Very insightful response Dan. You’ve given us good things to ponder. Thanks.

Very insightful response Dan, you’ve given us good things to ponder. Thanks.

Again, interesting perspectives from the reincarnation of Tertullian to armchair philosophers pondering on the wonder of the world. My own take is that I can deeply appreciate great music, great works of art, incredible cinematic achievements, marvels of engineering, political savvy, legal judgments that move one to desire a better world and strike awe in the beholder at the wisdom that God has given to human judges, scientific breakthroughs, entrepreneurial spirit and success, courage in the face of overwhelming odds–even if none of it had ever been produced by Christians.

Most of it has not, and I must both wonder what it is about our own Christian subculture that is not doing a very good job in creating such gifted individuals and why God has allowed these people such extreme success in life in spite of their own messed up spiritual values. In short, I can learn–and learn deeply–from those outside the faith WITHOUT putting blinders on about who they are. I can do this because they are still created in God’s image and have thus not destroyed all the good that is in them. And I can do this because I recognize that my own Christian subculture is defined by many not-so-Christian values. The Christian subculture in America is all too often simply a cheap knock-off of right wing politics that it hardly resembles the Christian faith as seen anywhere else on the planet.

When my oldest son went to college, he minored in philosophy. His favorite professor was an agnostic who tended toward atheism. My advice to Noah was not to get his Christian hackles raised, but to learn from this man. Learn deeply the arguments he had against God’s existence, discuss this with him, argue civilly and respectfully with him, and understand his own values and beliefs. I thought that this was a rare opportunity for my son to learn from one of the great thinkers at his university and to genuinely interact with what he had to say.

I believe the advice I gave him was solid. Noah not only learned to appreciate this professor, but also to engage in respectful dialogue with him. The feeling was mutual. The prof actually went to one or two of Noah’s swim meets, even though he had never darkened the door of any athletic competition at the university in all the decades he had taught there! A friendship was born, and Noah at one time had a great opportunity to speak to this professor about the gospel. By seeking understanding rather than taking a pugilistic stance, my son wore the gospel well.

What I’m getting at is that I think all too often we put up walls and act defensively. That posture can only feed anti-intellectualism and confirm us in our arrogance that we are right–even if the kind of Christianity that we are defending doesn’t resemble the historic Christian faith.

There can be a very great difference between intelligence and wisdom. A person with a high IQ can produce great works of genius, and yet lack wisdom. A person who is Godless can posses ‘worldly wisdom’, which is derived largely from observing what ‘works’ and what doesn’t work, and making logical adjustments. Godly wisdom is much more than this, and it is possessed by Christians as given by God.

Bethyda brings up an interesting thing to contemplate when he says: “Genius needs both excellent intellect and grounding in truth”.

I’m thinking that it is quite possible for someone of great wisdom to produce something of genius, even if they don’t have a particularly high IQ…. or ‘excellent intellect’. This is a gift of God. Perhaps we can even think of this in terms of spiritual gifts.

Jonathan Edwards was considered to be very intelligent, but I suppose there have been other great teachers and evangelists who were not considered to be so intellectual, but were brilliantly used by a special gifting of God outside of that which was inborn.

Many godless geniuses have made great contributions which we all appreciate, as Dan submits. Some, such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins (genius by the IQ definition anyway…), may have produced works of genius in some fields, and unfortunate detours from God in others, because they lack wisdom. It is often the case that the godless intellectuals of our times stir up cause for the godly to rise up… to point out the illogic and hopeless emptiness of their conclusions, and to proclaim the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in public forums!

Hi Dan,

This is a great post.

I don’t think He is the God of the mediocre by any means. I think however that believers seem to push for that in the arts but maybe I can rant about that a bit later.

I don’t quite understand why it is always the case that the best music, and poetry and painting etc. seem to come from those who are in poverty, or struggling with some dark demon of vice, or those who are just simply nuts but it does almost seem to be an objective truth that, that is the case.

I do have to think of David actually. Look at the Psalms – that is some incredibly powerful poetry and a lot of it comes from very dark places in David’s mind. (I am of the opinion David was a bit nuts at times and loopy due to depression). Much of David’s musings were brought on by utter despair and feelings of hopelessness.

I think what maybe resonates with people is this despair. All humans are faced with despair, that is simply a part of living life out in a fallen world. The difference however with believers is we have someone to whom we can call and therefore there is light in midst of this darkness (as we see in David’s writings). That is something with which the world (unbelievers) can not identify.

That we can call out to God in our time of need, or that we have to maybe, just maybe doesn’t bode well with those who do not belong to God.

Where most people find themselves in their art, and use that as a means of release and ridding themselves of despair and pain, we as believers can use art as a means to express these things (that are true and do occur in our lives) but not use it as a means to rid ourselves of our problems. We certainly don’t use it to define our lives.

So maybe our art (art done by Christians) expresses not only the human condition but also the solution for it. A solution, a ray of light, hope etc. tends to take the edge off things and subsequently makes things seem less “arty” or legitimate in the eyes of the art “world”.

Just my thoughts.

Wallace This discussion reminds of the difference between Justin Martyr and Tertullian, both great defenders of the faith long ago. Tertullian gave no quarter and saw virtually no good in the world around him. Justin was the opposite: he was conciliatory, even to the point of justifying the faith in terms of Greek philosophy.

Reading this makes me wonder if I am to be considered Tertullian So I just wish to clarify.

I do not doubt that there is some good in those outside the faith. I agree the imago Dei is important, even if it is broken.

My focus was on the idea of genius. Genius needs both excellent intellect and grounding in truth. False philosophy can lead far away from this. A good dog can only become a bad god but an angel can become a demon (to paraphrase Lewis).

If Keynes economic theories, for example, are disproven, then he is not a genius, he was completely wrong.

While error may spur us on to great ideas, I do not include errant men in the genius category.

So while grounding in truth can be outside Christendom, it is more likely within it. And those who reject Christianity but remain parasitic on its philosophy and are also intelligent can be geniuses.

As society abandons truth, then the arts will go before the humanities before the soft sciences before the hard sciences. And maths and logic will remain the longest.

And I still stand by my claim that many of the world’s geniuses were Christian.

Ron, I agree, but I think that what we are at fault for in this postmodern gen will make those guys look like saints.

One other comment. Alister McGrath in his book The Twilight of Atheism makes the case that enlightenment rationalism, atheism, and related philosophies are the unfortunate and rebellious offspring of Christianity itself, and more specifically the Protestant Reformation. I think he’s on to something… If so, then perhaps some of the souls to which Dr. Wallace refers are in a sense our own fault, much like an angry disturbed child might be the fault of abusive parents. There were directions the church took post-Reformation that ended up provoking the Voltaires and Bertrand Russells (and Richard Dawkinses and Bart Ehrmans, et al) of the world. I think we have to own up to this, to some extent. Perhaps if we did, the Church’s reaction to them would be less of condemnation and more that of a parent who realizes that he has let down the child given into his care…

Sometimes unfortunately it seems to necessitate the non-Christian (or anti-Christian) world to spur on the Christian world. How much early theology wasn’t really worked out until it was challenged? I haven’t read the church fathers deeply, but much of what I have read seems to be responses to challenges from without. One wonders how much writing the church would have produced from that era had it not been for the threats.

Closer to home, perhaps: it is the Bart Ehrmans of the world who, with their assaults on the reliability of the NT, provoke complacent Christians to wrestle with the realities of how their holy writ came to be. I know that’s nothing new in academia, but down here in the ordinary pew it seemed to me that textual criticism was practically an unheard-of topic pre-Ehrman. (And God bless folks like Dr. Wallace who’ve done a fantastic job of responding to the challenge in a way that non-seminarians like me can follow!)

And nothing’s forced me to think through my faith quite like the challenges posed to me by my highly rational, highly intelligent, atheist colleagues at work.

Often, like mules, we won’t move forward unless there’s something threatening to beat us. (One can go many interesting places from here…….)

Folks, I love this exchange! You all come at this with different perspectives, which is exactly what I was hoping would be the case. This discussion reminds of the difference between Justin Martyr and Tertullian, both great defenders of the faith long ago. Tertullian gave no quarter and saw virtually no good in the world around him. Justin was the opposite: he was conciliatory, even to the point of justifying the faith in terms of Greek philosophy. In the NT, I think we see some similar patterns: the author of Hebrews seems to have been indebted to Greek philosophy, especially neo-platonism to a degree, while others (like Matthew) were far less comfortable with such an integrated view of things.

I think it should go without saying that I would rather invest my life in promoting the kingdom of God than in being a world shaker. But my dilemma is that many of the world shakers have also made a huge impact on the faith. And unless I can appreciate what they have done–and learn from them–I will be bound by my own cultural views which are certainly not fully Christian, all the while calling my own cultural views Christian.

One way I think about this is that the Imago Dei or image of God is something that cannot be eradicated, but it can be (and always is) distorted. This goes for the individual as well as for society. Today’s postmodern world is a product of such a distorted Imago Dei, just as modernism was a societal distortion of the Imago Dei. What I find most intriguing is that many apologists today seem rather uncomfortable with postmodernism but wholly at home in modernism. Neither is our home. But just as each individual and each culture distorts the Imago Dei, each also possesses aspects of it that are not twisted. In this respect, I think that what Wittgenstein, Russell, etc. accomplished was a mixture of their God-given talents with a distortion of such. As a believer, I want to appreciate the accomplishments that they made that have benefited humanity (just as I can appreciate the accomplishments of Plato, Gandhi, and Einstein, to name a few), even though I recognize that they were not Christians.

The question that each of us needs to ask is whether we can appreciate the best that the world has to offer while critically examining the world itself. Or do we have to paint a black-and-white picture that in fact paints us into a corner? One of the things I have learned in biblical studies is that non-Christians often have done the best work, have created genuinely worthy exegesis, lexical and grammatical studies, historical treatments, and the like. If I had to restrict myself to only what Christians have produced, my own study of the Bible would be immeasurably impoverished. And so would yours, since there is a vast sea of scholarship that forms the foundation of how we think about the message of the Bible today. And this foundation is not always visible.

In short, I think we need to have a critical eye at BOTH the Christian community and the non-Christian community. Yet we can learn from both because God is the God of all truth.