In The Reason I Believe: The Basics of Christian Apologetics, Allen Quist reveals “the forgotten and untold secret of our time,” namely, that the apostles grounded their teaching of Christ’s resurrection upon well-supported and widely known facts, which secular authorities also documented during the first and second centuries A.D.
Quist identifies four objective criteria by which to distinguish true from false prophets in the Old Testament era:
- True prophets authenticate their ministries with sensational miracles.
- True prophets agree with the teachings of Moses.
- The predictions of true prophets always come to pass.
- True prophets avoid the marks of false prophets (that is, they avoid telling people what the want to hear, making self-serving predictions, promoting false gods, living immoral lives, and making predictions that fail to come true).
In a similar manner, Quist also identifies four objective criteria by which to distinguish reliable from unreliable accounts of the chief events recorded in the New Testament.
Avoiding academic jargon, Quist makes Christian apologetics accessible to a broad audience, equipping the rising generation to “share the gospel and the evidence of its truth.” This book will benefit high school and college students and is suitable both for personal reading and group study. I heartily recommend it.
Dr. Ryan MacPherson holds a PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame. After serving for twenty years as a professor at Bethany Lutheran College, he served as the founding academic dean of Luther Classical College for three years. He is author of Rediscovering the American Republic, a two-volume anthology of primary sources in American history, as well as several other books on topics ranging from theology to politics to bioethics. Dr. MacPherson has testified in court in defense of a homeschool father and for the protection of traditional American civics curricula, contributed to legal briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of marriage and the rule of law, appeared regularly on a variety of radio shows, and taught seminars for pastors and educators in Canada, Denmark, and Ecuador. The MacPherson homeschool family offers online enrichment courses through Lifelong Lyceum.
