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But for the earliest evangelists, not only was truth of central importance, it could be analyzed and defended. As the Christian message spread, the Apostles "reasoned" (Acts 17:17) and "persuaded" (Acts 18:4) their Jewish and pagan audiences that their proclamation was the truth. Biblical faith does not rest on ineffable mystical experience, nor is it a panacea for life's ills, or a dogma that demands acceptance without critical reflection. Biblical faith requires both a reasoned understanding and personal acceptance of essential

Because authentic conversion includes the choice to acceptance these claims as true, the work of evangelism

Biblical faith requires both a reasoned understanding and a personal acceptance of essential propositions.

Apologists must persuade non Christians about biblical truth claims not generally accepted in secular culture. The term apologetics comes from the Greek apologia, which means to make a legal defense. Plato's account of the trial of Socrates, for example, is called the Apology. The ability to provide a well reasoned, coherent defense of the Christian faith is a biblical imperative. Peter states,

"Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense (lit. apologia) to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence..." - 1 Peter 3:15

The ability to offer a reasoned defense of the Christian message to those who are seeking is normative for Christians. That is what Peter meant by "always being ready." Christians

The apologetic challenges of our day are broader and more technical than in any generation that has preceded us.

Both continuity and discontinuity are evident in the work of apologetics

Before we discuss the contemporary challenge of the apologetic task, we should reflect on Paul's thoughts regarding the importance of ideas.

In 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, Paul states,

"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ...."

This passage, perhaps more than any other, identifies the critical importance of ideas. And because apologetics focuses on the power of ideas, this passage is particularly relevant.

First, Paul asserts that Christians are involved in a war ("the weapons of our warfare"). The Bible describes a universe torn by the ravages of spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6:12). Like occupied France in the 1940's, there is no safe, neutral ground. We end up either giving tacit support to the enemy, or we join the resistance. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "he who is not for me is against me."

Second, spiritual war is subtle. It is fought on the battlefield of ideas. Paul points to "speculations," to "lofty things raised up against the knowledge of God," and states that we are "taking thoughts captive." Thoughts and ideas serve as would be fortresses. Ideas form a wall around the heart. To gain access to the heart, apologists must war with the ideas that shield it. To take a thought captive means to defeat it, to expose it's falseness. The apologist's task is to blow holes in the fortress, so that the heart can be exposed to light of truth.

The language of combat is not the only description we have of the church in the world. We are also called "ambassadors for Christ," "the aroma of Christ," "salt and light." Yet, there is something to the call to warfare in the realm of ideas that is uniquely challenging. Ideas matter. They guide us as individuals, and they move us collectively as a people. So much is at stake with the ideas we accept or reject. To know the truth is to be set free (Jn. 8:32). To suppress truth and 

Christians in our day do not easily hear the battle cry in the arena of truth and ideas. Even the war analogy itself

Ideas matter. They guide us as individuals, and they move us collectively as a people.

Ideas are subtle and as often as not, we absorb them in the form of attitudes. We breath them in like air, unconscious and unaware of their effects. We are so bombarded with ideas cast as images and 30 second sound bites on the television that we scarcely have time to digest them and interact with them. But they have their effect. We may think of ideas as lifeless abstractions, as pieces of art that we can either appreciate or ignore. But in fact, they are as real and have more effect than the keyboard on which I wrote this talk.

In our "information age," we are barraged with claims and ideas of every sort. And current research indicates that we naturally accept what we are presented with as true. In a survey of the literature on belief formation, Bruce Bower concludes, "We assume beliefs are under conscious control at all times. But beliefs can be created merely by passively accepting information without attempting to analyze it". This is especially true when ideas are communicated piecemeal or in an environment filled with distraction. Bower states, "In other words, when distractions derailed their train of thought, volunteers [in psychological experiments] who had been

This research is of particular interest for two reasons.  

Students often absorb secular world views without having the opportunity to critically interact with them.

Aldous Huxley wrote with exceptional insight forty years ago regarding media's influence on Western democracy:

"Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory... In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies--the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions... Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures."

We must be equipped with the ability to discern the ideas with which we are presented and subject them to scripture. 

...we will either take thoughts captive to Christ or be taken captive by them...

2 Corinthians 10:5
Colossians 2:8

Finally, we need to understand that God would have us wage an offensive war against the ideas raised

We can liken the image of an ideological fortress to what the Germans have called a "zeitgeist," or "spirit of the age." This refers to the body of prevailing attitudes, ideas and values that drive a culture at a given point in time. The spirit of the age manifests itself in cultural forms such as family, law, the arts, religion and literature as well as education, technology and economics. From these sources, we develop an awareness of personal identity, a sense of personal meaning, the values we serve, an understanding of the meaning of human history, what is real and how reality can be known. From the internalized thought-forms of a culture, its zeitgeist, a grid of understanding is formed within us. Ideas are processed through this grid, and either accepted or rejected based upon their adherence to received thought forms. Some ideas simply don't make sense to people of a given culture, not because they are incoherent, but because the people simply can not relate what they have accepted as true to the idea with which they are presented. That is, they don’t fit into the existing plausibility structure. For many, Christianity is simply implausible.

A central part of the work of apologetics, then, is to identify the zeitgeist of a given culture and, where it sets itself in opposition to biblical truth, engage in ideological warfare. The aim is to challenge people's confidence in their grid of understanding. To the extent that we are successful, we help create a new grid that includes a category for biblical truth. To complete the analogy, we blow a hole in the ideological fortress so that the gospel can shine in and expose spiritual darkness.

Gaining a hearing for the gospel in a non-Christian culture involves having a thorough understanding of the spirit of the age. But it is at just this point that the work so often breaks down. On the one hand, Christians have the tendency to be blind to the ideological forces at work in a culture. This results in the assimilation of inherently anti biblical ideas into the church. We can see in our own day, for example, the cultural preoccupation with the self manifested in an individualistic, self-help view of spirituality. In an earlier day, theologians were willing to reinterpret biblical teaching in terms of atheistic naturalism, resulting in the "death of God theology" so prevalent in the 1960's and 70's. There is also danger on the other side, where the church has failed to engage the unbiblical ideas and attitudes of its culture. The consequence is that the church becomes an irrelevant force in culture, living in the illusion of the "glorious Christian past." Christianity Today recently ran an interesting editorial observing that in the field of Christian fiction, stories are set either in past centuries, or at the end of human history. The author raised the question of whether this might be symptomatic of the church's

If we are to present Christ to our generation, we must move stridently toward the culture, yet with compassion and critical insight.

The task of apologetics is ongoing because cultural ideas, concerns, and attitudes change rapidly. Consequently, there will never be a "definitive" work on apologetics. Indeed, when we think such a work exists we are in trouble. Apologetics is an ongoing work, needing constant revision as new ideological elements enter into social discourse. If the aim of apologetics is to break down fortresses, the key concern is to know of what material the fortress is made. It does little good to engage the enemy with stones and arrows, if the wall is made of reinforced steel. To relate the gospel in a relevant way to our culture, we need to expose ourselves to the same cultural forms as the rest of society. We need to understand them, appreciate them, and discerningly interact with them.

The ideological fortress walling out the light of truth today is a very complicated one by comparison to previous generations. The late twentieth century faces numerous complex and perplexing issues distinguishing it from earlier periods of human history. The technological revolution of the past fifty years presents us with a dizzying array of things that only the wildest imaginations of earlier centuries could conceive: space travel, global communication, atomic energy, genetic engineering, to mention just a few. We who live at the end of this millennium tend to view ourselves as occupying a different universe than our not too distant ancestors. And in many ways this sense of uniqueness is justified. The dilemmas we face could not be conceived in earlier centuries. Possibilities such as the extinction of the human race by our own hand, creation of a truly global culture, a population curve so radical that it challenges the limits of the earth's resources are but a few of the concerns we face today.

Alvin Toffler is an early chronicler of a generation faced with such realities. His books Future Shock and Ecospasm offer helpful insight into the psyche of modern Western man. In general, the intellectuals of the late twentieth century, beginning with Toffler, perpetuate the notion of radical difference, even disconnection of this generation from earlier periods of Western history. Scholars commonly write about the end of the Western tradition, and the emergence of the "postmodern world." The idea is that the assumptions which have guided Western history for over two thousand years are worn out, they no longer apply, and it is time to build from a completely new foundation.

The contemporary zeitgeist is a patchwork of both old and new. Many of the ideological forms influencing Western civilization since the Enlightenment remain very much in the forefront of today's thinking. Yet, intriguing restatements of ancient ideas are enjoying a powerful resurgence in our day. In the university environment, and among broadly educated people today, we can identify two fairly divergent ideological strains. To do apologetics effectively, we must understand them. The first is referred to as modernism, and the second postmodernism. We will describe the public and personal tension created by the modernism/postmodernism schism. Then we will discuss how the confluence of modernism and postmodernism suggest a particular approach to the task of apologetics.

We use the terms modernism and postmodernism as broad conceptual categories to describe a fundamental rift between scholars who operate out of the tradition of enlightenment rationalism, and those who reject it. At the heart of the matter between modernists and postmodernists is a controversy over truth. Specifically, the nature of truth, how truth is arrived at, and the limits of human knowledge. The modernist camp is committed to a confidence in rational objectivity, and a stable field of knowledge. But for the modernists, the sphere of knowledge is limited to the empirical sciences. This limitation is commonly referred to as positivism. Taken as a world view, as it often is, positivism is referred to as scientism.

Scientism is a philosophical outlook that interprets the enterprise of science through a gird of materialistic naturalism. That is, all that exists is matter operating in a closed universe of cause and effect. With this assumption in view, the data of science and its philosophical interpretation have become virtually inseparable in the academic setting. For example, common interpretations of artificial intelligence assume that since humans are machines, then we can build a machine that is essentially human.

On the other hand, postmodernism rejects two key modernist assumptions: truth is objective and progress based on technology is inevitable. According to postmodernists, modernist views of truth, such as the correspondence theory, fail to provide a basis for unbiased objectivity. Truth claims are conceived as socially constructed paradigms that apply only to the community that finds them meaningful or useful. Further, postmodernists argue, truth is conceptualized and expressed in terms of language, which is an inherently circular and ambiguous system—the meaning of words is defined in terms of other words, forming a "hermeneutical circle", condemning reason to the "prison house of language." Consequently, all truth is in the realm of the subjective or socially constructed. Technological application of science is often regarded as dangerous, since it is the outgrowth of Eurocentric knowledge and motivated by Eurocentric cultural interests.

Any attempt to provide a coherent, comprehensive world view is referred to pejoratively as a "metanarrative." A metanarrative is a religious tradition or philosophical system that commits acts of cultural tyranny by promoting the fiction that all knowledge reduces to an absolute, unified theory. But understand that this is no mere academic squabble. It is our view that the contemporary ideological scene both within the university community and in the culture as a whole is characterized by this fundamental clash of ideas. Our research shows that influential public realms, such as law, politics, music, religion and education are deeply enmeshed in the modern/postmodern ideological schism. It has created a climate of intellectual schizophrenia in America that affects all of us. In his Beyond the Culture Wars, University of Chicago professor Gerald Graff provides an illustration of the kind of confusion that has become so common in academia:

An undergraduate tells of an art history course in which the instructor observed one day, 'As we now know, the idea that knowledge can be objective is a positivist myth that has been exploded by postmodern thought.' It so happens that the student is concurrently enrolled in a political science course in which the instructor speaks confidently about the objectivity of his discipline as if it had not been 'exploded' at all. What do you do? the student is asked. 'What else can I do?' he says. 'I trash objectivity in art history, and I presuppose it in political science.'

The person Graff mentions in his book represents of the kind of maneuvering required of students who attempt to navigate the turbulent waters of academia. And in this respect, the academic environment is a microcosm of society as a whole. On the one side, we are taught to believe that there is a new world of truth out there to be discovered, that our voyage is a heroic quest. On the other hand, we get word that we are hopelessly adrift in an ocean of ideas that lead no where, and that heroism is not to be found in the quest for new lands, but simply in the adventure of being out at sea.

There is a price to be paid both personally and culturally for this modern/postmodern fissure, and we will examine both briefly. As a culture, we express confidence in the objectivity of the scientific enterprise. Scientism, consequently, is appealing, because it is rationally oriented and meshes well with the sense of awe we experience when contemplating the accomplishments of science. But we also recognize that science by its very nature lacks the capacity to provide a meaningful moral framework to apply it's knowledge. Science can tell us what we can do, but it can not tell us what we should do. Many of the uses of advanced technology in this century have illustrated this dilemma in the most dramatic of

Science can tell us what we can do, but it can not tell us what we should do.

"Nothing happened in 1945 except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man; and conscience, in revenge, for an instant became immediate to us. Before this immediacy fades in a sequence of televised atomic tests, let us acknowledge our subject for what it is: civilization face to face with its own implications."

The development of scientific knowledge without the possibility of objective human values to guide it has never been more frightening. And this may explain why there is a growing uneasiness with science in our culture today. The uneasiness comes not from what we see in science, but what we fear of ourselves. Technological advancement forces us to see ourselves for who we are like nothing else can. As Bronowski reminds us, civilization stands "face to face with its own implications." In an era of history when we need as perhaps never before to be guided by the light of objective moral knowledge, we confront the titanic postmodern "no!" The twenty first century will be confronted with extraordinary problems and science will be mobilized to respond to them. But how will the solutions offered by science be implemented and directed? With a generation steeped in postmodern relativism, we have every reason to be deeply concerned.

The application of science is not the only place where the tension between modern and postmodern thought imposes itself on public life. The Constitution is the foundation of our public life. It is rooted, in substantial part, in the modernist belief in the objectivity of inalienable human rights. These rights, it is held, are identified by reason and protected by a body of law. But the postmodern rejection of objectivity brings into question the stability of the Constitution as a basis for social justice and individual rights. Postmodernists claim that the Constitution, like all social contracts, reflect the arbitrary whim of the powerful over the economically marginalized. They deny the possibility of objectively identifying a body of "inalienable rights." The scholarly and professional community has become deeply divided over the application of postmodern analysis to law and politics. And the stakes for society could not be higher. Sanford Levinson, professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin states, "The death of constitutionalism may be the central event of our time, just as the death of God was that of the past century."

We find increasingly both in the legal and political arenas disturbing implications of cultural relativism promoted by postmodern thought. Once the appeal to objective standards of truth and justice are removed, we are left with only the arbitrary exercise of power. Indeed, central to the

Once the appeal to objective standards of truth and justice are removed, we are left with only the arbitrary exercise of power.

"At times it seems that we can no longer talk to one another. Or rather, we can talk--and shout, demand, and vilify--but we cannot reason. We lack agreed-upon standards to which we can refer our disputes. In the absence of shared notions of justice or equity, many of the issues we confront appear increasingly to be unresolvable."

So the nature of public debate has changed in light of the denial of standards for justice and reason. As the demand for special sensitivity and group empowerment increasingly replace reason, we feel more threatened by others than drawn toward our common humanity. Where personal significance is tied to sub culturally defined identity, the possibility of meaningful exchange between subcultures becomes correspondingly allusive. Sykes continues,

"Increasingly, debates take place between antagonists who deny their opponents' ability to understand their plight. Inevitably, that turns such clashes into increasingly bitter ad hominem attacks in which victim status and the insistent demands for sensitivity are played as trump cards....Of course, sensitivity to the needs and concerns of others is the mark of a civil and civilized society. But the victimist demand for sensitivity is more problematic. To be sensitive is not to argue or reason but to feel, to attune one's response to another's sense of aggrievement...One can be insensitive without intending to be; only the victims can judge."

The Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas incident is one of the better examples of postmodern political bantering. Since the facts could not locate guilt, it came down to which side could portray itself as the most oppressed victim. Both sides were well prepared by public relations experts. Hill became a paradigm of oppressed womanhood, and Thomas championed the cause of the black male under, in his words, "a high tech lynching."

The climate on campuses around America have been characterized in McCarthyesque terms by many. The cardinal sin is to offend. But risking offense is a necessary condition 

Oddly enough, the objective of compassionate understanding envisioned by postmodern relativism is not producing increased tolerance, but closed-mindedness, intolerance and deep resentments.

But let's return to Graff's student. Here, we find the personal dimensions of the modern/postmodern split. We can identify three general characteristics of today's student. First, they are largely uncritical. It is increasingly difficult for students to form reasoned and defensible views in the realm of ideas. In the give and take of rigorous intellectual interaction around divergent ideas students sharpen their analytic skills, find their views challenged by the light of evidence and argument, and develop the ability to think critically and constructively. However, many observe, the ideological climate within the university is often inimical to the development of these skills. When students are taught that values are arbitrary "social constructions," and that there is no objective basis for them, they draw the obvious conclusion that it doesn't matter what view they hold. So the only analytical framework most students know are the vacuous principles of "openness" and "tolerance." Students get the message: since there is no truth to be discovered, one view is as good as any other. Consequently, students fail to find a place for reason in the formulation or defense of their ideas. This fosters an anti intellectual environment on campus where ideas are labeled "acceptable" or "unacceptable," then monitored and managed, rather than rationally engaged.

It has been my experience teaching philosophy, that when students are first confronted with the contradictory nature of their views, they are largely unmoved. One of two responses can generally be predicted. First, students will dislodge belief from reason, by reducing every judgment to opinion. Reason, after all, is for things like science, not values or truth. Secondly, students justify their positions by asserting their right to believe whatever views they want. Discussing abortion in ethics classes often brings this dynamic out. I found the majority of students attracted to the pro life position. They commonly conceded that the fetus is a person, given their intuition that neonates and others are persons. Further, they agreed that killing innocent persons is wrong. But when it came to the inference, "abortion is wrong," the majority of students who agreed with the premises fled from the obvious conclusion. Consistently, the response to this dilemma was "well, we should be free to do what we want," or "it's still my decision." For many, no amount of reasoning could dislodge these sophomoric pronouncement.

The majority of students exchange reason for feelings in the formation of spiritual, moral and political beliefs. As we observed in the above example, basic beliefs are justified in the realm of radically privatized, idiosyncratic preference. Individuals and the content of their belief are hard to separate when truth is rooted subjectively, rather than discovered in a world independent of them. Consequently, challenging a person's belief is tantamount to calling into question their right to choose, or their value as a person. Certain beliefs are sacrosanct. It is virtually immoral to engage in critical dialogue where a student's beliefs are politically correct. Since these beliefs are often anti biblical, the work of evangelism on campus is especially difficult.

Second, today's students are generally cynical. Some students find their way to identity groups that promote particular ideologies, but many avoid ideological commitment. Holding fast to beliefs, they have learned, is dangerous. True believers, the dogmatists, are often characterized as history's villain. The argument is that when we think we possess the truth, it leads to conflict; and conflict leads to war, prejudice and injustice. So, better not to take anything too seriously. Most students are in a state of indifference toward the world of ideas. Values are at best subjective and at worst malignant.

All too often, this kind of cynicism is cultivated in the class room. Instructors can and do unwittingly contribute to the students cynicism. This occurs when professors teach the pursuit of knowledge as either a value-neutral pragmatic exercise ("isn’t it fascinating what we can do"), or an interesting, if irrelevant, mental exercise ("isn't it amazing what these people thought"). Independent of meaningful and defensible values, knowledge reduces to technology or curious cultural artifact.

Third, students today are alienated. We refer not in the romantic notion of the alienated man of the '60's, but to a palpable sense isolation. More than ever, students come from divorced families. Often cynical of intimate personal relationships to begin with, students from this background find ever more reason to remain isolated through what they learn in college. Meaningful and lasting relationships require trust. But trust requires a shared foundation on which to base relationships. And it is at just this point that the relativism of the university has personal implications for many students. Bellah describes the problem well:

"Now if selves are defined by their preferences, but those preferences are arbitrary, then each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself. All we can do is refer to chains of consequences and ask if our actions prove useful or consistent in light of our own value systems. All we can appeal to in relationships with others is their self interest, likewise enlightened, or their intuitive sympathies. Where sympathy or already congruent values are not enough to resolve moral disagreements between ourselves and others, we have no recourse except to withdraw from them."

Other forms of alienation also affect college students. Racial minorities, first generation college students and women often feel isolated from the dominant culture of the university community. Isolation often drives minorities and women to life style enclaves, or at least under the ideological influence of these enclaves. Here, alienation from culture is furthered by isolationist ideology. In Women's Studies and Afrocentric Studies curricula, the Christian world view is under considerable assault. It is often characterized as "paternalistic," or "Eurocentric." Christianity is seen as the basis of racism, sexism and ecological tyranny.

Much of the thinking that shapes the ideological fortress around students come from the postmodern camp, as these descriptions suggest. But modernism also has it a role. The science-as-knowledge/reality-as-nature hypothesis is appealing to students because it provides an explanation for their observations about the world. The sciences provide a solid, objective base to pursue knowledge. There is, of course, a downside to scientism and students are quick to pick it up. While scientism provides a neat explanation for the operations of nature, it fails to do much for the human self-concept. In fact, scientism is very much about the business of erasing the notion of the individual all together. Sociobiology, artificial intelligence, animal language and other research areas often assert that individuals are nothing other than the sum total of the impersonal processes that constitute their being. Your former colleague Carl Sagan put it succinctly when he defined man as "an astonishingly compact, self-ambulatory computer." It is worth noting that scientism and postmodernism agree on this view of the self. Ironically while popular culture today is obsessed with the self, much of academia is, at least from the stand point of theory, committed to it's irradication. If current trends persist, the death of the self in the twenty-first century will follow on the heels of the death of God in the nineteenth and the death of objective values in the twentieth. With the kind of pressures the next century will experience, this is indeed a frightening prospect.

So where does this leave the contemporary university student? They are given reasons from every quarter to disregard the Christian message. And indeed, we find that while the debate used to center around the naturalism/theism dichotomy, in recent years Christianity has been pushed out to the periphery. In many ways, the secularized culture of Europe is looking more and more familiar on the American campus today.

Our assessment of the student population should not be excessively negative. There are both substantial fortresses raised up against the knowledge of God, and reason to be hopeful about reaching people for Christ in the university community.

An effective Christian presence on campus has many aspects. For the sake of the present discussion, I will briefly identify three factors that need to guide our thinking. First, 

In a fragmented culture, students are more likely to recognize their sense of lostness.

When challenged by the importance of ideas and the need to rationally justify one's beliefs, many students respond. It takes time to work through their pre-programmed relativism and subjectivism, but it certainly happens. The capacity to diffuse postmodern rhetorical devices is often helpful. For example, when notions of truth and value come up in my classes and I encounter postmodern rhetoric, I ask questions like these: ‘What do you think of the person who can never be wrong about what they believe?’ Obviously arrogant, close-minded, right?. Or, ‘What about the person whose views are meant to manipulate others for their own purposes?’ Clearly a dangerous person. But in reality we are describing the postmodern view. If truth is subjective and constructed, that’s what it comes down to. Genuine humility and tolerance can only be found in an objective view of truth. So there is, after all, a basis for discussion.

Second, students are, and perhaps always have been, anti authority in temperament. The student years are times of self-discovery and self-definition. Part of that process is casting off, at least for a while, the constraints of parental influence and social norms. This is one of the major reasons why the relativistic dogma of postmodernism is so appealing. But one authority not cast off by students is their instructors. Faculty have an enormous influence on students. Christian faculty need to be aware that for the vast majority of students, their classroom may be the closest thing to a church their students will enter. Since the ideologies discussed

Christian professors should discern the encroachments of scientism and postmodernism in their discipline, and be able to help students differentiate between data and theory.

Finally, Christian professors should discern the encroachments of scientism and postmodernism in their discipline, and be able to help students differentiate between data and theory. Consider the following example:

"Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomenon are its by-products….Yet, as pointed out by contemporary evolutionary scholar Douglas Futuyma, seldom do the detractors of the Darwinian world view take note of its positive implications. In Darwin’s world we are not helpless prisoners of a static world order but, rather, masters of our own fate….And from a strictly scientific point of view rejecting biological evolution is no different from rejecting other natural phenomenon such as electricity and gravity." (Levine, Joseph S. and Miller, Kenneth R., Biology Discovering Life, 1994).

Many Christian scholars spend at least a lecture helping students understand the theoretical perspective of the selected textbook and the philosophical assumptions of many of the scholars working in their field. I think this can be of enormous benefit in creating a climate of dialogue and, in some

The Christian community on campus needs to be adequately equipped to engage our Adversary in ideological combat.

The Christian community on campus needs to be adequately equipped to engage our Adversary in ideological combat. It is disturbing that the

"It is difficult to document such a thing as the general attitude of a profession. But the hostility of most psychologists to Christianity is very real. For years I was part of that sentiment; today it still surrounds me. It is a curious hostility, for most psychologists are not aware of it. Their lack of awareness is due mostly to sheer ignorance of what Christianity is--for that matter, of what any religion is. The universities are so secularized that most academics can no longer articulate why they are opposed to Christianity. They merely assume that for all rational people the question of being a Christian was settled--negatively--at some time in the past."

Christian professors can have a significant affect on both students and peers by providing critical insight into these ideologies and their confidence in biblical Christianity. Sponsoring discussion groups based on postmodern works relating to your particular field holds much promise. The idea is merely to get the conversation going and creating opportunity for colleagues and students to grapple with the issues of the day.

The influence of scientism and postmodernism far exceed their intellectual merits. While scientism is often countered by Christian scholars, most fail to take postmodernism seriously. But this results in our willingness to give ground to the enemy. On the other hand, Christians on campus appear intimidated by postmodern ideology. This is particularly true of undergraduates, but it is also evident in graduate students. There can be no question that the Christian community needs to have a response to the issues that are regularly confronted in the curriculum, the class room and in the social fabric of the university.

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