- Introductions: Name, Do you think killing can sometimes be right?
- Restatement of theme:
- “If this issue was the reason a non-believer gave as their obstacle to Christianity, what would we say to them?”
- Theme verse: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.” (Matthew 13:19)
- Introductory Question
- Why are we bothering to study philosophy? Isn’t Christianity all about faith? Doesn’t trying to reason our way through things simply diminish our trust in God?
- I really want to make it clear that I certainly don’t think any of this stuff is necessary to become a Christian. For salvation, what is necessary? “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” (Acts 16:31)
- In addition, philosophy is certainly not everyone’s area. Don’t get me wrong—some people just aren’t helped by philosophy. I am—but I know that doesn’t then always hold true for everyone else. Christ’s body has many parts with many members with many different gifts, talents, abilities, and interests. (1 Corinthians 12:12-26) I think philosophy is a great help, a great tool—but certainly not synonymous with salvation.
- But doesn’t this “reason” come in the way of our faith?
- I don’t think so. It does if we worship it and make it the sole object of our faith—I trust in reason, not in God. That’s silly. But I think it is a completely different thing to have one’s faith bolstered by things around us. I find my faith encouraged and bolstered by older and wiser Christians, by grace that I see displayed by people in unexpected ways, by a beautiful time in the outdoors, and even reason and philosophy.
- Paul and even Christ Himself use reason a lot to get their point across—basically, they say, “Hey, doesn’t this make sense?”
- Read John 20:30-31. John says that he wrote his book “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ.” He wrote his book to give us reasons, to convince our minds and hearts, that we ought to have faith in Christ.
- Reason and faith aren’t necessarily opposed—although they certainly can be. Like how ministry and faith aren’t necessarily opposed—but they certainly can be when ministry becomes an end in itself, such as appears to happen with many televangelists.
- Philosophy is a good tool to witness with to certain types of people. Just a tool—but Paul, for instance, used his knowledge of the common philosophical ideas in Athens to share Christ. (See Acts 17:16-34)
- I do think we need to understand at least some of the core philosophies of this age. Not to believe them, but to be able to understand enough of the people around us that we can talk to them “in their language.”
- Other thoughts/questions/comments?
- Topic for Today: Philosophy and the Christian
- Morality and Ethics
- (This is all borrowing heavily from Francis Schaeffer’s book He Is There and He Is Not Silent.)
- Back to the introductory question: Do you think killing can sometimes be right—or, maybe, at least “not wrong”?
- What different standards are there—both in our world today, and throughout history? (don’t forget war time, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, mercy killing, do-not-resuscitate orders, etc.)
- Examples:
- Vikings: “The Viking culture had no concept of murder. If you killed someone, then it was up to you to pay the family fair compensation (weregild) for the labor lost by the member’s death. If the perpetrator refused to pay weregild, it was up to the family of the slain to extract it from the perpetrator, or take his life.”
- What was the source of this standard? How did the people differentiate between right and wrong?
- Examples:
- A democratic process tends to make what is right and wrong come only from the vote of the people—a national average, so to speak.
- Many Darwinists would say that right and wrong come from “survival of the fittest”—what is right is that which will make survival possible for the most amount of people.
- Some would say that right is anything that “doesn’t hurt other people.”
- Muslims would probably say that the Koran determines right and wrong.
- Some might say that we really can’t determine right and wrong except for the specifics of the situation.
- Some might say that we can never determine right and wrong. Ever.
- Greek/Roman mythologies might have said that right was whatever made the fewest gods angry at once.
- Buddhists? New age types?
- General categories: morals that come from people, and morals that come from beyond people, or no morals at all.
- Do you see any differences between the Christian perspective and the above?
- What does class think?
- A ton of morality is based purely on what people think. But how do we really know that people can tell us what right and wrong is? Isn’t it kinda like your sibling when you were younger telling you that it was really okay to take extra cookies, when you’re parents (those above you) said it wasn’t? Getting our rules from equals ultimately doesn’t tell us a whole lot.
- Ultimately, if it is just people giving you morals, then you really have no morals at all.
- Pantheists can hardly have any morals—for them, whatever is the will of the “force” must be—they must be assimilated. If God is everything—how can you fight against God? “What is, is right.”
- Some morality—Jews, Muslims, and Christians, mostly—has morality coming from God, from a source above us.
- New question: do you think you are a moral person? Do you measure up to whatever moral code you subscribe to?
- How can we explain why man doesn’t measure up? How, for instance, does a Muslim explain why people aren’t “good enough”?
- Christianity (and Judaism) has something very unique is explaining that man fell into sin. It was not that God created faulty people. God is not a bad God. How could we fight against sin if God created it? Wouldn’t we be fighting against God?
- Conclusion.
- Morality is probably the biggest part of what keeps me a Christian. Practically everyone (including atheists) talk about good and bad—but there is no foundation for it apart from a belief in a Judeo-Christian-Muslim kind of god. Within that, there is no explanation for the sin in man except in the Judeo-Christian story of the fall. Within that, there is little hope for those of us who have fallen outside the Christian idea of grace in Christ.
- This is also why philosophy can be very important. It helps us understand our lives—why we believe what we believe. It helps us “give a reason for the hope that we have.”
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