Dear Church, we cannot afford not to reason in an unreasonable age.
Dear Church,
We cannot afford not to reason in an unreasonable age.
Consider this thesis:
“Most Christian young people are ill-prepared to meet the attacks on their faith that they will encounter as adults in the world, and especially in college…. What a person believes about God, the world, the human soul, and the afterlife are the most important beliefs he holds. These foundational convictions create his viewpoint of the world and therefore affect every other belief he has, eventually giving rise to his choices and behavior…. Aggressive atheists and postmoderns relativists are among those watering at the mouth to get hold of the minds and hearts of today’s teens, and lead them down destructive paths…. opposite the way of Christ.” (Steven B. Cowan; Jason Dollar and Bradley Pinkerton, Contend: A Survey of Christian Apologetics on a High School Level, Aventine Press, 2009, 5, 7)
Would it disturb you, Christian, if I told you that the Church is losing its young people when they go off to college at alarming rates, with conservative estimates ranging between 50-70%? This is reality, and a critical contribution to this reality is that the Church is simply not equipping its people (especially its youngest generations) to be vibrant, biblical, Christ-centered, Holy Spirit-dependent thinkers. According to author and editor Sean MacDowell,
“Presently, most teens who enter adulthood claiming to be Christians will walk away from the church and put their emotional commitment to Christ on the shelf within ten years. A young person may walk away from God for many reasons, but one significant reason is intellectual doubt. According to the National Study on Youth and Religion, the most common answer nonreligious teens offered for why they left their faith was intellectual skepticism.” (Apologetics for a New Generation: A Biblical and Culturally Relevant Approach to Talking About God, Harvest House, 2009, 18)
This is a problem.
Deep, God-centered, biblical,faith-filled, intentional and persistent thinking is inseparable from the Christian life, though from the modern Evangelical climate you would not discern this. The Apostle Paul, in his transition from the “theology” portion of Romans to the “application” section, begins, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12.1-2, ESV, emphasis added). Did you catch that? The Spirit-transformed mind is the means by which we are able to test and discern the will of God. Reflecting on his observations of the Western Evangelical Church in light of this biblical truth, Dr. John Patrick of Augustine College in Ottawa, Canada wrote:
“Evangelical Christians have largely given up on the practice of careful thought because they have not had it impressed upon them that they have a duty to transform the way they think with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is a problem which was first recognized in the forties but it is coming to its full fruition only now. Here is how CS Lewis puts it in the Screwtape letters. (In these letters Lewis uses the device of letting us read the correspondence of our tempters to give us insight into our own defects.) In the first letter from Screwtape to his underling Wormwood, Screwtape writes:
My Dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But… with [the media]… we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing around in his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true ” or “false” but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church …The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground…. By the very act of arguing you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake who can foresee the result?” (John Patrick, “Nine Questions Everyone Must Face”)
The plain fact – as I think that anyone familiar with modern education can attest – is that sound thinking, proper philosophy, and sincere rhetoric are systematically ignored. The result is the modern relativistic landscape of “what’s good for you is good for you, and what’s good for me is good for me.” You’ve heard the argument before.
This landscape includes the mass exodus of emerging adults from the Church, as referenced earlier. A contemporary generation of life-long churchgoers was taught growing up that they were to take the Bible on faith. (This is not awful, by the way, as faith is the assurance of things hoped for, as well as the means through which – by grace – we are saved in Christ, and without which we cannot please Him [Heb 11.1, 6; Eph 2.8]. The Bible must be taken on faith, as must everything else, at base – including a belief in such “scientific” theories as evolution! But that is another matter I will not deal with here.) Unfortunately, this teaching is too often coupled with either: (1) explicit discouragement when it comes to questions about the Bible; or (2) an inadequate and basically unintelligent response to legitimate questions that are posed. Neither option will suffice.
We must do better! We – the Church – who have more reason than anyone to reason well, must do better. Remember the teachings?
“The LORD possessed me [wisdom] at the beginning of His work, / the first of His acts of old. / Ages ago I was set up, / at the first, before the beginning of the earth…. / The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, / and knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” (Proverbs 8.22-23, 9.10, ESV)
“And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory…. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2.4-7, 14, ESV)
God is the Founder, Sustainer, and Giver of true understanding. The Bible contains true philosophy. If you are in Christ, then you have more reason to engage your mind in true knowledge and understanding than anyone. How are you doing with that? Drawing on the brilliant C. S. Lewis again:
image obtained from http://thegospelcoalition.org/
“If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now – not to be able to meet enemies on their own ground – would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
The learned life then is, for some, a duty.” (The Weight of Glory, ”Learning in War-Time,” Williams Collins Sons and Co, 1939, 28-29).
While the learned life is the duty of some, as Lewis aptly argues, I would also argue that (based on what we have seen) the relentless pursuit of biblical philosophy, true logic, and sound thinking is the duty of the Church. Unfortunately, we (the Church) are largely ignoring it. We claim the domain of biblical teaching (though the modern poverty of expositional preaching rightly brings this claim into question), while we relegate the responsibility of right thinking to the academy – as if right thinking and biblical teaching could be separated, or truly right thinking committed to an academy driven by a world-system fundamentally opposed to God! Yet to the extent that we disregard this plain fact, the world system takes our students “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col 2.8, ESV).
How, then, shall we think about these things? What, then, shall we do? Dr. Patrick has founded Augustine College in Ottawa, Canada as a biblically academic response to the increasing threats of thoughtless postmodernism upon Evangelicalism. Our church has committed itself to the historical and biblical practice of expository preaching, teaching and preaching verse-by-verse, rather than according to the whimsical trend of topical preaching found in most pulpits today. (After all, if God is the Originator and Propagator of true wisdom and philosophy, then teaching and preaching His Word as He has given it will inherently impart right thinking, which is a gift He gives His people in order to know Him rightly, Who is the true Treasure in all of life, to Whom all right reason leads us!) Moreover, I have recently announced the advent of the Shadowlands Society, which is a monthly two-hour gathering of students dedicated to learning how to think critically according to Scriptures, reason well and soundly about the Faith, and study the Bible via the literal-grammatical-historical method by which we arrive at a proper understanding of the Text.
What, then, will you do?
NOTE: For those who enjoy C. S. Lewis, here’s a very fascinating talk from John Piper on the inestimable value of Lewis’s thought and writings in spite of the numerous major problems of his theological leanings:
