Thinking Christian

A timely reminder. I’ve signed it, and I encourage you to do the same. Spread the word!

Share This

Last time I blogged on discipleship of the mind, I raised some serious warnings about relying on the Internet too much. Here we are, though: me writing, and you reading. It’s pretty strong evidence we both think there’s at least something to be gained here. And there is, just as long as we don’t let it be our whole reading diet.

Christian-Oriented Libraries on the Internet
Some people in my generation can remember having to drive to the library to find an answer to a question. Sounds almost quaint now, doesn’t it? In this blog post I want to steer you toward some of the better libraries for Christian thinking. This list won’t be complete, you can guarantee that. I’m almost certain I’m having a momentary memory lapse, and I’m not even including all of my own favorites. Please use the comments to add to the list, and accept my advance apologies for missing some of the best.

• The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview: a project to gather the best from all over the Internet
• Last Seminary: An academic resource for Christian research and education
• LeaderU: Thousands of popular and scholarly articles on a wide variety of topics
• Library of Historical Apologetics: Thousands more articles, with an emphasis on classics; under development but with much promise
• Reasonable Faith: William Lane Craig’s home on the Internet, with hundreds of articles
• Summit Ministries: More excellent articles
• BeThinking.org: And even more, both popular and semi-scholarly
• Bede’s Library: A resource not widely enough known, from James Hannam, historian of philosophy
• Apologetics 315: My favorite source for up-to-the-minute audio and reading resources
• Jesus.org: “Your Questions, Real Answers”

Genuine Internet Libraries (thousands of public domain books in electronic format)

• The Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• Project Gutenberg

Contrary Views

Thinkers engage contrary views. Here are three of the better places to do that. I endorse the process of studying these views, not the views themselves (or in many cases, the attitudes), mostly because in the end they don’t stand up to good evidence and analysis.

• Infidels.org

• Naturalism.org

• Common Sense Atheism

There are thousands more like these, but this will keep both you and me busy for a good long while.

Share This

Book Review

The book is titled Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options. Thankfully Mark Mittelberg, who wrote it, knew where to begin, for the first question that’s bound to come up is, Why choose any faith? It’s a good question, but I won’t take credit for it; I borrowed it straight from the title of his first chapter. Why write about choosing a faith? Is it any more relevant than a book about, say, Choosing Your Sword in a World of Knighthood? Well, yes, of course it is. Mittelberg cites evidence that religion’s influence remains strong in North America (if he had ventured into the rest of the world he could have shown the same, even more so).

Faith is a fact of life apart from religious belief. Mittelberg says of atheist extraordinaire Richard Dawkins (p. 11),

Whether the chances are large or small, the important thought to catch here is that Dawkins doesn’t know there is no God—and he even concedes the possibility that some kind of God might actually exist. Rather, he takes it on faith that there actually is no God….

That’s just the way life is. We all live by some form of faith. Which leads us to the central question: Is ours a well-founded faith? A wise faith? A faith that makes sense and is supported by the facts? One that works in real life and is worth hanging on to?

More personally, is yours a faith you’ve really thought about, carefully evaluated, and intentionally chosen—or did you just slide into it at some point along the way?

That question is directed at all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike. The next six chapters expose common ways people choose their faith: pragmatism and relativism, tradition, authoritarian sources, intuition, the mystical approach, and “logic, evidence, and science,” with an emphasis on “I’ve gotta see it to believe it.” Chances are you’re going to find yourself described in one of those chapters or some mix thereof. Chances are especially good if you’ve never given your faith much thought. Faith, after all, is a synonym for belief; and how many of us really pay attention to why we believe what we believe?

So it behooves each of us to reflect on where we’ve come from in choosing our faith. Mittelberg prefers a version of the logic, evidence and science path, renamed the Evidential path in chapter eight:

It’s the one path that tests—and ultimately supports or undermines—all the others. Its two key elements, logic and sensory experience, are God-given tools we must use to gain the vast majority of our information, to test truth claims, and ultimately to decide what to believe.

The other faith paths do not necessarily lead to the wrong destination, but within them there is little or no means of testing, nothing to correct us if, for example, we rely on tradition for tradition’s sake. (“Your parents could be wrong,” he says. I suppose that even applies to my kids’ parents.) Going on,

The Evidential approach tells us logically and empirically that there is one set of truths—based on actual, what is reality—that we need to discover and let inform our choice of faiths. We can use these tools to test traditional teachings, religious authorities, intuitive instincts and hunches, and mystical encounters, so we can know which ones are worth believing and holding on to.

On another thread I’ve been debating whether it’s conceptually possible for God to reveal himself to us just through direct impressions (the sensus divinitatus) such that we could reliably know that the encounter we’re having is with God. Clearly if there’s a God, it’s unreasonable to assume that he could not do that. I’ve had many experiences I would describe that way. For purposes of that discussion, it’s logically sufficient to establish that if there is a God, then God could do that. But that’s a very limited point, for a very limited purpose. (I wouldn’t have brought it up here except I knew it would be brought up for me if I didn’t.)

The fact is that even though I know God can convince me of his reality any way he wants to, nevertheless when I have an experience that seems like God, I want some way to check whether I’m getting it right or if I’m mistaken. We’re not left only to our impressions, as it turns out, nor are we stuck in a morass of doubt where we have nothing to turn to besides tradition, authority, feelings, or the science of the laboratory. All of these have checks and balances coming from a most useful source: objective reality. Mittelberg explores logical, scientific, and historical criteria for choosing one’s beliefs, along with ways to assess the biblical and historical evidences for Jesus Christ.

Like his friend (and author of the foreword to this book) Lee Strobel, Mittelberg writes on a very accessible level. I recommend this book highly for the seeker in your life (including yourself, if you are that seeker). For church study groups, it could provide good discussion material for assessing various worldviews. (Mary Jo Sharp recently recommended this book for the same purpose.) I especially appreciate that Mittelberg emphasizes how to think about spiritual questions rather than telling us what to think. Of course he lands on his own solid conclusion: that faith in Jesus Christ is an excellent choice, the only one that makes good sense. But he gets there through a thoughtful path that should help readers think thoughtfully about their own paths.

Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options by Mark Mittelberg. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2008. 254 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$13.59 hardcover.

Share This

Sixty members of the U.S. Congress joining together for prayer every week before their voting sessions, jointly led by a Republican and a Democrat. Sixty members of Congress taking strong action for religious liberty in the United States. Could such a thing be?

Indeed, it does exist. It is the Congressional Prayer Caucus (CPC). Whether you’re an American or a citizen of another country who cares about America’s role in the world, I think you’ll want to know about it, to be encouraged by it. I see it as one of the bright hopeful lights on our horizon.

It’s not about politics, and it’s not just for politicians. The non-profit, non-partisan Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF) is calling on you and me to be informed and to get involved in multiple ways: in building a prayer wall around our nation and its leaders, getting connected with our state level leaders, and building prayer efforts in our churches. The Foundation’s mission is expressed in its commitment to:

• Protecting the public expression of prayer and faith in God
• Communicating the constitutional truths that establish America’s freedom
• Sustaining and equipping leaders who believe in prayer and uphold Judeo-Christian principles

… and in its dedication to:

• Establishing a network of ceaseless prayer, and initiating a Wall of Prayer around America.
• Working with legislators to create an architecture within federal and state governments to protect religious and individual freedom for future generations.
• Sustaining, supporting, and equipping existing and emerging leaders to live and lead with a Biblical worldview.
• Sparking an intellectual awakening regarding prayer and God’s role in America’s foundation and our future.

Lea Carawan, President of the Foundation, says that

CPC and CPCF are mounting a strategy to restore and renew our great nation, and are uniquely position to stand above political parties, religious affiliations, and entrenched agendas; and unite all God-fearing Americans under one banner — In God We Still Trust.

Join in supporting this bright light for our country!

Share This

I appreciate brgulker’s question about Adam Kotsko’s paper, Christians in Academe: A Reply. He said he thought Kotsko made some good points. I see it as a bit of a mixed bag, myself. I’ll respond here to a few excerpts.

I am speaking from long, hard experience, therefore, when I say that there is something toxic about conservative evangelicals’ stance toward academe. This stance is informed by what can only be called a thorough-going persecution complex. In the rhetoric of prominent conservative evangelical leaders, the secular world is not merely a realm that exists alongside Christianity. Instead, it is in active opposition to Christianity, seeking its destruction. The theory of evolution, for example, is not simply a scientific theory that happens to reach conclusions at odds with a literal reading of Genesis — it is a conspiracy aimed at discrediting belief in God.

I’m not in the academy now, but I’ll never forget the way a philosophy prof reamed me out for thinking there was anything in Christian thought or history worth giving two minutes’ attention. The specific issue is not worth rehearsing today, but time has proved he was wrong on it. The main thing I learned at the time was to keep my head down. He was wrong, but he was a full prof and I was a freshman. That was all I needed to know.

More recently I’ve edited two books about secondary school, college, and university instructors/professors being forced out of their positions because of their Christian beliefs. Speech codes mandating Christians shut up about certain beliefs abound. Is Christian belief under pressure in the university? Absolutely yes. Is the theory of evolution a “conspiracy aimed at discrediting belief in God”? That depends on who’s expounding it; there are some in whose hands it has exactly that purpose.

But these things depend partly on local circumstances. Business school students experience very little academic pressure. Biology and humanities majors get a lot more. These are based on national averages in the U.S., so it could be very different from one school to another. When I teach on staying Christian in college, I encourage students to be prepared for both the good and the bad. College was, by the way, the very best thing that could have happened to my spiritual life.

On every front, the conservative evangelical community perceives itself to be under siege, particularly its children, since indoctrinating children in secular ideology is the most effective means of undercutting Christianity.

There’s truth in that. Look, we are in spiritual battle. Isn’t that obvious? The university, along with the media, is the most important battleground in that conflict, and undercutting Christian belief is certainly the opposition’s main mode of attack.

Believing that evangelical students are under continual attack, conservative evangelical leaders encourage them to boldly defend themselves whenever possible. Overall, the attitude their most prominent leaders promote in conservative evangelical students is a combination of extreme paranoia and defiance (conceived as self-defense).

Not being there in the classrooms, I don’t know if Christian students are exhibiting irrational fears. I don’t know if their defense of the faith looks more like “self-defense,” “defiance,” or just being present intellectually and refusing to swallow whole everything that gets spoon-fed to them. I don’t think there’s any call for irrationality or fear. There’s hardly ever anything good to be gained by being disrespectful, so if that’s what he means by “defiant,” I hope it’s not happening; it shouldn’t be.

If Christianity is what we believe it is, then it’s strong enough to stand up to attack. If God is God, and if we’re following him, then we’re in good hands. There’s no need for fear, and no call for rudeness or disrespect. Still, when someone says something untrue or misleading about God, the faith, or morality, then what’s wrong with speaking the truth in love?

Conservative evangelicals as a group, therefore, are not just one among many excluded groups. Rather, they are sui generis insofar as they have constantly been encouraged, from a very young age, to expect and create conflict in the classroom.

It takes two to fight.

Above all, parents and pastors need to stop giving a blank check to anything that professes to be “Christian.” Conservative evangelicals have long been skilled at sniffing out what they consider to be pseudo-Christian liberals — developing some discernment on the other end of the scale would be a welcome shift.

I agree wholeheartedly. There’s some really soft stuff out there, and even some wrong stuff, that claims to be Christian. We need to be far more discerning.

Rejecting the more radical leaders must also mean rejecting their paranoid and frankly made-up ideas. For instance, evangelicals need to reject the fantasy of America as a “Christian nation” and recognize that it is precisely America’s secular state and prohibition of an established church that has allowed American Christianity to be such a dynamic, grassroots-powered religion instead of the empty formality it often is in European countries. Even if conforming to secular culture seems disadvantageous or constraining in the short term, treating it as an enemy is amazingly shortsighted. Evangelicals should be American secularism’s biggest supporters!

There’s a lot of truth in that, and a lot of confusion, all mixed up too thoroughly for me to treat it in the time I have today. In short, if secularism means giving equal opportunity to competing beliefs in the university, letting them all duke it out until the best one wins, that’s great, especially for academic settings. Sometimes, though, secularism means advantaging secular beliefs above Christian beliefs, which creates an unequal playing field. That’s not fantasy, that’s not a “persecution complex,” it’s reality in some settings.

That’s not to say Christian students should walk in to class convinced they’re about to get stoned and thrown out of Lystra. That’s a persecution complex. No, they should enter confidently, secure in who they are and who God is. If something comes up that opposes their beliefs, they should listen, learn, and respond on the basis of well-studied and developed knowledge, including the relevant knowledge from both the Christian side and the opposing view. That’s good, healthy interactive learning.

Similarly with evolution: Christians have always absorbed the best of worldly knowledge and literature. If Christians in the past have found it acceptable to learn about the carousing of pagan gods through studying the classical literature, surely learning about the theory of evolution can’t be a huge problem. Just as previous generations could study classical literature to learn grammar and rhetoric without thereby worshiping pagan gods, so too can contemporary evangelicals benefit from the practical medical knowledge that has resulted from evolutionary theory without denying their belief in God. And in fact I have never met an evangelical who would reject medical treatment from a doctor who believed in evolution — if modern biology, founded as it is on evolutionary theory, can be relied on in a life or death situation, objecting to its use in the low-stakes environment of the classroom seems misguided.

I agree that Christians should learn, study, and thoroughly understand evolutionary theory. I’m all in favor of us knowing what we talk about before we talk about it. But please, let’s not treat “evolution” as if it were univocal. Depending on the context, it means change over time, within-species variations of populations, descent with modification, universal common descent, and/or naturalistic universal common descent. To agree with evolution in the sense of within-species variations, and to accept medical treatment that’s been built upon knowledge of that form of evolution, does not commit one to accept evolution in all senses.

If conservative evangelical parents and pastors focused on encouraging their children to simply get as much as they can out of their education and had the courage to speak up against leaders whose extreme views only bring their community into disrepute, no one would have the occasion to ask if conservative evangelicals are discriminated against and no one would need to develop strategies to cope with the unique pedagogical challenges they represent — instead, they’d be among the most sought-after students. Professors can and should do more to work toward that future, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the conservative evangelical community itself.

Here Kotsko shifts from talking about the nature of the university to the character of Christian students. I’m in agreement with him on this, but not because I endorse his analysis of the situation. I agree because what he’s describing is the way Christian students ought to be regardless of circumstances. I think all of us should focus on getting the most out of our educations (in school or out). I think we should raise our voices in opposition to extreme, false views, both within and without our community. Christian students should be the most studious, the most respectful, the most inquisitive of all. They should also be, in the best sense of the word, the most demanding: they should demand excellence of themselves, and they should expect to be educated with excellence—which includes being taught the truth as well as having freedom to challenge respectfully what is not true.

Oh, for more Christians who will enter the university and stay there, committed to truth, committed to learning, committed to demonstrating excellence and love!

Share This

This morning someone sent me a link to “Christians in Academe: A Reply,” in which Adam Kotsko calls on conservative evangelicals to abandon our siege mentality in the academy. I think that’s a great idea. I’m all for it. Wouldn’t it help, though, if people like John Horgan (not to mention Scientific American) would quit lobbing ignorant ordnance in our direction?

Share This

The ninth topic on my list of resources for basic discipleship of the mind is the Internet. This is the classic good news/bad news situation. I’ll save the good for another post, coming soon. I’ll raise the cautions first, beginning with two contrasting experiences I had today.

Today I had time finally to catch up on a long list of web pages I had set aside to read when I had more time. Most of these came through my feed reader. A few days ago I wrote about using a feed reader to subscribe and keep up with headlines from multiple websites, including this one. Maybe I got too much of it in one day it has something to do with a couple articles I read (see below), or maybe it has to do with the other reading I’m about to describe. Anyway, I have a new piece of advice to offer, specifically to Christians, and who want to grow in discipleship of the mind. If this or any other blog is helping you with that, by all means stay on top of it. If not, then take it off your list now. Because if it’s not helping, it’s hurting.

This afternoon I finished a book I’ve been working on for a week or two: Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross by Geisler and Saleeb. I’ll be blogging it soon, but that’s not the point for now. When I laid it down, I thought back on how helpful it had been to take an extensive and unified tour of a single topic. I realized how much it provoked thoughtful reflection in me—and how different that is from my usual experience on the Internet.

The web fosters a grab-and-go mentality. The analogy to junk food is almost too obvious to mention. Here’s this snippet, there’s that interesting little nugget, and oh! man that writer missed a detail there. We bloggers are on the lookout for things to write about, and it’s a lot easier to find something to react to than it is to come up with fresh thinking of our own.

Blogger or not, the web reinforces a reactive mindset. To come to the web just in that way, though, is to come for shallow, surface stimulus, not for depth of insight. At best, it’s an entertainment-seeking approach, an almost mindless flicking-about for diversion we can justify in “Christian” terms by the occasional pearl of insight we might find. At worst, seeking stimulus for stimulus’s sake runs one down the road of stimulus-adaptation and partial random reinforcement, which together feed a harmful spiral of potentially addictive behavior.

That’s the worst case, but it’s not unusual. I suspect a lot of Internet pornography use starts with perfectly innocuous, entertainment-oriented clicking with the hope of finding something intriguing, a hope that often as not falls short. What comes next is, “but there must be something here that could pique my interest,” and then, “well, I know something that will do the trick!” (In the end pornography’s promised satisfaction turns out to be one of the biggest deceptions of all.)

Well, I started off writing about using the Internet for discipleship of the mind, and look where that led. I told you it was a good news/bad news situation. Let me exhort you with this. When you come to the Internet, are you looking for a vague sort of “something interesting”? Or do you have a more focused purpose? Here’s a good test: how many web pages do you read with real care, and how many do you just skim? If you’re not reading with care, you’re developing surface habits. Even if there’s nothing one would call wrong with those web pages, they’re fostering bad patterns in you anyway. The water isn’t deep enough to be worth swimming in.

As I said, today I was catching up on web pages I had set aside for later. These were pages whose headlines I had flagged in my RSS reader as being potential gems, worthy of more serious reflection later on. Some of them turned out that way. I’m certainly not suggesting we all unplug from the Internet. But it was interesting to see what two of those gems had to say. One was titled “‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr: The Internet Warps You.”

“What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way our minds work?” he [Nicholas Carr] asks. His answer, iterated throughout this often repetitive but otherwise excellent book: “The news is even more disturbing than I had suspected. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just like it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”

Something similar just came up today from Tim Challies: “Infobesity,” including this John Naish quote on rebelling against information overload:

It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restricting one’s data diet. There are compelling reasons. The glut of information is not only causing stress and confusion; it also makes us do irrational things such as ignore crucial health information…. Catherine Collins, of the British Dietetic Association, says that info-overload is often to blame for this food-choice paradox: “We are so informed that we can’t be bothered.” That’s a fantastic slogan for the twenty-first century. We are so wired to gather information that often we no longer do anything useful with it. Instead of pausing to sift our intake for relevance and quality, the daily diet of prurient, profound, confusing and conflict information gets chucked on to a mental ash-heap of things vaguely comprehended. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by getting more.

The last two sentences are reminiscent of the stimulus spiral I described a few paragraphs up from here.

I’m going on a diet. I have unsubscribed from about half of my Internet news feeds. I’m holding on to subscriptions from friends, some that are directly connected to my work, and a limited few that keep me informed on essential news on a broad variety of topics. In addition to that, there are a few bloggers who have consistently helped me to think more deeply about God and life. I’m keeping them on the list. But I’m more inclined to pare down my list than to add to it—so that I don’t build up my own “mental ash-heap of things vaguely comprehended.”

I emphasize again, the Internet is both a good news and a bad news environment. If this blog is helping you in your discipleship, then stick around, and I’ll share with you several other websites that will probably help too.

Share This