The Best Argument for Christianity

10/1/12       Zach      early 20's

What is the best argument for Christianity?  A young man on his way to the train station, towing his suitcase, earbuds on, graciously stopped when he saw I had a question.  This began a very interesting 40 minute conversation about his spiritual beliefs and the claims of the Bible.  Zach had been raised Catholic, fell away from the church due its various scandals, tried to come back to the faith four years ago with a renewed effort at belief through a study of church history and origin, but gave up on faith in favor of scientific theories about our origins and destiny.  I let him know early on that my purpose for starting conversations like this is to promote faith in biblical Christianity, but what allowed us to talk without argument is that we agreed to hear each other's beliefs without expecting to change one another's mind.  I had no problem agreeing to this, because if anyone is to have a change of heart and mind about faith, it will be the work of the Holy Spirit, not myself.  Nonetheless, we discussed many different aspects of Christianity, from using the law to show Zach his need for forgiveness, to my own testimony of life in Christ, and to the  case for biblical Creation as opposed to the theories of science.  But what is the strongest argument for Christianity?  Jesus.  His life. His words. His miracles.  Zach hasn't read the Bible in years, yet he still claimed to admire Jesus "without all this talk of Him being God".  "But you can't separate Jesus from his claims of diviniity" I told him.  "No one could simply be a great religious leader while lying to people about his identity, especially if He claims to be God.  He also claimed to be "meek and humble in heart", yet we never question Him about it. No other religious figure could get away with that.  He forgave people for their sins against each other, acting as if He the one who had been offended."  As C.S.Lewis so powerfully stated in Mere Christianity, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”