Manifest Christianity is Manifest Eternity

I'd like to present a few blatant and obvious evidences for Christianity

Jesus Christ:

The God-man Himself that gave rise to Christianity and the faith system/worldview that bears His name, Jesus Christ. He is one person in a Trinity of three that constitutes God. I will expound on the Trinity in the near future.

Deuteronomy 6:4
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Matthew 28:19
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...

As believers will all (most all) assent to Jesus having actually existed, He himself would be the paramount and primary evidence for the support of Christianity and its faith or reason for inception (or origin). Most Christians would go as far as to make the claim that Christ’s life on earth was a “fact”. We have documents external to the Bible validating his existence or hinting towards a man of His description having lived at the time the Bible has stated as in the case of Josephus (Flavius). The Biblical proofs are countless. For the sake of brevity I will name only a few of the direct proofs.

Christ announces, "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" John 8:58

Since the Lord is the source of this truth and He speaks with authority I will claim His statement of who He is as evidential truth. In so doing I am, by implication, claiming it as an evidence of Christianity since without Christ, there is NO Christianity. This only becomes circular reasoning if Christ claim is not authoritative truth…but it is. Thereby making this a claim based on a given or known truth based on my worldview (Enns 227).

Fruit:

We see that through the fruits of the Spirit or manifested behaviors good indicators of whether or not people are walking in lock-step with the Holy Spirit. These are manifestations but not necessarily spiritual gifts per se. They are in order as listed Galatians 5:22-23- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Fruit is and “outgrowth” of character and a lifestyle. Failure to produce these fruits or success in producing the opposite of these fruits would be evidences to the contrary. What are the things to the contrary? Funny you should ask because they come right before the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:19-20, sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

Are the qualities manifested in the fruits of the Spirit attainable or possible outside of being a believer? Yes. But when we link these fruits in conjunction with the spiritual gifts we see a synergistic combination of evidences that point to an indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The indwelling of the Spirit aids us in our walk of sanctification which oddly, might be understood as evidence. We are continuing in a path and attempt to become more holy. A task which appears to be downright impossible for those that do not believe or have not been indwelt by the spirit as is told to us in the bible that we are all under sin. There are none righteous…not even one! We only gain righteousness through faith. Additionally, evidence(s) of that faith is/are spiritual fruit. Fruit is also an abundance of life or an outgrowth because of an abundance of life. As it is stated in Scripture, fruit also contains within itself the seeds of new life which in my mind is a supra-abundance of life.

The Body and The Bible:

I may be going out on a limb with my final evidence but I will try to offer a sound argument. The last evidence I present is The church itself or the idea of the church as an institution/body of believers drawing off the inspired word (and its authority) of God in the Bible and obeying it. The fact that there has been an unbroken line or lineage of these believers and the idea of its Christianity’s existence since Christ gave the command to “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations...” When we combine all the above statements of evidences into the fact that this is still a thriving and prospering entity that bases its belief system in the truths of the Bible argues for the belief that the Bible is indeed true about what it has stated and addressed. That this body continues to baptize and have communion as commanded. The Bible being the silent partner in this perpetuation of lineage and the church or people the non-silent partner going forth to the nations as God’s holy people/ministers of the Word.

Forget get all the scientific stuff. Let us just deal with the basic tenets of the Christian belief system. The ones I have mentioned here are long standing and understood to have been around since the beginnings of Christianity. Let us not be afraid to defend ourselves with only these evidences as it is the refuter that has the burden of proof to prove otherwise. Lets call these Manifest Christianity or Manifest Eternity. When we see them in the believers we see a peace/piece of the Kingdom that has already arrived as evidence of the promise God has made to us. It is a deposit on that promise to know that the Spirit and thereby the Kingdom is within us.

Enns, Paul. "Chapter 20 Christology: Doctrine of Christ." The Moody Handbook of Theology. Revised ed. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008. 227. Print.