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with Jim Leffel
"I believe more and more that this is truly the central task of the Christian, to give the Lord the opportunity to exhibit his existence." (Letters, 63,4).
"[T]he change in the concept of the way we come to knowledge and truth is the most crucial problem, as I understand it, facing Christianity today." (6).
The Way It Was |
The Way It Is |
General spiritual consensus |
Radical pluralism |
Evangelism put accepted ideas into a true and compelling framework |
Evangelists face widely conflicting and often hostile spiritual beliefs |
Apologetics assumed "common ground" Reasoning by "antithesis" |
Denial of "antithesis" |
The Line of Despair
- Above the line: absolutes, universals: truth, goodness, beauty, ultimate reality
- Below the line: individual experience, particulars, change, variability
Absolutes
Philosophy
Art
Music
General culture
Theology
- This represents the progression through time and the trail of influence in Western thinking that has brought us to the present situation.
"In the end the philosophers came to the realization that they could not find this unified rationalistic circle and so, departing from the classical methodology of antithesis, they shifted the concept of truth, an modern man was born." (10).
"When the apostle warned us to ‘keep ourselves unspotted from the world,’ he was not talking of some abstraction. If the Christian is to apply this injunction to himself, he must understand what confronts him antagonistically in his own moment of history. Otherwise he simply becomes a useless museum piece and not a living warrior for Jesus Christ." (12).
"The watershed is the new way of talking about and arriving at truth, not the terms the individual disciplines use to express these ideas." (43)
"To the extent that anyone gives up the mentality of antithesis, he has moved over to the other side, even if he still tries to defend orthodoxy or evangelicalism." (47).
Personal Integrity and Stewardship of the Truth
"Such answers are necessary in the first place for myself as a Christian if I am gong to maintain my intellectual integrity, and if I am to keep united my personal, devotional and intellectual life." (151).
Intellectual and Spiritual Work Together
"So then, the defense, for myself and those for whom I am responsible, must be a conscious defense. We cannot assume that because we are Christians in the full biblical sense, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, automatically we shall be free for the influence of what surrounds us. The Holy Spirit can do what He will, but the Bible does not separate his work from knowledge; nor does the work of the Holy Spirit remove our responsibility as parents, pastors, evangelists, missionaries or teachers." (152).
A Key to Discipleship
"It is unreasonable to expect people of the next generation in any age to continue in the historic Christian position, unless they are helped to see where arguments and connotations directed against Christianity and against them as Christians, by their generation, are fallacious. We must prepare Christian young people to face the monolithic twentieth-century culture by teaching them what the particular attack in our generation is, in contrast to the attacks of previous generations."
Communication of the Faith and Spiritual Reality
"The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that the people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life." (153).
Summary:
What is ultimate reality?
"The more rational a man who holds a non-Christian position is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions." (133,4).
"Non-Christian presuppositions simply do not fit into what God has made, including what man is. This being so, every man is in a place of tension. Man cannot make his own universe and then live in it." (132).
"If the man before you were logical to his non-Christian presuppositions, you would have no point of communication with him . . . But in reality no one can live logically according to his own non-Christian presuppositiions, and consequently, because he is faced with the real world and himself, in practice you will find a place where you can talk" (137).
"When we have discovered, as well as we can, a person’s point of tension, the next step is to push him towards the logical conclusion of his presuppositions." (138).
"Every man has built a roof over his head to shield himself at the point of tension." (140).
"The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is." (140,1).
- Recognize the impoverished values people serve in order to create some kind of meaning for their lives.
- Empathize with their despair
How Dare We Do It?
- Problem of Christian hypocrisy
- The power of consistency
- Can we meaningfully speak to the pressing issues of our day
