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COREFACTS.Pdf Trinity Academic Press World Wide Web: Trinitysem.edu Email:[email protected] ©2014 by Braxton Hunter All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author. All Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission." (www.Lockman.org) Printed in the United States of America ii For Michele Clime, my surrogate big sister already the arms of her Savior iii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION V THE UNIVERSE HAD A CAUSE 1 THE UNIVERSE HAS ORDER 25 THE UNIVERSE HAS RULES 43 PEOPLE CAN HAVE AN IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 61 THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS WAS FATAL 69 JESUS APPEARED TO OTHERS AFTER HIS DEATH 79 THE DISCIPLES WERE COMMITTED TO THE POINT OF DEATH 98 THE TESTIMONY OF MAN IS THAT JESUS WAS RAISED 103 JESUS OFFERS SALVATION 122 APPENDIX A 128 APPENDIX B 141 A C.O.R.E. F.A.C.T.S. DEBATE 142 iv INTRODUCTION Uneducated, ignorant, behind the times; these are the labels that Christians often receive from coworkers, classmates and friends. As a young pastor, I was bombarded with this sort of language. Even though I had been firm in my faith, the bluntness and glib certainty of critics was unnerving. I began to doubt. After all, some of the most intelligent people I knew were the very ones hurling these objections at the faith I was preaching. I decided to begin researching the old arguments for the existence of God that I had heard when I was a teenager in a freshman philosophy class. Searching library bookshelves, I poured over the modern classics on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. After wrestling with these weighty issues for about four years, I realized a peace that I could not explain. Uneducated? How laughable this assertion became. It wasn’t the leading philosophers and physicists who brushed off the evidence for Christianity. It was the uninformed students. Internet trolls made up the majority of the atheist scoffers. I learned quickly that while the most knowledgeable specialists in the relevant fields are not all necessarily believers, most of them take the evidence seriously and enjoy engaging in honest discussions about it. In short, the skeptics I knew were wrong. The Christian God exists, and there is powerful reason to believe. Once I began visiting other churches I realized that these evidences for the truth of the Christian message could be used not only to bolster the faith of believers, but also in witnessing to others. Many times, I presented the arguments and cases for the faith to crowds of unbelievers. In time, I learned of their embrace of the truth. In terms of leading doubters to faith in Christ, discovering these evidences amounted to striking gold. The problem was that almost no one was using them in this way. The only time anyone talked v about this sort of thing was in philosophy class. Some Christians had read through Christian apologetics books and enjoyed talking about the material with other congregants, but there was a disconnect when it came to unbelievers. They needed to hear these things and the church wasn’t sharing them. I went looking for the reasons why. First, most of our personal evangelism training material is designed around the assumption that unbelievers already accept that there is a heaven and hell, that Jesus is the way of salvation and almost everything else. After reading the key evangelistic question of one of the popular personal evangelism training resources, Christian apologist, Norman Geisler, pointed this out saying, One of the reasons that our old evangelistic techniques don’t work anymore whether it’s Evangelism Explosion or Campus Crusade, or Way of the Master, is because people don’t believe the prerequisites. Notice the prerequisites of that question. He believes there’s a heaven, a hell, a God who has revealed himself. people don’t believe that anymore. The vast majority in our country no longer believe that. That means it will no longer work on the vast majority of people.1 It became clear to me that there needed to be an evangelistic training resource that made the classical case for the truth of the Christian message understandable and easy to remember. In 2008 I began hammering out a method like this and decided to start using it in my own ministry. The result was C.O.R.E. F.A.C.T.S. Since that time, I have used the method to present the same faithful arguments for the Christian faith that classical apologists have grown to favor in a memorable way. I have used it for evangelism in formal public debates, private conversations, internet radio discussions and while preaching in churches. It has served me well and proved invaluable as my signature method. 1 Geisler, Norman, “Trinity 2008 Commencement Address Part 3,” (youtube.com/watch?v=z01_mS-a018) Internet. Accessed on 21 March, 2012. vi This work will explain the arguments involved and how to use them for the affirmation of your own faith or to reach others for Christ. If you are an unbeliever, I ask you to read this work with an open mind. You might even ask the God you do not believe in to speak to your mind and heart during this study. The book is designed in such a way as to be helpful and accessible to all who read it. Chapter one explains the evidence for God’s existence from the fact that the universe must have had a “Cause” for its own existence. This is a famous cosmological argument. The second chapter lays out the phenomenal “Order” of the world in which we live. Why is the universe so seemingly well designed? This is a presentation of a teleological (design) argument for God’s existence. Chapter three will consider the “Rules” that the universe seems to have for human morality. Isn’t it interesting that people everywhere have an awareness that certain things are good and bad, right and wrong? Many readers will recognize this as a moral argument. In the fourth chapter, the case will be made that individuals can have an immediate “Experience” of God if they are open to the evidence. This sets the stage for us to consider the resurrection of Jesus. Leaving the arguments for God’s existence, chapter five will be a demonstration that Jesus’ wounds on the cross were “Fatal.” In it, we will consider the evidence that Jesus really did die by Roman crucifixion. After all, if we are going to claim that he rose from the dead, then it needs to be demonstrated that he really was, in fact, dead. From there, the investigation will lead us, in the sixth chapter, to consider the claims that Jesus “Appeared” to others after his death. Chapter seven will be an examination of the level of “Commitment” that the disciples had to the message of the resurrection. This will open the door to the “Testimony” of early Christians about this whole matter in chapter nine. Finally, chapter ten will be an explanation of the logical conclusion one should draw on vii the basis of these Core Facts. Namely, Jesus is the way of “Salvation.” You may notice that this is a two-step approach. The evidences represented by the acronym “C.O.R.E.” are all related to the existence of God. However, this material doesn’t specify that the God being argued for is the one true God of Christian Scripture. This is why the evidences represented by the acronym “F.A.C.T.S.” show that Jesus is the one true God who has revealed himself in creation. In this way it will not be unreasonable to conclude that Jesus was raised by God from the dead since God’s existence is demonstrated in the first half of the case. In other words, if God exists as the creator of the universe, then raising Jesus from the dead is no problem for him. CORE MOMENT Pay attention to these “CORE MOMENT” boxes. If you are a beginner or just need a little clarification, these simplified explanations will help. As long as you watch the boxes, you’ll finish with a good foundation. In each chapter I explain and respond to the most frequent objections to these evidences. I take it as my self-designated responsibility to equip readers with the best defense possible. In some cases, the responses to objections take up more space than the explanations of the arguments themselves. I also conclude each chapter with a presentation on how a trainer or facilitator might teach the material to a class of learners. Those closing sections are also a great help for any reader who is struggling and in need of a simplified explanation. If you find that the material covered in the objections is too complex, just skip to the next section of the chapter. Just to ensure that I have given readers the best chance of success, an appendix is included which explains a conversational method of defending the faith. It is filled with extra evidence. The second appendix provides an easy reference outline of the C.O.R.E. F.A.C.T.S. so that they can be remembered and shared with others. Finally, I have included a debate that I had in viii 2009 in which I used the C.O.R.E.
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