Sundays, June 1 - August 10 | 9:45 am | Room 200
Scripture calls us to honor Christ and be ready to explain the hope within us (1 Peter 3:15). In this ten-week series, we’ll explore key questions of the Christian faith—Jesus’ identity and resurrection, the existence of God, the Trinity, scripture’s reliability, and the problem of evil. We’ll also look at how faith is best defended through faithful living, learning from the lives of Polycarp, Father Damien, Maximilian Kolbe, and C.S. Lewis.
Week 1 of "Reason To Believe: Accounting for the Hope that Is within Us" introduces Christian apologetics as the reasoned defense of faith, rooted in 1 Peter 3:15's call to offer an answer for our hope with gentleness and respect. Rev. Chris Knepp explores the "what, why, and how" of apologetics, emphasizing that it's about winsome witness rather than aggressive argument, and importantly, affirms the legitimate place for doubt as a path to deeper understanding. By examining the "ultimate apologetic" of a life lived in love and unity, Chris lays the groundwork for future discussions by focusing on the historicity and divinity of Jesus, drawing on both biblical accounts and external historical evidence from figures like Tacitus and Josephus to establish Jesus' undeniable existence and impact.
Building on week one's foundational understanding of Christian apologetics, this 2nd week of "REASON TO BELIEVE" delves into the crucial claims of Jesus's divinity and the historical truth of his resurrection, as outlined in 1 Peter 3:15. Rev. Chris Knepp examines biblical accounts where Jesus explicitly claims divine status, which his contemporaries clearly understood as blasphemy, and applies C.S. Lewis's "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" trilemma to underscore the inescapable conclusion that Jesus was either truly God or something far less. Crucially, the session then focuses on the resurrection as the cornerstone of Christian faith, analyzing Paul's eyewitness testimony in 1 Corinthians 15, comparing the harmonious yet distinct Gospel accounts of the empty tomb, and drawing on arguments from apologists like Josh McDowell and Chuck Colson to powerfully demonstrate the historical credibility of Jesus's resurrection. Join us for an enlightening class, with Chris welcoming questions and feedback.
Week 3 of Rev. Chris' Knepp's class "Reason To Believe" delves into the profound questions surrounding God's existence and nature. Chris explores compelling "clues" for God's reality, such as the Big Bang, the universe's fine-tuning (Anthropic Principle), the regularity of nature, our innate sense of beauty, and the universal experience of moral obligation, drawing insights from theologians like Timothy Keller and apologists such as Cliffe Knechtle. We differentiate between general revelation (God's self-disclosure through creation) and special revelation (His specific revelation in scripture and Jesus Christ). Finally, Chris tackles the complex doctrine of the Trinity, moving beyond simplistic analogies to explain the "divine dance of love," or perichoresis, as a foundational understanding of God's relational essence and a model for human community. Join us for this insightful and well-researched class.
In "Reason To Believe" week 4, Rev. Chris Knepp tackles the crucial topic of Biblical reliability, which is often a "stumbling block" to faith. To demonstrate its trustworthiness, Chris employs manuscript evidence for textual accuracy, corroborating Archaeological discoveries, the demonstrable fulfillment of Prophecy, and the statistical improbability of these predictions occurring by chance. As a bonus, Chris begins to explore Canonization process, illustrating how the Bible's authoritative books were gradually recognized by the early church through widespread acceptance, not imposed by a single emperor or council, thus solidifying the foundation of Christian hope.
Week 5 of "REASON TO BELIEVE" confronts the pervasive problem of evil and suffering, a major "stumbling block" to faith, by asking how an all-powerful, all-loving God could permit such pain. Chris Knepp presents evil not as a created entity, but as a privation or corruption of God's inherently good creation, largely stemming from humanity's free will—a necessary component of love—and the natural, yet sometimes harmful, regularities of the physical world. Drawing on insights from C.S. Lewis and Timothy Keller, we explore that evil and suffering, paradoxically, can even point to God's existence by implying a moral standard beyond mere human preference. Ultimately, God's ultimate solution is found in Jesus Christ, who uniquely entered into and overcame the deepest depths of human pain and cosmic evil through his crucifixion and resurrection, offering profound hope and a call to alleviate suffering in the world.
The greatest apologetic is not necessarily a reasoned argument in defense of the faith - though we have learned some good ones in our first five weeks - but rather the demonstration of what God has done in our lives. The next five weeks of our "Reason to Believe" apologetics class, therefore, will be devoted to examining the lives of Christians who serve as their own apologetic. This week we will begin by learning about Chuck Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship and a man about whom the Boston Globe once wrote, "If Mr. Colson can repent of his sins, there just has to be hope for everybody." We will then have the privilege to hear from Robert Dorrough, the Founder and President of the God of Hope Ministries, which has been caring for "the least of these" in Austin-area prisons since 2006.
Notwithstanding our ability to articulate the reasons for the truth of the Christian faith, the greatest apologetic remains the Christian life itself. In week 6, we looked at the life transformation of Chuck Colson from President Nixon's "Hatchet Man" to founder of the world's largest prison ministry. This week we go back in time to the earliest account of a Christian martyrdom outside of the New Testament. Come and consider the many ways in which the 86-year old Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna was a witness to Christ in the way he lived his life and faced his death.
