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CHALLENGE: The value of Christ’s sacrifice was infinite. He paid it all. Therefore, there is no role for penance in the Christian life.DEFENSE: The value of Christ’s death on the cross was infinite—more than enough to pay for all the sins of mankind. But even after God has forgiven the eternal consequences of our sins, he wants us to experience some negative consequences.When a child misbehaves, there need to be consequences. If parents never applied any discipline, the child would never learn h …

When a true prophet says something about the future, at some point, it must be fulfilled. This raises the question of how the concept of fulfillment works. In cases of non-symbolic prophecy, it is often easy to identify the fulfillment, as when Jesus said he would rise from the dead. The concept of fulfillment is not always so straightforward, however. One reason is that—as we noted in Answer 5—a symbol can have more than one meaning and thus be fulfilled in more than one way. In Revelation, the …

Asking questions is an important part of the apologetic process, and it is important for every apologist to devote conscious thought to the art of asking questions—what they are used for, how they should be phrased, etc. The Socratic Method: Often apologists think of questions in connection with the Socratic method. In Plato’s dialogues, the figure of Socrates uses questions to challenge the beliefs of those around him. He asks questions designed to strip away false elements of these beliefs. Th …

CHALLENGE: Matthew and Luke contradict each other. Matthew says Judas hung himself (Matt. 27:5), but Luke says that “falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18).DEFENSE: The accounts preserve different aspects of the event but do not contradict each other.Both agree Judas died shortly after the Crucifixion. Matthew says Judas hanged himself after returning the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, while Luke has Peter speaking of the event duri …

There are many books on the subject of salvation, and many of them share certain characteristics:1. They focus exclusively on the subject of eternal salvation.2. They focus in particular on the doctrine of justification.3. They often ignore, in the interests of systematic theology, the way in which the Bible uses language.4. They are often written in a polemical, hostile style.5. Due to the authors’ unfamiliarity with the way other groups of Christians express themselves, they mistakenly critici …