Author: Tim

Christianity’s debt to its critics

It is true, the unlearned Inquirer may not have leisure or capacity to search into other ancient writings and records of antiquity to satisfy himself, Whether the Gospel-History be of the same, or later date than is pretended; whether the Writers of it are any where recorded as men of suspicious characters; or whether their Relation clashes with any other credible History of the same times. But to his great satisfaction he may observe, that this search has been made for him, …

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Christianity and argument

“CHRISTIANITY,” it hath been said, “is not founded in argument.” If it were only meant by these words, that the religion of Jesus could not, by the single aid of reasoning, produce its full effect upon the heart; every true Christian would chearfully subscribe to them. No arguments unaccompanied by the influence of the Holy Spirit, can convert the soul from sin to God; though even to such conversion, arguments are, by the agency of the Spirit, render’d subservient. Again, if we were to understand by this aphorism, that the principles of our religion could never have been discover’d, by the natural and unassisted faculties of man; this position, I presume, would be as little disputed as the former. But if, on the contrary, under the cover of an ambiguous expression, it is intended to insinuate, that those principles, from their very nature, can admit no rational evidence of their truth, (and this, by the way, is the only meaning which can avail our antagonists) the gospel, as well as common sense, loudly reclaims against it.

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They have appealed to the bar of reason

They have appealed to the bar of reason; the advocates for Christianity have followed them to that bar, and have fairly shewn, that the evidences of revealed religion are such as approve themselves to impartial reason, and, if taken together, are fully sufficient to satisfy an honest and unprejudiced mind.

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Baur’s concession

Baur, to his dying day (e.g. in his Vorlesungen—Lectures—published posthumously, A.D. 1866), with reference to the resurrection of Christ, not only admitted, but strongly asserted, as things that have to be believed if history be worth anything— …

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I know of no one fact

[T]he evidence of our Lord’s life and death and resurrection, may be, and often has been shown to be, satisfactory; it is good according to the common rules for distinguishing good evidence from bad. Thousands and ten thousands of persons have gone through it piece by piece, as carefully as ever judge summed up on a most important cause: I have myself done it many times over, not to persuade others, but to satisfy myself. I have been used for many years to study the history of other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them; and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind, which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God has given us, that Christ died and rose again from the dead.

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