The Value Of Less Dramatic Conversions

He's commenting on passages like Romans 16:19 and the value of avoiding evil rather than having a more dramatic conversion from sin:

"I remember David Michael used to stand up and give a testimony. He said, 'God delivered me from drugs and alcohol and sexual immorality when I was six years old.' It was a great testimony. Don't even be a beginner [in sin]." (John Piper, 13:00 here)

People Converted Through Arguments

"My colleague J.P. Moreland, out at Talbot, has taken to responding to, when people say to him, 'You can't bring anybody to Christ through argument.', J.P. says, 'Oh, yeah, you can. I've done it.' And I can say the same. We constantly get emails and testimonies coming into Reasonable Faith that people who have come to Christ after seeing a debate or a video or have come back to Christ after walking away from Christian faith through Reasonable Faith materials." (William Lane Craig, 8:04 in the audio of his November 13, 2023 Reasonable Faith podcast here)

There are Biblical examples as well (e.g., Acts 17:2-4, 19:8).

Early Christian Conversions Independent Of Baptism

I want to discuss a neglected line of evidence against baptismal regeneration and baptismal justification. There's a widespread pattern of early Christian conversion accounts that involve significant changes in the individual's life prior to his baptism. Those changes range across a spectrum. Often, it can be shown to be probable that regeneration or justification occurred before baptism (e.g., through a reference to forgiveness of sins, through a reference to the reception of the Holy Spirit). But even if prebaptismal regeneration or justification is only possible rather than probable when a conversion account is considered in isolation, that account can have more evidential significance than is typically suggested, such as when it's considered in a larger context, like one of the ones I'll be discussing below.

We want a king!

We should keep in mind that one of the reasons people can have for being Roman Catholic or finding Catholicism appealing is the sort of interest in a king that the ancient Israelites had, an interest that can be sinful. People can have sinful reasons for desiring some other belief system, including Protestantism, but my focus here is on Catholicism and the connection between the papacy and a monarchy. We should keep in mind that a desire for a monarchical form of church government can be, and I think often is, part of why people are Catholic or are attracted to Catholicism. And the motives for wanting that sort of authority structure don't have to be entirely sinful in order to be partly sinful or to be inadequate to justify accepting the papacy.

"your wickedness is great which you have done in the sight of the Lord by asking for yourselves a king" (1 Samuel 12:17)

When You're Deep In History And Have Ceased To Be Protestant

Robert Wilken is a historian who converted from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism decades ago. He's sometimes mentioned in lists of converts to Catholicism. He appeared on Marcus Grodi's television program "The Journey Home" on EWTN. You often find Catholic scholars making comments like these ones from Wilken's book on the first millennium of church history:

"As the controversy over the dating of the Pasch revealed, there was no central authority within Christianity in the second century. The Church was composed of a constellation of local communities spanning the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. They had a strong sense of unity among themselves, but they were only loosely organized." (The First Thousand Years [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012], 39)

"In the early Church there was no 'private' confession. According to church law the emperor could not present himself quietly before the bishop, confess his sin, and receive absolution. The penitential discipline of the early Church was unremittingly harsh and carried out in front of the Christian people. The penitents were segregated from the rest of the community, assigned a special section in the church, and forbidden to receive the Eucharist." (135)

"By the middle of the third century the bishop of Rome had begun to acquire an unparalleled authority in the West - in Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Not, however, in the East. There the churches looked to the bishops in the major cities, Alexandria in Egypt or Antioch in Syria. This geographical fact, that Rome was the principal city in the West, whereas in the East there were several, would lead to a quite different understanding of how the Church was to be governed at the highest level….It is clear from the minutes of the Council of Chalcedon that the bishops, most of whom were from the East, did not view Rome's authority as Leo [the Roman bishop] did." (165-66, 170)

"Apparently [in The Apostolic Tradition, a document of the third century] infant baptism was permissible - though not conventional - and parents or guardians would speak for the children." (176)

The Thief On The Cross On The Day Of Judgment

Here are some good comments on the subject from John Piper. They're also applicable to deathbed conversions more broadly.

Watch Over Your Heart

"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life (Prov. 4:23). The heart of man is his worst part before it is regenerated, and the best afterward; it is the seat of principles, and the foundation of actions. The eye of God is, and the eye of the Christian ought to be, principally fixed upon it. The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God." (John Flavel, Keeping The Heart [Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2019], 13)

A personal narrative of Jonathan Edwards

Personal Narrative

I had a variety of concerns and exercises about my soul from my childhood; but had two more remarkable seasons of awakening, before I met with that change, by which I was brought to those new dispositions, and that new sense of things, that I have since had. The first time was when I was a boy, some years before I went to college, at a time of remarkable awakening in my father's congregation. I was then very much affected for many months, and concerned about the things of religion, and my soul's salvation; and was abundant in duties. I used to pray five times a day in secret, and to spend much time in religious talk with other boys; and used to meet with them to pray together. I experienced I know not what kind of delight in religion. My mind was much engaged in it, and had much self-righteous pleasure; and it was my delight to abound in religious duties. I, with some of my schoolmates joined together, and built a booth in a swamp, in a very secret and retired place, for a place of prayer. And besides, I had particular secret places of my own in the woods, where I used to retire by myself; and used to be from time to time much affected. My affections seemed to be lively and easily moved, and I seemed to be in my element, when engaged in religious duties. And I am ready to think, many are deceived with such affections, and such a kind of delight, as I then had in religion, and mistake it for grace.

Paul's eyewitness testimony to the Resurrection

From  a recently conversation:

Paul had not been a companion of Jesus prior to the crucifixion and hence cannot testify that this is a person he knows well whom he is seeing again...I admit to being astonished that anyone would find this controversial, much less offensive. Have we become so committed to "doing the resurrection argument through Paul" that we cannot even recognize what is obvious right on the face of the text? Paul openly asks Jesus who he is! He had not known him well personally while on earth. This is all intrinsic to the story. Disagree with me if you will about Jesus' "being in heaven" when Paul saw him. But if you try to insist that Paul verified that Jesus was risen from the dead in exactly the same way that the disciples verified it as reported in the Gospels and Acts 1, you're defending something that is utterly indefensible based on the nature and brevity of his encounter and his lack of previous personal acquaintance with Jesus.

Hays 

Actually, a strong argument can be made that Paul knew Jesus by sight prior to the Resurrection:

https://williamaross.com/2016/09/02/review-stanley-e-porters-when-paul-met-jesus/

Well, if he did, he didn't recognize him on the road! He has to ask who he is. And there is no evidence that he ever recognizes him in that encounter. (Unlike Mary Magdalene or Cleopas, who do eventually recognize him.) You can say that is because Jesus was shining and glorified. That's fine. But the fact remains that in that encounter he does not verify of his own knowledge that it is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.

Hays 

Paul is literally stunned by this unexpected encounter, and there's been a 3-year interval between the Resurrection and Paul's out-of-the-blue encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. This quite different from Jesus appearing to the disciples a few days later.

Okay, if you insist that he knew him by sight, you can say that. I think it's an ad hoc attempt to hang onto the idea that he knew Jesus by sight, which is by no means a given. At best it's a conjecture. But even so, your theory there is a way of acknowledging the epistemological point I'm making--namely, that he doesn't verify Jesus' resurrection by way of the same type and quantity of evidence that the disciples had.

Hays

i) It's not ad hoc when I point you to a detailed academic monograph which makes that case. No, it may not be a given, but your self-confident denial, uniformed by Porter's scholarly argumentation, is hardly a given.

ii) I for one haven't indicated that I'm offended by you interpretation. And I realize you are pushing back against overemphasis on the testimony of Paul in 1 Cor 15 to the demotion of the Gospels. But in the NT, Paul's witness to the Resurrection is a major apologetic argument.

iii) There's a point of tension between your insistence that this must be a psychological vision, on the one hand, and you objection to Dale Allison appealing to "grief hallucinations" on the other hand as an alternative to a physical resurrection.

I don't know why people take offense at the word "vision." Real visions are a pretty big deal. Why insist that it was "much more than a vision"? Nobody is denying that Paul had a sensory experience. But isn't that why visions are called visions? Because you see something! If Jesus appeared to me tonight and gave me a message, that would be huge, but it wouldn't mean that I thought of him as physically present in the same sense that he was with the disciples.

Hays 

I don't object in principle of psychological visions. However, you're quite critical of how Dale Allision proposes postmortem apparitions as an alternative to appearances of a physically resurrected Jesus, so there are contexts in which you think the distinction is all-important.

I answered that on the other thread. If all we had were Paul's experience on the Damascus Road, Allison would be in far better shape epistemically! It would still be weird, but Paul's experience was relatively brief and far less polymodal and unambiguously intersubjective than the disciples' reported experiences were. I'm critical of the way that people strip themselves of the capacity to respond to Allison!! The way we respond to Allison best is by emphasizing aspects of the disciples' experiences that are precisely those that go far beyond anything Paul experienced. These posts are in fact a continuation of my critique of any form of minimalism that is more vulnerable to Allison's type of approach. The distinction is very important. Extremely. That's why it's good that we have the other disciples' experiences and not just Paul's to go on!

Hays

The problem is that you're undercutting Paul's testimony to the Resurrection to build up the testimony of the Gospels. You're treating Paul's testimony as secondrate. Yet in Acts and the Pauline epistles, Paul's encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road has always been a fixture for Christian belief the in the Resurrection. You're now pitting these against each other, where the price of the testimony in the Gospels is to downgrade Paul's testimony.

Paul's Christophany

What did Paul experience on the Damascus Road? Was it psychological vision of Jesus or a physical Christophany? We can't say for sure, but here are some considerations. This is my side of a recent conversation on the topic:

It's important to distinguish "heaven" in the atmospheric/astronomical sense of the "sky" from heaven in the theological sense of where God, the saints, and angels reside.

In the Ascension account he levitates above ground a certain distance in midair, then disappears into the Shekinah cloud.

Yes, he left in some sense and he could return in some sense, short of the Parousia.

I agree with you that the Christophany to Paul isn't the same as the Lk 20; Jn 20-21 incidents. That said, there's still a categorical difference between "heaven" in the sense of "sky" and "heaven" in the sense of where God, saints, and angels reside. The sky is the location of sun, moon, stars, solar/lunar eclipses, rain, hail, meteor showers, &c. And it extends down to the air, where birds, bats, insects fly, and some seeds are blown by the wind. By contrast, there are no meteorological events in heaven in the sense of God's abode. So Jesus could appear to Paul from the sky (overhead) without appearing to him from heaven (in the theological sense). In a way it's similar to the Transfiguration, which has the Shekinah, but the location is in the low atmosphere.

I'd add that Paul's traveling companions could be facing in a different direction than Paul in relation to Jesus, which accounts for why they didn't see the same thing. Or Paul could be further along the road, over a hill, or some other physical obstacle, that blocked the view with respect to his traveling companions.

I never suggested that Jesus left footprints. The upper room isn't directly comparable because an indoor setting presents fewer opportunities for different spatial configurations and visual obstacles than an outdoor setting. Finally, there's a well-documented collection of Christophanies in church history https://www.amazon.com/Visions-Jesus-Direct-Encounters-Testament/dp/0195126696. This is also instrumental in the conversion of some Jews. And it's a source of revival in the contemporary Muslim world. Of course, these could all be psychological visions. But that's one of the interpretive issues.

It's possible that Paul's experience was a psychological vision, but his traveling companions also experienced something, albeit different, which suggests something more than a psychological vision.

At the Transfiguration there was some other entity floating in the sky above the heads of the disciples: the Shekinah cloud. And the Father may have been speaking from within the Shekinah since that sometimes functions as a chariot theophany for God's portable throne.

Shekinah clouds aren't normal natural phenomenon in the first place. They are preternatural phenomena. God making emblematic use of natural media in theophanies. There are different kinds of theophanies, some using overlapping media, viz. incandescent clouds, fire, thunderstorms, chariots. To say "It is not scientifically explanatory, in natural terms, of the sound that they heard. Nor is such an explanation necessary. There is, for example, no mention of any such cloud in John 12, nor do clouds normally produce or convey words. Nor does the Father need a Shekinah cloud in order to produce auditory sound. It's not like a cloud is God's voice box," completely misses the point. God doesn't need the chariot theophany in Ezekiel 1. But the value lies on the theological symbolism of these physical manifestations.

We already have precedent in the Ascension account for Jesus floating in midair, visible to observers. So there's no antecedent objection to a similar event on the Damascus Road.

He "returned" in the Rev 1 Christophany. Indeed, Revelation refers to Jesus threatening to return to remove the lampstand of some waning churches in Asia Minor. But that's not the Parousia. There's a difference between the once-for-all-time Second Coming of Christ and Jesus appearing to individuals in the course of church history.

Jewish visions of Jesus

The video also has an interesting anecdote by another commenter:

Open Eyes

A few of you asked me what exactly I saw that made me believe in the Messiah Jesus. I was a Marine, and deployed to Iraq 4 times, and was struggling with PTSD really bad, I was loosing more of my friends to suicide than to combat, something you don't hear on the news. One night I was having a particularly difficult night, I finally fell asleep and had a vision, not a dream. I was in space, standing on a sheet of crystal, or glass....I was looking at all of the galexies and the earth, sun, moon, stars, standing right there next to me was Jesus Christ....My soul knew who He was, He didn't say anything verbally it was all telepathic, and He never looked at me, just looked straight ahead, He said telepathically " I created everything that I am showing you, and I had you In my plan from eternity past"....that changed my life.......He had dark short curly hair, wore a very bright white robe that went down to His feet, and he had a Gold sash.....I will NEVER forget that

Edit: Open Eyes' testimony on video. More "I met Messiah" testimonies from Jews.

Breaking the spell

Because freewill theists often confuse Calvinism with fatalism, I've discussed the difference on a number of occasions. In Classical literature, Creon and Oedipus are paradigm examples. Although it's a bit cheesy, Final Destination 1 (2000) is a convenient illustration. 

But is fatalism real, and is there a way to successfully cheat fate? Cosmic fatalism is incompatible with the sovereignty of God. However, witchcraft has a fatalistic streak. By that I mean, hexing somebody. Suppose you come under a curse. Can you cheat fate?

I don't think that's a hypothetical or isolated case. For instance, witchcraft is common in cultures that practice animism, polytheism, and ancestor worship. 

I'm not talking about folks who merely practice occult rituals, but those who gain actual occult power through the practice of sorcery. 

Within the realm of witchcraft, fatalism may be a real phenomenon. If you've been hexed, you may be doomed.

There is, however, a way to break the spell. Christian missionaries have always engaged in "power evangelism". If a pagan converts to Christianity, then he's not doomed. That's a way to cheat fate. That liberates the convert from occult bondage, although there may be some lingering, residual effects. You've transferred allegiance from a lesser, malevolent power to a greater, benevolent power. 

Gene Ho

Here's an interesting testimony from a photographer named Gene Ho. Ho became a photographer for Trump before anyone took Trump seriously and he stayed with Trump for two years as his campaign photographer (2015-2017).

Yet Ho was politically liberal. He had a lucrative photography business that employed 25 photographers. He had photographed Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes. He constantly traveled and had fun. However, after he came to know Trump, whom Ho had expected to dislike, Ho found himself admiring Trump. Ho eventually endorsed Trump for president.

When Trump won, all his photographers left him because they disliked Trump, Ho suddenly found himself with an extremely "brutal" IRS audit, and he went broke. His family had been on the rocks even before this and Ho was even considering divorcing his wife and leaving her and their kids. Now he was struggling to provide for his own family.

Ho was tempted with an offer of a $1 million advance from a book publisher on the condition that he publish a photography book about Trump but the book had to be critical of Trump. This would likely mean Ho would also make millions more dollars after the book was published. Yet Ho knew if he did that, then he'd have to lie about Trump, or even make up stories about Trump, but in truth Ho had nothing critical to say about Trump.

At this dark moment, Ho turned to God and became a Christian.

Why I'm still a Christian

I mentioned a while back that there's an overemphasis on Christian conversion testimonies. Why these can be edifying to read, what's more useful is to read follow-up testimonies of why someone is still a Christian after 50 years, give or take. Recently I ran that question by some Christian thinkers who are approaching the end of their pilgrimage. The answers for interesting but off-the-record. Then one of them asked me how I'd answer my own question. So, for what it's worth, here's the question and my own answer:

Q. Have you written anything about why you're a Christian at this stage of life? As you know, there's a testimonial genre about how people became Christian in their teens/twenties or how they personally embraced the faith they were raised in at that time of life, but that's frozen in the past. At that age their reasons will be thinner. Over a lifetime, the reasons may evolve or change or be augmented or replaced with deeper reasons. Approaching the end of life, a Christian thinker has thicker reasons for his faith, due to all the life-experience under his belt, study, reflection, and interaction with others. 

A. There's why I became a Christian and then there's why I'm still a Christian. I've been a Christian for 44 years. I became a Christian at 16.

I grew up in a moderately Christian home. My father was intellectual, but agnostic and aloof. My mother was a P.K., pious, but religiously rootless when I was growing up. My grandmother, who lived in town until I started junior high, was the most devout. I adored her, but she wasn't intellectual, so her faith wasn't a reason for me to believe . My Aunt Grace was the best educated Christian I knew at that time, but she was more scholarly than analytical. And we didn't see her that often. My uncle Fred, who was Dean of Education at Anderson U, was a closet apostate. 

I never attended a fundamentalist church. We attended mainline denominations. No doctrinal preaching.

When I came of age around 13, I began to think about death. Not because I expected to die anytime soon, but I was beginning to think about what I'd do with the rest of my life as an adult. And since I was mortal, it made sense to mentally begin at the end and work back from there. At the time I was an atheist. However, it seemed to me that if we pass into oblivion when we die, then life is unimportant. It made me feel alienated from the world.

At that age I didn't have a philosophically astute argument for my intuition, but over the years I've definitely firmed up my view that atheism is a euphemism for moral and existential nihilism. Indeed, one of my pastimes is to collect atheists who admit that.

That didn't make me a Christian, but it did mean I've never been able to consider atheism as a viable fallback option. At one end, my Christianity begins with atheism. That's the backstop. That's just not a tenable alternative. 

I became a Christian at 16 simply by reading the Bible, beginning with Matthew. That was it. Apologetics came later. I backed into apologetics, not to answer my own questions, but to advise others.

As a new Christian it became quickly apparent that I could ask questions the people I knew couldn't answer, so I'd have to find my own answers.

Although I'm cerebral, I'm naturally an intellectual drifter. I coasted through public school on raw talent. I was never studious. 

Partly because I found public school boring. For instance, I was probably mathematically gifted, but they didn't know what to do with gifted students. They just taught techniques for solving problems, whereas I ignored the textbook and toyed with equations until they balanced out in my head. The teacher didn't approve.

Some guys excel academically because they have a competitive streak. I don't. I always thought living to beat the competition was a stupid goal in life. Until I became a Christian, I was an intellectually lazy, indifferent student. It took a sense of Christian duty to galvanize my abilities.

Theologically, I'm primarily interested in exegetical and philosophical theology. Intellectual challenges to Christianity have never been the chink in my armor. I've read all the best atheists. 

In addition, I've invested a great amount of  time in evidence for Christianity as well as evidence refuting naturalism, including neglected lines of evidence. 

As you know, Christian faith has several components. One is belief or conviction, grounded in evidence. My faith is pretty invulnerable in that respect, although I'm only human, so I don't claim to be indestructible.

Where I'm vulnerable is the emotional problem of evil. The way to harm me is through harming those I care about. My three closest, most devout relatives suffered the most. 

I think some Christians lose their faith, not because they cease to believe in God's existence, but God's benevolence. They feel God betrayed them or betrayed those they loved. If you doubt God's goodness, then his existence is secondary. 

However, I'm a presuppositional Christian and an existential Christian. I think God is the source of meaning, math, modality, morality, and logic, as well as creation. On that front alone, naturalism is not an option.

In addition, I've never been a truth for truth's sake, follow the evidence wherever it leads thinker. That bifurcates the good and the true. But both are necessary. Without truth, goodness is illusory; without goodness, truth is worthless. 

Watching what happened to my closest relatives was emotionally damaging to my faith, but damaged faith is worth clinging to. We can't live without hope.

So between the positive evidence for Christianity, as well as the evidence for the falsity of naturalism, I remain a Christian. Atheism is repellent, and the other religious offerings aren't serious rivals. 

I should add that I've had a number of uncanny experiences over the years (as well as witnessing like phenomena with some of my relatives), so it's not confined to abstract public evidence. 

Trophy converts

Stephen J. Graham

@sjggraham

Atheists: if you could convert one Christian philosopher to atheism, who would it be?

Christians: if you could convert a single atheist philosopher to the faith, who would it be?

1. This is a window into how atheists think. Imagine the damage to your cause if your best general defected to the enemy side. Or imagine the damage to the enemy side if their best general defected to our side. 

But from a Christian standpoint, that's not how it works. It's not like gifted Christians are doing God a favor. God can raise up new sons of Abraham from stones (Mt 3:9). Christianity is not elitist (1 Cor 1-3). The fortunes of Christianity don't depend on indispensable individuals. God can replace our generals with a new batch that's just as good or better. 

2. However, we could play along for the sake of argument. It's necessary to draw a distinguish between wholesale and retail thinkers. High-level thinkers and influential popularizes. In some cases, these overlap. 

On the Christian side, William Lane Craig and N. T. Wright would be trophy converts for atheism. At present, those are the biggest catches. They're both popularizers and intellectually influential. Lennox is a notch below. 

Then you have the also-rans. Popularizers like Zacharias, Turek, Strobel, and Licona. 

On the merits, you have the high-level thinkers and scholars like Keener, Bauckham, Pruss, van Inwagen, Plantinga, Rasmussen, Dembski, Swinburne. These cater to apologetic junkies and philosophy nerds. Ed Feser is a notch below. 

They'd be trophy converts for atheism, although at their age, if Swinburne or Plantinga switched sides, that might well be chalked up to losing their minds rather than changing their minds. Senility rather than seeing the light. 

On the atheist side, Bart Ehrman would be a trophy convert for Christianity. He's currently the most popular and influential atheist. A scholar by temperament and training, but 

nowadays he churns out potboilers. At present he's the leading popularizer.

Dawkins used to occupy that distinction, but his star has faded. Carrier is a social climber who used rival atheists as a ladder in his ruthless effort to reach the top rung, but he never achieved the following of a Dawkins, Hitchens, or Ehrman, and he suffered a precipitous downfall. A washed-up wannabe. 

There's also a rising generation of YouTube celebutantes who trade in starpower rather than brainpower. 

On the merits, Oppy would would be a trophy convert to Christianity, followed by guys like Shellenberg, Tooley, Wielenberg, and Sober. But they only cater to cerebral atheists, a fraction of the total fanbase. 

Again, though, this is judging the stage of play from a worldly, secular standpoint. The success of the Christian movement doesn't rise or fall on winning or losing trophy converts. Some have a larger role to play, some a smaller role to play, but everyone is expendable in the sense that God is never at a loss for the necessary resources. 

Why be Christian rather than Jewish?

A friend asked me how I'd argued against Rabbinic Judaism. What makes Christianity right and Rabbinic Judaism wrong. The question is significant in part because Rabbinic Judaism is the only serious religious rival to Christianity. And it's significant in witnessing to Jews. 

1. I'm distinguishing pre-Christian Judaism (OT Judaism/Second Temple Judaism) from post-Christian Judaism (Rabbinic Judaism). 

2. There's a sense in which it's easier to prove pre-Christian Judaism backwards. Begin with Christianity, then prove pre-Christian Judaism in reverse. There's less evidence for Judaism, considered in isolation, than Christianity. It's easier to make a case for Christianity than Judaism apart from Christianity.

3. The evidence for Christianity includes the argument from prophecy. In many cases, OT prophecies fulfilled in Jesus or NT times. But of course, Rabbinic Jews don't think those prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus and the new covenant. This means that according to Rabbinic Judaism, the OT still contains many outstanding prophecies. Yet when centuries or even millennia pass and nothing happens, that raises the nagging suspicion: are these genuine prophecies remaining to be fulfilled or failed prophecies which will never happen?

4. In fairness, Rabbinic Jews might level the same charge regarding the Second Coming of Christ. But there's a difference:

i) The first coming of Christ gives us a downpayment or precedent. That's reason to believe there's more to come, and it's not just wishful thinking.

ii) Christianity is a global missionary religion in a way that Judaism is not. Therefore, Christianity requires centuries to achieve its goal. In the nature of the case, Christianity takes a long-range view, to save as many of the elect as God has chosen, through many generations in time and space. 

5. If we had nothing but the OT to go by, some oracles seem to be failed prophecies. For instance, the new temple in Ezk 40-48 appears to envision what awaits the exiles when they return to the Promised Land. But of course, nothing like that happened. Christianity has room and resources to accommodate that vision in a way that an OT boundary does not. 

6. There's also the question of whether it's too late for some OT prophecies to be fulfilled if they haven't come true by now. For instance:

There is only one Messiah, but there are two parts to his mission, hence two comings, but the first had to precede the destruction of the Second Temple as we learn from Haggai 2 (where God promised to fill the Second Temple with greater glory than the First Temple, yet the Second Temple did not have the Shekhinah or the divine fire or even the ark of the covenant); Malachi 3 (where the Lord Himself promised to visit the Second Temple and purge the priests and Levites); and Daniel 9 (where the measure of transgression and sin had to be filled up, atonement made for iniquity, and everlasting righteousness ushered in). 

Yeshua fulfilled these prophecies, bringing the glory of God to the Temple with his own presence and sending the Spirit to his followers there, and as the Lord, visiting the Temple and purging and purifying the Jewish leadership. And the measure of transgression was filled up when the Messiah was crucified, at which time he made atonement for iniquity and ushered in eternal righteousness. And so Haggai, Malachi, and Daniel testify that the Messiah had to come before the Second Temple was destroyed. 

This is why we also have two pictures of the Messiah’s coming, one meek and lowly, riding on a donkey (Zech 9:9), the other high and exalted, riding on the clouds (Dan 7:13-14). But these are not either-or pictures, they are both-and pictures. First he comes riding on a donkey, to be rejected by our people, to die for our sins, only to become a light to the nations of the earth; then he will return riding on the clouds, bringing judgment on the wicked, regathering his scattered people, and establishing God’s kingdom on the earth. 

https://askdrbrown.org/library/dr-brown-notes-debate-yisroel-blumenthal-real-jewish-messiah

These are keyed to Second Temple Judaism. If it didn't happen before the temple was razed, then we passed the last exit on the freeway 2000 years ago. There are no future opportunities for their fulfillment. Jesus is the best and only viable candidate. 

7. Another problem is that Jews have been unable to practice the Mosaic Covenant for 2000 years. That makes for a truncated religion. But how can Judaism still be the right option if it can't be practiced, as commanded, for such long stretches of time? What Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews practice isn't Judaism as divinely prescribed in the OT, but a faith-tradition reinvented by rabbis to adjust to a world without the Mosaic cultus. Yet to that extent it's just a human construct.  

It might be said that the Babylonian Exile provides a partial precedent. But that had a portable tabernacle in the form of the chariot-theophany and the Shekinah (Ezk 1; 10; esp. 11:16). The Shekinah tabernacle followed them into exile. But what's the counterpart in the experience of Rabbinic Jews?

8. Another evidence for Christianity is the argument from miracles, answered prayer, special providences, and Christophanies. But do Rabbinic Jews have the same  experience?

On the one hand I'm not suggesting that God never answers the prayers of Rabbinic Jews. On the other hand, I'm not suggesting that God always answers Christian prayer. But consider the secularized Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan. Is that conditioned in large part by the despairing experience of a God who doesn't answer Jewish prayers. Of a God who doesn't intervene in Jewish lives? Do miracles, answered prayer, and special providences cluster around Christianity in a way that's not the case for Rabbinic Judaism? Consider evidence for an uptick in miracles when Christian missionaries break new ground on a virgin mission field, reaching the unreached. They're often opposed by indigenous paganism, witchcraft, and demonic attack. They must respond with exorcisms and healing miracles. 

And what about the role of Christophanies in church history, up to the present? Take Muslims who experience dreams and visions of Jesus, which are instrumental to their conversion. 

In the same vein it would be useful to have a representative survey comparing the experience of Rabbinic Jews with Messianic Jews. Is God more manifest in the lives of Messianic Jews than Rabbinic Jews? Michael Brown tells me there's big difference. 

9. What is the ultimate point of the sacrificial system in the Mosaic covenant? Christianity has an explanation.

Why I didn't become Orthodox

https://arturovasquez.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/why-i-didnt-become-orthodox/

My gang is Jesus

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/my-gang-is-jesus-brazilian-evangelicals/

Keener's conversion testimony

http://www.craigkeener.com/craigs-conversion-testimony-2/

Demons are real and Jesus saves