The average nuclear missile contains approximately 15 megatons of nuclear material. If one “average” nuclear bomb hit downtown Indianapolis (which is not completely unlikely, see [1]), the majority of everything inside of the I-465 ring and slightly past that would be heavily damaged if not utterly leveled. If you go to school at IUPUI and your family is around a 10-15 minute drive from campus, you and most likely your family will die from the blast itself or the effects of radiation poisoning. In an instant, everything your life ever was and everything it was going to be doesn’t matter anymore. I apologize for the morbid tone, but it is a fact that you live with whether you recognize it or not. Maybe your mortality isn’t real enough for you yet, let me throw another scenario at you.  On the average college commuter’s day, he/she travels (via car or walking) from home to school in about 10-30 minutes liberally, eats some sort of unhealthy lunch or dinner, and probably doesn’t wash their hands every 3 hours. By living this sort of lifestyle you expose yourself to a lot of risk. The risk statistically is this: the chance of dying in a car wreck is 1/100; chance of dying by getting hit by a car is 1/36; the chance of dying by eating chick-fil-a everyday is 1/5 for heart disease and for a stroke is 1/23. [2] Now understand that these are national averages, and vary base on location and a lot of other environmental and individual factors, but I know of a young teenager that was just diagnosed with cancer for the second time, the likelihood of him getting cancer was 1/285 the first time. [3]

Obviously, normal people don’t live in fear of death everyday. We push through and pretend that death will happen when we are old and grey, which isn’t unlikely for a lot of people, but it makes us comfortable, it makes us quit questioning what’s beyond death. We leave the deep, eternally relevant questions for scholars and teachers to tell us about while we live for the weekend and the moment. I was one of them. I lived for the weekend, I took what I was told by people above me as truth and never questioned. With a lukewarm mentality of accepting whatever I was told, I walked into church, greeted people, and prayed for God to give me the strength to push through the problems of the immediate. I wasn’t a hypocrite, I tried my best to read and pray everyday, but it turned into once a week by habit, and at times once a month. How did it get to this? Lets take a quick overview of my history.

I grew up in a middle class Christian family from Anderson, Indiana. My parents took me to church every Sunday and I even went to a Christian private school from third grade to ninth grade, my dad was even a pastor at my church. As a high school sophomore, I attended my first public school and got myself into trouble.  It carried over into my junior year and part of senior year. However, God got ahold of me my high school senior winter. I changed my life style, and my attitude and gave God my whole mind and heart. Fast forward to college, freshmen year, and my first college biology class. Evolution and secular thinking run unchecked and unchallenged, and for once I take it into consideration. I spoke to my father about it, but never seriously confessed my struggles with secular thought and Christian truths. Sophomore year, second semester, a new set of classes and a new set of challenges. Particularly, a new class was an outlier of the normal set of science classes: comparative religions.

In comparative religions I expected scenes from the movie “Gods Not Dead” to be relived. I prepared for blatant atheism and one-sided arguments. Instead, the instructor came off reasonable and rational. Likeable and levelheaded are the first adjectives that came to mind when meeting the instructor. His lessons came off as unbiased and evenly argued from a social and historical perspective. The class, in summary, compares all the major religions of the world to one another while informing students of each religion’s general information.  My lack of base from freshmen year left me without the truth I needed to be ready for the lectures I was experiencing. Weeks pass, and I found myself questioning the religion I had always believed in, and grown up believing. The truth, in my mind, had disappeared and I was beginning to fall sway to secular reasoning. My sinful nature kicked in and laziness took hold of what I believed. For a small amount of time, I was a stereotypical millennial, only living for the weekend, and pushing aside the questions that were relative to eternity, because why question something that you aren’t for sure is even real? 

I brought my questions to my Bible study group and a lot of people came and supported me. They wrote multiple short papers and blogs on why the Bible and Christianity are different. God brought me the evidence, but my laziness and sinful nature looked past it and took it for granted. I presumed I knew everything there was to know about what Christianity is and what God is. Remember, I grew up in a Christian home. This class was telling me that Christianity was just like every other religion. Nothing was different about my God. Everything about my religion only relates to the devices of man, and whatever men want from it is only for their social, political, or economic gain. 

God was sick and tired of my fence riding, and one day it hit me like a disease, the feeling of being alone. My father came down to console me, and answer my immediate questions, however it became increasingly clearer for me to make an eternal choice rather than examining evidence, no more fence riding.  You either make a step of faith for God, or you choose to go the way of self and sin. I was presented with evidence for faith in Christ, but a combination of doubt and laziness shaded my eyes from recognizing the choice at hand. My heart had to make a decision; because reason and logic would not find the answers it was looking for in this life. 

I made the decision for Christ based on the soul reason of him giving me hope to live and for giving me something to live for. However, everyday college kids just like me don’t care about these questions, often because the answers make them accountable for an eternal decision. Little do many of them recognize is that being on the fence is a decision. Doubt is a choice, because doubt  ignoring the truths and evidence that is in the world for us to examine, also its ignoring God’s role in our lives today. God wants everyone to make an eternal decision. God is real to the people that reach out and ask for the truth to become prevalent in their life. The individuals that truly search and hunt after the real truth of the world find their answers. While others that scoff and throw doubt are the ones that choose themselves as well as the broad road.  

You don’t have to live in fear as a Christian, not because you choose to be ignorant of the fact you could possibly die before you are “ripe and old”, but because God has you in his hand and his plan exceeds yours. God is real in the world when you look for him, and he gives you hope that your life has more meaning than self pleasure followed by death. I hope this blog was not interpreted as a call to salvation (fire and brimstone kind of preaching), but rather a call to get off the fence. 

 Joseph Rodriguez, Student in Impact at IUPUI, IUPUI ROTC

Sources

[1] https://heavenawaits.wordpress.com/top-american-cities-to-be-nuked/

[2] http://www.livescience.com/3780-odds-dying.html

[3] http://www.acco.org/about-childhood-cancer/diagnosis/childhood-cancer-statistics/

Every time I think about why I’m a Christian, the fundamental answer at the bottom of all the other ones is that I’m a Christian because of stories. Because when the world whispers “chaos”Christianity speaks of a narrative, both for all of history and for my day. Because God gets my English-major storyteller’s heart, because he made it and made it to look like his own. So when I look at the world through God-changed eyes, I see a story, with a plot arc and conflict and characters, and it’s a story about God and it’s a story of love and victory.  

This story comes in two forms: the textual and the actual. The textual is the arc laid out for us in Scripture, of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation. The actual is the history that we live, and track by calendars and clocks, and watch unfolding through news reports. One way we know we can trust God’s story is that these two forms of the story match. They affirm each other. This principle is the subject of libraries’ worth of discussion, and miles too deep to cover here, but we can look in a selective, close-up way at a few reasons to trust God’s story.

As Christians, we trust the Bible because we trust the character of God. However, as responsible students, we trust the Bible for the same reasons we would trust other history books. For example, we have far more original manuscripts or manuscript parts of the New Testament than of any other piece of literature from around the same period. This is important mainly because it shows us that what our New Testament says today is the same as what the copies hand-written almost 2000 years ago said. The story hasn’t changed. From this step, the next question is whether the people writing the original manuscripts were telling the truth about what happened. We can tell this through at least three trains of thought: the internal logic of the people writing the accounts, how soon after the events the accounts were written, and whether non-Christian historians of the time tell the same stories.

By the internal logic of the writers, I mean reasons we can believe they are trustworthy by the same kind of standards we would use to trust the people around us. For example, we tend to trust people humble enough to admit embarrassing things about themselves, and acknowledge when they make mistakes. The apostles who wrote the gospels admit that they did not always understand Jesus, that they fell asleep on him in his greatest crisis after he had asked them to stay awake and pray, and that they doubted his resurrection. Hardly a glowing recommendation for their own agenda. So maybe they weren’t trying to give a glowing recommendation. Maybe they were just telling things as they happened. In addition, we trust people who invest themselves. Who are in it through the hardest times and for the longest haul. The boss who puts in the latest hours and does the dirtiest work earns our loyalty. The apostles spread accounts of Jesus across hundreds of miles without cars or airplanes or even high-tech hiking boots , and then stuck with their stories through criticism, persecution, prison, and death. That kind of commitment earns my trust.

For the dates of the books in comparison with the time of the events, we can argue backward from the book of Acts. We conclude that Acts was written, at the latest, around the early 60s AD, mostly because of what it does not mention. Luke, the writer of Acts talks about both Jerusalem and Rome, but does not mention the war between them or the world-changing fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Similarly, he talks about the activity of Paul, Peter, and James, but stops before their deaths (which are all recorded by other historians to be in the 60s). We can conclude then that Acts was written about AD 60, and that the gospels (specifically Luke, since Luke starts Acts by referring to the previous account) were written before then, putting them well within the lifespan of eyewitnesses who would have influenced and corroborated their accounts. 

Other historians of the time also encourage us to trust the accounts in the New Testament. At least twelve ancient historians (including Jewish writers, Roman historians, government record-keepers, etc.), mention the death of Jesus, happening as the Bible records it. Others mention how he fulfilled the prophecies about the Messiah, his resurrection, how his followers suddenly began preaching, and additional details about his life. Writers who made a living and a reputation by telling history tell us about Jesus, the same as the apostles who lost their lives to tell the same story. Individually, there is reason to trust either of those categories of people. But together? They leave me with nothing to say.

Compared with the Bible, no other religious text meets these criteria. The Qur’an, for example (because it’s the only one I’m sufficiently familiar with) gets its credibility from the claim to be the literal words of God; it never pretends to be a historical record. It tells stories, like about Abraham and Moses and others, but mainly ones that were already ancient, not ones that happened a few decades prior. Never do the accounts include placement details, like the New Testament’s way of saying “when so and so was governor of this province, these events happened in this city,” and so affirmation from writers of the same time is irrelevant. The Hadith, or the accounts of the life of the prophet Mohammed, do little better in terms of corroboration, and have little narrative logic. In other words, there is little relationship between spiritual story and textbook story, and thus little reason to believe that my story fits into God’s.

But when I look at the Bible, I can see God’s story. And it’s the best story I know. 

Obviously, these notes are just a beginning. You could write books on these subjects, and many people have. In writing this, I looked at an essay by Gary Habermas titled “Why I Believe the New Testament is Historically Reliable” in an anthology called Why I Am A Christian and a chapter called “The Top Ten Reasons We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth” in Norman Geisler and Frank Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (a great and very readable intro to apologetics), in addition to the Qur’an and the Bible. Have a look at all of the above. Compare them with one another. I hope you find the same story I do, and I hope it’s a story that transforms the way you see all of history and the way you see your right-now life.

Because our God is the best storyteller there is. Pull up a chair and listen in.  

Krysitiana Kosobucki, Student in Impact Christian Fellowship at IUPUI

In a sense, the world is full of religion.  The Bible is but another face in the crowd when it comes to the abundance of religious texts available.  This situation has naturally caused Christians to question the validity of their holy book.  Why is the Bible the Truth above all other texts?  What makes Jesus so special?  Why are The Gospels superior?

These questions are difficult to answer and may cause Christians to shake in their shoes before summoning up a rebuttal.  However, the answer may be simpler than one would expect.

I believe the answer lies in one word – Grace.  The Bible offers Grace.  The word “Grace” is mentioned in the New Testament a total of 156 times, and I don’t think that was a mistake.  Titus 2:11 states that “For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.”

What is Grace?  Well, in the words of U2’s lead singer, Grace “takes the blame, covers the shame, removes the stain,” and “finds beauty in everything.”  Jesus Christ, a non-sinner, gave up his life so that we, sinners, may have life.  God offers Grace to all who mean to redeem themselves in Him.

So, why is the Bible the Ultimate Truth?  It addresses the most beautiful gift provided to the entire human race at no cost – Grace.  There would be no room for hope without it.  To me, there is no sweeter aspect of Christianity.

Haley Welch, Student in Impact Christian Fellowship at IUPUI.