The Pressure of Novelty

When, therefore, we discuss the church, her mission, her faithfulness, and more contemporarily, her relevance, against what standard or criteria do we judge? Is the only, or at least, the most important value whether or not we have success (defined largely in terms of modern management or consumer expectations)? In the world of emergent, seeker-sensitive, conservative, charismatic, and reformed models, what is the dominant value system that drives us? Is it numbers and size? Is it the accuracy of the Word preached and the presentation of the faith once and for all given? Is it how happy or ministered to everyone feels?

What disturbs me personally—and many people whom I have talked to across the country and internationally—is the growing trend to ignore Christian history, to devalue Scripture, to reframe worship, and to lessen the role of discipleship, holiness, theology, and content. What matters is whether God is “experienced” (something I also seek), whether worship is compelling (a commendable value), and whether people actually come (a valid desire). However, this tendency and practice of avoiding the past is distracting, and I believe, wrong.

Speaking of this trend, Christian scholar R. R. Reno says, “In all cases we are modern insofar as we will not suffer that which we have received. We must step back in order to unburden ourselves, to lighten our lives so that we can be raptured away from the hindering, limited, ruined forms that the past has imposed on the present. This is the spiritual pattern that makes modernity modern.”1

Within the mythology of modern and post-modern society is the deep belief and value that only what works or satisfies in the present is to be allowed. Thus a creeping evolutionary notion is married to an existentialist demand, and then served up with a muddle of therapeutic and marketing requirements, which begins to alter beyond recognition the thing (the Christian faith) that is the target of such enthusiastic revision.

Commenting on what he describes as the breathless pursuit of relevance, Os Guinness writes, “By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.”2

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we ignore or avoid the serious and real questions and needs on the hearts of people. Nor am I suggesting a return to some older model, defined by the “50’s”, sixteenth-century Geneva, eighteenth-century England, or America in the Great Awakenings. However, my concern is with an uncritical embrace of ideas and methods that bring with them a hidden value orientation and an inherent tendency to redefine the church. Sometimes the changes made come with a price tag that does not reform the church, but which may instead deform it.

I was reminded of this by my wife who sat in on a discussion about learning Scripture. One individual concerned with the other adult’s lack of biblical knowledge suggested this be might remedied by watching the Veggie Tales! (Might it also have been possible to suggest reading the biblical book itself?) On another occasion I was taking an elderly guest to church. As we entered the main hall the band launched into a mind-blowingly loud rendition of their latest song. The whole service was styled as a performance with the rock concert serving as the guiding model. My guest was first stunned then shocked. After we were able to talk outside, she asked what did any of this have to do with Christ. Perhaps her objection could be ascribed to age, style, preference, and culture, but I cannot help but feel it is more than that.

Not all progress is progress, and everything new or novel is not necessarily good. C.S. Lewis coined the phrase “chronological snobbery” to define an attitude he himself held for many years. Lewis referred to ideas that were viewed as “past their sell-by date.” The ingrained belief was that some things were simply outmoded. Yet Lewis’ friend Owen Barfield responded to him in the following way: Before we judge whether an idea is outmoded or not, we must ask some pertinent questions.

Why did this idea go out of date?
Was the idea ever refuted?
If it was refuted, by whom, where and how conclusively?3

Today it is not just ideas, but practices that are viewed as outmoded, and hence irrelevant. We tend to consult the gurus of our time, those with real success portfolios, because we want to have the power of real change. Once again, I am not suggesting all things modern, or post-modern, are bad. I am asking us to take a look at the underlying values or transformational factors that we may be unaware of, and which may inadvertently be smuggled in. As Marshall McLuhan suggested in the 1960s, “The medium is the message.” The question we need to ask then is what medium might corrupt, distract, or deform the message?

C.S. Lewis scholar Art Lindsley quotes an old proverb, “What is true is not new and what is new is not (necessarily) true.” He writes further, “While we can and should unearth new insights into truth, we should be cautious if we start to depart from the ideas believed and taught by Christians throughout history. Perhaps some traditional ideas need to be revised, and we are the ones to do it. However, if we differ greatly from the faithful giants of history, we must stay open to the possibility that it is we, not they, who need correction.”4

Contrary to Henry Ford, history is not bunk. History and tradition are valuable sources of insight and wisdom on how to live. Soren Kierkegaard said that life is lived forward but understood backwards. The great renewal movements in history came with a respect for the past and a desire to see God work again in a new generation as He had done in an earlier one. The impulses of the Scriptures’ grand themes and truths have often served to ignite and kindle fresh fires and new outpourings of the Holy Spirit on the church.

I guess I would see this article as a word of caution, as an exhortation to exercise due care towards some of our love of all things new and trendy and to not allow an unbridled enthusiasm for the present to blind us to the givenness and value of the historical Christian faith. After all, Jesus Himself instituted a memorial that roots us in the past, that feeds us in the present, and orientates us to the future (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis also cautioned against using the wrong “metaphors” to guide our reflections: “You can’t turn the clock back…. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” 5

Or as contemporary scholar Robert Webber reminds us, “The road to the future runs through the past.”

Stuart McAllister is vice-president of training and special projects at RZIM and a member of the itinerant speaking team

1 R.R. Reno, In the Ruins of the Church: Satisfying Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002), 18.

2 Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003), 15.

3 Art Lindsley, C. S. Lewis’s Case for Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 39.

4 Ibid. 47.

5 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 36.

Basic Logical Principles Required for Apologetic Endeavors

June 25, 2002 by Doug Groothuis

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Winfried Corduan only very briefly mentions three related principles of logic—identity, contradiction, and excluded middle—in his excellent apologetics text, No Doubt About It.¹ I will provide a bit more clarification concerning these principles and introduce one more closely related logical principle in order to fathom better their meaning in relation to apologetics. All four of these principles trade on the idea of antithesis and identity.

These principles of logic are not deduced or inferred from other principles that are more basic or more certainly known. These principles must be presupposed or assumed in order to communicate intelligibly. As such, we might borrow a term from Immanuel Kant (without endorsing his whole philosophy) and call them transcendental preconditions for knowledge. That is, if there is to be knowledge at all, these principles must be in place. These principles stand behind all rational thought and language. They are not arbitrary or whimsical, as are some other principles or ideas that people gratuitously adopt (such as, “I just know in my knower—without need of any outside evidence—that I was abducted by aliens."). They are fundamental principles or laws of thought, not groundless speculations or ad hoc notions. They are neither Eastern nor Western, neither male nor female, nor are they pigmented. They are eternal and essential principles by which our minds were created by God to function. They are rooted in the perfect reason and comprehensive knowledge of God himself.

1. The principle (or law) of identity simply states that something is what it is: “A=A.” Something is itself and nothing other than itself. If we say, “You’re not yourself today!” we don’t violate the principle of identity. We mean, rather, that someone is acting out of character, acting strangely or unexpectedly. The person is still identical to herself even if she is acting strangely.

2. The principle (or law) of contradiction is, rather paradoxically, also sometimes called the principle of non-contradiction. This is not a contradiction, but simply two ways of looking at the same logical operation of antithesis. Aristotle put it this way: “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect” (Metaphysics 1005 b19-20). Or: “A is not non-A.” Put another way: a proposition and its denial or negation cannot both be true. Those who deny the principle (or law) of contradiction, appropriately enough, contradict themselves. Consider: “The law of contradiction is false.” If so, the opposition of this claim—that the law of noncontradiction is true—must be reckoned false. Thus, the principle of contradiction is affirmed. The principle is inescapable and incorrigible if we intend to state anything meaningful about reality. It’s not just a good idea; its a law of thought and a law of being.

3. The principle (or law) of excluded middle states that “either A or non-A"; any middle option is excluded. That is, it is not the case that “A and non-A,” nor is it the case that “neither A nor non-A.” Put more technically, given any meaningful proposition A, the proposition “either A or not-A” is necessarily true. For example, “There is either a building over two hundred stories high or it is not the case that there is such a building.” Or: “Jesus is Lord or Jesus is not Lord.” This should not be confused with the similar principle (or law) of bivalence.

4. The principle (or law) of bivalance affirms that any meaningful proposition is either true or false. “Douglas Groothuis is half Italian” 2is either true or false; not both true and false, not neither true nor false. Every proposition has a truth value, and there are only two truth values—true and false. To distinguish this from the principle (or law) or excluded middle we should note that: “The law of excluded middle is a logical law operating at the level of the object language, whereas the principle of bivalance is a semantic principle, one governing the interpretation of the language to which it is applied.” 3In other words, the law of excluded middle relates to the state of things or being: “Either there is a pro-life Democrat at Denver Seminary or there is not a pro-life Democrat at Denver Seminary.” The principle (or law) of bivalance relates to the nature of statements (semantics): “There are no pro-life Democrats at Denver Seminary” is either true or false. Of course, these semantic statements about pro-life Democrats at Denver Seminary do refer to things outside of themselves, so the semantical content is related to objects outside of semantics, given the correspondence view of truth. The proposition, “Hell exists,” is either true or false and is made true or false in relation to states of affairs outside of the proposition itself.

Endnotes

¹ Winfried Corduan, No Doubt About It (Nashville, TN: Broadman, Holman, 1997), 26-27.

² This statement is true. My father was half-Dutch, my mother is fully Italian.

³ “Principle of Bivalence,” Dictionary of Philosophy, revised second edition, edited by Anthony Flew (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 46.