Tried With Fire

I've been reading Aimee Byrd's new book,  No Little Women. So far, so good, and a review will be forthcoming, Lord willing. I did skip ahead, though, to the 9th chapter "Honing and Testing Our Discernment Skills." 1 Aimee shares four essential questions to ask about what we read, and then lets the reader put it into practice on excerpts from popular women's books. I'm posting more on these questions at Out of the Ordinary  tomorrow, so stay tuned. As I was considering Aimee's call for discernment, my gut feeling is that women are at a disadvantage in pursuing a life of the mind  because of past cultural norms. Therefore, we may be more inclined to accept rather than critique. But does evangelicalism even encourage this type of critical thinking in the first place? I may be wrong, but I believe it promotes the very opposite. If you read authors like Nancy Pearcey, Mark Noll, David Wells, and Nathan Hatch, to name a few, history has shown that Americ...

Whether we like it or not and whether we realize it or not, we are the children of the philosophers who have gone before us. Our thinking is never done in a vacuum, but if you believe otherwise, read on. For Bacon, standing at the dawn of the scientific revolution, the main enemy had been Aristotelian philosophy. Thus he taught that science must start by clearing the decks - by liberating the mind from all metaphysical speculation, all received notions of truth, all the accumulated superstition of the ages... Applied to biblical interpretation, the Baconian method stipulated that the first step is to free our minds from all historical theological formulations (Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican or whatever). With minds washed clean from merely human speculations, we confront the biblical text as a collection of facts that speak for themselves - and then compile individual verses inductively into a theological system... Perhaps most serious, however, was the Baconian hostility to h...

Congratulations to Corey!!!! You're the winner of Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway. Stay tuned for more in the future, God willing.

Have you ever wondered... Why are our beliefs compartmentalized? i.e. Christianity is now a religion of the heart not the head Why is faith considered a personal preference and not something to be discussed in the public square? Why are religious values considered individual choices, not facts which apply to everyone? If you are looking for the answers to those questions and care about having a Christian worldview,  Total Truth  is the book for you. According to Nancy Pearcey, the divide between truth and values "is the single most potent weapon for de-legitimizing the biblical perspective in the square today. Here's how it works: Most secularists are too politically savvy to attack religion directly or to debunk it as false. So what do they do? They consign religion to the value sphere - which takes it out of the realm of true and false altogether. Secularists can then assure us that  of course they "respect" religion, while at the same time denying it h...

"The better to manipulate you with..." I wanted to give Finney the benefit of the doubt regarding his unnerving stare. He is justly criticized for his theology, but he can't help his looks. Maybe he was the victim of a bad portrait painter. But then again, maybe not. As the Second Great Awakening proceed, however, preachers began to employ methods calculated to pressure people into making a decision. The most aggressive was Charles Finney, a lawyer-turned-evangelist who toned down the revivalist style and added a note of rational persuasion to make it palatable to educated, middle-class audiences. His innovations included several high-pressure tactics, however, that were to become quite controversial. Finney "had a flair for pulpit drama", Hofstadter comments. "But his greatest physical assest was his intense, fixating, electrifying, madly prophetic eyes," 1 which he used to great effect in confronting sinners by name in his revival meeti...

Have you ever stopped to consider why you think the way you do? I thought about thinking hardly at all until the last 4 or 5 years when circumstances forced me to reconsider what I truly believed about God, people, and the purpose and meaning of life. (The answer, by the way, is not 42.) This ultimately led to a radical change in my theology and even my vocabulary, as theology was a word I rarely used and only in a slightly derogatory sense. After this paradigm shift, I started doing a little detective work. I began to dig more deeply into my past beliefs to see who influenced whom and where these ideas originated historically. I don't want to fall into assigning guilt by association but who we read or listen to exerts a powerful influence on how we think for good or bad. You may think (no pun intended) that this is a waste of time, but even the disdain for thinking is an idea that was planted somewhere along our mental family tree. So stop and think about it. If...

"Does this sound familiar? (John) Dewey is the source of much of today's moral education, where all values are treated as equally valid and students simply clarify what they personally value most. Teachers are rigorously instructed not to be directive in any way, but only to coach students in a process of weighing alternatives and making up their own minds. Any value that students choose is deemed acceptable, whether or not it comports with accepted moral standards, as long as they have gone through the prescribed series of steps. Why? Because, as one textbook puts it, "None of us can be certain that our values are right for other people." Each individual has to become an autonomous decision maker, determining his values strictly on his own."  Total Truth , Nancy Pearcey, Crossway, 2004, pg. 239. Isn't this the mantra of parents today? "I just want my child to find out for herself what she believes blah, blah, blah."  But how many Christian pa...

"If we have an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters, and an infinite amount of time, eventually they will type out the works of Shakespeare. So goes the theory, at least. But researchers in England recently put the theory to the test. They placed a computer in a cage with six monkeys to see what would happen. The monkeys' main response was to bang the computer with stones; for some reason many of them also found it appealing as an outhouse. When a few actually got around to pressing the keys, the result was a lot of s's, along with about four other letters. After a month the monkeys had not written anything even close to a word of human language. Shakespeare? Not a chance." Total Truth , Nancy Pearcey, Crossway, 2004, pg. 193.

In Total Truth , Nancy Pearcey gives a simple yet effective way of analyzing a worldview by asking 3 questions: 1. Creation: Where did it all come from? Who are we and how did we get here? 2. Fall: What has gone wrong with the world? Why is there warfare and conflict? 3. Redemption: What hope/answer is being offered to reverse the "Fall" and set the world right again? To give the reader practice, she breaks down several philosophies, the last of which is Eastern thought/pantheism: Creation: Q. What is the ultimate reality, the origin of all things, in New Age Pantheism? A. The Absolute, the One, a Universal Spiritual Essence. Fall: Q. In pantheism, what is the source of evil and suffering? A. Our sense of individuality. Redemption: Q. How does pantheism tell us to solve the problem of evil and suffering? A. By being reunited with the Universal Spiritual Essence from which we all came. In a nutshell, the ultimate reality is not a personal ...

[T]oday if you talk about Christianity being true or historically verifiable, many people would be puzzled. Religion is assumed to be a product of human subjectivity so that the test of "good" religion is not whether it is objectively true but only whether it has beneficial effects in the lives of those who believe it. Total Truth , Nancy Pearcey, Crossway, 2004, pp. 116-117. This quote reminded me of a pitch made by a popular preacher on television a number of years ago. He suggested that the host "try Jesus for 60 days and see if He won't change your life."  While it's true that Christ will change our lives, "try Jesus because it works" seems to be just a subtle form of the prosperity gospel. This is quite different from truth claim that God's wrath is coming, you must repent and believe the gospel. This also makes me wonder about the over emphasis placed on personal testimony. If the testimony is more dramatic, it's more convincing...

I would have thought that something as black and white as math would be exempt from the spreading ooze of postmodernism. Obviously not: Today, however, most philosophers no longer even regard mathematics as a body of truths. The dominant philosophy of mathematics treats it as a social construction, like the game of baseball. "Three strikes and you're out" is an arbitrary rule. It's not true or false; it's just the way we choose to play the game. By the same token, mathematical rules are regarded as just the way we play the game. Even American schoolchildren are now taught this postmodern view of math. A popular middle school curriculum says students should learn that "mathematics is man-made, that it is arbitrary, and good solutions are arrived at by consensus among those who are considered expert." Man-made? Arbitrary? Clearly, our public schools have waded deeply into the muddy waves of postmodernism. Moreover, if math is arbitrary, then there ar...