APOLOGETICS

The Question of Sin

The one thing a secular worldview can never provide is an answer to guilt and sin. Nor can it form the basis for reconciliation.

In fact, nothing apart from Judeo-Christian revelation can provide a basis for restoring a community that has been torn apart by sin — or offer hope of forgiveness and restoration to those who are burdened by sin. I have discovered while preaching in Hindu and Buddhist cultures that whenever I talk about forgiveness and a new life in Christ, eyes just bulge. This is something people haven't heard.

I remember in the Trevandrum prison in India, a thousand inmates looked up at me — outcasts, doomed to live with their sin for the rest of their lives, and then to have done to them in the next life what they did to someone in this life, which simply perpetuates evil. I told them they could be forgiven, that Christ died on the cross for their sins. The response was absolutely staggering.

I also remember the time I was in Japan, and met with a professor of comparative religion at the University of Yokohama. He was a Buddhist, of course, and had studied Born Again and used it as a textbook in his class on the Christian religion. He had asked to meet with me. We had a great conversation. I talked about forgiveness in the prisons and asked him how Buddhists could provide for forgiveness since there was no redemption, no Savior; no one had died for their sins. He said they had a new form of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism, where they can provide a level of forgiveness in the next life.

Buddhism, of course, is infinitely flexible; there is no one true God. There are simply stages of consciousness, and so to solve a dilemma — my question was how do you preach Buddhism in a prison — they simply invent a new sect or strain of belief to accommodate a particular need. It's almost amusing, but it also shows how bankrupt the system is.

Most secular thought today is parallel to Buddhism. It's really the same thing. We don't have a God in the secular world today, so we simply develop states of consciousness. We get in touch with our own feelings. We seek a higher state of consciousness or peace with nature.

How do you deal with the question of sin once you're aware of it? You can develop some better way to get in touch with your feelings and improve your self-esteem, but it won't solve the problem because the consequences of that guilt are there. You can't get rid of them. You can go to psychologists and they can try to help you get rid of the repressed memories and do all sorts of therapeutic gymnastics, but they can't get to the heart of the problem.

Only Christianity provides for that forgiveness and the subsequent healing that can take place in the individual's life and in the community. Kim Phuc, the little Vietnamese girl who became famous through a photograph showing her running naked after being burned by napalm, demonstrates this. If out of the horrors of war a young girl hideously burned can forgive those who dropped the bombs on her, then there is hope that the cycle of evil can be broken, guilt can be released, and people can be freed from bondage. This really is overcoming evil with good (Romans 12:21). There is no other way. Every secular system is doomed, as is Buddhism, as is Hinduism, as is Islam. It is only Jews and Christians who have a way out, and only the Christian has a way out by the grace of God.

This is an incredibly important and powerful apologetic.

Thank God for Peter Singer

I gave a lecture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary titled "Thank God for Peter Singer." The thesis is that when you want to make an apologetic argument, the best thing you can do is to force your adversaries to embrace the logical conclusion of their own ideas.

I mentioned a little story about my recent discussion with an agnostic, which illustrates my point. I forced this man to take his statement that all religions are alike, and reconcile it with the exclusive truth claims of Christianity. I said all religions can't be alike; they can't all lead to the same place because Christianity specifically denies that. So if all religions are equally true, then Christianity's truth nullifies the other religions.

I then got into a discussion of the law of noncontradiction, and drove him into a corner where he eventually had no choice but to say, "I have to admit that some things are extra natural." He wouldn't agree to supernatural, but he did have to conclude extra, at which point I said, "Precisely." He could not defend a naturalistic explanation for his own proposition.

That's the most effective apologetic there is.

The Question of God

I am two-thirds of the way through Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God, which contrasts the teachings of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. It is filled with wonderful apologetics.

For example, it's extremely useful to understand the role of the superego in terms of conscience in Freud's analysis. Freud has substituted the superego for God; if your conscience is being informed, it is being informed by the superego. Well, superego is just a made-up name. There's no more scientific validity to that than there is in saying God speaks to you.

Nicholi's comparison of Freud's view on natural law and C. S. Lewis's was also brilliantly done. Even though you're getting an objective presentation of both viewpoints, readers will come away with a realization that Lewis's position is vastly superior, because we know within ourselves what is right or wrong. Everybody does. So has the superego been taught, character passed on from our earthly father, father to son? If so, how did the first father come to know what is right and wrong? He didn't have any father to pass anything on to him.

Freud's arguments just blow away in the breeze as you read this book. It's absolutely brilliant.

The Question of God is Comparative Worldview 101, built around two great minds. Armand also weaves the gospel in, telling the story of Lewis's transformation, and points out that Freud actually admired religious people.

Armand finds inconsistencies in Freud's statements, though he doesn't say that. For instance, Freud talks about the importance of moral law as if there were a moral law.

This is apologetics in its most important form.

Idolatry Alongside

While Moses is up on the mountain for forty days talking to the Lord and receiving the Ten Commandments, the people below start grumbling. Gathering around Aaron, they said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us." And then, dismissively, they add, "As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him" (Exodus 32:1).

Notice how, in appealing to Aaron, the Israelites put down Moses as his competitor. In effect they say, "We don't know where this guy's gone. He's up...