The Christian faith is wholly rational. God has given men and women minds to use. The renewed mind of the one who is born again is wholly adequate for determining the rationality of his/her faith, and there should never be grounds for wavering. The Bible is a clean, clear, bright, revelatory book that enlightens the mind, feeds the soul, and elevates the spirit. The Author is God Himself, the Mediator is the Lord Jesus, and the Revelator is the Holy Spirit.
We do not have an impotent Father, a disappointed Christ, or a defeated Holy Spirit as is sometimes canvassed. Emphatically NO! We have an omnipotent Father, an all-victorious Christ, and an all-persuasive Holy Spirit, able to break the hardest heart, and subdue the stoutest will. Even if as yet “we do not SEE all things under His feet,” the victory was won at the cross, and it is merely a matter of time before the world wakes up to this as an absolute and irreversible fact.
Peter Kreeft, paraphrasing the words of Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), says, “Every possible argument against every Christian doctrine has a rational mistake in it somewhere, and therefore can be answered by reason alone.” Men may have a bagful of cunning reasons for arguing otherwise, often to keep guilt at arm’s length, but any honest enquirer placed in the company of a true man of faith will find satisfactory answers to his questions from Holy Writ. The Holy Spirit will re-enforce that, to bring the soul to repentance and new life in Christ. As it has always been, so shall it always be, and God will be honoured by it.
Jesus Christ claimed divinity. No one, reading the Gospels, can doubt that. There are just four ways of looking at this.
1. He meant it literally, and it is true. This makes Him Lord of all.
2.He meant it literally, and He knew it to be false. This makes Him a Liar.
3.He meant it literally, but didn’t know it was false. This makes Him a Lunatic.
4.He meant it non-literally, mystically. This makes Him a Guru.
Until the Edict of Milan in AD 313, Christians were subject to persecution, often tortured and martyred, and hated and oppressed for their beliefs. But at no time in the world’s history can we find men and women obstinately maintaining faith in one whom they KNOW to be a Liar or a Lunatic. History itself shows the absurdity of items 2 & 3. Men die for their faith because they hold fast to the Lordship of Christ.
As for the fourth possibility, one can only say that Jesus could NEVER have been a Guru, simply because He was a Jew. The utter contradictions between Eastern-style religion and that of Judaism cannot be emphasised enough. No Guru-type figure could find a place in the market places of Israel and find an audience. Furthermore, over the last 2,000 years Christians have held tenaciously to their belief in Christ’s distinctive doctrines, against the whole pagan, polytheistic, pantheistic, mythical, and mystical world around them. In this respect they have copied the ways of their Jewish founders in the first century AD.
The only reasonable, rational, acceptable and satisfying solution to all this, is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and as Paul declared on the basis of this, God now commands all men everywhere to repent, because a day is coming very soon when He will judge all men everywhere according to their deeds.
[The essence of part of the above statement is derived from “Handbook of Christian Apologetics” by Peter Kreeft& Ronald K. Tacelli. IVP. 1994]
