hughbiquitous

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

…I have learnt that a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith which he ought to make to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture.

— Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis

John Mark Reynolds has given me my best Christmas present this year. He has written a brilliant apologetic for Santa Claus in the finest Clarkian/Van Tillian epistemic tradition. (Or is it Vincent Cheung?)

(If you’ve never heard of presuppositional apologetics, you might still enjoy this, but just understand that this is hilarious in ways you won’t appreciate.)

It’s a bit of a straw man, but that’s allowed in satire.

John Mark, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Even to express doubts indicates a humanist, Enlightenment mindset. Santa comes to those who seek Santa. He chooses to reward his elite with special knowledge of Santa that they cannot doubt. Only then will their cognitive faculties work. This truth is evident in their failure to see Santa as we have seen him.

Everyone has presuppositions, but the mistake some people make is to challenge those presuppositions and to think about them! The mere fact that we like our epistemological cocoon is sufficient reason to stay in it.

The unbelievers ask for evidence, but there is no evidence they can understand. Only we can understand through the magic that Santa has given us. He will not give it to them, because they cling to human reason. They don’t realize that Santa hides from those who insist on thinking about him.

Santa comes to their house, but he wears gloves. He never leaves fingerprints that they can see. We could see his fingerprints, but we don’t bother looking since we already know they are there. We surely will not tell you about them, since that would be too much like philosophy.

The Santa doubters think they have an excuse, but it is good that Santa has left no evidence in nature for his existence.

Unbelievers cannot see him, but we can!

William Lane Craig has a new audio blog in which he offers short (10-20 minute) recorded commentaries on current events. It sounds like it’s drawn from his “Defenders” adult Sunday school class at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church.

Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:

In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)

Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.

There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.

Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:

For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.

Amen to Ken Samples:

I think one of the greatest apologetic challenges facing Christianity today is the anti-intellectualism present in many evangelical churches. …If our churches are going to be effective in the apologetic and evangelistic enterprise as God commands, then believers must regain the “life of the mind.” Many nonbelievers today view Christians as “feelers,” not “thinkers.” Our churches can reverse this unhealthy trend by embracing reason and rationality as the good gift of an infinitely wise God and by practicing the important intellectual virtues mandated in Scripture—such as discernment, reflection, testing, and intellectual renewal.