21 Lessons for the 21st Century: Lesson 3

C.S.Lewis & Francis Schaeffer: Lessons ... from the Most Influential Apologists of Our Time | 1998 | Scott R. Burson & Jerry L. Walls

[logos]

3. The big questions of life

For every seeker who came to L'Abri in a state of focused inquiry, Schaeffer realized there were countless others indifferent toward the big questions of life. For those people, it is not merely a matter of providing honest answers to honest questions, but rather it is helping them see why they ought to care about ultimate issues at all. In a world of growing specialization, fragmentation and skepticism, Schaeffer recognized that people were becoming increasingly proficient at diverting themselves from the big questions of life: "People are playing many, many games instead of thinking the big questions. Their game can be knocking one tenth of one second off a downhill run on the Swiss Alps. It also can show up in a highly disciplined science where one focuses on a very small area of reality and then never thinks of the big question."

Though the art of diversion is an age-old craft, it is easy to understand its proliferation in a day of widespread relativism. This is the logical outcome for a world that has lost its faith in ever achieving a rationally discerned unified body of knowledge and meaning. If we are incapable of discerning any objective verities in life, then why engage the traditional big questions? Is it not more sensible to eat, drink and be merry, or to focus on more manageable subject matter during our brief time here on this planet?

Given the assumption of epistemological relativism, this does seem sensible, but only if we arrive at this view by honestly grappling with the big questions of life, for how else can we have any intellectual assurance that relativism is the ultimate context? Though some surely have embraced relativism after honestly engaging the big questions, Schaeffer and Lewis recognized that most people in our society simply have been carried along by the cultural consensus. These are the people whom our apologists often attempted to reach, and we must do the same. We must show those who have carelessly embraced a set of assumptions that there is too much at stake in life to buy into any worldview, including Christianity, without adequate reflection. Our perception of the ultimate context frames everything we care about, from downhill skiing to scientific minutia. On that basis, nothing should be more important than engaging the big questions of life.

[logos]

NEXT: A unified body of knowledge and meaning

[logos]

The next installment.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for this installment!

I certainly agree that many (if not most) people become very compartmentalized. No doubt the pace and complexity of modern life works against quiet moments for reflection and meditation.

However, I also believe that these same oh-so-busy people have a tendency to trust others to tend to the deep questions and let them know if there is a need for them to know something. Thus, even though they were mostly complacent back when abortion was made the law by Supreme Court fiat - had they known, they might have actually rebelled and insisted that the legislators take it up and express the will of the people - as they are doing now in the face of homosexual marriage, etc.

And those are two easy-to-understand moral issues - the really deep questions remain. Some of my favorites:

What is reality?
What is life?
Why am I?
Why is good and evil?
Why does the universe exist this way?
Why does it exist at all?

The difficulty, IMHO, is getting their attention. Perhaps this is why more people make a profession of faith while they are still young and haven't become bogged down by the overwhelming pace of modern life?

At any rate, I believe teenagers and young adults still in school are particularly ripe for the deep questions. They are already confused - not quite a child, not quite an adult - not quite caught up in the vortex of daily life.

[betty boop]

Though the art of diversion is an age-old craft, it is easy to understand its proliferation in a day of widespread relativism. This is the logical outcome for a world that has lost its faith in ever achieving a rationally discerned unified body of knowledge and meaning.

The curse of our age, logos.

Thank you for posting this excellent selection!!

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed, it is the curse of our age! Thank you for your post!!!

[logos]

I have found that my evangelistic efforts have much better results when I wait for "them" to ask me questions than when I break in to their lives "out of the blue", so to speak. Further, that non-believers ask questions far more often based on one's actions than on one's words.

See you ladies in church!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your insight and wisdom on such witnessing!

I find it particularly curious that non-believer's are more interested in actions than words. I wonder if this is a reflection of the "microscope to telescope" worldview...

[suzyjaruki]

I also believe that these same oh-so-busy people have a tendency to trust others to tend to the deep questions and let them know if there is a need for them to know something.

Does this tendency come from having been taught "what" to think rather than "how" to think?

the really deep questions remain. Some of my favorites:

How about, "Who is God?" and "What does He want from me?"

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Does this tendency come from having been taught "what" to think rather than "how" to think?

Indeed, that could very well be the reason.

I also very much like your sample questions!!!

[logos]

I think our current culture has taught people, by default perhaps, that words are whatever you want them to mean at any given time, while actions are "real". If I'm right, that means that those who silently witness Christ (for want of a better phrase) proclaim louder than those who "preach". I don't know, just thinking out loud.

[Alamo-Girl]

Your analysis sounds reasonable to me, logos! Thanks for the insight.

[suzyjaruki]

Your post reminded me of what Mark Helprin, of the Claremont Institute, wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

"The reflexive lie cannot overcome stubborn scrutiny. Anyone can tell a lie or two and get away with it, and a president, because he is chief of a vast apparatus and has more assistants than Humpty Dumpty, can tell a hundred lies. Perhaps he can tell so many lies that he himself is no longer [even] able to distinguish lies from truth. But he cannot tell an unending number of lies, a lie with every breath and thought. [When you do so] The enemy against which you fight is the actuality of things and the way they fit together seamlessly to refute your version of events. The house against which you have staked your bets is the truth. [Though] your approach has been to suppress, obfuscate, and obstruct the natural flow of this truth…truth is a force. You may spend all your energy in attempting to stanch it, but like water spilling over a levee once bravely tended it will attack from a hundred thousand places at once."

[logos]

Ah, yes! The truth will out, as someone famous once said. :)

Even if it is only present silently, it is still present - and must be dealt with at some point.

[blue-duncan]

Henry Virkler wrote a book, "A Christian's Guide to Critical thinking" back in 1993. It is not a particularly hard read but it takes time and concentration. I tried to get some of the Christian High Schools I represent to use it to prepare their students for what they would be exposed to in college, even Christian colleges. No one was interested. I tried it with churches and pastors weren't interested. I even tried it with a classics class I was teaching for highly educated parents whose children were attending a classical school and they weren't interested in learning "critical thinking" so as to handle rightly the things of God.

As a saved people we, as a whole, would rather read "devotional" material that makes us feel good or bad, depending on the spiritual weather, or regurgitated sermons that someone has put into book form, or be amused and entertained by "christian fiction", not allegory like Bunyon's, but fiction, as if that was going to move us on to God or prepare us for spiritual warfare and the taring down of strongholds or bringing all imagination into captivity. As was debated just recently in the Van Til thread, we as a saved people, can't give a "reason" for our reasonable faith because we can't logically think through the tough questions and we can't cogently, and concisely explain our faith to a questioner.

We are too tired, too busy, too spoiled, and too comfortable to be properly prepared to hear the cry of the harvest or interpret the times for the "midnight cry". The "cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches" have disabled one of our God given characteristics, the ability to think God's thoughts. This is our condition with the benefit of regeneration. Imagine the problem the world has without the Divine Teacher to prod them along.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your testimony and insight!

We are too tired, too busy, too spoiled, and too comfortable to be properly prepared to hear the cry of the harvest or interpret the times for the "midnight cry".

Then let's repent, ask God for His guidance and get busy fixing it!

[RightWhale]

easy-to-understand moral issues

What is morality? Is it different from ethics? Dig.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your challenge!

What is morality? Is it different from ethics? Dig.

To my understanding, morality is good v. evil, right v. wrong, etc. - whereas ethics is the study of morality.

[RightWhale]

That is how it is taken often enough. But that is also not effective. Something Gurdjieff said is really important. He said that most men do not do. What did he mean?

We should view morality as something entirely different from ethics. Morality is personal, individual. Ethics is for the group, the community, legal. Morality measures the individual power to do. Ethics concerns the power of exchange, an economic quantity still, related to the free market.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

We should view morality as something entirely different from ethics. Morality is personal, individual. Ethics is for the group, the community, legal. Morality measures the individual power to do.

I agree with you that ethics ought to be interpreted as for the group, community, legal.

Morality, OTOH, I see as universal, which is to say defined by God. IOW, good and evil are universals which are manifest in the individual by his thoughts, words and deeds.

[RightWhale]

Morality as a metaphysical quantity is abstract. That's fine, we can think about abstract things. But, morality is also a practical matter of concern to emanations from the whole, that is, to individuals. How does an individual have the power to do, to act? The primitive forest people do not have the power to act, to do, at anything like the level that civilized men do. Morality is the difference, the power itself. Truth and right comprise the power and the result is morality.

All three of these terms--truth, power, and right--act together and each is irreducible to the other.

Truth is the oldest concept. Right is much more modern. Power is totally modern. All three together form a triangle that corresponds to the old Roman concept of morality, the Romans being practical above all. Rome is back, it was never really gone, just put in mothballs for a few years.

Along the same lines, ethics was a Greek idea and related to the community. Morality and ethics didn't divide their meanings until Rome, and they are definitely divided now. Now, here is the thing: we appear to be constructing some kind of international society, like it or not. We ought to divide either ethics or morality or both to create a new metaphysical entity of efficacy in the global environment so that we can think about the new global entity.