Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Christianity: Facts-Evidences-Reasons

CLICK HERE for more Information
We are in the final throes of proofing our up-coming book, which we have retitled, yet again to more closely match the content—CHRISTIANITY: FACTS-EVIDENCES-REASONS — 33 college level lectures by ancient language scholar Dr. Stan Walters from Yale, Princeton and Oxford. 

The more we read these lectures, the more convinced we are, and excited we become about the exemplary material it contains for Christians and Christian apologists. 

So, we're going to tease you with a few passages and quotes.

From Lecture No. 1: Goals of the Course
One of the things that gets omitted even in the best public high school programs is the development of a sophisticated understanding of religion. There are good and sufficient reasons for it. But this means that even though you may arrive at college with something like an adult understanding of many facets of life’s experiences, most of us come to college with what is basically a grade school or a junior high school or a Sunday school understanding of the Christian faith. This has a lot of disadvantages, from my point of view. For one thing, all the time that you are learning new concepts, new ideas in matters of science, history, literature, and language, you are not learning anything new in the matter of religion. Everybody knows that grade school science has to give way to a high school understanding, and, in turn, high school understandings, say, in science, have to give way to college-level understandings. 
Wouldn’t this also be true of our understanding of the Christian faith? It seems to me a kind of demoralizing thing when a person is learning new and perhaps exciting ways of looking at everything except religion—and religion he keeps on looking at in the same old Sunday school way. Now that’s nothing against Sunday school. It’s nothing against grade-school understanding. That’s fine for grade-school people. When you become a college person, you want to develop a college-level understanding of the Christian faith.  
Evidence Based 
This is one of the reasons that I try to center the class on evidences rather than on dogmatic affirmations. What you can’t explain to a child you may be able to explain to a college student. I will talk to you differently than I talk to my boy. I would like to explain some things to him and go in deeper than I do, but I know that he can’t follow those things, and he has to take my word for a lot of things.  
Well, part of developing an adult-level understanding of the Christian faith will involve us, then, in the consideration of the evidences for the plausibility of the Christian faith. And this, I hope, will help your religious thinking and, your theological thinking, keep pace with the development of your scientific and other thinking. 












No comments:

Post a Comment