Christianity in a World of Religions

Would you please give a warm Twin Lakes welcome to Dr. JP Morland. Thank you. Well, I had the privilege of being here two or three years ago and really enjoyed that time, and it's wonderful to be back with you. I wish the sun was shining, but hey, you can take what you can get.

A few years ago, I was in the airport in Seattle flying home on a Sunday morning after having spoken at a conference like this up in the Seattle area, and I picked up a copy of the Seattle Times newspaper. I made a beeline for the editorial page, and there on the front page of the Seattle Times editorial section was covering two-thirds of the page, and it spilled over into another page. So it was a major syndicated editorial, and it was entitled A Divided Nation. The author went on to say that we now live in the most divided period in the history of the United States since the Civil War. Now, I think he's right about that, but what interested me most was what he identified as the central thing dividing the American people.

He went on to say that what is dividing us is not race, it is not socioeconomic status, it is not fundamentally gender, and it's not even fundamentally politics. He said the fundamental thing that is dividing the American people is a division about worldview. Worldview. How people, your worldview is the broad way that you see reality. It is what you think is real and what you don't think is real. And he said that America is divided into two worldviews. He was wrong about that, but basically I'm reporting what he said. America is divided into a secular worldview where God, whoever she is, or they are, or it is, either doesn't exist or nobody can know anything about it, and those who believe that God clearly is real and created the world and gave us the moral law.

Now, he basically went on to say that those of us who believe in God are losing the struggle for our culture, and he was right about that. The fundamental division among the American people is over how we see reality and what we take to be real. And the fundamental division is over Western monotheism in a secular form of atheism where there is no God, there is no unseen world. And that is really what divides the American people most fundamentally.

Now, we've been, we've had atheists around for some time, so that's nothing new about that, although their numbers are growing. But what is new is that not only are there a lot of people in our culture that think that following Jesus is stupid, there are now a growing number of people that think that following the religion of Jesus is immoral and bigoted. See, for a long time, if you were a follower of Jesus, people would just think you were stupid and ignorant. Now they think you're immoral, you're a bigot.

In fact, in a recent column, Jane Smalley, who's a novelist, made the following point. Here, describing us, she said, "Here is how their ignorant bigotry works." First, they put the fear of God into you. If you don't believe the literal word of the Bible, you'll burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory. And so you have to abdicate all critical thinking to follow their religion. And you have to accept the simple but logical system of belief that you're not allowed to question. So we won't be having questions later on.

A corollary to this point is that they make sure that you understand that the devil resides in the toils and snares of complex thought, so it's best not to try to think at all. We are now portrayed as ignorant bigots. And this raises an important question because there are three worldviews, not two. There are three worldviews that are currently dominant in American culture.

The first worldview is Christian monotheism, Christianity. And it is a vibrant and alive worldview. It is making a comeback in the university community. There is a revival of Christianity taking place in the academic field of philosophy. And in history, more and more Christians are getting PhDs in history and starting to have an influence in the discipline of history. So there are good things happening with respect to the vibrancy among cultural movers and shakers with respect to the Christian worldview.

The second worldview, which is by far the dominant worldview in American culture, dominates the news media and it dominates where the money goes at the university, and that is scientific naturalism. Scientific naturalism is basically the idea that science alone can give us knowledge of reality, and science tells us that the physical world is all there is. Science alone gives us knowledge of reality, and science tells us that the physical world is all there is.

I met a very, very antagonistic physicist at a dinner engagement years ago, and when he found out I loved philosophy and theology, he said, yes, he said I used to be interested in philosophy and theology myself when I was a teenager, but when I grew up, I matured past it. And he said now I realize that if you can't prove it and test it in the laboratory, you can't know it's true. So you're considered ignorant today if you don't believe what science says. If you don't, if you stand up and say what was it they asked one of the Republican candidates the other day, you don't believe in global warming, you don't believe that the earth has been here for billions of years, and the idea is that if you don't believe something that science teaches, you're just taking flat ignorant, you're not qualified to lead.

However, you cannot believe in God, and nobody will call you ignorant. What they'll say is you don't have faith maybe. Do you understand the difference? If you don't believe in science, you're ignorant. If you don't believe in God, you're not ignorant, you're just, you just don't have faith. That's not a good situation, ladies and gentlemen, that's not a good situation.

Now the third worldview, which dominates the arts and the entertainment industry and literature, and if you have a child that goes to the university and majors in communications, literature, anthropology, or sociology or art, they will be exposed to this worldview, and it's called postmodern relativism. Postmodern relativism is basically the idea that everything is relative to your culture. What is true for your culture is true for your culture. What's true for someone else's culture is true for their culture, and nobody's wrong. All truth and reality is relative to your group. So Christian, Jesus is the Son of God for Christians, but He's not the Son of God for Muslims, and they're both right. They're both right, okay?

Now this raises the question in terms of our attempts to influence this culture as to whether this book, the Scriptures, is a source of faith or is it a source of knowledge of reality? Can you actually know the things it teaches, or do you have to at the end of the day simply believe them? Can you know, for example, that there's a God, or is that something you have to accept by an act of faith?

Now what I want to do is to say then that one of the most pressing issues facing our community today, in addition to whether we care for the poor and other things, one of the most pressing issues is whether the Christian community values the life of the mind. Do we have an intellectual presence in this culture or do we not? Do Christians value the intellectual life? Our study and reason and critical thinking and reading, are these important values for us or are they not?

I want to submit to you that Christianity has always been a religion that claims to present knowledge to people, not faith. It claims to present things that one can actually know to be true, and the Christian religion has always been a religion that values the life of reason and the life of the mind. And I'd like to take a look at a couple of texts that demonstrate that this morning, and I can think of no other place that would be better to start than 2 Corinthians 10, Matthew, Mark, Luke, 2 Corinthians.

All right. Spiritual warfare is real. I myself have had the opportunity to exercise demons out of people, and typically when you think of spiritual warfare, you might think of praying against the demonic. I've been on some college campuses where the presence of the devil was so thick you could feel it, and we had to pray just to create a clearing for light and air in the midst of a dark cloud on that campus. And so many times when we think of spiritual warfare, we think about praying against the devil and demons and exercising authority over them, an important thing that in the western church we've lost how to do.

I had a couple of African students come over to study under me at Talbot, and they came to my office one day and said, "You Americans don't really believe a lot over here, do you?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, there's almost no room for demonic activity to be dealt with in your church services." He said, "Over where we're at, we have a time in our church services for people to be prayed deliverance prayers over. It's like you all think it's all psychology over there or antidepressant medication. It's like the devil doesn't exist." Well, so I tried to change the subject, but in any case, there's another aspect of spiritual warfare that is very, very real, and this is what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 10. It's the second most important passage in the New Testament on spiritual warfare, and here it goes.

Verse 3, "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh." There's not going to be a Twin Lakes church militia established anytime in the near future with shooting exercises in the back of the church. "For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but instead they are divinely powerful for the destruction of what?" My translation says that we are to be destroying fortresses. Now, what's a fortress? What exactly is a fortress? Well, he clarifies what a fortress is in the next verse. We are destroying speculations. One translation says, "Theories and every lofty thought raised up against," what? The power of God? Nobody can thwart the power of God. No, these weapons are raised up against the knowledge of God, and if you can make a culture believe that you can't really know there's a God or God is real, then spiritual warfare will have succeeded in that culture.

Now, what this tells us is that we are about the task of destroying ideas. Now, how do you destroy an idea? Do you burn the books it's published in? No. Do you yell at it? Do you yell at the people who propagate the idea? No. If you want to destroy an idea, you have to argue against it, and what that means then is that teaching and learning to defend your faith are a part of the warfare of ideas. Think of it like this. How do you control another person? Do you understand that I could control you if I could control how you think and feel? If there were a way that I could control how you think about things and feel about them, I could control your life. If the devil and demons are trying to control people in this culture, one of the ways they will do it will be to try to control how people in this culture think and feel.

And that means that the world of ideas are the way people control other people. If I can give you ideas that allow me to control you, I will be able to enlist you in my cause, you see. And that's what the devil is doing. And so what we realize is that it's up to the church to know how to feel comfortable in the world of ideas and to address these ideas from a Christian perspective.

Now, I want to give a practical application because not everybody in here can know everything. We are a team. We're a body. We don't all have to know everything. But you know, some of you can master the abortion controversy for the rest of us. Others of you may have an interest in Bible and science, and you could study questions about the Bible and science for the rest of the church and be the go-to person in that regard. Others of you might want to learn issues about Christianity and politics. And you could be the person that we could go to if we had a question about Christianity and politics. We could ask, "What can we read?" or "How can we think about certain issues?" Others of you might know how to lay out a case for God's existence. Others of you might be able to deal with certain ethical issues in the culture.

The point I am making is, find the job in the church and perform it in the world of ideas. Find something that you care about involving ideas and learn about it for the rest of the church. Read. Listen to downloads or CDs. Sit under good teaching. Study. Learn. Read books that are hard to understand, like lifting weights. You're not going to get any stronger if you don't lift a little bit that's a little hard. If you always read books that you can understand, you're not going to grow as a person intellectually.

So what you want to do is to develop the habit of reading books that are a little bit beyond your reach. This morning I spent probably an hour, I'm reading an 800-page book on the history of medieval philosophy from 1275 to 1671. And it's a challenging read. It's got an awful lot to do with the abortion controversy and whether there's life after death. But those are the payoffs for the Christian church. But I'm working through this book very, very slowly, and it's going to take me time because you don't read an 800-page book this heavy quickly. But you don't have to read a book like that, but you can read more than you're doing.

So turn the DadGum TV off a little bit more. Do a little bit more reading and be a part of the cause of Christ in the world of ideas because folks, whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, we're in a fight. And it's not so much with people as it is with the unseen principalities and powers of the unseen world. And it's about ideas, unfortunately, which means that we've got to become involved in the world of ideas.

Now, I want to suggest to you that Paul gets the idea that all the wisdom of… all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge reside in Jesus Christ, which he tells us in Colossians, from Jesus Himself. Because I believe Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived. He was smarter than Einstein, smarter than Plato, and he should be on Time magazine's top 51 intellectuals in the history of the world. He should have Jesus as number one because the power of his ideas changed culture a thousandfold more than anybody else's ideas.

Now, just to demonstrate the intelligence of Jesus, would you mind opening your Bibles to Matthew 22? Matthew 22. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Matthew. I'm really not in a bad mood, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. Now, what we have is a situation where… now, where Berkeley professors and Stanford professors are having a dispute with their graduate students. Now, you know Jesus spent a lot of time with farm folk and fishermen and blue-collar workers in his day, and he was comfortable with blue-collar workers. I'm from a blue-collar family. My mom worked in a cup factory, and my dad was a welder, and Jesus would be comfortable with my mom and dad. But Jesus was also comfortable in the university. He could go to Berkeley if he were here today and give a lecture that would be extremely sophisticated and powerful there.

And in this particular occasion, Jesus was invited by the Stanford and Berkeley professors to come to a student… a graduate student gathering and to give a talk, and they were going to ask him questions to show he was stupid, and they were going to trip him up by asking him questions. And so, what we have are the Pharisees and the Sadducees come up to Jesus in Matthew 22, verse 25 and on. And I won't read the text with you, but I'll explain it to you because we're a little short on time this morning. But the Sadducees come up to Jesus and say to him, "Do you believe in eternal… do you believe in life after death?" We don't because the Sadducees didn't believe in life after death. And if you believe in life after death, Jesus, what do you do with this?

And then they raised a reductio ad absurdum argument against Jesus, which basically means that you grant your opponent's premise view, you grant their view, you showed that if you grant their view, it leads to an absurd conclusion, and then you end up concluding that since your view, if it's true, leads to this absurdity, you should give up your view. And so they say, "You believe in life after death?" Okay, what do you do with this? There was a man that was married, a woman who was married to a man, and he died, then she married his brother, and he died, and she married seven guys in a row, and they all eventually die. Finally, she dies and she goes to heaven. What was she feeding those guys? No one knows. But they all go to heaven, and to whom is she married, Jesus? You believe in life after death, he got two answers.

First of all, you can say she's married to one of the seven, maybe the first guy, in which case Moses and God through the Old Testament sanctioned adultery with the other six men. You believe in adultery? Then what you probably ought to say is that she's married to all seven of them, in which case Moses and God through the Old Testament sanctioned polygamy. Which do you like, adultery or polygamy? If you don't like either one of them, then you've got to give up belief in life after death. Now, what's interesting is at this point, Jesus didn't just give us testimony. He actually gave an answer to their questions. And what he did is he first of all denied their main premise of their argument because their main premise of their argument assumes that there's marriage in heaven.

Given that there's marriage in heaven, then this woman is either an adulterer or a polygamist, one of the two. And what Jesus says to them is he goes right for the heart of the argument and says, "You're making a fundamental mistake, namely there's no marriage in heaven. Given there's no marriage in heaven, you no longer have an argument." And that's true. That undermines their fundamental premise. And then he goes on to reason with them in certain ways about why they should believe in life after death. And he confounds the Sadducees and the intellectual leaders of his day. The point that I want us to remember is that when we raise children and in our middle school and high school youth groups, we need to hold in front of them a picture of Jesus as a smart person.

We are doing a pretty good job of holding before them a picture of Jesus as a holy person. We hold a picture before them of Jesus as someone who's extraordinarily kind and loving, and that is absolutely critical. Jesus is filled with mercy. He's also smart. And he knew what he was talking about. And we need to regain and reestablish the value as a part of the Christian way that we are people who think. We are people who think. Why? Because our Master was smart. And he wants those of us who follow along after him to be thoughtful.

Now, we can't all get PhDs. That's fine. We've got a division of labor. And I have four grandchildren, and both of my daughters are stay-at-home moms at this point. And to get involved in a lot of reading is just pretty tough for them at this stage of their journey. What they can do is listen to some CDs occasionally. And what they also can do at this stage of their journey is to every Sunday place themselves under good solid teaching. But in your station in life, no matter what your station in life is, you can become a little bit more committed to developing your mind for Christ's sake.

And so I would suggest to you that you think a little bit more about trying to get involved and doing a little bit more thoughtful reading. That you try to get involved, as I said earlier, in listening to things. Place yourself under good teaching. Don't let your intellectual life atrophy. Don't let your intellectual life atrophy. Because the Christian religion is a religion that values us being thoughtful, intelligent people who know how to destroy speculations in every lofty thought raised up against the knowledge of God.

And who are like our Master in valuing the ability to interact with thoughtful people in an intelligent way as best we're able. Find a place in the church to serve in the world of ideas. Read up on it. Learn something about it for the rest of the body of Christ. And you will be becoming a more mature Christian as you do that. Let's pray together.

Lord, guilt is a terrible emotion that does no good to anybody. And we all fall short in this area. So we're sorry about that and we'll just leave that behind. The real issue, Lord, is how we can become more thoughtful and more studious and more intelligent. And we pray that you would help each one of us think through our lifestyle and find a little bit more space to become more involved in reading and studying and reflecting and listening. Not simply for our own good, but so we can be more effective for your kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Dr. Morland. You listed quite a few questions with the shortest talk, actually. How much time do we have? We've got about 20 minutes, so we're going to go for it here. This person wrote and others wrote along these lines. There's a statement out there that says, "The world can only expand as the church regresses." Now the question is, what has happened to the power that raised Jesus from the dead? What does that power look like in everyday life?

Well, the first… the power that raised Jesus from the dead should manifest itself in two ways. The first way that it ought to manifest itself is in the transformation of people in a way that other things can't accomplish. So it ought to be the case that as you look back over the 2000 years of the church, that we have done more by way of feeding orphans and caring for the poor and reaching out and establishing just societies more than, say, the North American Humanist Society or Buddhists or other people. And so you can just look at the record. And I submit to you that the Christian church towers over any other religion or any other social organization in the impact for good that we've had for 2000 years on world history and on caring for people.

We have had… we've done mistakes, but have you noticed every time everybody wants to mention a mistake, it's always the Crusades? You know why they have to do that? Because there aren't that many examples of them. And so they have to always pick the same stinking one because there aren't four or five of them. And it's not that we're perfect, but we've done a very good job compared to rivals in making an impact. And that's evidence that the power of God and what raised Jesus from the dead works through us in that way.

The second way the power of God and the power of the resurrection ought to manifest itself is through miracles and signs and wonders. The last time I was here, I spoke about signs and wonders. But there are around the world today more miracles happening in the name of Jesus than Jesus ever performed. There are blind… the blind are being made to see, the lame are being healed in the name of Jesus. I myself have seen physical healings. And this is where a church like this can take a page from the Charismatic and the Third Wave Church because many times Bible churches where I've spent the vast majority of my ministry in tend to be a little bit threatened by the power of the Holy Spirit because they don't want to become weird. And I agree that we don't want to become weird, but I also think there's the danger of being too uptight.

And so I think what we need to do is to find room to allow for there to be more praying for the sick. When you see an answer to prayer or a miracle of some kind, share it with somebody else. How many of you have ever seen anybody healed or know of somebody who was healed through prayer? Okay, 40% of you. How many of you have ever had an answer to prayer that was specific where you know God answered a prayer? It couldn't have been a coincidence. How many of you ever had God speak to you or guide you in something that you were in your life? We've got a bunch of supernaturalists around here and things have happened in your lives, but we often don't share it because we're, "Oh, well, I don't want to talk about that." No, share your stories with one another because you're seeing them happen.

That was windy. Yes, absolutely. Next group of questions, several asked along this theme, and I'm going to confirm the time together. It has to do with, what about unreached peoples who perhaps never heard the witness of Christ, even Old Testament saints, and how does a loving God who's just and loving, how do we reconcile that with notions of heaven and hell?

Yeah, I think that people who don't have a chance to hear about the gospel, God is going to treat them fairly and kindly and will be just and fair to them. God will either get the message to them or He will judge them based upon how they would have responded had they had a chance to hear the message. I don't know if you've heard this, but it is now beyond reasonable doubt that there are tens of thousands of Muslims coming to Christ because Jesus Himself or angels have appeared to them and communicated the gospel of them without a missionary. This is happening all over the world. And so if you have a Muslim out there who really wants to know about Jesus, Jesus will make the gospel clear to that person even if a missionary is not willing to go.

So I think that God will get the word to them or judge them based on how they would respond. He's never going to condemn anybody simply because they were born in a place where they were unfortunate not to hear. Old Testament saints were saved on the basis of Christ's death on the cross, but that wasn't the means of their salvation. They didn't have to know about that to be saved even though that was the basis of their salvation. In order to appropriate the death of Christ, they had to call out to God in faith based on what they understood at that time.

Would you say they sort of looked forward through the prophets to the coming Messiah on the cross? Yes. We look back at what He did. That's exactly right. That is the end of history. And by the way, the reason there's a heaven and a hell is because God loves people. And the reason there's a hell is precisely because God loves people. How can you be a loving person and force people to do what you want them to do? There has to be some opportunity for people who don't want to be around God, not to have to be around Him.

Now, why would God then not annihilate those people? People reject Him. Why would He not annihilate them and snuff them out of existence? Because that is like active euthanasia rather than a sanctity of life view. If you hold the sanctity of life ethics, you believe that a person that's terminally ill has value because they exist even though the quality of their life is low. So while you might let the person die, it's immoral to kill them. Similarly, it would be wrong for God to annihilate a person in the afterlife because if God were to take people who were going to hell and snuff them out of existence, here's what God would be saying. You get your value not from the fact that you exist in my image, but from the fact that you have a quality of life of a certain kind.

People who exist in hell with a low quality of life are still unbelievably valuable because they bear God's image, and that's why you want to annihilate them. I would say also hell is not a torture chamber. There aren't flames in hell. Those are figures of speech for judgment. Hell is essentially away from the presence of God in anything that's good associated with His kingdom.

And I think you are taking that even fuller in The Case for Faith. That's Lee Strobel's second book, We Have Case for Christ. And you have a whole chapter on that. Thank you very much. A lot of questions around this theme. People that are dealing with atheists or friends or loved ones that are just really happy with their life and feel no need to follow this Jesus that folks here might be inviting them to come and hear about. And they might even think that those folks that invite them are rather arrogant and narrow-minded in trying to claim that Christ is the only way. How would you respond to that?

Well, first of all, the real question is whether Christianity is true, not whether it makes you happy. So I would say to an atheist, how do you explain the origin of the universe? Where do you think the moral law came from? How do you explain A, B, C, D? What do you do with the resurrection of Jesus and the dating of the Gospels? They seem to be historically. So the first thing I would do is I would say whether you're happy without Christ or not, Christianity is still true and you need to believe it because it's true, not because it'll make you happy.

Secondly, I doubt that they're that happy. And I'll tell you why. I think that people can be happy if they have a low standard of what that means. And the low standard is pretty much being able to succeed according to the American dream. My definition of happiness is to become the kind of person who genuinely loves my enemies. My definition of happiness is to be kind of person that my grandchildren and my children and the people in my neighborhood say, "I would give my teeth to be that man because of the character of his life and the wisdom that exudes out of him." Now that's happiness. And I submit to you that I haven't met a whole lot of atheists that are like that.

Wow, thank you. Another group of questions have to do with Adam and Eve. Is this a literal couple? Is it some sort of story that makes a point? And how do we reconcile stories like that in the Bible with evolution and science today, that sort of group?

Well, yeah, Jesus and Paul take Adam and Eve to be historical figures. If we're going to be a follower of Jesus, then it means that we take Adam and Eve to be real historical figures that really lived. Now they didn't look like Donny and Marie Osmond. They may have looked kind of odd, but they did not evolve from pre-human species. They were created by God, especially. How do we reconcile that with evolution? Well, number one, you critique evolution at certain points. Evolution is a very odd set of ideas, and some of it's true, but some of it is far from being proved.

And so what I would simply say would be that there is no significant scientific evidence that implies that there weren't an original pair of human beings. I think that humans haven't been here forever, after all. There had to be a time when there was a first human. And I submit to you it's not at all implausible to think that there had to be a first man and woman. And so I would basically just say that there's not enough scientific evidence to demonstrate that Adam and Eve had to evolve, or humans had to evolve, from pre-human species. I think there's a lot of speculation that's going on in that literature, and that we don't have that evidence to make that claim. That would be my argument.

Now, I always heard that Eve was quite a looker because when introduced to Adam, he went, "Whoa, man," and hence the name.

Well, thank you so much.

This is how liberalism gets started in the churches, I'll tell you.

This is why René's not here when I'm up front. He just can't bear it. He's not sure what's going to happen.

This was brought up in all three hours, and we never got to it until now, and that is the question of how do we distinguish between what we're to take literally in the Bible and figuratively?

The same way you would do that in any piece of literature. If you're going to be asking those questions, you might want to eventually get a little book on hermeneutics or how to interpret literature. There's a little book by Gordon Fee that's good on this, and Stuart and Fee, but the basic idea is that you interpret literature literally, unless there are indications in the text that it's supposed to be a figure of speech. So poetry, like the Psalms and things, should be interpreted with a lot of figurative language. Historical narrative should be interpreted literally, unless there are reasons to think that there are figures of speech.

And one way to tell whether something's a figure of speech is whether it would hurt the author's purpose if you took it that way. So suppose that an author is making a point by describing an event, and there's something in the event that you took to be a figure of speech, does that hurt the purpose of what the author's trying to do? And if the answer is no, that doesn't seem to change anything that the author's trying to prove, then it's permissible to take it as a figure of speech. But I would interpret the scriptures the same way you read the newspaper. I would read it in the plain sense of the word, unless there are good reasons in the text to take something, like when it says the trees clap their hands. That's a figure of speech. That's not one that I would take literally. So just read it normally like you could read any literature, and you'll be okay in 80 to 90 percent of the cases.

Okay. If God is so powerful, we talk about it's testable, the resurrection is bona fide proof of this Jesus, and therefore God and all of His omnipotence. Why then, in light of who God is and all of that, don't more people seem to want to embrace following Jesus?

Yeah, I think number one, there are two reasons for this. The first reason is that they have been presented with a picture of Jesus that's inaccurate. And so they think Jesus is a very angry kind of white middle-class guy that probably was raised in Missouri and holds, you know, kind of middle-class values, and he's just kind of sort of sad and hacked off all the time. And he's just kind of uptight. So they, I mean, there's no way that a person could be exposed to the New Testament Jesus, I mean, there is a way, but not fall in love with them for most people. So I think the first problem is they've been exposed to a picture of Jesus that isn't the way He really is.

The second reason is that people love their own evil more than they do Jesus. I mean, the truth of the matter is that to become one of Jesus' followers requires change and requires giving certain things up. I had to give up promiscuity when I became a Jesus follower as a university student in 1968. And I was wonderfully glad I did, but that was for people who don't like that trade-off, they're not going to want to make that decision because they want to hang on to things that they would rather have than have a new life. Now remember, this doesn't have anything to do with the power of God. It's not like people that don't accept Christ counts against God's power. God has the power to force everybody to believe in God if He wants to.

So the fact that people don't believe in Jesus is not due to His lack of power, it's due to the fact that He's non-coercive and He's loving. He's not going to force people to believe in Jesus. So this is not a power issue. With all this apologetics business, it both starts at a simple level and goes to very complex. How do you recommend to the just the common person that they can stay on task and not get distracted with non-believing friends? What are some of the core things you focus in on?

Yeah, I think I would get, I mean, I've got a website called jpmorland.com. You can download messages and papers I've written there that might be helpful to you, jpmorland.com. So find websites you can go to, get a book, get one of the books here, some of the CDs and listen to them. So the first thing I would do is I would educate myself on certain fundamental issues. Now here are two issues that I would want to try to know. The first would be how can I demonstrate that God exists? What is the evidence there's a God? And there's a little handful of evidence that you can learn that would take you a few weeks that you could master that there's a God. And the second thing that I would want to learn about is how can I argue that the New Testament is good history and Jesus rose from the dead? Those would be the two things.

Now I wrote a book that's available here, I'm not getting royalties off of it. It's called The God Question and it's written for an intelligent non-Christian. If you have an uncle or someone that doesn't know the Lord who's pretty thoughtful, get that book and give it to them. But it's got a chapter, it's got two chapters in there on how do we know God exists, and it's got one chapter in there on how do we know the New Testament's historically reliable. Those would be the two things I would start off with and I would learn those.

A couple of people want to know if you think it's inconsistent to be pro-life and support the death penalty. Not at all because pro-life is the idea that we ought to protect innocent human life. It isn't the idea that we ought to protect all life. So the pro-life movement does not believe that all life should be protected. It believes that all innocent life should be protected. And it's consistent with that to believe that those who are morally culpable of capital punishment ought to get capital punishment. In fact, the death penalty is more of a pro-life view than incarceration forever, and here's why. The more severe a criminal, excuse me, the more severe a crime is, the more severe the punishment ought to be. If a person steals 10 bucks, they shouldn't be punished as much as somebody who takes a million dollars. That makes sense to you.

So the more severe the crime, the more severe should the punishment be. When it comes to somebody killing someone, we take that more seriously if we take their life than we do if we just put them in prison forever because capital punishment is a more severe punishment than imprisonment for the rest of your life. Therefore, capital punishment takes the crime the person did more seriously than incarceration forever, and that means that it respects the life of the person who was murdered more than those who want to incarcerate the person forever.

Wow. Well just a couple more. With your expertise in the issues of the soul and all of the different bioethical questions on the horizon, I mean I've even heard of people beginning to try to take DNA from parents so that they can be the parents of a child, and there's just different ways that we're tinkering with trying to make a baby so to speak. And the soul obviously enters the question at that point, what do you think about that? And just a little easy question for you. Go ahead.

Yeah, there's a… I've written on this in a book called Body and Soul but here's basically the answer. I am at what's called a traducian when it comes to the soul. That's a view in the history of the church that means that God does not create the soul. God created the original souls of animals and humans and animals have souls. What is a soul? A soul is what contains consciousness and animates the body. So dogs have consciousness and they have something that makes their bodies animated. So there's a dog soul and a cat soul. So all animals have souls because they have something, a nephesh, the Old Testament says or a suke, the New Testament says, that animates their body and makes it living.

Now when God created the first dog souls and the first human souls, those souls are passed on through sexual reproduction in the egg and sperm. The egg and sperm generate a new soul God doesn't create it. Now the ancients believed that there were forms of asexual reproduction of souls. For example, the ancients believed and I believe too that starfish have souls, and if you take a piece of a starfish off, that new piece will generate a new starfish soul. That is a form of soul. That means that all the parts of that starfish's body have what is called totipotentiality, which is a dollar ninety-eight cent word for the fact that every part of the starfish's body has the potential to generate a new starfish soul if something happens to it.

So I see the generation of a soul through cloning and those means as on the same level as the generation of a new starfish soul by taking a piece of the starfish off of it. It is the form of asexual reproduction, which means that every cell in your body has the potential to generate a new soul. It isn't just egg and sperm. We've learned that the parts of the body that can generate a new soul aren't just egg and sperm, but your cells have that ability if something happens to them.

Wow. Well, we have time for one more. So let's say someone came, they're a little overwhelmed by all this knowledge and petty stuff. They're not an expert in any of these areas. What tips do you have for that person? How can they be a winsome person to their friends and reaching out?

Best thing to do when you get asked a question is to say, "You know what? I really don't know how to answer that. Let me write it down and I'll find somebody at church who has an answer and I'll bring it to you." But you can do that. The other thing is to realize we're a body. We don't have the same calling. Some of us are called to do this more than others, and you're not all supposed to be good at this. We can all get a little better at it. Would you agree with that? We could all do a little bit, but that doesn't mean that you all have to do what I'm doing because I've got a special calling and you have a special calling. So I would say, A, get a little bit better at your game and, B, if you can't answer a question, say, "I don't know the answer to it. Let me write it down and I'll see if I can find an answer."

Thank you very much. Give a warm round of applause for Dr. Morland.