3 Kinds of Objections You Will Get
By Joel Settecase / April 27, 2021
Any Christian that wants to obey Jesus needs to be about the business of evangelism. Evangelistic conversations are often going to lead to pushback from unbelievers. They’ll present objections, and believers need to be prepared to respond well to them. The good news is this: there are really only three basic categories of objections. Knowing what these categories are can help us ready ourselves to respond to any objection, from anyone, at any time.
So, You’re A Christian? Expect Pushback.
You’ve repented of your sins and believed the Gospel (Mark 1:15); you’ve embraced Jesus as Lord and Savior (John 1:12). You believe in God, but more than that, you believe God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 10:9) and gave Him all authority in Heaven and on the earth (Matthew 28:18, Acts 13:33). And you are committed to following Jesus and obeying Him in all things (Matthew 28:19).
Well, first of all, that’s awesome. And I mean it—I’m not using the word lightly—that is truly awesome. In fact it’s a miracle. Salvation by grace through faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8-9). And the fact that you’ve dedicated yourself to obeying Jesus is a sign that you really do love him (John 14:15).
But now I need to warn you. Obedience of Jesus comes with a social cost. The fact that you recognize Jesus as Lord puts you at odds with many of your neighbors and the people you will come into contact with, because, guess what, they don’t recognize the Lordship of Jesus.
So here’s how the social cost comes in. And this is two-fold. One of Jesus’s commands is to make disciples, right? And that requires evangelism, correct? This is the first part of the social cost: you are putting yourself at risk of a continuous state of awkwardness (at some level), because when you’re conversing with your non-believing loved ones, friends and acquaintances, you’re going to be thinking about how you can direct them to Christ.
And here’s the second part of the social cost: when you evangelize (i.e. convey the Gospel that Jesus is Savior and Lord) someone who does not recognize His Lordship, you’re going to get pushback. Expect it. There is going to be conversational and relational friction when you tell a man the news that Jesus is Lord and he is not. He will have objections to your faith, and he will challenge your faith. He’ll have reasons why he doesn’t believe and why he has no intention of believing. There’s no way to avoid this, so we might as well prepare for it.
How To Prepare For Objections
While some think of Christianity as blind-faith-based, or emotionally driven (and God help you if that’s what your religion is based on!), we have to understand that loving Jesus means loving Him with our minds (Luke 10:27), and what we need here is not blind faith, not emotionalism, but knowledge. Hosea 4:6 says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” and we don’t want to neglect knowledge. We don’t want to get caught flatfooted in conversation with unbelievers, because we rejected God’s knowledge and failed to study His word. Because we didn’t think it was important to prepare.
So we need to prepare; we need to know very well what God’s word says, so that we can handle objections. And we also need to understand that, while objections may be multifarious, there are really only three kinds of objections you will get. If you can prepare to answer each kind of objection, and you can learn to identify your discussion partner’s objection as being in one of these categories, then you will be one (huge) step closer to being ready to answer any objection from anyone at any time.
The Three Categories of Objections to Christianity
What are these three kinds of objections? Here they are, and guess what: they all begin with S.
1. “Scripture-Based” Objections
These are perceived problems with the Bible. They could be logical, authorial, moral, or related to the transmission of the text over time. In other words, “The Bible, upon which Christianity is based, is wrong, inconsistent or bad.”
Examples of scriptural objections include:
The New Testament was written too long after the events it describes to be considered trustworthy.
The Bible is full of contradictions.
We can’t know who wrote the Bible!
The authors of the Gospels were biased; we can’t trust them.
The God of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is immoral!
2. “Situation-Based” Objections
These are seeming incompatibilities between Christian truth claims and the world. In other words, “Christian teachings are false, unsubstantiated or harmful.”
Examples of situational objections include:
If God were real, evil wouldn’t exist.
Christianity is bad for society.
All the wars have been caused by religion.
“Faith” is just believing something without (or in spite of) the evidence.
Christianity is unscientific.
There are so many religions. You can’t know yours is the only true one.
3. “Self-Based” Objections
These are problems arising from one’s own lived experience or human existence. These could also be called “soul” objections, because rather than being rational or evidential (as the other categories of objections are purported to be), they stem from one’s emotional state or visceral reactions.
Examples of self-based objections include:
Christianity is just a crutch—one I don’t need.
Christians are hypocrites.
I’ve been hurt by the church.
I need to be free to do me.
So How Do We Respond?
So far, all we have is a diagnosis. Or rather, we have a diagnostic tool. Using the three categories above, you should be able to classify your opponent or discussion partner’s argument, which will then better prepare you to answer it.
How to answer questions from each of the three categories could take another three episodes and articles, and maybe I’ll just do that very soon. But in the meantime, here are three (very quick) blurbs to bolster your rebuttal of each category of objection.
For Scripture-Based Objections:
The goal of these objections is to show that the Bible (and therefore the Christian religion based upon it) is false.
But as our current president might say, look, here’s the deal, Jack: if the Bible weren’t true, then you’d lose a lot more than Christianity. See it’s the Bible that reveals the Triune God who grounds things like logic and truth. So if the Bible weren’t true, logic (necessary for “contradictions” to be a thing) and truth (necessary for “falsehoods” to be a thing) and morality (necessary for “God commanded evil” and “God is a moral monster” to be things) all evaporate. Poof! No more objection. You can’t have logical violations, if there’s no such thing logic. And yes, logic requires God (and so do truth… and morality). So, if the Bible were false, then it wouldn’t matter if the Bible were false, because nothing would be logical, true or moral.
Within the biblical, Christian worldview, however, there’s no problem with perceived problems with the Bible. Why? Because within this worldview, God is the basis for truth, logic and morality, and as such He is the ultimate defeater for any perceived violation of truth, logic or morality in Scripture.
Get a hold of this, because it’s important: any problem we have with Scripture is a reflection on us, not God’s word. We either misunderstand it, or we don’t understand why it’s good. But within Christianity, there is no way of disproving the Bible. Some will argue that makes Christianity unfalsifiable, but as my friend Eli Ayala says, that’s not a weakness of Christianity, it’s a strength!
So if we start with the Bible as God’s word, then all problems with the Bible disappear. If, on the other hand, we start with the Bible as false (or even possibly false, which is the same as calling it false, since the Bible claims to be totally true), then truth, logic, and morality lose all meaningfulness and the objections disappear anyway.
For Situation-Based Objections:
Let’s keep this one short and sweet.
So, someone has accused Christianity of not being true, good for society, scientific, or in keeping with the facts of the world. Here’s the key question to ask, with a view to refuting these objections:
“Is it possible that your understanding of the evidence is wrong?”
In other words, could the skeptic or unbeliever possibly not have all the facts yet? Could he be misinterpreting the data? Could there be a fact out there in the cosmos that answers his objection? If this is even possible, then there’s no issue. The only objection that the non-Christian can make is simply, “I don’t know whether that truth-claim is true or false.”
But do you see? This is a statement about the skeptic, but it says nothing about Christianity. And here’s the deal, too (Jack): if the Lord is not real—if the Triune God of Scripture doesn’t exist and Christianity is not true—then man has no basis for knowledge at all. Without an ultimate reference point of knowledge and truth, all man has is points of data, and all he can do is attempt to piece them together into something coherent, but without ever knowing if even one conclusion he makes about any of those data points is actually accurate. Because man is finite (both in intellectual capacity and in how much knowledge he has or can possibly have), for all he knows there could be a fact out there that disproves every proposition he believes to be true. And of course, that includes the proposition, “Christianity is false.”
Now, within the biblical worldview, again there is no problem here.
If the evidence doesn’t appear to be stacking up in our favor, we can fall back on the truth that “evidence” is only a meaningful concept because God is there. In other words, the attempt to pit evidence against Christianity only assumes that Christianity is true to begin with.
I want to make this very explicit: it is impossible for anyone to ever disprove biblical Christianity with any evidence.
Either Christianity is true, or evidence is not a thing.
For Self-Based Objections:
Here we need to exercise Christlike compassion. Yes, I know, we should have been doing this with the other two objections as well. But we especially need it here in the third category.
People are dealing with real pain and hardship, and sometimes that’s been caused by professing Christians. We’d be foolish not to acknowledge this and tread delicately, making every effort to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).
So how do we respond?
First, remember that you can’t save anyone, and you aren’t necessarily going to be able to help someone get over serious trauma in a short conversation. Leave the results to God, and be okay with not seeing the results you want. It might not be in God’s timing to bring the person to faith right then and there.
Second, make the connection between the person’s emotions and sense of self-worth, and the biblical worldview. How? Like this: the person is expressing hurt and pain rooted in the belief (an incorrigible one, not irrational but certainly pre-rational) that he has intrinsic value. He’s been hurt by the church (for example) and that is wrong. It’s wrong because he is a person who shouldn’t be unjustly treated in a hurtful way. Now, as a Christian, you can make sense of that. He’s been created in God’s image and has God-given rights. But as a non-believer, why does he believe he has worth and value? Human dignity does not arise from atheism, nor from any other non-Christian system—at least, certainly not the the degree that it is taught in the Bible, where we have the account of God Himself becoming a human being!—and his feelings are therefore not in line with unbelief.
And yet, the same Bible that says he’s been created in the image of God, and says that God cares for him (as Jesus says in Matthew 5:45 that God meets the daily needs of the righteous as well as the unrighteous), also says that his deepest problem is sin. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is everlasting life in Christ Jesus, who came to lift burdens and set the captives free (Romans 6:23; Matthew 11:28-30; John 8:36).
Always bring your apologetics back to the Gospel, and an invitation to repent and receive Christ as Savior and Lord.
Remember, apologetics is there to vindicate truth, but also to aid in evangelism and the Great Commission.
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