Eleven American, British, and Canadian philosophers contributed to this collection of essays, addressing the theme of their practice of Christianity. Both the Roman Catholic and various Protestant traditions are included here, but the majority of writers are affiliated with or have been influenced by the philosophy staff at Calvin College and Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alvin Plantinga, Mortimer Adler, and John Rist number among the authors, all of whom write well and many of whom write compellingly. However, an overall lack of clear audience focus — some are writing for scholars, some for the convinced, some as though they were addressing the callowest undergraduates — calls into question the usefulness of the volume as a whole. The best place for this in the library may be where undergraduate students browse for relaxation or inspiration. ~ Library Journal
Prepare Your Mind For Action. The mind plays an important role in Christianity. Unfortunately, many of us leave our minds behind when it comes to our faith. In Love Your God with All Your Mind, J. P. Moreland presents a compelling case for the role of the mind in spiritual transformation. He challenges us to develop a Christian mind and to use our intellect to further God’s kingdom through evangelism, apologetics, worship, and vocation. "This exploration into the mind of evangelical Christianity is one of the most courageous books of our time. In language that is thoroughly erudite but compassionate, theological but practical, and scriptural but entirely relevant to today, the author presents the deeper significance of Paul’s plea to the Christians at Phillipi: ‘Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. ‘". ~ From the Publisher
One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth with a work likely to claim a place at the very center of the contemporary philosophical literature on the subject. William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from “aletheia,” Greek for “truth”). This idea holds that the truth value of a statement (belief or proposition) depends on whether what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Although this concept may seem quite obvious, Alston says, many thinkers hold views incompatible with it — and much of his book is devoted to a powerful critique of those views. Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam are two of the prominent and widely influential contemporary philosophers whose anti-realist ideas he attacks. Alston discusses different realist accounts of truth, examining what they do and do not imply. He distinguishes his version, which he characterizes as “minimalist,” from various “deflationary” accounts, all of which deny that asserting the truth of a proposition attributes a property of truth to it. He also examines alethic realism in relation to a variety of metaphysical realisms. Finally, Alston argues for the importance — theoretical and practical — of assessing the truth value of statements, beliefs, and propositions. ~ Product Description
Twenty professional philosophers tell how they combine intellectual rigor with religious commitment. Although most of the great philosophers have believed in God, argues Morris , many Americans today reckon that religion and reason are diametrically opposed. With this collection of essays, Morris assembles a cross section of scholars who effectively challenge this assumption. In brief chapters, the philosophers touch on themes such as their upbringing, conversion or religious development, and the ideas and thinkers who have most influenced them (Immanuel Kant, William James, and C.S. Lewis are among the most often mentioned). The general tone, however, is more personal than scholarly. We are treated to insights into the connection between spiritual life and the love of learning, as well as discussions of more obvious philosophical problems such as the nature of objectivity and the rational grounds required for religious assent. Eleanore Stump offers a moving account of how confrontation with the problem of evil can cause us to seek, rather than reject, God. Peter van Inwagen questions the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment, which he believes continue to distort our view of religion. David Shatz speaks of the dual program of Torah and secular studies at New York’s Yeshiva University and of the intense relationship between religion and study in Orthodox Judaism. Morris lets his authors speak for themselves, without attempting to draw together what has been said. Although he provides a broad spectrum of Christian viewpoints, some readers will regret the absence of Islamic and Buddhist perspectives and of any discussion of the classical syntheses of faith and reason, such as that of St. Thomas Aquinas. The honesty and humanity with which these controversial themes are treated make for attractive reading. ~ Kirkus Reviews
Mel Gibson’s Braveheart won five academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Most people would assume that Gibson’s character, William Wallace, about whom the movie was named, was the movie’s central character. Was he?
J.P. Moreland, in Evangelical Apologetics (out of print), eds. Michael Bauman, David W. Hall, and Robert C. Newman. (Christian Publications Inc., 1996).
Moreland defines what he calls philosophical apologetics as "a philosophical activity which has as its goal (or perhaps as its result) the increasing or maintaining of the epistemic justification of a Christian world view in whole or in part." Moreland surveys several varieties of philosophical apologetics and makes the case for philosophy as an essential and specially placed discipline for the effective integration of theology with other sources of knowledge claims. Finally, Moreland suggests several practical ways in which Christians can interact persuasively with the world of ideas that undercut the plausibility and relevance of Christian ideas in contemporary culture. ~ Afterall
Looking to end the divisive conflict tht has raged between Christians who attack each other either as “liberals” or as “fundamentalists”, Newbigin gives a historical account of the roots of this conflict in order to begin laying the foundation for a middle ground that will benefit the Christian faith as a whole and allow Christians to unitedly proclaim the gospel in a pluralistic world. “A masterful demonstration of the bankruptcy of secularism and all forms of Christian accommodation to it.” ~ Books and Culture “This is an important book for pastors and teachers serving in church settings where the temptation to soften the scandal of the cross is present or where the good news, for all its outward acceptance, is thought (deep down) to be a source of embarrassment…. The book is beautifully written, a powerful statement of faith in God, whose incarnation has changed the nature of human life forever and whose call to the church cannot be altered by the temptation to believe that the human being is the center of the universe.” ~ Princeton Seminary Bulletin
Faith and Criticism addresses a central problem in the church today — the tension between traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists want above all to hold fast to traditional foundations in belief and ensure that nothing of value is lost, even at the risk of a clash with “modern knowledge.” Progressives are concerned above all to proclaim a faith that is credible today, even at the risk of sacrificing some elements of traditional doctrine. They are often locked in uncomprehending conflict. Basil Mitchell argues that, not only in theology but in any other serious intellectual pursuit, faith and criticism are interdependent. A tradition which is not open to criticism will eventually ossify; and without faith in some established tradition criticism has nothing to fasten upon. This interdependence of faith and criticism has implications for society at large. Religious education can be Christian without ceasing to be critical, and a liberal society can espouse Christian values. ~ Product Description
I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.
Moreover, it’s not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged with the issues. Christian laymen, too, need to be intellectually engaged. Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true.
But the fact that Christianity can only be shown to be probably true need not be troubling when two things are kept in mind: first, that we attain no more than probability with respect to almost everything we infer…without detriment to the depth of our conviction and that even our non-inferred, basic beliefs may not be held with any sort of absolute certainty…; and second, that even if we can only show Christianity to be probably true, nevertheless we can on the basis of the Spirit’s witness know Christianity to be true with a deep assurance that far outstrips what the evidence in our particular situation might support (think analogously of the person convinced of his innocence even though all the evidence stands against him). To demand logically demonstrative proofs as a pre-condition for making a religious commitment is therefore just being unreasonable.
Throughout the academic world, non-Euclidean geometry was invoked to support a positivistic, anti-metaphysical temper of thought. A culture was assumed to be analogous to a geometry. Both were built on a few postulates chosen from an indefinite number of possibilities; both consisted of internally consistent, interrelated wholes; and both were immune to judgements about their truth or falsity in any ultimate
sense. Just as different geometries could all be logically valid, it was argued, so any number of different cultural and ethical systems could all be logically valid. Thus non-Euclideanism became a metaphor for the rejection of all traditional deductive systems — particularly the moral and religious tradition of Christianity. This is not to say that non-Euclideanism is intrinsically anti-Christian or anti-religious. Yet it was invoked as a symbol to deny that Christianity has any claim to a superior or exclusive truth.
The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. Despite dynamic success at a popular level, modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned the university, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture… The historical situation is… curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind.
What, then, should be our approach in apologetics? It should be something like this: ‘My friend, I know Christianity is true because God’s Spirit lives in me and assures me that it is true. And you can know it is true, too, because God is knocking at the door of your heart, telling you the same thing. If you are sincerely seeking God, then God will give you assurance that the gospel is true. Now, to try to show you it’s true, I’ll share with you some arguments and evidence that I really find convincing. But should my arguments seem weak and unconvincing to you, that’s my fault, not God’s. It only shows that I’m a poor apologist, not that the gospel is untrue. Whatever you think of my arguments, God still loves you and holds you accountable. I’ll do my best to present good arguments to you. But ultimately you have to deal, not with arguments, but with God himself.’
If the world seems attractive, the Christian must ensure that God, as its creator, is seen to be even more attractive. The world reflects the attractiveness of its creator, as the moon reflects the light of the sun. ¶ Two incidents from classical Greek mythology suggest themselves here. Homer introduces us to the Sirens, a group of women whose singing was so seductive that they caused sailors to crash their vessels through inattention to their duties. When Ulysses was attempting to sail his ship past the Sirens, he prevented the Sirens from causing any difficulties by the simple expedient of blocking his sailors’ ears so that they could not hear the captivating Siren song. Orpheus, on the other hand, was a skilled lyre player. His method of dealing with this kind of threat was rather indifferent. He played his lyre, the music of which proved so enchanting and fascinating that its beauty totally outweighed anything else.
The scribes were treated with excessive deference in Jewish society because of their education and learning. Everyone honored them because of their wisdom and intelligence. The “mere children”(napioi in Greek, really meaning babes) were Jesus’ image for the uneducated and ignorant. He is saying that the gospel of grace has been disclosed to and grasped by the uneducated and ignorant instead of the learned and wise. For this Jesus thanks God… The babes (napioi) are in the same state as the children (paidia). God’s grace falls on them because they are negligible creatures, not because of their good qualities. They may be aware of their worthlessness, but this is not the reason revelations are given to them. Jesus expressly attributes their good fortune to the Father’s good pleasure, the divine eudokia. The gifts are not determined by the slightest personal quality or virtue. They were pure liberality. Once and for all, Jesus deals the death blow to any distinction between the elite and the ordinary in the Christian community.
Before F. W. de Klerk was chosen to succeed P. W. Botha as President, he was asked if he would be the Mikhail S. Gorbachev of South Africa, a loyal party man who overturns much that the party once held inviolable. Mr. de Klerk had a quick reply: “The only thing Gorbachev and I have in common is this!” he said, slapping the top of his head.
Three years later, there is more than baldness to support comparisons between the two leaders. Like President Gorbachev, President de Klerk has freed men previously vilified as traitors, declared past policies bankrupt and begun a process of change that has outraged party conservatives.
Also like Mr. Gorbachev, who has shown some of the old Kremlin reflexes in his recent actions in Lithuania, Mr de Klerk has perplexed supporters and opponents alike, who wonder where he will call a halt to the scrapping of old policies. While the South African leader has said he believes in an “equal vote” for blacks and whites and a system that eliminates racial discrimination, he has been purposefully vague about the details of the “new South Africa” that the Government has said it wants in place within five years.
Pragmatic Cast of Mind
Mr. de Klerk’s broad formula acknowledges that he considers apartheid a dead-end street and that majority rule in some form is inevitable, But Mr. de Klerk has left no doubt, either, that he will strive to protect what the five million whites here have built up in the 350 years since the first settlers arrived, including their property rights and their right to control their own residential communities and schools.
While Nelson Mandela and other black leaders have said that Mr. de Klerk’s vision appears to encompass limitations on black political authority that they could not accept, many South Africans who favor far-reaching political change say they believe that the real hope for the future may lie not in Mr. de Klerk’s current pronouncements but in his probing, pragmatic cast of mind and an instinct to reach out for new solutions.
‘He realized that you get nowhere if you don’t have a following.’
Mr. de Klerk’s associates say those traits are allied to a profound religious commitment to ideals of justice that sets him apart from his predecessors.
The leaders of the National Party before Mr. de Klerk belonged to the main wing of the Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist body that lent such powerful theological backing to apartheid that it became known as “The National Party at Prayer.” Mr. de Klerk is a member of the small Dopper church, a 19th-century breakaway that insisted on the separation of church and state, and, partly for that reason, avoided sanctoning the official racial doctrines.
‘Dialogue Is God’s Style’
While Mr. de Klerk makes little public show of his faith, his thinking on political matters has apparently been powerfully influenced by Dopper teachings, especially those taken from the New Testament. Meeting with Afrikaner church ministers in January, Mr. de Klerk traced his hopes for negotiations with black leaders to Dopper tenets about the need for believers to seek justice and reconciliation. According to the Rev. Pieter W. Bingle, Mr. de Klerk’s Cape Town minister, the President put it simply. “Dialogue is God’s style,” he said.
That belief in breaching differences through discussion appears to have converged with a politician’s caution to persuade Mr. de Klerk that, for now at least, it is better not to draw blueprints of the new political system he will attempt to negotiate.
Officials close to Mr. de Klerk say the President will be flexible about matters that the National Party seemed set on as recently as September, when it won a bitterly contested election.
Among those matters, the officials said, is whether a new constitution should provide for separate, racially defined voters’ rolls resulting in a Parliament composed of racial blocs, as the National Party suggested in its September campaign, or whether the protection for whites that Mr. de Klerk has demanded can be achieved in other ways.
Under pressure from the right-wing Conservative Party in Parliament earlier this month, Gerrit van N. Viljoen, Minister for Constitutional Affairs, said the Government would hold out for separate voters’ rolls.
But at other times Mr. Viljoen has sounded as though the Government might accept Mr. Mandela’s demand for a single voters’ roll that is blind to race in return for other mechanisms like voting procedures that would give white members of Parliament, perhaps in conjunction with members from other minority groups, an effective veto on issues like property and education rights.
A few years ago, not many in the National Party would have bet on Mr. de Klerk leading the party to change. As a member of President P. W. Botha’s Cabinet for 11 years, and of B. J. Vorster’s Administration before that, he sometimes sided with racial hard-liners.
Afrikaans-language newspapers recently identified Mr. de Klerk as one of two Cabinet ministers who went to President Botha in 1986 and demanded that the Foreign Minister, Roelof F. Botha, be ordered to recant a prediction that South Africa might one day have a black president. The Foreign Minister complied.
De Klerk’s Political Shifts
But the story is recounted these days to show that Mr. de Klerk, then leader of the National Party in Transvaal Province, was a canny politician, aware that to have any chance of leading South Africa away from apartheid he would first have to consolidate his position with the powerful conservative wing of the National Party.
“He realized that you get nowhere if you don’t have a following, that you have to be able to take the people with you,” said Ebbe Dommisse, editor of Die Burger, a Cape Town newspaper with close links to the Government.
More recently, the setbacks for Communism in Eastern Europe is said to have a profound effect on Mr. de Klerk’s thinking. The President acknowledged as much in his speech to Parliament on Feb. 2, when he announced the legalization of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, among other anti-apartheid groups.
He implied that the decline of Stalinist Communism in Eastern Europe had encouraged the Government to move toward negotiations with groups like the African National Congress that have relied strongly for financial support and military training on the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies.
‘Dialogue is God’s style,’ the South African leader has said.
But according to a senior Cabinet minister, there was another lesson Mr. de Klerk took from Eastern Europe, that battalions of soldiers and police officers cannot sustain an unpopular political system indefinitely.
Facing the Hard-Liners
The lesson was one Mr. de Klerk took to a meeting in December with the country’s top 500 police commanders, many of whom were skeptical of moves to dismantle apartheid. Mr. de Klerk offered a grim picture of the alternative to a settlement with blacks. “Even if the blood flows ankle deep in our streets and four or five million people have been shot dead,” he said, “the problem will be just as great as before we began shooting.”
Roelof P. Meyer, the Deputy Minister for Constitutional Affairs, said that that realization fortified Mr. de Klerk in the face of the wrath of racial hardliners.
“The President has come to the conclusion that we have to do something about our situation, that we cannot go on with conflict indefinitely,” Mr. Meyer said. “This means that we have to go for political reconciliation, and that we cannot wait for the support of all whites, because if we do, we will have to wait years, indefinitely even, and in the meantime we will lose the country.”
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.
It is helpful to distinguish between negative and positive apologetics. In negative apologetics, the major objective is producing answers to challenges to religious faith. The proper tack of negative apologetics is removing obstacles to belief… In negative apologetics, the apologist is playing defense. In positive apologetics, the apologist begins to play offense. It is one thing to show (or attempt to show) that assorted arguments against religious faith are weak or unsound; it is a rather different task to offer people reasons why they should believe. The latter is the task of positive apologetics.
The Judeo-Christian religious tradition, is not just a domain of poetry, imagery, mystical transport, moral directive, and non cognitive, existential self-understanding. Interacting especially with the philosophically developed tradition of Christian theology, [I] joint the vast majority of other leading contributors to contemporary philosophical theology in taking for granted theological realism, the cognitive stance presupposed by the classical theistic concern to direct our thoughts as well as our lives aright. It has been the intent of theologians throughout most of the history of the Christian faith to deserve correctly, within our limits, certain important facts about God, human beings, and the rest of creation given in revelation and fundamental to the articulation of any distinctively Christian world view. In particular, reflective Christians throughout the centuries have understood their faith as providing key insights into, and resources for, the construction of a comprehensive metaphysics.
Moreland’s work must be considered one of the premier works on apologetics written by an evangelical. Although William Lane Craig is probably now worthy to be called the dean of evangelical apologists, Moreland’s volume from the 1980s still stands alone as the best single volume in dealing with challenges to the Christian faith. This is due in large part to two factors: the format of the book and Moreland’s concise way in handling the issues under discussion. ~ Shannon Richie … “No evangelical now writing on apologetics surpasses Moreland in philosophical ability. Every person who intends to speak for Christ to the contemporary mind should master the content and spirit of this book.” ~ Dallas Willard, University of Southern California.
Here I am … living in a time of permanent drama, witnessing upheavals such as perhaps the globe never before saw since the mountains rose and the seas were driven into their caverns. What have I to do for this panting, palpitating century? More than ever before thought is waiting for men, and men for thought. The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims. We are in a train rushing ahead at top speed, no signals visible. The planet is going it knows not where, its law has failed it: who will give it back its sun?
In this paper, I ponder two questions: (1) Why can’t the religious believer simply put the burden on the skeptic, and ask him to justify his unbelief, with the underlying assumption that as between theism and atheism, it is the former that is obviously true and the latter that is obviously false? (2) This not being possible in any way that is of immediate interest to religious belief, how does the believer regard his inability to prove the truth of faith in the manner the skeptic demands?
Now it is often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding ‘there wasn’t a God after all’ or ‘God does not really love us then.’ Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat … Some qualification is made — God’s love is “not merely human love” … perhaps — and we realize that such suffering are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that “God loves us as a father …” We are reassured again … I therefore put … the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?”
I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy… It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone — the most important domain for thought and intellect — is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and Sorbonnes — and by then where will these universities be?
