Why My Apologetic Does Not Begin With Jesus

Today’s title in no way is meant to suggest that Jesus was not present at the very beginning.  To the contrary, as the Gospel of John declares, “In the beginning was the Word…all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (1:1-3).  “The Word” (who is Jesus, see 1:14) is the creator of all things and therefore is the foundation of every other thing.  Furthermore, Jesus is the center of all things.  He Himself said, “You search the Scriptures because you believe that in them you have eternal life, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:24).  And Jesus is also the end of all things (including the end of apologetics) in the sense that all Christian proclamation points to Jesus Christ as the purpose, the goal, and the fulfillment of all of history (Ephesians 1:10).

When it comes specifically to the apologetic challenge and task, however, it is necessary to begin elsewhere than with Jesus Christ.  When the Apostle Paul preached to the almost entirely pagan audience at Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17), he began not with Jesus, but with the actual state of knowledge (or should we say ignorance? see 17:23) of his hearers with respect to the true and living God of the Bible.  For this reason, the Apostle Paul began his proclamation with the theme of creation by making use of insights both from universal human experience (v.24-27) and also from the writings of their own Athenian poets (v.28).  It was from these two that his trajectory then moved to the lordship of Christ Jesus, His resurrection from the dead (v.31), and the implications for repentance and faith that logically follow from Jesus’ reality (v.30).

In our own day the thinking of our culture has become almost entirely secularized.  Because of the influence of Darwinian evolution which has led to an almost entirely materialistic world view, people have no framework that is receptive to the robust view of Jesus Christ described in the first paragraph above.  As I continue to argue elsewhere in my blog, the secular world view that stands in the way to Christian belief is profoundly wrong.  Yet, I repeat, it is pervasive.  This is why I give such emphasis to the foundation provided by the insights of cosmology.  The existence of the God of the Bible is intellectually inescapable on a whole host of scientific grounds.  Specifically, the absolute beginning of the universe out of nothing in the Big Bang logically demands an intelligent creator (the God of the Bible) to bring it into existence, therefore overthrowing all grounds for denying the possibility of miracles.
  
Since science has no way to account for existence, neither are there scientific grounds for denying out-of-hand the major Christian tenets concerning Jesus Christ.  Whether the facts of history indeed support the Christian claims about Jesus is a different matter.  As the calendar moves us toward Easter I will continue to unpack the powerful body of evidence that solidly supports the central claims of Jesus with respect to His trial, His death, and His bodily resurrection on the third day.  But I will uphold these claims, as the Bible itself does, within the larger framework of the God of the Bible who created all things out of nothing (Hebrews 11:3).