Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
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).
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.
A religious experience is when someone feels they have had a direct or personal experience of God. An important question: does religious experience provide grounds for believing that God exists?
“I’m too scientific for religious superstition. Science is the only way of gaining knowledge of reality, and it tells us the physical world is all there is.” This claim, espoused by scientific naturalists, is called scientism, the view that science is the paradigm of truth and rationality.
The ancient Egyptian equivalent of a “voodoo doll” was to write one’s enemy’s name on a clay statue or pottery vessel and then smash the pot while pronouncing a curse. Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of ...