Imagining that there is no worldview; is imagined from someone's worldview (John Lennon). But at the opposite end - like George Harrison (My Sweet Lord) - we can lump them all together by ignoring the fundamental contradictions. The inexorable answer is carefully testing mutually exclusive truth claims.

1. Christianity on Trial
“A Proposition of fact is proved,
When it’s truth is established by
competent and satisfactory
evidence.”
- Simon Greenleaf
An Adversary Proceeding

2. Socratic Skepticism
I never enter the research phase to
"win the debate," but rather to find the truth.
As I examine the material relevant to
the theme of the debate,
I have to ask myself several questions:
1) Is this the truth or is it someone's
personal opinion, bias, or prejudice?
2) Is there sufficient credible evidence
to support the truth claim?
3) Is it relevant to the argument?
- Josh McDowell
Honest or Dishonest

3. The Bible is:
Made up of 66 different
books.
Written over a span of
1,600 years (approximately
1500 BC to AD 100).
Written by more than 40
kings, prophets, leaders,
and followers of Jesus.

4. The Ancient Documents Rule
& Evidence
“The law is the witness and external deposit
of our moral life. Its history is the history
of the moral development of the race.”
– Oliver Wendell Holms, Jr.
Ancient documents will be
received as competent
if they are “fair on their face”
(i.e., their preservation
has been consistent with their content).

5. Applying The Ancient Documents Rule:
Q. Is the content of the Bible
consistent with it’s preservation?
A. Applied to the Gospel records,
and reinforced by responsible lower
(textual) criticism, this rule would establish
their competency in any court of law.
- Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

6. What is Truth?

7. The Realm of Fact
Pilate Inscription

8. Caiaphas Ossuary

9. Names, Dates, and Places?
“Ignorance of the law
excuses no man;
not that all men
know the law,
but because ‘tis
an excuse
every man will plead.”
–
John Selden
Tabgha. The Church of St. Peter’s Primacy (John 21:1–17)

10. Examine the Defendants Character
Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Lord?
Put simply,
the best reason for believing
that the Christian religion is true
is Jesus, and the best reason
for believing in Jesus
is Jesus himself.
- James Shire

11. What Did He Teach?
Jesus wants us to be Good:
Saved (2 Pet. 3:9),
Spirit-filled (Eph. 5:15–18),
Sanctified (1 Thess. 4:3, 4),
Submissive (1 Pet. 2:13–15),
Willing to suffer (1 Pet. 4:12–19).

12. Unselfish Love
Be not angry that you cannot make others
as you wish them to be, since
you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Man proposes, but God disposes.
Love is swift, sincere, pious, pleasant, gentle,
strong, patient, faithful, prudent, longsuffering,
manly and never seeking her own;
for wheresoever a man seeketh his own,
there he falleth from love.
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher,
nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller or better
in heaven or in earth;
for love is born of God, and cannot rest
but in God, above all created things.
- Thomas a’ Kempis (1420)

13. Greek Papyrus

14. Part 2: Lawyers ask Questions
The Defendant posits a well reasoned faith:
What Is Faith?
An arbitrary act of the will and feelings,
detached from the mind?
Faith is that which
I have evident reason
to believe is true.

15. The Defendant Accredits the OT
Practically…Legally…Logically

16. But no one can answer every
Question?
“Only deductive logic and pure mathematics
provide ‘apodictic certainty,”
and they do so because
they stem from self-evident formal axioms
(e.g., the tautology, if A then A)
involving no matter of fact.
The moment we enter into the realm of fact,
we must depend on probability;
this may be unfortunate,
but it is unavoidable.” -JWM

17. Truth and Knowledge
Truth The word knowledge
is a characteristic denotes a person’s
of statements that proper
properly describe understanding
aspects of the true nature
of the real world... of reality
True affirmations Truth doesn’t
are those that depend on anyone
correspond knowing the truth!
to reality.

18. The Art & Science of Answering Questions
Epistemology:
The study of theories How do we Know
of knowledge. anything at all?
1. Rationalism How can we know
2. Empiricism the world around us?
3. Historical
4. Intuition How can we know
God?

19. The History of Philosophy
The One and the Many
The Subject Object Problem
What Essence underlies Existence?
Rationalism Empiricism Skepticism Despair
Existentialism: Existence Precedes Essence

20. Albert Camus: “Death is Philosophy’s only problem.”
Rome
Alexandria
Athens Pergamum Temple Jerusalem

21. A Pagan Opinion
“I find that it has been the opinion
of the wisest men that
Law is not a product of human thought,
nor is it any enactment of peoples,
but something eternal which rules
the whole universe by its wisdom
in command and prohibition.
Thus they [the wisest men]
have been accustomed to say
that Law is the primal and ultimate
mind of God… - Cicero

22. Did Jesus rise from the Dead?
The last vice from Pandora’s box was hope.
In Thessalonica an inscription on a stone reads,
“After death no reviving.
After the grave no meeting again.”
Theocritus, a Greek philosopher and poet, wrote,
“Hopes are among the living.
The dead are without hope.”

23. God is Immanent
Mt. Sinai
Aaron
Burning Bush
Israel Manger

24. 1500-400 BC Old Testament
Events are written down in Hebrew (with
portions in Aramaic) over many centuries.
In Exodus, the LORD tells Moses to write in a
book. Other writers, inspired by God, include
leaders, kings and prophets. Together, these
writings on leather scrolls and other materials
are called the Hebrew Scriptures or
Old Testament.
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
500 BC AD 1
AD 1 AD 500
AD 500 ADAD 1000
1000 ADAD 1500
1500 AD 1900
AD 1900 AD 2000
AD 2000

25. 450 BC Ezra
According to Jewish
tradition, Ezra, a
priest and scribe,
collects and arranges
some of the books of
the Hebrew Bible,
around 450 BC.
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
1000 BC AD 1BC AD 500
500 AD1 AD 1000
AD 500 AD 1500
AD 1000 AD 1900
AD 500 AD 2000
AD 2000

26. Stone, Leather, and Clay

27. 250-100 BC The Septuagint
The Septuagint is the first Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible
(the Old Testament).
It was translated in 250-100 BC
by Jewish scholars in Alexandria,
Egypt.
1500 BC 500 BC AD 1 AD 500 AD 1000 AD 1500 AD 1900 AD 2000

28. Qumran

29. AD 45-100 Followers of Jesus
Followers of Jesus write eye-witness reports
(Gospels), history, letters to other believers,
and the Revelation.
• Matthew • Paul
• Mark • James
• Luke • Peter
• John • Jude
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
500 BC AD 1
AD1 AD 500
AD 500 AD 1000
AD 1000 ADAD 1500
1500 AD AD 1900 AD 2000
1900 AD 2000

30. “The Testimony of the Evangelists”
“All that Christianity asks of men
on this subject, is,
that they would
be consistent with themselves;
that they would treat its evidences
as they treat the evidence of other things;
and that they would
try and judge its actors and witnesses,
as they deal with their fellow men,
when testifying to human affairs
and actions, in human tribunals.”
- Simon Greenleaf

31. David Inscription

32. The Hearsay Rule
…a witness must testify
“of his own knowledge” not on the basis
of what has come to him indirectly from others.
Applied to the New Testament documents,
this demand for primary-source evidence
is fully vindicated by the constant asseverations
of their authors to be setting forth
“that which we have heard which we have seen
with our eyes, which we have looked upon,
and our hands have handled, the word of life”
- 1 John 1:1

33. Isaiah1:18
"Come now, and let us reason together,"

34. A witness must testify “
of his own knowledge”
Luke 1:1, Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order
a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us,
just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers
of the word delivered them to us…
2 Peter 1:16, …For we did not follow
cunningly devised fables when we made known to you
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.
1 John 1:1, That which was from the beginning,
which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon,
and our hands have handled…

35. AD 400
Jerome
Jerome starts translating the
Scriptures into Latin in
AD 410 and finishes 25
years later. This translation,
called the Latin Vulgate,
remains the basic Bible for
many centuries.
Jerome
1500 BC
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
500 BC
500 BC AD1
AD 1
AD AD 500
AD 500
AD 500 AD 1000
AD 1000
AD 1000 AD 1500
AD 1500
AD 1500 AD 1900
AD 1900
AD 1900 AD2000
AD 2000
AD 2000

36. AD 500 Roman Empire
Declines
Germanic migrations
(AD 378-600) Germanic
Peoples
cause new
languages, other
than Latin, to
emerge.
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
500 BC AD1
AD 1 AD 500
AD 500 AD 1000
AD 1000 AD 1500
AD 1500 AD 1900
AD 1900 AD2000
AD 2000

37. AD 397
The
The 27 books of the
Canon
New Testament are
formally confirmed as
canonical by the Synod
of Carthage in AD 397,
thus recognizing three
centuries of use by
Carthage
followers of Christ.
1500 BC
1500 BC 500 BC
500 BC AD1
AD 1 AD 500
AD 500 AD 1000
AD 1000 AD 1500
AD 1500 AD 1900
AD 1900 AD2000
AD 2000

38. “A book is not the Word of God
because it is accepted by the people of God.
Rather, it was accepted by the people of God
because it is the Word of God.
That is, God gives the book its divine authority,
not the people of God.
They merely recognize the divine authority
which God gives to it.”
- Norman Geisler

39. The Parole Evidence Rule
External, oral testimony or tradition
will not be received in evidence
to add to, subtract from, vary, or contradict
an executed written instrument such as a will.
Applied to the Biblical documents,
which expressly claim to be “executed” and complete
(Rev. 22:18-19),
this rule insists that
the Scriptures be allowed to “interpret itself”
and not be twisted by external, extra-biblical data
(comparative New Eastern religious texts
and practices, Sitz im Leben interpretations,
“historical-critical method “New Hermeneutic.” etc.).
-Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

40. God indicates that his written word
would be a complete and final
revelation!
Exodus 20:1;
Deuteronomy 4:2; 8:3;
Psalm 19:7; 119:89, 152, 160;
Proverbs 30:5-6;
Isaiah 40:8;
Matthew 5:18; 24;35;
Luke 16:31;
John 10:35; 16:13;
Romans 10:17;
1 Corinthians 14:37; 15:1;
Galatians 1:9;
Hebrews 1:1-2; 2:2-4;
Jude 3;
Revelation 1:1; 22; 18-19

41. The Verdict Please
Dr. John Warwick Montgomery
“…to be skeptical of the resultant text
of the New Testament books
is to allow all of classical antiquity
to slip into obscurity,
for no documents of the ancient period
are as well attested bibliographically
as the New Testament.”

42. Part 3: Escape From Reason
To obtain the To avoid as much
largest amount of error as possible;
true beliefs doubt everything
possible;simply (Skepticism).
believe everything
you hear (Gullible).

43. Christians: Thou Shall Not
Judge?
Only God can judge the human heart (Jer.17: 9).
(1) Truth from error
(Rom.12:2, 9; 1Cor. 12:10; 14:29; 1Thess. 5:19),
(2) Good from evil
(Acts 17:11; 2Peter 2:1; 2Peter 3:2; 1John 4:1; Jude 17)
(3) Sin, (Matt. 18:15; 1Cor. 5:9),
(4) False, corrupted or counterfeit worldviews.
(Rom.16: 17; Gal 1:6; 2 Tim. 3:16, 4:4; Titus3:10; 2Tim.2:17 )
Hypocritical, unjust, and presumptuous judgments
are always wrong.
(Matt. 7:1-5, 23:1-3; Phil. 1:15; John 7:24; John 5:22;
Acts 17;31 ; James 4:11, 5;9).

44. Judgment Seat

45. C.S. Lewis
“If nothing is self-evident,
nothing can be proved.
Similarly, if nothing is obligatory
for it’s own sake,
nothing is obligatory at all.”
(The Abolition of Man)

46. Unprovable Assumptions
“Without an objective criterion
one is at a loss to make a meaningful
choice among a-prioris.
The resurrection provides a basis
in historical probability
for trying the Christian faith.
Granted, the basis is only
one of probability, not of certainty,
but probability is the sole ground
on which finite human beings
can make any decisions.

47. Particular to Universal
“…the weight of historical probability
lies the side of the validity of Jesus’ claim
to be God incarnate, the Savior of man,
and the coming Judge of the world.
If probability does in fact
support these claims
(and can we really deny it, having studied the evidence?),
then we must act in behalf of them.”

48. Universal to Particular
…“In geometry the “given” concepts
are called axioms.
Geometry begins with certain concepts
which are unproved,
but from which the rest of geometry
is deduced.
Theology also has it’s axioms
or beginning principles.
This is why we do not hesitate
to begin with the doctrine of the Trinity
as our a-priori axiom.”
-Robert Morey

49. How Then Do I Judge?
Without basic
first principles of reality,
nothing can be known.
Everything we know about reality
is known by them.
Twelve basic first principles
can be set forth.

50. First Principles
1. Being Is
The Principle of Existence.
2. Being Is Being
The Principle of Identity.
3. Being Is Not Non-being
The Principle of Noncontradiction.
4. Either Being or Nonbeing
The Principle of the Excluded Middle.

51. 5. Nonbeing Cannot Cause Being
The Principle of Causality.
6. Contingent Being Cannot Cause Contingent Being
The Principle of Contingency (or Dependency).
7. Only Necessary Being Can Cause a Contingent Being
The Positive Principle of Modality.
8. Necessary Being Cannot Cause a Necessary Being
The Negative Principle of Modality.

52. 9. Every Contingent Being
Is Caused by a Necessary Being
The Principle of Existential Causality.
10. Necessary Being exists
Principle of Existential Necessity.
11. Contingent being exists
Principle of Existential Contingency
12. Necessary Being is similar to
similar contingent being(s) it causes
Principle of Analogy

53. The Case for Christ
1. Truth is Knowable 7. The New Testament says that
Jesus claimed to be God
2. The opposite of
true is false 8. Jesus’ claim to be God
3. Theism is True was miraculously confirmed
9. Therefore Jesus is God
4. Miracles are Possible
5. Miracles Confirm 10. Whatever Jesus
6. The New Testament (Who is God) Teaches is True
is Historically 11. Jesus Taught that the Bible
Reliable is the Word of God
12. Therefore it is
True that the Bible is the
Word of God
(and anything opposed to it
is false).

54. Part 4: Arguments
Kalam Time Argument
Cosmological Argument
The Design Argument
Teleological Argument
Axiological Argument
Ontological Argument

55. Proving The Unseen
“If anything does now exist,
then either something must be eternal,
or something not eternal
must have come from nothing.”
The Argument then proceeds to that
it is more reasonable to believe
that something is eternal;
and that among the many hypotheses
of eternal existence,
the God of the Bible is the most reasonable,
the most probable eternal being.
-Oliver Busswell

56. Science is not Ultimate
Reality!
The Great Questions
(origin, meaning, morality, and destiny);
that underscore all of life, are fundamentally
philosophical and theological.
Induction is limited to probabilities.
But then, with just a pinch of faith,
they point us in the right direction.
“Best explanations,” are real explanations that
we apply and live by every day.
Meaning, morality, and destiny won’t fit
into any test tube.
-Mal

57. There are Different Kinds of
Proof
Martin Heidegger:
Philosophy cannot be based on history-
neither on the science of history
nor on any other science.
For every science rests on presuppositions
which can never be established scientifically,
though they can be demonstrated philosophically.
All sciences are grounded in philosophy ,
but not vice versa.

58. John Locke
“If, therefore, it be evident that
something necessarily must exist from eternity,
it is also as evident that something
must be a cogitative being;
for it is as impossible that incogitative matter
should produce a cogitative being,
as that nothing,
or the negation of all being,
should produce a positive being or matter.”

59. Information
John Gerstner observed;
“Where ever we see matter, there is information in
matter, that is not native to matter.”
Ravi Zacharias adds,
“We live in an ontologically haunted universe.”
William Lane Craig asserts;
“There needs to be some kind of ontic seeding.”
Francis Schaeffer says it all; “Personality is central.”

60. Something Exists
“The DNA blueprint must encapsulate
not only every physical attribute
of our bodies,
but also the concepts that underlie
our inborn instincts.
For example, nature has managed to capture the
notion of “height” in mammalian DNA.
Psychological tests show that human beings,
and most other mammals, fear heights at birth.
-Arno Penzias
Program, means Programmer

61. Four options for the origin of the cosmos.
1. The cosmos is an illusion
2. The cosmos is self-existent
3. The cosmos is self-created
4. The cosmos is created by something
that is self-existent
“This is a modern restatement of
St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument of
necessary being (ens necessarium).”
-R.C. Sproul

62. 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause,
2. The universe began to exist,
The universe had a cause.
1. The fine-tuning of the initial conditions of
the universe is due to;
natural law, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to natural law or chance.
The fine tuning was designed.
1. If God does not exist,
objective moral values don’t exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
God exists.

63. Actually or Potentially
Infinite?
Oliver Buswell:
“There is no religion or philosophy in all the
history of human culture
which teaches the omnipotence of God.
This must be in the light of the fact
that there is no other
doctrine of creation from nothing,
than that found in the Judeo-Christian
tradition or derived from it.
There are only three monotheistic religions in
the world; Judaism, Christianity, and
Mohammedanism.

64. Uncaused Cause
Christianity claims to be an outgrowth of the
Jewish revelation, and it is quite obvious that
Mohammed, in the seventh century A.D.
derived his concept of one, and only one,
supreme God from Judaism and Christianity
Polytheism could not, of course exist along
with the doctrine of God’s omnipotence,
for if there are many gods, each with a
sphere of power, no one god could have all
the power that is or could be.”

65. Part 5: Supernatural?
Is the Universe a Closed system.
Is the Universe an Open System?

66. What is mind? No matter.
“Mental events
are feelings of pain, However,
episodes of thoughts, physical events
or sensory experiences. and their properties
do not have the same
Physical events are features
happenings in the brain as do mental events
and central nervous and their properties...
system
that can be described
exhaustively
using terms from
chemistry and physics.

67. What is matter? Never mind.
….Picture a pink elephant in your mind.
Now close your eyes and look at the image.
In your mind, you will see a pink property
(a sense datum or a sensory way of experiencing).
There will be no pink elephant outside you,
but there will be a pink image of one in your mind.
However, there will be no pink entity in your brain;
no neurophysiologist could open your brain and see
a pink entity while you are having the sense image.
The sensory event has a property-pink-that no brain event has.
Therefore, they cannot be identical.
The sense image is a mental entity, not a physical one.”
- J.P. Moreland and Gary Habermas, Beyond Death

68. One Breath Away: Death
“Body is form. Even “If no necessity exists
now what makes our between events and
bodies our bodies is interpretations, then
not atoms but there is no way of
structure. The atoms determining which
change every seven meaning is correct....
years; yet it is the This is both repugnant
same body because of and absurd.
its continuity of form.” There must be an
(Peter Kreeft) empirical necessity
that unites an event
or fact with its correct
interpretation.”
- Paul D. Feinberg

69. Res ipsa loquitur
“…A resurrection considered
only as a fact to be proved
by evidence, is a plain Case;
it requires no greater ability
in the witnesses, than that they be able to
distinguish between a man dead, and a
man alive; A Point, in which I believe
every Man living thinks himself a Judge.”
-Thomas Sherlock

70. Primary Source Documents
“…no historian can legitimately rule out
documentary evidence simply on the ground
that it records remarkable events;
if the documents are sufficiently reliable,
the remarkable events must be accepted
even if they cannot be successfully explained
by analogy with other events
or by an a-priori scheme of natural causation.”
(Dr. John Warwick Montgomery)
Naturalism: Is the Universe a Closed System?

71. A Non-Analogous Event
“People like us, who believe in physics,
know that the distinction between
past, present, and future is only a
stubbornly persistent illusion.”
(Albert Einstein)
An awesome and wide open
universe is best explained by an
Awesome God.

72. C. S . Lewis
Miracles : “Now of course we must agree
with Hume [Eighteenth Century Skeptic]
that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’
against miracles,
if in other words they have never happened,
why then they never have.
Unfortunately, we know
the experience against them to be uniform only
if we know that all the reports of them are false.
And we can know all the reports to be false
only if we know already
that miracles have never occurred.
In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”

73. Who Moved the Stone?
Frank Morison:
[1] If Jesus didn’t rise
someone must have stolen the body;
[2] the only people involved were
the Roman authorities,
the Jewish religious leaders, and Jesus’ disciples ;
[3] The Romans and the Jewish religious leaders
would certainly not have taken the body, since to
do so would have been against their own interests
(the Romans wanted to keep Palestine quiet, and
the Jews wanted to preserve their religious
influence): and
[4] the disciples would hardly have stolen the body
and then died for what they knew to be untrue.

74. Francis Schaeffer
But they failed [German Higher Critics]
In the same way that the rationalistic philosophers
had failed.
They too were caught in the round room
without an exit Their search for
the historical Jesus was doomed to failure.
The supernatural was so intertwined with
the rest that if they ripped out all the supernatural,
there was no Jesus left!
If they removed all the supernatural,
no historical Jesus remained;
if they kept the historical Jesus,
the supernatural remained as well.

75. Part 6
The Opposite of True is False

76. The Parole Evidence Rule insists
that the Scriptures be allowed to
“interpret itself”
and not be twisted by external,
extra-biblical data

77. What About New Prophets?
External, oral testimony or tradition
will not be received in evidence
to add to, subtract from, vary,
or contradict
an executed written instrument
such as a will.
- The Parole Evidence Rule

78. The Verdict Please
F. J. A. Hort
“…in the variety and fullness of the evidence
on which it rests the text of the New Testament
stands absolutely and unapproachably alone
among ancient prose writings.”
F. F. Bruce writes:
“There is no body of ancient literature
in the world which enjoys
such a wealth of good textual
attestation as the New Testament.”

79. Primary or Secondary Source?
The Book of Mormon?
The Koran?
The New World Translation?
These are secondary sources;
positing contradictory truth claims
and no contemporaneous eyewitnesses.

80. MORMONISM
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
KEY WRITINGS
 The Book of Mormon
 Doctrine and Covenants
 Pearl of Great Price
 The Bible (King James
Version only or Smith’s
“Inspired Version”)
 Authoritative teachings of
Mormonism’s prophets
and other “general
authorities”

81. JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society
KEY WRITINGS
Include…
– Bible (New World
Translation only)
– You Can Live Forever in
Paradise on Earth
– Reasoning from the
Scriptures
– Watchtower magazine
– Awake! magazine1

82. ISLAM
KEY WRITINGS
 Qur’an (Koran), scripture in Arabic
In principle, no
translation is regarded as
conveying the exact
meaning of the original;
although a few
translations are
considered acceptable,
non-Arabic speaking
Muslims are encouraged
to learn Arabic.

83. Mormonism
“Joseph Smith is credited with the “translation” of the
Inspired Version of the Bible.
Actually, it is not a new translation,
instead, Smith added to and subtracted from the King
James Version (KJV)-not by examining Biblical manuscripts ,
but by “divine inspiration.” Smith corrected, revised,
altered, added to, and deleted from’ the KJV.
Virtually thousands of changes were introduced.
While it took 50 of the world’s greatest Bible scholars, with
a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek,
seven years to finish their work on the KJV,
it took Smith a mere three years to complete his work-
despite the fact that he had virtually
no knowledge of the biblical languages.” (Ron Rhodes)

84. Jehovah Witnesses: New World
Translation?
Dr. Julius Mantey:
“a shocking mistranslation.
Dr. Bruce Metzger:
“a frightful mistranslation.”
Dr. William Barclay:
“It is abundantly clear
that a sect which can translate the
New Testament like that
is intellectually dishonest.”

85. Islam: Politically Correct
Idolatry
“The earliest accounts of “The very least we can say
Muhammad’s life were is the more Fundamental
written at least 150 years a Christian becomes,
after his death. the more just and loving
he will become;
All are Muslim sources, but the more Fundamental
and there is no external a Muslim becomes,
(i.e. non-Muslim) the more violent and
supporting evidence.” intolerant he will become.
This is the reason why
-Patrick Sookhdeo Islamic Fundamentalism
is almost synonymous
with terrorism.
Not all Muslims
are terrorists,
but almost all terrorists
today are Muslim.”
- Hal Lindsey

86. Let None Dare, Call It
Idolatry
“…There are at least 109
identifiable war verses in the Koran.
One out of every 55 verses
in the Koran is a war verse.
War verses are scattered
throughout Mohammed’s chapters
like blood splatter at a crime scene.”
-Don Richardson

87. David Hume (1711-1776)
“ …[Mohammed] bestows praise upon
such instances of treachery,
inhumanity, cruelty, revenge and
bigotry as are utterly incompatible
with civilized society. No steady rule
of right seems there to be attended
to, and every action is blamed or
praised so far only as it is beneficial
or hurtful to the true believers.”

88. Part 7

89. Law and Grace at the Cross
Ravi Zacharias: “The Crucifixion
displays the horror of sin in concrete
form.”
Denotation and Description

90. The Cross Examination Principle:
“All trials proceed upon the idea
that some confidence is due to human
testimony, and that this confidence
grows and becomes more steadfast
in proportion as the witness
has been subjected to a close and
searching cross-examination”
(Justice Ruffin, in State v. Morriss 84 N.C. 764)

91. Applied to the apostolic proclamation,
this rule underscores
the reliability of testimony to Christ’s resurrection
which was presented contemporaneously
in the synagogues-
among hostile cross-examiners
who would certainly have destroyed
the case for Christianity had the facts
been otherwise
-Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

92. Cross Examining the Cross
1. Were the witnesses trustworth
2. Did anything external influence
their motives?
3. Does their testimony harmonize?
4. Is the external physical
or written evidence consistent?
McCloskey and Schoenberg: “the finest work on the subject.” Alan Saltzman

93. Richard A Givens: Advocacy
Event
Recollection
Portion selected to be communicated
Symbols
Interpretation by listener
John Warwick Montgomery: Evidence for Faith, Part 6

94. Evidence For Faith: Pg. 328-329

95. The Historical Jesus
Gary Habermas: “Twelve Facts, even the Skeptics agree with”
Jesus was: executed by Amazing Transformations:
Roman executioners From Fear to Boldness
Publicly buried The Early Church
proclaimed the
His Disciples were Resurrection
disoriented
Proclaimed in Jerusalem
His Guarded tomb was
found empty The Growth of the Church
Exodus 31:12
Many, witnessed Worship on Sunday
post resurrection
appearances Paul’s Conversion
James’ Conversion

96. Just the Facts
1. Jesus was 3. The radical
publicly crucified transformation
and buried of the disciples
2. Witnesses, 4. Paul’s
proclaim many conversion
literal
appearances of
the risen Jesus

97. Paul’s Radical Transformation
Paul …and that He was buried, and that He rose again the
third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:4)
…“the earliest evidence we have for the resurrection
almost certainly goes back to the time
immediately after the resurrection event is
alleged to have taken place.
This is the evidence contained in the early sermons
in the Acts of the Apostles…
But there can be no doubt that
in the first few chapters of Acts its authors
have preserved materiel from very early sources.
Scholars have discovered that the language used
in speaking about Jesus in these early speeches in Acts
is quite different from that used at the time
when the book was compiled in its first form.”
- John Drane

98. The Cowardly Lion
Peter…And we are witnesses of all things
which He did both in the land of the Jews
and in Jerusalem, whom they killed
by hanging on a tree.
Him God raised up on the third day,
and showed Him openly,
not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen
before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him
after He arose from the dead.
He commanded us to preach to the people,
and to testify that it is He who was ordained by God
to be Judge of the living and the dead.
To Him all the prophets witness that,
through His name, whoever believes in Him
will receive remission of sins.
(Acts 10:40 NKJV)

99. Therefore:

100. Salvation
There are four kinds of people
when it comes to assurance of salvation;
1. Those who are saved
and know they are saved;
2. Those who are lost and know they’re lost;
3. Those who are saved
but think they are lost;
4. Those who are lost
but think they are saved.
(Augustine) In essentials unity,
in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.

101. Walter Martin
“The secular and scientific age in which we live
demands that things be tested and re-tested.
They require evidence upon evidence, fact upon fact.
Yet here in the truest sense is a controlled experiment.
Christianity has been observed
for almost two thousand years.
Wherever it is faithfully proclaimed, accepted, and acted upon,
it transforms men, cultures, and societies;
and it can do this only because it is energized
by a living Savior…
To those who come to Him,
Jesus Christ becomes the to all the problems of soul and body.
The results of their experience with Him
become the truly unanswerable argument
of essential Christianity.”