Transition to the Gospel for
Skeptics
This evangelistic script was
developed by Dave Geisler (Meekness and Truth Ministries) and Prof. Rob Koons
(Philosophy Prof. U.T. Austin) to be
used with the article “Two Sources of the Knowledge of God” by Dr. Rob Koons, which is located on
our web-site at: www.meeknessandtruth.org
* This article may be copied and distributed for Ministry
purposes only
1. It
doesn’t make the assumption that the individual you are trying to reach “buys”
into the belief that God exists to begin with.
For some people there is no use talking about Jesus as
the Son of God unless there is a God who can have a son. And for some there is
no use talking about the Bible as the word of God unless there is a God who can
have a word.
2. It
uses apologetics in a way that encourages people toward making a decision about
Jesus Christ.
3.
Although
it contains apologetic material, it does not allow others to get you bogged
down in defending difficult philosophical issues such as God’s existence, etc.
4.
It allows you to uncover
the nature of people’s barriers to belief in God and Christianity, and provides
opportunities for further dialogue with them.
There are a number of transitions you can use to open
the door to sharing what you believe and why.
Here are a few:
Transition 1:
W.P. Alston, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse
University, says,
“Human
beings have a deep-seated need to form some general picture of the total
universe in which they live, in order to be able to relate their own
fragmentary activities to the universe as a whole, in a way meaningful to
them.” We call this a sense of
coherence.
The Five Key Questions
I
believe that there are five critical questions that people need to address, in
order to develop make sense out of their own lives. The questions are:
1. Who am I?
2. What is my purpose?
3. Is there a God?
4.
If so, what is God like?
5.
What does God have to do
with me or my purpose?
Can I show you one way to
think through the answers to these kinds of questions?
Transition 2:
I realize that we
live in a world that has a hard time believing that any one religious
perspective can be better than another. But can I share with you some of the
reasons why I believe Christianity is true, and what difference it could make
in your life?
Transition 3:
Can I share with you
some of the reasons why I believe Christianity is True?
Transition 4:
(Develop your own transition and let us know if it is helpful!)
Please note: The following script can be explained on
a piece of paper or napkin
Evangelistic Script
Seeing the Big Picture
I
believe that every individual makes observations, consciously or unconsciously,
about the world around them, draws some kind of speculation from that about
what “ultimate reality” is, and then determines the significance of that for
their own lives. The problem, however,
is that different people draw different
conclusions about the nature of ultimate reality, even though they observe the same world.
For
example, one individual looks at all the beauty of nature around him. He sees
the trees, the birds, the flowers, the lakes, the beautiful blue skies, and
says, “I believe that there is a God, and that he is good.”
A second
individual comes along, looks at the same world, and says instead, “I see war,
famine, poverty, discrimination, hatred, loneliness, man’s inhumanity to
man. I conclude that there is a God,
but that this God must be evil.”
A
third individual also agrees that there is a “God” but concludes that we are
all a part of God. He does not believe
that God made the flowers and the birds and the trees but rather that God is the flowers, the birds, and the
trees. “We’re all god! There is no separation between God and his
creatures. We are all one and the
same.” This is the basic pantheistic
view.
Now,
a fourth individual comes along and says, “Wait, you've got it all wrong. There
is no God! All that exists is the natural universe.” This is the basic atheistic
view.
Let’s say you don’t fit into any of these, well I’ll draw another place for your view as well)
The
problem is that each person makes observations about the world around them, and
then draws certain inferences about the nature of the supernatural based on
those observations. An inference is a
step or process of reasoning. Yet isn’t the problem with inference accuracy or
verification? The fact is that we all
bring individual biases and sometimes even irrational prejudices to the task of
inferring the nature of ultimate reality, and those biases and prejudices
introduce distortion and uncertainty into our conclusions.
However,
these problems are not completely insurmountable. Certainly, not all worldview
perspectives can be true and some seem to make more sense than others.
For
example, in the last 20 to 30 years, more and more leading scientists and
philosophers are coming to the conclusion that the universe did have a
beginning.
As a
result, the evidence appears to support belief in a Theistic God (See Rob
Koons’ article “Two Sources of the Knowledge of God” located on our website at
http://www.meeknessandtruth.org). All
the same, we must admit that this conclusion is not universally agreed upon.
But,
let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that we could resolve most of the
problems normally associated with inference and that as a result, the evidence
does seem to point, firstly, to the existence of a Theistic God, and secondly,
to his innate goodness! Even in a
best-case scenario, we would still be left with some unanswered questions about
this Theistic God. For example, we
might be able to determine from inference alone that He is creator of the world
and that He is infinite and eternal, but still there would be so many other
important things that we wouldn’t know--such as what He thinks of us, what He
expects of us, and what possibilities there might be for a personal
relationship with Him. So, even if we could know from inference alone that a
Theistic God exists, it still might not be enough to be relevant to your life
or mine.
But
what if, in addition to all the knowledge we might gain from empirical
observation and sound logical inference, there is an additional means of
obtaining information about the supernatural? What if it were possible for God
to take the initiative, and come down to us in human form and tell us what He
is like and how we should relate to Him, and do all of this in ways we could
understand? Then, we might be able to fill in some of the missing pieces about
God that observation and inference
alone cannot provide. The technical term for this kind of knowledge is “special
revelation.”
So
one could ask the question, has there ever been a time in history, when an
individual has claimed to be God, and provided some kind of evidence to
substantiate it? Well, Buddha did claim
to point to the way and Muhammad did claim to be a prophet of God. However, Jesus Christ is the only major religious leader who ever
claimed to be God. So it seems that
we should deal with Jesus’ claim first.
Jesus
claimed to be the higher authority that helps man to answer those questions
that inference alone cannot answer about God. Now, if Jesus were truly God,
then He would know what the truth about God is. And, if Jesus spoke the truth about God, then whatever anyone
else says about God that contradicts what Jesus says would have to be false. So
the next question becomes, what did Jesus say about God? Jesus said three basic
things:
(This
is where you insert your evangelistic presentation of the gospel if you don’t
want to use these three points).
1. God loves us.
Jesus said that God loves man very much and that the source of meaning
and purpose in life is found in a personal relationship with Him.
(Note: Show them that this statement provides the answer to the first two questions: “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose?”)
2. Man is separated.
Jesus
spoke of the fact that there exists a separation between God and man due to
personal sin.
3.
Christ spoke of Redemption.
But
Jesus spoke of redemption because God’s love for Man is so great!
Now
we need to recognize that the problem with revelation
is credibility! There are many other
people who claim to be God, yet most are in mental institutions! So one needs
to ask, “What makes Jesus’ claims better or more credible than the claims of
others?” There are at least four strands of evidence that validate Jesus’ claim
to be God.
1. Messianic Prophecy
There
are numerous prophecies concerning the Messiah (or God-appointed savior) that
were fulfilled in the life of Jesus, such as: that he would be born in
Bethlehem (Mic 5:2), raised in Egypt (Hos 11:1; Matt 2:15), yet called a
Galilaean (Isa. 9:1-2,6). (feel free to
discuss others as there are at least 191)
The
ninth chapter of Daniel pinpoints the death of the Messiah to a period
corresponding to the 30’s A.D., and in addition predicts that soon afterward
the prince of a new world empire would destroy Jerusalem (as the Roman emperor
Titus did in 70 A.D.).
Also,
Psalms 22 contains a medically accurate description of a crucifixion. We know that David wrote the psalms in about
1000 B.C., but crucifixion wasn’t commonly practiced in Palestine until the
Romans introduced it (at the earliest) a few centuries before Christ’s
lifetime.
2. Evidence for the Resurrection
We
know that Jesus really did die. He was placed in a solid rock tomb, with a very
large bolder rolled into a fixed position in the front of the tomb. There were
at least four to eight armed guards placed at the entrance of the tomb. Yet, we
also know something else. Three days later something happened. The tomb was
empty. The Apostle Paul claimed that
more than 500 people at one time saw Jesus alive after his death, and that
dozens of others saw him on a number of occasions. This makes the Resurrection
one of the best-substantiated events in all of history.
Jesus
Resurrection Appearances
(Note: The fact that Christianity arose in
Jerusalem, the very city where Christ was crucified, in the years immediately
following the event, means the Jewish leaders who adamantly opposed Jesus would
have had plenty of opportunity to expose the resurrection as a lie. You can be sure that if there really had not
been as many as 500 witnesses at one time who confessed to seeing Jesus alive
after his death, the Jewish leaders would have buried Christianity in the first
century!)
3. Changed life of the Apostles
When
Jesus was crucified, the apostles all became cowards and were very discouraged.
They were scared, scattered, and skeptical. Yet, three days later, something
occurred to change them so completely that they were willing to suffer painful
martyrs’ deaths for their changed beliefs.
(Eleven of the 12 apostles died a martyr’s death.) What could have transformed a bunch of
scared, scattered, skeptics into the greatest missionary society the world has
ever seen!?
·
People will die for what
they think to be true but no one dies for what they know to be false.
(Note: In fact a well-known Jewish New Testament
scholar, Pinchas Lapide does not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, yet
believes that God raised Jesus from the dead.
He says, “If the Disciples were totally disappointed, and on the verge
of desperate flight because of the very real reason of the Crucifixion, it took
another very real reason in order to transform them from a band of disheartened
and dejected Jews into the most self-confident missionary society in world
history.” He concludes that a bodily
resurrection could possibly have been that reason. [Time, May 7th, 1979])
4.
Personal
testimony of how God has made a difference in my life.
(Remember the main purpose in explaining
in detail all the apologetic information above is to get the opportunity to ask
the following important questions)
Important Follow-up Questions
Question 1:
Well,
(Name of Person) we have looked at a lot of evidence today. What would you say
is your biggest barrier to belief in God or Christianity?
Question 2:
What
would it do for you personally, if you were to discover that there was adequate
evidence to believe that there is a God, and that you can know Him personally?
Question 3:
Or a
more direct approach:
Question 4:
Can you think of anything that is
keeping you from making a decision today to accept Christ into your life?
-- End of Script --
This evangelistic tool is a work in progress.
Send your suggestions or comments to:
Dave Geisler at dgeisler@meeknessandtruth.org
References
1. Josh McDowell, Evidence
that demands a verdict, San Bernardino, CA. Campus Crusade, 1972
2. W.P. Alston, “Problems of Philosophy of Religion,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
reprinted ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 6:286.
3.
Nick
Repak, Video Lecture: The Relativistic
Bog.
4.
Prof. Robert
C. Koons, Two Sources of the Knowledge of
God.
5.
Bill Heth,
Unpublished notes, The Relativistic Bog,
1975.
6.
Norman Geisler, Baker
Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, 1999
THINGS TO BEAR IN
MIND …
·
Without
being able to pinpoint what will motivate them to get answers to these kinds of
questions, you might be wasting your time and theirs by just talking about the
evidence!
·
Explain
clearly the difference between belief that
and belief in!
When
witnessing to a non-believer, always point out that there are two decisions one
needs to make about Christ, in order to become a Christian. First, he must decide if there is enough
evidence to “belief that” Jesus
really is the Messiah. Secondly, once
he has determined that there is good reason to believe that Jesus is who he
claims to be, he must also decide if he wants to put his trust in Christ, “believe In.”
·
Remember
that the purpose of this evangelistic/apologetic script is not to answer all
objections against Christianity.
Rather, it is to allow you to uncover the nature of a person’s barriers
to belief in God and Christianity, and to provide opportunities for further
dialogue with them.
·
Remember
that Apologetics can be used as a “pinprick” to help awaken people from the
delusion of their own distorted worldview, so that the Holy Spirit has an
opportunity to work on their hearts!
How to witness to a skeptic overview
1. There
are five fundamental questions that we all tend to wrestle with.
2.
We all make
observations about the world around us and then draw some kind of conclusion
about the supernatural based on those observations.
3.
People draw
different conclusions.
4. The different
conclusions which people draw cannot all be right.
5. The
problem with drawing conclusions based on inference alone is accuracy.
6. Even
if we could determine from inference alone that a Theistic God exists, that
might not be enough information to be relevant to us.
7. Special
Revelation could possibly fill in some of the missing pieces about a Theistic
God that inference alone cannot provide.
8. Jesus
Christ claimed to be that higher authority who answers the questions about God
that inference alone cannot provide.
9. Jesus told us three
specific things about God.
10. Acknowledge
that the problem associated with revelation about God is credibility.
11. Jesus
provided some evidence to substantiate his claim to be God.
·
Important
follow-up questions!
What is your biggest barrier towards belief in God or Christianity?
What would motivate you to get answers to these questions?
Can you think of anything that is keeping you from making a decision today to accept Christ into your life?