Dr Greg Bahnsen - Mid-Level Apologetics: Practice Pt 2 (Part 18)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. As we begin our second hour, we'll take a look at a religion of eminent moralism. By that I mean a religion that places the emphasis on this world, man's life in the cosmos, and leads to a moralistic code or an emphasis on lifestyle, a call for ethics, rather than the emphasis being on getting in touch with what goes beyond this world in some mystical way, obviously. The founder of Buddhism was called the Buddha. His name actually was Sid Hartha Qutama Siddhartha grew up in a Hindu environment and became the Buddha. Buddha means enlightened One. He ended up renouncing a life of luxury and renouncing the world. And he did this, he says, when he saw the vision of the four passing sites, an old man, a sick man, a dead man and a shaven monk. After seeing the four passing sites, he joined an ascetic Hindu cult where at one point he almost beat himself to death. The ascetic discipline being so rigorous. And he did this in an effort to find the meaning of suffering. In the process, he actually discovered what he called the Middle Way. This is the halfway point between pleasure and suffering. He claims that he was under a fig tree and that Mara, the evil one of Hinduism, tempted him. And he overcame the temptation of Mara and was enlightened to become the Buddha, the enlightened one. Because he went into a rapture for 49 days. And after this 49 day rapture, seven weeks of seven days, he set out to tell everyone of his experience, according to the Buddha, the Enlightenment, there is something wrong with the human race. There's a lot of suffering out there in the world. Buddha taught whatever he did in a way that he said was devoid of authority. He says, you will only believe what I taught if you experience what I have experienced. He wanted to break with all ritual, with all speculation and all religious tradition. He wanted a here and now experience to be the basis of religion. This is the, the way of Buddhist religion. It's a religion of self effort, intense self effort. Buddhism denies the supernatural. It is, strangely enough, an atheistic religion, a religion of personal experience to the exclusion of any transcendent. Buddhism tries to deal with the causal relationships that produce suffering in this world. And according to Buddhism, suffering stems from, from man's desires. Hinduism says the problem with man is he thinks logically in terms of distinctions. Buddhism says man has desires and that leads to suffering in this world. And so Buddhism teaches What is called the Four Noble Truths. These Four Truths are life is suffering, both physical and mental. To put it simply, bad things happen. Secondly, the cause of the suffering is the desire for pleasure or being individualistic. The reason we suffer is because we want things. We lust for things. Thirdly, suffering ceases when desires cease. If we think of ourselves as the universal awe, the all, if we get rid of individualism, we get rid of desire. And in getting rid of desire, we get rid of suffering. And so fourthly, the cessation of desire comes with perfect detachment from this world. And perfect detachment is achieved through the Eightfold Path. Notice how regimented this religion is already of the Four Noble Truths. The Fourth Truth leads to the Eightfold Path. You have to have right views. Secondly, right desires, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right meditation and the Eightfold Path. These right things that you should be pursuing is hindered by 10 fetters. There are things that get in the way of following the Eightfold Path. Belief of yourself as being real, confidence in rituals, unkindness or spiritual pride or ignorance, doubting anything. The Buddha said sensuality, desiring a separate life, self righteousness, things like this are fetters upon your pursuit of the Eightfold Path. Well, I'm not going to tell you a whole lot more about Buddhism, maybe a couple more things, but let's just stop right here. I mean, it could have been Confucianism we were talking about. Confucius says that the nobleman does the following, does this, does that. Or we could have dealt with Taoism. Taoism tells us that the universal force flows through all of us and the right way to live is this rather than that and so forth. The question is, who says so? Confucius says one thing, Buddha says another, Plato says another, Jesus says another. Why follow Buddha? Now this is going to be the problem. I want to make it very simple. With every one of the religions that falls into this non mystical, non transcendent mold, those religions that tend toward a lifestyle or moralistic approach, you're just going to say, why should we follow you? Why your authority? I mean, I get indigestion when I eat certain kinds of food. Maybe indigestion is the source of true religious insight into the world. Why should I follow you rather than my indigestion? How do I know the difference between the two experiences? Hearing you and burping? What is the difference between these two? Why is there any special religious authority in what you are saying? Or why should I accept your authority over somebody else? Who made you the Authority in my life. Well, Buddha made himself the authority. Confucius made himself the authority. Always in the name of enlightenment, always speaking for the greater reality. But nevertheless, you'll notice that no religion, no worldview escapes this idea of self authorization at the final point. Who says? Buddha says, Confucius says, and so forth. Now it turns out that this particular self authorized teacher, the Buddha, held to the doctrine of karma, that impersonal law of retribution. But then Buddha had another doctrine called the doctrine of Anattav, which means simply no soul, man does not have a soul. I know I'm going fast, but I bet this is going to cause some confusion. How can you have no soul? And karma, well Buddha had problem with that too. What is it that gets reincarnated if man has no soul? Buddha said it's like two candles sharing one flame. The flame is passed to the next candle. Karma is the flame. So what I'm passing on is my karma, not my soul. I don't mean to be cynical, but to be honest with you, then tough luck for the guy who gets my karma. You know, I'm going to go out and have a good time. Since it isn't going to be me because I don't have a soul, I'm not going to be reincarnated, some other candle is going to have my karma. See these religions, what have I been hammering over and over and over again in our course? People put together worldviews and they are either arbitrary or self contradictory. And here you have this religion just like Hinduism, got this terrible self contradiction. Well, Nirvana will be reached according to the Buddhist, when all the cravings and sufferings we've been released from those things. But then you have to ask the Buddhist, what is Nirvana? Describe Nirvana. Buddha says it's indescribable, unexplainable and inconceivable. Oh yeah, if it's all those things, then it's one more thing too. It's unutterable. If it can't be conceived or explained or described, then there's nothing that can be said about it. In which case Buddhists can't talk about nirvana, can they? And then one more major problem with every religion that is moralistic and this is a dynamic which the Apostle Paul reflects on in terms of the legalistic religion of the Jews of his day as well. Every one of these religions is moralistic. But not one of these religions claims that anybody lives up to the code. You have all the problems of legalism here. No one lives up to the code. Well then what do you do about those infractions of the code. Let's say the religion that we're dealing with says, well, bygones will be bygones. Well, if that's their approach to infractions of the code, then keep on infracting, keep on breaking the code. Because, well, then, you see, we just have to say, well, everyone makes mistakes. These are the religions of cheap morality where immorality doesn't require any atonement. But then if they don't take the approach that bygones will be bygones, then the religion is going to say, you have to do something to atone for your, what we'll call sins, using the Christian word. What's the problem with asking me to atone for my sins? Well, why are you asking the one who has sinned to do even better now to atone for that sin? I mean, I got into this problem because I wasn't able to live up to the code. If you're going to tell me now I'm going to do the code and a bunch of other things too, then you're just putting a greater weight on me. A greater depression results from this. Legalism has no way out. Moralistic faiths have no way out. They only encourage depression on the one hand. And yet ironically, on the other hand, pride. These religions all encourage pride. The pride of accomplishment. I'm better than others. These are, to use the Christian terminology, Pharisee religions. Boy, am I glad I'm not a publican religions. So you have these conflicting forces of depression because there's the realization no one really does live up to the code and at the same time pumping up man's pride because he's doing things on his own. Okay, let's talk thirdly then about religions that are biblical counterfeits. Transcendent mysticism leads to irrationality. Eminent moralism leads to legalism. And then we have biblical counterfeits. Those religions that think, well, we can handle all these other worldviews just as well as you. But then what we want to point out is that they're only able to do so because in one way or another, they're aping Christianity. They're tag along Christians or, or if you will, heretical Christians. Those of you who've heard my debate with the Islamic scholar last fall might remember that's what I said to him. And to the Jewish scholar, I said, in a sense, we Christians see you as heretical Christians. See, you're not really Christians, but you're aping Christianity. You have your heretical version of it. There was a hand. Yes, just for a minute. Going back to some of these keys. If you were to take concert, more or less, you would use the ethical triangle as your paradigm to work from. Because you talk about motives, you know, why should I be good? Yes, you could do that. What's my goal? Reward being group. And then talk about who satisfy what authority. That time is the standard. Yes, that's right. I use that as a paradigm. And then also the last one, you're talking about sanctions, basically the sanctions of moral law. In other words, what you said about what do you do about in practice? Well, you could. Yeah. It's really a question of if this is a religion of ethical attainment, what do you do with those who don't attain? And you admit none do. So you can't be simply moralistic or else you create the problem of pride and depression simultaneously. The only way to get beyond moralism is to become a religion of redemption. Okay, let's look at biblical counterfeits real quickly. The three subcategories. Unitarian, polytheistic, pseudo messianic. The Unitarian biblical counterfeit is Islam. Islam, like others in this category, Jehovah's Witnesses, so forth. Denies the Trinity. To be a Muslim, Muslim means submission is to be someone who has submitted to Allah. Islam worships one God and they say that this God's name is Allah. When Muhammad, the alleged prophet of Allah, began to promote the outlook of Islam, the Arabians about him were worshiping many gods, were very idolatrous and polytheistic. Interestingly, one of the gods they worshiped was Allah. Muhammad said Allah was the only God and that the other gods had to be purged from Arabian culture. That obviously got him into a lot of trouble culturally. That led to his flight from the city of Mecca and created a number of wars. This is the thumbnail sketch history of Muhammad. Muhammad had been born in the year 570. His father died before he was born and his mother died shortly thereafter. He was actually raised for a while by his grandfather, then eventually by an uncle who was a caravan trader. And so Muhammad came into contact with a number of different cultures and different religions. Eventually he married a very wealthy woman. He did this when he was 15 years old, by the way. And he no longer had to work. And so he had time to reflect on things. He'd often go to a cave and meditate. It was here that he began to have violent convulsions. And he claims revelations. Others, of course, would say that he was an epileptic. Muhammad at first thought that these revelations had come from Satan. You need to remember that. You might talk to your Muslim friends about that. You know, Muhammad originally suggested these came from Satan, and his wife encouraged him to submit to them and to write them down. And he did. They got written down in a variety of ways, on leaves, on bones, on rocks, any number of very unsuitable materials. Some of it dictated to many different secretaries and so forth. But these various revelations became the chapters of the Koran. The Koran is the reading and the various chapters are called surahs, surahs of the Koran. Then, in the year 620, Muhammad died. However, before he died, he had pretty much won the war with polytheism and had militarily fought his way back into Mecca. And Muslims date everything from Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina. But as I've said, he eventually returned to Mecca, died there shortly thereafter. Mecca became then the center of Muslim culture. Here are some things you need to know about Islam. There are five doctrines that are crucial to any Muslim. One, Allah is the one true God. Two, Allah has sent many prophets to guide men. And Muhammad is the last and greatest of these prophets. Three of the four inspired books. The Koran is the most important. Ah, you're waking up. You say four inspired books. What else do they recognize as inspired besides the Koran? Well, they recognize the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospel of Jesus and the Koran. That is to say, portions of our Bible they acknowledge to be inspired. They also believe that we've corrupted it and so you can't really read it in our Bibles anymore. But they say the Pentateuch, the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel of Jesus are inspired. Fourth, Islam teaches there are many intermediary beings. There are numerous angels and demons that are involved in this world. And fifth, there's a final day of judgment with the heaven and hell. And whether you go to heaven or hell will be determined by weighing your good and bad deeds. If you go to heaven, it will be a place of sensuous delight and gratification. And I do mean sensuous. Young women described very voluptuously in the Koran will wait upon you, your every need and your every desire satisfied. Quite a contrast to nirvana for the Hindus. Well, there's no secret about this that in Muslim culture, women don't amount to much of anything. They will serve the eternal delights of men. Okay, Well we won't get into the details of how they work all this out. For the Hindu, nirvana is a place where you lose yourself completely. For the Muslim, heaven is a place where you indulge yourself completely. Quite a difference. And then sixthly, they have a doctrine of fate, Kismet. Everything is set ahead of time by the will of Allah and there is no free will. What do Muslims need to do if they are faithful Muslims? They must recite the creed. Their creed is there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet. They must practice prayer five times a day facing Mecca. They must practice almsgiving. They must respect the month of fasting, Ramadan. They must make a pilgrimage to Mecca. And sixthly, if called upon, they must engage in Jihad, holy war. Now how on earth could we answer a Muslim? It seems like presuppositionalism is just totally, you know, stifled in the face of Muslim theology. And this is thrown back at presuppositionalists all the time by evidentialists. Of course, evidentialists don't have an answer either. It's kind of humorous to hear them say that and then go through why they can't answer the Muslim any better. That is any better than their conception of how we do. But how do we answer a Muslim? He has his divine revelation, his Prophet, his God, his creed. He has everything we have. He has a worldview that's just aping Christianity. Choice made by just tossing a coin. What do you do? Well, here's how you answer a Muslim. First of all, notice the Qur' an claims to be a confirmation of the Old Testament law in the New Testament Gospel. The Quran claims to be a continuation of the revelation of God that was given first to Moses, then David and Jesus, and finally Muhammad. Well that means Deuteronomy 13 is inspired according to the Quran. Deuteronomy 13 sets out the test of a true prophet. And one of the tests of a true prophet is that he does not contradict previous revelation. The Qur' an says that it confirms previous revelations. And yet you can demonstrate. You'll have to take the time to look many of these things up because we're moving so fast tonight. But you can demonstrate that the Koran contradicts the Bible. It contradicts the Torah, the Pentateuch and the Gospel of Jesus, for instance. It denies the deity of Christ. It contradicts the need for blood atonement in the Torah. It makes historical mistakes, the most embarrassing of which is that the Koran confuses Aaron's sister with Jesus. Mother Miriam and Mary are confused in the Quran at one point, according to the Koran, Jesus was not crucified, but Judas was crucified in his place. Muslims claim that Jesus was not Divine did not claim to be divine, that you're to worship, but one person is God. And so what we have done is just here in two minutes. We've seen that the Muslim faith destroys itself by its internal inconsistency. On the one hand, it recognizes the inspiration of parts of the Bible and then it turns around and it contradicts. Now what's the Muslim going to say? Yeah, but you Christians have corrupted the Bible. That's not really what the original revelation is. And here's where you're going to attack the Muslim for his arbitrariness. And you say, oh, and why do you say that? Apart from that it's convenient to your case, what is the evidence for the corruption of the Bible? Well, it must be corrupt because it contradicts the Koran. Now that is vicious circular reasoning, because here we're not dealing with, you know, whether it's the Bible or the Koran. We're all, you know, we're all agreed that the Pentateuch and the Psalms and the Gospel of Jesus are inspired. What they're saying is, though we don't have a true copy of these things, we say, do you have a true copy of these things? No, we don't. They've all been destroyed. How convenient. Do you have any reason to believe that the copies we have are corrupt? And the answer is there are all these textual variations in the Bible? Yes. And so if you do any study of textual criticism, you're going to be able to tell the Muslim not 1%, not even 1% of the textual variations in the Bible concern any significant doctrine of the Christian faith that cannot be established somewhere else. Muslims say, oh well, we have the miracle of the Koran where there are no textual variations. That's true. Well, actually it's not so true because I have different copies of the Koran and there are debates over how to interpret and to align and so forth. But nevertheless, assuming for argument's sake that they have a more uniform text, does that prove that their text is more divine than ours? Well, let's ask how did they get a uniform text? Anyone know the answer? In the third Caliphate of Othman, there was a recension of the text. Upon pain of death, everyone had to bring in their alleged copies of the Qur' an and they destroyed all variants so that there'd be but one text type left. Well, I mean, if you're going to use political enforcement, of course you can create the miracle of a uniform text. We could do that too. We'll shoot everybody that doesn't use the NIV and burn all the copies. And so now we just have one text of the Bible left. What's that? I was in the third caliphate. I'd have to look it up. You have three key rulers, caliphs. And in the rule of the third one, I think Othman is his name, there was a recension of the text. There's a problem with Muslim theology as well. On one hand, the Quran teaches that Allah has no characteristic that hints at change. Allah cannot be affected by the actions or attitudes of men. That Allah is so different from his creatures and the created order that he cannot even be described in any category of human experience. Well, that creates quite a problem, doesn't it? If Allah cannot be described in any category of human experience, where does Muslim theology learn about Allah? In the Koran. But then the Quran describes Allah in terms of human experience. All we have are human categories in fact. And so given what the Quran says about Allah, that is indescribable in human terms. The Quran cannot be what it claims to be a revelation of Allah. For the sake of time, I'll just encourage you. If you'd like to get more on this, you might listen to the debate tape. The debate that I had with this Islamic scholar a few months ago. In that debate, I particularly pushed the point of the material inadequacy of Islam to deal with man and his problem. I said, since Islam recognizes the Old Testament, the Torah, then we'll go to the Torah for our argument. And I press them for the meaning of circumcision and animal sacrifice and so forth. Then looked at the Messianic prophecies and said, none of this is accounted for by Islam. Man's need and God's provision of man's need, the coming Messiah. And I think it's interesting. I don't think it was just because of the format of the debate, but I didn't get the impression that the Muslim scholar wanted to debate Old Testament theology at all. That's a throwaway point. We recognize the Torah. But now, having said that, don't bring up the Torah anymore. And so Islam turns out not to be able to deal with mankind's basic problem, obviously the problem of sin. There is no redemption in Islam. Quickly, let's look at the next subcategory of biblical counterfeits. We'll take as an example the polytheistic perversion of Mormonism. I'm sorry, a couple that come to my mind. I'm not systematically prepared to narrow it down. This might be the ones I would Give if I thought about it, but Robert Morey has a book on Islam. It's gone under a couple of different titles, but you can still get that that's fairly helpful. I think it's overdone in a couple of places, but not so much that I wouldn't recommend the book. And then it turns out that John Ankerberg fellow who has the TV program has a little booklet on Islam that it's very brief but summarizes a lot of mater that I think you'll find helpful. Okay. The Mormons. It's been demonstrated from the county records of Bainbridge, New York that prior to Joseph Smith assuming the role of the prophet of a new religion, he had been tried and convicted as Joseph Smith the glass looker. Know what a glass looker is? There's somebody in the 19th century who went around and looked for buried treasure or for wells of water, source of water underground by putting a glass in his hat and then looking into the hat and claiming to be able to see into the bowels of the earth. It was a confidence game in those days. And he was convicted of being guilty of that sort of thing. He was, to put it simply, an imposter. And he admitted that he had done this on trial. His defense was not that he didn't do it, but that he didn't seek out the customers, they sought him out. That didn't prove to be true either. But I mean, the point is you need to know this man was an imposter before he became the prophet of God. Now, Mormons are very sensitive to the character of Joseph Smith. You need to be aware of that. So I'm not suggesting that should be your lead point, but I want you to know that before this man became the imposter prophet, he was already convicted as the imposter. You know, who would find buried treasure and where to dig wells and so forth for people. When all is said and done, you're going to find out that studied Mormons. For them, the issue will come down to the credibility of Joseph Smith. He was born in 1805 in Vermont, settled in New York at the age of 11. He didn't choose to join the Presbyterian Church a few years later when the rest of his family did so at the time he said he was perplexed as to which denomination he should join. So he went into the woods to pray at the age of 14. Allegedly two persons appeared to him in the woods and one said, this is my beloved son, hear him. Joseph Smith was told to join no church since they were all wrong and their creeds were an abomination. In September of 1823, he had another vision. It was repeated twice in the same night. Moroni came to his bedside. Moroni is supposed to be the messenger of God's presence. According to Mormon theology, Moroni said that God had work for Joseph Smith to do. His name should be had for good and evil among all nations. And that a book that was written on golden plates giving an account of former inhabitants of the continent of North America and the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was delivered by the Savior to these ancient inhabitants and was deposited in a hillside this village. According to the story, the next day Joseph Smith went out and found these golden plates in a stone box. He couldn't take them. He had to return them to the same place on the same day for the next four years. And then in 1827, he was given them for careful keeping. Now, for some months previous to this, Joseph Smith had eloped with a woman named Emma Hale of Harmony, Pennsylvania, because her father refused to give consent to his daughter to be married to a peep stoner. Later he returned to his. I can hardly blame him. Later he returned to his father in law's house due to the persecution he was facing, where he began copying characters and translating the plates. Now we introduce another character by the name of Martin Harris, who was a New York farmer. Harris proposed to publish the book Joseph Smith was writing, but he wanted assurance that the plates from which he was translating were genuine, that they were being properly translated. Not a bad idea. And so Smith gave the copied characters and translation, which he said was reformed Egyptian, to Martin Harris, who allegedly had them confirmed by a certain Professor Charles Anthon in New York City. He confirmed that these characters were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac and Arabic, which of course is not a language at all. In 1829, a former school teacher, Oliver Cowdery, became in amanuensis as Smith was allegedly translating these plates that had these four different languages, the fourth of which is not a language. He wasn't allowed to see the plates. However, they had to put up a sheet so that Smith would be on one side of the sheet and translate and Cowdery would write down the translation, the alleged translation, as he was on the other side of the sheet. A month later they went to the woods to pray and were there conferred with the priesthood of Aaron by John the Baptist, who descended as a heavenly messenger. They then began to prophesy and to understand the scripture. Later, Peter, James and John confirmed the Melchizedekan priesthood on them on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Why the three apostles had the authority to confer a priesthood that they didn't participate in, I'm not sure. But that's the story. March 26, 1830. Finally, the Book of Mormon goes on sale. On April 6, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was officially organized and incorporated. They began with six members. The oldest was 31 years old. Within a month they had 40 members. They did a great deal of missionary work among the Indians in Kirkland, Ohio. And it was at this point that Smith allegedly received the revelation of the Doctrine and Covenants. And also at this time he revised the King James Version of the Bible. Then he received a revelation that Jackson County, Missouri was the land of promise and the place for the city of Zion. For that reason, many followers settled at Independence, Missouri. The people of Missouri didn't take well to that. So mobs attacked them and led them to change to the city of Far West Missouri. The state militia had to intervene. After a number of battles between the settlers and the Mormons, Smith and a few other Mormon leaders were imprisoned. They escaped. They moved to Illinois. So much for the vision of where Zion was supposed to be. In 1839, the City of Nauvoo on the Missouri river was established and a small army called the Nauvoo Legion was organized. Things get pretty nasty hereafter. If you want to do your own reading, you need to learn something about what the Mormons did to enforce their religion on their followers. When a small anti Mormon newspaper published an article unfavorable to the Mormons, Joseph Smith ordered the press to to be destroyed and all the copies burned. A complaint was brought to the governor of the state and that led to the arrest of Joseph Smith. He was later released, but then rearrested with his brother. At that point a mob attacked the jail in Carthage, Illinois and he was killed. Much to the chagrin of us who have studied this. Because I believe that if Joseph Smith had not been killed, therefore becoming a martyr of the cause, he would have been discredited and the rest of his life would have probably destroyed the small beginnings of Mormonism. There was a struggle for leadership within the Mormon Church which was eventually won, as you know, by Brigham Young, who became the President of the Twelve Apostles. In 1846, Illinois expelled the Mormons. They had a troubled journey. But In July of 1847 they founded the city of Salt Lake city, Utah. Over 3,000 converts pushed hand carts from Iowa City to Salt Lake City. Take a look at the terrain and think about that and the number of people who died in the process. When Brigham Young died in 1877, there were then 140,000 Mormons. And from the 1960s on, there's been more than 2 million. What's the authority for Mormon doctrine? Article 8 of their articles of Faith says, we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. Okay. They also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. There's no reservation about its translation, however. Now, how do you know whether the Bible is translated correctly? Well, it's only translated correctly if it agrees with the Book of Mormon. So when all is said and done, it's going to come down to the authority of the Book of Mormon, isn't that right? Smith's revision of the Bible is far more than a corrected translation. In fact, it's a rewriting of the Bible in light of his new Revelations. For instance, in his version of Genesis 3, Satan now offers to God to redeem mankind, and there's a rebellion that takes place thereafter. In Genesis 6, Adam is baptized by immersion in this new translation, and we find a long prophecy by Enoch given in Genesis. We learn in Joseph Smith's translation that a man's ability to propagate sexually rests on his fall into sin. And Amazingly, in the 50th chapter of Genesis, we have a prediction of the appearance of Joseph Smith, the prophet of God, in this new translation of the Bible. In addition to those strange things, I would encourage people to read the Book of Mormon. I found many Mormons have not so much. So I actually had this experience. I had two Mormon missionaries come to my door one day, and I invited them in, as I always do. Enjoy talking to these people. People. I said, well, one of the reasons why I didn't agree with the Book of Mormon is because it was polytheistic. And this young lady said, we're not polytheistic. I said, well, sure you are. The Book of Mormon teaches there are many gods. No, it doesn't. So I pulled my Book of Mormon down, opened it up, duly showed it to her, and she wanted to leave. She's going to go back and ask about that. Then she came back and she informed me that they were not polytheistic. I was wrong, because they don't believe that we should worship many gods. We should only worship one God, the God of our universe. I said, okay, so you're henotheistic. Fine. There are many gods, but we only follow one of them. But there are many gods. Now that's just an example. Here's a missionary who has not even read the Book of Mormon. To understand what is in there, encourage people to read the Book of Mormon. They should also read the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Mormons believe that further revelation can be given through the President or the Council of Apostles. Then we must apply the test of Deuteronomy 13:18 to the Book of Mormon. Deuteronomy 13:18 tell us false prophecy, I.e. predictions that don't come true or prophecy that is not in accord with previous revelation discredits the prophet. According to Mormons, there is a plurality of gods and each has his own universe. They teach that women engage in celestial marriage and they have the privilege of bearing children for all eternity. That the baby souls that are born will go into human bodies when bodies become available. They teach that the God of this world is Adam. They teach that all gods are material in nature rather than spiritual beings. And that the gods undergo change. Now disasters up. Does the Bible teach there are many gods? That God is material, that Adam is the God of this world? Obviously, the Book of Mormon contradicts the Bible. And so you're going to have to choose between Joseph Smith's alleged translation of the Bible and the Book of Mormon or the Bible as we now have it. What about the Book of Mormon? The languages of the Book of Mormon? Allegedly four of them. Of course, Arabic is not a language, so that's a little strange that an alleged expert would say that. But the interesting thing is in the Book of Mormon, chapter nine, verse 32, we read that reformed Egyptian is not a human language either. Supposed to be reformed Egyptian, but we're told it's not a true human language. There are no manuscript copies for scholars to study of the Book of Mormon. There are of course, numerous hundreds of manuscript copies of the Bible to compare. So it comes down to taking one man's word for it. And that's why I began my short discussion by reminding you you're taking the word of a man who was a convicted peep stoner before he became the prophet of God. Chapter 9, verse 33 of the book of Mormon says Hebrew would have been a more perfect language, but the plates were not large enough for the Hebrew script. Ask yourself, couldn't God have made bigger plates? I mean, if that's true. Moreover, we have no instance of writing on metal plates from antiquity. And yet the Mormons claimed the entire Old Testament was once put on a brass plate about the year 600 BC. There have been many Changes made in the Book of Mormon since its original edition in 1830. This was supposed to be an inspired translation. Why then were changes made? There are both theological and grammatical errors in the Book of Mormon. Chapter 9, verse 34 of the book of Mormon says that no other person knows reformed Egyptian. And yet Mormons claimed that they went to an expert in linguistics and had the book confirmed. I mean, these contradictions, they can't even get their story straight. This is embarrassing. Internal contradictions, historical blunders, and a totally arbitrary story about a man with golden plates. I mean, people have got to be committed in advance to a lifestyle in order to keep defending this sort of thing. It's of course, intellectually discredited. There's one other kind of biblical counterfeit we should say something about as time is running out here, and that is religions that are pseudo messianic. I take as my example the Unification Church of Sun Young Moon from Korea due to an alleged vision of Jesus. Moon claims that Jesus commissioned him to complete the messianic work that he had not been able to do in the Unification Church. The final authority is not the Bible, but the writings of Sun Young Moon. He considers himself a Christian minister, even though he's been excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church. And he claims that his church is a Christian church even though he's very hostile to Christianity as a religion. He says that God is now throwing Christianity away and replacing it with the Unification in church. And that he, Moon, will be the most important person on the face of the earth someday. He says the Bible has a place, just so long as it goes along with what Moon has to say. According to him, there are three Adams and three Eves, three divine couples. The first pair were created by God to become the parents of perfect humanity. But God told them not to come together sexually until a period of spiritual maturation was completed. That got all messed up when Lucifer seduced Eve to have sex with him, whereby he became Satan the demon. One thing you can hand these religions, I mean, they are very creative, right? I mean, come up with these amazing stories. This marked the spiritual fall for both Lucifer and Eve. Eve then goes and tempts Adam to have sex with her, which leads to the physical fall of the human race. Eve had a baby by Lucifer, whose name was Cain. And according to Moon, he says Cain symbolized communism. Then Eve had a child by Adam, Abel, who symbolizes democracy. Well, at least he's against communism. You know, we can say one good thing for the guy. The second Adam, he says, was Jesus Christ. Moon denies the virgin birth and the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus was not God, but he was the first man to obey God since the first Adam. However, according to Moon, Jesus had a number of failures in his ministry. For example, the three wise men were supposed to rear Jesus until the day he would take a wife. Supposedly, Jesus was going to unify all the world religions. He failed in that task and was prematurely murdered on the cross before he found the second Eve. So he's the second Adam, but he never found the second Eve. If he could have found the second Eve, he would have had sex with her, and they would have begun the physical restoration of the human race. Wild Moon claims that Jesus was the bastard son of Zachariah and Mary. He claims that Christ was to find the most perfect girl in the world and have a huge family. According to Moon, the Holy Spirit is a female. He denies the resurrection. He denies the second coming of Jesus. Well, there's three Adams. You've heard the story of the first and the second. Who do you think the third Adam might be? That's it. The third Adam is the Lord of the second advent, Moon himself. He and his fourth wife, the third Eve, are to be addressed by followers as the true parents. You follow that? His fourth wife is the third Eve. Okay. Why do people believe this sort of thing? Sometimes apologetics is just done by telling the story and saying, you believe this? Really? Come on. Moon claims his followers can reach a level of sinless perfection through him, and they have no need to turn to Jesus Christ. He says, you can atone for your own sins and those of your ancestors by your good works. Is Moon who he says he is? If he's not, he's one of the most blasphemous men you can imagine. How are we going to settle the difference? Talking to a muni? Muni says, this man's the third Adam. He's the true messiah. You say, no, this man's blasphemous. Who's right? Who's wrong? How are we going to settle that? Moon must give his credence to the Bible, and he tries to do so. He shows deference to the Bible, provided it's interpreted according to his own teachings. Moreover, Moon wants to defer to Jesus Christ as a great religious leader while remembering, of course, Jesus failed and he's greater than Jesus. Most messianic cults, you will find in some way or another, do the very same thing. They bow down in some limited way to Jesus, and they want to use the Bible along with their own stipulations and restrictions on the Bible. Why won't they simply reject both Jesus and the Bible? You have to push them, say, why don't you just reject Jesus? This failure. Why don't you just reject the Bible altogether? And the reason why they can't is because there is a gripping power and credibility about Jesus and the testimony of the Bible they cannot avoid. And Jesus said that he was the only way to the father. He gave no deference to other religions. And so here you have Mooney's trying to defer to Jesus. He's a great man, and yet Jesus himself said that he was the only way to God. The Moonies want to incorporate Jesus into their religion, but the Jesus of the Bible wants nothing to do with the Moonies. When the claims of the new messiah are not publicly verifiable, as they are not for sun young Moon, then we must suspect that those claims are not true. Jesus gave claims which were publicly verifiable. Jesus challenged those who opposed him to go to the Bible. He said, go to the Bible. That's what testifies of me. He worked miracles. He rose from the dead. And the greatest verification, he said that those who reject his word will be judged by that word on the final day. Moon has none of these characteristics about him. In the case of Moon in particular, notice what kind of God he's talking about. He says God is to be pitied because God is surrounded by the forces of Satan right now. And God is hoping that Moon doesn't fail in his mission. Moon not only came to do better than Jesus, he came to save God. And now you should be able to complete the internal destruction of the system. What kind of God is it that needs to be saved? This isn't God we're talking about. Moon's not just the Messiah, he's actually greater than God. But then why should it be Moon and not me? I'm, you know, tongue in cheek. This is for apologetical purposes. If you're going to start doing that, why does Moon get to be the Messiah? I think I'll be the Messiah. Thank you. I have to find the third Eve and we'll propagate the new family of God. Why you. Every time someone responds with an arbitrary claim, you counter with an arbitrary claim so that the arbitrariness cancels each other out. Moon claims to be the third Adam. Why can't there be a fourth Adam? What's the source of his revelation? What's the source of his authority? He just made all this up. Let's see if we can summarize this. When we defend the faith, we're going to answer the fool according to his folly. You know that that's part of our task. So that he won't be wise in his own conceits. We're going to run into secular worldviews. Atheistic materialism, which cannot account for ethical absolutes, cannot account for concepts, cannot account for the uniformity of nature, for universals, for the mind of man, the dignity of man, the freedom of man, or how the one and the many are brought together, simply cannot put together a worldview that accounts for the simplest elements of human experience. Secondly, we have those worldviews that are dualistic or idealistic, like Plato's, which cannot relate mind and matter, idea and physical things. And then you have religious worldviews, transcendent mysticism which leads to irrationality, imminent moralism that leads to legalism, and counterfeits of Christianity like Islam, which contradict the Bible, the Mormons that contradict the Bible, and the Moonies that contradict the Bible. It's interesting. A lot of people think, well, presuppositionalists can't deal with these people that have their own revelations. We say, well, sure we can, because they acknowledge the Bible in one way or another. And so all we have to do is theological polemics with them. We just go to the Bible to disprove them. Well, the only other possibility is that somebody has a worldview that he wants to put together that we haven't run into yet. You say, okay, what if I get somebody who says, okay, I'm going to make up my own worldview? Well, but you see, that one sentence is enough to hang him, isn't it? I'm going to make up my own worldview. To which you're going to say, and then what authority will it have? So you've made up this worldview. Why should we believe your worldview rather than mine, or this guy's down the street or somebody else? Arbitrariness. Secondly, when he tries to make up his worldview, he will run into all the problems that you've seen in these worldviews up on the board. He will contradict himself over and over again. He will be arbitrary, and he will not be able, finally, to account for our most basic experiences as human beings. He won't be able to account for science or for ethics or for logic or for human dignity and freedom and all the rest. Answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceits. Do not answer the fool according to his Folly, lest you be like unto him. In a sense, what I've been trying to do over these nine sessions is to elaborate on those two verses from Proverbs. And I hope I put enough meat on the bones of this outline of apologetics that you have some idea how you could develop it yourself with the particular people that you talk to. I am sorry that in our rush tonight to get through all these different possibilities, we did not spend much time on the last portion of my syllabus. The conditions for apologetical success. Let me just encourage you, please, to do the reading there. It's not difficult, doesn't call for a lot of explanation, but I do want to end with that note that we began with that faithfulness and success in apologetics are going to be judged on the basis of what God's Word teaches us. If our goal as apologists is to try to lead people to belief in Jesus Christ, then we need to know what the nature of true belief is. The nature of true belief, according to the New Testament, is believing against hope according to the word of God. That's what the father of the faithful Abraham, did. Abraham did not come to faith, which is the model of Christian faith, did not come to faith by running out and checking with the evidentialist as to whether his wife could really have a baby in old age when she was barren. He believed against hope because the word of God had spoken it. We read in the Bible the nature of faith is to submit to the authority of God speaking in his word. The Bible exhorts us in 2nd Corinthians 11:3 not to be beguiled, as Eve was beguiled, to listen to the temptation of Satan, which ultimately made her her own authority to decide between God's hypothesis and Satan's hypothesis. And finally, the Bible exhorts us that we are not to lie in the defense of the truth. And I hope you can see that if we defect from the path of what I've called presuppositional apologetics, in a sense we are giving false impressions to the unbeliever that he has the right to put God on trial, that intellectually he has a worldview in terms of which he can argue and which he can launch his attack on Christianity, that he's really all right as far as he goes. He just doesn't add the religious dimension to his worldview. Those are things which are not true. If we're going to defend the truth, I think we need to lay it on the line with unbelievers and tell them it's really all or nothing. Basically, our defense of the faith is that if you don't have the Christian faith, ultimately you can't account for or defend anything. Do you have any questions you'd like to ask in this hurried conclusion to our class? Okay. Well, then I will tell you it's been a real pleasure being with you. I know the trip has forced me to leave shortly after the class. Haven't had a chance to visit with you. But I want you to know that I've had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope it won't be the last class that we do together. Thanks for coming. This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our bonsoninstitute.com where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.