Kevin Rogers is the director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide. He is now mainly retired after having an electrical engineering career for 40 years and then working as a research Fellow, lecturer and PhD student at the University of South Australia.
On the 23rd February 2023, Kevin Rogers provided a presentation on What is an experience of knowing Christ?’
He describes his talk as follows:
It is often claimed that being a Christian means having a personal relationship with Christ, but what does this mean, how should it feel like, and do I have one?
Within conservative protestant circles, assurance is often based on scriptural promises. E.g., we can know we are a Christian if we have put our faith in Christ, or ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so’. However, although these statements are true, they do not go far enough. Both Jesus and Paul state that assurance goes beyond this, and Paul expects his readers to share in his own experience.
Apologetics by reasoned arguments is commanded and is useful for providing intellectual support, but it does not go the whole way. God can do more than that such that we can we truly know. The Spirit can attest with our spirit that we are children of God.
During this talk, I will cover:
The value and limitations of apologetics,
My own Christian experience,
The Biblical warrant for Christian experience and assurance,
Paul’s teaching on knowing Christ, and
The conditions for knowing Christ,
Kevin Rogers
Dr Kevin Rogers
Kevin Rogers is the director of Reasonable Faith Adelaide. He is now mainly retired after having an electrical engineering career for 40 years and then working as a research Fellow, lecturer and PhD student at the University of South Australia.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds was popular in Europe, particularly in many leading philosophical circles. To Francois-Marie Arouet, more commonly known as Voltaire, this was nonsense, and he set out to lampoon the concept in brilliant satire.
But:
What was the basis of this belief in the first place?
How effective is Voltaire’s response?
And what should we make of it today, particularly in our covid-ravaged world?
There’s an aspect of Christianity that most churches are uncomfortable with, and that is directly hearing from God.
This can be by such means as:
Hearing an inner voice,
Two-way conversational prayer,
Dreams,
Visions, or
Prophesy.
Some churches argue that the Bible is all-sufficient. Nothing more is necessary, and such forms of direct human-God communication died out in apostolic times. Others, generally of a more ‘charismatic bent’, regard at least some of the above as still valid for today but are wary of such teaching as applying to the ‘normal Christian life’. So, can we hear God?
