When I was in my late forties, about 13 years ago, I began looking into whether Christianity is real. I'd turned away from it as a teenager and had never reconsidered it through the lens of a mature mind. I was aware of there being New Testament scholars who question not only that Jesus said and demonstrated that he was God, but also that the earliest Christians believed that he was. The media coverage of that viewpoint and the seeming confidence with which its adherents disseminated it certainly made an impression on me. And at some of the churches I tried out, many of the congregants and even a good portion of the clergy had clearly been infected by it to one degree or another (and of course by the naturalism that underlies it and is so popular in our current intellectual culture). So when I began reading transcripts of William Lane Craig's debates with skeptical New Testament scholars, it was a tremendous eye-opener. They were the main reason for my persisting for 13 years in looking into Christianity. Dr. Craig's arguments for the historicity of the resurrection were particularly important to me. I was wanting to ascertain not only whether Jesus is the son of God, but also whether God even exists at all. If the resurrection really happened, I would have the answer to both questions. (It would also mean that none of the difficult issues such as why God allows evil to exist or what happens to people who never hear about Christ could prevent me from becoming a believer.) I found Dr. Craig's arguments in debates on the existence of God to be very strong, but it didn't matter very much to me whether there was a God unless he was a God who has communicated with us. I focused on the question of who Jesus was.Early last winter I realized that, finally, the intellectual issues I'd perceived as standing between me and becoming a believer had all been resolved in my mind -- primarily via Dr. Craig's work and N. T. Wright's. Their analyses of the New Testament in its historical and cultural contexts had made it clear to me that it is more reasonable to believe that the resurrection happened than that it didn't. For a few months, however, I was held back by an imaginary scenario that would play out in my head of becoming a Christian and then one day encountering a skeptical New Testament scholar on the train or wherever who would raise some argument that I couldn't counter and that I'd end up never finding an answer to. I felt that to be safe against such an occurrence I'd have to keep on studying and studying until I'd personally ascertained that no such argument existed. I quailed before such a task. I wasn't on a foolish quest for absolute "proof." I just wanted to be confident that Christian faith is (to borrow Dr. Craig's phrase) "reasonable faith" -- that there wasn't a clear refutation of its reasonableness that I hadn't happened to run into yet waiting for me around the corner.But I gradually came to a huge realization: It was enough that well-credentialed scholars like Craig and Wright have looked into all the evidence, have presented assessments of it that are convincing to a large sector of the scholarly community and to me, and have engaged many times with people such as my hypothetical skeptic on the train -- and more than held their own. (Plus, I've realized that the strength of their arguments even exceeds what is needed as a foundation for reasonable faith, providing a kind of extra margin of reasonableness. That's because even if the overall result of the debates had seemed to be a draw, that result would still have been 100% a green light intellectually for becoming a believer. The reason is that it makes sense that God would not provide humankind continually with a level of evidence of himself that's impossible for anyone to deny, but rather would allow us to feel drawn to him and choose him. He did provide overwhelming evidence once, in Jesus and his resurrection, and that news was passed on to us -- but we're free to come up with reasons to reject it.) On March 18, I yielded my life to Christ. Marked changes took place instantaneously both in my inner state and in behaviors of mine. They included changes that I had not anticipated or even imagined and that I therefore consider to be objective evidence of the reality of Christ. Not that I feel a need for confirmatory evidence: I can't even begin to doubt what the source is of the deep transformation of myself that occurred and is still occurring, or of the amazing, absolutely new-to-me peace and joy that came and are still with me. Dr. Craig's work was a crucial instrument in the clearing of the way for me to accept God's grace.
-Lee
