Tag Archives: Bart Ehrman

Apologetics Leads to a Resilient Faith

Illustration from FEMA 277, the 1996 report on the OKC bombing

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb was detonated in front of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. While it was an incredibly powerful bomb that did extensive damage to hundreds of buildings in a 16-block radius, there is one primary reason for the devastating partial collapse of the Murrah building. The front of the building, where the bomb was detonated, used what’s called transfer girders on the 3rd floor to support the columns for the upper six floors. They worked great for creating a more open entrance with ground-floor columns spaced at twice the distance of the columns on the 8 stories above, but they also decreased the number of load paths available for supporting the weight of the floors above. Therefore, when the truck bomb was detonated right next to a ground-floor column, shattering it and shearing through the columns on each side of it, 8 of the 10 bays of the building’s north facade were now unsupported. From the 3rd floor up, taking away that much support would’ve required eliminating 7 columns, but at the first 2 levels, it only took the destruction of 3 columns. This was a painful reminder that part of making a resilient building that can survive disasters is having redundancy, the ability to safely redistribute loads through alternate paths in the event of the loss of one load path. It’s what a lot of us engineers like to call a “belt and suspenders” design. As a Christian engineer, I have to ask, is my belief in God such that one crisis of doubt will destroy it, or is it more robust than that? I think you know the answer, but let’s work through that today.

In reading atheists’ stories of their deconversions from the Christian faith they had grown up espousing, I am struck by how precarious their trust (or faith) seems to have been. Atheists like Bart Ehrman, Dan Barker, and Matt Dillahunty have told of surprisingly small things making shipwreck of their souls. Whether it’s built on a particular emotional experience, or the teachings of a particular church or pastor, or some very shallow understanding of the Bible, they seem to often have a belief structure resembling a house of cards. Frustration with the hiddenness of God, a personal encounter with suffering, inability to fathom their omniscient Creator’s reasons – and the cards come tumbling down. Yet Christianity is anything but a house of cards. The basic belief in God is not built on one make-or-break proposition. Rather, we have a strong cumulative case based on multiple lines of reasoning. Most well-known among these are the Cosmological Argument, the Design Argument, the Moral Argument, and the Ontological Argument, although arguments from consciousness, miracles, religious experiences, beauty, and reason [1], just to name a few, have also been developed over the years in support of the existence of God. Different people often find particular lines of reasoning among these especially persuasive, and others not so much, hence my use of the term “argument” rather than “proof”. Proof can be very subjective, as anyone that’s ever had to sit through jury deliberations can confirm. But what’s fascinating is how many different supports there are for rational belief in God. Of course, like the many columns in a building, no single argument supports the entire “structure” of belief in God, but all of these different lines of reasoning, taken together, interlock well to provide a formidable framework highly resistant to collapse. While skeptics often seem to enjoy sniping at the views of others, the significant challenge for the skeptic is formulating a worldview of their own that explains so much of the world around us as well as Christianity does.

“But”, one might say, “you’re doing a bait-and-switch between the case for generic theism and the case for Christianity! Christianity has all its eggs in one basket – the Bible. So much for your redundancy!” Here’s the thing: while the Bible is conveniently bound in a single volume now, the writings contained therein were the result of multiple witnesses writing independently at different times and places. Though all inspired by God, they are separate historical records. And everything described in the Bible that has ever been able to be compared against archaeological findings has confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. In particular, Luke, Paul’s companion and the author of the gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, has been proven to be a historian accurate in even the most trivial details. So Christianity encompasses the general case for theism, with its strong philosophical support along several independent lines, as well as having strong historical attestation and archaeological support. In fact, I would say Christianity is the only system that answers so many questions coherently and is so well-grounded.

Now, for the Christian, our trust in Christ isn’t simply a matter of intellectual assent, but also a relationship with our living Creator. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, dwells in each Christian, and testifies with our spirit that we are children of God [Ro 8:16]. This should be the single biggest contributor to an unshakeable faith, but we humans are often fickle creatures, prone to worry and doubt, falling far short of what God intends for us. To make matters worse, false religions have claimed similar certainty, such as the Mormon “burning in the bosom” that they genuinely believe to be authentic. Even though the existence of a counterfeit does nothing to refute the  existence of the true original, it can still cause us to doubt the Spirit’s testimony in our own hearts. But this is where knowing that these different lines of reasoning all converge on the God of the Bible is helpful. While we typically use these apologetics tools to demonstrate to non-Christians the reasonableness of belief in God and trust in Christ alone, they can also help us to remember the truth ourselves in times of doubtful struggle (or encourage a struggling Christian brother or sister). That gives us multiple supports to lean on when we are weakened by attacks, whether from circumstances without or doubts within. Hence, apologetics helps us to build a resilient faith [2].


[1] See The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell, 1st edition, 2012) for several of these. See C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1960), for his argument from miracles, as well as Craig Keener’s massive 2-volume work on the subject. Also see Chapter 4 of Lewis’ Miracles for his argument from reason, and Ch. 6 in Blackwell for Victor Reppert’s detailed defense of Lewis’ argument from reason and response to objections. Pascal’s “anthropological argument“, presented in chapter 10 of Christian Apologetics, by Doug Groothuis, is another contribution with significant explanatory power.
[2] Though not specifically quoted, much of this last paragraph is inspired by the ever-insightful William Lane Craig, and his excellent book Reasonable Faith, 3rd Ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), pp. 43-51 .

The Twin Pillars of Christmas & Easter

National Building Museum, Washington DC, 2017. Author’s photo.

As the Christmas celebrations wrapped up, a friend shared the following quote yesterday from atheist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman:

The God of Christmas is not a God of wrath, judgment, sin, punishment, or vengeance. He is a God of love, who wants the best for people and gives of himself to bring peace, joy, and redemption. That’s a great image of a divine being. This is not a God who is waiting for you to die so he can send you into eternal torment. It is a God who is concerned for you and your world, who wants to solve your problems, heal your wounds, remove your pain, bring you joy, peace, happiness, healing, and wholeness. Can’t we keep that image with us all the time? Can’t we affirm that view of ultimate reality 52 weeks of the year instead of just a few? I myself do not believe in God. But if I did, that would be the God I would defend, promote, and proclaim. Enough of war! Enough of starvation! Enough of epidemics! Enough of pain! Enough of misery! Enough of abject loneliness! Enough of violence, hatred, narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and suffering of every kind! Give me the God of Christmas, the God of love, the God of an innocent child in a manger, who comes to bring salvation and wholeness to the world, the way it was always meant to be.”[1, emphasis mine]

I get it. We tend to like the “God of Christmas”: the God who sends Jesus to be born as one of us, the God who so loved the world that He sent His Son for us, the God who is “pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel!”[2] Unless you have some psychosis where you resent being loved, who wouldn’t want “that God”? But here’s the thing. God isn’t one-dimensional. We often complain about books and movies where the character development is shallow, and each character has one personality trait that is exaggerated to the exclusion of all others. Then, why do we want God to be equally one-dimensional? Can He not be loving and just? But justice requires the judgement that Bart resents. Can He not love us, and punish evildoers? It’s hard to complain of the “problem of evil” if you specifically reject a God who judges and punishes evil.

What I think Bart is missing is that the “God of Christmas” is necessarily the same “God of the Cross”. You can’t have the manger without the cross, or the cross without the manger; they are twin pillars  in God’s plan of redemption.  We must not forget that the birth of Christ is not really functional without the other pillar: Easter. These two events, separated by about 33 years, mark the beginning and completion of a critical phase of God’s redemption plan established before the world was even formed. If Jesus had simply materialized at the cross to be a sacrifice for our sin, he wouldn’t have lived a sinless life [2Cor 5:21, Heb 4:15] to be an unblemished sacrifice [Heb 9:14]. If Jesus had been born and lived His perfect life, only to die the familiar and final death of men, then He would’ve been a great teacher and role model, but not our redeemer bringing eternal life, and we would be no better off than before He came. We can’t have one without the other. While we may feel more comfortable with the lowly child Jesus, the incarnation through a virgin birth was the necessary beginning that must end in the crucifixion and resurrection. The purpose of Jesus becoming that “innocent child in a manger” that would satisfy Bart, was to become the sacrifice that would satisfy the wrath of God that Bart resents.

Does wrath make you uncomfortable? It should. Left to face the perfectly fair justice of God on our own, wrath is rightly ours to bear. But that doesn’t have to be our fate. For God so loved the world, that He sent His Son [Jn 3:16], not to stay a sweet lowly baby, not to merely be a good teacher, and not to be an interesting story to ponder centuries later, but to be the mediator between us and God [1Tim 2:5], to be our great High Priest [Heb 2:17-18, 7:25], to pay the price for sin that we might receive the free gift of God [Rom 3:23-24, 5:8, 6:23]! There is no dichotomy here – the  God of Christmas and the God of the Cross are one and the same. For that sweet baby came to be our ransom and take the wrath of God; and the cross and subsequent resurrection were the culmination of God’s love for us in sending Jesus to redeem us, and Jesus’s love for us in sacrificing His life for us. Christmas and Easter are both necessary pillars supporting God’s plan for our salvation. So give me that God, that is big enough to orchestrate a plan so much grander and better than anything Bart Ehrman, or me, or anyone else could ever come up with. Give me that God, who is loving and just, whose wrath is righteous, who is the only one who can be trusted with vengeance, who judges fairly and consistently, yet whose mercy and grace are unfathomable.  Give me that God, who loved me while I was His enemy, with a costly, sacrificial love, but also loves me enough to not let me stay wallowing in my sin. Rather He disciplines me, convicts me, molds me, even though it’s uncomfortable, but it’s for my own good, even when I can’t see that far.

In short, give me… the God of the Bible.


[1] Bart Ehrman’s blog, from Christmas Eve, 2017, https://ehrmanblog.org/christmas-reflection-2017, accessed 2017-12-26.
[2] Charles Wesley, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”, verse 2.