Can You Defend That? Common Challenges to Christianity

"When Christian college freshmen arrive on a typical secular campus, their faith will be ridiculed on all sides by their very own friends and teachers. They will hear that the Bible is unreliable, that Christ was no different than any other religious teacher, and that any Christian who thinks otherwise has been seriously misguided. Professor J Budziszewski notes, "Modern institutions of higher learning have changed dramatically in the last half century, and from the moment students set foot on the contemporary campus, their Christian convictions and discipline are assaulted." (Ravi Zacharias, Beyond Opinion, 40)

"They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that-that's what I am, and that's exactly what I am trying to do." (42)

The above quotes drive home the need to be prepared to defend Christianity and the Christian worldview at least by the time you go away to college. This is what you will be facing. Will you know what to say or will you be left speechless? According to Alison Thomas, a contributing author in Beyond Opinion, studies show that over half of college freshman who enter secular universities will abandon their faith in the few short years before they graduate. I've heard that statistic again and again from many different sources. That should alarm us all! Don't be caught off guard when someone challenges your faith. Even if you don't have all the answers - and most of us don't! - at least realize you have resources to find them.

Since Jesus commanded us to love God with our minds as well as our hearts and our souls, as Dr. Mathewson pointed out in his last post (Reflections on Loving God), and since we can expect to hear objections to our faith, if not attempts to sabotage it all together, I thought it might be helpful to name a few of those objections and how to refute them.


1. The Bible is Unreliable

This is probably one of the most common objections. Some will claim the Bible has been corrupted as it has been handed down over the centuries. In fact, the Bible is the most well attested book in history.

While there are only a few manuscripts of the Old Testament, their accuracy is supported by other sources. Manuscripts prepared by different people and found in a variety of places (Palestine, Egypt, & Syria) all agree to a great extent. They also agree with the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the OT) which dates to the second-third century. The Dead Sea Scrolls give us a comparison from about 1,000 years before our manuscripts were written. The comparison shows that the transmission over the centuries has been remarkably accurate. "One scholar observed that the two copies of Isaiah found in the Qumran caves, 'proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling." (Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, 158-9)

This remarkable consistency is due to the great care the Jewish scribes took in copying the sacred text. There were laws and traditions in regards to copying the text, and just one mistake found meant the whole copy had to be destroyed.

The New Testament has even more evidence of its reliable transmission. There are 5,366 manuscripts for comparison and some date very early - to the second or third century, within 70 years of their writing. Now consider: there are only 643 copies of Homer's Iliad, 10 copies of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars (and it's earliest copy was made 1,000 years after it was written), but no one questions their reliability. So why is the Bible's reliability questioned when there is so much evidence showing its reliable transmission?

Most people who throw this objection at you have no idea that there is so much evidence. Simply making them aware of these facts will let them know their objection has no basis and may even motivate them to do some investigating for themselves.


2. You can't take the Bible literally.

If someone uses this objection, ask them to clarify what they mean by "literally." If they are saying that the Bible is filled with metaphors & similes, imagery, and parables and these things aren't to be read literally, they are right and Christians would agree. Of course, the Bible is also filled with historic events and narratives, law, epistles (letters), and biographies (although they look a bit different than the biographies we are familiar with). These are to be taken literally.

What they may mean, however, is that none of the Bible should be taken literally. "Some of it's true, some of it isn't - just don't take it too literally." (That means don't take it too seriously-take what you like and leave the rest!) If you are talking to someone who has this in mind, ask them how they decide what is true and what isn't; and why they trust or accept anything in a book that they believe is even partially untrue. What they accept and reject from the Bible is usually based on what their agenda is; they will accept what they can without having to change their lifestyles or behaviors and reject what would mean making the changes they don't want to make.


What objections to Christianity have you heard? Maybe you have some objections yourself? We'll pick up next time with some more common objections to Christianity, so if you have any you want to discuss, or have any thoughts about this post, leave your comments! I want to hear from you!!!