Pointers for Defending the Faith, Part 4

Here’s another tip to keep in mind:

4) Non-Christians usually do not properly distinguish between the biblical message and the history of the Church. This is an extremely common occurrence and a very important point. I can’t recall how many times when speaking to a non-Christian evangelistically the first objection I heard was, “But what about the crusades?” or something like that. We need to draw a distinction here. When we’re commending Jesus to someone, we’re not commending all the mistakes and blunders of the church as well. Please don’t confuse us for Jesus, He’s much better than us! Now, are they connected questions? Very much so! The church is the community that claims to be people transformed by Jesus Himself, spiritually inhabiting us through the Holy Spirit; we’re His “body” (cf. 1 Cor. 12).
But none of this should detract from the plain fact that we’re claiming that the Bible records historical, space-time events. So, the wrongs self-proclaimed Christians have done in the 1600’s (for instance) doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t live in Israel roughly from 3 B.C. to 30 A.D. anymore than to say that because we discover that one of our elementary schools teachers was a pedophile, the mathematics that you learned from him or her is invalidated. That’s sloppy thinking.

Another important strength to making this distinction between “Bible-history” (we’ll call this (Canonical-redemptive history) and Church history is that when we do we’re free to develop some common talking points with non-Christians. We shouldn’t feel constrained to defend everything the church has always done. The church is made up of broken, fallen people who need a savior, which is the very reason why they’re in the church! So, we don’t need to defend the crusades and the wrongs they did, the passivity of the German church during WWII, the abuses that the Roman Catholic Priesthood currently finds itself in, etc. Those are wrong, and should be acknowledged, by both saint and sinner, as wrong. Believe it or not, seeing that Christians aren’t “blind” to these moral blemishes within it’s own family may actually get you a hearing.

Four down, one to go…