Monday, December 14, 2020

Don't poo poo apologetics

A Christian on the internet poo pooed apologetics on the basis that Jesus didn't engage in debates and arguments. He said 1 Peter 3:15 says that we should give a reason for our beliefs, but we shouldn't try to prove our reasons. This was my response:

Proving something entails giving reasons for why it's true, so I don't understand the dichotomy you're making between "proving" and "giving reasons."

That is unless you think "giving reasons" just entails giving autobiography or reporting your subjective experiences. I would agree that's a case of giving reasons without proving.

But what if the reason I have for believing in God or in the resurrection of Jesus is a combination of evidence and argument? How could I give reasons in that case without, in some sense, proving that existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus?

While you may be right that Jesus never attempted to prove the existence of God, he certainly did engage in debate, and he used arguing to demonstrate the truth of some things he taught. I'll give you an example.

In Matthew 22, some Sadduccees engaged Jesus in debate over whether or not there would be a general resurrection of the dead at the end of the age. Pharisees (as well as Jesus) believed in a general resurrection, but Sadduccees didn't.

The argument the Sadduccees gave Jesus took the form of a reductio ad absurdum. Their argument was that if there is a general resurrection, it creates a conundrum. If a woman were married to one man who died, then another man who died, etc., whose wife would she be at the resurrection? It is absurd to think she could be the wife of multiple men, but general resurrection results in this absurdity.

Jesus defended the general resurrection against this argument in two ways. The first thing he did was dispute one of the premises in the Sadduccees argument--the premise that marriage would even exist after the general resurrection. Jesus said nobody would be married in the general resurrection, which eliminates a premise in the Sadduccees' argument.

The second thing he did was give an argument for why there is a general resurrection. The argument Jesus gave was very interesting. There are passages in the Old Testament that explicitly mention a resurrection, like Daniel 12:2. But Jesus didn't bring those up. The text doesn't tell us why Jesus didn't just appeal to these explicit references to general resurrection, but from what we know about Sadducees by reading Josephus, we can figure out why. It's because the Sadduccees only accepted the five books of law as scripture. They did not accept what the rest of the Jews referred to as "the writings and the prophets" as scripture. So instead of appealing to any of those scriptures, Jesus referred to something the Sadduccees would accept. He said the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of the living, not the God of the dead, and he argued that this implied a future resurrection of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So yeah, Jesus did engage in debate, and he used scripture, logic, and reason to make his arguments. So should we.

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