Without Excuse: Apologetics Blog

  There is a common accusation that Christians adopted the concept of the soul from the Greeks, most notably from Plato. There’s a variation of this argument that Christians adopted ideas about the soul and the afterlife from the Egyptians. But just how true is this accusation? We will seek to answer that very question. It should first be established that Israelite/Jewish thought had already allowed for a postmortem existence prior to Greek influence. One very prominent example can be found in 1 Samuel involving the story of the Witch of Endor. King Saul had gone to visit the witch to summon Samuel from the grave. Much to the witch's surprise and dismay, she summoned what appeared to be the spirit or ghost of Samuel (1Sa 28).  The summoned spirit of Samuel is often dismissed as a trick, hallucination, or a demonic deception. Those are all separate objections that can be addressed another time. But it is far less relevant whether it was the actual spirit of Samuel or not for th...

Soul sleep proponents believe that Greek philosophy significantly influenced traditional Christian ideas about the soul and the afterlife rather than Scripture alone. For that reason, they reject the continued existence of the soul after death, also known as the intermediary state. Instead, they have a more Hebraic worldview that places far less emphasis on heaven and the afterlife than later Jewish and Christian theology. It is founded on the belief that humans don’t have a soul; we are souls. This belief is interpreted from Genesis 2:7: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul ( nephesh ).” The Hebrew word for “soul” is “ nephesh ” and is broadly defined as the whole living being or person. The question is, are we only nephesh ? “ Nephesh ” is translated to “psyche” in the Septuagint. If nephesh were strictly biological, they could have used the Greek word “bios,” from which we get the Engl...

Introduction: There are those who will contend that the Church has replaced Israel, the Jews have no future role, and the modern state of Israel was either created by happenstance or by some nefarious plot. Such views are often intertwined with replacement theology, allegory, and modern conspiracy theories. But if we shift the paradigm by connecting the right prophetic dots and having the proper eschatological framework, a different picture emerges. This view is based upon dispensationalism, covenant theology, and literalism ( i ). These are prerequisites that not everyone accepts. However, I will contend it is the only view that explains two perplexing enigmas: why Jews have been one of the most persecuted people in history, and why the world is so fixated over the tiny state of Israel. The Covenant God chose Abraham among the nations to create a people for His own (Gen 12:1–3). He then made an "everlasting" covenant with Abraham and his descendants (Gen 17:7-8). A series of...

Catholic integralism is a pre-Vatican II political theology that holds that the Catholic Church should exercise direct authority over governments and the state should be subordinate to the Church, among other contentions. Neo-integralism is fairly modern, though it has roots that are much older. To be clear, integralism is not part of traditional Catholic doctrine. Most Catholics are probably not even aware of it, though it was specifically denounced by Pope Pius XI for using the Church as a political tool of politics rather than the bearer of divine truth. The reason this has become relevant is because it has been creeping into the ideological framework of the political far right, though it remains obscured in the background and has not been fully articulated to its audience. Part of its appeal is that it has a moral framework that places Christian values at the center. It also plays into legitimate grievances over the moral degradation of the West that has largely been facilitate...

We live in a world with three spatial dimensions (length, width, height) and one dimension of time. The concept of extra dimensions is not fantasy but science. For string theory to work, there have to be 10 or 11 dimensions. One theory is those dimensions are so small that they are impossible for us to perceive or access. But there is an alternate theory by physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum that we can't access them because our entire universe is "stuck" on a three-dimensional membrane floating in higher-dimensional space. If that is the case, some of those dimensions are large, even infinite. In simple terms, a dimension is an independent direction. That sounds trivial at first until you realize the more dimensions you have access to, the more freedom you have, and the more things are possible. It's difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize what more dimensions would look like. But we can get an idea of how big a difference just one dimension makes by su...

The ancient Galilean wedding ceremony is the model for the rapture, specifically the pre-trib rapture. When the Scriptures are compared to the Galilean wedding ceremony, it explains the purpose of the rapture, why the church won’t go through the tribulation, and puts certain biblical passages into proper context. There are very few who understand the significance of the Galilean wedding ceremony, and even fewer who understand the parallels with the pre-trib rapture. That significance, however, would not have been lost on Jesus or His disciples, all of whom were Galilean except for Judas. Nor would it have been lost on the Galileans of the first century, whom Jesus spent most of His time around. It may be no coincidence that Jesus’ first recorded miracle was turning water into wine at a Galilean wedding. It was as if He was trying to draw attention to the wedding for reasons that will soon become apparent. It’s been said that Jesus taught about the resurrection but not the rapture. Ye...