Erwin Lutzer’s One-Minute Challenge to Atheists

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What follows is Erwin Lutzer’s one-minute challenge to atheists. Lutzer is an Evangelical preacher and author, the former pastor of The Moody Church in Chicago, Illinois.

Lutzer’s one-minute challenge is the stupidest, funniest thing I have ever heard uttered by an Evangelical preacher — and that’s saying a lot. 🙂

Let me know in the comment section if you think Lutzer’s challenge has any merit. I suspect every atheist, agnostic, pagan, universalist, Satanist, and other non-Christians will say no — that is after they get up off the floor from all their laughing. Trust me, Lutzer’s challenge is really, really, really d-u-m-b.

Video Link

Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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14 responses to “Erwin Lutzer’s One-Minute Challenge to Atheists”

May 11, 2022

Logan

Oy. Lutzer assumes we atheists have not already intensively read the gospel of John. I’m sure I am like many of your readers in that I studied and repeatedly read all of the gospels and the entire New Testament many times, but later rejected it as myth and fable. Yep, that is laughable!

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May 11, 2022

Michael Mock

That is… very definitely something. And I absolutely guarantee he does not say that shit to atheists; he’d get laughed out of the building.

His little testimony at the end there is very telling: “I had a man say to me, ‘All my objections were like puffs of smoke in the presence of the risen Jesus.’” I mean first off, who talks that way? Nobody who wasn’t evangelical already. Second of all, clearly what we need isn’t ten minutes of Bible reading a night, it’s the presence of the Risen Jesus. Why not just cut to the chase and get Him down here to puff away all our objections?

Also, my brain has now informed me that Risen Jesus is the boss battle you get after you defeat Preacher Jesus and Cross Jesus in the earlier stages of the game.

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May 11, 2022

Jaqen H’ghar

5-seconds challenge for all Loosers aka Lutzers — Why do you have a mouth and an anus? Is that the best your God can do?

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May 11, 2022

Karen the rock whisperer

As a middle schooler, the gospel of John kept me clinging to the religious beliefs imposed by my family longer than I otherwise would have.

As a middle-schooler.

IIRC, by the time that gospel was written, the early church was pulling itself together. It was codifying its mythology, figuring out how best to support it’s adherents, and so forth, especially since it was no longer completely flying under the radar of Rome, perhaps. Still a small movement, but in an empire continuously at war, small movements could make trouble. It had attracted literate men, who could write to flesh out the mythology.

Lutzer has clearly never engaged with atheists who’ve reached our unbelief through careful thought. If John really is a conversion tool, then the folks being converted are pretty credulous to begin with.

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May 11, 2022

Sage

I wish people like him would ask me that question. I’ve read the Bible front to back multiple times. I’ve read John countless times. I still conclude Jesus is a myth.

Christians really do not seem to comprehend that people can read the Bible, understand it, and still consider it to be wrong.

And John didn’t write the gospel of John.

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May 11, 2022

ObstacleChick

Um…okay….this seems silly. I have read John, but not in many years. I am pretty sure that I can read John and still not believe the fantastical claims about Jesus being a deity, just as I read Harry Potter and know that he is a fictional character, not a real wizard.

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May 12, 2022

BJW

Well…it’s been a long time since I read the Bible. And here’s a funny thing: I could find my Bible and read some texts that would make me feel okay. But I can also read things that aren’t Christian, things that are non-Biblical, and I find some peace too. It’s the content of actual sentences, and not the spirituality of a book.

I have a friend from high school who was the oldest son who grew up as a Catholic. Well, he went through the motions, but he ended up a Buddhist. And he gave me a saying to say if I felt stressed. Weird! A Buddhist saying gave me some peace. (Probably due to concentrating on it, instead of the stress.) But, I did NOT convert to Buddhism.

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May 12, 2022

clubschadenfreude

it’s always notable that they demand that you only read the gospel of John. Not the whole bible, not all of the gospels. That prevents anyone from seeing how their religion fails.

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May 12, 2022

… Zoe ~

I’m not going to listen to it . . I know you won’t mind. 🙂

I spent a long season on a mattress on the bedroom floor, due to spinal problems. It was during my immersion in the fundamentalist years. Unfortunately, for me, I listened to him on the radio every Sunday (as I couldn’t attend church) and read one of his books and began to go deep into the concept of “it’s all Satan’s fault including my pain” and suffice it to say, it was terribly unhealthy for me.

Anymore, whoever approaches from an evangelical state of mind, I just ask them to take it up their concerns with their God.

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May 12, 2022

Brian Vanderlip

I do like the concept of taking ten minutes a day to do something worthwhile and I think that usijng it for morning mediitation might be useful indeed. As for John, I remember as a Christian man in my twenties, giving my girlfriend ( a devil worshipper via the Bahai’s ;-)) an exegesis of John in the hope that Jesus would use the erudite insights to bring her into the one true faith.
It didn’t work because she was in the devil’s dugout and the game was too far along. So I married her and dang! a miracle happened. I learned to play better baseball… (This is a blog about sports, right?)

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1. May 12, 2022
  
  MJ Lisbeth
  
  Brian—So you didn’t “strike out” with her. Great!
  
  Your comment is funny. The comments on the Lutzer video are funny or sad, depending on your POV.
  
  I’ll echo what some other people have said here: This Lutzer guy (whose name his sidekick pronounces as “loser”—is that a Freudian slip?) makes the same mistake plenty of other Evangelicals make! They assume we haven’t read the Bible—or, in Loser’s case, John specifically.
  
  Reply
May 12, 2022

Emersonian

He lost me the moment he said “John.” Really? The least historic, least beliveable, most weird and wonky of the gospels? Nearly every verse in John is suspect from a historic and spiritual standpoint, IMHO. So, nope, try again.

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May 12, 2022

Bruce Gerencser

As a pastor, I preached a 100+ expositional sermon series on the book of John. I know the book inside and out. I can’t imagine anything in John causing me to come running back to Jesus. 😂😂

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May 14, 2022

Tom Herres

Erwin isn’t using the prefix, “Dr.” anymore? The fact that his is merely an honorary doctorate must have created backlash.

I know that he wrote, “When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany.” The fact that he doesn’t even have a baccalaureate in history, and can neither read nor write German, makes me even more skeptical than I would be for the usual Argumentum ad Hitleram.

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