Sunday, January 15, 2012

William Lane Craig on Results

"Success in witnessing is simply communicating Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God. Similarly, effectiveness in apologetics is presenting cogent and persuasive arguments for the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit, and leaving the results to God."

- William Lane Craig
Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, p. 50.

5 comments :

Anonymous said...

How can he say that and not be a Calvinist?! I don't know how he doesn't see the inconsistency...

Chad said...

Hello josepholivares,

I hope you are well. Just a friendly question -Could you please explain how WLC is being inconsistent here? I don't see it.

I appreciate it!

Godspeed

James said...

Chad,
I think what Joseph finds inconsistent is that in both witnessing and apologetics, whether the person you're presenting the arguments to is convinced or not is left entirely up to the Holy Spirit, thus precluding any real choice to have faith in Jesus.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding here, too, but this is what the quote implies to me.

James said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

@James I'm not sure that is what WCL is saying.

Leaving the results to God is an ambiguous phrase and could mean a lot of things. I don't know what WCL meant by it but it doesn't seem to be that God is the only factor in a person's salvation.

Clearly there is at least 1 other factor mentioned; the communication of Christ. He also mentioned a few more; the qualifications on communication (at least in the 2nd quote): cogent and persuasive.

To illustrate how ambiguous the phase is: The listener's choices, their friends choices and previous evangelists choices to witness along with the devil's choices could all be glossed over by leaving the results to God if you think of yourself being on a team with God where both of you have parts to play. In Christian circles I've also seen it used to effectively mean don't worry about it; I've prayed and done everything I can now it is in Gods hands.

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