Defining Christianity // Show Notes
1:55 – Legg’s Project about Salvation
5:55 – Velvet Elvis comments
What has to be true?
What do I have to believe?
What could I believe wrongly and then have the wrong god?
7:25 – Sherrod comment about talking to Mormon about salvation
8:13 – Voddie Baucham story
8:25 – Legg’s Convo with Islamic apologist
10:40 Sherrod’s definition of Christianity
⁃ Essentials/most foundational things of Christianity
⁃ God is one, but exists in 3 parts, father, son and holy spirit
⁃ Equal in essence
⁃ Son came to earth, was fully god and fully man – Hypostatic union
⁃ As we understand scripture to teach Christianity, we need a savior – a way to repair the broken relationship with God, and God provided that way through his son Jesus.
⁃ Salvation – Jesus lived the life we should have lived, died the death we should have died, rose again and conquered death. He offers this to us freely.
12:55 – What separates Christianity from everything else. Everything else spells salvation as: D-O. Works based salvation.
Christianity spells salvation: D-O-N-E. Christ has done the work for us to be saved.
13:17 – Two diagnostic questions:
⁃ Do you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven? 1 John 5:13 “I write these things to you who believe in the son, that you may know that you have eternal life.”
⁃ If you were to die, and God was to say “Why should I let you into my heaven?,” what would you say?
16:14 – Short definition when we, at Reconstructed Faith, talk about Christianity
⁃ We are talking about the Christ-centric faith, the provision and revelation of the Holy Bible (Old and New Testaments).
17:17 – Trusting God for something he hasn’t promised.
⁃ Sheep Analogy
⁃ Very often the faith that people deconstruct should be deconstructed
⁃ Tim Keller quote – if someone says they don’t believe in God, he’ll say describe for me the god you rejected, because I may not believe in him either.
18:00 – Sheep discussion with Sherrod
19:00 – Sherrod Christianity “Box” analogy
20:40 – Legg, Elephant discussion
23:20 – Roadblock example – Age of the Earth
25:25 – False Dichotomy some people have
⁃ Having to choose between science and faith
26:55 – what to look for in a church conversation
⁃ Deferring to the authority of scripture – humble attitude
31:45 – if you’re going to wander through the wilderness, you need a true north, something to trust. Humans aren’t it.
32:00 – G. K. Chesterton quote – It used to be that we were confident in trusting in truth revealed to us, and skeptical about ourselves. Now it is the exact opposite. Now we are skeptical about truth and confident to trust ourselves.
34:45 – Legg unpacking of Christianity definition
36:38 – The appeal of legalism is that it allows you to look religious without heart change
37:00 – Difference between legalism and relationship
Key Quotes from the Episode
It’s a wild conversation just how short the list is about what you have to know and believe in order to be a Christian.
A lot of people are deconstructing a faith that 1) never was their own faith, essentially jumping because their parents in front of them jumped (see sheep analogy, 18:00) or 2) they have built into it all these expectations of God who, for example, will never let me go through pain, or who always makes me happy. Unfortunately if you believe that about God you’re going to be disappointed.
When you read the scripture for yourself, you are either set free in a positive way to believe the God who is (not the God I was raised on), or you’re set free to not worship anything but myself because I don’t trust anything but myself.
What Christians needs to do is deconstruct the childish faith they have, the “Santa-Clause” faith they have.
In rebelling against the false stuff in your beliefs, you don’t have to throw everything away. Just the false stuff.
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