Well, welcome everyone to the second episode of Anabaptist Perspectives in the series "Why I Believe."
Merle Burkholder is with us once again, so welcome Merle.
Thank you.
In the prior episode you talked about why you believe that there is a God
So in this episode, could you discuss why you are a Christian, and specifically what is different about
being a Christian than just believing in some theology, having some mere theism?
Yeah, for me my crisis of faith, if you wanna call it that, or sort of an
evaluation my faith came when my mother was passing away.
She had cancer and during the time when she was dying, I just really had questions about like,
"Is what I've been taught and believed really true?"
This is my mom, and she's gonna die, and in a few weeks she's gonna be somewhere else.
Where is that, and how do I know that what the Christian faith teaches is really true?
We put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, and
expect to spend eternity in heaven with the Lord Jesus, but is that really true?
Like, how do I know that that's true? This is my mom, if it's not true I want to know.
And so I really went on a journey of looking for answers and confirmations.
Is what I believe really true?
And what settled it for me, at almost 40 years of age was the resurrection of Christ,
and did that really happen?
William Lane Craig has some excellent work on the resurrection.
His work on the resurrection just really got me at a heart level to really believe.
Yeah. I'm convinced the resurrection happened an actual historical fact.
If that happened, then Jesus really was who he said he was.
The central question, like Jesus was either a pathological liar, or he was insane,
or he really was the Son of God as he said he was. The Jews didn't kill him because
they didn't like him or because they felt threatened;
they killed him because they said he blasphemed. He said he's a man, and he says he's God.
So that was clear to them that he claimed to be God; and that was the thing for them.
So was he or wasn't he?
There are a lot of people who made a lot of claims about their powers and who they are;
but they all died and when they died it was finished and that was it.
So if Jesus really rose from the dead then his identity was confirmed by God himself.
There had to be a power outside of himself that raised his body from from the dead.
The things that convinced me that the resurrection actually happened are first of all the death of Christ.
Like, he really did die. There were theories, that are not as prevalent now as they were in the past,
but there were theories that,
"No, he just went unconscious, and they put him in the tomb, and they thought he was dead,
but a couple days later he actually had just passed out, and he actually was still alive,
and so he came out of the tomb and he was still alive.
The problem with that theory is that he was executed by the state; so this was a state execution.
There were people that were professional executioners, they knew when their job was finished.
They knew when people were dead.
So it's absurd to say that he never died; because it would be like saying,
Well, the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, yeah they executed him but he did not die.
He survived that somehow. They thought he was dead, but actually he's living in Panama; he's alive.
We'd say that's absurd.
I mean he they know what they're doing. When they execute him, he's dead.
These Roman soldiers, they were the executioners; they were the state executioners.
When Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate, asked for the body of Christ, Pilate was like,
"Wow! Is he dead already?" and so the centurion came and certified that, "Yes, he's dead."
When the centurion certified his death, he really did die.
It wasn't a fake death. He didn't just pass out.
Secondly, you have the early record of the resurrection.
The Gospels were written within ten years of the resurrection of Christ.
You have Peter, James, Paul, they were all
martyred by execution by 61 or 65; 61 to 65 AD.
The resurrection probably happened 30 to 33 AD. The book of Acts gives the record of the early church but
it doesn't record the death of Peter or Paul.
So, obviously Acts was written before they were executed.
So it was written before 65 AD, which would be 30 years after.
The book of Acts is the second part of Luke's writings, which the Book of Luke was written before that.
And the book of Mark precedes the book of Luke.
So Mark was probably written 10 to 15 years, at least, after the resurrection.
It was too early for there to be legends.
Because to have a legend you have to have enough time pass that there's no eyewitnesses.
So right now, it would be too soon to have a legend about 9/11.
A hundred years from now you might be able to say those airplanes didn't
really hit the buildings; like, that was all fake videography and the government
all staged the whole thing.
A hundred years from now you might be able to say that, but now you can't because there are
too many people who were on the streets of New York and actually saw the planes flying into the buildings.
If you put that out there as a proposition now there would be people who would say,
"No, I was there. I saw that, that's a lie."
The same thing is true with the gospel writings. There were a lot of people who were still alive.
I'm sure that in Jerusalem the talk of Jesus and his crucifixion.
Then when the story of the resurrection came out, people knew where the tomb was.
And I'm sure there were people who kind of went by with, "Let's go see this" , and take their
children and go over there, "Yeah, there it is. It is empty."
The Jews were Jesus' main opposition they had the most to lose if a resurrection actually happened.
They never denied the empty tomb. They could have squashed the whole thing
just by saying, "Well, now the tomb isn't empty, right there it is."
The best thing they could come up with was, "Well, the disciples stole the body."
They had to have a cover-up.
Yeah, so the tomb actually was empty. The records were written too early.
When you read the records of the resurrection in the gospel,
you just really get the sense that these writers, they're just kind of saying what happened.
They're not trying to create a story that's gonna sell or that's gonna start a new religion.
They are just saying these are the things that happened. So you don't have the language of legends.
The Gospels aren't that way. They're just, the women went there and the tomb was empty.
The other thing is that in some of that, "this is what happened",
it actually deterred from people believing the account of what happened.
Because if the disciples were faking the resurrection, and if they were creating a story,
I think they probably would have had themselves be the heroes of the story
So probably Peter and John would have gone to the tomb and discovered the empty tomb,
But the fact that the women were the ones who discovered it was a it was disgraceful to them.
It was, and women were not, they weren't considered to be believable.
So it actually discredits their account to have it first be told by women;
because women's testimony wasn't valid in a in a Jewish court of law.
So you really feel like they they put that in because it was true;
It wasn't because it was what helped them with their story.
Then you have the the post-resurrection appearances of Christ.
The people he appeared to, and people who knew him and met him.
He talked with them, he ate with them.
It was not like sometimes, when somebody passes away, and then you're walking through Walmart
and you see somebody, and just that first glance you think,
"Oh. That looks like my relative that just passed away."
These weren't that kind of encounters. It wasn't just sort of a passing,
"Yeah, I think I saw him on the street in Jerusalem."
I think he was there present with them and they got to touch him.
There was no question who it was.
The Gospels, and Paul and in Corinthians, they give lists of names of people;
these are the people that met him.
So people could go talk to those people.
Paul says in First Corinthians that he was seen by this person, and this person, and he was seen by
five hundred people at one time, and most of them are still alive.
He was writing so that people who kind of would question, was it really true?
They could go find some of those people and talk to them and say, "Yeah, this is we saw him."
It wasn't hallucinations, it was real appearances of Christ as a living person to people who knew him.
Then the faithfulness of the disciples.
You have eleven men. If it was a lie, ten of them were were martyred for their faith.
People will do a lot of things, but when you're faced with torture,
or you're faced with long-term imprisonment, or you're faced with death.
Somebody is going to say, "No, that's not what really happened, and it was just a story."
You look at Watergate; you look at other scandals.
It just takes one person to crack under pressure, or the threat of imprisonment.
It takes one person to say, "You know what? Let me tell you what was really going on here."
And then, all of a sudden, you have a flood of people saying, "Yeah, and let me tell you what I know too"
Because nobody wants to go to prison.
These men, all 11 of them went through the rest of their lives and died saying,
"This is true, this is what happened."
I just think if it was a lie, somewhere along the way somebody would have cracked and said,
"You know what, it isn't really true"
And so when you have eleven men who give their lives for something, and just that change
in their lives, and the transformation in their lives.
So those things convinced me that the resurrection actually happened as a historical fact.
I'm convinced that the basic essential elements of the gospel of Jesus Christ are true.
And that the Christian faith is based on reality. Something that is really true.
There's a lot of things about Christianity that I can't explain.
There's a lot of things in the Bible that I don't understand;
but I'm willing to live with a lot of confusion, because I'm convinced that the
essential elements of Christian faith are true.
That is what makes it different than, your question about how does it compare
with other religions, is that it's not based on legends, or stories, mythology.
These things really, actually, happened.
So is that the primary distinction you would see from other, particularly other monotheistic religions?
Could you maybe discuss some of the weight that's given to Christianity in your studies and your experience?
Yeah, I would say in in comparison to other monotheistic religions,
of course the Jewish faith is still looking for the Messiah, and still
looking for that Redeemer who is going to come and fulfill the prophecies,
they still have that component to their faith where they're still looking for that Messiah to come.
Islam has, you know, the role of Muhammad as the prophet,
and Jesus as a prophet, or teacher.
But no other monotheistic religion has an actual atoning sacrifice for sin;
someone who has broken the power of sin and death, and who gives us that
opportunity to experience forgiveness from sins.
So then, you either have to base your eternal hope on morality and good deeds,
or there has to be some some other way of saying, "It's all going to work out."
So, for you, the resurrection is kind of the pivotal point that sets Christianity apart from every other religion.
And then the fact that it provides a mean of salvation beyond ourselves,
beyond what we as humans can do.
Well that brings us to the end of the second part of a four part series on "Why I Believe."
Thank you Merle for joining us for that.
And to those of you listening and watching, thank you for being here.
We invite you back next week for another episode with Anabaptist Perspectives.
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