Saturday, October 20, 2012

Week 3 with Jonathan Morrow


I feel like I am going to end up apologizing each week at the beginning of my blog but I promise I will try really hard not to this next week! That being said I feel like I have so much I want to talk about and so little time to get it all down. I just finished watching the Vice-Presidential debates; first off I keep forgetting Missouri is not on Eastern Time… so I missed the first hour of the debate. So now I get to go back and watch the whole thing again before I can talk about how much I dislike Joe Biden. Also I have a soccer game tonight at 11:30 which should be interesting since I haven’t played soccer in years.

All right! Now that that’s out of the way let’s get down to the good stuff…

This week we had Jonathan Morrow, the author Think Christianly and several other books. This man is incredible. He spent three days going over how to defend our faith. Let me say that I already love this stuff. It’s something I just get stoked about.

Right off the bat we hit the ground running. We started by asking the question, “Does truth exist?” We talked about how claims of truth can be split into 2 categories: subjective and objective. Basically we discussed how people are entitled to their own beliefs BUT they are not entitled to their own truth. Then we went into what our job as believers is during apologetics, which is to: Respond to Objections; Make a Case, and Give Hope. As we discussed this I felt convicted because I know that in the times I’ve discussed the Bible with people who don’t believe in it or question things about God, I usually skip the last and definitely most important step. I get into the heat of the argument/debate so strongly that I end up losing focus on why I am having this conversation and will just try to show the person why they are wrong and feel as if I’ve accomplished something. Which I have done - I showed the person I was speaking to that I can argue with them, but they know nothing more of the Lord.

We also learned several arguments that we can make which will lead to proving the existence of God and in turn give us an opening to share more from Scripture. One was the “Kalam Cosmological Argument” which is actually very simple and just deductive reasoning. Here’s a simplified version of it.

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause

2) The universe began to exist

3) Therefore the universe has a cause

From here we can move the conversation to how if time began it must have come from something timeless; if matter began to exist it has to come from something immaterial, etc. 

It’s so much more complicated, but I love that instead of starting with conflict you focus on things that anyone would agree on and then you can take things step by step and create minimal confrontation to make your point. Not that I am against confrontation, but once people get heated they tend to stop listening to the message you are presenting and are focused on doing the same to you and you end up gridlocked.
 

We also looked at arguments for God’s existence from the angle of design. How things came to be. I thought the coolest example he gave us was Mt. Rushmore. He asked us if we knew who created it, and when none of us could answer, he asked if we could still be certain that it was created or was it just a happenstance of nature. He extended this metaphor to the world - just because we can’t say we saw God make the world doesn’t mean that we can throw away an Almighty Creator of the world.

I love history, and we discussed just a few things to support the existence of Jesus and His resurrection. We have recorded accounts from Roman officials of Jesus’ death and the “strange doings” that happened after. Then the fact that every one of Jesus’ disciples died for this belief in His resurrection - why would men do that who knew it to be a lie? Another thing was that Jesus first appeared to women. At this period of history women’s testimony meant nothing, so if you were going to have a believable story of a risen Lord you wouldn’t use the word of women.

Honestly I have like 15 pages of notes of stuff; I have so much left to process. I love what we went over and I think it has given me a greater boldness for defending my faith.

No comments:

Post a Comment