ABHE Opening Session – J.P. Moreland

The theme of the conference is “Engaging Culture Through Biblical Thinking.”

J.P. Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Moreland). He debates on a wide range of philosophical and social issues. He has spoken on over 200 college campuses, served with Campus Crusade for Christ. He has 4 degrees in three areas: philosophy, theology, and chemistry.

Following are my notes from his message:

A few years ago in the Seattle airport, he picked up the newspaper and read on the editorial page a page-long editorial which was syndicated to newspapers around the country. The title was “A divided nation.” “We now live in the most divided period in the history of America since the civil war.” The core issue that the author said divides us into two groups (which Moreland disagrees with) is not fundamentally political, racial, or socio-economic. The fundamental division is over worldview. (Joel Kitkin, “A Nation Divided,” The Seattle Times section C, May 9, 2004, p. C1.)

On one side are secularists who believe that God, whoever she is, is not knowable and probably doesn’t even exist. Morality is a social construction and the result of evolution. There is no right way to do family and marriage can be defined however you like.

On the other side are ethical monotheists who see a supreme being as the source of morality and our ethical obligation.

The leading proponents of the secular side are the entertainment industry, the news media, and the universities.

The leading proponents of the ethical monotheists are evangelical churches and their institutions.

The odds are stacked against us if that is true. To think we have any chance at all to fight against Harvard/Stanford, ABC/NBC, and Hollywood/Madison avenue would seem very discouraging. These people are leading us into a secularized society day by day.

It’s not bad enough that we are considered ignorant to believe in these things. What is new is the idea that we are bigoted because of our belief. For the first time in the history of the church, the religion of Jesus is considered to be immoral. To follow the teachings of the New Testament is to embrace an immoral view of the world that is intolerant, bigoted, and racist. What we are fighting is a situation where we are considered both ignorant, immoral, and intolerant.

“Here is how their ignorant bigotry works. They put the fear of God in you if you don’t believe the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. You have to abdicate all critical thinking. . . They make sure you understand that the devil resides in the toils and snares of complex thought so it’s better not to think at all.”

Robert Reich wrote, “The greatest conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists. Those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance to a higher authority. Between those who believe that allegiance is to life in this world and those whose allegiance is beyond the grave. Terrorism will disrupt our life, but religious believers is the greatest danger we face.”

We now live in the most secular period of American history. What is the core of a secular culture? A view of the nature and limits of knowledge.

What is the view of the nature of knowledge? That knowledge can only be gained through the five senses and the hard sciences. Knowledge is limited to only what science can tell us. No other field gives knowledge, just belief and experience. Therefore, no knowledge can come from religion, ethics, and politics. Only personal beliefs.

In an interview on Dateline NBC, Rick Warren said that changing the definition of marriage is a bad idea. The interviewer said, “What if science discovers homosexuality is something we aren’t responsible for?” A good response would have been that since ethics and religion teach that we are responsible for homosexual activity, science will never teach us that.” Science is not a source of truth, but knowledge of truth. The Christian religion is a source of knowledge and faith, the choice to believe something in the absence of any evidence (a modern definition of “faith”).

Science wears the trousers in our culture. Religion and theology are matters of personal belief and blind faith. Time Magazine had a story about how the universe will end, that it will run out of all of its energy. Religion and philosophy amount to nothing but idle speculation. The idea is that if you can prove something in the hard sciences it will pass as objective fact and true knowledge. Outside of that, then we are only trafficking in private feelings, not factual knowledge about reality.

Within the top 4 or 5 things we can do for students is to treat the Bible as a source of knowledge, not just a source of truth. It is a source of knowledge of truth, not just truth. The mindlessness of evangelical Christianity is a crisis. It will no longer be adequate for people to have a set of private beliefs to overcome the secularism of our culture. They need to know what they believe and why they believe it.

We don’t simply increase the intensity level in this area. Advice to Bible colleges: The most important thing you can do is have a professional philosopher on your campus. We got intimidated by philosophy in the forties and fifties and now we haven’t well integrated the study of Scripture with philosophy. Since the eighties, there has been a return to Christianity in the field of philosophy, a revival in the field. The top philosophers are evangelical Christians. These are the people who can engage the culture and help our students develop a biblical worldview.

We don’t only care about the life of the mind because of the urgency of the hour, but because it flows from the nature of our religion. We are people who celebrate the life of the mind. There are a couple of texts that illustrate this.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 is one of the most important texts concerning spiritual warfare.
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”

What are the fortresses? It is a theory, idea, or speculation. These are “ideational structures,” a pattern of thought and feeling that hang together in some way. We are in a culture with a set of ideas that it is our job to destroy. The devil can’t do much with the power of God, but he can attack the knowledge of God. That is where the battle is being waged. The idea that one can actually know things about God is considered ludicrous in our culture, even among some Christians. They take it we can believe them, but not know them.

It is our job in spiritual warfare to destroy speculations, theories, and ideas that are raised up against the knowledge of God. There are “inhouse” issues with the faith and “outhouse” issues. However much time we spend on inhouse issues, make sure we don’t ignore the external issues that come at us from the culture in which we live. What we have to do is come up with a hit list in our culture that we want to take them out one by one. Examples:
1. The idea that I can only know what I experience.
2. The idea that reality is physical only.
3. The idea that I am my brain and central nervous system. It shocks people to be taught that God doesn’t have a brain. They wonder, “how can God think if he doesn’t have a brain?” But God has a mind, not a brain (physical).
4. The idea that animals and bodies don’t have souls. The soul is what animates animals and humans.

In the seminars where he speaks, he doesn’t want to integrate faith and learning, because those are not two separate areas. Sit down in the area that you are teaching and find a way to resolve those tension points with students before the semester is complete. That is fighting spiritual warfare in the act of teaching. The Christian school is a “war college” that is training soldiers for warfare in the realm of ideas and thought.

This involves the study of biblical teaching, art, literature, history, and other areas.

Colossians 1:19 – Jesus is the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The word pleroma was a pre-Christian gnostic term that reflected the assumption that matter was evil and God couldn’t take on the form of matter. They ranked angels from high to low spiritual, who would communicate down to those of a lower spiritual nature. This ontological mediation between God and the world was called the “fulness” or pleroma.

So Paul says that there is a mediator between God and the world, but it isn’t a series of angels. It is Jesus Christ himself. In order for Paul to make that statement, he had to know pre-Christian gnosticism so he could understand their system of thought and address it. We need to always keep in mind that our faculty are soldiers training other soldiers in the war of ideas. How are people controlled? The best way is to control how they think and feel. When a system of ideas causes people to think and feel certain things (like the word “tolerance” does), then you have controlled them. Tolerance has been associated with certain feelings so that when the word is heard, it brings up positive ideas. We Christians need to be able to defuse the ideological structure associated with it.

Moreland’s argument: Tolerance is immoral because it silences the protest of evil. Thus the principle of tolerance is morally hideous. In 50 words, that whole idea can be addressed. Can our students do that? Are we training them to have these answers to the questions that our world is asking and needing to have answered?

If you go to Duke and major in literature, the literature faculty can’t agree on what a good piece of literature is. The idea that one piece of literature is better than another is racist or prejudice. So the curriculum is fractured. We do it better by integrating literature. We can have a better educational product than they have, because we can do things better than they do. They don’t live in a uni-versity, they live in a plural-versity. Not only does literature have nothing to do with science or math, but there isn’t even an integrated approach to literature. We are trying to unify every thought around Christian thought at the core. What we have is superior to what they offer.

This job of engaging in spiritual warfare is not only at the core of what we do when we teach, but provides us the opportunity to increase the quality of Christian education while the quality of secular education is descending.

Most people believe that Jesus is a sixties kind of hippy dude who dropped one-liners on people who didn’t understand what he was talking about. The idea is that Jesus was a friend to common, ordinary, simple people. That is true, but not the whole truth. He was also the smartest man who ever lived and if he came back today would be very comfortable giving a lecture to the humanities faculty at UC-Berkeley. We have lost the view of Jesus Christ as an intellectual. He was not only that. He was a common person with intellectual capacity. He could go toe to toe with the smartest person of his day.

Matthew 22 is an illustration of how he got in the middle of the intellectual debates of Judaism. They were trying to show that he was stupid, but he demonstrated his ability to summarize knowledge and interact with them. His intellectual ability to summarize 39 books of the OT in 2 sentences is amazing. Included in that is loving God with the mind. That is part of our obligation, not all of it, but an important part.

They gave him a reductio ad absurdum argument, in which “this” is assumed true for the sake of argument. “This” is absurd. Therefore, your position is wrong. Either you believe in adultery or polygamy, if you believe in eternal life. That is their argument. Jesus was able to distinguish the central part of their argument. He found that they had a wrong assumption: there is no marriage in heaven. Their argument was wrong if there is no marriage in heaven. Then he has a question for them: how can God be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob if they are dead? Since it said, “I am” it meant God continued to be their God and they continued to be in existence.

The point is that we need more young people to see the life of scholarship as a calling from God. They need to go into journalism, philosophy, chemistry as Christians. We want them to be Christians who happen to be journalists, not journalists who happen to be Christians. Part of encouraging them in that calling is to remind them that Jesus was the greatest intellectual giant the world has ever seen. His thoughts shaped the world for 2,000 years and have led to some of the greatest scientific discoveries.

We need to insist upon integrative worldview thinking and that Jesus was skilled in dealing with the intellectual leaders of his day.

Marilyn Vos Savant was asked this: I am an adult who likes the religion of my parents, and I refuse to consider the religions of my friends. What do you think of a person who does that? She said, “You are smarter than your friends. Religions can’t be proven true intellectually. They come from the heart, not the mind. In my idea, you have behaved badly.”

If we let our culture believe that areas outside of science can’t provide knowledge, we will be marginalized in a culture that becomes more secular every day.