Tuesday, March 28, 2006
So Which Is It?
In the Sunday School class I am teaching last Sunday an interesting debate devleoped. We are reading CS Leiws - but myself and the other instructor are deep into Total Truth some of the themes of which Lewis touchs on a lot so we brought up the issue that pervades Total Truth or discussion the spirtual/material divide. We presented it to the class using Pearcey's claim that closing that divide was the great intellectual challenge of our time and to allowing Christianity to thrive.
One of the class members responded that the greatest intellectual challenge to Christianity was not that divide, but convincing or being convinced of sin. A fact that has bee a repeated theme on this blog.
We seemed to settle on the compromise that the spirtual/material divide is the great issue when it comes to Christianity penetrating cultural, but conviction of sin was the great issue when doing evangelism, but that is somewhat unsatisfactory to me, too easy somehow.
I did think when reading Pearcey's book that closing that gap was "insufficient" because all it could really produce were diests or legalistic Christians. Conviction of sin is, to my mind the difference between a church-goer and a person that really engages their faith in a fashion that is completely life transforming.
So I am looking for comments here! What do you think? Can this even be an either/or issue? - Maybe it's a both/and? Let's hear it!
Related Tags: material, spiritual, sin, conviction, intellectual questions of faith
One of the class members responded that the greatest intellectual challenge to Christianity was not that divide, but convincing or being convinced of sin. A fact that has bee a repeated theme on this blog.
We seemed to settle on the compromise that the spirtual/material divide is the great issue when it comes to Christianity penetrating cultural, but conviction of sin was the great issue when doing evangelism, but that is somewhat unsatisfactory to me, too easy somehow.
I did think when reading Pearcey's book that closing that gap was "insufficient" because all it could really produce were diests or legalistic Christians. Conviction of sin is, to my mind the difference between a church-goer and a person that really engages their faith in a fashion that is completely life transforming.
So I am looking for comments here! What do you think? Can this even be an either/or issue? - Maybe it's a both/and? Let's hear it!
Related Tags: material, spiritual, sin, conviction, intellectual questions of faith
