Reasons
Reasons to take a second look
Answering a claim only clears the ground. These pages make the case for Christianity itself, one step at a time, so you can see exactly where you agree and where you do not.
- Biblical monotheismThe Hebrew Scriptures teach that the LORD alone is God, uncreated and owed all worship, with no god formed before him or after him, so any later teaching must be tested by whether it keeps worship where he placed it.
- Contingency and creationEverything we know of might not have existed, and a universe made only of such things does not explain its own existence, so the best explanation is a reality that exists by its own nature, which is what Christians mean by God the Creator.
- Daniel 9 and the Messiah before the Temple's destructionDaniel 9 says an anointed one is cut off before the city and sanctuary are destroyed, Jewish interpreters including Rashi place that destruction in AD 70, and Jesus, cut off about forty years earlier and proclaimed as an atonement before the Temple fell, fits the passage better than other candidates.
- Fine-tuning and ordered creationThe basic settings of physics fall within a narrow range that allows a universe with stars, chemistry, and life, and a purposeful Creator explains that fact at least as well as luck, necessity, or a multiverse, which makes it real evidence, though not proof.
- Jesus and messianic prophecyThe Christian case that Jesus is the Messiah does not rest on any single verse but on a pattern in the Hebrew Bible, a figure who suffers for others and a figure who reigns forever, which Jewish tradition also recognized and which Christians hold is filled out by one person.
- Jesus is GodThe earliest Christian writings present Jesus as distinct from the Father yet sharing the names, works, and worship that the Jewish Scriptures reserve for the one God alone.
- Liar, lunatic, or LordIf the earliest sources about Jesus are broadly reliable, the view that he was a great moral teacher and nothing more is the hardest one to hold, because his teaching includes claims about himself that no merely good teacher would make.
- Objective morality and GodIf some things are really wrong and every human being has a worth that no one can revoke, a morally perfect God who made us explains those facts better than the main alternatives.
- Public revelation and prophetic testsThe Bible tells its readers to test anyone who claims to speak for God by public standards, agreement with what God has already said, faithfulness to the one God, and whether predictions come true, and never by signs, sincerity, or private experience alone.
- The apostolic gospel is finalThe New Testament treats the message the apostles preached as entrusted once for all, so any later message, however it arrives, is measured by whether it agrees with that message.
- The bodily resurrection of JesusThe New Testament presents Jesus' resurrection as bodily: the same Jesus who was crucified and buried is raised, seen, touched, and changed, not replaced by a spirit.
- The crucifixion of JesusJesus' execution by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is one of the best-attested facts about him, recorded by his followers within a few years and by Roman and Jewish writers who opposed them.
- The Holy Spirit is a personThe Bible describes the Holy Spirit as someone, not something: he teaches, speaks, chooses, and intercedes, he can be lied to and grieved, and he is named alongside the Father and the Son.
- The new covenant promised in the prophetsThe new covenant is a promise Jeremiah made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, of the Torah written on the heart and sin forgiven, and Jesus' first followers believed the Messiah's death brought it about.
- The reliability of the BibleThe Bible's message can be recovered with confidence, because it was copied early, widely, and in public, and because the same abundance of manuscripts that produces variants also lets scholars find and weigh them.
- The reliability of the New TestamentThe New Testament is a set of first-century documents that preserve early, public testimony about Jesus, written close enough to the events, and copied widely enough, to be weighed as serious historical evidence.
- The resurrection as messianic vindicationJesus' first followers, all of them Jews, presented his resurrection as God's reversal of the verdict passed on him at the cross, and argued that the Hebrew Scriptures already describe suffering followed by vindication.
- The resurrection witnessesWithin a few years of Jesus' execution, named people, including a skeptical brother and a persecutor, said publicly in Jerusalem that they had seen him alive, and the natural explanations struggle to account for all of what they reported.
- The Trinity is monotheismThe doctrine of the Trinity confesses one God who exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; it is an attempt to hold together three things the Bible says, not a belief in three gods.