Courage under fire

Jun 1, 2017 by Andrew Symes

by Joe Boot, Ezra Institute.

[…] How is it that Christians have been caught so off-guard and flat-footed in our revolutionary times? There are many things that could be said about this question, but one important answer is that, in general, Christian believers lacked vigilance and neglected the development and defense of a consistently scriptural vision of reality in the wake of our remarkable, historic success in evangelizing and shaping Western cultural life.

In other words, we too readily assumed that broadly Christian norms would hold; that largely Christian categories of life and thought, established by centuries of tradition, would remain the religious presuppositions of the people; that a robustly developed scriptural philosophy and cultural theology were unnecessary because Christian assumptions were now simply ‘common sense’ assumptions; that the apologetic task was largely done and the sacrifices of the past no longer necessary. Biblical laws were really ‘natural laws’ – surely agreed upon by all ‘civilized’ people – and the Christian view of life and truth, liberty and justice was in fact an essentially ‘neutral’ perspective received by every ‘rational’ state in terms of God’s common grace or a ‘natural theology.’

In short, we need not insist on being distinctly Christian or explicitly directed by biblical revelation as a culture, because people already accept broadly Christian ideas.

Read here

Recovering a more complex story of the Christian West, by Matthew J Franck, The Public Discourse

The birth and near death of Christian culture, by Gavin Ashenden

Relativism and totalitarianism, by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch