Faith Like Claus

  Secular college students don’t give their Christian peers a second thought because this generation has taken upon itself the existential, anti-intellectual kind of “faith” and is thus unequipped to answer the questions of average, college-aged unbelievers.

  Since when has God required us to believe, confess, or proclaim something we don’t know or understand? Faith moved from the realm of saving knowledge to that of mystical, intangible existentialism soon after the Enlightenment, and the church (in America) became drunk with that spirit. The Christian should be the one with the hard, profound, and life-changing questions and answers, not the one avoiding such questions and answers.

  And since when does God ask us to believe that which is illogical? Since when is the object of our faith inexplicable or unknowable? That belief is “taking a leap of faith” is a rather new idea in Christianity. This is the idea that faith is believing in something that doesn’t make sense and has no reasonable evidence to support it; belief requires the person to make an intellectual, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. “leap”.

  Both of these ideas are products of modern and post-modern presuppositions and are incompatible with historic Christianity. The gospel and the Scriptures are so reasonable, and their evidence so convincing, that when they are properly investigated and explained they convert people.

  The reason college-aged students are not coming back to the churches they grew up in is because their churches did not equip them to face and answer opposition. Kids aren’t stupid, they learn when you teach them. If you teach a 7-year-old about the judgment of God and salvation in Christ by using the story of the Flood, they will learn and understand and be less susceptible when challenged by it as being an unscientific or unhistorical fact. But when you just tell them the story as if it were a fable, what else are they going to believe? Such college-students, when their inherited “faith” is challenged, probably feel exactly the same way they did when they learned that Santa Claus isn’t real.

  God designed mankind and the gospel so that his word would give faith and life to those who hear it. His word is truth, this truth is knowable and tangible, and Jesus is this Truth. Truth is calling all people who hear his words to change their minds and believe; he’s not calling all people to forsake their God-given abilities to think and reason and believe a bunch of non-sense.

  In reality, there are so few unanswerable objections to Christianity and the Bible that unbelievers shouldn’t have a reason (outside of their truth-suppressing unrighteousness) not to believe the good news of salvation by grace through faith because of the electing love of God in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus.

To discover, or to uncover: that is the question.

The Lights and Shadows blog was originally located at discoverlight.wordpress. However, upon investigating the difference between these terms, I was compelled to change the url from “discover” to “uncover.” The switch was not a matter of mere aesthetic preference but of semantic conviction. Observe:

When a thing is discovered, it is found and learned; A thing discovered was previously unknown. For example, remote islands and laws of nature are discovered; Marie Curie discovered the existence of radiation; Should someone find the lost city of Atlantis, the event would be a discovery.

When a thing is uncovered, its true or original state is revealed; A covering hides some or all properties of a thing. For example, socks are coverings for feet, and an alibi may cover a crime; A tattoo is not seen on a socked foot until the tattoo is uncovered (de-socked? lol); It may take years of investigation and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses to uncover the actual location of a suspect during the time a crime was committed.

So, can you see why I switched from discoverlight to uncoverlight? Truth is light. Truths are facts about reality which comport with and explain our experience and existence; as light increases the visibility of the physical, so truth increases the awareness of the metaphysical.

It is not as if truth is still unknown or hidden from the minds of men, waiting to be discovered; The Christian Worldview pre-supposses than man is not and has never been ignorant of himself, his Creator, or his role in the universe. However, these truths have been covered by millennia of fables and subtleties, darkening man’s perception of his very self, surrounding, and purpose.

Issues pertaining to theology, philosophy, and politics have shaped the global and individual identity. What we are undertaking at Lights and Shadows is the uncovering of truth, the revealing of light, the stripping away of shadows, of mis-applications, mis-appropriations, and mis-understandings of truth throughout history. We engage these issues in order to dismantle the zeitgeists of the past, to forecast the failings of modern philosophies and ideologies, and to fore-stall such trends.

Consider,
MPM