Thinking Matters » Quotes

We’ve got to train our kids for war

Rodney — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:02:50 +0000

An Excerpt from the 3rd Edition of Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig:

In high school and college Christian teenagers are intellectually assaulted with every manner of non-Christian worldview coupled with an over-whelming relativism. If parents are not intellectually engaged with their faith and do not have sound arguments for Christian theism and good answers to their children’s questions, then we are in real danger of losing our youth. It’s no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics. Frankly, I find it hard to understand how people today can risk parenthood without having studied apologetics.

Unfortunately, our churches have largely dropped the ball in this area. It’s insufficient for youth groups and Sunday school classes to focus on entertainment and simpering devotional thoughts. We’ve got to train our kids for war. We dare not send them out to public high school and university armed with rubber swords and plastic armour. The time for playing games is past.

Hell, Compassion, and Apologetics

Jason — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:38:54 +0000

“An apologetic that denies or shies away from the doctrine of hell is not a truly Christian apologetic. Yet this teaching must be done with compassion and tears. Such was exemplified by Francis Schaeffer, a man who believed in eternal punishment and who gave his life to rescue people from it and to lead them into the abundant life that only Jesus Christ delivers (John 10:10). When asked why he continued to defend and proclaim the gospel, even while afflicted with what would become terminal cancer, he replied that it was “sorrow for all the lost” that drove him to be a faithful witness, “regardless of the cost.” To believe in the “eternal lostness of the lost without tears would be a cold and dead orthodoxy, indeed.” Since each lost person is one of our kind, it would be “totally ugly and opposed to the biblical message” if we did not give our all to this task of evangelizing them.”

— Douglas Groothius, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for the Biblical Faith, page 661 (IVP. 2011).

[HT: The Emerging Scholars Network]

The Limits of Science

Jason — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:04:23 +0000

But science is never the end of the story, because science cannot teach humans what they most need to know: the meaning of life and how to value it. The sciences are as practical as theoretical; science has evident survival value, teaching us how to gain benefits that we desire. But what ought we to desire? Our enlightened self-interest? Our genetic self-interest? More children? More science? The conservation of biodiversity? Sustainable development? A sustainable biosphere? The love of neighbor? The love of God? Justice? Equity? Charity? … After science, we still need help deciding what to value; what is right and wrong, good and evil, how to behave as we cope. The end of life still lies in its meaning, the domain of religion and ethics.

—Holmes Rolston (Genes, Genesis, and God, 1999).

The Incompatibility of Anti-intellectualism and the Fullness of the Spirit

Jason — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:11:45 +0000

“The fact that Jesus called the Holy Spirit ‘the Spirit of truth,’ and gave such a prominent place to his teaching ministry, is of great importance in the anti-intellectual cultures of the world. I do not hesitate to say that anti-intellectualism and the fullness of the Spirit are mutually incompatible, because the Spirit with whom we claim to be filled or desire to be filled is the Spirit of truth. In consequence where the Holy Spirit is free to work, truth matters.”

John R. W. Stott in “Biblical Expositions” (The Anglican Communion and Scripture), page 27.

[Source: Joseph E. Gorra]

The Centrality of Joy

Jason — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 06:36:17 +0000

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”

–G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (page 138).

An Inconsequential God

Jason — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:54:53 +0000

“The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, and His Christ is too common.”

–David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (page 30).

Defending Christianity is Not Enough

Jason — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:07:45 +0000

“We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects — with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.”

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock.

[Source: Tim McGrew]

Nicholas Wolterstorff on How to Think with a Christian Mind

Jason — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:31:05 +0000

In a 2007 address at the University of Tennessee, Nicholas Wolterstorff offered some thoughts on how to faithfully and effectively serve in the academic world as a Christian:

First, be patient. The Christian scholar may feel in his bones that some part of his discipline rubs against the grain of his Christian conviction, but for years, and even decades, he may not be able to identify precisely the point of conflict; or, if he has identified it, he may not know for years or decades how to work out an alternative. Once he does spy the outlines of an alternative, the Christian scholar has to look for the points on which, as it were, he can pry, those points where he can get his partners in the discipline to say, “Hmm, you have a point there; I’m going to have to go home and think about that.” He doesn’t just preach. He engages in a dialogue – or tries to do so. And that presupposes, once again, that he has found a voice.

Second, to arrive at this point, the Christian scholar will have to be immersed in the discipline and be really good at it. Grenades lobbed by those who don’t know what they are talking about will have no effect. Only those who are learned in the discipline can see the fundamental issues.

Third, to be able to think with a Christian mind about the issues in your discipline, you have to have a Christian mind. As I see it, three things are necessary for the acquisition of such a mind.

First, you have to be well acquainted with Scripture – not little tidbits, not golden nuggets, but the pattern of biblical thought. Let me add here: beware of the currently popular fad of reducing acquaintance with scripture to worldview summaries.

Second, you need some knowledge of the Christian theological tradition.

And third, you have to become acquainted with the riches of the Christian intellectual tradition generally, especially those parts of it that pertain to your own field. Too often American Christians operate on the assumption that we in our day are beginning anew, or on the assumption that nothing important has preceded us. You and I are the inheritors of an enormously rich tradition of Christian reflection on politics, on economics, on psychology, an enormously rich tradition of art, of music, of poetry, of architecture – on and on it goes. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore this. Part of our responsibility as Christian scholars is to keep those traditions alive.

Fourth, Christian learning needs the nourishment of communal worship. Otherwise it becomes dry and brittle, easily susceptible to skepticism.

The Gospel Paradox

Jason — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:02:36 +0000

“We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world. But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it give us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing — it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in them most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness — not humanness as they were created to be human but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow.”

Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (InterVarsity Press, 1968).

The Nature of Science

Stuart — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:59:06 +0000

Max Planck, a highly-regarded physicist, discusses one of the foundational assumptions necessary for the discipline of science.

[quote]
We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in future. It is perfectly conceivable that one fine day nature should cause an unexpected event to occur which would baffle us all; and if this were to happen we would be powerless to make any objection, even if the result would be that, in spite of our endeavors, we should fail to introduce order into the resulting confusion. In such an event, the only course open to science would be to declare itself bankrupt. For this reason, science is compelled to begin by the general assumption that a general rule of law dominates throughout nature or, in Kantian terminology, to treat the concept of causality as being one of the categories which are given a priori and without which no kind of knowledge can be attained.
[/quote]

Max Planck, in his book The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics, translated by W. H. Johnston. Planck is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. In 1918, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his services “to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta”.