The Areopagus Revisited

AMONG Adventists there seems to be considerable antipathy for Mars' Hill and the approach to witness it has come to represent. This feeling apparently carries over to our attitude regarding Christian apologetics (the logical defense of the faith in the face of secular philosophical debunking). Many view this kind of apologetics as unnecessary; it's not the simple gospel. . .

-an instructor in the department of psychology on the La Sierra Campus of Loma Linda University.

AMONG Adventists there seems to be considerable antipathy for Mars' Hill and the approach to witness it has come to represent. This feeling apparently carries over to our attitude regarding Christian apologetics (the logical defense of the faith in the face of secular philosophical debunking). Many view this kind of apologetics as unnecessary; it's not the simple gospel.

I remember a college professor dogmatically stating that nothing was accomplished at Areopagus. He'd forgotten that Dionysius, Damaris, and a few others were converted, however important, but remembered that Paul was later "Not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified," leaving the polemics aside.

In Paul's age this was probably the most effective method for proliferating the Good News. It was news in A.D. 70, hot from the quill. But in the 1970s, in the Western world, in our secondary schools, colleges, and universities, everyone knows who Jesus Christ is.

Our great challenge, then, is to present Jesus Christ as Creator-God, correcting the reigning academic misapprehension: Christ as Man-teacher.

We need to not only develop an essential understanding of who Jesus Christ was and is but we must also demonstrate that the profundity of Christianity exceeds infinitely that of any rationalistic system of beliefs. Doing so re quires a basic understanding of things philosophical and theological.

Those who are academicians should particularly feel, and act on, the responsibility to be Christian apologists to their respective fields. Who besides the behavioral scientist, who also under stands fundamental Christian theology, can effectively answer spurious views on the nature of man advanced and acted upon by secular psychology? Who other than a Christian who understands the biological sciences can point to the other side of the evidence cited by, say, evolutionary paleontologists? And so on, in geology, anthropology, physics, philosophy, and even, or perhaps especially, theology.

We need way-stations with open juice stands and nourishing whole-wheat sandwiches avail able so that when the travelers stumble in, low on faith, we'll be there ready. Logic soup and evidence crackers should be an essential part of the menu. We can't offer proof. Nevertheless, no one is asked to believe blindly without evidence.

We need also to re-examine our approach to the sciences listed above. The book sections of our college and university campuses, pharmacies, and mercantiles, market Froom, Freud, Ericksen, Harriss, Bach, Berne, Rand, often to the exclusion of Tolkien, Carnell, Shaeffer, Williams, Chesterton, Guiness, Berger, and Lewis.

The first group has little in common, philosophically, with the second group who propound God's creation, sacrifice, and resulting eschatological hope. But few seem to recognize the specious philosophical presuppositions of the first group, or care. Particularly it is the common absence of group two that disturbs, not the presence of group one who, we must grudgingly admit, do have their practical merit and insights.

How many SDAs would not be surprised to realize that the play wright Robert Bolt, who wrote the script for the movie we show in our churches and schools, Man for All Seasons, feels the need in the preface to the play to "perhaps apologize for . . . the appropriation of ... a Christian saint" and confesses, "I am not . . . even in the meaningful sense of the word a Christian." Rather, Bolt believes "our thinkers, artists . . . our men of science should labor to get for us a sense of self-hood without resort to magic." [Religion?]

We need to understand how a man can write a play so filled with Christian insight and still choose Camus over Christ. We need to be wise as serpents in our witness. For witnessing is our only finally important industry.

There are many Thomases among us who need a bit of evidence to shore up a flagging faith. And we are remiss if we do not, like Christ, appear to Thomas with the evidence.

How can we fail to present what light we can acquire through the use of God-provided reason?

Athens and Jerusalem must understand one another for Athen's sake.


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-an instructor in the department of psychology on the La Sierra Campus of Loma Linda University.

March 1975

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