Is Evil a Problem Only for Christianity? | Ratio Christi
Cyclone Relief Work – Odisha Cyclone Phailin – Gospel for Asia
The Church’s Fourfold Purpose
One of the great challenges of today’s Church is the quest for vitality. Recent years have been marked by an increasingly rapid decline in church attendance and dwindling interest in the organized church as a whole. Many people are seeking new ways of expressing their spirituality, or simply abandoning spirituality all together. The movement of being “spiritual but not religious” borders very closely to agnosticism.
People are looking to the ancient writings of the mystics and monastics for answers to this disturbing situation. In my own journey, I have discovered some very helpful materials in that arena of thought, but there is more. Perhaps we can look to the foundational story of the Church as found in the Book of Acts. This sacred writing chronicles the formation of Christianity as a separate movement. Acts is an eyewitness account of the birth and growth of the early church. This book begins…
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Evidence From Ancient Critics
In his book The Historical Jesus, author and ancient historian Gary Habermas quotes the following ancient source, Lucian, who was a critic of Christianity.
The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day — the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account. . . . You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws. All this they take on faith . . . (p.206)
Lucian’s words are significant to Christian apologetics for a couple of key reasons. First, this is an…
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CADRE Comments: More Scientists Beleieve In God Than Atheists Want to Think
In a civilization like ours – C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question. – C.S. Lewis
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Read the book of Leviticus and then turn to Acts— from “What is so Amazing about Grace?” by Phillip Yancy
You need only read the book of Leviticus and then turn to Acts to sense the seismic change. Whereas Old Testament worshipers purified themselves before entering the temple and presented their offerings to God through a priest, in Acts God’s followers (good Jews, most of them) were meeting in private homes and addressing God with the informal Abba. It was a familiar term of family affection like “Daddy,” and before Jesus no one would have thought of applying such a word to Yaweh, the Sovereign Lord of the Universe. After him it became the standard word used by the early Christians to address God in prayer.
Earlier, I drew a parallel of a visitor in the White House. No such visitor I said, could expect to barge into the Oval Office to see the President without an appointment. There are exceptions. During John F. Kennedy’s administration, photographers sometimes captured a winsome scene. Seated around the President’s desk in gray suits, cabinet members are debating matters of world consequence, such as the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, a toddler, the two-year-old John-John, crawls atop the huge Presidential desk, oblivious to White House protocol and the weighty matters of state. John-John was simply visiting his daddy, and sometimes to his father’s delight he would wander into the Oval Office with nary a knock.
That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus’ word Abba. God may be Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father. In Romans 8. Paul brings the image of intimacy even closer. God’s Spirit lives inside us, he says, and when we do not know what we ought to pray “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”
We need not approach God by a ladder of hierarchy, anxious about cleanliness issues. If God’s kingdom had a “no Oddballs Allowed,” sign posted, none of us could get in, Jesus came to demonstrate that a perfect and holy God welcomes pleas for help from a widow with two mites and from a Roman centurion and a miserable publican and a thief on a cross. We need only call out “Abba” or failing that simply groan. God has come that close.
Phillip Yancy, What is so Amazing about Grace? Zondervan 1997, page 152
St. John One: One 