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Has anyone noticed that the drop deadline for the raising of the debt ceiling coincides with the beginning of Ramadan (depending on the moon)? An artificial imposed deadline? Perhaps not...

BIRMINGHAM -- The 217th General Assembly voted Tuesday afternoon to declare that ordaining bodies in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have the leeway not to comply with the constitutional prohibition against ordaining practicing homosexuals and adulterers. By a vote of 298-221, with one abstention, the commissioners of the national governing body approved an Authoritative Interpretation that included recommendation 5 by the Theological Task Force on Peace, Purity and Unity. That recommendation was the major dividing issue in the task force report. It provides guidance to candidates for ordination on how they may qualify for selection and installation as deacons, elders and...

21. The final reality Love is the final apologetic. Schaeffer made it utterly clear that this kind of love is of a distinctly Christian variety. It is not a mere "humanistic, romantic oneness among men in general". Rather, it is the same kind of love that Jesus showed his followers. For Christians this is nothing less that the same kind of love demonstrated by the Son of God incarnate. But there is more. The love Christians are to demonstrate and exemplify is ultimately the same kind of love that the Father had for his Son from all eternity. This love...

20. The final apologetic While Schaeffer's apologetic arguments and cultural commentary have elicited a wide variety of responses throughout evangelicalism, there is one feature of his ministry that has evoked nearly unanimous favor, namely, his captivating emphasis on community. Even Jack Rogers, one of Schaeffer's stiffest critics, has noted that he finds the Schaeffers' "arguments exasperating, but the description of life at L'Abri exhilarating." The L'Abri community is in many ways a microcosm of what the church ought to be. In combines spiritual formation, intellectual stimulation, holy living, ethnic diversity, shared responsibility and mutual interdependency. It is a fertile context...

19. Flexibility and versatility John Frame, professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, believes Schaeffer's most important contribution was his ability to bring the full spectrum of reality into the apologetic arena. From biology to business, philosophy to physics, ecology to engineering, Schaeffer consistently displayed remarkable flexibility and versatility in his quest to meet a wide range of people on their own turf. Schaeffer firmly believed that apologetics must be a person-relative enterprise. Each individual is unique, so no single argument will work with everybody. This is undoubtedly a poignant word in light of our...

18. Pastoral apologetics Jerry Jenkins, former editor of Moody Magazine, tells of a time when he heard Francis Schaeffer speak in Chicago. After presenting his How Should We Then Live? material, Schaeffer fielded questions from an audience of more than four thousand. Jenkins recalls one gentleman who "began a question in a halting, nearly incoherent growl. Clearly, he suffered from cerebral palsy." Schaeffer pressed his eyes firmly shut and listened intently as the questioner offered a lengthy, garbled inquiry. Jenkins admits to grasping only about a quarter of the question, but Schaeffer discerned all but the final three words, which...

17. Virtue epistemology A few lessons back, we made the point that holiness is nonnegotiable for deep, settled satisfaction. Now we want to insist that holiness is equally essential for true epistemological insight and profound discernment. In other words, personal character has a direct bearing on one's ability to apprehend the nature of ultimate reality. As noted in chapter five, Lewis thought one reason God has not provided unambiguous revelation is because such a message might have engaged only the mind instead of "the whole man". God's primary purpose is not to satisfy our curiosity but rather to transform us...

16. Moral intuitions In The Problem of Pain Lewis noted that we face a dilemma when we try to relate God's goodness to our own notion of goodness. One the one hand, since God is wiser than we are, and his ways higher than our ways, what seems good to us may not really be good, and what seems evil may not really be evil. On the other hand, if this is true, then calling God good is meaningless, and if he is not good in our sense, then we shall obey him not on moral grounds but through fear....

15. Libertarian freedom One of the central themes of this book has been the insistence upon maintaining a self-consistent, comprehensive, livable vision of reality that does justice to the character of God and the significance of humans. This means there is no escaping the reality that apologetics is tightly connected to systematic theology. In fact, apologetic activity should emerge naturally from one's theological assumptions and commitments. That is why we have devoted so much space in this study to issues like soteriology, free will and determinism, divine election, and biblical inspiration. These are not peripheral matters that can be easily...

14. True moral guilt Closely connected to the need for a renewed appreciation for holiness is the need to recapture the biblical concept of sin. Schaeffer and Lewis both recognized the difficulty of awakening a sense of sin in a culture saturated with psychological techniques designed to explain away the notion of true moral guilt. Nevertheless, both apologists insisted that a cure cannot be administered until people recognize they are sick. Schaeffer made it clear that the unbeliever must realize "that we are talking about real guilt before God, and we are not offering him merely relief for his guilt-feelings....

Empowering the Will 13. The highway to happiness Holiness. In our age, this term conjures up a whole array of bizarre, outdated images. Thoughts of sour-faced, cannot-do-anything-fun legalists are surely what comes to mind for many. This is unfortunate. In a day when society is desperately searching for unshakable happiness and sturdy ethical moorings, the very thing understood least is that which is needed most - a renewed appreciation for the biblical concept of holiness. Even within Christian circles, holiness has all too often been construed as a relatively marginal matter or a doctrinal distinctive of certain sectarian denominations, as...

12. The hope of heaven In their fascinating book Heaven: A History, Colleen McDannel and Bernhard Lang observe that even among conservative Christians "eternal life has become an unknown place or a state of vague identity." A recent article in Time magazine made the same point, although it reported that 81 percent of those they polled professed to believe in heaven as a place "where people live forever with God after they die." While they still believe in heaven "their concept of exactly what it is has grown foggier, and they hear about it much less frequently from their pastors."...

11. The attraction of agape Perhaps no culture more than modern and postmodern Western culture has been more obsessed with love, and has celebrated it more, while gleaning less real satisfaction from it. Naturalism tells a story in which love is a relative newcomer on the stage of history, emerging late in the evolutionary scheme from impersonal and loveless sources. But according to Christian theism, love is the eternal and highest reality. Human loves are an image of Love himself and thus have a more secure grounding in ultimate reality. As Lewis argued so powerfully, a proper relation to Love...

10. Subversion by surprise Lewis and Schaeffer did some of their best evangelistic and apologetic work with those who were resistant to a direct presentation of the gospel. Years of compassionate conversation and an attentive ear enabled Schaeffer to "smoke out" incongruities with remarkable finesse. Lewis, likewise, was adept at catching his audience with its guard down. One way he went about doing this was by turning the tables on the skeptic. Consider how he responded to the charge that Christianity is discredited by its similarity to other religions. Instead of seeing similar motifs as a strike against the faith,...

9. The marriage of myth and fact The myth of progress has given way to the progress of myth. This is one way of describing the transition from the optimistic Age of Reason into our current Age of Imagination. As C. Stephen Evans has aptly noted, "there is considerable fascination with mythology in our culture." Evans suggests a number of reasons for the appeal of myth in our postmodern age. Chief among them is the belief that "myth is in many ways living water for a dry culture." As we suggested earlier, humans are created for a thorough integration of...

Today we enter a new topic: Enchanting the Emotions 8. Emotional redemption A central point of The Abolition of Man is that true virtue is impossible without trained emotions. Without the support of such trained emotions, we are powerless to do what is right in a consistent fashion, even if we know intellectually what we ought to do. The key to real character, then, is for the emotions to be trained so they follow the lead of the intellect. This requires that our heart, our "chest" as Lewis put it, must be shaped and schooled by the perception of objective...

7. Critical rationalism and cumulative case argumentation In chapter nine we suggested that Lewis and Schaeffer occasionally employed the principles of cumulative case argumentation, an attractive alternative to classical foundationalism. Now we want to propose further that this mode of reasoning and marshaling of arguments has considerable apologetic promise because it can respond to some of the central themes of postmodernism without falling into the relativism that is characteristic of postmodern epistemology. Postmodernism is difficult to define precisely, and its correct contours remain a matter of (perhaps interminable) controversy. This alone is a good reason for Christian apologists to exercise...

6. Cultural engagement It is surely significant that the two most influential spokesmen for orthodox, evangelical Christianity in the twentieth century were both apologists. Both spent much of their time and energy engaging ideas and challenging the prevailing wisdom of the age. Ironically, much of modern culture, including the church, is heavily pragmatic and has little patience with such issues as whether or not naturalism is a coherent worldview or whether it can adequately account for personality. The immediate pragmatic cash value of such discussions and distinctions is not always apparent. At first glance they may seem almost irrelevant to...

5. The historical texture of the Christian faith What would you say if you picked up the newspaper tomorrow morning and the lead headline screamed, "Bone of Jesus Found: Scholars Refute Resurrection"? Your first reaction might likely be grave skepticism and a quick glance through the body of the story to identify the names of these radical revisionists. But suppose upon reading the opening paragraph you discovered that the academicians who made this pronouncement are not of the Jesus Seminar variety but rather a battery of the most respected evangelical New Testament scholars in the world. The article indicates that...

4. A unified body of knowledge and meaning A leading motif in the Schaeffer corpus is the divided field of knowledge and meaning. It was Schaeffer's staunch conviction that the twentieth century ushered in an age of fragmentation. Reason and faith, intellect and imagination, matter and meaning all have been shoved into mutually exclusive compartments. In fact, a young C.S. Lewis serves as a prime example of this type of dichotomized existence: "The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. One the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and...