A few weeks ago, a couple of my debate club buddies met at my place to ask questions about the Christian faith to a long time Christian. It was a great discussion, with a lot of focus on trying to use science to prove faith. Ultimately, we ran out of time. A week later, the gentlemen to whom we asked our questions sent this email I have quoted below. Enjoy:
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All week I had felt badly about not saying what I wanted to say when we met to discuss your questions with your friends. They were good and important questions but I wanted to share the uniqueness and life-giving power of the Christian faith, which ultimately answers all questions and gives life in all its fullness in ways that nothing else can. Christianity is based on certainties and truths that we accept by faith and find to be true, because they are God derived and not arrived at by man's intellect. Not that we despise man's scientific discoveries, because they too are God derived. So what follows is something of what I wish I had said.
There is nothing in any of the other great religions that gives or allows, intimate personal relationship with the God of the universe. This is because of the person of Jesus, the Christ, from which Christianity gets its name. Jesus alone and uniquely reveals everything we know about God and is the only Way to have intimacy with an awesomely pure and Holy God whose essential nature is Righteousness and Justice. "No one has ever seen God.but God the only son (co-creator of the universe as part of the triune Godhead), who is at the Father's side, has made him known" (John1:18). Hence only Jesus and scripture reveal everything that can be known about God. Through Jesus' perfection and sacrificial death and resurrection , he becomes the only Way to come close to God in his unapproachable Holiness and light. This is a free gift based on unconditional love, to be received and internalized by faith, along with the empowering gift of the third member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. This births in us a new life in all possible fullness, which is so overpoweringly true that millions accept it and believe. There is no greater truth in all of human existence. Scripture foretold it and events affirmed it's fulfilment in history. Jewish historians recorded the events. Dozens of eye witnesses affirmed the truth. John, who was a cousin of Jesus (his mother and Mary, the mother of Jesus, were sisters) gave eyewitness and intimate details of all that happened. Millions of believers over thousands of years trust their lives and work completely in the truth of it all.
There is much more one could say, but no other faith or religion has even a fraction to offer to human life and existence, of what the Christian faith provides.
So Ivan , this is what I wish I had said and wish I could redo a second time. If you think it worthwhile I would be happy if you wanted to forward this email to you friends. They deserved a better answer than I was able to give. I'm so excited about the Christian life! It is worth giving up everything for. My experience is that we receive far more than we ever give up to follow Jesus.
There was an inscription in the church where I became a believer in 1961, "I said to the man who stood at the gate of the years, 'Give me a light that I might tread safely into the unknown'. He said to me 'Put your hand into the hand of God. That will be better than a light for your feet, and safer than the known way' "
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