Spare the Rod? America's Parents Just Won't Get With the Science

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

Alan E. Kazdin is a frustrated man, and it's America's parents who are frustrating him. These parents are, of all things, prone to use an occasional spanking in disciplining their children. Dr. Kazdin's great frustration is that these parents insist on doing what seems right to them, and thus they are ignoring or rejecting the fact that "science" shows that spankings don't work.

Dr. Kazdin is John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University and director of the university's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. Writing at Slate.com, Kazdin argues that parents just don't get it -- "The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: 'What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?'" No kidding. Is the parent supposed to go review the scientific data before dealing with a disobedient child? Just how out of touch can the folks at Yale be?

Slate.com is one of the most interesting digital magazines yet to appear. It leans predictably leftward, but offers some of the brightest reportage to be found anywhere in today's journalism. Nevertheless, Kazdin's article, "Spare the Rod: Why You Shouldn't Hit Your Kids," reads more like a parody of an article than as a serious article in a serious magazine.

After acknowledging that parents do not pause to ask the science question before "whacking a misbehaving child," Kazdin concedes that most American parents admit to spanking and that most children and adolescents (85%) report having been spanked.

"Parents cite children's aggression and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them," Kazdin reports. But, he insists, science shows that spanking just doesn't work over time. Though spanking may produce an immediate change in the child's behavior, children are "endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn" and adapt to punishments faster "than parents can escalate it."

Of course, that same flexibility and ability to learn could well explain why spanking does work, but that would not fit Kazdin's line of argument, to say the least.

Professor Kazdin provides an indictment of spanking that includes the charge that parents generally can't stop themselves from "stepping up from a mild, generally harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one." He even suggests that spanking is addictive . . . like smoking cigarettes.

Here is some of the scientific research Professor Kazdin wants America's parents to take into account:

The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.

All of this is put forth without even a single footnote or citation. We are just to take Professor Kazdin's word for all this. He argues that "the science" shows this and shows that, but anyone who reads scientific reports knows that there is nothing so clearly defined as "the science" about just about anything. The "findings" Kazdin summarizes in the paragraph above appear to be matters of correlation anyway. When a report suggests that spanking (or anything else) is "associated with" a list of ills and bad outcomes, realize that "associated with" is a very thin argument. Non-spanking may be just as or even more "associated with" these same issues, under the right conditions and described by the right definitions.

Professor Kazdin laments the fact that "most of us pay, at best, selective attention to science." He understands that scientists "have not done a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal punishment." Parents believe that spanking works, at least to some useful extent, and they reject what are presented as arguments based in what "the science" has to say against it.

Kazdin is simply infatuated with "the science." What case can be made against spanking? "It can be argued from the science," he assures. Research "consistently shows" that spanking does not work over time.

Kazdin wants spanking to be outlawed. He reports that 91 nations have banned spanking in the schools and 23 have banned corporal punishment even in the home -- generally by criminalizing parents who spank.

He also offers this news bulletin sure to attract the ire of America's parents:

Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United Nations has set a target date of 2009 for a universal prohibition of violence against children that would include a ban on corporal punishment in the home.

Ah, so now parents are up against, not only "the science," but the United Nations as well. Kazdin does not call for any specific legislative provision that would ban spanking, but "we ought to be able to at least discuss it with each other like grownups." It is time to question "the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home." Thanks for the warning.

Professor Kazdin's confidence in "the science" just demonstrates that scientists often have short memories. In all too many cases, what is considered "the science" in one generation is laughed off in the next.

In her important book, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert traces the progression of conflicting advice offered by scientists to parents through the twentieth century. As she makes clear, these "experts" cannot even agree on the most basic issues. She lays out two opposite views of parenting that appear in the literature. The first argues that parents need to assert more authority; the second argues that parents should be more empathetic with their children. Popular theories based on what has been called "the science" swing on that pendulum. The "experts" almost never come back to admit they were wrong.

As Hulbert explains:

America's parenting experts, in short, have fared no better or worse than the rest of us in the quest for calm consistency in child-rearing technique and theory. The story of the popular advisors' search for clarity about children and for authority with mothers is marked by controversies, contradictions, and unintended consequences. Among the most ironic of these consequences has been to leave parents, teachers, policymakers, ministers, and the media -- to say nothing of the experts themselves -- convinced that expert counsel is precisely what it was not supposed to be: constantly shifting and conflicting, throwing both grown people and children here and there like balls.

We can safely assume that Professor Kazdin is genuinely concerned about America's children and their welfare, but he joins the ranks of those who would, like the proverbial desperate attorney, beg the jury to ignore what they can see with their own eyes. In this case, the jury represents the nation's parents -- and they are not buying this argument.

Christian parents have a special stake in this controversy, because the Bible speaks so directly to the use of corporal punishment and the necessity of disciplining disobedient children. Furthermore, Christian parents should feel a shiver go down the spine when the United Nations is invoked as the moral authority.

Professor Kazdin's article also reminds us of the limitations of science and the inadequacy of scientism as a worldview. There is no such authority as "the science," and the contradictory debris of now outdated scientific theories and "findings" should be sufficient and persuasive evidence of that fact.

I do agree with Professor Kazdin on this major point: "The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: 'What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?'"

Perhaps some smart child will keep Professor Kazdin's article at hand, to be pulled out the next time mom or dad decides to spank. Nice try kid, but I wouldn't count on that working, either.

In Intellectual Neutral

By William Lane Craig
ReasonableFaith.org

Passionate Conviction, pp. 2-16. Ed. Wm. L. Craig and P. Copan. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 2007. Used by permission.

A number of years ago, two books appeared that sent shock waves through the American educational community. The first of these, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by E.D. Hirsch, documented the fact that large numbers of American college students do not have the basic background knowledge to understand the front page of a newspaper or to act responsibly as a citizen. For example, a quarter of the students in a recent survey thought Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War. Two-thirds did not know when the Civil War occurred. One-third thought Columbus discovered the New World sometime after 1750. In a recent survey at California State University at Fullerton, over half the students could not identify Chaucer or Dante. Ninety percent did not know who Alexander Hamilton was, despite the fact that his picture is on every ten dollar bill.

These statistics would be funny if they weren't so alarming. What has happened to our schools that they should be producing such dreadfully ignorant people? Alan Bloom, who was an eminent educator at the University of Chicago and the author of the second book I referred to above, argued in his The Closing of the American Mind. that behind the current educational malaise lies the universal conviction of students that all truth is relative and, therefore, that truth is not worth pursuing. Bloom writes,

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about. . . . That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—a combination of disbelief and indignation: "Are you an absolutist?," the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as . . . "Do you really believe in witches?" This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. . . . The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.1

Since there is no absolute truth, since everything is relative, the purpose of an education is not to learn truth or master facts—rather it is merely to acquire a skill so that one can go out and obtain wealth, power, and fame. Truth has become irrelevant.

Now, of course, this sort of relativistic attitude toward truth is antithetical to the Christian worldview. For as Christians we believe that all truth is God's truth, that God has revealed to us the truth, both in His Word and in Him who said, "I am the Truth." The Christian, therefore, can never look on the truth with apathy or disdain. Rather, he cherishes and treasures the truth as a reflection of God Himself. Nor does his commitment to truth make the Christian intolerant, as Bloom's students erroneously inferred; on the contrary, the very concept of tolerance entails that one does not agree with that which one tolerates. The Christian is committed to both truth and tolerance, for he believes in Him who said not only, "I am the Truth," but also, "Love your enemies."

Now at the time that these books were released, I was teaching in the Religious Studies department at a Christian liberal arts college. So I began to wonder: how much have Christian students been infected with the attitude that Bloom describes? How would my own students fare on one of E.D. Hirsch's tests? Well, how would they? I thought. Why not give them such a quiz? So I did.

I drew up a brief, general knowledge quiz about famous people, places, and things and administered it to two classes of about fifty sophomores. What I found was that although they did better than the general student population, still there were sizable portions of the group who could not identify—even with a phrase—some important names and events. For example, forty-nine percent could not identify Leo Tolstoy, the author of perhaps the world's greatest novel, War and Peace. To my surprise, 16 percent did not know who Winston Churchill was. One student thought he was one of the founding Fathers of our nation! Another identified him as a great revival preacher of a few hundred years ago! Twenty-two percent did not know what Afghanistan is, and 22 percent could not identify Nicaragua. Twenty percent did not know where the Amazon River is. Imagine!

They fared even worse with things and events. I was amazed that a whopping 67 percent could not identify the Battle of the Bulge. Several identified it as a dieter's problem. Twenty-four percent did not know what the Special Theory of Relativity is (mind you, just to identify it—even as, say; "a theory of Einstein"—not to explain it). Forty-five percent couldn't identify Custer's Last Stand—it was variously classed as a battle in the Revolutionary War or as a battle in the Civil War. And I wasn't really surprised that 73 percent did not know what the expression "Manifest Destiny" referred to.

So it became clear to me that Christian students have not been able to rise above the dark undertow in our educational system at the primary and secondary levels. This level of ignorance presents a real crisis for Christian colleges and seminaries.

But then an even more terrible fear began to dawn on me as I contemplated these statistics. If Christian students are this ignorant of the general facts of history and geography, I thought, then the chances are that they, and Christians in general, are equally or even more ignorant of the facts of our own Christian heritage and doctrine. Our culture in general has sunk to the level of biblical and theological illiteracy. A great many, if not most, people cannot even name the four Gospels—in a recent survey one person identified them as Matthew, Mark, and Luther! In another survey, Joan of Arc was identified by some as Noah's wife! The suspicion arose in my mind that the evangelical church is probably also caught somewhere higher up in this same downward spiral.

But if we do not preserve the truth of our own Christian heritage and doctrine, who will learn it for us? Non-Christians? That hardly seems likely. If the Church does not treasure her own Christian truth, then it will be lost to her forever. So how, I wondered, would Christians fare on a quiz over general facts of Christian history and doctrine?

Well, how would they? I now invite you to get out a pen and paper and take the following quiz yourself. (Go on, it'll only take a minute!) The following are items I think any mature Christian in our society ought to be able to identify. Simply provide some identifying phrase that indicates that you know what the item is. For example, if I say, "John Wesley," you might write: "the founder of Methodism" or "an eighteenth-century English revivalist."

Quiz

1. Augustine
2. Council of Nicea
3. Trinity
4. Two natures united in one person
5. Pantheism
6. Thomas Aquinas
7. Reformation
8. Martin Luther
9. Substitutionary atonement
10. Enlightenment

How did you do? If you're typical of the audiences to whom I've given this quiz, probably not too well. If that is the case, you might be tempted to react to this quiz defensively: "Who needs to know all this stuff anyway? This junk isn't important. All that really counts is my walk with Christ and my sharing Him with others. Who cares about all this other trivia?"

I truly hope that will not be your reaction, for that will close you off to self-improvement. This little exercise will have been of no profit to you. You will have learned nothing from it.

But there's a second, more positive reaction. You may see, perhaps for the first time in your life, that here is a need in your life for you to become intellectually engaged as a Christian, and you may resolve to do something about it. This is a momentous decision. You will be taking a step which millions of American Christians need to take.

No one has issued a more forceful challenge to Christians to become intellectually engaged than did Charles Malik, former Lebanese ambassador to the United States, in his address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. Malik emphasized that as Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Our churches are filled with people who are spiritually born again, but who still think like non-Christians. Mark his words well:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy.2

Malik went on to say:

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes—and by then where will these universities be?3

What Malik clearly saw is the strategic position occupied by the university in shaping Western thought and culture. Indeed, the single most important institution shaping Western society is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our lawyers, our teachers, our scientists, our business executives, 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.

Why is this important? Simply because the gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the Gospel which a person who is secularized will not. For the secular person you may as well tell him to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ! Or, to give a more realistic illustration, it is like a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement approaching you on the street and inviting you to believe in Krishna. Such an invitation strikes us as bizarre, freakish, even amusing. But to a person on the streets of Delhi, such an invitation would, I assume, appear quite reasonable and cause for reflection. I fear that evangelicals appear almost as weird to persons on the streets of Bonn, Stockholm, or Toronto as do the devotees of Krishna.

It is part of the broader task of Christian scholarship to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the Gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. Therefore, the Church has a vital stake in raising up Christian scholars who will help to create a place at the university for Christian ideas. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked as irrational or obsolete, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed that viewpoint.

This is a war we cannot afford to lose. The great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen warned on the eve of the Fundamentalist Controversy that if the Church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism would become immeasurably more difficult in the next:

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.4

The root of the obstacle is to be found in the university, and it is there that it must be attacked. Unfortunately, Machen's warning went unheeded, and biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closets of Fundamentalism, from which it has only recently begun to re-emerge. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.

So what are evangelicals doing to win this war? Until recently, very little indeed. Malik asked pointedly,

Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas?
. . . For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.5

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Most prominent evangelical scholars tend to be very big fish in a very small pond. Our influence extends little beyond the evangelical subculture. We tend to publish exclusively with evangelical presses, and therefore our books are likely to go unread by non-evangelical scholars; and instead of participating in the standard professional societies, we are active instead in the evangelical professional societies. As a result, we effectively put our light under a bushel and have little leavening effect for the gospel in our professional fields. In turn, the intellectual drift of the culture at large continues to slide, unchecked, deeper into secularism.

We desperately need Christian scholars who can, as Malik said, compete with non-Christian thinkers in their fields of expertise on their own terms of scholarship. It can be done. There is, for example, a revolution going on right now in the field of philosophy, which, as Malik noted, is the most important domain for thought and intellect, since it is foundational to every other discipline at the university. Christian philosophers have been coming out of the closet and defending the truth of the Christian worldview with philosophically sophisticated arguments in the finest secular journals and professional societies. The face of American philosophy has been changed as a result.

Fifty years ago philosophers widely regarded talk about God as literally meaningless, as mere gibberish, but today no informed philosopher could take such a viewpoint. In fact, many of America's finest philosophers today are outspoken Christians. To give you some feel for the impact of this revolution, let me quote an article which appeared in the fall of 2001 in the journal Philo lamenting what the author called "the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s." The author, himself a prominent atheist philosopher, writes,

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism . . . began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.
. . . in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, "academically respectable" to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today. . . .
God is not "dead" in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.6

This is the testimony of a prominent atheist philosopher to the change that has taken place before his eyes in American philosophy. I think that he is probably exaggerating when he estimates that one-quarter to one-third of American philosophers are theists, but what his estimates do reveal is the perceived impact of Christian philosophers upon this field. Like Gideon's army, a committed minority of activists can have an impact far out of proportion to their numbers. The principal error that he makes is calling philosophy departments God's "last stronghold" at the university. On the contrary, philosophy departments are a beachhead, from which operations can be launched to impact other disciplines at the university for Christ.

The point is that the task of desecularization is not hopeless or impossible, nor need significant changes take as long to achieve as one might think. It is this sort of Christian scholarship which represents the best hope for the transformation of culture that Malik and Machen envisioned, and its true impact for the cause of Christ will only be felt in the next generation, as it filters down into popular culture.

So it can be done, if we are willing to put in the hard work. Machen observed that in his day "many would have the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents" instead of confusing students "with a lot of German names unknown outside the walls of the university." But to the contrary, Machen insisted, it is essential that Christian scholars be alert to the power of an idea before it has reached popular formulation. Scholarly procedure, he said,

is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.7

Like Malik, Machen also believed that "the chief obstacle to the Christian religion today lies in the sphere of the intellect"8 and that objections to Christianity must be attacked in that sphere. "The church is perishing to-day through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it."9

What is ironic about the mentality which says that our seminaries should produce pastors, not scholars, is that it is precisely our future pastors, not just our future scholars, who need to be intellectually engaged and to receive this scholarly training. Machen's article was originally given as a speech entitled "The Scientific Preparation of the Minister." A model for us here ought to be a man like John Wesley, a Spirit-filled revivalist and at the same time an Oxford-educated scholar.10 Wesley's vision of a pastor is remarkable: a gentleman, skilled in the Scriptures and conversant with history, philosophy, and the science of his day.

How do the pastors graduating from our seminaries compare to this model? Church historian and theologian David Wells has called our contemporary generation of pastors "the new disablers" because they have abandoned the traditional role of the pastor as a broker of truth to his congregation and replaced it with a new managerial model drawn from the professional world which emphasizes leadership abilities, marketing, and administration. As a result the Church has produced a generation of Christians for whom theology is irrelevant and whose lives outside the church do not differ practically from those of atheists. These new managerial pastors, complains Wells, "are failing the Church and even disabling it. They are leaving it vulnerable to all the seductions of modernity precisely because they have not provided the alternative, which is a view of life centered in God and his truth."11 We need to recover the traditional model which men like Wesley exemplified.

But finally, it is not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged if the Church is to make an impact in our culture. Christian laymen, too, must become intellectually engaged. Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. J. P. Moreland in his challenging book Love Your God with All Your Mind has called them "empty selves." An empty self is inordinately individualistic, infantile, and narcissistic. It is passive, sensate, busy and hurried, incapable of developing an interior life. In what is perhaps the most devastating passage in his book, Moreland asks us to envision a church filled with such people. He asks,

What would be the theological understanding, . . .the evangelistic courage, the. . . cultural penetration of such a church?… If the interior life does not really matter all that much, why spend the time . . .trying to develop an . . . intellectual, spiritually mature life? If someone is basically passive, he or she will just not make the effort to read, preferring instead to be entertained. If a person is sensate in orientation, music, magazines filled with pictures, and visual media in general will be more important than mere words on a page or abstract thoughts. If one is hurried and distracted, one will have little patience for theoretical knowledge and too short . . . an attention span to stay with an idea while it is being carefully developed. . .
And if someone is overly individualistic, infantile, and narcissistic, what will that person read, if he or she reads at all? . . .Christian self-help books that are filled with self-serving content, . . . slogans, simplistic moralizing, a lot of stories and pictures, and inadequate diagnosis of issues that place no demand on the reader. Books about Christian celebrities. . . . what will not be read are books that equip people to . . . develop a well-reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian religion, and fill their role in the broader kingdom of God . . . [Such] a church . . . will become . . . impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. In such a context, the church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, . . . the church will become her own grave digger; her means of short-term "success" will turn out to be the very thing that marginalizes her in the long run.12

What makes this description so devastating is that we don't have to imagine such a church; rather this IS an apt description of far too many American evangelical churches today.

Sometimes people try to justify their lack of intellectual engagement by asserting that they prefer having a "simple faith." But here I think we must distinguish between a childlike faith and a childish faith. A childlike faith is a whole-souled trust in God as one's loving Heavenly Father, and Jesus commends such a faith to us. But a childish faith is an immature, unreflective faith, and such a faith is not commended to us. On the contrary, Paul says, "Do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature" (1 Cor. 14.20 RSV). If a "simple" faith means an unreflective, ignorant faith, then we should want none of it. In my own life, I can testify that, after many years of study, my worship of God is deeper precisely because of, and not in spite of, my philosophical and theological studies. In every area I have intensely researched—creation, the resurrection, divine omniscience, divine eternity, divine aseity—my appreciation of God's truth and my awe of His personhood have become more profound. I am excited about future study because of the deeper appreciation I am sure it will bring me of God's personhood and work. Christian faith is not an apathetic faith, a brain-dead faith, but a living, inquiring faith. As Anselm put it, ours is a faith that seeks understanding.

Furthermore, the results of being in intellectual neutral extend far beyond one's own self. If Christian laymen do not become intellectually engaged, then we are in serious danger of losing our youth. In high school and college, Christian teenagers are intellectually assaulted by every manner of non-Christian philosophy conjoined with an overwhelming relativism. As I speak in churches around the country, I constantly meet parents whose children have lost their faith because there was no one in the church to answer their questions. In fact, George Barna estimates that 40% of the youth in our churches, once they leave for college, will never darken the door of a church again.

There can be no question that the church has dropped the ball in this area. But the structures are in place in the church for remedying this problem, if only we will make use of them. I am speaking, of course, of adult Sunday school programs. Why not begin to utilize Sunday school classes to offer laymen serious instruction in such subjects as Christian doctrine, church history, New Testament Greek, apologetics, and so forth? Think of the potential for change! Why not?

I believe that our culture can be changed. I am excited about the renaissance in Christian philosophy in my generation, which bodes well for the next. Whether God is calling you to become a Christian scholar on the front lines of intellectual battle, a Christian pastor to serve as a broker of truth to your congregation, or a Christian parent or layman who is always ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you, we have the awesome opportunity of being agents of cultural change in Christ's name. For the Church's sake, for your own sakes, for your children's sake, do not squander this opportunity! So if, up until now, you've just been coasting, idling in intellectual neutral, now is the time to get it in gear!

Answers to the Quiz

1. Church Father (354-430) and the author of The City of God who emphasized God's unmerited grace.The Roman Catholic monk (1483,1546) who started the Protestant Reformation and was the founder of Lutheranism.
2. The church council that in 325 officially ratified the doctrine of the equal deity of the Father and the Son as opposed to the view held by the Arian heretics.
3. The doctrine that in God there are three persons in one being.
4. The doctrine enunciated at the Council of Chalcedon (451) affirming the true deity and true humanity of Christ.
5. The view that the world and God are identical.
6. A medieval Catholic theologian (1225-1274) and the author of Summa Theologica, whose views have been determinative for traditional Roman Catholic theology.
7. The origin of Protestantism in the sixteenth century in the efforts of men such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli to reform the doctrine and practice of the Roman Catholic church; it emphasized justification by grace through faith alone and the exclusive authority of the Bible.
8. The Roman Catholic monk (1483-1546) who started the Protestant Reformation and was the founder of Lutheranism.
9. The doctrine that by His death on our behalf and in our place Christ reconciled us to God.
10. The intellectual revolt in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the authority of church and monarchy in the name of human autonomy; also called the Age of Reason.

Endnotes

1 Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 25-26.

2 Charles Malik, "The Other Side of Evangelism," Christianity Today, November 7, 1980, 40.

3 Ibid.

4 J. Gresham Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913): 7.

5 Malik, "Other Side of Evangelism," 40.

6 Quentin Smith, "The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism" Philo 4/2 (2001).

7 Machen, "Christianity and Culture," 6.

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Ibid., 13.

10 John Wesley, Works 6: 217-31.

11 David F. Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 253.

12 J. P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: Nav Press, 1997), 93-94.

God on Mammon: theology for the credit crunch

What faith says about finance: in Islam, Judaism and Christianity

By Bess Twiston Davies
Times Online

It's been a hell of a week for God and for Mammon. "The love of money is the root of all evil" Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York reminded City bankers on Wednesday, adding, rather presciently as it turned out, "We have all worshipped it. No one is guiltless".

Indeed, less than 24 hours after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had ripped into global capitalism, decrying the greed of "City robbers," it emerged that the investments controlled by the Church itself were involved in short selling – because its stock was lent to enable short selling to happen and because it owned shares in Man Group, a large hedge fund manager. As a morality tale, it was almost worthy of Chaucer’s Pardoner. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas: the Root of all Evil is Money he preaches in The Canterbury Tales, making, in the process, a tidy profit.

Yet for all the justified charges of hypocrisy, this weeks’ battles between Church and City have, if little else, turned the spotlight on God and the question of what, if anything, the world’s main faiths, Islam, Judaism and Christianity have to say about finance, debt and spirituality.

The answer is perhaps most obvious in Islam – specific verses of the Qur’an expressly forbid the charging or paying of interest says Sultan Choudhury, Commercial Director of the Islamic Bank of Britain. “Usury is a very big sin in Islam, one verse in the Qu'ran forbids it and another says that God will declare war on those who undertake it,” he explains.

Islamic banking services are designed to reflect this, he says: “The ban on usury means you cannot make money from money and for legal (as per Shariah) trading a real transaction has to take place."

In practice, what this means is that "a shopkeeper, for instance, is allowed to buy rice and to sell it on to the customer at a profit because a physical trading activity has taken place. What it does not allow is for Adam to give Mary £100 and demand £101 back the following week without a real asset or service being exchanged.”

Furthermore: “Islam also imposes ethical restrictions on what you trade and how you trade. There are detailed rules about transactions. Long before consumer legislation came, Islam said that there must be no deception involved in a transaction, that a transaction must be transparent for the consumer," Choudhury explains. He adds "Another very strong principle is that a transaction has to be linked to a real asset.

" When you look at the credit crunch, you’ve got banks buying paper, which may represent land in Florida, or housing but they are not sure of the underlying real asset. There is a divorce between the monetary system and the real system. By and large, speculation and hedge funds are prohibited in Islam, as is short-selling. You may only sell what you possess," explains Choudhury, drawing a parallel with the recent crisis: "In this case, people are selling things which they have never owned, which is what has been happening with speculators in HBOS. The problems we’ve had are unlikely to happen within an Islamic banking system.”

Usury was once strictly condemned by the Christian Church too: laws enforced during the Lateran Councils of 1215 specified that no one who lent money could enjoy a Christian burial, a ban which virtually forced all money lending to be executed by Jews, who, as a result, have been frequently and unfairly stigmatised for usury, with some websites today even blaming them for the current financial crisis. By the 16th century, despite issuing three papal bulls against usury between 1569 and 1586, the papacy relented, lifting an outright ban on the practice. However, greed, and the charging of exorbitant interest, are still prohibited, says Father Peter Harris, Roman Catholic Chaplain to Canary Wharf. He says Christ used the forgiveness of debt as a frequent metaphor for the forgiveness of sin, explaining: "The essential economy of the Church is debt-free as Jesus has paid the debt. We are the benefactors of God's freely given love through the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus."

The cancellation of debt is also integral to Jewish tradition, says Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue, who is the Chair of the Assembly of Reform Rabbis UK. “Deuteronomy includes the Jubilee idea of all financial debts being annulled and land sold reverting to the original owners every fifty years. However, this was seen as an ideal rather than a practicality, and there is no record of it happening. Jewish groups have been heavily involved in the Drop the Debt campaigns as a matter of religious principle.”

Unlike Islam, Jews do not attach any spiritual stigma to loaning money with interest, he adds: "It has always been a puzzle to Jews that in some other faiths the idea of wealth is regarded as shameful, while lending money with interest is seen as sinful,” Romain says. He adds “ For Jews, neither are intrinsically wrong, although serious question marks do arise if the method of earning money is dubious or if the interest charged to others is excessive.”

Conversely, there is no objection to Jews receiving credit, which is also seen as a normal mechanism of business and free of any religious strictures. However, it is subject to the caveat that if there is no intention of repaying the debt - or clearly no ability to do so - then taking a loan amounts to stealing and transgresses that commandment."

So is money in itself wrong? No, says Kit Dollard, a former businessman and the co-author of Doing Business with Benedict: the Rule of St Benedict and Business Management, a guide to finance based on the 6th century rule of the Italian saint. “St Benedict, while not commenting directly on money, does say that “God is present everywhere”, that those who use their creative gifts in the monastery’s workshops should exercise “proper humility” and when charging for their products should “avoid any taint of avarice.” It is more about good stewardship – how and where we spend our money,” he explains.

Spending, however, is a conscience issue argues Father Harris: “Although the right to work, to support oneself and one’s family is part of Church teaching, so is sharing. How vital is it really to own a Porsche in London? When I first arrived in Canary Wharf, I would see Audi and Ferrari car dealers set up their stands at bonus time, and bankers literally hand over their bonus cheques.”

For the Right Rev Bernard Longley, the auxiliary Roman Catholic bishop of London, the Biblical parable of the Talents – where a master asks his servants about the use to which they have put the gifts he has given them – offers pertinent reflection for those impacted by the market crisis.

After celebrating a Mass in Canary Wharf, he explained: “ The Church teaches that the mission of baptised Christians is to witness to faith in the midst of the world. You could not look for a better example of that than here in Canary Wharf. In the midst of all the commercial activities, these Christians who have just come to Mass and work here believe in grace – which is something offered for nothing. That influences their personal and professional relations. These are people who know to use what is given to them as gifts received.”

So what exactly can faith offer depressed bankers in the credit crisis? “Hope” says Bishop Longley. Katalina Reynolds-Carryl, a regular worshipper at the weekly Wharf Mass agrees. An analyst with the global finance managers, State Street Corporation, her company has been directly impacted by the recent market turmoil:

“What happened to Lehmans has had an impact on our business and we felt the threats to AIG in a big way. To an extent you have to put yourself in the Lord’s hands,” she says. “But what can you do? You can’t worry about every little thing. For me, being able to come here once a week [ to Mass ] is a sanity check. People often try to book meetings during the lunch hour but I miss enough lunch hours and work enough weekends to justify taking thirty minutes out of my week once a week to come here. This is my time. It is a moment of peace.”

On Monday, the Church of England posted a prayer for the debt-trapped on its website, which calls on God to be a "tower of strength" amid the "shifting sands" of the current economic climate. By Thursday it had called for a stringent review of financial regulations, and the Archbishop of Canterbury had suggested that, at least in part, Marx may have had a point in his critique of Capitalism.

Economic liberalisation in itself is not to blame, claims the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Speaking on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on Friday he said: "Markets remain the best way we know of harnessing human creativity for the benefit of all. Economic liberalisation has taken 500 million people out of poverty in China, and 130 million in India. They're also the best antidote to war. As Montesquieu pointed out in the eighteenth century, when two nations come into contact with one another, they can either fight or trade. If they fight, both lose; if they trade, both gain."

What is both "wrong" and "unacceptable" the Chief Rabbi argues is rather "the unbridled pursuit of short term gain at the expense of long term economic health, financial greed at the cost of moral responsibility. "

One of the Chief Rabbi's first initiatives on taking office was to found the Jewish Association of Business Ethics. This now offers its programme, Markets and Morals, to all British schools. He says: "This summer, representatives of all the faiths in Britain marched together with the Archbishop of Canterbury in support of the Millennium Development Goals. Markets need morals. Trade needs responsibility. God's gifts must be for the benefit of all.” .

Will the current crisis, wonders Kit Dollard make people “more humble or more angry? This of course varies as to how you have been affected and where you see the money coming from in the first place."

God, Evolution and Charles Darwin: Ten surprising things Darwin said about religious faith

By Nick Spencer
Times Online

Next year is the big Darwin anniversary. Two hundred years after his birth and 150 after the publication of On the Origin of the Species, millions will celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin, one of the most brilliant scientists in history, and a man who was thoroughly decent, honourable and likeable.

Unfortunately, he has become caught up in the crossfire of a battle in which Darwin exhibited little personal interest. On one side of this cartoonish debate are the creationists. Their precise numbers, in the UK, are uncertain, although the major survey Theos/ComRes are conducting into the public's beliefs about Darwinism, creationism and ID, which will be published next year, should help us find out more. Numbers aside, the point is that creationists dislike Darwin and regularly criticise him for supposedly undermining their religious beliefs.

In the other trench lie the militant Godless who – bizarrely – wholly agree with the creationists. Darwinism, they proclaim, does indeed undermine religious belief and a good thing too. Darwin is their icon and they frantically genuflect before his image, in a way brilliantly parodied by the satirical magazine The Onion.

The truth is, as ever, more complex. Darwin was too interesting, too careful a thinker to be caricatured in these ways. He was a Christian and yes, he did lose his faith. But he was never an atheist. He engaged in religious debate with friends but confessed to being in a hopeless “muddle”. He agonised over whether the exquisite beauty of life on earth was worth the pain of natural selection. He hated religious controversy and was deeply respectful of others’ views. He took upon himself the duties of a country parson whilst living at Downe and contributed to the South American Missionary Society. And, to top it all, he often doubted whether, his mind being evolved, he could even trust it in such matters. All in all, he was too complex, too subtle a man to be left to the polemicists.

So, in the interests, of rescuing him from the no-man’s-land in which he has become trapped, here are 10 Darwin quotations, from his later years, which you are unlikely to hear from the mouths of either creationists or atheists in 2009.

1. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” (Autobiography)

2. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

3. “I hardly see how religion & science can be kept as distinct as [Edward Pusey] desires… But I most wholly agree… that there is no reason why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness.” (Letter to J. Brodie Innes, November 27 1878)

4. “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

5. “I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)

6. “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.” (Letter to Frederick McDermott, November 24 1880)

7. [In conversation with the atheist Edward Aveling, 1881] “Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?” (Edward Aveling, The religious views of Charles Darwin, 1883)

8. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Letter to Graham William, July 3 1881)

9. "My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent Design." (Letter to Joseph Hooker, July 12 1870)

10. “I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence.” (Letter to Francis Abbot, September 6 1871)

Movie Review: Religulous

Religulous

Starring Bill Maher
Directed by Larry Charles

Reviewed by
Craig J. Hazen, Ph.D.
Graduate Program in Christian Apologetics
Biola University

...

The biblical view of saving Christian faith has never had anything to do with blind leaping. Jesus himself was fixed on the idea that we can know the truth—and not just in some spiritual or mystical way. Rather, he taught that we can know the truth about God, humans, and salvation objectively. That is, the very best forms of investigation, evidence, and careful reasoning will inevitably point to God and His great plans for us. The early church learned well from the Master because they too were fixed on the idea that they knew that Jesus was raised from the dead and that we could know it too. The Apostles never made any room for interpreting their experiences of the risen Christ in some mystical or fictional fashion. As the Apostle Peter put it, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).

What we mean by “faith” is not blind leaping that is oblivious to the evidence, especially evidence to the contrary. Rather faith in it’s biblical context is trust grounded in objective knowledge. Faith is trusting that which we can know to be objectively true. I run a graduate program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in which we train students at the highest levels to give compelling reasons for their faith. Maher did not knock on our door. But unfortunately, I think many of the Christians he interviewed would be surprised to learn that there is a robust knowledge tradition in Christianity. I long for the day when a guy like Maher would never consider making a film like this because it would be so difficulty to find Christians that he could hound and hoodwink. (more)

Pursuing a World of Dreams

By Paul Spears
Scriptorium Daily

Daily, I see people pursuing things they believe will make them happy. They live lives where one must be sleep deprived to the point of exhaustion to really be taking advantage of all that this life has to offer. They are always looking for the newest thing-be it the newest movie, TV show or iPhone. Recently, Apple unveiled the new “iPod touch,” the self-proclaimed “funnest iPod ever.” Far be it from me to be a part of the grammar police, but I have been working hard at keeping my kids from using the terms “funner and funnest” (how hard is it to say, “most fun iPod ever?”) and, besides, who needs 32GB of RAM to hold 7000 songs? Who has 7000 songs? Clearly, you are not the “funnest” person around if you don’t have an iPod touch, and all of us want to be that. So, we end up taking an extra part time job to pay for our new iPod—sacrificing the physical and emotional rest we need.

Humanity has become trapped in a culture that cannot rest, because most of us do not have a destination. They are always chasing a moving target, and cannot find satisfaction. This moving target is great for manufacturers and advertising agencies, but horrible on human souls. This frenetic pursuit ultimately will lead to exhaustion, depression and disillusionment, because we cannot stop looking for fulfillment of purpose even when it is misdirected.

As Christians or followers of “the Way,” as the apostle Paul puts it, we understand that human beings are in one very clear sense in an unnatural state without a clear sense of purpose. The apostle Paul points out in Ephesians 2 that, before Christ, we were “dead in our trespasses and sins,” following the “prince of the power of the air,” and that we were “carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” Our sin affects every part of our being, making us unable to know or pursue what is truly best for us. The prophet Jeremiah points out that the level of corruption in our own hearts makes it impossible for us to understand ourselves (Jer. 17:9). Our human state of sin causes us to vainly pursue true satisfaction. Swiss theologian Karl Barth states in his work Church Dogmatics that because of our sinful nature we are blind and deaf to the real source of truth, and that we live in a world of dreams where what we think we know only shows the depth of our ignorance. To put it mildly, sin compromises our capacity to clearly understand what we as humans need for our success and happiness.

Only by the grace of God and the atoning work of his son Jesus Christ, through his death on the cross, are we able to come to an accurate understanding of what it means to flourish as a human being. This is not something we can understand through the work of Plato and Aristotle or any modern psychologist who is attempting to explain why it is that our western lifestyle leads to depression. This salvation that comes through the work of Jesus Christ not only changes our position before God because of the forgiveness of sins, but also enables us, through the Holy Spirit’s labor, to be able to comprehend our humanity. Our ignorance about the totality of reality around us prior to our salvation is repeatedly illustrated in Scripture by the concept of darkness. First Peter 2:9 states that God “called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” In Acts 26:18 the apostle Paul, describing his conversion experience on the Damascus Road, quotes Jesus who tells Paul he is sending him to the Gentiles, “to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.” It is God who calls us out of our own intellectual and spiritual darkness into the illumined world of understanding.

If we are to have any notion about what our true purpose is, God must give it to us through his illumination of our minds. Karl Barth writes in volume IV of the Church Dogmatics:

Illumination, however, is the seeing of which man was previously incapable but of which he is now capable. It is thus his advancement to knowledge. That the revelation of God shines on him and in him, takes place in such a way that he hears, receives, understands, grasps and appropriates what is said to him in it, not with new and special organs, but with the same organs of apperception with which he knows other things, yet not in virtue of his own capacity to use them, but virtue of the missing capacity which he is now given by God’s revelation.

Barth is pointing out that God’s illumination enables us to gain knowledge that we could not have without his intervening revelation. Consequently, prior to God’s illumination, even our best attempt to craft a coherent understanding of true human purpose falls woefully short.

In our society we are driven by a desire to carve out our own destiny. We are encouraged to be our own woman or man. We are told if we only work hard enough there is nothing we can’t do. In reality there is a great deal of things that we should not do, and, yet, we doggedly pursue our “success” when it may very well destroy us. We would do well listening to the admonition found in James 4:13ff :

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil.”

All of these empty pursuits, all of these attempts to find what truly completes us is just chasing after the wind—if they are done without looking toward God and His wisdom. We cannot just pursue what we want and throw a cursory prayer over our shoulder and say, “God, will you bless this endeavor I have decided to pursue?” And expect Him to bless our pursuits. Without petitioning the one who is complete wisdom we will be unable to tell dark from light, north from south or up from down, and we will be enticed by the siren songs of this world which only lead to destruction. So we all need to get some sleep, take time in prayer, His word, and, thereby learn to pursue His best for us.

A New Type of Christianity

The Biblical World
July 1910

CHRISTIANITY IN THE MAKING

There is a widespread feeling that we are witnessing the rise of a type of Christianity different in some respects from any that has preceded it, and this feeling undoubtedly has its basis in fact. Not even Christianity with its canonical literature and its creeds intended to be perpetual can altogether escape the influence of the evolutionary process that characterizes every phase of human life. The process is always going on; and when we speak of a new type as existing today, we mean neither that it is wholly new, nor that it will displace the older types, nor that it is itself rigid and fixed, nor that it will give rise to a new church or denomination. What we do mean is that the process of change has been more than usually rapid of late, and that there are in consequence signs of the emergence of a type of Christianity, partly old, partly new, with some elements already defined, others yet to be determined, yet on the whole distinct enough to be recognized as taking its place as a new type alongside of others that have been longer established and are more familiar. If this be true, the fact is worth observing and, as far as this is possible, defining.

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN RELIGION

One characteristic of the new Christianity that is already clearly defined is its thoroughgoing acceptance of the maxim, “Whatsoever is true.” This principle is of course not new. It was enunciated long ago by the apostle Paul, and has ruled the thinking of many both before and after him. But the type of Christianity of which we are speaking bids fair to yield a more unqualified allegiance to it than it has ever received since the day when Jesus made it the ruling principle, intellectually speaking, of his religion. This allegiance finds expression in the acceptance of the results of scientific study of the world. If there be a controversy between Genesis and Geology, the new Christianity will stand with Geology. The record left in the strata of the earth cannot be impugned by a poet of the prescientific age, even though that poet be also a prophet of a higher conception of God than had before his day prevailed. In conformity to the same principle the new Christianity will accept the assured results of historical investigation into the records of ancient times. Religion has its rights, but so also has history, and one of these is that it be studied by historical methods. The Chronicler’s religion may have been far better than that of the stone-cutter who left his record in the monuments, or the builder of cities whose ruins uncovered today tell the story of days long gone by. Yet the record in stone and clay may furnish the sure basis for the correction of the Chronicler’s chronology. So also will it be in that special department of historical study that is known as literary criticism. How the books of the Bible came into their present form; how we got the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Apocalypse, are all questions respecting which we may have not unnatural prejudices and preferences. But in the long run the evidence patiently sifted, by a process that may require two or three generations to complete it, must determine our decision, rather than any prejudice or preference whatever.

But decision of such questions as these on the basis of the principle “Whatsoever is true” will affect our decision of other questions also. For, in the first place, the decision of a historical question will often directly affect our judgment in a matter of doctrine. Thus the discovery of historical errors in the books of the Old Testament has compelled the revision of the dogma of the inerrancy of Scripture, and the recognition of the source of the apocalyptic theories of the New Testament has led to a re-examination of the whole matter of the validity of these theories. And in the second place, the thoroughgoing applications of the principle in historical matters will inevitably give rise to the demand for an equally uncompromising application of it in matters of even greater importance. The result of this twofold influence of the apostle’s great maxim-or, if you please, of the incursion of the scientific spirit into the field of theological study- is already seen, and will increasingly appear, in the releasing of men’s minds from the bonds of tradition and creed. The men of the past were quite within their rights when they sought to formulate their own convictions and faith; we ourselves are constantly doing the same thing in a more or less formal way. They were only wrong in forgetting that the same right would belong to their successors, and we are wrong when in slothfulness or timidity we shirk our tasks and hide ourselves from our perhaps painful duty behind the shelter of their achievement.

THE INSISTENCE UPON CHARACTER

A second already determined characteristic of the Christianity that is now taking shape lies in the fact that it lays less stress on theology than has been usual in the past, and less than it itself lays on conduct and character. It recognizes the possibility that an honest man may be in great perplexity on many questions of doctrine, and yet be sincerely and wholly devoted to the practice of the principles that Jesus taught and exemplified. It does not forget that “he that wills to do his will shall know of the doctrine”; but it remembers also that there is no clause of time or degree attached to this promise and is willing to wait for its fulfilment in its own time and measure. Hence it is disposed to welcome to its fellowship not only all classes and conditions of men in respect to wealth, education, and culture, but also men of widely different types of theological belief or doubt; but not men of widely different moral purpose. It will not indeed be without theology, nor will that theology be a series of negations. It will be positive, but it will be simple and brief; and its emphasis will be on those things assent to which is a test of character rather than a measure of theological subtlety; on sympathy with the aims of Jesus and readiness to walk in the footsteps of his self-sacrifice, rather than on theories of his person or precise predictions respecting the future.

THE DEMAND FOR EFFECTIVE SERVICE

A third characteristic of the new type of Christianity will be- already is-its emphasis on practical achievement. Not indeed that the church as such will undertake all the great tasks that demand doing. It will rather be the duty of the church to produce men and women who will do these things through such agencies as may be found most convenient and effective. But the character of Christianity will be manifest in the type of men that it produces, and in the work that they do in the church and outside of it. It will be in the true sense philanthropic, and in the broadest sense missionary, seeking to make its own Christianity ever more perfectly Christian in spirit and deed, and to extend that religion through the length and breadth of the lands of the earth. Unmoved by fear or hope of the speedy end of the world, undismayed by any doctrine of the inherent depravity of men or the inherent badness of all non-Christian religions, recognizing in all nations one race of men, it will labor with zeal and with discretion for the promotion of the highest welfare of all and the harmonious relation of all nations.

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT

These characteristics we believe may be clearly discerned in the type of Christianity which is now taking form in this country and Europe. But there is one question respecting it that is as yet unanswered. It will be scientific, ethical, practical, and altruistic; will it be religious ? Will it perceive that the morality that is to be effective in personal character and the elevation of the community must be deeply rooted in religion ? Will it acknowledge that to love one’s fellow-men in truth and steadfastness one must live in loving and believing fellowship with God? It is indeed easy to overlook these things. Morality may sever itself from the religion that produced it, and seem for long to suffer nothing in consequence. But the history of religion does not permit us to believe that either religion or morality can continue to flourish alone. Each needs the other for its own best development. The religion of Jesus is profoundly ethical, demanding right motives and right conduct. “He that heareth these words of mine and doeth them not is like unto a man that built his house upon the sand.” But it is just as deeply religious. The injunction to enter into the closet and pray to the Father who is in secret is as central and as fundamental as the command to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. The scientific spirit-absolute loyalty to the teachings of evidence- is a necessary element of the highest type of religion and morality. This spirit is, as we have already said, central in the teaching of Jesus. No tradition, no scripture even, is authoritative for him against the conclusions demanded by his own insight into the world of present fact. But equally necessary to the highest type of religion is the recognition of the reality of the spiritual and of the possibility of fellowship between man and God. Science and mysticism do not easily blend. The man of science tends to reject the mysterious as unreal; the mystic to thrust aside the scientific as irreligious. But Jesus found a way to blend them, and blend they must if religion is to reach its best development. The new type of Christianity will be scientific; it will be ethical; it will be social and altruistic; will it be religious? It will not be the religion of authority; will it be the religion of the Spirit?