Part Four:  Do the Dark Pages in Church History Make the Christian Faith Hypocritical? Two Apologetic Responses

In previous blogs in this series, we saw that one of the most common attacks against Christians is that we are hypocrites because we sometimes sin. I refuted this in Part Two. In this and next week’s blog, I’ll disprove the more serious challenge: The dark pages of Church history demonstrate the Christian Faith itself is hypocritical because the church had engaged in behaviors that are not in harmony with biblical moral teachings. (I gave examples in last week’s blog.)

I’ll begin today by demonstrating that the ethical standard critics use to judge Christianity has its source in Christianity—making the critics’ claim of hypocrisy itself somewhat hypocritical, as I’ll explain below.

A Borrowed Standard

Critics who denounce Christianity because of activities in the distant past fail to acknowledge that the moral absolutes they use to justify their condemnation turn out to be the very moral values written by Moses thousands of years ago and later recorded in the Bible!  Why was murdering so-called witches wrong? God forbids murder. Why was torturing heretics during the inquisition wrong? God forbids torture. And so it goes. In fact, it was biblical principles that lay the groundwork to end centuries of slavery and subjugation of women common in other cultures throughout much of history.

Non-Christians cannot stand in judgment of the actions of Christians—past or present—without using the ethical standards described in the Bible as their source of reference. This can only mean that biblical ethics are the absolute standard of human morality applied by the very critics who reject Christianity.  This, in turn, demonstrates that the Christian faith is not the source of hypocrisy—people are.

Let me carry this thought a step further. Without Bible-based Christianity, there would be no adequate moral foundation on which to make ethical decisions. Apart from the Christian God, one cannot judge what is right or wrong, know if what is wrong today will be wrong tomorrow, or know if what is wrong for me is also wrong for you. If such a philosophy is carried to its logical conclusion, persecuting minorities, murdering babies, the aged, and the infirm are perfectly acceptable acts, providing one’s personal or cultural belief system embraces it.

To sum up, without an absolute moral standard mandated by God and recorded in the Bible, there would be no universal moral code applicable to all people and every culture whereby one can judge and condemn sin and evil. Concerning the issue of hypocrisy, regardless of what individual Christians do or what the Christian church has been guilty of in history, Christianity as the voice of God’s moral will revealed in Scripture is in no way falsified. This is further proven by the fact that the Bible is the very standard by which the Christian Church has purged itself of sinful behaviors and by which non-Christians themselves judge the actions of others. ©

Next week we’ll look at the second apologetic response to the claim that the dark pages in church history make the Christian faith hypocritical and illegitimate: The positive influence Christianity has had throughout the world.