Individual Christians must accept the teachings of others or make up their own minds.
For Christians, God is the judge of right and wrong and scripture represents the accepted body of legal precedent (Cosgrove, pp. 38-40). The Golden Rule, the ultimate statement of Christian ethics, is grounded on "the law of Moses" (Luke 10:25) and "taught in the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12), and its universal applicability likewise hinges on accepting the word of Jesus that the "neighborhood" of love theoretically extends to all humanity (Luke 10:36-37).
In fact, given the absence of compelling evidence, even the historical existence of Jesus or any of the other foundational Christian figures must be taken "by faith" or interpreted in metaphorical terms (Strobel, 2002, pp. 96-97). However individual Christians struggle with (or resolve) this dilemma in their own lives, the very fact that the dilemma is meaningful to them at all reveals the depth of their participation in the Christian worldview. While faith "cannot be equated with religious experience" -- that is, it is not a simple matter of successfully receiving empirical validation of the truth -- it "cannot be separated from ordinary ways of learning" either (Cosgrove,...
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