Apologetics Guided Reading: George Park Fisher “Manual of Christian Evidences” Chapter 11

Source for image: http://divinity-adhoc.library.yale.edu/Exhibits/YDSMilestones.htm

I am leading a guided reading of the Manual of Christian Evidences by George Park Fisher. It is freely available online and will serve as a base for discussing Christian apologetics throughout this series. The chapters are short and readable. I encourage you to join in by reading the chapters and commenting with your thoughts. When I discuss the book, I will be citing page numbers from the edition linked above

Chapter 11

Fisher notes the charge that the apostles had “erroneous opinions on certain subjects” and makes it more clear that it may be related to scientific questions like “astronomy, or of other sciences.” Such a charge, however, is largely irrelevant because we can acknowledge they held mistaken views of such things and they may have been “greatly excelled” in knowledge of these topics by others of their or our own day. Instead, what matters is whether someone can show what they report in the Gospels for their testimony of the facts is untrue (86).

The question of religious opinions of the apostles has also been called to account, and Fisher notes one area charged with error was the belief that Jesus would return quite soon. To rebut this, Fisher highlights several passages in which it is made clear that none knows when Christ will return except for the Father, and that those who believe the apostles held this erroneous belief are more likely to discover it. Others have argued that the apostles’ discussion of demons and demoniacs is cause for seeing error, but Fisher offers to possible solutions. One is to accept physical/mental ailments for the cause of these reports and hold that Christ condescended to the beliefs of the time to see, say, epilepsy as evidence of demonic activity. Another solution he offers is more open minded: “Too little is known of the supernatural world to warrant a dogmatic denial of such an influence exercised by evil spirits (89). That is, Fisher argues that we assume much if we grant a supernatural realm and then turn around to deny that it could have such physical manifestations. One might argue that even someone who remains agnostic should grant this as a possibility, for only “dogmatic denial” can exclude this possibility.

Study Questions

1. What do you make of Fisher’s argument that apostolic error regarding scientific questions is irrelevant to their testimony regarding the events they witnessed?

2. Fisher acknowledges that some may simply state that Christ’s healing of demons and discussions of the same could be accommodation to the cultural understandings of the people of his time. What problems might their be with such a reading? How could it be strengthened?

Links

Be sure to check out the page for this site on Facebook and Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies and more!

Apologetics Read-Through: Historical Apologetics Read-Along– Here are links for the collected posts in this series and other read-throughs of apologetics books (forthcoming).

Dead Apologists Society– A page for Christians interested in the works of historical apologetics. There is also a Facebook group for it.

SDG.

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