Lutheran Pastor Hans Fiene has blessed us with another Lutheran Satire video. This one relates to the circularity that often emerges in atheists’ arguments against miracles, particularly the miracle at the center of our Christian faith: The resurrection couldn’t have happened because we know miracles don’t happen. We know miracles don’t happen because we have no evidence of miracles happening. But doesn’t the resurrection itself offer evidence of at least one miracle happening?
My boys—13 and 10—thought this was funny.
I would rather converse with an atheist/agnostic who puts their beliefs up front than someone who identifies as a Christian but does not believe that Christ rose from the grave. I had a heck of a conversation with a young man on David F. Watson’s blog last week about the subject. I kept pressing until his basic assumptions were exposed. He had more faith in man and man’s wisdom than the Good News of Christ and God’s wisdom. In the end, it just came down to him not believing in the supernatural.
Ridiculous. If he identified as Christian, does that not mean (at the very least, although let’s not take anything for granted) he believes in a Creator God, in which case God intervened in the physical universe in a rather dramatic way at least once—in creating the universe. Is it that much harder to believe that God intervened again? I mean, if you’re not also willing to concede the other miracles in the Bible? Intellectually, is really so hard?
See, that’s the way I feel too. I mean, heck, if you believe that God created the world out of nothing then why is it so hard to believe that He brought His Son (who was God in the flesh) back to life?
Anyways, you should go and check out the conversation:
http://davidfwatson.me/2015/04/03/yes-we-really-do-need-atonement/
(I hope you don’t mind links being posted in your blog; some people don’t mind, others don’t like it)
I think the conversation is a mirror of where we are at in our denomination. I was really shocked at the last posts that this guy named Britt put up. He just blatantly put out there some totally ethnocentric and, in my view, racist remarks about other cultures who accept supernaturalism in their worldview.
Many years ago I became convinced that the bodily resurrection of Christ really happened, in which case it wasn’t difficult at all to believe the rest of the Bible.