The Impasse Series (4/4): Christianity on Trial

Christianity has a PR problem. And honestly? A lot of it is self-inflicted.

The people who are supposed to represent it often do the worst job of it. The book that anchors it gets picked apart, mistranslated, and wielded like a weapon. The institution built around it has, at various points in history, been corrupt, violent, petty, and small. In a world full of other religions making their own claims, Christianity stands up and says we're the one which, depending on who's saying it and how, can look like hypocrisy or conviction.

This is the fourth and final post in The Impasse Series. Four posts on the questions that stop people at the edge of faith. This one puts Christianity itself on trial. The institution, the exclusive claims, the evidence.

I'm not going to defend the institution uncritically. Some of it deserves to be called out. What I will do is separate the failures of the people from the truth of the thing they claim to represent because those are not the same, even though people treat them like they are.

The witness may be a mess. That doesn't mean the case is closed.

1. Why do Christians often behave so badly?

Christianity is a hospital, not a showcase. The whole premise is that people are broken and in need of repair, so it should be no surprise that the people in the building are broken. What would be disqualifying is if Christians claimed to be already fixed. The hypocrisy is real and inexcusable; the question is whether the failure of the patients disproves the medicine. They're hypocrites. It's embarrassing, and it makes me furious.

2. Why are there so many denominations if Christianity is true?

Humans disagree about everything including things that are true. There are hundreds of schools of philosophy, thousands of scientific journals with competing interpretations of data, and fifty versions of every political idea. Disagreement doesn't disprove the subject matter. What's remarkable is actually how much the global Christian tradition agrees on at its core across cultures, centuries, and continents a level of coherence unusual for any human movement.

3. Why does God allow religious hypocrisy?

For the same reason God allows any other sin because coercing people into integrity isn't integrity. The hypocrite who performs religion for social benefit is making a free choice to exploit something good. God allowing it is a feature of genuine freedom, not a design flaw. What's notable is that religious hypocrisy is one of the things most sharply condemned in the tradition itself. The harshest words, spoken by Jesus himself, were reserved for religious frauds (Pharasees and Saducees).

4. Why do sincere people arrive at different religious conclusions?

The same reason sincere people arrive at different philosophical, political, and scientific conclusions. Sincerity doesn't guarantee methodology, starting assumptions, or the quality of available information. Sincerity is necessary but not sufficient. That said, the diversity of sincere conclusions across human history has interesting patterns: nearly every tradition points toward something transcendent, moral, and purposeful. The disagreements are often about the details of something people broadly agree is there.

5. Why did Jesus really have to die?

This is the central question of Christian theology and the answers are dense. The short version: the claim is that moral debt is real and that wrongs done are not simply erased by deciding to move on. Justice and mercy cannot both be satisfied unless someone absorbs the cost. The death of Jesus is understood as God choosing to bear the weight of what humans owe rather than demanding they pay it themselves. Whether you buy the metaphysics or not, it's a story about love choosing cost over comfort.

6. How can science and faith coexist?

Easily, historically, and actually. The founders of multiple scientific disciplines: genetics, astronomy, physics, chemistry were committed believers. Science answers how questions; faith addresses why questions. They operate in different registers. The conflict is mostly recent, mostly loud, and mostly manufactured by people on both sides with something to prove. Most working scientists who are religious report no internal contradiction; most serious theologians have made peace with what science has demonstrated. Science actually demonstrates God's creative design and order in millions of ways. There have been scientists who have graphed what a thought looks like, both positive and negative. The positive looks like a healthy tree. The negative looks like a dead tree. The power of life and death is in the words we think and speak. That was written before science could prove it.

7. Is morality possible without God?

People clearly act morally without believing in God and this is observable. The harder question is whether morality is grounded in God, or whether it's simply a useful social agreement. If morality is just what societies decide, then the Holocaust wasn't objectively wrong it was just unpopular. Most people's moral instincts reject that conclusion, which raises the question of what those instincts are pointing toward. Hint: Its the fact that morality is rooted in God.

8. How can Christianity claim exclusivity in a world of many religions?

Every worldview claims exclusivity in its own way. Atheism claims religion is wrong, Buddhism claims the path to liberation is specific, Islam claims Muhammad is the final prophet. The question isn't whether a view makes exclusive claims (they all do), but whether those claims are true. Christianity's specific claim is historical that Jesus rose from the dead and that's a claim that can be investigated, not just asserted. It either happened or it didn't. If it did happen, which by the way many ancient texts and writings speak of a "Son of Man" dying when they recorded their account of the celestial events that happened on the day of crucifixion and ressurection. Do you think I'd make a claim like this and not back it up? Here is the proof of my statements: 1. Phrygia (Modern-Day Turkey)

• The Record: The 2nd-century Greek historian Phlegon of Tralles wrote a comprehensive history called the Olympiads.

• What was Recorded: He explicitly documented that in the 4th year of the 202nd Olympiad (around AD 32–33), the "greatest eclipse of the sun" occurred. He noted that it became dark as night at the sixth hour (noon) so that stars appeared in the sky, and that a massive earthquake simultaneously struck Bithynia and destroyed much of Nicaea.

2. Greece (The Mediterranean Basin)

• The Record: A historian named Thallus, writing around AD 52, authored a three-volume history of the Eastern Mediterranean world.

• What was Recorded: While his original texts are lost, he was quoted extensively by later scholars like Julius Africanus. Thallus documented a fearful midday darkness that pressed upon the whole world and accompanied an earthquake. Thallus personally tried to rationalize the event by claiming it was a natural solar eclipse, which later historians pointed out was impossible during a full moon.

3. Heliopolis, Egypt

• The Record: Dionysius the Areopagite, an astronomer and philosopher, was reportedly in Heliopolis, Egypt, at the time of the crucifixion. [1]

• What was Recorded: Classical Christian traditions record that Dionysius and his fellow philosopher Apollophanes witnessed the midday darkness from Egypt. Recognizing that the moon was not in the correct orbital phase for a solar eclipse, Dionysius reportedly exclaimed, "Either the God of nature is suffering, or the mechanism of the world is dissolving."

4. Rome (The Imperial Archives)

• The Record: While not an independent region, the capital of the Roman Empire itself allegedly held these records.

• What was Recorded: Early Christian apologists like Tertullian (writing around AD 197) boldly challenged Roman authorities to look at their own official imperial archives. He wrote that the midday cosmic darkness was a "wonder... related in your own annals, and preserved in your archives to this day," indicating that local Roman governors in Judea routinely logged unusual natural phenomena and sent the reports back to Rome. 

5. Jerusalem, Judea (The Lunar Phenomenon)

• The Record: While the Gospels record the 3-hour darkness, modern NASA astronomical models have confirmed that a partial lunar eclipse occurred over Jerusalem on the evening of Friday, April 3, AD 33—the most widely accepted date of the crucifixion.

• What was Recorded: This celestial event caused the moon to take on a reddish hue as it rose over Jerusalem, which Peter explicitly refers to in the Book of Acts as "the moon turning to blood" right after the crucifixion.

9. Why are there apparent contradictions in Scripture?

Many of what look like contradictions dissolve under close reading different audiences, different genres, different purposes. Some are genuine tensions that the tradition has debated for centuries. The presence of tension in an ancient library of texts written across a thousand years in multiple genres is not surprising; it would be more suspicious if there were none. The question is whether the tensions are irresolvable or generative. Every single contradiction in Scripture is caused by problems in translation specifically the KJV, which failed to study the cultural context. The translations where they do, are the most accurate translations, and they have no contradictions.

10. Why does God permit demonic influence at all?

If you accept the reality of spiritual agency beings capable of choice then the same logic that applies to human freedom applies here: genuine agency means the possibility of genuine rebellion. What's distinctive in the Christian view is that demonic powers, while real, operate under limitation. They cannot do anything to us that isn't allowed by God. The story is not a power struggle between equals; it's a battle that's already been won by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

In Summary:

Here's what I want you to walk away with from this post: the failures of Christianity's people are not an argument against Christianity's claims. They're an argument against hypocrisy, which Christianity itself condemns more loudly than anyone.

The question you actually have to answer isn't whether Christians are good enough. They're not, and they'll be the first to tell you. The question is whether the resurrection happened. That's a historical claim. It can be examined. And when you examine it honestly the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances, the willingness of eyewitnesses to die rather than recant the evidence is stronger than most people have been told.

Don't let the worst representatives of a thing keep you from investigating the thing itself. That's how you miss the most important truth you'll ever encounter.

This has been The Impasse Series. Four posts. Forty questions. One throughline: God is sovereign, He is our Father, and not one of your hard questions catches Him off guard.

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→ If you need to go even deeper, I have written Escape Artist: The Workbook that will guide you through deeper reflections and healing. Available now on Amazon.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

The Impasse Series:

• The Father's Heart

• The School of Love

• The Cost of Belief: The Surrender

• Christianity on Trial