Christian Basics Home
Christian
Basics Course Session 1: Good reasons to be Christian?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?