So what is up? Mostly random thoughts mainly at my end. A need to write but not a theme really.

 

I grabbed a book off my shelf today called Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine & Aquinas by Curtis Chang. So far it’s very good. The topic is a daunting one to take on but one that constantly enters my mind as we move to a post-Christian era. I can appreciate the premise which is to engage to of Christianity’s greatest thinkers in times of what Chang calls epochal challenge. The epochal challenge is the rise of a new system of thinking on a massive scale. For Augustine and the Holy Roman Empire it was the the rise of Christianity itself within the old Roman empire that was the new way of thinking that led to the erosion of centuries of Roman thinking that had held the empire together.

 

Augustine lived in a time when the priviledged intelligentsia felt that Christianity was incompatible with the "thoughtful citizen". A time when Christianity was being blamed for the woes of the empire. A time not unlike our own. Augustine’s response to the intellectual doubt about Christ was his powerful work – The City of God.

 

With Thomas Aquinas the epochal challenge was the rapid rise of Islam. Not only did Isalm bring with it a powerful military and religious challenge but it also re-introduced the long lost philosophy of Aristotle. Aquinas and culture were challenged by a complete and utterly different system of thought and with it came the inevitable violence – physical violence and intellectual violence. Aquinas, in an effort to respond to a missionary friend’s request for help in meeting the challenge of Islamic philosophy he wrote Summa contra Gentiles.  

 

Chang looks to Hebrews 12:1 which calls us to pay attention to "that great cloud of witnesses" as his justification for looking to our own spiritual ancestors as examples in dealing with our own epochal challenge – postmodernity. Chang’s perspective of the postmodern is in line with my own – a wholesale challenge to the West’s modernist way of thinking which is collapsing under its weight. I also agree with Chang’s perspective that while postmodernity is tearing down the modernist framework it has offered little to nothing to replace it – hence the vaccum which has formed is being filled with whatever can rush in. What you get is a pluralistic, chaotic, mess of conflicting ideologies battling for supremecy.

 

Chang is not an ivory tower thinker he’s engaging the culture where it is as director for Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship in Boston working on the campuses of MIT, Harvard and Tufts. His experience utilizing apologetics to debate a student on the validity of the Christian perspective while showing the invalidity of the student’s own logic taught him that even age-old rules of logic are being discarded. Having effectively shown the student the fallacies in his logic the response Chang was met with was "so what".

 

This is the increasingly loud response of our culture to the claims of Christ and His followers – a resounding "so what?" Our temptation to such a response is to smugly wrap ourselves in our modernist culture and claim the ignorance of this culture is too bad and it will be the culture’s own undoing. This, however is not the response of Christ to indifference and nor should it be ours.

 

Chang’s experience with the effectiveness of apologetics in our postmodern culture reminds me of Bonhoeffer’s own thought that apologetics was most effective as a tool within the church in the lives of lapsed or doubting believers than as a tool for evangelism.

 

So – I’m not done the book yet but I’ll keep you posted.