Redeeming The Mind!

We can observe elsewhere that many Christians around the globe have been putting greater emphasis on spirituality and as well as the subjective aspect of Christianity, they even went on to the extent of losing sight to the objective flavor of their tenets. As it is true, Many Christians in this age, are virtually quite skeptical with intellectual ideas, as if reducing Christianity merely to subjective experience. As a result, they are providing acquiesce largely to the cutting edge of secularism, that is, Christianity and its truths are one thing, while Scientific truths are another.

Most professors and instructors of renowned Universities particularly in America, are admonishing their students, whenever they appeal to their religious beliefs, to better subsume their truth-claims under the rubric of “personal reservation”. That is, accordingly, religious truths are no less than “private beliefs”; hence, they cannot be brought into the public square.

Scientific truths, on the other hand, are said to be regarded as “public truths”, that is to say, whatever truth claim it makes, they are scientifically reliable and thus worthy to be embraced as “true knowledge”. With this in mind, they want us to believe that true knowledge limits only to empirical knowledge.

This is exactly the subtle skirmish that I observed that continues to choke Christianity to become powerless and indelibly dormant over the century. This is a battle against secularism and religion. Both of these two, though they somewhat have similar claims, they nevertheless have tremendous opposing claims. In fact, one of the leading apologist, J.P. Moreland has therefore observed this crisis,

“The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual struggle going on in the universities and scholarly journals and professional societies.”
This problem has been aggravated with the emergence of Postmodernism whose divine penchant is “relativism”. Relativism strives to reconcile these opposing truth claims, without adjustment and conformity to one’s standard. Relativism considers these opposing claims as both “truths”. Furthermore, this mainstream sort of ideology espouses the idea that there is no “objective truth”, except the objective fact that everything is subjective truth. In other words, what is contradictory to a certain truth, can also be called truth in other places. This drastically entails, that everything is truth, even if two concepts are contradictory. This is an intellectual anomaly or a lethal virus that crept into the hub of universities. And what menacing threat could be derived with this problem?

J.P. Moreland, has rightly observed that, “It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our teachers, our business executives, our lawyers, our artists, will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture.”

The Christian worldview was dethroned and stripped with its own respect in the public square! But for what reasons? This is due to their repellent attitude towards intellectualism! Folks, Christianity as a whole, has become oblivious that we should honor the Lord not only by our hearts, but also with our MINDS. We have a very huge responsibility to regain back that which was taken from us– THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW.

– Jezreel Madsa

References:

J.P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview, [An Invitation to Christian Philosophy] p.17-18

Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity