Christianity is the best explanation

In a recent podcast on Stand To Reason, Greg Koukl discussed his view of why Christianity is the best explanation for how things are.

My notes:

Xty best way to a coherent world view

Atheism has too much that is counter intuitive and is not possible to affirm rationally.

To say that everything came from nothing, that life came from non-life?

That 'dead stuff' became 'living stuff' by itself? Really?

That consciousness emerged from some re-combination of molecules

That morality is a function of Darwinian evolution? (see 'Street Smarts' book).

None of these things work. Even in the slightest degree. So radically counter-intuitive.

Morality: all NDE can do is give you relativism, where the moral locus is the self. And if relativism is true, there is no 'problem of evil'. In fact, to the individual 'evil' should be undetectable. All one has is personal inconvenience or aversion.

Evil second most salient feature of reality: to all people at all times it is obvious that 'something is not right with the world, let alone 'me' in the world. [cf Paul in Romans 7:14ff)

First is consciousness: not brain or central nervous system. But consciousness itself: your 'who-ness' and by which all perceptions above come and who you know you are.

Your conscious self is the most salient thing about you.

Matter by itself cannot do what consciousness does. thoughts, feelings, experiencing them, having them, acts of will, intentions (itself teleological: about things that do not exist), beliefs: none are features of physical things.

So obvious that atheism and materialism are false.

No equal to Christianity as a world view in its ability to coherently explain the nature of reality and the nature of our experience of reality.

Reality is structured a certain way. You 'bump into it', you cannot make it up and succeed with it.

Individual beliefs are not 'our truths'. If they conflict, someone must be wrong! We can both be wrong, but both cannot be right in the same terms.

Individual truths: just silly. Either sound/factual or not.

Beliefs are either true or false, not always personal truth. There is 'true truth' in Schaeffer's terms. 

Messiah?

I'm guessing that most people do not know what it means that Yeshua is the Messiah: the chosen one of God. In the line of David, descendant of Judah, priest after the order of Melchizedek: Hebrews 7. 

Muslims certainly don't know, even though their book makes this reference.

In brief, the Messiah is the messenger of God to man as God in man (Daniel 7 -- one like a 'son of man'). One come to resolve the severance of man from God and the resulting dilemma of man otherwise unresolved.

He reunifies man and God. 

Who are you and who am I?

Christians, even today, often attempt to present the gospel on the basis of 'you are a sinner' or 'God own you but you are disobedient to him' and similar lines, perhaps stimulated by a misreading of Galatians 3:24, where the law as the guardian in anticipation of Christ is misread/translated as the teacher/tutor/guardian to 'lead us to' Christ.

No. With Christ, the law as any route to salvation, even contra-positively, plays no role. 

So talking to our contemporaries:

Lets not start with the word 'sin' and 'sinner' because these are either meaningless terms to our contemporaries, or conjures up an obdurate legalism that has nothing to do with the proclamation of the gospel.

Still, we do need to drive a point, but, in language that makes sense to our peers.

So, let's expand 'sin' in terms of the biblical words: the Bible Project has a helpful piece on this.

Missing the mark! Much more descriptive.

I like the phrase "failure to be who we really are". Something that might make sense to people outside the
Christian community. A phrase more likely to open a conversation than close it down.

Your interlocutor might then ask: so who are we really? How could you/we know?
Whence 'failure' and how do you define or understand it? 

A few conversational gambits might be up your sleeve.

In response to someone's horror at some horror: social, natural, criminal, etc

"Sadly part of the horror show of a dislocated humanity"  

Far better than the conversation stopper of 'that's sin for you'

The follow on concept snippets that might be ready for use could be:

'Sin' is the word Christians use for our dislocation from who we really are and the resulting loss of value coherence. 

Reprieve has to come from outside humanity, and even outside this world, because we can only keep doing what we keep doing! And it has in the self-existent creator joining us in Jesus of Nazareth/Yeshua the Nazarene.

If they dismiss this as being 'religious' you might point out that a religious belief is a belief about what is independently real. So everyone lives in terms of a 'religious' belief, articulated, examined, or not. (Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality) 

What other 'disrupting' but positive comments might you make to open the way to a 'gospel' conversation (even if a mere snippet)?

In many cases this opening might be appropriate (or not inappropriate):

In a world conceived in (purely) materialist terms there is neither diagnosis nor treatment for the  human (dilemma/condition) -- only must wide-eyed despair at humanities history of failure, terror and cruelty in spite of its inexplicable (nobility/dignity/potential); yet in that conception the only real onclusion is the futility of death.

Back to the 'failure to be who we really are'

"Which is?" the interlocutor might ask.

People in harmony with their creator.

This idea jars against a materialistic conception of both who we are and life having any real purpose.

That itself is a symptom of the disconnect that we live in: denial that personhood is the most basic structure of reality.

And we are made to be connected to that basic structure, which, of course, is personal and relational. 

This can then go many ways...

 

Creator...personal, but not merely personal, 'love' expressed within the personal triple being...Genesis
creation description...we made for community with the creator (Gen 3:8a) then severed from creator by rejection of the way he is ...love ...repaired by him entering our humanity to rebuild the connection by renewal of us.

The idea of reality being basically delineated in terms of life in person strikes the materialist, particularly
the modern Western one, as strange if not alien.

Time for reorientation, and the implication is that our personalness is derivative of and compatible
with what absolutely is; it is not derivative of incompatible random material events by which no value is real. 

 A book: Beyond Identity by Dick Keyes of the L'Abri Fellowship. 

How long is an age long, and why?

Part of the age issue is theological, which I don't think has attracted much attention.

Some thoughts:

Ancient (pagan -- or 'mimetic' and idealistic -- or exilic, such as Hinduism -- using Westphal's taxonomy) views of the age of the cosmos were of long ages ( far longer than modern), eternal existence or unquantified into myth. They all tended to dehistoricize the origin stories or myths (often accompanied by ludicrous and irrational causality and calling upon fantastical creatures -- perhaps related to pre-flood denizens?). That is, outside the flow of time we are in and thus unreachable by and uncontactable by us.

It is the 'uncontactable' that is important: they all thus tend to or actually de-personalize the creation event(s) and place the creating force at inaccessible remove from our life-world and historical flow. The 'gods' are incommunicado,  remote, and uninterested in the creature, except as fodder or slaves, it would seem

All of this serves to strand humanity in an impersonal cosmos with the only possible 'integration point' being, at best, fickle exploitative forces indifferent to man's good and often inimical to it. At worst enabling man's depravity, cruelty and assertion of determinative moral opinions 

Modern materialist 'long ages' touted as accommodating Evolutionary processes, but in fact far too short for NDE to produce the current biota, are in this league. As against the Genesis account (which extends across Genesis 1-3, IMO)  which places man for fellowship with God in the same time-space and historical flow that the stage of fellowship was created.

In this account God is communicatively with us and ontologically and actually present and active directly and personally in our time-space world, which he spoke (speaking the first gesture of fellowship) into existence. The creation is thus both historicized and personalized. It echos the love with which the Creator worked.

Furthermore, it grounds in what is truly real our epistemology, our ontology and our axiology, all in the God who is and who speaks, finally in his Messiah where the '2nd person of the godhead' takes on human form as the inheritor of the creation. The grounding is in our time-space shown in God's action in the days that we exist in without denigrating but rather exulting in them .They define the domain of his creatures who would reflect his image in his creation for them, in a resonant responsive relational congress.

So, modern 'long ages' push God's creative acts out of our sphere of action and history to de-couple the creation from our 'life-world' and intruding an existential barrier of an incomprehensible past unreflective of the warmth and care of the creation events. They make any interaction with God of dubious historical weight. This possibly invites back the Platonism which has dogged theology for too long and makes God personally differently from his revelation of self in Genesis 1-3. It detaches Messiah from the continuity of care (love) demonstrated in that account and fantasizes the New Creation, when the NT has it the palpable consummation of the Kingdom of Christ.

 

More cogitating on my previous note:

Long age views of creation displace God as he identifies himself in G 1-3 as the sole author of creation. They replace him with the creation itself in some way, To the extent that in TE he is merged into and becomes indistinguishable from the creation. However, long-age creationists similarly displace him more subtly because the bulwark against displacement is removed.

The work in days delineate God's self proclaimed relationship with the creation, and convey his identity as the one distinct from creation while able to, preserving that distinction, be its sole author.

This diminished identity then diminishes what it is to be in God's image and in communion with God...imperiling the communion we look forward to in the New Creation, which may now also be destabilized as the creation no longer bears the exclusive mark of God's love.

Other views challenge his sole authorship by deferring to views that were old when Epicureanism was current and use that story, which served to eliminate God as creator. These invented views then supplant the Biblical account, taking us somewhere else. At once God's identity and our relationship with both the creator and the creation as the creation is  changed. The priority that God reserves for himself in G 1-3.is now shared with or given to the creation.

The locus of 'creation' moves from the propositional and relation-building word of God, to the mute creation itself.

Christ's lordship is, as a result, diminished as the creation has  'done its own thing' absorbing God's work and anonymizing it, at best. In these terms the question as to what God did in the long age views remains unanswered or reduced to speculation adrift from revelation.

The various long age views fail to stand up to Nagel's forlorn description of life as a (meaningless) episode between two oblivions...despite that no sane person really lives this way.

Provisional thoughts, but may be of interest.

 

How does God Work?

One of the theological puzzles we have is how does God work? How does he achieve his will with (currently) 8 billion people doing their own thing?

The two classical answers post Augustine and even more so post the Reformation are "Calvinism" (re-badged Augustinianism) and "Arminianism", which amounts to a reconfigured Calvinism.

So-called "Provisionism" so-branded by its opponents, is the classic Baptist approach to both soteriology and divine sovereignty in terms of creatures in his image ( which God must take seriously as he called it very good), I don't think takes much time, explicitly, over this issue.

In short terms, Calvinism holds that God 'meticulously pre-determines' all things whatsoever, down to the organization of sub-atomic particles (not that he knew about them, but it follows), This extends to who will be 'saved' and who will be 'damned'. Not a good look, in my view, based as it is on pagan philosophy mixed with a misreading of Romans 8-11 and a God who is as limited as is man.

Arminians have a similar end state but by a different route: God knows what will happen as from his timeless existence can see it into the future and chooses those who he knows will turn to him in Ephesians 1:13 style. These he reflexively chooses to save, the others not so.

This makes too many assumptions about time, God's state of being and what human volition truly is or is not.

I think there is a simpler approach.

Firstly, God and time.

Whatever we might think theoretically about time and timelessness, the creation account shows God present and active in the days of our lives (to quite a TV show), or to be more existential, the days in which we have our life-world, in which we live. So God is here, with us, in time, in our history and in fellowship.

How this works out.

Calvinists and Arminians and other determinists seem to have a small God, projected in terms of the nature of limited human decision matrices. But God is far bigger than that.

First off, God created all being we experience. We are in the restricted domain of his creating. A domain he is exhaustively knowledgeable of. Nothing that happens in that domain can catch him out. He will always have an answer to achieve his ends despite anything man can do or imagine.

So, he has no need to 'determine' anything. Given his knowledge of the existential structures and the nature of man he has created, nothing can out-wit him. He neither needs to determine (eviscerating our true freedom as in his image), or see into a yet to exist future.

Even with the vast number of consequential choice options on earth (say 5 to the power of 8 billion at each choice node) and along consequential choice pathways, the options remain a tiny number for God to comprehend and manage. As a participant in history, which he shows he is, he is well able to use focused interventions (those quiet prompts we might feel, for example or circumstantial events) to bring special circumstances to action, in reflection of Romans 8:28.

No matter what puny man with his tiny intellect and dull imagination: just above the level of a gnat's from God's perspective, can do, nothing can derail God's objective which he has for the ultimate good of those in Christ and adopted into his family.

 Soli Deo Gloria!

Why only 1 way?

At my youth group (attendee only) back last century (I love saying that), one of the other attendees asked why Jesus was the only way. She had become quite upset at the exclusivity as she perceived it that this claim seemed to entail.

All I can recall of the answer was a repetition of the relevant scriptural passage, with no further discussion, and much frustration and bemusement all around.

In later years the obvious answer has come to mind and one that reaches back into the scriptural framing of reality: Jesus, is the creator! That's why he is the only way!

 

He is the "reference point" for all that exists and the integration point for we who are alienated from our creator, which alienation only he is able to overcome by giving us new life.

Nothing and no one from within the creation can resolve its final dilemma of estrangement (Romans 8:19ff), only one from without the creation.

The sermon spot

If we must have the rhetorical set-piece known as 'the sermon' at least let's make it useful!

For instance, the speaker comes across Colossians 1:14 - "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." referring to Yeshua.

I heard of one speaker who did explain that "firstborn" referred to primogeniture.

 

Primogeniture is a historical system of inheritance where the firstborn legitimate child inherits the entirety of their parents' estate, titles, or royal succession, typically prioritizing the eldest son. It was designed to keep large estates and political power intact, though it has been largely abolished in modern societies in favor of equal division.

The guy did briefly mention this, and that it was a counter to Arians who claim that Yeshua is not divine.

But, how is it a counter? How does the creator-son inherit what he has created? Doesn't he 'own' it already?

 

Well, no. Satan is the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2) -- the one who sought to tempt Y to prostrate before him to gain the world, to inherit it as it were (Matthew 4:1 ff).

 

Y as firstborn to inherit must be placed in the great arc of redemption: Creation-Christ-New Creation.

 

Creator - The creation fallen under the influence of Satan - Christ defeats the consequence of the fall at the cross - Christ brings the New Creation and now 'inherits' it for all eternity! No more satanic influence. 

The Messianic Arc

Why are Christians, New Testament people, so interested in Torah, indeed the whole Old Testament, the Tanakh?

Because it is the genealogy of the world!

And that of the world to come as it traces the great cosmic arc etched in history in the coming and accomplishment of Messiah and his New Creation.

 

"Behold, I make all things new". Revelation 21:5 

Great chain of redemption

Calvinists get all excited about Romans 29-30

²⁹ For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; ³⁰ and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

 I know this is their wet-dream, but if only with the tendentious Calvinistic verse-picking at work.

Even while he tends to Arminianism, Clarke's commentary on this segment is more to the fact of the matter. I also read it with a Molinist tinge, but I nevertheless don't think 'Middle Knowledge" is either necessary or helpful as it seeks too much without providing enough.

Let's move slowly:

 

God knew there would be those who had faith in Christ.

Because God is creator and  made us in his image he knows what humans are like and capable of (although child sacrifice took him by surprise: Jeremiah 19:5) and the range of their dispositions and inclinations. The range of human thought, capability and motivations is for God is finite and tiny. We can present to God no conundrum.

We are constrained by the reality we are in, so God has no need of meticulous or even particular 'foreknowledge'. In whatever combination of options available to any person and between all persons no impediment can be given to God's achieving his objective. He doesn't need to 'look into the future' because for God's no-limit-ness the finite (but very large to us) set of possible outcomes for humanity are trivially differentiated for God. Also the challenge range in the set is always within God's much larger capability range with respect to Romans 8:28.

This is somewhat akin to an experienced parent confident of their formation of their children into adulthood because they know their children, they can with high reliability predict their children's responses to events and instruction and set up accordingly for success for the parental objectives.

That said, back to Romans 8

Let's work through the contentious opening moves in vv. 29-30.

For that God knew there would be people who would become faithful to Christ:

The destination of those people he established was that they will be conformed to Christ and so in the New Creation and in God's family.

How God will do that? He will have invited who those who are faithful and will justify and glorify them. So all who turn to Christ will have been those God has invited...but not all invited will necessarily accept the invitation, of course...God knows people!

Ephesians 1:13

This is the true order of salvation (what theologians like to latinize to impress as Ordo salutis). Note, the 'in Him' is the theme of this pericope: all of it is about the result of being 'in Christ'.

 ¹³ In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise...

There it is:

    Listened (attention)

    Believed (faith)

    Sealed with the Spirit (regeneration) 

 

Discussing God -- with an atheist

The term 'atheist' has wide usage these days. It can run from a doctrinaire and thoughtful person, to what I call the 'village atheist'. The person who has picked up a few quips that mostly stop most Christians in their tracks, but absent any real thought by them.

A younger Christian raised the discussion of dealing with such views.

It started with a comment on Social Media by a Christian who made a reference to 'God'. Some bright atheist, or para-atheist (the Village Atheist type) compared God in ontology to Harry Potter, the Fairy God Mother and the Easter Bunny.

How would you come back, presuming the person is interested in chatting, and not a "quip-dropper".

If they are a quip dropper, you might ask what they think about life, the world and any 'hereafter'. If they come back a 'materialist' or 'naturalist': naturalist meaning one who finds in 'nature' its own ontological basis, as distinct from one who is interested in 'nature' for its own sake.

For this person, a simple question might be: "How is anything a dust-bunny says worth anything more than the bunch of dust that says it?" 

But seriously, folks:

First question, of course

'Why do you think your comic-book trio is equivalent to, I presume you mean 'God' as viewed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition?

You might alternatively ask such probes as. What do you think people mean by 'God', or what do you really think about 'God' (with a hint of irony), 'what 'god-function' do you think your comic characters fulfil' or 'Christians hold that 'God' explains something about them and the world...what does your fairy story  trio explain?'

Next stop

'Let me guess, you think 'God' is a religious idea, and you don't take 'religion' seriously. Would that be correct?'

Answer is probably 'yes'. so

"Do you know what 'religion' is or the purpose it seeks to serve?"

Answer probably about 'crutch' to give the believer some sort of comfort in the face of life's vicissitudes.

I like Clouser's definition of religion: that which is independently real, or that represents what is independently real. He discusses it in his boon The Myth of Religious Neutrality. 

There's another way of thinking about religion generically, according to Westphal. He identifies three types of religion

Exilic: typified by Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Bhuddism. These have a godless, or ultimate impersonal monism that one gets absorbed into and becomes one with...but with no more self. It is identical to final annihilation. Here the real world of every day life is at base illusory.

Mimetic: typified by both ancient and modern paganism: earth worship, the ancient pantheons, and modern extremities of environmentalism. This world is also finally impersonal and has none but a mechanical connection with the individual. Modern scientism and dogmatic evolutionism sit here.

Either option means life is in practical terms dust! But no one lives this way...what has to be explained to take one into what is real, is personhood, the reality of moral judgements, that values are possible, than knowledge is real and persons have an ultimate connection with what is basically real: the personal self-existing and self-revealing communicating Creator, Yahweh 

The alternative is Covenental religions, of which there are two, but perhaps their heretical derivatives are also covenental, but I think are actually Mimetic in concept. The two are Judaism as the pre-cursor and Christianity as the fulfillment.

The result of Christianity is that it has real-world pay-offs: modern notions of human rights, education for all, equality before the law, the dignity of the individual, the meaning of justice and the very basis of modern material life: science, are true elements of the understanding of what is true. It underwrites knowledge as being instrumentally true, and, at the limit, ultimately true.

It also explains the disjunct between our experience of life and our ambitions in life, most prominently exhibited in 'suffering' and acts of evil, even within ourselves or are victims of. Whence evil? Cannot be answered in either Exilic or Mimetic religious frameworks. Both bring the insight of the earthworm to their contemplation.

10 tough questions for Christians

This is based on a video interview by Sean McDowell with Doug Groothuis

It deals with 10 prominent, supposedly 'tough' questions that Christians might be asked.

These are the time stamps for the source video with some notes after each.

1-- 0:57 - How can a loving and good God allow so much evil in the world?

The 'evil' in the world; let's call it suffering, tells us what we are like, beneath the veneer of self-righteousness, pride, convenient niceness, and basic selfishness. We can break through these from time to time, usually for short periods, or with an eye to 'duty', but look at the general suffering: Our world, and we can't mange it for universal benefit. Look at the evil that people do, in their simultaneous dignity and corruption: we are people. Evil? It's what people do.

Refer to Luke 13:4: our basic response to evil is to repent. Turn from the world we shape to the world to come and its king, Christ.

Also to Romans 7:14-25.

2-- 5:49 - How can a loving God send someone to hell?

People who repudiate life with God and love their life of alienation from him will not be forced to love God against their will; their will will be 'respected'. The Bible assures us that there is ample reason in the created world to know God. In our fallen vanity we avoid this knowledge. 

3-- 11:18 - Why is God so hidden? 

Only to the obdurate. He has shown himself firstly in the creation, then in Christ, and now, with those, in the church universal and its proclamation of saving hope. 

4-- 15:18 - What about those who have never heard (of God)?

God is just, so all will be dealt with justly. 

5-- 19:12 - If Christianity is true, why is there so much abuse and damage done through the church?

Christ came to save us from who we are, with the gradual transformation this brings; and to help others to see him...also see 1 and 3 above. 

6-- 21:30 - Isn't the cross an example of divine child abuse?

The cross is the culminating demonstration of God saving us. This started in Genesis 22 where, instead of child sacrifice (and Isaac was a 'youth') God provided and guaranteed the sacrifice. The token of God provides, and man cannot 'save' himself. In the Cross, God is the sacrifice. Jesus was God, creator, taken on human flesh and limitation. So, no! 

7-- 25:43 - Is Christianity racist since the Bible was used to promote and justify slavery?

You misunderstand chattel slavery with ancient indentured service one could enter to avoid penury and death.

See Exodus 21:16 and Deut. 24:7. 

8-- 30:38 - Is Christianity homophobic and hateful towards the LGBTQ community?

Leaving aside the tendentious elephant hurling of the terms, Christ came to save we sinners. He hates all sin because it degrades our creational humanity. Any person who turns to Christ is a broken person, but is on the path of recognition of that, seeking its repair in new life aligned with our creational origin. 

9-- 35:05 - Is Christianity at war with science?

Christianity, or rather the world-view of the Bible, framed in Genesis 1-3 shows why science is possible at all. It shows we are in a real world of which we can and are called to make sense. The real enmity is between the dehumanizing doctrines of materialistic naturalism and the various colours of humanism,

10-- 39:00 - Is Christianity sexist?

No. The church often as been as it apes the corrupt culture of the fallen world, but, Galatians 3:28 sets the scene for being 'in Christ'. 

Son of Man?

As a younger Christian I was much puzzled by this term. Not helped by the poor Christian education provided by my church, of course.

One minister, RS, offered a suggestion that it had something to do with the Son of Man in Daniel 7:13; and this has some weight, I think.

Perhaps it was merely the human-like form of the vision, that attracted the title, but even here, it seems to denote something of greater significance, a sort of summative title.

The son is usually the inheritor, so what does the 'son of man' inherit?

I think it might be that, as the incarnate (to be, in Daniel) God...the Son, he inherits all that man as created was to be, pre-fall. He also, as the Lamb of God, inherits the consequence of the fall for man as created. This bears out both his conduct on earth pre-resurrection, but as the divine adopting human form, and his accepting the punishment given for sin (the repudiation of God-ness, and of God himself): death, despite him not meriting it. He accepted it to defeat it.

Also check out this video from the Bible Project. 

Chosen?

I commented to a post on FreeGrace blog on Ephesians 1:

You wrote: "Verses 4-6 expound on how the Father is involved in the church’s salvation: He chose us."

They DO NOT. This passage is not about salvation, but about  the blessings from God by our position as saints based on our being 'in Christ'. This phrase or its analogue 'in him' is the drum-beat of the first chapter, and they are all showing that our blessings revolved around our being 'in him'.

The passage is about Christ not about us. It is about us, being regenerated we are 'in Christ' for the purpose that we would be holy and blameless being in him.

Correspondingly, we are not predestined for salvation, but being saved we have a destination previously set by God for those who would be in Christ: adoption as sons!

 Incidentally, if we are talking about salvation, the order of salvation is set out in 1:13, 14:

In him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, ¹⁴ who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.

See the order: Listened--Believed--Sealed (regenerated).

We could set it out thus:

    "In him, you also, after

    listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also

    believed, you were

    sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, ¹⁴ who is given as a pledge of our inheritance,

[For?]

    with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory."

 

Whence the Trinity?

A lot of scuttlebutt on the Internet seems to assert that the Trinity is 'invented'. But, as Greg Koukl points out, the Trinity is a solution, not a problem.

Bob from Speakers' Corner in the UK put this logical set of Bible references together:

1. There is one God

Isaiah 45:5

“I am the Lord, and there is no other;
Besides Me there is no God.
I will gird you, though you have not known Me;

2. The Father is that God

John 17:1-3

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

3. Jesus is also called that God

Titus 2:13

looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus,

4. The Holy Spirit is called that God

Acts 5:3-4

But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land? ⁴ While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.”

5. Christ promises a 'helper'

John 15:26

“When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me,

6. The Holy Spirit is the helper promised by Christ

Acts 2:1-4

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ² And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³ And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. ⁴ And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.

7. Jesus aligns himself with God via the Old Testament

John 8:54-59

Jesus answered, “If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing; it is My Father who glorifies Me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God’; ⁵⁵ and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I will be a liar like you, but I do know Him and keep His word. ⁵⁶ Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.” ⁵⁷ So the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?” ⁵⁸ Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.” ⁵⁹ Therefore they picked up stones to throw at Him, but Jesus hid Himself and went out of the temple.

The Trinity in Summary

A nice summary from Google's AI

The Trinity is the belief that God exists as three persons in one Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Bible establishes the basis for the Trinity through references to these three persons.
Biblical evidence for the Trinity

    Matthew 28:19: "In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"
    John 10:30: "I and my Father are one"
    2 Corinthians 13:13: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all"

History of the Trinity

    The Trinity emerged around 33-34 AD/CE, during or shortly after Jesus's death and resurrection

The Nicene Creed established the official Trinity belief for Christians at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD/CE 

The word "Trinity" comes from the Latin word Trinitas, coined by the early Christian writer Tertullian

The Trinity is used to defend the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods. It's also connected to the sacraments, which believers receive to enter into the divine life.

Atonement?

Penal Substitution theory seems to have topped the conservative evangelical world in recent decades. Due, at least in part, to the parlous influence of Calvinism. (ref. 1 Cor. 1:11-13)

Here's a list of reference to the atonement compiled by Hal Chaffee:

Jesus--

    Died for our sins -- 1 Cor 15:17

        Gave himself for sins -- Gal 1:4

            Purged our sins -- Heb 1:3

                Suffered for sins -- 1 Pt 3:18

                    Put away sins -- Heb 9:26

                        Bore our sins -- 1 Pt 2:24

                            Made propitiation for sins -- Heb2:17

                                Was sacrificed for sins -- Heb 10:12

                                    Took away our sins -- 1 Jn 3:5

                                        Washed us from our sins -- Rev 1:5

                                            Forgives us our sins -- Eph 1:7

BUT NOT

Paid for our sins -- ???

A Better TULIP

Talking to a relative, I suggested to him that whenever someone challenges his non-calvinism, he say something like:

"You know the biggest problem I have with Calvinism? It's signature acrostic TULIP makes no mention of Christ!"

Anyway, we came up with a better TULIP:

T: total grace

U: unlimited atonement

L: love for the world

I: irrepressible hope

P: provision for all

Why didn't God just destroy Adam and Eve, and start again.

This was a question posed to Greg Koukl on his "STRask" podcast, and the 'start again' was posed on the basis of God knowing that he'd be wiping out all except Noah in a few centuries.

His answer was a little like the curate's egg: good in parts. The not good parts arose from his Calvinism and his view as to 'long ages' defining the history of revelation and thus the cosmos.

As a result he missed the obvious point, which I discuss.

Initially, the question seems to presume a couple of things that, to my mind, run against the Bible's data on creation (with respect to mankind's place and role, and God's action in creation) and on biblical anthropology.

Firstly, it seems to consider a cosmos that is disconnected from the creatures in God's image and that their fall affected only themselves. Subsidiary to this, it seems to presuppose that there was death before the fall, contrary to the God who found everything very good in a world not yet marked by corruption. Even animal death would be very much a mark of corruption. Upsetting, as it often is even today, rather than a matter of joy!

Secondly, it seems to trivialize the scope of sin and God's true relation to his creation and its creatures in his image: that we are made for fellowship and the first couple are the only ones by whom that unique status is unveiled. It would hardly be significant if there was a 'start again' option! God made them for fellowship, and now he goes about restoring the breach.

The notion that God could 'start again' with a new couple fails to recognize the effect of the fall on the cosmos. Paul tells us that the entire creation is groaning (Romans 8:19-23). So post fall, any new couple would no longer be in the pristine creation, but in the marred creation, subjected to futility and corruption: death now the unwelcome feature.

There would be other depredations of sin affecting the entire cosmos by virtue of Adam and Eve being God's image bearers and vicegerents. A new couple would be aliens at best, in a world not fitted for them and be either immediately frustrated, not knowing the world for which they were made as it has been damaged, or quickly become part of it. At worst they would conceivably be completely incompatible with it!

The original couple who fell being God's image-bearers are not just disposable and replaceable. Because sin has entered there could be no starting again. Yet they are rescuable, and God shows both his love and his power in that he is not outdone by sin, but rather overcomes it, as he promises them. A benefit of this is our further encouragement that God is truly the King of Creation and not a Zoroastrian bit player. God is not equally opposed by the 'not-God' of sin, but overcomes it. He does not tolerate death, but in Christ defeats it.

Following on, then, the gross condition of Noah's time was cleared for the line of the Messiah to be established in the. God let conditions play out until they needed to be wiped away for his plan to unfold.

Death: do animals count?

Some people question the meaning of the fall in relation to its introduction of death. They want to limit this to either mankind alone, or restrict it to a 'spiritual' death. This is to avoid the implication of materialist long age of earth and the obvious death of animals this would require prior to the fall. That is, millions of years of animal death recorded in fossils, again, on their terms.

This question, of death before the fall, in reference to animals (the 'living creatures' of Genesis 1:24 excluding plants, bacteria, insects, and the like) seems to want to make God part of the creation, and not separated from it as creator, but separate from it as source of life; despite being so as the creator of all life.

That is, somehow 'life' is external to even God, in some mystical or platonic construction.

Thus some disregard animal death in cavalier fashion. I doubt this can be sustained with a biblical understanding of the relation of Creator and his creation of life; something flowing from his word and the direct action of Christ. The Creator has no 'not-life' in him! Death is the denial of life and the reversion to a not-God state of being; that is, 'not being'. I don't think the hand of God, the Word of God produces death, otherwise, death would not be a cause for grief.

Death in these terms is a direct insult to God and an inversion of his creation (as sin is the inversion of his love).

I write this after recently seeing an aged relative's corpse and learning that our pet dog has multiple malignant tumors and will soon die. At different levels both are death, an assault on the life God created and both confront us with the horror, in different degrees, of the termination of life, of relationship and fellowship (even with an animal).

Our revulsion and grief at death is at its unnaturalness, its reverse of the purpose of the creation, It could not be before the fall, as the direct reading of Genesis 3 and as the ramifications of the fall are described.

Some days later:

We buried our pet dog today. The vet sent her on her way peacefully and without discomfort, or even curiosity at the cannula, she was so sick. The termination of life, even of an animal, was still horrible, it was still the inversion of life, it was still something not of the God of life who made Adam to govern (have care over) the animals that he named (examined, considered, classified, identified). Did Adam expect these animals to then die?

It was not until the fall that decay set in; and death is the result of decay.

Name the animals? Why?

Adam was told to name the animals in Genesis 2:20. Why?

We don't know at what taxonomic level naming occurred. So the time it would take is a moot point. A day may have been plenty of time. It is certainly foolish to imagine it was every modern species. At higher levels we have cranes, water fowl, raptors and parrots...etc. Perhaps a dozen or so kinds.

Aside from anything else, this process of 'naming' was perhaps the first move of Adam's governing of the creation and so has significance in his reflecting the image of God in ' taking responsibility'. It also drives the point of the location of the event in real time and space, in history, that is, and showing that the animals were not creatures to be worshipped, but to be subject to mankind.

The other aspect of naming is the commencement of the intellectual component of stewardship. Here Adam is told to make the first move in creating knowledge! The intelligibility of the creation shown in Adam's intelligent analysis of it.
 

Now we must be careful in talking about man's dominion here. Today anti-theists, read back into this man's current foolish and selfish domination of the creation. Adam's role as being in God's image would entail loving and caring for the creation as God's gift and reveling in the joy of doing so.

 

How could Adam have named all the animals in a single day?