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Christian Basics Course Session 1: Good reasons to be Christian?

Appendix B to Session 1: More on Luke’s method for Christian confidence

 

 

  1. The things Luke has said about his method can be drawn in a picture.  Luke’s method can be compared to a spider's web, hanging from two trees.
  2. The inner part of the diagram is the web, which shows how the teachings of Christianity relate to each other.  The strands of the web represent Christianity’s teachings.  For example, two teachings in Christianity are that God is powerful, and that God made the world.  They are consistent, and so their spiders webs cross. 
  3. In his introduction, Luke is pointing us to the trees in the diagram.  They show us Christianity’s links to our world.  If there were no such trees, we could not know whether Christianity were true.  That’s not to say that Christianity would be wrong.  But we just couldn’t test it.  We couldn’t even work out its probability (its chance) of being true. We could know that Christianity is possible in an imaginary world.  But it might be like the movie ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – it might be possible, but not real.  We wouldn’t know whether it is true in our world.
  4. The two trees represent testable aspects of Christian teaching.  We can test if the Old Testament speaks about Jesus’ life in advance.  We can test if the witnesses sound reliable and real.
  5. Many religions are like a spider’s web with no trees: the religions might agree with themselves, but there’s no way to be ‘certain of the things you have been taught’.  For example, the Karma of Buddhism is a possible in an imaginary world.  When we do bad things, bad things might always come back to us, in this life, or in a future life.  But we can’t test whether this teaching is true in our world.  We can’t see the links between past lives and future lives of people.  It is not a testable concept.  So Buddhism would have a picture of a spider-web with no trees to hold it up.
  6. So a big point to take away is this difference in Christianity from most other religions.  Christianity is different because you can test it.

 

Christian Basics Course Session 2: Who is the Christ?