Case for Christ
Blood and Water (Pericardial Effusion)
John 19:34 records that when a Roman soldier pierced Jesus's side with a spear, "immediately blood and water came out." For centuries this was taken as a symbolic…
The Archive
Glossary
Schaeffer Framework
Creatureliness
The theological concept that human beings are created beings; finite, dependent, contingent; and that this is not a defect but a design feature. To be a creature is…
Case for Christ
Criterion of Embarrassment
A standard tool in historical Jesus studies: if a source reports something that would be embarrassing or disadvantageous to the author or the community that produced it, that…
Philosophy
Epistemology
The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. How do you know what you know? What counts as justification? Can you know anything…
Schaeffer Framework
Escape from Reason
The title of Schaeffer's second book in the trilogy, and his diagnosis of modern culture's flight from rational coherence into pure experiential knowing. Once philosophy accepted that reason…
General Theology
Ex Nihilo (Creation Out of Nothing)
Latin for "out of nothing." The Christian doctrine that God created the universe not from pre-existing material, but by a free act of His will, bringing into existence…
Case for Christ
Gospel as Verdict (Euangelion)
The Greek word euangelion ("gospel") was not originally a religious term. In the ancient Roman world, it meant a public announcement of a military victory or the accession…
Schaeffer Framework
He Is There and He Is Not Silent
The title of Schaeffer's third book and his argument for the epistemological necessity of divine revelation. The core claim: if the infinite-personal God does not exist, you cannot…
Philosophy
Hegelian Synthesis
G.W.F. Hegel's dialectical method: thesis meets antithesis and produces synthesis, which becomes a new thesis in an ongoing historical process toward Absolute Spirit. For Schaeffer, Hegel was the…
Case for Christ
Hematidrosis (Sweating Blood)
A rare medical condition in which capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture under extreme stress, causing the sweat to mix with blood. Luke 22:44 describes…
Case for Christ
Hostile Witnesses (Non-Christian Sources)
Ancient non-Christian writers who confirm the basic framework of Jesus's life, death, and the early Christian movement; often while expressing contempt for Christianity. Tacitus (Roman historian, c. 116…
Schaeffer Framework
Propositional Truth
Truth that can be stated in propositions; subject-predicate statements that correspond to reality. "The tomb was empty." "Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Pontius Pilate." "God exists." Schaeffer…
Case for Christ
The Erastus Inscription
A Latin pavement inscription discovered in Corinth in 1929 that reads: "ERASTUS PRO AEDILITATE S.P. STRAVIT" ("Erastus, in return for his aedileship, laid this pavement at his own…
Case for Christ
The Grimes Formula (Conspiracy Collapse)
In 2016, Oxford physicist David Robert Grimes published a mathematical model in PLOS ONE calculating how long a conspiracy can survive before it collapses from internal defection or…
General Theology
The Incarnation
The Christian claim that the second person of the Trinity; the eternal Son, the divine Logos; took on full human nature in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.…
Case for Christ
The JAMA Study (1986)
In 1986, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a forensic analysis titled "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ" by William Edwards, Wesley Gabel, and Floyd…
Philosophy
The Kierkegaardian Leap
Søren Kierkegaard's concept, central to Schaeffer's analysis of the Line of Despair, that religious faith requires a "leap" beyond rational evidence into the absurd. Kierkegaard accepted the rationalist…
Schaeffer Framework
The Line of Despair
A term from Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There describing the historical rupture in Western thought; a line crossed when philosophy abandoned the hope that rational man…
Schaeffer Framework
The Mannishness of Man
Schaeffer's term for the irreducible qualities of human beings that cannot be explained by purely materialistic or deterministic frameworks. These include: personality (we are not machines), creativity (we…
Case for Christ
The Minimal Facts Approach
A historical methodology popularized by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona that builds the case for the resurrection using only facts that are accepted by virtually all critical scholars;…
Schaeffer Framework
The One and the Many
The oldest unsolved problem in Western philosophy: how do you relate the individual particular thing (this chair, that person, this moment) to the universal category (Chairness, Humanity, Time)…
Case for Christ
The Pilate Stone
A limestone block discovered in 1961 at Caesarea Maritima bearing a damaged inscription that reads: "...TIBERIEUM... [PON]TIUS PILATUS... [PRAEF]ECTUS IUDA[EA]E." This was the first archaeological evidence confirming the…
Case for Christ
The Pool of Bethesda
Described in John 5:2 as a pool with five porticoes (covered colonnades) near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem where Jesus healed a paralyzed man. For centuries, critics dismissed…
General Theology
The Resurrection
The central claim of Christianity: that Jesus of Nazareth, having been executed by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and buried in a known tomb, was raised bodily from the…
Case for Christ
The Shroud of Turin
A 14-foot linen cloth bearing the faint image of a man who suffered exactly the traumas described in the Gospel crucifixion accounts: scourge marks consistent with a Roman…
General Theology
The Trinity
The Christian doctrine that God is one being in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not three gods (that would be tritheism). Not one God wearing three…
Schaeffer Framework
The Upper and Lower Story
Schaeffer's architectural metaphor from Escape from Reason for the modern two-story division of knowledge. The lower story contains "public truth"; scientific facts, empirical data, the things everyone can…
Schaeffer Framework
True Truth
Schaeffer's deliberately redundant phrase for truth that is true regardless of what anyone thinks about it; truth that corresponds to reality as it actually is, independent of the…
Case for Christ
Undesigned Coincidences
A category of internal evidence where a detail in one Gospel account accidentally explains a puzzling detail in another; "accidentally" because the two authors show no awareness of…
Case for Christ
Yehohanan (Crucifixion Victim)
In 1968, archaeologists in a Jerusalem suburb discovered an ossuary (bone box) containing the remains of a first-century man named Yehohanan ben Hagkol. What made the find extraordinary…
No glossary terms in this group yet.