have to immediately affirm its opposite—that all views do not have equal value and some are better than others—since both, according to him, have equal merit.
This, of course, is nonsense. The claim is hopelessly contradictory. It can’t be taken seriously since it negates itself.
“Can a non-Christian go to Heaven if he is sincere in his beliefs?”
Most people hold their beliefs—whatever they happen to be—with complete sincerity. Their sincerity, though, cannot make those beliefs true. Some people have accurate beliefs, and some do not. The difference matters.
When it comes to the spiritual truth of salvation, sincerity cannot rescue. Note the apostle Paul’s lament about his brethren, the Jews:
Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Rom. 10:1–4)
Paul’s Jewish kin were filled with sincere zeal regarding their convictions, but their sincerity could not save them. They were lost because their zeal was not according to knowledge. Their views were false.
“Abortion should not be banned since nobody really knows when life begins.”
The time when an individual human life begins is no mystery to anyone marginally schooled in embryology. A human being’s life begins at conception. This is scientific orthodoxy and is not a matter of debate with anyone familiar with the issue.
If you make this legitimate appeal to authority, though, you’re likely to be contradicted and dismissed, as I was when interviewed on abortion by a particularly hostile BBC reporter during an international broadcast.
If that happens to you, don’t worry. There’s a workaround. The important question with abortion is not when life begins, but whether or not the unborn is alive when an abortion takes place.
Here is the question I ask when confronted with this challenge: Is the offending “tissue” growing? Of course it is. Well, if it’s growing, then it’s alive. End of issue.
Abortion kills a living thing. That’s the point of abortion. It doesn’t just terminate a pregnancy. It terminates an individual life, regardless of the precise point of time that life began.
“If God is able to do anything, can God sin?”
The capacity or potential to sin is not an ability; it’s a disability. God has no disabilities. Therefore, God cannot sin.
Think of it this way. We all err now and then when doing our sums. Does our “ability” to get our math wrong constitute a meaningful skill we possess? Of course not. It’s not a skill; it’s a flaw.
To say someone possesses the propensity to err is a positive way of stating a negative thing. It’s like saying, “I can fail.” This statement is not really about what one can do (fail), even though it’s stated that way. Rather, it’s an obverse way of stating what one can’t do (succeed). It’s not a strength; it’s a weakness. It’s a debility, not an ability. Since God lacks nothing good, he lacks no genuine ability.
A variation of this challenge suggests that if God can’t sin, then he doesn’t have the freedom we have to do what we want to do.
Two thoughts. First, freedom to sin is not freedom. It’s slavery. Jesus said that everyone who commits sin is slave to sin (John 8:34). Second, God always does what he wants to do. Because God is perfectly good, though, all of his desires are noble. Consequently, God is the most free because he is never encumbered as we are by evil desires or evil actions.
“There is no truth.”
There’s one question that immediately comes to my mind when I encounter this frequent claim: Is that statement true? Is it true that there is no truth?
You can see the problem immediately. The claim that there is no truth is self-refuting. Since it self-destructs, nothing more is needed to dispatch the challenge than to simply point out the problem.
Since this insight is lost on many when you draw their attention to it—they think it’s a word trick—sometimes you’ll need to clarify the concern. Try something like this.
“I’m confused. I’m trying to figure out how you want me to respond to what you just said. I think you want me to take you seriously. I think you want me to believe you’re right. But if I were to say you’re right, I’d be saying your statement is true, and that’s the very thing you won’t let me say. Now what?”
A truth is a fact. To claim there is no truth is to say there are no facts—including the “fact” that there is no truth. That’s the self-refuting part. Plus, it turns out there’s a multitude of facts we know and live by every single moment.
Humans are truth seekers by nature. Each day, in thousands of ways, we’re observing, testing, and assessing to determine one thing: truth. Our lives depend on it. Animals are guided by instinct. For humans to survive, though, we must use our minds to discover what’s true. It’s why we fault ignorance.
The claim “There is no truth” says all such attempts are fruitless since there’s nothing to discover. This is obviously false. It’s also dangerous. It’s like convincing someone there are no germs or diseases before inviting them to dine in a dump.
If you’re convinced there is no truth, there’s nothing to protect you from being destroyed by lies. And there are lies. And they do destroy.
“Who created God?”
Kids ask this question all the time, but a surprising number of PhDs trot it out, too, when they ought to know better. It usually shows up when a Christian argues that the origin of the universe is an event that requires God as the adequate cause.
The argument has force for the theist because virtually everyone—believer and atheist alike—agrees the universe has an age. The cosmos came into being sometime in the distant past.[2] If the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a beginner. Simply put, a Big Bang needs a Big Banger. That’s the argument, and it’s a good one. [3]
The atheist tries to apply the same reasoning to God. “Okay,” he says, “then who created God?” Since the Christian argues the universe must have a creator because it began to exist, therefore—the atheist thinks—God must have a creator, too.
The reason PhDs should know this is not a proper question about God is because the theist’s argument only applies to things, like the universe, that begin to exist. No one—even the atheist—thinks that if God actually existed he’d need a beginning.
The kind of God we’re talking about is eternal, with no beginning and no end. Since God had no beginning, it makes no sense to ask where he came from or who created him. This doesn’t prove God exists, of course, but it does show that certain questions about God make no sense.
“Why would a good God make a bad place like Hell?”
The simple answer to the question of why a good God would make a bad place like Hell is that it’s precisely because God is good that he made Hell. Further, Hell isn’t a bad place. It’s a good place.
I realize that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true.
No good government allows guilty criminals to roam free. It locks them up in prison. Incarceration doesn’t just isolate felons, though, preventing them from harming law-abiding citizens. It also punishes them for the wrongs they’ve committed. Any government that didn’t sentence outlaws wouldn’t be good because it wouldn’t be just.
In the same way, God would not be good if he simply let evil people go free. When people are punished in God’s court, they get exactly what they deserve. The books of death are opened for all to see.[4] Every wrong anyone has ever committed is recorded there.
At that great white throne judgment, God dispenses perfect justice—punishment for everything a person has ever done wrong, and God misses nothing. Those whose names are written in the book of life, though, do not get punished since Jesus has taken their punishment for them. They receive perfect mercy—forgiveness for everything they’ve ever done wrong, and God misses nothing. Either Jesus pays, or we pay. That’s the calculus.
Hell, then, is a good place in the same way that prisons are good. It may not be subjectively good—it’s no fun going there—but it is objectively good because a good purpose is accomplished there: justice.
“The fact that the apostles gave their lives for what they believed in is not good evidence for Christianity. Islamist suicide bombers die for their beliefs, too.”
There’s a point here. If Christians were merely arguing that the apostles’ beliefs must have been true because they died for their convictions, then suicide bombers would have equal standing for the same reason. Unfortunately for the skeptic, that’s not the argument.
Agreed, many people have died for a lie. How many people, though, die for a lie when they know it’s a lie? That’s the meaningful distinction. The 9/11 terrorists all died for a lie they were convinced was true. If Jesus didn’t rise bodily from the grave, though, there were at least 11 people who knew it: his closest surviving disciples.
Not every apostle died a martyr’s death, though many did.[5] The historical record makes it clear, however, that martyrdom was a risk for everyone preaching the gospel in the early days, and many suffered brutal persecution for their efforts. Here’s the question: Why would those men suffer so much for a lie that they perpetrated? That doesn’t make sense.
The basic rule about lying is one every schoolboy understands. If you make up a story, tell one that gets you something good for your efforts. Don’t invent a story that gets you beaten, whipped, stoned, crucified upside down, or beheaded. That’s not a good lie. The simple truth is that myths don’t make martyrs when the martyrs are the ones who made the myths in the first place.
The disciples claimed they had seen the risen Christ. They had met with him. They had broken bread with him. They had talked with him many times over in many different settings. They were willing to sign their testimony with their own blood. Many did.
Here is the question. What would transform a group of cowering disciples who had abandoned Jesus into vibrant witnesses for Christ standing firmly in the face of the authorities who threatened to flog them for their testimony?
In the final analysis, no explanation fits the evidence better than the one given by those previously gutless disciples who were now putting their lives on the line for this testimony: He who was dead is alive. He has risen.
That is the argument.
“All religions are basically the same.”
The first time I fielded this question was at a lecture I gave at the University of California, Irvine.
When I heard it, I simply turned around to the chalkboard behind me and drew two small circles of equal size. I asked the student if these circles were basically the same. She said yes. I then drew a line from the first one and labeled it “aspirin” and from the second one and labeled it “arsenic.” Then I asked the same question: “Are these basically the same?”
She got the point. “The similarities between religions are not really important,” I said. “It’s the differences that matter.”
Any person who claims all religions are basically the same has not taken a close look at all religions. They are wildly diverse, conflicting and competing with each other on essential points in their attempt to give an accurate account of reality. For example, some affirm a personal God, others a nonpersonal one. For still others, God is not a factor at all.
Given that diversity, some have searched for a common spiritual principle uniting all faiths. The Golden Rule—allegedly taught by all religions—is the most popular candidate. Here is Jesus’ version: “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12).
Unfortunately, as sound as this moral maxim might be, it’s certainly not enough to map ultimate reality. Worldviews are characteristically constructed around four key concerns: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. A minimalistic moral principle like the Golden Rule speaks to none of those foundational elements.
In the next issue of Solid Ground, I’ll answer more “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Gregory Koukl, The Story of Reality (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 137.
[2] How far in the distant past the universe came into existence is a matter of debate between well-intentioned Christians, but that issue is irrelevant to this argument for God. Ironically, both believers and unbelievers agree on the critical point: The universe had a beginning. That’s all that’s necessary for this argument to get a foothold.
[3] This line of reasoning is a version of a case for God based on the existence of the universe. It’s called the kalam cosmological argument.
[4] See Revelation 20:12–13. I call them “the books of death” because they’re contrasted with the book of life, a record of all the redeemed.
[5] For historical details, see Sean McDowell’s helpful The Fate of the Apostles.
Tactics and Tools
Rapid Fire – Part 2
Events in the last few months have thrust Christianity into view in the public square in a way I haven’t witnessed in a long time. Spiritual curiosity is on the rise everywhere, it seems. We’re experiencing it at STR and hearing of the surge of activity with Christian groups and local churches around the country.
As interest in Christ increases, so do both the questions raised by genial spiritual tire-kickers and the challenges offered by more aggressive hardcore skeptics. Thus, in this month’s Solid Ground, I’m continuing to respond to what I’ve called “rapid-fire” challenges. Some are rather simple; others are more complex. Understanding each, though, will help you be a better ambassador for Christ during this surge of interest in him.
“Christians are stupid.”
My simple response to this slight is, “Yes, some of them are. So what?”
When I lectured on relativism at UC San Diego years ago, I’d heard that many students on campus thought Christians were not very bright, so I started my lecture with that point.
“I understand that some of you think Christians are stupid,” I said. “Well, many of them are. But many non-Christians are stupid, too, so I don’t know what that gets you. What I want to show you tonight is that Christianity is not stupid.”
The fact is, lots of religious people are dull-witted and gullible, but so are multitudes of non-religious people. Conjectures about Christians’ low IQ get you nowhere since nothing useful follows from the observation—even if accurate—that some believers are not very clever. The challenge is a dead end because you cannot refute a belief simply by denigrating the believer.
I was once asked why it seemed that most intelligent people don’t believe in Christ. I said it was the same reason most unintelligent people don’t believe in Christ. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Rather, Christianity makes too big of a moral and ethical demand on people. Simply put, they don’t want to bend the knee. The problem is moral, not intellectual.
“Morality based on God is just another form of relativism.”
During a panel discussion I participated in after a talk I gave at the University of Alaska, one of the philosophy professors on the panel mentioned that a divine command approach to morality like the one found in Scripture is just another form of ethical subjectivism—relativism, that is. This troubled me because I believe in God’s moral absolutes. As an ethical objectivist, I’m committed to the idea that God’s commands are the foundation for all our moral obligations. That’s a form of divine command morality. Yet, the comment seemed to put divine command ethics on par with ordinary moral relativism.
In a certain sense, the philosopher had a point. Generally speaking, subjectivism in morality is when moral truth is completely dependent on an individual subject—the person holding the moral conviction. Good and evil are not objective features of the world on this view but are subjective judgments of individual minds. God is a subject—a mind, true enough—and on divine command theory, morality is grounded in him. At first glance, then, it seems that grounding morality in God provides no rescue from ordinary relativism.
But it does. Here’s why.
In moral relativism, morality is based on a subject—a human individual or group of individuals—whose beliefs about what is moral and what is immoral can change over time. What’s right or wrong for that person or group at one point in time could be completely different at another point since human values vary. Nothing fixes morality in any absolute sense.
God is an individual subject, of course, but he’s a completely different sort of subject. He is a personal being, but he is also the very ground of being. He doesn’t give commands arbitrarily according to his changing whim—like ordinary subjectivism—because God doesn’t change. Rather, his commands flow forth from an objective source: his unchanging, morally perfect nature.
So even though God is a subject—a personal individual, so to speak—he is also an object of fixed moral perfection, the standard of good by which all other good (and bad) is measured.
The problem with relativistic morality grounded in human subjects is that humans are numerous and they are capricious. There are many of them, resulting in a variety of moralities, and their moralities change over time because they are not grounded in or attached to anything fixed and moral in itself.
In an odd sort of way, then, morality grounded in God can be objective yet still relative to a subject. In this case, though, that subject is God himself—the objective ground of moral perfection and, therefore, the only unchanging, morally perfect, objective standard for all moral good.
“Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam.”
The word “radical” is ambiguous here and needs clarification, along with the word “dangerous,”[1] especially since the theologies of these two religions are so different. What does a radical Christian look like compared to a radical Muslim?
I take this sense of “radical” to mean a religious extremist—one who has a thorough and complete dedication to his spiritual convictions. Being a religious radical in that sense is not always a liability, though. Mother Teresa followed her convictions to the extreme by creating the Missionaries of Charity and spending her life caring for the poor in the slums of Calcutta.
So, whether or not religious “radicalism” is dangerous depends entirely on the fundamental beliefs that a person pursues in the extreme. Generally, religious radicals are dangerous if their theology dictates violence towards unbelievers and/or denial of fundamental human liberties.
Since no religion can be held responsible for the crimes of its heretics, it’s important to be clear on the orthodox fundamentals that define a given religion.
The word “fundamentalist” has a negative connotation and is often used to discredit and marginalize Christians. Taken in a merely descriptive sense, though, religious fundamentalism is characterized by three things. A fundamentalist 1) faithfully follows his religious leader, 2) obeys his religious book, and 3) adheres to the fundamental dictates of his religion.
So how do Christianity and Islam compare by these standards?
What faithful imitation of Christ leads readily to oppression and wanton bloodshed? None. What New Testament teaching mandates forcible conversion to the faith? None. What fundamental dictates of Christian theology command coerced adherence to biblical doctrines? None.[2]
None of these are logical consequences of the teachings of Christ or of the doctrines of Christianity. If they’re not, then oppression and violence done in the name of Christ cannot be laid at his door. Jesus himself warned of interlopers, of wolves in sheep’s clothing. His assessment of them was clear: “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matt. 7:23).
Well-meaning but misguided people who self-profess Christianity sometimes do regrettable things, often out of ignorance. This is not an excuse, of course, but it shows that the problem is not with “radical” Christian religion, but with misinformed or malicious individuals.
What about Islam? What does a “radical Muslim extremist” look like—one who is thoroughly and completely dedicated to his spiritual convictions, who follows Mohammed, obeys the Quran, and adheres to Islamic fundamentals?
We’re all familiar with the concept of violent jihad characteristic of many followers of Islam because examples of it show up frequently in the news. Their actions are not a result of well-meaning but misguided zeal since they’re following the example of their leader, who regularly justified military force to advance Islam.
The Quran, their religious book recording their fundamental doctrines and practices, commands the following in surah 9:29:
Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor comply with what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth from among those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled.
Note that surah 9 is one of the last revelations given by Mohammed.[3] According to the Muslim “principle of abrogation,” when a contradiction occurs between two passages, the later surahs annul the earlier revelations. Thus, any older, more tolerant-sounding teachings of Mohammed are abrogated (nullified) by surah 9, which teaches violence, subjugation, and religious jihad as a spiritual duty.[4]
To summarize the contrast, note this. Mohammed died in AD 632. In AD 732, Charles Martel successfully stopped the European military advance of the Islamic horde at the Battle of Tours. It took Muslim armies 100 years to forcibly conquer the entire Mediterranean region. It took Christians 300 years to “conquer” the same area, and the only blood they shed was their own.
Thus, it is not the case that radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam. The religions are at opposite ends of the spectrum when they are viewed at their “extremes”—extreme kindness, mercy, and tolerance from followers of Jesus versus extreme violence, suppression, and subjugation from followers of Muhammed.
“Do you take the Bible literally?”
This question sounds like it’s about one thing, but it’s usually about something else.
Let’s start with a definition. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the word “literal” means “taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory, free from exaggeration or distortion.”
The fact is, most people read most things in their usual or most basic sense, including when that sense employs standard literary tools like metaphors or allegories. I call it the “ordinary” way of reading. History is history, poetry is poetry, similes and metaphors are figures of speech, etc. Pretty straightforward.
Why do people hesitate, then, when applying this commonsense notion to the Bible or, more precisely, to certain passages in the Bible? The concern hinges not on how the Christian reads the text but on what the Christian thinks the text actually says.
Of course, no one balks at reading the Bible “literally” when its commands or theology suit their purposes. Jesus’ directive not to judge or his injunctions that we love each other seem clear and unambiguous. No trouble there.
The linguistic rules change, though, when the critic comes across something in the text that offends his own philosophical, theological, or moral sensibilities. “Jesus, the only way? No sex outside of marriage? Give me a break.”
Some claims seem so fanciful that it’s hard for skeptics to take the statements at face value. “Were Adam and Eve the first human beings? Was Adam created from dirt and Eve from Adam’s rib? Did Jonah survive three days in the belly of a great fish? Did a virgin really have a baby? You don’t take that stuff literally, do you?”
Yet, how else should we take it? Following the basic rule of reading the text the ordinary way, that seems to be what the author intended us to understand in each of these cases.
As I said, frequently the problem isn’t with how we read the text but with what the text clearly seems to say. If it’s offensive, odd, or inconvenient in some way, then the linguistic rules change for many. This subtle double standard, I think, is usually at the heart of the taking-the-Bible-literally challenge.
Next is a different sort of “literal” reading challenge.
“Homosexuality was punishable by death in the Old Testament, so Christians who take the Bible literally must promote the execution of homosexuals.”
The answer to this question is based on the difference between what I call taking the Bible literally vs. taking the Bible laterally. This distinction will also help show that Christians are not “cherry picking” moral dictates from parts of the Law while ignoring others, which is the basic complaint here.
In the Law of Moses, homosexual activity was punishable by death (Lev. 18:22–23 and 20:13). Therefore (the charge goes), any Christian who takes the Old Testament Law literally and opposes homosexuality must also advocate capital punishment for homosexuals, as the Law requires.
The strategy with this move is obvious: If we don’t promote executing homosexuals, then we can’t legitimately condemn their behavior, since both details are in the Law. If we don’t take the Bible literally in the first case, we shouldn’t in the second case, either.
How do we escape the horns of this dilemma? By using care and precision with our definitions, that’s how.
The Mosaic Law is the legislation that governed the commonwealth of Israel. So here’s our question: When Moses wrote that Law, did he expect the Jewish people to take those regulations literally?
If you’re not sure how to answer, let me ask it another way. When an ordinance is passed in your local state (California, in my case), do you think the legislators intend its citizens to understand the words of the regulations “in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory, free from exaggeration or distortion”?
Of course they do. Legal codes are not written in vague or figurative language allowing each citizen to get creative with the meaning. The same would be true for the Mosaic Law. Moses meant it the way he wrote it. He expected his directives to be taken at face value—as all legislation requires.
It seems, though, that now we’re stuck on the other horn of the dilemma. To be consistent, shouldn’t we currently campaign for the death penalty for homosexuals? For that matter, aren’t we obliged to promote execution for Sabbath-breakers and disobedient children, both capital crimes under the Law?
The simple answer is no. Here’s why. Even when a biblical command is intended to be understood literally, that does not mean it is intended to be applied laterally, so to speak—that is, universally across the board to all peoples at all times in all places. Any particular piece of legislation applies only to those who are under its jurisdiction. The Mosaic Law governed Jews during the theocracy. It does not govern them anymore, and it was never intended to govern Gentiles.
Here’s another way of looking at it. California legal codes are to be read literally but not applied laterally. The codes only apply to those in California and have no application to people in other states. California’s laws have local, literal application within its own borders but no lateral application anywhere not under its jurisdiction.
In the same way, the words of the Mosaic Law, like those of all laws, are to be taken at face value by anyone who reads them. Yet only those under its jurisdiction are obliged to obey its precepts.[5]
The Jews in the theocracy were expected to obey the legal code God gave them, including the prohibition of—and punishment for—homosexuality. It was not the legal code God gave to Gentiles, however. Therefore, even if the words of the Mosaic Law were to be taken literally by those under the jurisdiction of that code, this does not mean that in our current circumstances we are governed by the details of the provisions of that law.
Am I saying that nothing written in the Mosaic Law ever applies to Christians or other Gentiles? No, I’m not saying that. There are many universal moral obligations that humanity shares with the Jews of Moses’ time.
Though Moses gave legal statutes for Jews living in the Jewish state, the Mosaic Law in many cases still reflects broad ethical principles that show up in laws governing people in jurisdictions outside the commonwealth of Israel—though punishments may differ based on different legal sensibilities. Both California and Wisconsin prohibit homicide, for example. As I have written elsewhere:
Perversion is still perverse, and wickedness is still wrong, whether it be adultery, rape, incest, or bestiality—or any of a number of evil acts all condemned by Moses in the “old” Law.[6]
So yes, we can glean wisdom and moral guidance from the Law of Moses for our own legal codes, but there are limits. Working out those details is a different discussion, however.[7]
The key question here is not whether we take the Mosaic Law literally, but whether we are now under that legal code. We are not.[8] That law was meant for Jews living under a theocracy defined by their unique covenant with God. The fact that a directive appears in the Mosaic Law does not, by that fact alone, make it obligatory for those living outside of Israel’s ancient jurisdiction. It’s literal, but it’s not lateral.
Consider this situation. Jesus told Peter to cast his net into deep water (Luke 5:4). That’s exactly what Peter did because he took Jesus’ command literally, in its ordinary sense. He had no reason to think otherwise. However, even though Jesus’ command to Peter was literal, that does not mean the same command applies laterally to anyone else. We are not obligated to cast nets into deep water just because Peter was.
Americans are a mixture of peoples in a representative republic governed by a different set of decrees than the Jews under Moses. We are not obliged to obey everything that came down from Sinai. Just because it was commanded of the Jews, that does not mean it is commanded of us. Some moral precepts, however, will show up in every country’s legislation because they reflect universal ethical obligations.
Some may disagree, but if anyone wants to argue for a lateral application of all literal biblical injunctions, it seems to me he is also duty-bound to take his net and cast it into deep water.
In our next Solid Ground, I’ll respond to another batch of “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Thus, the initial tactical question, “What do you mean by that?” is in order here.
[2] Of course, ethical teachings of Scripture that prohibit behaviors like murder, rape, theft, perjury, kidnapping, etc., are universally acknowledged as immoral and are, for that reason, reflected in legal statutes. For more detail on this issue, see Gregory Koukl, “Getting ‘Political’—Vice or Christian Virtue?” at str.org.
[3] Surahs are not in chronological order.
[4] Not all Muslims hold to this version of Islam, of course, but vast numbers—hundreds of millions—do. In Islam, as in Christianity, there are both obedient fundamentalists (in the sense clarified above) and theological liberals who deviate from foundational orthodoxies.
[5] This principle is critical to understanding the role of Old Testament Law in New Testament times.
[6] See Gregory Koukl and Alan Shlemon, “A Reformation the Church Doesn’t Need: Answering Revisionist Pro-Gay Theology—Part 1,” available at str.org.
[7] For the record, I think the immorality of homosexuality is one of those universal moral laws since, among other reasons, it’s identified in the New Testament as immoral irrespective of the Mosaic Law (e.g., Rom. 1:27 and 1 Cor. 6:9).
[8] Note Paul’s discussion on this issue in Romans 7:1–6.
In our last two issues of Solid Ground, instead of focusing on one large topic, I looked at a number of smaller ones, offering you short vignettes providing insight on common challenges you might face as a Christian ambassador. I continue that pattern here with more short treatments on a variety of topics.
“How can God hear everyone’s prayers all at once?”
Easy. God doesn’t have to “listen” to requests the way we do.
We pay careful attention to the details of a person’s appeal so we can understand it accurately and not miss something significant. Then we decide how we’re going to respond.
God doesn’t need to listen in that way, though, since when we pray to God he never learns anything he didn’t already know before we asked. Put another way, there never was a time when God didn’t know what we were going to pray. Since God is omniscient—he’s always known all things—he’s always known what we would ask for, and he’s always known how he would respond.
That insight raises another question, of course. If God already knew what we were going to pray before we asked, then what’s the point of asking in the first place? Philosophers describe it this way: Even though God’s knowledge is temporally prior to our prayers, our prayers are logically prior to his knowledge and, thus, his response.
Simply put, even though God’s knowledge of our prayer comes before the prayer is prayed (temporally prior), his knowledge in the past is dependent upon what we choose to ask in the present. If we didn’t pray now, there wouldn’t be anything for God to have known in eternity past to respond to in the present moment. In other words, our prayers make a difference.
Plus, God’s omniscience provides a hidden benefit. Since he knows what we’ll ask before we ask it, he can put his answer into motion, when necessary, even before we pray. Imagine a poor family asking God to provide food at dinnertime. At the close of their prayer, they hear a knock on the door and discover a bag of groceries delivered by an anonymous donor waiting for them on the porch. Clearly, the food had to be on its way before the request was offered. God acted in advance because he knew the petition was going to be made.
“Euthanasia is good since it puts suffering people out of their misery.”
Once, I participated in a debate on California’s Initiative 161 legalizing physician-assisted suicide. My opponents charged that I was forcing my religious views on others. They didn’t realize that their position entailed religious assumptions of its own.
When people claim that suicide will end a person’s suffering, they’re assuming a religious view about the nature of life after death. They’re counting on the fact that there’s no conscious existence beyond the grave, or that what greets those who pass on will be a pleasant improvement on the misery of their lives on earth.
If their presumption about the afterlife is wrong, though, and Hell awaits those who deserve it, then for some people, euthanasia will not end their misery but compound it. The person suffering here on earth is not transported from a place of anguish to a place of peace and rest but rather to a place of significantly greater suffering in Hell.
It is theoretically possible, then, that so-called “mercy” killing would actually be cruel, not merciful. By living longer on this earth, a sick person who is not euthanized will either delay more intense suffering that follows or—if they receive God’s mercy in the interim—escape it altogether. Consequently, accelerating death through doctor-assisted suicide would be an act of cruelty, and delaying death an act of kindness. Everything depends on which religious view is correct.
Ultimately, then, it’s impossible to avoid the intrusion of spiritual convictions on either side of this issue. It’s not a matter of one party forcing its religious views on another. It’s a matter of two religious views competing with each other.
“We can’t trust our New Testament reconstruction from ancient manuscripts since they have more variations in the copies than there are words in the original.”
This challenge is a fair one since the claim is true, as far as it goes. There are roughly 138,000 words in the New Testament, yet the surviving handwritten copies reveal an estimated 750,000 disagreements in the wording, though that number is probably much larger.[1] In fact, New Testament critic Bart Ehrman points out that the manuscripts “differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are.”[2]
Though Bible critics like Ehrman are correct on this point, the fact is misleading since the number of variants itself—any deviation from the standard text that’s found in the existing copies[3]—is ultimately irrelevant to our ability to recapture the original wording of the New Testament. Here’s why.
For one, any difference, no matter how slight or irrelevant, is added to the total count. Yet the vast majority of the total differences between the texts is completely inconsequential—spelling differences,[4] insignificant variations of word order (e.g., “Christ Jesus” vs. “Jesus Christ”), obvious omissions, use of synonyms, clear transpositions of words, nonsense readings, and “singular readings,”[5] among others. None of these trivial differences affect accurate translation in any way and thus have no bearing on our ability to reconstruct the original.
Second, there’s a reason we have lots of variants: We have lots of manuscripts. This is a strength, not a weakness, since there is safety in numbers. Thousands of extant New Testament manuscripts amounting to millions of pages of ancient text provide the best opportunity for comparison and correction, even though the number of variants increases with each new fragment discovered.
Third, the mere comparison of original words to manuscript variants, even though accurate, is profoundly misleading. Note Hixon and Gurry:
The problem is that the comparison itself is meaningless. It makes a little sense to compare the number of supposed variants in all our Greek manuscripts to the number of words in only one manuscript or printed edition. [Emphasis in the original.][6]
It would make more sense to compare the total number of variants to the total number of words in the total number of manuscripts. That exercise, however, would not serve the critics’ interests since the statistic, though accurate, would be completely inconsequential.
So, the number of differences itself is irrelevant. A closer examination of the nature of the variants is what matters, not the raw number. When that work is done by the legion of textual specialists deciphering the variants, even critics like Bart Ehrman have been able to reconstruct the New Testament with an unprecedented degree of virtually word-for-word accuracy.
“Why does God make death the deadline for salvation? It seems arbitrary and even unfair to those who may die on their way to a church service where they intended to become a Christian.”
I’m including this rather unusual question because it offers a handful of different elements that are important to consider when responding to challenges.
The first concern above has to do with the apparent arbitrary nature of God’s salvation “cutoff” point. The author of Hebrews writes, “It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). But why then? Why not sometime later? Why any cutoff point at all? It makes little sense to some critics.
The second concern is more weighty. What if someone gets killed on his way to church where he intended to respond to an altar call to become a Christian? Since death is the point of no return for salvation, then a circumstance this person had no control over deprived him of eternal life. Worse, what if murder was the cause of the death that interrupted the trip? Wouldn’t it be odd if a felon’s crime were the reason his victim was damned to Hell forever?
Implicit in this challenge is a subtle insinuation. Christianity is just too strange, bizarre, or unfair to be taken seriously.
Is Christianity significantly undermined by an inability to divine God’s reasons for a salvation cutoff point? The answer is no for a number of reasons—the death-on-the-way-to-the-altar-call concern notwithstanding.
First, I have no reason to think God is arbitrary about anything. Why assume he’s arbitrary just because in some cases we don’t know why he does what he does? It suggests a defect in the Divine when there’s no good reason to think so.
I’ve often pointed out that questions starting with the phrases like “Why did God…” or “Why didn’t God…” are frequently impossible to answer for good reason: God hasn’t told us. If God is mute on some issues, then we’re simply in the dark. Unless God gives us his reasons, we can speculate all we want. Some of those speculations may have merit, but they will have no authority. Speculations remain speculative.
Second, what if I simply responded, “I don’t know why God set death as the deadline”? What harm would befall the case for Christianity then? None, as far as I can tell. All the evidence in favor of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection would still be intact as well as all the various lines of evidence for God’s existence.
Here’s the basic principle: Our inability to answer hypothetical questions about God’s intentions has no bearing on the truth of the Christian worldview. Full stop. Lack of concrete answers to these kinds of queries signifies nothing.
Third, it’s not clear that any answer to the first question would satisfy a critic. If God had decided on a different “point of no return” for salvation, would that make any difference to the challenger? No matter where God drew the line, it seems, the same question could always be raised, so suggesting alternate cutoff criteria gets you nowhere.
Fourth, some speculations may be useful—though not definitive—if they suggest reasonable possibilities. For example, it makes sense to me that death ends any opportunity for forgiveness because when a person dies, it ends the lifetime of sin for which he will be judged. A criminal’s life of crime comes to an end when he’s caught. If he had eluded capture, he might have changed course and possibly eluded justice as well. When he’s brought before the judge, though, it’s too late. His career of crime is over and “after this comes judgment.” Nothing odd about that.
What about the darker concern, though, that circumstances outside the control of a would-be penitent might seal his fate forever? My answer is twofold.
First—in my view at least—anyone planning to become a Christian at the next church altar call is probably already a believer simply waiting for an opportunity to formalize his faith publicly. Interrupting his trip to church changes nothing about his eternal destiny.
Second, any critique of Christianity must take the whole of Christian doctrine into account, or the critic will be tilting at windmills.[7] Human freedom has its limits, otherwise God would not be God—not the Christian God, at least, and that’s the God in question. Even a murderer’s free will doesn’t ultimately determine the course of the universe. God has his purposes, too, and he accomplishes them in spite of the sinful choices of evil people. Any hypothetical circumstance that presumes human actions alone decisively determine human destiny ignores a cardinal principle of the Christian creed: God is sovereign.
When all is said and done, keep in mind that there are imponderables in every worldview. We shouldn’t be surprised if some turn up in ours.
“What’s a quick biblical argument to show that Jesus is the same as the God of the Old Testament?”
Suppose two Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your door, and you invite them in for a chat. What passages can you show them, even in their own New World Translation (NWT), that will challenge their conviction that Jesus is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures?
Here’s an approach that might get them thinking—which is usually the best you can hope for in an initial conversation with anyone, especially a Jehovah’s Witness. Use Old Testament texts that identify unique characteristics of Jehovah God, then turn to the New Testament and show them that the very same characteristics are applied to Jesus by his own disciples.
For example, in the NWT, Isaiah 45:23 says, “By myself I have sworn; the word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and it will not return: To me every knee will bend, every tongue will swear loyalty.” Yet in Philippians 2:9–11, Paul cites the very same passage and says:
For this very reason, God exalted him to a superior position and kindly gave him the name that is above every other name, so that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend—of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the ground—and every tongue should openly acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
The scriptural parallels abound. Both Jehovah in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are called the Creator (Gen. 1:1; cf. John 1:3; Heb. 1:8a, 10), the Light (Ps. 27:1; cf. John 8:12), the Good Shepherd (Ps. 23:1; cf. John 10:11), the only Rock (Isa. 44:8; cf. 1 Cor. 10:4), the Judge of all the earth (Gen. 18:25; cf. 2 Tim. 4:1; Acts 17:31), the first and the last (Isa. 44:6; cf. Rev 1:17–18), and the Savior (Isa. 43:11; cf. Luke 2:11; John 4:42; Acts 4:12; Titus 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:1).
Conclusion? Jesus is the Creator of all things, the Light of the world, the Good Shepherd, the only Rock, the Judge of all the earth, the first and the last, and the world’s only Savior—the same as Jehovah in the Old Testament.
“People of other faiths are just as confident they’re right about their religious views as the Christian is of his. Obviously, then, culture is the biggest influence on a person’s beliefs.”
American atheist Michael Shermer raised a version of this issue with me in a three-hour national radio debate I had with him a number of years ago.
Of course, Shermer is right, as far as it goes. Everyone who believes anything is convinced his views are true, otherwise he wouldn’t believe them. Multitudes have what might be called “psychological confidence” in their own beliefs, a confidence which, in most cases, is a result of cultural influences in their lives. No argument there.
The problem with this observation is that it doesn’t take us very far. This challenge is another one where a legitimate response could be, “You’re probably right. So what?” Most people feel they are right in their views, true enough—some even invincibly so. Obviously, though, everyone can’t be correct when their views conflict with others’ views. Some may be right, but that means the others are mistaken. Now what?
Consider two men, one a pediatrician in New York and another an indigenous tribesman deep in the Amazon jungle. Each attributes disease to different causes. The pediatrician faults germs; the tribesman faults spirits. The doctor invokes medicine for healing; the tribesman invokes magic. Each is fully convinced of his view precisely because this is what his culture has taught him to believe.
Here is my question: Which one is correct, the doctor or the tribesman?
You will never know the answer to that question by weighing relative amounts of psychological confidence, or by reflecting on the influence of the culture each was raised in, or by pointing to the emotional influences that formed their beliefs.
The psychological, cultural, or emotional reasons people believe anything may tell you about their psychology, or their culture, or their emotional states. They will tell you nothing, though, about whether germs or demons cause disease. They will also tell you nothing about whether Christianity—or any other religion, for that matter—is true or false. To get to the answer to those questions, you have to look elsewhere.
Critics raising this issue have their cart before their horse. They think they can discredit a religious view by citing a host of cultural or psychological influences that shaped the belief. However, they must first discredit the views on their individual merits before it becomes meaningful to ask why anyone would believe something the critic may consider foolish.
In order to get to the truth of anything, including religion, they’re going to have to look at the reasons supporting the view itself. To quote C.S. Lewis, “You can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning—never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.”[8] And, I might add, never by making observations about emotional confidence or the influence of one’s culture on his religious convictions.
Examining the motives (or cultural or historical influences) of one’s view may tell you interesting things about psychology or about history, but it can never tell you anything about the legitimacy of the view itself.
To answer those questions, one needs more than internal psychological confidence. He needs external evidence. That’s why careful Christians don’t just have “faith.” They have convictions anchored to objective evidence because they know the dangers of putting too much stock in their subjective psychological confidence.
In our next Solid Ground, I’ll respond to another batch of “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Elijah Hixon and Peter J. Gurry, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 8–9.
[2] Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus—The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, first paperback edition (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 10.
[3] To be more precise, according to manuscript expert Daniel Wallace, “A textual variant is any place among the MSS [manuscripts] in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission or edition of words, even spelling differences. The most trivial changes count, and even when all the manuscripts except one say one thing, that lone MS’s reading counts as a textual variant” (Emphasis in the original.), Daniel B. Wallace, Ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2011), 26.
[4] There were no universally agreed upon spelling conventions in ancient times.
[5] A singular reading is a variant found in only one Greek manuscript and is therefore not considered authentic, obviously.
[6] Hixon and Gurry, Myths and Mistakes, 10.
[7] Failure to do this is called a “straw man” fallacy.
[8] Clive Staples Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 274.
Events in the last few months have thrust Christianity into view in the public square in a way I haven’t witnessed in a long time. Spiritual curiosity is on the rise everywhere, it seems. We’re experiencing it at STR and hearing of the surge of activity with Christian groups and local churches around the country.
As interest in Christ increases, so do both the questions raised by genial spiritual tire-kickers and the challenges offered by more aggressive hardcore skeptics. Thus, in this month’s Solid Ground, I’m continuing to respond to what I’ve called “rapid-fire” challenges. Some are rather simple; others are more complex. Understanding each, though, will help you be a better ambassador for Christ during this surge of interest in him.
“Christians are stupid.”
My simple response to this slight is, “Yes, some of them are. So what?”
When I lectured on relativism at UC San Diego years ago, I’d heard that many students on campus thought Christians were not very bright, so I started my lecture with that point.
“I understand that some of you think Christians are stupid,” I said. “Well, many of them are. But many non-Christians are stupid, too, so I don’t know what that gets you. What I want to show you tonight is that Christianity is not stupid.”
The fact is, lots of religious people are dull-witted and gullible, but so are multitudes of non-religious people. Conjectures about Christians’ low IQ get you nowhere since nothing useful follows from the observation—even if accurate—that some believers are not very clever. The challenge is a dead end because you cannot refute a belief simply by denigrating the believer.
I was once asked why it seemed that most intelligent people don’t believe in Christ. I said it was the same reason most unintelligent people don’t believe in Christ. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Rather, Christianity makes too big of a moral and ethical demand on people. Simply put, they don’t want to bend the knee. The problem is moral, not intellectual.
“Morality based on God is just another form of relativism.”
During a panel discussion I participated in after a talk I gave at the University of Alaska, one of the philosophy professors on the panel mentioned that a divine command approach to morality like the one found in Scripture is just another form of ethical subjectivism—relativism, that is. This troubled me because I believe in God’s moral absolutes. As an ethical objectivist, I’m committed to the idea that God’s commands are the foundation for all our moral obligations. That’s a form of divine command morality. Yet, the comment seemed to put divine command ethics on par with ordinary moral relativism.
In a certain sense, the philosopher had a point. Generally speaking, subjectivism in morality is when moral truth is completely dependent on an individual subject—the person holding the moral conviction. Good and evil are not objective features of the world on this view but are subjective judgments of individual minds. God is a subject—a mind, true enough—and on divine command theory, morality is grounded in him. At first glance, then, it seems that grounding morality in God provides no rescue from ordinary relativism.
But it does. Here’s why.
In moral relativism, morality is based on a subject—a human individual or group of individuals—whose beliefs about what is moral and what is immoral can change over time. What’s right or wrong for that person or group at one point in time could be completely different at another point since human values vary. Nothing fixes morality in any absolute sense.
God is an individual subject, of course, but he’s a completely different sort of subject. He is a personal being, but he is also the very ground of being. He doesn’t give commands arbitrarily according to his changing whim—like ordinary subjectivism—because God doesn’t change. Rather, his commands flow forth from an objective source: his unchanging, morally perfect nature.
So even though God is a subject—a personal individual, so to speak—he is also an object of fixed moral perfection, the standard of good by which all other good (and bad) is measured.
The problem with relativistic morality grounded in human subjects is that humans are numerous and they are capricious. There are many of them, resulting in a variety of moralities, and their moralities change over time because they are not grounded in or attached to anything fixed and moral in itself.
In an odd sort of way, then, morality grounded in God can be objective yet still relative to a subject. In this case, though, that subject is God himself—the objective ground of moral perfection and, therefore, the only unchanging, morally perfect, objective standard for all moral good.
“Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam.”
The word “radical” is ambiguous here and needs clarification, along with the word “dangerous,”[1] especially since the theologies of these two religions are so different. What does a radical Christian look like compared to a radical Muslim?
I take this sense of “radical” to mean a religious extremist—one who has a thorough and complete dedication to his spiritual convictions. Being a religious radical in that sense is not always a liability, though. Mother Teresa followed her convictions to the extreme by creating the Missionaries of Charity and spending her life caring for the poor in the slums of Calcutta.
So, whether or not religious “radicalism” is dangerous depends entirely on the fundamental beliefs that a person pursues in the extreme. Generally, religious radicals are dangerous if their theology dictates violence towards unbelievers and/or denial of fundamental human liberties.
Since no religion can be held responsible for the crimes of its heretics, it’s important to be clear on the orthodox fundamentals that define a given religion.
The word “fundamentalist” has a negative connotation and is often used to discredit and marginalize Christians. Taken in a merely descriptive sense, though, religious fundamentalism is characterized by three things. A fundamentalist 1) faithfully follows his religious leader, 2) obeys his religious book, and 3) adheres to the fundamental dictates of his religion.
So how do Christianity and Islam compare by these standards?
What faithful imitation of Christ leads readily to oppression and wanton bloodshed? None. What New Testament teaching mandates forcible conversion to the faith? None. What fundamental dictates of Christian theology command coerced adherence to biblical doctrines? None.[2]
None of these are logical consequences of the teachings of Christ or of the doctrines of Christianity. If they’re not, then oppression and violence done in the name of Christ cannot be laid at his door. Jesus himself warned of interlopers, of wolves in sheep’s clothing. His assessment of them was clear: “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matt. 7:23).
Well-meaning but misguided people who self-profess Christianity sometimes do regrettable things, often out of ignorance. This is not an excuse, of course, but it shows that the problem is not with “radical” Christian religion, but with misinformed or malicious individuals.
What about Islam? What does a “radical Muslim extremist” look like—one who is thoroughly and completely dedicated to his spiritual convictions, who follows Mohammed, obeys the Quran, and adheres to Islamic fundamentals?
We’re all familiar with the concept of violent jihad characteristic of many followers of Islam because examples of it show up frequently in the news. Their actions are not a result of well-meaning but misguided zeal since they’re following the example of their leader, who regularly justified military force to advance Islam.
The Quran, their religious book recording their fundamental doctrines and practices, commands the following in surah 9:29:
Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor comply with what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth from among those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled.
Note that surah 9 is one of the last revelations given by Mohammed.[3] According to the Muslim “principle of abrogation,” when a contradiction occurs between two passages, the later surahs annul the earlier revelations. Thus, any older, more tolerant-sounding teachings of Mohammed are abrogated (nullified) by surah 9, which teaches violence, subjugation, and religious jihad as a spiritual duty.[4]
To summarize the contrast, note this. Mohammed died in AD 632. In AD 732, Charles Martel successfully stopped the European military advance of the Islamic horde at the Battle of Tours. It took Muslim armies 100 years to forcibly conquer the entire Mediterranean region. It took Christians 300 years to “conquer” the same area, and the only blood they shed was their own.
Thus, it is not the case that radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam. The religions are at opposite ends of the spectrum when they are viewed at their “extremes”—extreme kindness, mercy, and tolerance from followers of Jesus versus extreme violence, suppression, and subjugation from followers of Muhammed.
“Do you take the Bible literally?”
This question sounds like it’s about one thing, but it’s usually about something else.
Let’s start with a definition. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the word “literal” means “taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory, free from exaggeration or distortion.”
The fact is, most people read most things in their usual or most basic sense, including when that sense employs standard literary tools like metaphors or allegories. I call it the “ordinary” way of reading. History is history, poetry is poetry, similes and metaphors are figures of speech, etc. Pretty straightforward.
Why do people hesitate, then, when applying this commonsense notion to the Bible or, more precisely, to certain passages in the Bible? The concern hinges not on how the Christian reads the text but on what the Christian thinks the text actually says.
Of course, no one balks at reading the Bible “literally” when its commands or theology suit their purposes. Jesus’ directive not to judge or his injunctions that we love each other seem clear and unambiguous. No trouble there.
The linguistic rules change, though, when the critic comes across something in the text that offends his own philosophical, theological, or moral sensibilities. “Jesus, the only way? No sex outside of marriage? Give me a break.”
Some claims seem so fanciful that it’s hard for skeptics to take the statements at face value. “Were Adam and Eve the first human beings? Was Adam created from dirt and Eve from Adam’s rib? Did Jonah survive three days in the belly of a great fish? Did a virgin really have a baby? You don’t take that stuff literally, do you?”
Yet, how else should we take it? Following the basic rule of reading the text the ordinary way, that seems to be what the author intended us to understand in each of these cases.
As I said, frequently the problem isn’t with how we read the text but with what the text clearly seems to say. If it’s offensive, odd, or inconvenient in some way, then the linguistic rules change for many. This subtle double standard, I think, is usually at the heart of the taking-the-Bible-literally challenge.
Next is a different sort of “literal” reading challenge.
“Homosexuality was punishable by death in the Old Testament, so Christians who take the Bible literally must promote the execution of homosexuals.”
The answer to this question is based on the difference between what I call taking the Bible literally vs. taking the Bible laterally. This distinction will also help show that Christians are not “cherry picking” moral dictates from parts of the Law while ignoring others, which is the basic complaint here.
In the Law of Moses, homosexual activity was punishable by death (Lev. 18:22–23 and 20:13). Therefore (the charge goes), any Christian who takes the Old Testament Law literally and opposes homosexuality must also advocate capital punishment for homosexuals, as the Law requires.
The strategy with this move is obvious: If we don’t promote executing homosexuals, then we can’t legitimately condemn their behavior, since both details are in the Law. If we don’t take the Bible literally in the first case, we shouldn’t in the second case, either.
How do we escape the horns of this dilemma? By using care and precision with our definitions, that’s how.
The Mosaic Law is the legislation that governed the commonwealth of Israel. So here’s our question: When Moses wrote that Law, did he expect the Jewish people to take those regulations literally?
If you’re not sure how to answer, let me ask it another way. When an ordinance is passed in your local state (California, in my case), do you think the legislators intend its citizens to understand the words of the regulations “in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory, free from exaggeration or distortion”?
Of course they do. Legal codes are not written in vague or figurative language allowing each citizen to get creative with the meaning. The same would be true for the Mosaic Law. Moses meant it the way he wrote it. He expected his directives to be taken at face value—as all legislation requires.
It seems, though, that now we’re stuck on the other horn of the dilemma. To be consistent, shouldn’t we currently campaign for the death penalty for homosexuals? For that matter, aren’t we obliged to promote execution for Sabbath-breakers and disobedient children, both capital crimes under the Law?
The simple answer is no. Here’s why. Even when a biblical command is intended to be understood literally, that does not mean it is intended to be applied laterally, so to speak—that is, universally across the board to all peoples at all times in all places. Any particular piece of legislation applies only to those who are under its jurisdiction. The Mosaic Law governed Jews during the theocracy. It does not govern them anymore, and it was never intended to govern Gentiles.
Here’s another way of looking at it. California legal codes are to be read literally but not applied laterally. The codes only apply to those in California and have no application to people in other states. California’s laws have local, literal application within its own borders but no lateral application anywhere not under its jurisdiction.
In the same way, the words of the Mosaic Law, like those of all laws, are to be taken at face value by anyone who reads them. Yet only those under its jurisdiction are obliged to obey its precepts.[5]
The Jews in the theocracy were expected to obey the legal code God gave them, including the prohibition of—and punishment for—homosexuality. It was not the legal code God gave to Gentiles, however. Therefore, even if the words of the Mosaic Law were to be taken literally by those under the jurisdiction of that code, this does not mean that in our current circumstances we are governed by the details of the provisions of that law.
Am I saying that nothing written in the Mosaic Law ever applies to Christians or other Gentiles? No, I’m not saying that. There are many universal moral obligations that humanity shares with the Jews of Moses’ time.
Though Moses gave legal statutes for Jews living in the Jewish state, the Mosaic Law in many cases still reflects broad ethical principles that show up in laws governing people in jurisdictions outside the commonwealth of Israel—though punishments may differ based on different legal sensibilities. Both California and Wisconsin prohibit homicide, for example. As I have written elsewhere:
Perversion is still perverse, and wickedness is still wrong, whether it be adultery, rape, incest, or bestiality—or any of a number of evil acts all condemned by Moses in the “old” Law.[6]
So yes, we can glean wisdom and moral guidance from the Law of Moses for our own legal codes, but there are limits. Working out those details is a different discussion, however.[7]
The key question here is not whether we take the Mosaic Law literally, but whether we are now under that legal code. We are not.[8] That law was meant for Jews living under a theocracy defined by their unique covenant with God. The fact that a directive appears in the Mosaic Law does not, by that fact alone, make it obligatory for those living outside of Israel’s ancient jurisdiction. It’s literal, but it’s not lateral.
Consider this situation. Jesus told Peter to cast his net into deep water (Luke 5:4). That’s exactly what Peter did because he took Jesus’ command literally, in its ordinary sense. He had no reason to think otherwise. However, even though Jesus’ command to Peter was literal, that does not mean the same command applies laterally to anyone else. We are not obligated to cast nets into deep water just because Peter was.
Americans are a mixture of peoples in a representative republic governed by a different set of decrees than the Jews under Moses. We are not obliged to obey everything that came down from Sinai. Just because it was commanded of the Jews, that does not mean it is commanded of us. Some moral precepts, however, will show up in every country’s legislation because they reflect universal ethical obligations.
Some may disagree, but if anyone wants to argue for a lateral application of all literal biblical injunctions, it seems to me he is also duty-bound to take his net and cast it into deep water.
In our next Solid Ground, I’ll respond to another batch of “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Thus, the initial tactical question, “What do you mean by that?” is in order here.
[2] Of course, ethical teachings of Scripture that prohibit behaviors like murder, rape, theft, perjury, kidnapping, etc., are universally acknowledged as immoral and are, for that reason, reflected in legal statutes. For more detail on this issue, see Gregory Koukl, “Getting ‘Political’—Vice or Christian Virtue?” at str.org.
[3] Surahs are not in chronological order.
[4] Not all Muslims hold to this version of Islam, of course, but vast numbers—hundreds of millions—do. In Islam, as in Christianity, there are both obedient fundamentalists (in the sense clarified above) and theological liberals who deviate from foundational orthodoxies.
[5] This principle is critical to understanding the role of Old Testament Law in New Testament times.
[6] See Gregory Koukl and Alan Shlemon, “A Reformation the Church Doesn’t Need: Answering Revisionist Pro-Gay Theology—Part 1,” available at str.org.
[7] For the record, I think the immorality of homosexuality is one of those universal moral laws since, among other reasons, it’s identified in the New Testament as immoral irrespective of the Mosaic Law (e.g., Rom. 1:27 and 1 Cor. 6:9).
[8] Note Paul’s discussion on this issue in Romans 7:1–6.
Theology
Rapid Fire – Part 3
In our last two issues of Solid Ground, instead of focusing on one large topic, I looked at a number of smaller ones, offering you short vignettes providing insight on common challenges you might face as a Christian ambassador. I continue that pattern here with more short treatments on a variety of topics.
“How can God hear everyone’s prayers all at once?”
Easy. God doesn’t have to “listen” to requests the way we do.
We pay careful attention to the details of a person’s appeal so we can understand it accurately and not miss something significant. Then we decide how we’re going to respond.
God doesn’t need to listen in that way, though, since when we pray to God he never learns anything he didn’t already know before we asked. Put another way, there never was a time when God didn’t know what we were going to pray. Since God is omniscient—he’s always known all things—he’s always known what we would ask for, and he’s always known how he would respond.
That insight raises another question, of course. If God already knew what we were going to pray before we asked, then what’s the point of asking in the first place? Philosophers describe it this way: Even though God’s knowledge is temporally prior to our prayers, our prayers are logically prior to his knowledge and, thus, his response.
Simply put, even though God’s knowledge of our prayer comes before the prayer is prayed (temporally prior), his knowledge in the past is dependent upon what we choose to ask in the present. If we didn’t pray now, there wouldn’t be anything for God to have known in eternity past to respond to in the present moment. In other words, our prayers make a difference.
Plus, God’s omniscience provides a hidden benefit. Since he knows what we’ll ask before we ask it, he can put his answer into motion, when necessary, even before we pray. Imagine a poor family asking God to provide food at dinnertime. At the close of their prayer, they hear a knock on the door and discover a bag of groceries delivered by an anonymous donor waiting for them on the porch. Clearly, the food had to be on its way before the request was offered. God acted in advance because he knew the petition was going to be made.
“Euthanasia is good since it puts suffering people out of their misery.”
Once, I participated in a debate on California’s Initiative 161 legalizing physician-assisted suicide. My opponents charged that I was forcing my religious views on others. They didn’t realize that their position entailed religious assumptions of its own.
When people claim that suicide will end a person’s suffering, they’re assuming a religious view about the nature of life after death. They’re counting on the fact that there’s no conscious existence beyond the grave, or that what greets those who pass on will be a pleasant improvement on the misery of their lives on earth.
If their presumption about the afterlife is wrong, though, and Hell awaits those who deserve it, then for some people, euthanasia will not end their misery but compound it. The person suffering here on earth is not transported from a place of anguish to a place of peace and rest but rather to a place of significantly greater suffering in Hell.
It is theoretically possible, then, that so-called “mercy” killing would actually be cruel, not merciful. By living longer on this earth, a sick person who is not euthanized will either delay more intense suffering that follows or—if they receive God’s mercy in the interim—escape it altogether. Consequently, accelerating death through doctor-assisted suicide would be an act of cruelty, and delaying death an act of kindness. Everything depends on which religious view is correct.
Ultimately, then, it’s impossible to avoid the intrusion of spiritual convictions on either side of this issue. It’s not a matter of one party forcing its religious views on another. It’s a matter of two religious views competing with each other.
“We can’t trust our New Testament reconstruction from ancient manuscripts since they have more variations in the copies than there are words in the original.”
This challenge is a fair one since the claim is true, as far as it goes. There are roughly 138,000 words in the New Testament, yet the surviving handwritten copies reveal an estimated 750,000 disagreements in the wording, though that number is probably much larger.[1] In fact, New Testament critic Bart Ehrman points out that the manuscripts “differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are.”[2]
Though Bible critics like Ehrman are correct on this point, the fact is misleading since the number of variants itself—any deviation from the standard text that’s found in the existing copies[3]—is ultimately irrelevant to our ability to recapture the original wording of the New Testament. Here’s why.
For one, any difference, no matter how slight or irrelevant, is added to the total count. Yet the vast majority of the total differences between the texts is completely inconsequential—spelling differences,[4] insignificant variations of word order (e.g., “Christ Jesus” vs. “Jesus Christ”), obvious omissions, use of synonyms, clear transpositions of words, nonsense readings, and “singular readings,”[5] among others. None of these trivial differences affect accurate translation in any way and thus have no bearing on our ability to reconstruct the original.
Second, there’s a reason we have lots of variants: We have lots of manuscripts. This is a strength, not a weakness, since there is safety in numbers. Thousands of extant New Testament manuscripts amounting to millions of pages of ancient text provide the best opportunity for comparison and correction, even though the number of variants increases with each new fragment discovered.
Third, the mere comparison of original words to manuscript variants, even though accurate, is profoundly misleading. Note Hixon and Gurry:
The problem is that the comparison itself is meaningless. It makes a little sense to compare the number of supposed variants in all our Greek manuscripts to the number of words in only one manuscript or printed edition. [Emphasis in the original.][6]
It would make more sense to compare the total number of variants to the total number of words in the total number of manuscripts. That exercise, however, would not serve the critics’ interests since the statistic, though accurate, would be completely inconsequential.
So, the number of differences itself is irrelevant. A closer examination of the nature of the variants is what matters, not the raw number. When that work is done by the legion of textual specialists deciphering the variants, even critics like Bart Ehrman have been able to reconstruct the New Testament with an unprecedented degree of virtually word-for-word accuracy.
“Why does God make death the deadline for salvation? It seems arbitrary and even unfair to those who may die on their way to a church service where they intended to become a Christian.”
I’m including this rather unusual question because it offers a handful of different elements that are important to consider when responding to challenges.
The first concern above has to do with the apparent arbitrary nature of God’s salvation “cutoff” point. The author of Hebrews writes, “It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). But why then? Why not sometime later? Why any cutoff point at all? It makes little sense to some critics.
The second concern is more weighty. What if someone gets killed on his way to church where he intended to respond to an altar call to become a Christian? Since death is the point of no return for salvation, then a circumstance this person had no control over deprived him of eternal life. Worse, what if murder was the cause of the death that interrupted the trip? Wouldn’t it be odd if a felon’s crime were the reason his victim was damned to Hell forever?
Implicit in this challenge is a subtle insinuation. Christianity is just too strange, bizarre, or unfair to be taken seriously.
Is Christianity significantly undermined by an inability to divine God’s reasons for a salvation cutoff point? The answer is no for a number of reasons—the death-on-the-way-to-the-altar-call concern notwithstanding.
First, I have no reason to think God is arbitrary about anything. Why assume he’s arbitrary just because in some cases we don’t know why he does what he does? It suggests a defect in the Divine when there’s no good reason to think so.
I’ve often pointed out that questions starting with the phrases like “Why did God…” or “Why didn’t God…” are frequently impossible to answer for good reason: God hasn’t told us. If God is mute on some issues, then we’re simply in the dark. Unless God gives us his reasons, we can speculate all we want. Some of those speculations may have merit, but they will have no authority. Speculations remain speculative.
Second, what if I simply responded, “I don’t know why God set death as the deadline”? What harm would befall the case for Christianity then? None, as far as I can tell. All the evidence in favor of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection would still be intact as well as all the various lines of evidence for God’s existence.
Here’s the basic principle: Our inability to answer hypothetical questions about God’s intentions has no bearing on the truth of the Christian worldview. Full stop. Lack of concrete answers to these kinds of queries signifies nothing.
Third, it’s not clear that any answer to the first question would satisfy a critic. If God had decided on a different “point of no return” for salvation, would that make any difference to the challenger? No matter where God drew the line, it seems, the same question could always be raised, so suggesting alternate cutoff criteria gets you nowhere.
Fourth, some speculations may be useful—though not definitive—if they suggest reasonable possibilities. For example, it makes sense to me that death ends any opportunity for forgiveness because when a person dies, it ends the lifetime of sin for which he will be judged. A criminal’s life of crime comes to an end when he’s caught. If he had eluded capture, he might have changed course and possibly eluded justice as well. When he’s brought before the judge, though, it’s too late. His career of crime is over and “after this comes judgment.” Nothing odd about that.
What about the darker concern, though, that circumstances outside the control of a would-be penitent might seal his fate forever? My answer is twofold.
First—in my view at least—anyone planning to become a Christian at the next church altar call is probably already a believer simply waiting for an opportunity to formalize his faith publicly. Interrupting his trip to church changes nothing about his eternal destiny.
Second, any critique of Christianity must take the whole of Christian doctrine into account, or the critic will be tilting at windmills.[7] Human freedom has its limits, otherwise God would not be God—not the Christian God, at least, and that’s the God in question. Even a murderer’s free will doesn’t ultimately determine the course of the universe. God has his purposes, too, and he accomplishes them in spite of the sinful choices of evil people. Any hypothetical circumstance that presumes human actions alone decisively determine human destiny ignores a cardinal principle of the Christian creed: God is sovereign.
When all is said and done, keep in mind that there are imponderables in every worldview. We shouldn’t be surprised if some turn up in ours.
“What’s a quick biblical argument to show that Jesus is the same as the God of the Old Testament?”
Suppose two Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your door, and you invite them in for a chat. What passages can you show them, even in their own New World Translation (NWT), that will challenge their conviction that Jesus is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures?
Here’s an approach that might get them thinking—which is usually the best you can hope for in an initial conversation with anyone, especially a Jehovah’s Witness. Use Old Testament texts that identify unique characteristics of Jehovah God, then turn to the New Testament and show them that the very same characteristics are applied to Jesus by his own disciples.
For example, in the NWT, Isaiah 45:23 says, “By myself I have sworn; the word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and it will not return: To me every knee will bend, every tongue will swear loyalty.” Yet in Philippians 2:9–11, Paul cites the very same passage and says:
For this very reason, God exalted him to a superior position and kindly gave him the name that is above every other name, so that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend—of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the ground—and every tongue should openly acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
The scriptural parallels abound. Both Jehovah in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are called the Creator (Gen. 1:1; cf. John 1:3; Heb. 1:8a, 10), the Light (Ps. 27:1; cf. John 8:12), the Good Shepherd (Ps. 23:1; cf. John 10:11), the only Rock (Isa. 44:8; cf. 1 Cor. 10:4), the Judge of all the earth (Gen. 18:25; cf. 2 Tim. 4:1; Acts 17:31), the first and the last (Isa. 44:6; cf. Rev 1:17–18), and the Savior (Isa. 43:11; cf. Luke 2:11; John 4:42; Acts 4:12; Titus 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:1).
Conclusion? Jesus is the Creator of all things, the Light of the world, the Good Shepherd, the only Rock, the Judge of all the earth, the first and the last, and the world’s only Savior—the same as Jehovah in the Old Testament.
“People of other faiths are just as confident they’re right about their religious views as the Christian is of his. Obviously, then, culture is the biggest influence on a person’s beliefs.”
American atheist Michael Shermer raised a version of this issue with me in a three-hour national radio debate I had with him a number of years ago.
Of course, Shermer is right, as far as it goes. Everyone who believes anything is convinced his views are true, otherwise he wouldn’t believe them. Multitudes have what might be called “psychological confidence” in their own beliefs, a confidence which, in most cases, is a result of cultural influences in their lives. No argument there.
The problem with this observation is that it doesn’t take us very far. This challenge is another one where a legitimate response could be, “You’re probably right. So what?” Most people feel they are right in their views, true enough—some even invincibly so. Obviously, though, everyone can’t be correct when their views conflict with others’ views. Some may be right, but that means the others are mistaken. Now what?
Consider two men, one a pediatrician in New York and another an indigenous tribesman deep in the Amazon jungle. Each attributes disease to different causes. The pediatrician faults germs; the tribesman faults spirits. The doctor invokes medicine for healing; the tribesman invokes magic. Each is fully convinced of his view precisely because this is what his culture has taught him to believe.
Here is my question: Which one is correct, the doctor or the tribesman?
You will never know the answer to that question by weighing relative amounts of psychological confidence, or by reflecting on the influence of the culture each was raised in, or by pointing to the emotional influences that formed their beliefs.
The psychological, cultural, or emotional reasons people believe anything may tell you about their psychology, or their culture, or their emotional states. They will tell you nothing, though, about whether germs or demons cause disease. They will also tell you nothing about whether Christianity—or any other religion, for that matter—is true or false. To get to the answer to those questions, you have to look elsewhere.
Critics raising this issue have their cart before their horse. They think they can discredit a religious view by citing a host of cultural or psychological influences that shaped the belief. However, they must first discredit the views on their individual merits before it becomes meaningful to ask why anyone would believe something the critic may consider foolish.
In order to get to the truth of anything, including religion, they’re going to have to look at the reasons supporting the view itself. To quote C.S. Lewis, “You can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning—never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.”[8] And, I might add, never by making observations about emotional confidence or the influence of one’s culture on his religious convictions.
Examining the motives (or cultural or historical influences) of one’s view may tell you interesting things about psychology or about history, but it can never tell you anything about the legitimacy of the view itself.
To answer those questions, one needs more than internal psychological confidence. He needs external evidence. That’s why careful Christians don’t just have “faith.” They have convictions anchored to objective evidence because they know the dangers of putting too much stock in their subjective psychological confidence.
In our next Solid Ground, I’ll respond to another batch of “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Elijah Hixon and Peter J. Gurry, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 8–9.
[2] Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus—The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, first paperback edition (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 10.
[3] To be more precise, according to manuscript expert Daniel Wallace, “A textual variant is any place among the MSS [manuscripts] in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission or edition of words, even spelling differences. The most trivial changes count, and even when all the manuscripts except one say one thing, that lone MS’s reading counts as a textual variant” (Emphasis in the original.), Daniel B. Wallace, Ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2011), 26.
[4] There were no universally agreed upon spelling conventions in ancient times.
[5] A singular reading is a variant found in only one Greek manuscript and is therefore not considered authentic, obviously.
[6] Hixon and Gurry, Myths and Mistakes, 10.
[7] Failure to do this is called a “straw man” fallacy.
[8] Clive Staples Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 274.
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