Dec 9, 2016 | Truth
Eric Metaxas, famous Evangelical author and speaker, went off to college like many Christian kids, naive and ignorant about the environment he would encounter there. He learned about something there called relativism, a concept every Christian parent needs to be familiar with, and needs to guard their kids against. I’ll let him explain what it means:
I first encountered relativism when I went to college at Yale. Before that I had lived in a working-class world where truth was a real concept. In my parents’ world, truth was something noble and beautiful; it was something that people lived and died for, like freedom. To be an enemy of the truth was to be about the worst thing there was. Since Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas—Latin for “Light and Truth”—I was eager to get there so that I could begin learning what truth really was. I was genuinely excited about the idea of searching for it.
But by the time I got there—in the 1980s—Yale had abandoned the outdated notion that truth was something real, something to be sought after and discovered and treasured. That onetime seminary had instead espoused a winking, postmodern attitude, in which the notion of a singular truth had been replaced by the relativistic theory that there are many “truths” . . . which is to say no truths at all.
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Dec 3, 2016 | Epistemology - Trust
I have a feeling that most Christian parents (and the churches they attend) don’t often get into conversation with their kids about epistemology. Since most people have never heard the word before, that’s not surprising. The concept is simple, though the answers often are not. It’s a branch of philosophy that deals with how we come to know things, or the study of knowledge (episteme is one of the Greek words for knowledge).
One of the reasons epistemology is so important in the 21st Century West is that the secular culture’s default epistemology is skepticism. A recent blog post by Sean McDowell reminded me how easy skepticism is in an age where we are flooded with information every day. He starts it this way:
Recently I was speaking to a group of pastors, youth pastors, and other church workers in Idaho. One pastor asked a question that, in my experience, perfectly captures the thinking process of many students today. He said, “My younger brother, a Millennial, is constantly on his cell phone. When I try to talk to him about God, he says that people disagree and so we simply can’t have any confidence at all in our beliefs.” How would you respond? Can we know things or are we lost in a sea of endless information?
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Nov 30, 2016 | Theology
In my last post I wrote about the best way to ruin your kids faith is to make it all about them. It’s an extremely easy thing to let happen if you don’t actively take responsibility for the content and shape of your kids’ faith. We live in a culture where the subjective reigns in the form of the sovereign self, which is the reason the default religion of America, and especially our young people, is something called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). The phrase was coined by sociologist Christian Smith in his 1995 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. He describes MTD thus:
First, a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. Second, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. Third, the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. Fourth, God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. Fifth, good people go to heaven when they die.
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Nov 27, 2016 | Theology, Truth
Make it all about them!
Yes, I know this is a blog, and book, about keeping our kids Christian, but what we must warn them against is also important if we are to make that keeping more likely.
I recently learned about a Christian women. a famous “mommy blogger,” who was divorced, and recently announced she’s started dating a famous soccer star who happens to be a woman. Yes, this famous Christian author (New York Times Best Seller, no less), blogger, and speaker is now a confirmed lesbian. What makes this particularly especially problematic for conservative, orthodox Christians isn’t the so much the lesbian part of it, but the rationale she gives for engaging in a lesbian relationship. It makes her happy! Oh, so very, very happy! As she put it in her Facebook announcement about the relationship: (more…)
Nov 24, 2016 | Gratitude
This is my first post for this re-purposed blog, and Thanksgiving Day is certainly an appropriate day on which to do it. I say re-purposed because I initially focused on the intersection of Christ and culture, something that is still near and dear to my heart. But about a year and a half ago I decided to write a book, and my orientation changed, which is reflected in the title of this blog and the name of my book.
The thing I am most grateful for in my life, second only to my salvation through Jesus Christ, is my wife and kids. They are the only dream in my life that has ever come true. I’ve always been a big thinker, but all those big thoughts over the last 30 plus years have crashed on the shoals of reality before could ever got to shore. Not so Sarah, Gabrielle, Adam, and Dominic. (more…)
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