D A R E
T O
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L U T H E R A N
Higher Things
12 e 20 sid gs In in fo Th In er ce gh ren Hi nfe Co
Inside:
• Is Faith Unreasonable? • Evangel-less Christianity On Campus • Did the Resurrection Really Happen? • Lutheran Apologetics, Augsburg Style
Special Apologetics Issue! www
. h i g h e r t h i n g s . o r g / S P RING / 2 0 1 2
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When:
March 24, 2012
Where:
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church 7611 Park Lane Dallas, TX 75225
Cost:
$25 per person
Teacher:
Rev. Dr. Carl Fickenscher II Faculty member of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
RSVP:
Rev. Michael Schuermann: revschuermann@orlcs.com (972) 638-7652 (972-638-SOLA)
God’s Fingerprints on Creation
H I G H E R
God’s No and God’s Yes
Higher Things Spring Retreats
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St. Paul Lutheran Church 5433 Madison Road, Cincinnati, OH 45227
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Teacher:
Rev. Charles St-Onge Pastor at Memorial Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas and Plenary Teacher at the upcoming Twelve - NC conference!
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Contents T A B L E O F
Volume 12/Number 1 • Spring 2012
HigherThings
®
Volume 12/Number 1/Spring 2012 Bible Studies for these articles can be found at: higherthings.org/ magazine/biblestudies.html
Dear Readers,
Editor
Welcome to our Apologetics issue! This marks the first ever completely topical issue of Higher Things Magazine! We’ve brought together a stellar array of articles all related to and dealing with apologetics or “defending the faith.” Of course, you can’t argue someone into becoming a Christian but the ammunition you discover here will help you confess Christ boldly at work or school, demonstrating to others that the Christian faith isn’t foolish but really quite reasonable. Each of the authors in this issue gives a clear testimony to the importance of Christ as the center of everything we believe as Christians, while illustrating how we can speak of Jesus clearly and without sounding silly while doing so. With all of the challenges to the faith from the world around us, this Apologetics issue will be a great resource to help you respond. Special thanks to Katie Micilcavage, our editor, for all her hard work in bringing this issue together. We hope it will be the first of many topical issues that will serve as a great resource for parents, pastors, congregations and youth! Pastor Mark Buetow Media Service Executive, Higher Things
Art Director
Katie Micilcavage Steve Blakey Editorial Associates
Rev. Greg Alms Rev. Paul Beisel Rev. Bart Day Copy Editors
Lu Fischer Dana Toma Bible Study Authors
Rev. Mark Buetow Rev. John Drosendahl Rev. Jason Braaten Subscriptions Manager
Special Features
4 Lutheran Apologetics, Augsburg Style
By Rev. George F. Borghardt Rev. Borghardt takes us back to the movers and shakers at Augsburg, where defense of the Scriptures was a matter of life and death. Find out how we can learn greatly from these men and appeal to the resulting Confession of Faith in our own apologetic efforts.
6 Did the Resurrection Really Happen?
By Rev. Jonathan Fisk Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:19 that we Christians, of all people, are most to be pitied if the resurrection of Christ did not happen. Rev. Fisk commandingly lays out the historically based argument for the reality of the Resurrection, which is at the very heart of our defense of the faith.
8 Text, Typos and Transmission: Why You Can Trust the New Testament
By Rev. Mark Pierson When critics attack the Christian faith, one of the first areas they will zero in on is the New Testament. After all, they say, it’s full of errors and we don’t have the originals. Rev. Pierson, who has an extensive background in this area of study, presents a compelling argument for the reliability of the New Testament.
14 Rev. Mark Jasa: Getting to the Heart of the Matter
By Katie Micilcavage Apologetics is a way of life for Pastor Mark Jasa. As you read about God’s crystal-clear faithfulness in his life, you’ll gain an appreciation for those in campus ministries like University Lutheran Chapel at UCLA, and also gain a few very helpful tips for engaging in apologetics in your own circles.
18 Is Faith Unreasonable?
By Rev. William M. Cwirla “Faith is the great cop-out.” “Religion is a crutch for the weakminded.” “Faith is all emotions-based.” Rev. Cwirla handily debunks those and other notions that attempt to claim that faith and reason are opposed to one another.
20 Christianity’s Answer to the Problem of Evil
By Rev. Ian Pacey We’ve all either asked or have been asked this question: “Why would a good God allow bad things to happen?” Rev. Pacey, who often has to field questions of this sort in his campus ministry at the University of Arizona, dissects all of the typical arguments and gives you tools to provide an answer.
Elizabeth Carlson IT Staff
22 Answering the Knock
By Rev. Brent Kuhlman Mormons aren’t naïve young men in white shirts riding their bicycles around your neighborhood. They have been intensely trained to defend THEIR faith, so it is vital for you to know what YOU believe, so when that inevitable knock on the door comes, you can answer with confidence. Rev. Kuhlman will get you started.
24 Islam, Muslims and the Gospel
Dr. Adam S. Francisco Although you might hear a lot about the Muslim world by watching the evening news, you may not know what Islam really teaches. And because it is an ever-growing religion, and Christians in other countries are already in a position of having to vigorously defend their faith, it is vital that we take steps to understand that religion. Learn from Dr. Francisco how to approach a conversation with a Muslim, and in doing so, share the sweetness of the Gospel at the same time.
Stan Lemon Jon Kohlmeier Conference Coordinator
Sandra Ostapowich ___________
Board of Directors President
Rev. William Cwirla Vice President
Rev. David Kind Treasurer
Chris Rosebrough Secretary
Rev. Joel Fritsche Rev. Jonathan Fisk Rev. Brent Kuhlman Chris Loemker Sue Pellegrini Jeff Schwarz ___________
Regular Features
10 Christ on Campus: Evangel-less Christianity on Campus
By Craig A. Parton College campuses are growing increasingly more secularized. This hasn’t happened overnight. Mr. Parson explains this history but doesn’t leave it there. By the time you are done reading, you will have resources to draw from and know some of the basics as you endeavor to defend your Christian faith on the college or high school campus or wherever you might find yourself.
26 Catechism Hallowed Be Thy Name
By Rev. William M. Cwirla Continuing in his backward trek through the Lord’s Prayer, Rev. Cwirla clearly explains the First Petition and even manages to cleverly tie it into our theme of apologetics.
28 Bible Study Did the Resurrection Really Happen?
Here are both the student and leader guides for Rev. Fisk’s resurrection article on pg. 6. Feel free to reproduce these for use with your youth group.
Executive Staff Conferences and Deputy Executive
Rev. George Borghardt Business Executive
Connie Brammeier Media Services Executive
Rev. Mark Buetow Christ on Campus Executive
Rev. Marcus Zill
Higher Things® Magazine ISSN 1539-8455 is published quarterly by Higher Things, Inc., PO Box 156, Sheridan, WY 82801. No portion of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the executive editor of Higher Things Magazine. Copyright 2012. Higher Things® and Christ on Campus® are registered trademarks of Higher Things Inc.; All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States. Postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. For subscription information and questions, call 1-888-448-2359 or e-mail subscriptions@higherthings. org. (This phone number is only used for subscription queries.) For letters to the editor, write letters@higher things.org. Writers may submit manuscripts to: submissions@higherthings.org. Please check higherthings.org/ magazine/writers.html for writers’ guidelines and theme lists.
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Did the Resurrection
Really Happen? By Rev. Jonathan Fisk
It’s kind of an important question. I mean, if the resurrection didn’t happen, what on earth are we Christians doing? It’s not like it’s gaining us any power or money or anything. But if the resurrection did happen, then why is it that so many people in the world don’t believe it?
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The resurrection did happen, and I can tell you how you can be certain of it. More than that, I can do it without telling you that you have to believe it just because the Bible says so. That’s the key thing. A lot of non-Christians in our world think that Christians are just a bunch of willfully ignorant nincompoops who believe in some book that fell out of the sky. But nothing could be further from the truth. Christians are Christians because something happened in history unlike any other thing ever: A guy named Jesus was murdered, but refused to stay dead. It’s not a leap of faith. It’s an historic fact that is as easy to prove as any other bit of history, if you aren’t too close-minded to consider the evidence.
1. Jesus was a real human. Even without the Bible, modern scholars have to admit that there was a Jewish man named Jesus who lived in the first century. Non-biblical writings like Flavius Josephus, Mara Bar-Serapion and the Jewish Talmud all mention Him as a real, historical figure.
2. The real human Jesus died by crucifixion and was buried. In the same way, some of these extra-biblical texts mention that Jesus was killed. They don’t go into detail, but only an ignorant person who gets all their information from internet forums will try to tell you that the real Jesus didn’t die, and wasn’t even buried.
3. This Jesus had real followers who took his death very hard. At this point, we have to start trusting the books of the Bible as eyewitness accounts. We don’t have to believe they are true. We just have to trust that they tell us what the people who wrote them actually thought. That’s what we do with every historical document about any piece of history, at least, until we find other history that tells us something different. So the guy who wrote John’s Gospel around 90 AD also claims he followed this real guy Jesus, and believed He was the Savior of the world before He was murdered, watched Him die, and then fell into despair.
4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty three days later. Next, the followers of Jesus who despaired after His death also tell us that they stopped despairing because He appeared to them as risen. But not just to them. Extra-biblical sources from Roman historians tell us that after Jesus was killed, “a most mischievous superstition...again broke out.” Yet another document, traced to Jewish sources, tells of a gardener named Juda who stole Jesus’ body. When you put all of these pieces of history together, and combine it with the fact that Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection all started within walking distance of His tomb, there is only one reasonable historical answer: Somehow, some way, that tomb was empty.
5. The disciples stopped despairing and started preaching, even though it meant their own deaths. Both biblical and extra-biblical documents tell us that Christianity came from the meeting together of these followers, in order to worship their leader “Christ” and listen to his teachings. Rather than give this up, the same disciples who once fled, willingly faced gruesome and painful deaths.
6. Antagonists convert. James, Jesus’ brother by blood, and Saul, a man who made a business of killing Christians, were among these converts. More so, Saul’s own writings claim his reason for conversion was a face-to-face meeting with the risen Jesus.
7. This is the event upon which Christianity is founded. Christianity is not direct proof that Jesus rose, but it is proof that people who knew Jesus personally before His death believed that He rose.
8. Christianity was founded in Jerusalem. No one in the town where all this was happening could present the dead body so as to put a stop to it. Instead, the “stolen body theory” is preached even by the first skeptics.
9. They worshiped on Sunday. These new Christians, a bunch of Jews (whose religion insists they worship on Saturday) start worshiping on Sunday, because Sunday is the day when they believe the resurrection happened.
10. Do the math. The challenge for the non-Christian or the skeptic (which they are usually unwilling to take up) is to find an alternative historical explanation for where this Christianity came from which also fits all of these simple, documented facts. What could make orthodox Jews change their most sacred rituals, and go to the ends of the earth to tell others about it even though it only gets them killed? They say it was because they themselves saw this man risen from the dead. On top of this, the tomb was clearly empty and the man was nowhere to be found. So, what other explanation for all the facts can you come up with? Over the last several hundred years the skeptics have tried. There’s the hallucination theory, and the swoon theory and that good ol’ stolen body theory. But none of those theories explain all of the above facts. You can’t steal a swooned body that gets up and walks away. Separate groups of people don’t experience the same hallucination. A Jesus who needed to be taken to the hospital would hardly have convinced terrified disciples to go out and die for him. The simple reality is that there is only one explanation of the evidence that fits all the facts. It might be unbelievable, but it is anything but unreasonable. So put it in your pocket for the next time a skeptic attacks you with his claims that you are ignorant. Ask him how he explains what Tacitus says. Ask him why the Talmud called Jesus a sorcerer. Ask him to explain all the historical facts. Then, when he won’t (since he can’t), feel free to go right on believing the truth: that the resurrection did happen. Not only is it the best explanation for all of the real historical evidence, it also happens to be what the Bible says was God’s plan for the precise purpose of saving you.
Pastor Jonathan Fisk serves as pastor at Bethany Lutheran Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is also on the board of Higher Things and host of the popular Worldview Everlasting videos. He can be reached at revfisk@gmail.com.
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Texts, Typos, and Transmission:
Why You Can Trust By Rev. Mark Pierson
I
remember when it first dawned on me that there might be “problems” with the New Testament. As I casually flipped through the red-lettered words of Jesus in my parents’ study Bible, something surprising caught my eye. There, in the Gospel of John, I noticed a particularly strange footnote. It said something like,“This part is not the same in all ancient manuscripts.” This struck me as rather odd and out of place. Why would a note like that be in the New Testament? Does this mean we don’t know the whole truth about Jesus? Can a book that contains typos really be God’s holy Word?
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Not all of these questions were at the forefront of my mind that day, but years later they popped up. In fact, one of the most common misconceptions about the New Testament (NT) is that it has been copied, translated, and altered so many times that it no longer resembles what the original authors wrote. Thankfully, an apologist—a defender of the faith— explained to me why the NT is actually the most trustworthy collection of texts from the entire ancient world.
The Older the Better: The Earliest NT Manuscripts Have you heard those radio ads telling you to back up your computer before it crashes and all your data is erased? Well, as far as we know, the original writings of the NT have been erased from existence. Copies were made, but since neither computers nor the printing press existed back then, everything was preserved by hand for centuries. So how do we know some drunken monks from the Middle Ages didn’t change the text? Maybe somewhere along the line people put words into the mouth of Jesus, having Him claim to be God, or that His death would pay for our sins, when He himself never said such things. Could it be that the text was tampered with and we just don’t know it? The answer is NO, for at least two reasons. First, the oldest surviving parts of the NT date all the way back to the beginning of the second century. This may seem like it’s still not early enough, since Jesus and the apostles lived in the first century. But keep in mind that most of the NT was written in the latter half of that century, such that only a couple of decades separate the last living apostle from our earliest copies. (In fact, even as I write this article, scholars are claiming a new discovery—a portion of Mark’s Gospel from the first century. The official report
the New Testament will come out next year, but this new find could make any time gap completely negligible.) Second, since discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls we have learned that texts could be used for a hundred years before they wore out and disintegrated. This means our oldest copies of the NT were likely made when the originals were still being read in the churches. Thus, it is far-fetched to think significant changes crept into the NT so soon after the apostles died while their original writings remained in circulation. Plenty of people who knew the apostles firsthand lived into the second century and could have prevented this from happening.
Too Much of a Good Thing? The Number of NT Manuscripts “Thou shalt commit adultery.” How’s that for a commandment? This is what one version of the Bible actually said, due to a printer’s error. But what if this was our only copy of the Ten Commandments? Or what if we only had one other copy, which said “Thou shalt not commit adultery?” The fewer the manuscripts, the harder it is to know what the text initially said. On the other hand, if there are lots of copies to compare with each other, reconstructing the original is much easier. So how many NT manuscripts are there, and how well do they match? Currently, there are 5,700 NT manuscripts in ancient Koine Greek (its original language). Add to that all the early translations into other languages, as well as quotations made by early Christians, and we have around 25,000 sources for the NT text. In fact, if all Greek copies were permanently destroyed, almost the entire NT could be reconstructed from these other sources alone. Scholars have even admitted that they are embarrassed by such a large quantity of manuscripts. After comparing them, altogether 99 percent of the NT has been established with confidence.
Quantity vs. Quality: The Variants in the NT Manuscripts Returning to that footnote from the Gospel of John, I later learned that it was called a “variant.” Variants occur whenever there is not a letter-for-letter or word-for-word match between copies. Such discrepancies are actually quite common in the NT—a fact which some skeptics have pounced on and made into a big deal. “There are more variants in the New Testament,” they’ll say dramatically, “than there are words in the New Testament!” This is true, but also entirely misleading. The reason for so many variants has to do with the vast number of copies, not with a vast number of errors in the text. For example, this article contains over 1,000 words. If someone were to copy it by hand and make only one mistake, that copy would be 99.9 percent accurate. Then let’s say 2,000 people copied this article, with each of them making one mistake. This would create twice as many variants as words, but each copy would remain 99.9 percent accurate. So the real question is not how many variants there are, but how significant the variants are. Almost all variants in the NT have absolutely no bearing on what the text means. The most common of these are spelling mistakes and changes in word order. (In Greek, you can speak like Yoda and still make perfect sense). So can you tell what this verse is saying? “God gave his only Son, for love the world so much he did that whosever beleives in him will have life etneral and perish not.” Though this is an exaggerated example of a variant, you probably had no trouble figuring out what it means (“typos” and all). And of those few variants where scholars remain divided on what the original text said, none of them brings into question anything Christians believe about Jesus. You could literally cut out each of these variants from your
Bible and your understanding of Jesus would remain the same.
Putting it into Perspective To realize how well preserved the NT is, it should be compared with other ancient manuscripts from about the same time. Three historians who lived in the first century, Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus, make for helpful examples here. The time gap between them and the oldest surviving copies of their works is 800 to 1,000 years. For the number of manuscripts, there are 133 of Josephus’ writings, 200 for Suetonius, and only three for Tacitus. Reconstruction of Suetonius’ text often rests on speculation, and too few copies of Tacitus remain for comparison. Josephus is the best preserved of these, but that is largely due to the efforts of Christian copyists. Professional historians accept these texts as generally reliable sources, and yet the NT clearly has much stronger credentials. It is evident that the New Testament has been preserved with remarkable accuracy. There is simply no reason to think we cannot know what the original texts said. The Jesus we find in our modern Bibles is the same Jesus who once walked this earth, who has taken away the sins of the world, and who is present in the midst of His church for you today. The Word who became flesh among us for our salvation has preserved His Word in the pages of the Bible to make sure that salvation is delivered to you! Rev. Mark Pierson is currently working toward a Ph.D. in New Testament studies. He also has a passion for evangelism and apologetics. You can email him at markapierson@gmail.com.
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