Blog@GraceJunction

Hi Shirley,

I did not want to be an unwelcome guest at your party. I mean the mail that I wrote about your pre-marital relationship but being a college senior I thought I should warn you about the steps that you have already taken. But it seems you have made up your mind and seem to be in no mood to listen to anybody. You asked me ‘not to push my morality on you’ because you feel that everything is a matter of personal choice. You also felt that moral values should not be dictated but rather left to the individual to decide if it’s good for him. (more…)

Hi Imran,

It has been two months now since I have been discussing Christianity with you and I must appreciate that you are a true seeker of the truth. Not only have you been patiently hearing all my arguments but also getting deeper in your search for God by asking me questions and raising doubts. And all this, not to prove yourself right or put me down, but because of your desperate search for the one true God. Now continuing from where we left last time, I want to tell you that anyone who wants to seek God should start with Christianity first.

Well, most people think that religion is normally a blind leap in to nowhere, something that is hardly objective and leaves much to the subjective experiences of each believer. But Christianity is unique in this aspect also because it is the only religion that lends itself to the test of history and facts. It is bold enough to say that its entire structure hangs by the one thread of resurrection of its author, Jesus Christ, from the dead. Paul the apostle, who wrote much of the New Testament Bible, says that if Christ did not come back from the dead then the entire Christian message is in vain and so is the faith of all the Christians. He says that if Christ has not raised from the dead then we Christians are to be pitied more than all men.

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Hi Imran,

In response to my mail on the subject of Trinity you had posed a few questions which I intend to answer in this mail. I appreciate your sincere efforts in finding the truth about God and his nature. You wanted to know if Jesus ever claimed to be God. That is a very common question that I receive from many people because Jesus is often considered to be a prophet, moral teacher, a social revolutionary, a zealot, a spell binding preacher who could heal but not God.

However, the scriptures tell us that Jesus does things only God can do, exercises the rights of a deity and also makes direct claim to be God in flesh. In the Bible, before Jesus’ ministry here on earth, God calls himself as ‘I AM’. In Exodus 3:14 it says, God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” (more…)

Hi Imran,

It was a great discussion that we had about world religions last night. But you had this objection about my Christian belief that we really believe in only one God. As per your understanding we believe in three different God’s namely Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I could not spend much time explaining that to you in the chat room because I would not have been able to explain it adequately and also I had to rush to meet someone.

Trinity is the word that denotes this Christian doctrine that God exists in a unity of three distinct persons. Each of them is distinct but identical in essence. In other words each is fully divine in nature but each is not the totality of the other persons in the trinity. We call them ‘persons’ because it says about their individuality and self awareness. Because each of them has a will, loves and says ‘I’ and ‘You’ when speaking. But here is the Christian stand on your objection. Included in the doctrine of Trinity is a strict monotheism which is a teaching that there exists in the entire universe a single being known as God who is self existent and unchangeable. So when some critics call Trinity as a polytheistic approach they are making a judgment arising out of their lack of knowledge on the subject. (more…)

Dear Troy,

We got your mail yesterday evening and it was such a relief to know that you are settling in to the new surroundings of your engineering college. We missed you so much as this is the first time you have gone away from home for such a long time. Nice to know that you have been allotted a room in the college hostel and that you have a new friend who is also your room mate.

Mom is glad to know that you have been reading the Bible daily and praying. But it seems you have been having difficulty explaining to your friend why the Bible is a reliable piece of literary work. In your mail you raised three concerns which were also bothering your friend. It reminded me when I was a college student and I would raise the same questions to my friends. But I have had the privilege of spending a lifetime as a historian committed to the task of researching the authenticity of many literary works, not just the Bible. So allow your dad to put on his historians cap for a while as I try to address your concerns on the Bible.

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Hi Abhishek,

I got your response to my last mail but I was unable to respond on time as I was travelling for some seminars. But now I am back home and things are back to normal after some hectic weeks of travelling. However I am glad that my last letter helped you to dig deeper in to this issue of evil and the existence of God. You came up with some important points in your last mail. You asked me that, wouldn’t it have been good for God to curtail some of our freedom to make this world a better place.

Well let me tell you that all my students who were copied on your mail were really confused by your argument because it all sounded so reasonable. If God had proposed a curtailing of free will to keep the evil in check wouldn’t we all have gladly agreed to it? We would all give up some of our freedom in order to protect the spreading of AIDS, killing of innocent foetuses and the killing of innocent people in the name of wars and Holy wars. (more…)

Hi Abhishek,

I don’t know how to respond appropriately to your pain of loosing your eight year old son. I heard that he was suffering from Progeria due to which he was ageing much beyond his age. You told me that he had the body of an eighty year old when he died, a premature death, something that raises a lot of questions in our mind. I can understand your anger against God for allowing such evil but I cannot agree with your conclusion that therefore there is no God.

I still remember the days when I was the professor of philosophy at the University and you were one of the best students that I had. You were always a good thinker and used reason to good effect. In your last mail to me you told me to explain how an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni benevolent God can allow evil. According to you both are not logically compatible. And since evil is the most proven fact in this world you deduced that there is no God. (more…)