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Showing posts from February, 2012

Preparing the Body of Christ Series: Part 4 – “Who do you say that I am?”

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Peter was asked this question, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15, NIV) Peter’s answer defined Jesus. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Those few words have turned a culture upside down. Peter’s answer set the stage for a debate that has lasted for centuries. Today the challenge is more evident as culture tries to take the divinity out of Christ and make him into an ordinary man who happened to be holy. The answer brings us to fork in the road, either Christ is the Son of God, the Messiah or he is not. The church must rise up and provide an answer in this age of information, for if we do not, someone will deconstruct the very figure of Jesus Christ. What a great opportunity we have to share the hope of Christ. We live in a time where everything is relative, even in the areas of faith. The doors of opportunity are opening and if we do not have the answer to the “why’s” and the “what’s”, we will miss that chance to be used by God. Our culture cries for all religio

Preparing the Body of Christ Part 3: Can the Bible Be Trusted?

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In Christian Theology, Millard J. Erickson defines inerrancy in the following manner,” inerrancy of Scripture is the doctrine that the Bible is fully truthful in all its teachings” (Erickson pg 247) The key words I would like to focus on are “truthful in all its teachings”. One of the main arguments of our postmodern culture is the claim that the Bible is full of contradictions or mistakes. When the content of their claims is further studied, we find that the accusations fall pretty short. An example of that would be the use of names in the culture of biblical times and the rounding of numbers as described in chapter eleven on pg. 261. Could the Bible contain written mistakes, such as misspelled words? It’s possible. Could the Scriptures contain simular accounts of the same event as described by the witness? It’s possible. Yet we must ask ourselves the question, who is the focus of the Gospel? As a body of believers, Jesus is the focus, not inerrancy. Even though inerrancy is important

Preparing the Body of Christ Series: Part 2 – Is the Resurrection Of Christ a Historical Event?

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The journal article, JESUS RESSURECTION AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM: AN APOLOGETIC by Gary R. Habermas, deals with a pivotal point in Christian theology, and that is the claim of the resurrection of Jesus. In a quote used by Habermas he states, “Christianity stands or fails with the reality of the raising of Jesus from the dead by God.”1 G. Bornkamm is also used to stress the importance of this event. He states, “ there would be no gospel, not one account, no letter in the NT, no faith, no church, no worship, no prayer in Christendom to this day without the message of the resurrection of Christ. . . ."2 The content of the thesis is to look at contemporary approaches to the resurrection and ask ourselves, can they be apologetically answered as a historical event? Habermas writes, “…the major theme of this essay is to point out how the resurrection can be historically demonstrated even by such skeptical standards of investigation.3 Habermas builds his case by laying down a claim