C.S. Lewis' challenge to Christian scientists

What kind of books should Christian intellectuals and scientists write? What will be the most effective for defending and promoting the Gospel? I find it surprising, interesting, and challenging to consider the view of C.S. Lewis.

While we are on the subject of science, let me digress or a moment. I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. 

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects, with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the re-conversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground. Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.

C.S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics" (1945), included in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970), p. 93.

An atheist who understands what faith in Jesus really is

Terry Eagleton is arguably one of the UK's most prominent literary critics. He is an atheist, but a prominent critic of the New Atheists. He takes them to task for their superficial treatment and mis-representation of Christian faith.

There is a nice series of interviews of Eagleton with Arnold Eisen, a Jewish scholar.

Here is one where he discusses his understanding of what Christian faith really is.

Why do charities spend so much money on fund raising?

Whose fault is it? How do we stop it?
It is easy to blame the charities/NGOs/churches/mission agencies and their leaders and staff.
But what about us, the prospective donors?

The problem is that many people do not give systematically and regularly but do respond to "crisis" appeals.
So a solution is to not respond to these appeals but rather to start giving small amounts in a regular fashion over a sustained period of time (3+ years). Electronic banking makes this very easy.

Once the charity realises they have a certain stable income stream and their "crisis" appeals have little effect, they may accept their budget and focus on spending it wisely rather than on raising more money.

Sorry, if I am a little idealistic. You can't change everyone else. But you do have a choice as to whether you join me in this strategy.

Are we good at heart?

What does history tell us?

Sir Herbert Butterfield was a Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and noted historian. He has an interesting statement (reproduced here) about how if certain social safeguards are removed then our true nature will be revealed.

An essay The Christian and the study of history reviews Butterfield's broader contributions to scholarship.

Helping the needy

Apologetics in the twenty-first century

There is a helpful article "Atheists, Archbishops, and Airport Novelists: Recent trends in Christian apologetics," by Greg Clarke in the latest CASE magazine.

He lists four positive trends

• God is well and truly centre-stage in global intellectual life.
• The affective dimension of apologetics is receiving new, and overdue, attention.
• Christianity is often now presented as a story, a very good story, and a story into which anyone can enter.
• The ethical discontents of secularism have become a pathway into discussion of the moral shape of Christianity.

The discouraging trend is "Too many centres of apologetic engagement are entwined with specific or institutionalised political commitments, to their detriment and to the confusion of the public..... If a project on the relationship between God and science ends up as bitter dispute about the politics of teaching evolution or creation in schools, it has probably not achieved its best end."

The poor man has a name

Here is an interesting question.
Do any of the characters in the parables of Jesus have a personal name?
The prodigal son, the unmerciful servant, the good Samaritan, ....

I learnt this past week that there is only one: Lazarus, the poor man in the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus recorded in Luke 16:19-31

The Africa Bible Commentary (p. 1263) says

At the one extreme in this story is an unidentified rich man, whose clothing, mansion and lifestyle, mark him as one of the rich and famous. The very idea of such lifestyle might have been amazing to some of the original hearers. But deep in the night, when hunger kept them awake, they may have reflected on why some poeple enjoy life while others have to sweat and scrape just to get by. 

At the opposite extreme is a representative of the poverty of the masses, named Lazarus. All that he has going for him is the fact that he is the only person in all of Jesus' parables with a name, Lazarus. This name is the Latinized from of Eleazar and means "God is my help". Lazarus is a beggar, but he has a name. He is covered with ulcerated sores but he has human dignitty. He does not remain nameless. 

The sin of the rich man is that he has no heart. He looks at a man with a name, but does not ask him his name. He saw Lazarus' hunger and pain, but did nothing about it. He accepted the poverty of Lazarus as part of the normal order of things and thought it perfectly natural and inevitable that Lazarus whould lie in huger, pain, suffering, sickness and ultimately in death while he wallowed in luxury. There are none so blind   as those who will not see.