Some Random Quotes

My wife and I went to a Farmer's market recently and I found someone selling books at a table, used books of various kinds. I bought two. Both were $2.00. They were by J.P. Moreland and they were on Christian apologetics. I guess it was good that I got a deal. But it was discouraging in another way. When I buy a quality book, I keep it. When good books that challenge the mind are casually discarded, it makes me wonder who let them go and why.

On the way home, I leafed through the book "Love Your God With All Your Mind." At the beginning of each chapter there were various quotes from different figures. Three in particular aroused some old passions in me.

"False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and succeed only in winning a straggle here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion." - J Gresham Machen



It reminds me how frustrated I am with the attitude of many in the church today who continue to insist, and who seem to be winning a lot of supporters, that what is important is to just point people to the person of Jesus, as if the person of Jesus could be separated from the written record of scripture and disconnected from history. There is a significant strain of Christianity that wishes to drive a wedge between the experience of God and rational thought. It seems to me to be the root of old liberalism and at the heart of much of the emerging church thinking. The idea that apologetics itself is passe', that rational defense of Christianity is a silly "modernist" exercise seems to have a lot of support. It is as if the entire secular world is saying "Christianity is just a personal esoteric and non-rational experience" and many supposed Christian leaders are saying, "Exactly!", as if this is the best news to come along in centuries.

Then there was this quote: "The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking - Neil Postman."

I know what Postman is saying. God chose to reveal Himself in a variety of ways, but the one constant through the Old and New Testaments is written text. One cannot duplicate, over and over again, Moses' experience at the burning bush, the visions of Daniel or Ezekiel, Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. God chose to have individuals write down what had been revealed. He told them not to add to it or take away from it. We are told to read it, listen to it, meditate on it, study it. This is the picture we are given consistently from 1400 B.C. to 60 A.D., give or take. To know God, for most Jews and Christians, means to listen to or read words and apprehend meaning from those words - to make connections between word pictures and sentence structures that draw on earthly images and make inferences to heavenly concepts, to gather ideas and formulate a conception of God consistent with that written text. That text is to govern and regulate our experience of God, to inform our decision making, to guide our actions in worship and service to others. That notion that the text reveals truth is under attack.

I currently have a role that looks at data in relation to high school education. What that data seems to show is that a significant number of students cannot read in a way that involves higher order thinking. Specifically, they can read words and simple sentences, but cannot infer meaning that is not spelled out in the simplest terms. They cannot determine the meaning of a word from the context of a passage. They cannot read a section of text and draw a general conclusion about the intent of an author. If the sentence is simple enough, they can follow a basic singular thought, but can't do the things that require logical analysis. This leaves them ill prepared for college and for real jobs that require them to read instruction manuals, business letters or written policies.

And yet, many in the church today wish to denigrate the place of "text" in the faith. They say that overemphasis on the text is an aberration that is the result of modern influences since the invention of the printing press. Emphasis on the text should not be the norm. Rather, the experience of God in corporate worship and community is to be the guiding principle.

I wonder then. Why did God find it so necessary to write the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone? Why was it necessary for the apostles and their companions to create four different written records of the life of Christ? Why then does scripture exist?
I find it interesting that wherever Christianity has spread, literacy has increased with it. I am able to think rationally, logically, in large part because my mind was trained to read a text at a Christian college, to consider historical context in the interpretation of a passage, to read a sentence in the larger context of a particular passage, to allow the immediate context to provide clues to the meaning of a word. I was taught to think largely in relation to puzzling over the meaning of scripture. And that is, referring back to Machen, precisely the area where Christianity is most under attack - and where high school students are entering college completely ill-equipped.

And Christian teens enter secular colleges completely unable to reason their way around clever arguments from professors antagonistic toward faith. They cannot think because reading has been denigrated.

These quotations stirred me, because I've felt this need to think in terms of apologetics, the reasoned defense of faith, the carefly exegesis of scripture, from almost the day I fully committed to Christian belief. And for most of the last 30 years, it has been an uphill battle. Most Christians don't care much about apologetics, and as many embrace the postmodern epistemology that says all truth is perception based on experience and formed in particular communities, apologetics seems to be falling off the map in many circles. Which leads me to one additional quote:

"Western civilization is for the first time in its history in danger of dying. The reason is spiritual. It is losing its life, its soul; that soul was the Christian faith. We do apologetics not to save the church but to save the world." (Peter Kreeft and Ron Tacelli)

Wow. I wish more young people would memorize that one. We do apologetics not sto save the church but to save the world. I don't think most Christian leaders see apologetics as much of a priority. And that is tragic.