Should We Only Study the Truth in the Bible and Not Learn About Other Beliefs?

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Should We Only Study the Truth in the Bible and Not Learn About Other Beliefs?

October 17, 2024

Questions about whether we should only study the truth in the Bible and not learn about other beliefs, whether the apologetics approach is contrary to the warning in 2 John 10, and the biggest change STR has seen in the types of questions asked over the years.

* If people who are trained to identify fake currency only study the real currency, should we therefore only study the Bible and not learn about other beliefs?

* Isn’t the apologetics approach contrary to 2 John 10, which tells us not to let anyone in our home who has an opposing view?

* What’s the biggest change STR has seen in the types of questions asked over the years?

Transcript

Thank you for joining us on hashtag SDRask and by us, I mean Amy Hall and Greg Koukl. And today, Greg, we have some tactics questions related to doing apologetics. So we'll start with one from Sharon.

I have frequently heard the analogy that people trained to identify fake currency only using their own as the real currency and therefore we should only study the Bible and not learn about other beliefs. This doesn't sit right with me. Am I wrong? It's not.

What would be your biblical defense against this idea? Well, this is interesting and I don't know if I can give a biblical defense, but you don't need a biblical defense necessarily to come to a wise conclusion about how to conduct yourself. The Bible has lots of wisdom, but it doesn't have all the wisdom there is. You know, a stitch in time saves nine.

That's been Franklin, right? That's pretty good. Penny saved as a penny earned or whatever. So it's ironic that I just recently heard a piece that was raised a concern about this advice and I thought it was a valid concern.

When you have a doctor who is going to take care of you, you don't want him to only know what health looks like. You want him to know what does it mean? What does the disease look like so he can recognize the particular disease and have the proctor antidote to it? The advice that is often given about recognizing the true things so you know a counterfeit is good advice, but it's not it's not all inclusive as advice because there are other options, other alternatives that are important. Take critical theory, for example, okay, I don't know how anybody who has a good grasp of scripture, a basic good grasp of scripture to Christian worldview is necessarily going to see, readily see, the falsehood contained in critical theory as a worldview.

That takes other other help, people who know more about it and then can connect the dots or show how the dots don't connect with a sound Christian worldview. So I think there is a place, a big place for knowing the challenges and how to respond to them. Look, scripture says a fool says in his heart, there is no God.

So atheists are fools. Okay, we know that's true because scripture says there is a God and we and we believe scripture on that regard. And we have a different testimony like, for example, Romans 1 that everybody has this evidence available to them to know that God exists, but they suppress the truth and righteousness.

Okay, well, that's all well and good as far as it goes. But if you have an atheist who is showing saying, I don't believe in God because of the problem of evil, how can a good powerful God allow evil in the world? Well, I can't think of a text that's going to answer that question. That's going to take a different sort of knowledge, a knowledge of that disease and how to cure it to follow the medical metaphor I was using earlier.

And so I think that's true about a whole host of things, even the things that we're facing uniquely now, which tend to be sexual. Yes, knowing that God made human beings, male and female tells us the norm, but it doesn't give us a shrewd way of dealing with the errors. You have to understand the errors and some of the things about the errors to know how best to respond to them.

One of the things we've said this before is that this particular error has attained the status of a fad, a social, what do they call it, a social contagion? And so when you see that that's the case, it helps you in responding to these issues, but that's going to come from somewhere else other than the Bible. We get foundational truths about the way God made the world and how he wants the world to operate and who he is. All of those will help with secular issues and understand the errors of secular issues and understand the errors of theological issues coming from aberrant groups.

But that doesn't, how can I put this? That isn't always adequate for you to be able to respond to the issues in a way that's going to be helpful and productive for the person who holds these views. That's additional stuff. It's interesting, Paul, it says in Acts 17, that he argued and gave evidence that Jesus was the Christ.

And what's interesting is when he argued with those who were the Athenians, the Ariapagos, he didn't use scripture. He actually cited Epicurean philosophers that they might have been familiar with. So there's a whole range.

So there are some scriptural support for the point I'm making, but mostly just appealing to a kind of a common sense. You can know the truth and spot the lie. But that doesn't mean that you're capable of helping people see that the lie is a lie.

And that's a different level than just simply knowing the lie is there. Now, I just want to add to this that, of course, knowing your Bible goes a long way and I wish people knew their Bible is better. And I would even go so far as to say, if you're trying, if you need to pick one or the other, am I going to only study the Bible or am I only going to study other religions, then obviously go with the Bible.

We need a better foundation. Everyone needs a better foundation. So this nothing that we're saying is denigrating the Bible or saying we should do less of the Bible.

I think we need all need more of that. But when it comes to other religions, if you don't know anything about them, you will miss things. As you said, Greg, I was just thinking about Mormons, for example, Mormons use the same words we do.

So if you don't actually know what they believe, you would think you agreed and you could have a whole conversation with them and not realize that you were saying two completely different things. So there's a specific case where you would need to have a little bit of knowledge of the other, of the other religion. And you pointed this out to Greg, if you don't have any knowledge of other worldviews, you will not notice when they start creeping into the Christian world and creeping into what your friends are saying.

If you can recognize what somebody is saying and see not just their one statement, but how it connects to a greater worldview as a whole system of ideas, let's say they say something like, well, you do you. Okay, well, if you don't understand what the worldview is behind that, it's much harder to try and reach them and help them to understand where they're going wrong in their thinking and how to show them the gospel in a way that they can understand. So you want to be able to hear what people are saying and immediately know where they're coming from.

It's just, it's very helpful and you'll hear them the way they're actually speaking, because sometimes if you only know one worldview, you won't actually hear what people are saying at all. You'll kind of interpret it in terms of what you believe rather than what they believe. So that is a good reason to understand what other people are saying.

Look, I love the author Orson Scott Card. He's Mormon, and I can spot Mormon things in his books, and I recognize where they're coming from. I bet a lot of people wouldn't recognize those things, but in the past I'll be reading it and saying, oh, this is so Mormon.

I just recognize there are certain worldview ideas that are coming out in his books that I can recognize. Now, in terms of the Bible, you mentioned Paul. I can think of a couple times with Paul.

There's the time when he is being put on trial, and so he says, I'm being put on trial because of my belief in the afterlife, basically. The resurrection. And so he's obviously aware that the two groups who are arguing against them actually have different views on this, and therefore they start arguing amongst themselves.

So he clearly knew what he was doing there. And then, of course, in Acts 17, he knew what the views of the, was that the Corinthians? The Athenians. And so he obviously was aware.

He quoted their poets. He understood what their worldview was, and he was able to speak to them in a way that they could understand. And even Jesus with the woman at the well was aware of what the Samaritan thought.

So I don't think there's any need to hide ourselves from these other views and only look at the Bible. But I also still think the Bible has to have first place because that is the, that is the first thing you need to do. If you don't know what you're comparing things to, then it's very hard to respond to other ideas.

Yeah, our kind of first order of affairs is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. It's not to make converts. You know, that's the highest good, the sumum, and the source for that information is scripture.

Of course, scripture also commands us to take this message and to share it and to make disciples, etc. I was thinking in one other meaningful parallel to your semantic confusion that you cited with LDS and Christians, same language, different definitions in that social justice. Well, a lot of Christians are concerned about justice, especially social justice, if you will, on a certain sense of it.

I'll just read Zephaniah, you know, Zechariah. Zechariah a couple days ago, and Zechariah is talking about don't oppress the poor and the fatherless, you know, the widows and the orphans. Well, okay, we believe in that.

So when we hear terms like social justice, that's what we think of often time biblically, but we don't realize often times that that is the term of art in a different worldview. It's not about the kind of social justice we're talking about. It's about a Marxist view of reality and imposing that view with these moralistic terms with this moralistic terminology attached to it that Christians would misunderstand if they didn't understand what was going on.

Okay, let's go to a question from Ossoff. Isn't the apologetics approach contrary to 2 John 10? If we are not letting anyone in the house slash church with an opposite view, how can we tell them the good news? Well, 2 John 10 says this. If any, it's a very short book, one chapter, 13 verses.

All right. And it is written to the elder, to the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all who know the truth for the sake of the truth, which abides in us and will be with us forever. All right.

That's the first two verses. Okay. There's only a lot of more verses.

And this is instruction regarding a church in the house of this woman. And what John is warning against is the deceivers that infiltrate Christian churches and are accepted as teachers, yet they are wolves in sheep's clothing, not a metaphor. He uses here, but still that's a biblical one that applies in the circumstance.

Verse 10 says, let me back up and say, I'm starting verse 8. Watch yourselves that you do not lose what we have accomplished, but that you may receive a full reward. Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God, the one who abides in the teaching. He has both the father and the son, now are relevant first, verse 10.

If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, the teaching of Christ, he just referred to, do not receive him into your home and do not give him a greeting for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds. Now, keep in mind, the purpose of this letter is to speak to the problem of false teaching in local communities. This is one of them, and that's the nature of this warning.

Some people think this means if a Jehovah's Witness knocks on your door, you don't open the door, you don't ask them in. If LDS missionaries come in, you don't ask them in. When they come into your home, they are not coming into a church environment and giving teaching for the Christians that are there, unbeknownst, unbeknownst to them that they're teaching error.

That's the circumstance that's being addressed in this passage. No, we are supposed to engage people that have false ideas with inappropriate defense apologetics, if you will, but we are not to let these people into our church to teach falsehood. And this is the kind of thing that John was addressing here in 2 John.

Okay, Greg, I don't have anything to add to that. Let's go on to a question from Julie. What is the biggest change STR has seen in the types of questions asked over the years? Well, actually, that's pretty easy.

That, and you mentioned it, I'm not sure if this is a podcast or a previous one that we did recently, but that we are beset by questions on this. On the issue of sexuality, particularly the issues of gender and gender dysphoria and transsexualism and transvestitism and all of the things that relate to that. Now, why are so many people asking questions about how to deal with that, pronouns, et cetera, and the reason is because there's a massive push in the culture in a particular direction.

And it's a full court press is coming from government principally that and its areas of influence. But it's also the word that came to mind was seeped down into, but it doesn't hasn't seeped hasn't been a passive kind of enterprisely. It's flooded the public sector, the private sector, the big business, all kinds everywhere.

The educational system, not just the academy, not just the university environment, but also in grade school and just as far down as the teachers unions and the left is able to get it. All of these sexual things. And so it is, it is just consumed our culture and Christians are facing it everywhere, even in their own families.

And so consequently they have been, they've been really, really challenged. And so they ask questions about that. That's the biggest one.

And this flood started 2015 right after the Supreme Court Obergefell decision that essentially legalized same sex marriage as a constitutional right. I thought it was going to be all over after that. It would quiet down.

And all of a sudden this other issue came out of nowhere and has taken over everything. Yeah, I think I'm, that's definitely been an increase in that for sure. I can just see that just from the questions that come into the show.

I'm going to step out and get an even bigger picture perspective, looking at all the questions I've gotten over the years because a lot of the questions that come into stand a reason go directly to me. So I see a lot of questions coming in. And I would say there has been the biggest shift and it's related to what you said, Greg, has been from more philosophical type questions to theological questions.

So whereas at years and years ago it was more about is is intelligent design real does God exist? What's the evidence for God? And now the questions are, look, God is not good. He, he says this about sexuality and that's bad. He says this about justice and hell and that's bad.

And the questions have just moved to almost exclusively theological questions, which I think is is very interesting. And I think there are two reasons for this. Wait, no, let me back up that the second area where things have changed is that they've gotten way more practical questions and people have probably noticed on the show that we get questions about what should I do in this situation.

So there are a lot more questions about how do I handle this situation where my Christian worldview is being challenged. So it's a specific question. It's not just an abstract question about ideas.

These are specific questions about how to respond to other people in certain situations. And I think there are two reasons for this. And one is what you said, Greg, our culture has changed.

And as our culture moves away from the Christian worldview, I think it's even moved somewhat away from atheism at this point. I think it's starting to people are becoming more pagan. There's other kind of new AG ideas and other sorts of ideas happening.

And now the question is, is your God, is your God good or bad? I also think people maybe have less of an idea of religion actually being true or false. I'm not sure if that's worse now or better now that I have to think about that. But I think the other thing playing into the difference in questions has to do with the expansion of apologetics.

I think probably 20 years ago, it was a much smaller world, and you had a lot of usually men, philosophers who were discussing these philosophical questions. As apologetics have spread and become more popular, you have a lot more women interacting in this world. And I think because of that, because we're so relational, we end up in these situations where we want to know how to respond to people.

There are certain social situations. And I think that is also played into the interesting questions we get. Right.

Right. Good thoughts, Amy. And that's it for me, Greg.

I think we're out of time. That went really fast. I had more questions, but we'll have to save them for another time.

So thank you, Sharon and Asif and Julie. We appreciate hearing from you. You can send us your question on X with the hashtag STRS.

I still have trouble saying X is Twitter, even after all this time. It's a habit. But we'd love to hear from you.

So send us your question. This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.