Jeff Dunn, senior pastor at Christ United in Myrtle Beach, said he wouldn’t be preaching if he did not believe Christ rose from the dead. About 1,000 people worship each Sunday at his church.
“If he didn’t in fact rise from the dead, as Paul said, we’d be guilty of lying about God, and we would be wasting people’s time. Christians would be the most pitiful people on the planet.”
Dunn has been a pastor for 33 years. He said early in his academic career he was ready to abandon the idea that scripture was authoritative or historically accurate, or that it represented truth.
“I was completely beginning to embrace the idea that it was simply man’s effort to explain God.”
But before he completely bought into the idea that the Bible might or might not be true, he studied harder.
“I began looking at the evidence around Scripture and the evidence within, both from a theological perspective and from more of a scientific type perspective or investigatory perspective. It just became more and more clear to me that it was solid truth.”