Jan 6, 2017 | Explanatory Power
In my last post on the nature of plausibility structures, I used a movie with death as a central character to show how subtle messaging in movies leads to making God seem more or less real to people, thus more or less plausible. As I said, death never caused one of the other characters to ever bring up God, as if the divine being is irrelevant to life and death. I want to make the case briefly that although death and suffering often cause people to reject God, they are a far bigger problem for the materialist/atheist than the Christian. My contention is that death and suffering lends credibility to the Christian faith, while making atheism/materialism less credible.
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Jan 4, 2017 | Plausibility
Plausibility is a word we don’t often hear in church (ever?), but the concept plays a crucial role in helping us keep our kids Christian. A familiar word, it is defined thus: having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable. One of the basic premises of my book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, is that most people reject the Christian faith, or drift away from it, not because they’ve studied all the evidence, worked through the logic of it, and come to a conclusion, but because it doesn’t seem real to them. It is not plausible to them. If we add structure to the word, we get a building, a structure, of belief in our minds such that certain things seem real and credible to us, and others don’t. The culture we inhabit contributes to that conceptual edifice.
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Jan 2, 2017 | Explanatory Power
In her fiction, O’Connor deliberately tried to alter her readers’ perception, to get them to notice what she called the “distortions” of modern life and to look at the created world closely enough that they might perceive in its depths proof of a creator. For secular audiences, she saw little point in subtlety, famously explaining her grotesque style in this way: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
—Cassandra Nelson, “Seeing Is Believing: What Flannery O’Connor Meant by ‘Vision'”
Jan 1, 2017 | Explanatory Power
Liberal Christianity (J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity & Liberalism is an excellent study on the differences between liberal and conservative Christianity) got it’s start in America in the late 1800/early 1900s. It started with the 17th Century Enlightenment that made reason the ultimate arbiter of truth, which lead to German Higher Criticism’s study of the Bible as a merely human document. Without the supernatural, all that was left of Christianity was ethics, which became the sine qua non of liberal Christianity. When the welfare of human beings becomes the focus of Christianity, and not the glory of a Savior God in Christ, it eventually loses it’s power to captivate the human heart. That’s what happened to “The Evangelical Scion Who Stopped Believing.”
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