Our church have started working through Luke’s Gospel. Chris who was preaching on the first bit of Luke 1 noted that we can be so caught up in the apologetic type questions about eye witnesses and reliability that we forger to read the Bible itself.
This is a helpful corrective to how we tend to approach conversations about the Gospel and indeed about Luke 1. Indeed, whilst the points about careful investigation, orderly accounts and wye witness reports are helpful to some of our apologetic approaches (indeed, I pick up on some of those issues in The First Look Course), there are a few reasons as to why we might not want this to be our focus.
First, whilst our desire as Christians is to prove the reliability of the accounts, this isn’t often the kind of question that people are asking. It’s not even about whether it works, or about all truths being relative now, we’ve moved on even from post-modern concerns. There is a suspicion of some truth claims, especially those attached to establishment sources. After all, if you can create fake news, you can also create fake evidence. There is also a willingness to accept other truth claims from alternative sources.
So, it is worth remembering that at the time, Luke was writing his Gospel that Christianity was not the establishment position. The Gospel writers all wrote from marginalised positions. This is especially trtue given it was likely that they wrote prior to AD70 but even if they wrote much later, they still all preceded the post Constantine world where Christianity dominated.
Secondly, whilst Theophilus, the initial recipient may have had a need for certainty and assurance about what he was hearing, it wasn’t necessary in relation to the kinds of questions and doubts that our modern approaches to apologetics assume. He would have had little problem accepting that there was a virgin and that a divine power had caused her to conceive or that the child was able to work miracles, nor indeed that he may have been Israel’s messiah figure. He may have had questions about the likelihood of resurrection, something that noomne was really expecting as a one off event for one person at that time.
However, I’m inclined to think that the big question for people like Theopholis was about whether the claims were true that Jesus had come for people like him, that Jesus was his Christ, his saviour, that he could be included in the resurrection and the Kingdom.
This may well help us to think about our situation. Whilst the question about whether or not we can trust the Bible may still be relevant in evangelistic contexts, it may not be the thing that those hearing us preach Luke are worried about. Indeed, by coming to hear us, they have indicated a willingness to take what we say on trust. The bigger questions are more likely to ber around “is this for me?” Could Jesus really love, die for and save someone like me?
And this question can be as pertinent for long term believers as it is for new inquirers. There are all kinds of reasons as to why we may at any point struggle to believe that Jesus loves us and came to save us.
Faithroots 