A common mistake in popular reasoning about complex issues is to swing from one unhealthy or inaccurate extreme to an equally (or worse) unhealthy or inaccurate extreme in the opposite direction. We swing the pendulum from one bad place to another.
I have long been enamored by C.S. Lewis’ discussion of joy, his technical term for that longing we feel for something more than this life can deliver. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he says it’s the theme of his entire life. In his classic essay, The Weight of Glory, he describes this “lifelong nostalgia” as a “longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside” and concludes that it is “no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”
Thoughtful Christians often find themselves confused by mixed signals. A church or organization or any structure that involves a group of people may say they believe one thing but, in practice, they reveal something rather different. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially if you value mission or doctrinal statements. The problem occurs when you fail to evaluate your actions through the grid of your stated beliefs or priorities.
With the goal of taking “a step toward clarifying what the ancient enterprise of relating faith and learning might mean in the academy today,” George Marsden’s landmark work, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997, Oxford University Press) is worth rereading every so often to remind us (or acquaint us for the first time) of what it could mean for Christians to engage the world of academia
One of the challenges of living faithfully in a predominantly secular age is imagining what difference it would make if we looked for God in history. That sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But much of history, American history at least, has been considered, explored, and recorded as if God were absent. Even for some who acknowledge God’s existence, their historical inquiry assumes he’s apathetic, uninvolved, distant
Are there unanswerable questions? Should we opt to not answer some questions and choose instead to just “accept some things by faith?”
Billy Graham faced this dilemma early in his career as an evangelist when his close friend Chuck Taylor barraged him with questions about the Bible. Taylor had
Proverbs 25:2 may be the leading candidate for a life verse for thoughtful Christians. The text reads, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” This shows the contrast between God and people but also the glory of both. There are some things only God knows or can know. People are not omniscient. But there are some things that people can know, should know, and
The tag line on this blog reads, “where thoughtful faith and faithful thinking intersect.” Perhaps that needs a little explanation. What do I mean by “thoughtful faith” and “faithful thinking?”
Thoughtful faith dares to ask questions, probing into implications and applications not immediately
Thoughtful Christians encounter a double loneliness. I have seen this surface many times in my years of ministering to Christian professors, graduate students, and academically minded undergraduates.
On the one hand, they face an alienation from their academic peers. Fellow department members marvel