April 3, 2025 Show with Daniel P. Buttafuoco on “Every Christian is an Apologist”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this third day of April 2025.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have an old friend on the program today. He's a returning guest. He is a key financial supporter of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and always has been, as well as a sponsor and supporter of every single event that I have set my hand to do, including all of the great debates from the Great Debate Series with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and other conferences and events that I have arranged and hosted.

His name will be no stranger to my audience, for sure, because his ads are heard on this program every day. His name is Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law. He is the senior partner and founder of the law firm of Buttafuoco Associates, and he's also the founder and president of the Historical Bible Society.

And today we are talking about every Christian is an apologist, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my old friend, Dan.

Buttafuoco. Well, Chris, it's exciting to be here. I'm glad to see you and to talk to you, and you said an old friend. Is this a friend that is old or a friend.

That you've known a long time? I'm not sure. I think in our case it's both.

Probably both. But anyway, I feel like I'm just getting started. I'm full of energy. I've got seven grandkids, and they're keeping me young. And I just actually spoke at their high school, a Christian high school.

They called a special assembly for 150 kids. And I got to tell you, I want to talk about this. We had a.

Really great time. Great. Well, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your law firm and the specialty of law that you practice there?

Well, I think it's well known that I'm a personal injury and medical malpractice trial lawyer. We represent people all over the country. I just got a case in Alaska just a few minutes ago involved in serious injuries and serious accidents.

We have sort of a nationwide network of firms that are handpicked by me that I've known, colleagues of mine that we use. And so that's how we make our money, and that's how we also serve the Christian community.

But more importantly, I'm more interested at the present in terms of explaining to your listeners the need for all of us to be able to engage at least in a rudimentary form apologetics, the idea of defending the faith.

It's really needed more than ever today because we understand that we should preach the gospel. I'm not saying we shouldn't, that we understand that only the Lord can bring—I hear this all the time by well-meaning Christians—only the Holy Spirit can bring somebody under conviction and get them saved and change their heart.

Of course, I know all of that. The bottom line here, though, is that we're being faced with the challenge that we're dealing with people on a regular basis who do not have a biblical worldview. So while you may be able to preach the gospel—and certainly we can't ignore the mystical aspects of that and the fact that you engage in suppositional apologetics, the fact that the Word has power in and of itself—but apologetics is sort of like clearing the brush.

It's sort of like plowing the ground before you can plant the seeds of the gospel. And it's actually wisdom to do it this way. You know, the Lord used a lot of metaphors when he taught his people and his disciples and taught us.

He talked about farming and he talked about the farmers sowing the seed. He spent a lot of time emphasizing, well, if the seed is the same wherever it's sown, the ground is the issue. And the ground today has gotten very hard.

The ground today is full of weeds. The ground today is on trodden paths and rocky soil, and it's evident in the culture. One of the big problems we're having here is we're losing the young people at an alarming rate.

And there's reasons for that, which I'll get into. Presently, two-thirds—it was a survey that was done recently. I forget who did it, but it was a good survey, quality survey—two-thirds of the young people aged 18 to 22 are leaving the faith when they hit university.

That's 66 percent. That's the vast majority of them. And this is heartbreaking. You know, these are kids that go to church, grow up in the youth group, you know, and tends to be the smarter kids that leave.

And, you know, when only the smart kids leave, you know who's left, right? So the smart kids, they go to college, they go to university, they're enamored with their professors, and the professors talk them out of the faith.

And it's such a bad and chronic problem. They've made a movie out of it. If you haven't seen it, it's worth seeing. It's called God Is Not Dead. I've had this own experience with my daughter in university.

She went to the same university I went to, and the first day of class, a backslidden, fallen-away Jesuit was attacking her faith, found out that she was a Christian, zeroed in on her. And, you know, as a young woman, she came back to me and said, Dad, what do I do?

Oh, how do I handle this? I said, we're gonna handle it, all right? Watch what we're gonna handle it. You know, we've got a lot of good arguments and a lot of good reasons for why we believe. You know, the Bible says always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you.

That's in Peter. And so I'd been studying apologetics under some famous apologists, got my degree at Alliance Theological Seminary in apologetics, and in addition to my law degree, which I got at Hofstra University.

And so we started answering the professor. We started coming back with our own challenges and our own apologetic answers. And to make a long story short, at the end of the class, she got an A-plus.

Wow.

With, yeah, yeah. But the better part was he wrote across her paper, and I had the paper somewhere, he said, you have made me doubt some of my own atheism.

Wow.

Now, see, here's the thing. Whether the guy gets saved or not, that's another issue. I sure hope and pray that he does or did. But what we did, it was very important for my daughter to see that we have excellent answers for the questions that the unbelievers throw at us.

And you know the questions. You've seen the questions. Why does a good God, an omnipotent God, permit evil? Either he's not all good or he's not all omnipotent, right? What about evolution? Do we believe in evolution?

What about the Big Bang? And well, the Big Bang supports us, first of all, if you properly understand it, because before that, it was believed that the universe was eternal. And now we know for certain, scientifically, that it's not eternal.

It had a beginning, which means it had a beginner. And the other questions that typically get hurled at believers, you know, the Bible was written by men. Yeah, yes, it was, right? It was. But was it accurately transmitted?

We know there were copyist errors. Yes, there were copyist errors. So what? If I asked you to copy the Bible, you'd make an error. We know exactly where the errors were. We can reclaim Scripture with great accuracy.

There are great answers to these questions, but, you know, if you don't know them, you tend to sit on your backside and sort of, you know, surrender to the lies of the culture and the lies of the age.

So what I'm here to talk about is the fact that every Christian, whether you're a plumber talking to your fellow plumber, whether you're a police officer talking to someone in your squad car while you're out on a stakeout, or whether you're working in an insurance company in a cubicle talking to the person next to you, you need to have some basic ideas of apologetics and how to defend your faith, to know why you believe what you believe, because those are the things that people want to know.

And by the way, if you don't know why you believe something, you shouldn't believe it. I tell you that. I make you that challenge because I want everyone to realize that there are good and solid reasons for why we believe the Bible's the Word of God, why we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and why we believe and faith in Him will save us from our sins.

We have very good reasons to believe the Bible's accurately preserved. We have lots of good reasons for all the stuff that we believe, but if you don't know them, then you're not able to give an answer.

And I'll tell you one more thing, and then I'll let you talk, Chris. The Bible says in Jude that we ought to contend for the faith once and for all and trust it to the saints. You know, contend means to fight, like two contenders in a ring.

We need to fight. Lawyers love to fight. It's not personal. We fight in court, and then we go out, and we have a cup of coffee, and we hang out, and we go back, and we fight some more, because you're fighting with ideas.

You're casting down vain imaginations. You're taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and that's what apologetics does. Apologetics is contending for the faith, and so we need more than ever today to contend for the faith and be able to.

Give a reason for the hope that is within us. Yes, that is a quote from 1 Peter 3 .15, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you with gentleness and reverence, and that is what we are talking about in regard to apologetics.

I recently heard somebody being interviewed on TV, and he hated that phrase because he thought it meant that we are apologizing for our faith, trying to explain it away, and being sorry for it. That has nothing to do with what the word apologia means, and it has to do with that very thing that I just quoted from 1.

Peter 3 .15. An apologist is basically a lawyer for the faith, somebody who contends or who argues for the truth of the gospel, and you don't have to be a lawyer. It does help someone like me, the fact that I'm trained in rhetoric, I'm trained in spotting issues, I'm trained in evidence, I'm an evidence guy, that's what a trial lawyer is, and so it's important.

If you're a lawyer listening, even more so, you should be somewhat adept at apologetics, but you don't have to be a lawyer. You just have to be, like many of your listeners I know are very intelligent and very knowledgeable people, and just spend a little less time wasting time on TV or watching cat videos, and get involved in some YouTube apologetic sites.

There are great resources online to learn apologetics, and what I'm going to tell you today, the time that we have, I'll give you some basic arguments, time permits that you can use, but the idea here is that we should be knowledgeable about what we believe.

Now, Chris, you just quoted Peter, right? Now, if somebody were to ask Peter in the first century, you know, for the reason why he believes, because that's what he's saying, be ready to give a reason, you know what he would have said?

He would have said, I was not a follower of cleverly invented fables, but I'm eyewitnesses to his majesty, right? Because that's exactly what he says in one of the verses of the book that he writes. We're not followers of cleverly invented fables, but we're eyewitnesses of his majesty.

So Peter's apologetic could be different than yours. Peter's apologetic would be, you know what? I've seen the risen Christ. I watched him turn the water into wine. I was there when he raised Lazarus from the dead.

I know that he was crucified, and I saw the risen Christ. I saw Thomas put his hands in the wounds. So his apologetic is different, but our apologetic can be based on the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, which is, by the way, what separates Christianity from every other faith, right?

Our faith is historic. It has what is called historicity, unlike many of the other religions of the world, right? You talk about Islam, right? Islam, it all hangs on the testimony of Muhammad. And Muhammad says that Jesus was never crucified, right?

But as anybody knows, Muhammad was born 600 years plus after Jesus walked the face of the earth. So Muhammad is giving testimony about something he never saw. Now, you don't have to believe Muhammad. He claims he got his revelation in a cave from an angel.

Initially, he thought he was demon possessed. And then he went and asked his wife, and his wife says, no, no, it's God. You run with it. I'm paraphrasing, right? And so all of Islam hangs on the testimony of Muhammad, who initially wasn't even sure who he was hearing from, right?

The Bible's not like that. The Bible has multiple eyewitness accounts. John 1, that which we have seen, that which we have handled, this we declare to you concerning the word of truth. And then Luke says that the faith, having been handed down from the first two eyewitnesses, we've investigated carefully everything.

So there are a lot of good reasons to believe what we believe, and a lot of strong evidences for it. In fact, there's so much evidence for the faith that the founder of Harvard Law School, Simon Greenleaf, who is a known expert on evidence—anybody knows new evidence—was this guy, and he says, you can choose not to believe the biblical accounts, you can choose not to believe in Christ, but you can never say there's not enough evidence.

This is a guy that's an expert in evidence, and I'm also an expert in evidence, having tried a good number of cases and being very familiar with the federal rules of evidence and the state code of evidence as well.

So when you look at the evidence, we have a very strong evidentiary case for the gospel. Now, having said that, our evidence, we don't have a slandered case in the sense that we have one piece of evidence that is overwhelming, and that, I believe, is by design.

God has put the burden on us, the onus on us, if you will, to seek the Lord while he may be found. God doesn't overwhelm you with evidence. He puts the burden on us to seek and to ask and to taste and see that the Lord is good.

And the evidence for the gospel, the evidence for the Christian faith, is very much like a jigsaw puzzle, where you assemble little tiny pieces of evidence until a picture emerges, and that picture is ultimately of Jesus Christ.

Well, I want to give our listeners our email.

Address right now in the event that they have questions for you. It is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

You may want to ask about your own efforts and apologetics and evangelism to someone you love who may be an apostate from the faith, or perhaps was never a professing Christian, could be a backslider in your family, somebody who has plunged into the wicked sins of fornication, adultery, or homosexuality.

It could be a whole host of things. And obviously, you would be compelled to remain anonymous if you're asking about something that personal. But if you're just asking a general question, give us your name, your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

I also wanted to quickly plug Dan's work with the Historical Bible Society. He travels around, especially in the eastern coast, and even more especially in the New York tri-state area, to churches, to schools, and other institutions with a portion of his vast collection of Bibles and Christian books of antiquity, some of them extremely rare and valuable, and he puts on a display of these items and gives a lecture on why we should trust the Scriptures and how we came to receive them from their original languages into modern English.

And I have been overwhelmed with blessings. Every time I've seen Dan do it, he always adds something to make each lecture unique, and it's one of those rare times when I've been at an event when those in attendance, the vast majority of those in attendance, stay long after the event is over to not only observe in a closer fashion Dan's collection of books and rare Bibles of antiquity, but to ask questions.

So, if you are ever interested in having Dan speak for your church or school or other organization, you can call his toll-free number 1 -800-NOW-HURT, 1 -800-NOW-HURT, that's the number for his law firm, and his website for the Historical Bible Society is historicalbiblesociety .org.

Dan, can you tell our listeners when this fascination and excitement over apologetics really started to rise up in your heart and mind as a Christian?

Well, Christian, I've always had a very curious nature, and I've always been somebody who wanted to look for and look at the underlying reasons for why we believe things. I grew up in a religious home.

My mother handed me a Bible when I was three years old. As far as I remember, my first words were Scripture. We loved the Lord. My mother and father loved the Lord. They met in church. Their parents loved the Lord.

I have a long history in the faith. But you know, when you're the first person in your family to have any kind of serious education, these questions arise when you're taught to think critically, and I think that's really lacking among a lot of Christians today.

I'm really sad to say that. A hundred years ago, the pastor was the smartest guy in the room when you went into a gathering. 150 years ago, without question, the pastor was the intellect that was at any party.

Sadly, that's not the case anymore. They give rudimentary training to some people. People go out and they start a Bible study, and then they have a charismatic personality, and that Bible study morphs into a church.

You get the predictable result. You get a lot of people saved. You get a lot of people excited. But a lot of times, the understanding and knowledge of theology, of the background, church history, is not very deep.

If you don't have the deep roots, it's very easy to fall away. Sometimes it's just a fad with these people, and I'm sad to say that. I've been part of these churches. It's shocking, the level of ignorance in terms of how ancient the faith is, what it's based on, the scholarship behind it.

We have amazing, amazing scholars in the church, but within the last hundred years or so, that's sort of been shoved aside. Some denominations have actually made a conscious effort to walk away from the intellectual arena, figuring that, justifying it by saying, well, this is a spiritual thing.

We'll just preach the gospel, and we'll get people baptized in the Holy Spirit, and that's going to be the job. But what ends up happening as soon as you abandon any of the arenas of society—in this case, the intellectual arena of the universities—is that the vacuum gets filled.

The vacuum gets filled by evil thinkers and satanic thoughts, and you see the predictable result that we have in the universities. It's a bastion of unbiblical and evil thinking. It's postmodernism. It's secularism.

It's the worst of all philosophies. That's starting to change a bit. There's been a swing back the other way. But they take a special pride in trashing Christian beliefs and trashing traditionalism, trying to rewrite history.

This is no secret. It's pretty obvious what's going on, and we need more Christian intellectuals. We need more Christian professors. We need more Christian scientists. We need more people to stick up for the truth of what they believe.

Jesus said, you'll know the truth, and the truth will make you free. Truth is under attack. You now have people that think they can change their sex. People think they can be a cat. We indulge all this nonsense out of a sense of sympathy or empathy for these people.

Tolerance.

Yeah, well, tolerance means putting up with what you don't like. I don't tolerate chocolate ice cream. Even this idea of tolerance has been co-opted and changed into a different word. Listen, we should love everybody.

I'm not saying that. I debate people all the time. I feel bad for some of the choices that people make. Our obligation is to protect people sometimes from themselves and not indulge every fool thought that is promoted today.

Apologetics is a big factor of that because really it starts with the defense of the truth. The devil goes right for the foundation. Today, they say there's no such thing as absolute truth. That's a big one.

You heard that. You have your truth, and your truth might involve you believing something that is different than what I believe. We resolve it by saying you have your truth, and I have my truth. That's ridiculous.

Truth is not something that is personal. It's not something that is private. Truth is that which comports with reality. It's an objective reality that we're all obligated to try to find. To cop out by saying you have your truth, and I have my truth, and she has her truth, and he has his truth is just nonsense.

I can believe with all my heart that I could fill my gas tank of my car with a water hose from my garden. I'd like to believe that. I really want to believe that. We all know what's going to happen if I put water in my gas tank because it's objectively true that my car needs gasoline, and no amount of wishful thinking on my part, even if I'm sincere, is going to change that.

I could be sincere and be sincerely wrong. It's not about being sincere. You could be sincere and be sincerely wrong. We are all obligated to find the truth, to embrace the truth, and to work with the truth and to live with the truth.

Even the idiotic statement that there's no such thing as absolute truth is itself a self-defeating statement because you're making a truth declaration. You're saying it's absolutely true, that there's no such thing as absolute truth.

On its face, it just breaks down. It's nonsense. Why do we buy this? We've got to push back against this stuff. I think it's starting to change. I want to tell you a really great story, if I have time, about my kids' school.

About three weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a special assembly of about 150 high schoolers. This was at a Christian school. I will tell you, my kids and my grandkids have not spent a single day in public school, not because we are snobs, but because we don't trust the ideology that is being pushed upon these kids.

I understand that a lot of people can't afford to do that. I'm sympathetic of that. In fact, I start scholarships for these things to help people. My wife has told me she said she would clean toilets if she had to, so that our grandkids don't have to spend a single day in secular school.

They're all in Christian school, but even the Christian school, like anything else, has its issues. They called me in to do a special assembly, and they wanted to see the Bibles. I don't think they expected what they were going to get, because they were like, well, you can have a half hour.

We're going to do five songs. It's a chapel, and then you can have a half hour. I said, listen, I need an hour. They said, you're going to hold these kids' attention for an hour? I said, I'm going to hold their attention for an hour.

With God's help, I'm going to hold their attention for an hour. Then my daughter chimed in. She says, oh, don't embarrass your grandkids. I was under attack from all sides. I just prayed, and I said, you know what?

I'm going in there. I'm going to be obedient. Then the pastor gets up to introduce me, and he says, I'm going to tell them that you're Effie and Ariane and Braden's grandfather, because they're triplets.

They're 14 and a half years old, smart kids. I said, don't do that. I got word from the tower there that I might embarrass somebody. I don't want to do that. The kids, they're freshmen. They want to be accepted by the seniors.

I get it. I'll just keep this plain vanilla, and we'll go from there. He introduces me as a lawyer. Let me tell you something. I made them do one song, and they handed it over to me. I had the full Bible collection displayed.

I launched into my apologetic talk. I felt the anointing. They didn't flinch, Chris. They didn't blink. They didn't move an eye. They didn't pass a note. They didn't talk. They were riveted on me for one solid hour.

It was miraculous.

I believe it.

The headmaster was astonished. Here's the crazy thing. We bled over into the next period, and they didn't stop me. Other classes started coming in. Teachers started coming in. Then we opened it up to questions, and the place exploded with questions.

These kids, Christian kids that are in Christian school have questions. I started out by telling them. I'm like, why are you here? Your parents make you go? Is that why you're in Christian school? Do you really believe this stuff?

It was dead silence. I said, let me tell you something. You shouldn't believe anything if you don't know why you believe it. I really gave it to them. Let me tell you something. They swarmed the stage.

It was unbelievable. They had to shut it down. Eventually, it would still be going. My grandkids jumped up, and they're like, this is my pop.

That must have been a wonderful moment for you.

Yeah, it was great. I loved it. More importantly, I loved it that the kids were engaged. They took my phone number. They took my email. They said, when are you speaking next? Do you want to come? Let me tell you something.

This is interesting stuff. It's satisfying to know why you believe this stuff. It's satisfying to know that we have a good basis in truth and in reality for our faith. Christianity, like Bertrand Russell claimed, is not a blind leap in the dark.

That's nonsense. That's what the devil wants you to believe. Christianity is more like little stepping stones in which you get pieces of evidence, and you follow the breadcrumbs to see where they lead.

Again, the burden is on us to assemble this jigsaw puzzle, but when we assemble it, the picture becomes very clear. Actually, it doesn't take as much faith as you might think to believe some of these things.

Yes, it takes faith to believe people rise from the dead. Yes, it takes faith to believe that Jesus turned the wine from plain old water. Yes, it takes faith for that, but it doesn't take faith to think that something amazing happened in the first century, such as to cause James, the brother of Jesus, to go from mocking his brother to being martyred as the leader of the Jerusalem church.

Well, what would account for that change? Something dramatic had to happen. Well, you see it right there in Corinthians when Paul says afterwards, he appeared to James. Yes, when he rose from the dead, he appeared to James.

Listen, if my brother claimed to be God, I think I'd have a hard time with it. I think I'd have a difficult time with that, but you know what? If he rose from the dead and said, guess what, here I am, I think I'd probably die for that at that point, too.

So all of this stuff is in the book. You have to know how to read it. You have to know how to find reasons via faith. I just, again, want to encourage people to get motivated, to get answers to these questions, and to.

Especially tell the young people. Okay, we've got to go to our first commercial break. And Dan, I don't know about you, I love all things retro, and the ad that we are about to hear is a retro ad, a blast from the past, and it may even make you misty-eyed, Dan, but we're going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors, including an ad that has a very dear place in my.

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No matter where you live in the world, Royal Diadem will walk you step by step through every stage of the process and even hold a high-tech internet virtual visit using state-of-the-art jewelry design technology to serve you.

They start by listening carefully to determine your needs. They're interested in making what you want, not what they want to sell you. From rough design to digital model, to photorealistic image, to wax prototype model, to the finished product, they're continually listening to your input, likes and dislikes, making any changes necessary along the way.

This will ensure that your custom jewelry will turn out exactly as you dreamed and well beyond your expectations. Visit royaldiadem .com. That's royaldiadem .com today. Sterling Vandewerker, owner of Royal Diadem Jewelers, his wife Bronnie, his business partner and manager Brian Wilson, and the entire family thank you all for listening to, praying for, and supporting the work of.