Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
When Scripture speaks about God, it invariably uses masculine imagery. God is King, not Queen. God is Father, not Mother. When Scripture uses pronouns in reference to God, it always uses male pronouns—He, Him, His. God is never “she” or “it.”
Christians are committed to the reality of knowable truths from the Bible and science. Further, Christians seek to integrate claims from both sources into their worldview. How is this done? What is the relationship between the Bible and science?
What is a modern reader of the Old Testament to do with a book that teaches animal sacrifice, male circumcision, strange dietary codes, and festivals based on an agricultural cycle? Its contents appear to be so ancient and so removed from our day that some dismiss it as “primitive religion.”
In apologetics, accommodation theory can refer to either of two views, one acceptable and one objectionable to evangelical Christians.
Jehovah is entirely different from the immoral Canaanite gods. The false gods were nothing like the Almighty God of the Bible. What you have in these extra-biblical sources (Ugaritic texts) is a twisted version of the genuine historical given to us by God in the Bible.
In creating men and women, God had something different in mind than He did for the other creatures. The latter are spoken of as having been created “according to their kinds” (Gen 1:25). Humans, however, are described as being made in the image and likeness of God (1:26–27).
The traditional accounts describe Arabs before the time of Muhammad as being in a state of confusion, which Muslims refer to as “Jahiliyyah.” This term means that the Arabs were spiritually lost, and their practices were strongly opposed to Allah’s ways – they did not know the truth and were always fighting among themselves.
Agnosticism comes from two Greek words (a, “no”; gnosis, “knowledge”). The term agnosticism was coined by T. H. Huxley. It literally means “no-knowledge,” the opposite of a Gnostic (Huxley, vol. 5). Thus, an agnostic is someone who claims not to know.
Because God is truthful, we can expect His written self-revelation (in the original manuscripts) to be truthful in what it affirms. But not everything in Scripture is perfectly clear. The Apostle Peter admitted that Paul’s writings are hard to understand in places (2 Pt 3:15–16).
According to Genesis 15:6, Abram did not buy righteousness with his faith. Rather, God gave Abram righteousness, which means right standing or acceptability before God.