| Something I found interesting...
Alrighty...I was reading and thinking, reading and thinking, and I have a bit to present to you. I'm going to jump right into it, please forgive me if you start off floundering. To give you a plank of wood you can hang on to, this is in relation to apologetics--both intelletual and visual apologetics. Visual apologetics, I define as, is having Christ soverign over our lives, that one can see a distinct difference between the Christian and a non-Christian. Many if not most, most if not all, people can safely say, "Look. This guy is different. What's the cause of this?" So here we go:
From Chuck Colson's The Great Hope for the New Millenium:
If we understand the conflicting world views [postmodernism and Christianity], we have a wonderful apologetic. If we stand up and say, "The Bible says you've got to do this," people aren't likely to listen. But if we stand up and say, "Your system of thought leads you to ridiculous conclusions that you can't live with, and let me explain why," they listen.
We have to be able to argue--present these cultural issues in terms the world can understand so we can win them over. I try to do this with my "BreakPoint" radio commentary every day. I did a commentary once on the Saab automobiles and their advertising line, "Find your own road." I said they weren't selling cars; they were selling the existentialist philosophy of the 1960's, which is do your own thing, live your own life. A week after the commentary, I got a call from the new president of Saab U.S. "Mr. Colson," he said, "I listened to your commentary. Then I studied our ads. You know, you're right. We're not selling cars; we're selling a philosophy. I'm pulling all those ads off the air." You see, if we can point out to people what they're doing and if we make sense, we can win the argument. The problem is they're blind; they don't see it. We have to help them.
End quote. Colson goes on to say that people must see us as a loving community, loving them notwithstanding, but pointing out to them why their ways don't work. [More on the "loving community" soon.] Colson gives the example of Robby George, a professor at Princeton, scheduled to debate Stanley Fish, perhaps the leading deconstructionist in America. "Robby was scheduled to debate him before the American Society of Political Scientists" [the acronym is ASAP, incindentally], "on Labor Day weekend in Boston. Two hundred political scientists gathered from around the country. The issue was the pro-life verses pro-choice position. Robby wrote a brief on pro-life. He never mentioned Scripture. He set out simply to prove that the baby in the womb is a human being, and he did it based on scientific and medical evidence. And he sent the brief ahead of time to Stanley Fish. Fish arrived at the meeting, stood up before that whole crowd, and said, "I have read Dr. George's brief carefully. I must confess that the pro-choice position is wrong, that life does begin in the womb; the evidence supporting the pro-life position is correct. I have been wrong.""
Not too long after that, Colson makes a point on being "mere Christians". He uses C. S. Lewis' book as the example, and points out that "Lewis was saying, "The imperative thing is that Christians be 'mere' Christians" that is, that we not add hyphens or other qualifiers; we are first and foremost Christians--and we're Christians together. Yes, we Christians among ourselves have docrtinal differences, long-standing ones that go back hundreds of years. And we've been negotiating and discussing, and we've been trying to find common ground to narrow these differences. But we're always going to have them. And we don't want to compromise the truth. But if the imperative thing as we approach the new millennium--if we really want to present the world a loving community that draws people in--is that we must not be constantly fighting among ourselves. We've got to stand together as "mere Christianis" in the new millennium and say we love God together, say we're going to stand together as the church."
__________________ Mostly gone after what happened with CFT. On occasionally to check up on people. Drop a line to my gmail. | 
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