Continuing on the same line of thought I started in the previous post, I wanted to clarify further the problem of reductionism in Christian apologetics. By reductionism I mean reducing the requirements of what it means to be a Christian to an absolute minimum. In other words is it okay to simply affirm God's existence, Jesus' resurrection and that's it? Is that what Christianity is?The answer ought to clearly be 'no'. You cannot be a Christian without accepting all of Christianity. Let me be clear, I am not talking about soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). What must you do to be saved? Repent and believe on the Lord Jesus (Acts 2:38;19:4 John 3:16; Eph. 2:8-10). You don't need to know, understand or believe any more than the basic gospel to be saved. Almost no one can articulate the Trinity when they come to faith in Christ, but do you need to believe the Trinity to be a Christian? Yes.
It's not about what you have to believe, at minimum, to be saved. It is about what do Christians believe? What should I (we) believe if we have repented and believed in Christ? We should believe the Bible and all it teaches. To reject the Scripture is to reject Christ because the Scripture is the word of Christ (Romans 10:17).Now someone will surely say 'but, that argument is circular' because I am arguing from the Bible to say that the Bible is the word of Christ. Okay, that's a fine thing to say... if you are an unbeliever. I understand having to defend the Bible to an unbeliever, but I am talking about those who have been convinced already that God exists and Jesus is His Son and that God raised Jesus from the dead. If you can get there by evidence and reason, what's your hang up with believing the Bible?
Furthermore, if you have believed in Christ as the resurrected Savior, what are you supposed to do now? What did Jesus save you from and what did he save you for and to? You see all of the information about why Christ had to die, why he had to rise bodily and what we are supposed to do with our lives in light of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection is in...guess where? The Bible.
The Bible is the content of Christianity. If you separate the Christ of history (the Christ of apologetic argumentation) from the Christ of the Bible what do you have? Some disconnected facts about a person named Jesus who taught (something?) and died by Roman crucifixion and rose bodily from the grave on the third day. But what do you do with that information if you don't have the Bible to fill in the context and meaning?
Now some will surely say 'well of course the Bible is important and we need it, but it's not inerrant'. The idea being we can use the Bible to fill in context and meaning but we cannot take it as perfect or infallible truth. Maybe they got a lot of things right but some of it wrong?
But who are you, O man, to judge the Bible? Will the one who is saved by Christ say to him 'why have you not protected all of your word?' Or do you not know that is exactly what he has done! The God who is powerful enough to create the world out of nothing, powerful enough to save sinners and raise Jesus from the dead, is powerful enough to keep his word trustworthy.
But you realize what happens when we talk about the Bible being 'generally reliable' don't you? It becomes ours to use selectively. If we reject the notion that the very words of the Scripture are 'theopneustos' (God breathed) and that every 'jot and tittle' is inspired and instead go with the notion that the Bible is just 'fairly historically accurate', then we set ourselves up as judges over the Bible. Ruling from our wicked hearts (Jeremiah 17:9) we decided what in the Bible is important to obey and what we can dismiss as simply a product of that culture. The Bible is accurate enough to tell us that Jesus rose from the dead to save us from our sins, but not accurate enough to tells us about God's will for human sexuality or whether or not it is okay for women to be pastors (those things are cultural, right?).
When you separate Christ from the Bible you separate Christ from Christianity. If your Christ isn't the same as the one in the Bible then your Christ is without content and cannot save you because you don't have a basis for understanding what you need saved from or saved to. Christ Jesus, if he is anything, is the Jesus of the Bible. He is the Lord who commends the Bible to you as the very word of God. He looks back to the prophets and says that's the word of God, he is God and he spoke, and he set apart apostles to speak for him.
So while I understand the reasoning of some apologists who say that you only have to believe that Christ died and rose from the dead to be a Christian, that is only true as it relates to believing that the Christ in mind is the one who is understood in light of the Bible. To be a Christian is to recognize Jesus is Lord of your life and that involves knowing and following his commandments. But where do we get the content of Jesus' teaching? From the Bible.
John 8:31 "So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples."
