The Opening go the Christian Mind, Pt 1

I recently finished David W. Gill's book, The Opening of the Christian Mind. This isn't so much a review as it is a summary of what stood out to me. Some of these are random comments and some are summaries of chapters. I hope it helps you as it helped me.

"There is no legitimate field of study or work which will fail to be illuminated by the Word of God. A corollary which I think is equally true: If a field of study or work is found, after due effort, to be impossible to locate under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the burden of proof is on us to demonstrate why we should continue in that field." (27) Whatever you do, the Bible has something to say. This is related to the sufficiency of Scripture as we studied in Sunday School a few weeks ago.

"A genuine pluralism means we have the cultural space to act as these foreign agents in the world. Our call is not to unify, master and manage the society, but to bear witness to it with truth and love. I think we should, therefore, thank God for the degree of freedom pluralism brings with it." (36) Sometimes we say we want a Christian America, and in some senses that would be good, but in many ways a pluralistic society is tolerant of our Christianity and our relationship with God in ways that a society with an official religion could not be.

In a discussion of the challenges of living in a techno-pluralistic world, Gill defines technique as "the method of reducing every phenomenon to rational analysis, reducing what is qualitative to quantitative consideration, thinking and working only in relation to measurable results. It is the worship of measurable effectiveness." Im afraid that in the church we have reduced spiritual techniques and Biblical education to those things that have immediate and measurable results. In school the question over and over is "When will we ever use this?" While relevance is important, there are long term benefits to education that can't be measured in the short term.

"...modern secular society 'compartmentalizes religions and treats it as peripheral or even irrelevant to large areas of life and thought.'... But my own visits to Christian college campuses have not turned up much integration there either....no significant attempts at creative Christian perspective on anything except religious studies....But my general impression (from many lecture tours to Christian colleges) is that most Christian college professors are no more interested in integration than are their secular counterparts. Their coursese treat economics, medicine, law, sociology, history, and other fields just as they would be treated in major universities -- but without the same level of academic depth and stature as the latter.) (54, 123) A biting indictment! The Christian school movement is crying "Biblical integration!" but often that is just tacking on a verse of Scripture to a lesson or making an object lesson out of the content. Really examining the foundations of our course of study and determining what God says about it seems to be rare in the church.