Tag Archives: Knowledge

Commentary

Greg Koukl’s plan for raising his kids to be effective Christians

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Here’s a neat post from Stand to Reason.

First, the introduction:

Last weekend I was in Ottawa, Canada, speaking at the Metropolitan Bible Church. While I was there I met a number of fellows who were dads, and we spent an afternoon at a barbecue, talking about raising our children in the Lord. We have a responsibility to do this. We cannot just pawn it off on teachers, or Sunday school teachers, or our pastor, or a Christian school, if we have one. They can help, but it is our primary job to raise our children in the Lord.

And here’s an excerpt:

There’s another thing that I’m doing to teach my kids theological content that is more of a guideline than a program. I think a lot of times people like me, and maybe you, want to have a program. Sometimes we think if we don’t have a program we’re not being good parents. But even if you don’t have a program, it’s good to have a plan. One thing I’ve been using is a concept that I’ve been developing the last few years. I call it Credo, “I believe.” Credo consists of five words that capture the entire Christian worldview, and I think when I give you the words, you’ll see the relationship between them. Here they are: God, Man, Jesus, Cross, Resurrection. And here, by “resurrection” I mean the final resurrection to reward or judgment, the eschatological last things. I don’t mean any particular understanding of Jesus’ second coming; I mean that there will be a final day of reckoning. History is moving towards that point.

These five words capture the essence of the story of Christianity, starting with God, then man,then the fall. Then God invading the world–the physical world–by becoming a man Himself as part of a plan to die on a cross to rescue man, so that at the final resurrection they will be numbered among the sheep and not among the goats. This is the Christian story in five words.

Read the whole thing – he explains his program.

News

Melanie Phillips asks why incompetent teachers can’t be fired

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Melanie Phillips

Story here in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Wes Widner)

Excerpt:

For years, head teachers have complained that one of their main problems was that the terms of teachers’ contracts with local education authorities meant they were unable to sack those who were not up to scratch.

Now Panorama is apparently reporting the shocking fact that, instead of being removed from the profession, dud teachers are merely being recycled by being given good references in exchange for agreeing to look for work in alternative schools.

According to Mick Brookes, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, this is a common practice which he says causes heads serious problems.

The classroom teacher unions, however, think it is perfectly justified.

Well, there’s a surprise. In fact, it is an absolute betrayal of the children for whom school represents their one chance in life.

And a bit later:

The most successful teachers have always understood that children need to be inducted into a body of knowledge, to be taught in a structured and disciplined manner, to be corrected when they make mistakes.

But for decades, the predominant educational ideology has ordained that children effectively teach themselves, with teachers taking a back seat as mere ‘facilitators’.

What children feel about themselves has been deemed to be more important than what they know.

Achievement was bad —because it made others who didn’t achieve feel bad about themselves.

This led to the collapse of the teaching of reading and the dumbing down of virtually every subject on the curriculum. Indeed, it eroded the very basis of teaching as the transmission of knowledge.

The first thing we need to do is pass a law that allows teachers to work without having to join a union. The best teachers will be able to command much higher salaries when they don’t get dragged down by the union. That should cut into the union’s political power, and then we may finally get some decent school choice laws passed – like vouchers – so that parents can choose where their children go to school. That will create pressure on schools to perform – and that means that bad teachers will be fired.

Polemics

Sean McDowell on whether Christians should embrace postmodernism

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The article by Sean McDowell is here.

Excerpt:

In Postmodern Youth Ministry, for example, Tony Jones argues that postmodernity is the most important culture shift of the past 500 years, upending our theology, philosophy, epistemology (how we know things), and church practice. It is an “earthquake that has changed the landscape of academia and is currently rocking Western culture.” (p. 11). Thus, to be relevant in ministry today, according to Jones and other postmodernists, we must shed our modern tendencies and embrace the postmodern shift.

For the longest time I simply accepted that we inhabit a postmodern world and that we must completely transform our approach to ministry to be effective today. But that all changed when I had the opportunity of hearing philosopher William Lane Craig speak at an apologetics conference not too long ago.

[…]In the introduction to Reasonable Faith, Craig provocatively claims, “Indeed, I think that getting people to believe that we live in a postmodern culture is one of the craftiest deceptions that Satan has yet devised” (p. 18). Accordingly, we ought to stop emphasizing argumentation and apologetics and just share our narrative. Craig develops this idea further:

And so Satan deceives us into voluntarily laying aside our best weapons of logic and evidence, thereby ensuring unawares modernism’s triumph over us. If we adopt this suicidal course of action, the consequences for the church in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality, while scientific naturalism shapes our culture’s view of how the world really is (p. 18-19).

In a personal email, Craig relayed to me that he believes postmodernism is largely being propagated in our church by misguided youth pastors. While he meant the comment more to elicit a smile than to be taken as a stab in the back, I can’t help but wonder if he is right.

There was a podcast that Sean did a while back on the worldview of Christian youth, where he explains how they think that religious claims are all basically personal preferences, not real knowledge that can be reasoned about and supported by evidence. It really eats into their ability to act in Christian ways when they don’t think Christianity is true.

My personal experiences with “Christian” postmodernism

Growing up, I was often confronted with the idea that God was not somehow insulated from logic and evidence. The main people who asserted that idea were the church leaders and campus club leaders. They were very skeptical of controversial doctrines like Hell, exclusive salvation, inerrancy and authorial intent. They didn’t like the law of non-contradiction, and they didn’t like historical or scientific evidence. Some others didn’t even like the idea that the Bible could override their emotions and intuitions.

As I grew older, I began to uncover why the postmoderns in leadership believed that God is not bound by the laws of logic, and that evidence was not as authoritative as personal experiences and stories. It was because of their desire for popularity. They did not want to have to confront people with exclusive and judgmental Christian claims. They did not want to have defend orthodox Christianity as true, using logic and evidence. The leaders even attacked the people who tried to introduce thinking and reasoning about Christian claims.

Postmodern Christians want to be able say to offer Christianity as one choice in a buffet, with the goal of addressing people’s felt needs. They say things like, “Christianity is true for me, and Hinduism is true for you“, in order to be accepted. And they feel, emotionally and intuitively, that non-judmentalism and non-exclusivism are right. Postmodernism helps them to justify their focus on popularity and their refusal to learn apologetics. They don’t want to learn facts, because they don’t want to have to defend Christianity as being objectively true.

Postmodern Christians are opposed to the idea that Christianity is knowledge, because “knowing for certain” takes away their ability to have “wiggle-room” when they want to do what all the other people are doing. They want to be able to keep God at arms-length when he is morally demanding, while keeping him within arm’s reach for emotional support, when needed – maybe just in private. God “exists” for postmoderns when they need comfort, and he doesn’t “exist” when they want autonomy from the moral law.