Traditionally (yes, even Protestantism have their traditions), Protestantism has not been very big on defending the Christian faith. Protestants have not really started to defend their faith until this last century, with people like C.S. Lewis, B. B. Warfield, John W. Montgomery, William Lane Craig, Francis Schafer, and Norm Geisler. But before the 20th century there was not much attempt to do Christian apologetics from Protestants. In contrast, the Catholic Church Church has a rich tradition of apologetics (apologetics is the practice of defending your faith).
In the Catholic tradition, one can go all the way back to St Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century. St Justin was a philosopher, and he knew how to use philosophy to speak to the Greeks of his day. St Augustine in the 4rth century wrote The City of God, which defended the Christian faith against the charge that Christianity caused the pagan gods to be angry with the Roman Empire which resulted in the invasions from the barbarians. And St Anselm came up with proofs for the existence of God. His argument was that just by us having an idea of God proves that He exists. St Thomas Aquinas debunked this argument; just because we can think of something does not prove that it exists – we can think of unicorns, but that does not mean that they exist. But St Thomas did come up with seven arguments for the existence of God, that have stood the test of time. He wrote these in two books, The Summa Theologica and The Summa Contra Gentiles. Both are masterpieces of works. Then there was Blaise Pascal, who came up with Pascal’s Wager.
But the Protestant Reformers wanted nothing of defending the Christian faith. There were several reasons for this:
1. The Reformers had a heavy view of predestination. Since God predestined some to heaven and some to eternal life, why bother in trying to reason with non-Christians? It was almost an affront to God to persuade others of the validity of the Christian faith.
2. The belief in sola scriptura contradicted defending the Christian faith. If we cannot know anything from God except what is in the Bible, then that means all the arguments by St Thomas Aquinas are invalid. St Thomas came up with a way that we can reason with the non-Christian about the existence of God and many of His attributes from what we see of His creation. But if we can know something about God from reason and creation, then this would invalidate the notion that we can only know about God from the Bible.
3. The emphasis on sola fidei also made it difficult to believe that the Christian faith can be reasonable. If our salvation is only by faith, then faith must only have a supernatural origin. Faith was only by the Holy Sprit. If faith was possible through the use of reason, then faith would no longer be a gift from God.
4. The Reformers believed in the total depravity of man as a result of the Fall. Since man is totally depraved, it is impossible for him to use reason to find God. The Catholic Church does not teach that man is born totally depraved; man is wounded by Original Sin, but is not depraved.
5. The Reformers wanted to frame the arguments against Catholicism solely on the use of scripture. And scripture divorced from its historical context (the early church) allows them to say whatever one wants it to say, based on his own presuppositions. When the Reformers would point to the scripture verse, Catholic apologists would argue how can they used scripture to argue against the Catholic tradition when scripture came to us through Catholic tradition. Catholics would argue how can the Protestant Reformers say that everything we believe must be explicitly based on the Bible, when there is no verse in the Bible that explicitly teaches that everything we believe must be explicitly based on the Bible. The Reformers are shown to holding onto an unreasonable position. But the Reformers had an out. Their argument was that they do not have to be reasonable, as long as they were Biblical. They would argue that reason was the great harlot.
Martin Luther, above all, the father of Protestantism, was against reason.
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but--more frequently than not --struggles against the Divine Word
Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God
The damned whore Reason....
To be a Christian, you must pluck out the eye of reason
Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason
http://www.2think.org/hii/mlquotes.shtml
Luther's negative attitude toward reason has affected both Protestant Christians and atheists throughout the centuries. Protestant tradition had a suspicious attitude toward reason that was applied to the Christian faith. Soren Kirkegaard came up with a “blind leap of faith”. Protestant Theologian Karl Barth once said that even if it was proven that Christ did not rise from the dead, he would still believe. To me, this is absurd. But to Barth, it is being Protestant, where reason has nothing to do with faith. It reminds me of what the Protestant Archie Bunker once said – faith is believing what in your right mind you would never believe. Sure, this was said as a joke; but for many people, this is what faith is. And this plays right into the atheists hands! See, they say, faith has nothing to do with reason – better to embrace science than faith!
There has been a change this part of the century. Many Protestants are finally realizing that the Christian faith is a reasonable faith. And I think that some credit should be given to Catholicism. One of the earliest of the Protestant Christian apologists was C.S. Lewis. He wrote many books to show how reasonable the faith is, without quoting scripture. Some are classics in apologetics – Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. He shows to his fellow Protestants that they can converse with skeptics without quoting Bible verses (a major turn-off for skeptics). But where did he learn this? The two people who were the most influential in his conversion to the Christian faith were G.K. Chesterton and J.R. Tolkien, both Catholics. Both of these Catholic writers used reason to persuade people to come to Christ. And modern Protestant apologists, like Bill Craig and Norm Geisler, are re-discovering the arguments presented by St Thomas Aquinas.
So Protestants are coming late to the game. But better late than never! And yet I must be frank here. I know that as Protestant minister, I used to even use their arguments. But now I do not see them as strong as I once saw them. I think it is because now I am exposed to the Catholic apologetics. I see the Catholic approach to defending the Christian faith much stronger. Compared to the Catholic approach, the Protestant approach seems to me to be weak.
Here are the Protestant argument for the Christian faith, as I see it:
1. If Jesus was not God then He was either a liar, a legend, or a lunatic . Since He was not a liar, a legend or a lunatic, then He must be God.
This argument seems to have been championed by C.S. Lewis:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg--or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us
Mere Christianity
This was an excellent argument back when Lewis wrote this, but I think the argument has lost its power 60 years later. Back when Lewis made the argument, atheists were still saying that Jesus was still a good man and a great moral teacher. But society has become more depraved now. Our society calls good evil and evil good. Today, an atheist has no qualms in saying “OK, then Jesus was as crazy as a poached egg” or “Ok, Jesus was then an evil liar”. Back at Lewis’s time, there were three interpretation of Jesus. Now, we have many more interpretations – that Jesus was an alien from outer space, that Jesus was a homosexual, that Jesus was a violent revolutionary, etc. I do not think we can narrow it down to only 3 alternatives if Jesus was not God.
So unless the person has a high regard for Jesus as a good person and a great moral teacher, I do not think I would use this argument. Know your audience.
2. Jesus proved He was God by rising from the dead. There are two evidences of the resurrection: the empty tomb and the eyewitness appearances.
Jesus proved He was who He said He was by rising from the dead. There are two facts that are uncontested – the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses.
Jesus was laid into a tomb, with a great stone rolled over the entrance (Matthew 27:60). A Roman seal was placed on the seal, which meant death to anyone who broke the seal, and a guard (about 19 soldiers)was place at the tomb (Matt 27:66). Frank Morrison, an atheist and a lawyer, investigated this. Because of his investigation, he became a Christian and wrote a book called Who Moved the Stone. It is obvious that this tomb was empty. If it was not empty, then the once the apostles started to preach that Jesus rose from the dead, it is logical that the enemies of Jesus would have gone to the tomb and displayed the body to the public, and this would killed the apostles’ testimony. So who then moved the stone? Would have the Jews moved the stone? Unlikely, since they were enemies of the Christian sect. Would the Romans? Unlikely, they had nothing to gain, and they were the ones who crucified Jesus. Did the disciples of Jesus steal His body? So Unlikely, since they fled Jesus when He was arrested. And besides, all but one apostles was martyred. Why would they die for a lie?
The other evidence is the eye witness testimony that they saw Jesus after he died. As already mentioned, all but one, John, and he ended on a prison-like island, were martyred because of their testimony, and not one of them changed their testimony. It is true that people may die for what they thought was a lie, but no one dies for what they know to be a lie. So it does not make sense that none of them cracked until torture. Some skeptics then argued that they did not deliberately lie, but they hallucinated. The apostles wanted this to be true so much that though they saw him. But it is counter-argued that they did not just see him, they touched him (John 20). They saw him and ate with Him for a month. This was not just some bodiless vision that they professed that they encountered.
The evidence for the resurrection is so strong, so say the proponents, that if the resurrection of Christ was presented in a court of law today, the evidence would demand the verdict that Jesus did rise from the dead. Eye-witness testimony is compelling, especially when the ones who made that testimony were willing to die for it.
This argument seemed to me to be very compelling for a very long time. I used to give these arguments when I was a minister. But now, I can see some holes in this argument. If you notice, I made many statements concerning the details surrounding Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. I supported these details by using scripture references. And that’s a big hole in the argument! Those who argue for the evidence of the resurrection are using Bible verses! How do we know Jesus was laid in the tomb? Because it says so in the Matthew 27! How do know that a seal was placed on the tomb? It says so right here in the Bible! I remember once sitting in the audience when a Campus Crusade staff member gave the evidences from scripture. One skeptic rose his hand and said “Hey! You’re using the Bible to prove your argument! I don’t believe in the Bible!” The staff member just responded that he did not have the time to get into the historical reliability of the Bible. But I thought even then that this skeptic made a valid point. How can we use the Bible to prove the resurrection of Christ? To those who already believe, it is not necessary. To those who do not believe, it is not sufficient.
Evangelicals may counter “We are not using the Bible as the Word of God, but as historically reliable documents. We are just using them as reliable records of the details of what happened”.
I admit that the New Testament documents are historically reliable. FF Bruce presented a convincing case in his book the New Testament Documents: Are the Reliable? But just because the New Testament is historically reliable, that does not mean it cannot be wrong in its details. Do not misunderstand me – I believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. But in finding common ground with the skeptic, I can only use the Bible as a collection of historical documents. And all that scholarship can prove is that the New Testament is generally reliable. Anything can err in its details. The newspaper is generally reliable, but there are times that it can get a particular story wrong, at at least the details wrong.
There are times that the Protestant apologist makes assertions that are not in the Bible, and that is also a problem for the Protestant. For instance, take the argument that most of the apostles were martyred for their testimony without recanting their testimony of seeing Jesus after he rose from the dead. How do we know that? Not from the Bible! The Bible only records one apostle who died for the faith! So what about the others? How do we know they were martyred? How do we know that none of them recanted their story later on? There is only one way that Protestant apologists could have known this – it was through TRADITION! Frankly, if I was an atheist, this would be my biggest argument against Protestant apologists. The only way we know that some or even all of the apostles did not recant is because tradition recorded for us what happened to the apostles after the Bible was written. We only know that Peter was crucified upside down through tradition. We only know that Paul was beheaded by what is written by tradition. But here the Protestant apologists are being intellectually dishonest to the skeptic. They use tradition to prove their argument to the skeptic, but to the Catholic they argue that we should distrust tradition and only believe what is in the Bible. If we only believe what is in the Bible, then we must admit to the skeptic that we are completely agnostic as to what eventually happened to the apostles. That means we cannot argue that they all but John, died for their testimony.
And last of all, the problem with trying to prove the evidence is that this happened 2,000 years ago. That is a very long time. Protestant apologists argue that if the resurrection of Christ was on trial that there is enough evidence to have him declared as being rose from the dead. I am not so sure about this. There is a thing called the statute of limitations – something that happened so long in the past that any evidence is just too old to use. Sure we have the eyewitness accounts, but everyone is long gone by now. The apologists would argue that we know more about Jesus than any other person in ancient history. We know more about him than Socrates or Aristotle. But so what? I once met an atheist who said that we cannot know that anything happened before the invention of the printing press. So how could we even begin to argue the resurrection of Christ with him? He would not be impressed that we know more of Jesus than Aristotle, because he was not even sure Aristotle existed!
On the positive side, this also works against the skeptics. Throughout the internet, one can find arrogant skeptics who say dogmatically that Jesus did not exist or that Jesus was just a man. Again, we must remember that Jesus existed 2,000 years ago! If it is difficult to prove something 2,000 years ago, it is also difficult to disprove something 2,000 years ago. This is the big hole in Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. It is absurd that Brown would know who the real Jesus was 2,000 years after the fact and those who were closer to the situation (the apostles and the early church fathers) did not.
3. Jesus proved He was God by fulfilling the prophesies concerning Him
I dealt with this elsewhere – how the New Testament writers used the Old Testament. I pointed out that the NT saw that God’s word had two meanings – the human author’s meaning and God’s hidden meaning which at times was even hidden from the author. For instance in Matthew 2:15, Matthew writes that Jesus left Egypt, and that this fulfilled the Old Testament passage where God said “Out of Egypt did I call my Son”. But in its context, this passage is not a prophesy of the coming Messiah, but of the Israelites once being delivered out of Egypt by God. You need the presupposition of faith to see this verse in light of Jesus Christ. It is not going to convince a skeptic.
But even more to the point, as I wrote elsewhere, we do not have any of the original manuscripts of the New Testaments. We have only copies of copies of copies, etc. The skeptic sees that these copies by the Church could have been a corruption of what was originally written. This is totally consistent with the Protestant argument against Catholicism, which is that the Catholic Church corrupted the gospel message that we are saved only by faith with a legalistic system of works. Well, if the Church was able to corrupt the gospel, then the Church was also able to corrupt the Bible. So the skeptic would be skeptical of any citation of a New Testament passage.
4. I know that Jesus is God because He changed my life
This has value to some extent. If Jesus is who He says He is, we definitely would expect to see changed lives. But followers of other religions also say that their religion has changed their lives. Mormons says that their religion has changed their lives. Also, there are many professing Christians who do not have changed lives. Jesus warned us that there will be wolves in our midst. There are some people who left the Christian faith because some Christians have let them down. They say that they were fed up with the hypocrites in the church. The usual response to them is that they need to look to Christ and not to other Christians. This is true, bad Christians do not prove that Christianity is false. But on the other hand, good Christian do not necessarily prove that Christianity is true. We need objective evidence, not the subjective experience of some Christians.
So is there any evidence at all that Christianity is true? The good news is – yes! Absolutely! And here is not just one miracle that we can look at. It is not just the resurrection of Christ. No, there are so many verifiable miracles that it has blown my mind away! And these miraculous events happened recently, within this last century. Some of the eyewitnesses are still around. These events have been investigated by historians and scientists. But there is one caveat. These miraculous, verifiable events within recent history not only prove the truth claim of Christianity, but they also prove the truth claim of the Catholic Church. So in order to accept these miracles as valid, they confirm not only Christianity, but Catholic Christianity!
As a Protestant, I was really bothered that only in the Bible are there miracles. That did not make any sense to me. Why does the Bible record so many miracles in the Old and New Testament, and yet there has been a drought in miracles ever since then? My Protestant professors would explain that God only did these miracles while He was still writing the Bible. But this made no sense to me. It sounded like a cop-out. Also, the Bible itself never said that God would stop doing miracles after the Bible was written. So if I was to believe in sola scriptura, then I had to reject this explanation unless it can be found in scripture.
But the Catholic view of history is that God has never ceased performing miracles. There are miracles involving the Eucharist. Once the Eucharist was miraculously transformed into human tissue for all to see. It is still today in the form of a piece of human tissue, and recently the Catholic Church has invited scientists to investigate it. The scientists determined that is was a piece of a human heart, from someone who just recently died. But this piece of tissue is 500 years old! There is then the miracle of Padre Pio. Padre Pio had the stigmata, deep wounds on each hand. But immediately after he died, these wounds closed up. Then there is the miracles of the incorruptibly dead saints. They dug up these bodies years after they died, and yet there bodies have not decayed. We have pictures of their bodies! There are the statues and pictures actually crying! There are miracles involving the Rosary. There are miracles involving the Miraculous Medal! And there are over 20,000 recorded instances where the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to someone – some with verifiable evidence investigated by historians and scientists. And finally, there is the miracle of the Catholic Church. There is no government or any other human institution existing today that is even close to the age of the Catholic Church. Governments have come and governments have gone, but the Catholic Church is still there. Not only that but there is no other church that has remained unchanged in its doctrine and moral positions. Other churches have eventually fallen into the modernism, but the Catholic Church has held strong in the unchanging truth.
These miracles do not point to themselves. They point back to Jesus. Because of these, I know more than ever before that Jesus is who he said he was, and that he rose from dead.
