Defending Your Shield: Responding to Attacks on the Uniqueness of Christianity
Walton, Robert C.
Synopsis "Defending Your Shield: Responding to Attacks on the Uniqueness of Christianity"
Have you ever heard critics of Christianity say these things? -Ancient Near Eastern religions all had creation and flood stories and legends of gods coming to earth, dying, and rising again; Christianity just borrowed from them. -All religions are basically man-made and are derived from the cultural environment in which they arose. -All religions are basically the same because they are different ways of worshiping the same Ultimate Reality. It doesn't really matter what religion you practice as long as it meets your needs. -All religions are essentially harmful. They are relics of our primitive past, and we are quickly evolving beyond the need for them. Christianity is the worst of the lot because of its record of violence and prejudice regarding race, gender, and sexual preference. -How can Christians claim to have the truth when they are divided into thousands of denominations and can't even agree among themselves? In Ephesians 6:10-18, the Apostle Paul describes the armor God has given His people to defend themselves against the attacks of the devil and the "spiritual forces of evil." One of the pieces of armor he lists is the shield of faith. The faith to which he refers is the trust in Christ that enables the believer to stand firmly against all challenges that he may face in this life. While those challenges may often take the form of personal trials and suffering, they sometimes take the form of intellectual attacks as well. In Defending Your Sword, I delineated and responded to attacks against the Bible and its veracity. In this volume, I address attacks against the uniqueness of Christianity. All too often the Christian's shield of faith (Ephesians 6:16) is weakened or penetrated by those who would attack the Faith - the system of belief with which Christians identify. Some even lose their faith and turn away because they have no answers for those who seek to undermine the Faith. This book seeks to provide some of those answers. Christianity is unique, but just because an idea or practice is unique does not make it true; Mormons teach that God lives on the planet Kolob - surely a unique doctrine, but this gives it no special claim to truth. How, then, can Christians argue that Christianity is not really a religion at all, but the only truth that all man-made religions distort in their rebellion against God? If we are to be able to give an answer for the hope we have in Christ (I Peter 3:15), we must be prepared to use the shield of faith to ward off attacks against the "faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3).
