16 April 2015 A.D. Emotionalist Boom-Boomers Who Opt for Emotionalist-Worship Creating Ignorant Boom-Boom-Millenials (Turn the Music Up!)
16 April 2015 A.D. Emotionalist Boom-Boomers Who Opt for
Emotionalist-Worship Creating Ignorant Boom-Boom-Millenials (Turn the Music
Up!)
Nazworth, Napp. Young Christians
Spiritually Failing in Real World Because Youth Groups Depend Too Much on
Emotional High, Says Nancy Pearcey. Christian
Post. 14 Apr 2015. http://m.christianpost.com/news/young-christians-spiritually-failing-in-real-world-because-youth-groups-depend-too-much-on-emotional-high-says-nancy-pearcey-cp-interview-1-2--137420/. Accessed 14 Apr 2015.
Young Christians Spiritually Failing in Real World Because Youth Groups
Depend Too Much on Emotional High, Says Nancy Pearcey (CP Interview 1/2)
By Napp Nazworth
April 14, 2015 | 8:09 am
The main reason people abandon Christianity is unanswered
intellectual questions, yet many churches treat faith as a mostly emotional
experience, philosopher Nancy Pearcey argued in an interview with The Christian
Post. Her new book, Finding Truth: 5
Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, provides five practical
strategies to help Christians think about issues that challenge their faith.
Pearcey is a best-selling author whose previous works
include Total Truth:
Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, and,
coauthored with Charles Colson and Harold Fickett, How Now Shall We Live?
Following the Apostle Paul's example in the first chapter
of his letter to the Romans, Finding Truth provides readers with a progression
of five principles to help them identify unbiblical ideas and articulate a
response to those ideas. These principles are useful for both speaking to
non-Christians and for addressing unbiblical ideas that have infiltrated the
Church. Each of the core chapters deals with one of the five principles, and
there is a study guide in the back of the book.
Those principles are: 1. Identify the idol. 2. Identify the idol's
reductionism. 3. Test the idol: Does it contradict what we know about the
world? 4. Test the idol: Does it contradict itself? 5. Replace the idol: Make
the case for Christianity.
In her CP interview, Pearcey said the book was motivated,
in particular, out of a concern for young Christians. Church youth groups are
often good at establishing an emotional commitment but are failing young
Christians intellectually. Parents and church leaders need to encourage their
youth to grapple with difficult questions and help them learn to think through
those issues, she argued, or else they will be left unprepared when their views
are challenged.
Below is part one of the transcript of that email
interview. In part two, Pearcey applies the five principles of Romans 1 to the
issue of same-sex marriage.
CP: Why did you want to write
this book?
Pearcey: Finding Truth challenges
the mindset of "Don't think, just believe," whether in the Church,
the classroom, the media, or politics. Studies find that the main reason people
abandon their Christian upbringing is unanswered intellectual questions. The
researchers were surprised; they expected to hear stories of relationship
issues — people saying they'd been hurt or emotionally wounded. But the reason
given most often by those who de-convert is that they could not get answers to
their doubts and questions.
That is my own story as well. Raised in a Lutheran home,
I started asking questions in high school: How can we know that Christianity is
true? Is it just an emotional crutch? None of the adults in my life gave any
answers. I asked a college professor why he was a Christian, but all he said
was, "Works for me." A seminary dean said, "Don't worry. We all
have doubts sometimes" — as though I was just going through a
psychological phase.
Eventually I concluded that Christianity must not have
any substantial answers. I decided to put it aside and embark on a search for
truth. After several years as an agnostic, I finally stumbled across L'Abri,
the work of Francis and Edith Schaeffer in Switzerland. There for the first
time I met people who offered reasons and arguments supporting the truth of
Christianity.
My own experience convinces me that it is important to
take people's questions seriously. I wrote Finding Truth to help other people
who have questions to find solid answers.
CP: Did you have a particular
audience in mind? Pearcey: I am especially concerned about a generation of young people who are not being prepared for the challenges of growing up in a secularized culture.
Recently a mother told me, with tears in her eyes, that
her son had lost his faith at a state university. The teen was a psychology
major; and ever since Freud, most psychological theories have treated
Christianity as a symptom of neurosis, an infantile regression, a projection of
an imaginary father figure in the sky. The student came from a loving family
and strong church, but he was not prepared for the barrage of critical theories
he was learning in the classroom. Within a semester, he had abandoned his
Christian upbringing.
This is where Finding Truth can help. It
offers a 5-part strategy derived from Romans 1 that empowers people to think
critically about secular theories in any subject area. Paul states that there
is a body of knowledge giving real-world evidence for God, available to everyone
across all cultures and all periods of history — what we call general
revelation — which provides a way to test worldviews.
For example, we all have direct awareness of human
nature. Because humans are capable of thinking, the first cause that created us
must have a mind. Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that
created us must have a will. As one philosopher sums it up, because a human is
a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone
— not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as we are told by philosophies
like naturalism or materialism.
CP: You write about the failures
of the Church to help young people seek answers to difficult questions. What
grade would you give the American Church on the subject of apologetics?
Pearcey: The good news is that in
recent years, apologetics resources have become far more available. The bad
news is that many churches continue to ignore those resources, treating
Christianity as though it were primarily emotional.
Youth groups rarely encourage young people to grapple
with tough questions. Instead the goal seems to be to engineer events that
ratchet up emotional commitment. But emotional intensity is not enough to block
out questions. If anything, it leads teens to redefine Christianity in purely
emotional terms — which leaves them vulnerable when they finally do face their
questions.
Finding Truth opens with the story of a presentation I
was invited to give on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Afterward a congressional
chief of staff stood up and announced to everyone there, "I lost my faith
at an Evangelical college." How did it happen? The staffer explained that
his professors taught the prevailing theories in their field, but those
theories are typically secular and sometimes explicitly anti-Christian. They
did little or nothing to offer an informed biblical counter-interpretation. The
young man even met with his professor privately, asking, "How do you
relate your theological convictions to what you teach in the classroom?"
Not one could give an answer.
A 2007 survey of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and
Universities found that only about half the faculty said they could give a
biblical perspective on the field they teach.
A unique feature of Finding Truth is that it
offers a strategy that can be applied in every field, every profession — and in
ordinary life too. One of my students wrote, "The method of critique you
taught in this book has been incredibly helpful to me, not just in my other
classes but also in my life, reading books and watching movies.
CP: Sometimes in our culture
people grow up thinking they are Christian just because their parents are
Christian and they live in a community of mostly Christians. At Southern
Evangelical Seminary's National Apologetics Conference in January, Josh
McDowell said Christian parents can help their children develop
their own convictions by not answering their questions, but responding to questions
with more questions. What do you think of this suggestion?
Pearcey: Most adults do need to
learn to ask more questions and listen more. But that should not become a way
to avoid doing the careful work of finding answers. When I went to L'Abri as an
agnostic, I was impressed by the way the staff used my questions to introduce
me to the wider world of ideas. It was exhilarating to discover that
Christianity is not limited to a privatized "religious" sphere — that
it actually gives superior answers to the fundamental questions that everyone
faces.
Finding Truth cites several
secular thinkers who admit that Christianity offers answers precisely where
their own worldview fails. The late philosopher Richard Rorty was revered as
the "philosopher of democracy," yet he admitted that his own
worldview did not give a basis for democracy. He was a committed atheist and
Darwinist, yet in the Darwinian struggle for existence, the strong prevail
while the weak are left behind. So, clearly, evolution is not the source of
universal human rights. Instead, Rorty acknowledged, that concept came from the
Christian claim "that human beings are made in the image of God." So
he simply borrowed the concept of universal rights from Christianity. He dubbed
himself a "free-loading" atheist.
No wonder Paul, living in the midst of the powerful Roman
empire, proclaimed that he was "not ashamed" of the gospel (Rom. 1:16). Christianity is so appealing and so attractive that
adherents of other worldviews keep free-loading the parts they like best.
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