DAY 107

CHALLENGE

“Catholicism is false because it bases its teachings on things other than the Bible—the word of God.”

DEFENSE

Catholicism bases its teachings on the word of God, which is not limited to the Bible.

The Church acknowledges that “Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit” (Vatican II, Dei Verbum 9). However, even a cursory reading of Scripture shows that the word of God is not limited to Scripture.

In the very first chapter of the Bible, we read about the power of God’s creative word, as he say…

DAY 106

CHALLENGE

“Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus omits some generations and thus is wrong.”

DEFENSE

In Israelite genealogies, it was permitted to skip generations.

Hebrew and Aramaic don’t have terms for “grandfather,” “great-grandfather,” “grandson,” “great-grandson,” and so on. Any male ancestor was called a father (Hebrew, ’ab, Aramaic, ’ab, ’abba), and any male descendant was called a son (Hebrew, bēn, Aramaic, bar).

Thus, prophesying the birth of Jesus, Gabriel tells Mary, “The Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). David lived a millennium before J…

DAY 105

CHALLENGE

“The pope can’t be infallible. Paul opposed Peter at Antioch ‘because he clearly was wrong’ (Gal. 2:11, NABRE).”

DEFENSE

This involves a straw man argument.

The Church holds the pope engages the Church’s infallibility “when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—who confirms his brethren in the faith—he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals” (CCC 891).

To proclaim a doctrine “by a definitive act” means he has to use language that indicates the matter is permanently settled. To define a matter means to completely end it (L…

DAY 104

CHALLENGE

“If Jesus’ speech on the Mount of Olives referred to the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 (see Day 69), then he falsely prophesied that he would return before then, saying that people ‘will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory’ (Mark 13:26; cf. Matt. 24:30, Luke 21:27).”

DEFENSE

There are other ways of understanding this passage.

Material in the Gospels is not always chronological. The evangelists had the freedom to arrange material by other criteria, such as topic. They could have grouped a saying about the Second Coming with other proph…

DAY 103

CHALLENGE

“Why should dogmas like the Assumption of Mary be necessary for salvation? That makes no sense.”

DEFENSE

A belief can be related to salvation in more than one way.

Some are directly related. Thus, “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6). The belief that God exists and that he will bless those who attempt to please him are directly related to salvation. So are be- lief in Jesus as Savior (Acts 4:12), and the means by which we receive salvation, such as the need for repentance, faith, and baptism …

DAY 102

CHALLENGE

“Science is superior to faith, as shown by the way Christians adapt parts of the Bible to the findings of science.”

DEFENSE

All truth is God’s truth, and the fact that we learn new things in one field does not mean it is superior to another field.

This is true within the scientific disciplines themselves. What is learned in one field has ripples that affect others. For example, a discovery in physics may impact astronomy or chemistry. The reverse is also true. The scientific fields thus exist in a state of creative tension with respect to one another, and this is true…

DAY 101

CHALLENGE

“The pope is the Antichrist.”

DEFENSE

This claim does not fit the biblical evidence; it is based on unbiblical polemics.

Although the Antichrist is sometimes associated with figures like the “man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3–10) and the beast of Revelation (Rev. 13:1– 18), there are only four passages in the New Testament that explicitly speak of the “antichrist”: 1 John 2:18, 22, 4:3, and 2 John 7. To under- stand the role of the Antichrist, we must look to these passages.

According to them, the Antichrist “denies the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22), the “spirit of anti…

DAY 100

CHALLENGE

“Christianity proposes that a number of implausible things will happen

at the end of time: Everyone who ever lived will be resurrected (John 5:28– 29); the faithful from all history will be gathered to Christ (1 Thess. 4:16– 17); the New Jerusalem will be a cubic city 1,500 miles long, tall, and

wide (Rev. 21:16). The math for these claims doesn’t add up.”

DEFENSE

These objections falsely presume that the world will continue to operate the way it presently does.

Paul compares the difference between our present bodies and our resurrected bodies to the difference betwee…

DAY 99

CHALLENGE

“God imputes righteousness to us; he doesn’t infuse it, as the Catholic Church teaches.”

DEFENSE

This involves several misunderstandings.

The words “impute” and “infuse” are derived from Latin terms—imputare and infundere—that respectively mean “to reckon” and “to pour in/on.”

The image of God imputing righteousness suggests a legal or commercial context where God either legally declares us righteous or credits righteousness to our commercial accounts. The image of God infusing righteousness suggests a context in which God pours righteousness into us like water into a…

DAY 98

CHALLENGE

“We may only be supposed to worship one God, but the Catholic belief that only one God exists is false. Paul writes, ‘though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth (as there be gods many, and lords many), but to us there is but one God, the Father . . . and one Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 8:5–6, KJV).”

DEFENSE

This passage refers to pagan deities.

Mormonism holds a position known as “henotheism” (Greek, hen, “one,” and theos, “god”), according to which only one god is to be worshipped by a people as its patron deity, though many gods exist. They se…