The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself.
Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.ĭoubt is never a purely intellectual problem. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.įor 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. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next.
And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. “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.
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