Why I know Jesus lives (feel free to add to this in a comment)

Because of the last post, I had a few requests in comments and emails to complete my story with how I know Jesus lives. These will be short answers, because I'm a novice apologist, so please feel free to add your convictions to the list in a comment:

• The congruencies yet distinctions of the gospel accounts. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all record Jesus appearing to many people after His resurrection. The stories (as with the other stories contained in more than one gospel) are similar, yet not exact, just as eyewitnesses to an event all see the same thing, but notice and observe it from a different point of view.
• Jesus first appears to women. Good Jewish (Greek, orRoman, for that matter) men who were making up a story would NOT include this. Women's credibility as eyewitnesses would not hold up in court.
• Hundreds of people attested to seeing Jesus alive after He had been crucified, spent their lives proclaiming this event, and died defending it.
• Thousands and thousands more during the first few centuries after Christ's death believed and spread the doctrines of the disciples despite the most grueling persecution of any religion known to date. Under decrees of Nero and others, Christians were tortured, crucified, burned, stoned, drowned, etc. for being followers of Christ, and despite this, the faith in Christ as sinful man's Savior spread faster than Nero's fiddle-playing fire.

Those are the historical reasons I can think of off the top of my head to back up the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The spiritual reason is even more convincing (or is it more convicting than convincing?). The outright logic in God's plan of mankind's redemption is mind-boggling to me, and leaves me shaking with awe every time I think about it. The doctrine of propitiation, wherein God's wrath for sin is satisfied through His own sacrifice, is ineffably magnificant. Any person who is not an idiot or deranged knows that people are not perfect or even really good. God is a holy (perfect, set apart) Judge, who not only cannot allow anything less than perfect in His presence, but also cannot stand evil (which, let's face it, we are). However, to save fallen humanity and glorify Himself, He became one of us, through Jesus Christ, and lived a life without any tarnish of sin. Though He was without fault - and because He claimed to be God - the people crucified Him, fulfilling prophesy. Through the crucifiction of Christ, the undeserving One was punished in place of the deserving many. "He who knew no sin became sin" to satisfy the wrath of a just God. "The wages of sin is death," and mankind's sin brought the Messiah's death, because "the gift of God is eternal life in [the death and resurrection of] Jesus Christ our Lord." So that to those who look upon Him as their Savior, God sees the perfection of His Son. Our sins were imputed to Him on that cross, and His righteousness is imputed to those who know we have no righteousness in ourselves.

The fact that Jesus did, then, rise from the dead the following Sunday, shows that this propitiatory act was indeed successful. Hallelujah! Because He lives, I too can LIVE! Praise the Lord in His merciful Providence!

Apologetics at its philosophical hard-coreness

I have a feeling that my blog is going to turn into a mini book-review station, as my goal this summer is to read 87.3 books. Well, hopefully I can be a little more lively than that, but nonetheless, I've never really had a summer where I didn't have a job (golf is included in the 'job' category) the whole time. I just finished summer school last Friday (and I'll probably give some high-and-low-lights in an upcoming post), and I have approximately 2 months to read, paint, work out, lay out by the pool, visit Joy in Colorado (!), and climb the Tetons with my dad (!).

Book #1 checked off from my reading list (well, actually, I've been working on this one for a while): Beyond Opinion; Living the Faith We Defend by Ravi Zacharias. An anthology of essays by people associated with this modern-day CS Lewis (as I've heard Ravi called), this book provides a insight into a plethora of religions, philosophies, and worldviews that affront Christianity today.

What really got me thinking while reading this book is how ill-equipped Christians are in the deep and incredibly stimulating truths of the Bible. Ravi describes his three levels of philosophy: "level one states why one believes what he believes. Level two indicates why one lives the way he lives. And level three reveals why one legislates for others the way he does" (321). The problem with most "Christians" today is that they cannot legitimately answer a single one of those questions. They believe a pile of fluff because it makes them feel good about themselves through emotion, conformity, and tradition. They don't want doctrine because they don't want to think, and they don't want someone telling them what to do if it contradicts what they like. "Christianity Lite" and the Emergent movement promote the feel-goodism of emotional experience without the real truth of the Gospel behind it. They only want to invision a God that they like, and forget about the yucky stuff like justice and wrath over sin. However, Ravi says, "None of these levels can live in isolation. They must follow a proper sequence... Life must move from truth, to experience, to prescription" (322). People often jump to experience (hence, personal testimony trumps Gospel presentation) as if the doctrines (what make experiences happen) don't matter. We can't have a real experience without knowing the truth behind it. You can't really "ask Jesus into your heart" without knowing what that really means. You can't be "saved from your sins" without knowing why and how you can be relieved of them. Granted, people do that every day, but can the transformation be real if they don't know what they're doing besides getting a good feeling of acceptance? I'd of course argue no.

While reading this book, I've also been listening to some of the podcast of the White Horse Inn (look it up), which for a series discussed the dumbing down of people and the Church in the name of self-esteem. As a teacher, I've witnessed this sad truth in the classroom, and as a Christian, I'm enraged that people claim to be Christians without any intent to know Christ. Those don't fit together. [That could be a long red-herring, so I'll get back to my intended write].

When I was younger, my dad was constantly quizzing Asher and me over what we learned at church, what we were studying, or what we could explain about what we believed. This questioning was crucial to my growth, because I could not get by with fluff, cliche, or "I don't know". I remember that one time Dad asked me why I know Jesus lives, and I answered, as a good little baptist, with the hymn lyrics: "You ask me how I know He lives; He liiiiiiives withiiiiiin my hearrrrrrrrrrt." Dad banished me from the table until I give him an argument that actually held. Now I was probably ten at the time and used to giving a quick, prescripted Sunday School answer, but I found out rather quickly the merit in actually thinking and reasoning why this is so. Needless to say, I did not go hungry that night or any. :)

I fully believe that this interrogation is what made me dig deeper into the Whys and Hows of the Word of God. It made me make my faith my own, and not just a slew of cute words that had no meaning for me personally. I think this is why, when I went to college, my faith in Christ blossomed under pressure instead of wilting as happens to so many these days. I praise God often for the guided challenge my parents provided, and I wish that all parents and youth pastors could do the same for others. Kids (and all of us) need truth: unfiltered, un-dumbed down, big churchy words and all, TRUTH. And we need to be questioned, without allowance for easy-button answers, so that we actually grow as we are researching to find the best, fullest, most accurate answer. The Word of the Almighty Living God deserves no less!

"Why I'm Not Emergent" By One Gal Who Could Never Be

Upon finishing Kevin DeYoung's and Ted Kluck's Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), I hope I have a greater understanding of the movement that is apparently sweeping the world of Christendom, though this more informed viewing only reveals that there's not much new in the movement, but more of the same ideas that Christians have battled since the beginning.

While the emergent movement calls Christians to be more loving, which is good, it seems to focus way too much on people and not enough on Christ (which is why there's nothing new about it). Particular to the emergent movement (apart from other heresies) is its mother, postmodernism, which (according to Wikipedia), "Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy... and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality." Wikipedia later mentions its philosophy founders, who were predominantely men who really hated God.
The emergent church embraces postmodernism and seeks to not only fit in with the postmodern culture, but be itself postmodern as well. When I first heard about this movement, I picked out the postmodern influences immediately, was shocked that they called this movement Christian, and was even more shocked to find out that the above mentioned connection (the fact that this idea was started by atheist should be a red flag) did not cause any concern in the people I know who are caught up in the movement.

Some things to beware of about this movement (that I found in the book) are:

• The movement focuses more on Christ's life and not His death. While emulating Jesus is what Christians are supposed to do, it IS kind of important to know what a Christian is: a former "vessel of wrath" who was chosen and set apart by God in the beginning, purchased by God per Christ's sacrificial death, and transformed by the Holy Spirit. The Cross was the reason Jesus came - for there is no other way a person can be righteous before God but by wearing Jesus's righteousness. Hopefully this does not represent very many emergents, but whenever you consider the real gospel a footnote instead of the focal point, you've got MAJOR issues.


• What emergents are most known for is their pride in their "humility". They take the ambiguity factor of postmodernism so far that they claim that someone who thinks they know something about God is just being arrogant, because no one can know anything about God. The movement finds more beauty in "mystery" than the knowledge of God. So the point of the Bible is...??? and this leads into the next point which is...


• False dicotomies - TONs of them. Like the one above, they say God cannot be known completely and fully (and I agree). However, they also say that if a person cannot exhaust God, then they can't claim what they do know about Him. Which is False. Just because my finite mind can't possibly comprehend everything about the infinite God does not mean that I should claim ignorance of what He's clearly revealed through creation, scripture, and Christ.


• The emergents generally have an errant view of history. They claim that understanding of scripture, exegetical preaching, and doctrine all derive themselves from modernism and the enlightenment (1600's - 1900's). I'm guessing that they haven't read much Augustine, Luther, Calvin.


• I think one of the main causes for all the stirring in the emergent church is emergents' problem with authority. They don't like people who actually know what they're talking about (which is why all their "leaders" constantly claim that they don't know, or that they may be wrong), probably due to the whole 'self-esteem' thing we all want to be equals. Maybe they think only authorities are totally depraved. Maybe they were traumatized when they were spanked as kids (dang parents who don't "spare the rod"!). Who knows. As DeYoung assesses, "Much of the emergent disdain for preaching is really an uneasiness about authority and control. Discussion, yes. Dialogue, yes. Goup discernment, yes. Hearlding? Proclamation? Not on this side of modernism!" Brian McLaren (the main guy [of course titleless] in the emergent church) promotes leaders who are like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz: "Rather than being a person with all the answers, who is constantly informed of what's up and what's what and where to go, she is herself lost, a seeker, vulnerable, often bewildered." WOW. Could this be an example of "blind leading the blind"? I think so.


• The movement is full of verbiage that lacks real meaning, other than sounding mystical. Most of the phrases just make me laugh, but there are some that cross the line. I'm tired of hearing sacred words like 'incarnate' thrown around when someone could say 'personified' or 'lived out'. Overusage tends to dull down the word so that what it really means no longer has the punch. "Incarnate" should be reserved for speaking of Christ's divinity, so that it can bear more weight of the concept.
  

As with most wayward works-focused movements, the emergent movement puts the cart before the horse, for how can a person act like a Christian unless he first knows Christ? How can he know Christ unless Christ can be known?

This movement is so troubling to me because I can see how people fall susceptable to its deceptions. It is sneaky because it sounds uber-spiritual, nonconformist, and novel, but really the emergent movement is smoke and mirrors, like what Dorothy at first believes is the true Wizard.