So Secular Pluralism, as functional as it may be for the time being in our culture, mis-diagnoses the problem and so of course mis-diagnoses the solution. My guess is that it will remain the dominant worldview for the next couple decades, again, particularly in the university setting. However, eventually it will pass the way of Marxism, Romanticism, and parachute pants: all things that proved foolish over time.
Like Marxism, Romanticism, and parachute pants, there will most likely remain ardent followers. And old worldviews never fully go away, they become a part of the cultural consciousness, a patchwork of thoughts and ideas and concepts that continue to inform our understanding of how the world works (or why it doesn't).
By the way, the talk last Thursday that my rants for the last several days have been based on went pretty well. One person received Christ and there have been lots of fun follow-up conversations over the past week with a variety of different people.
It's interesting to see how much my Christian students respond to this type of converation as well as those who aren't Christians. For both sets of students, it's often the first time they've heard someone offer an apologetic or defense of the Christian faith using largely secular terms and engaging in intentional dialogue with the culture to find both points of commonality and to articulate clear places of divergence. Mostly they hear the latter from their Christian sub-culture and have heard very little about the former.
2 comments:
Question -
Does education, say about other cultures and people, at all contribute to people and cultures learning to accept each others existence and not fight out their problems?
If so, I fail to see why it's so bad.
Rather, it should even be embraced by the Christian worldview, should Christians think of themselves as promoting peace and accepting someone else's existence.
Royale,
Yes, we are absolutely on the same page. Historically, Christians have built more schools than just about anyone other than national governments...they wanted people to be able to read their Bibles!
I'm not denigrating education, it's critical to real peace. And there is some correlation between higher levels of education and freedom from oppression, violence, etc. I'm not saying that education doesn't matter (that's obviously not true) but what I am saying is that it's (falsely, I believe) touted as the global panacea. It has a critical role to play, but lack of education is not essentially the problem. There are some very well educated bigots running around!
So Christians must both promote education while at the same time have a clear understanding that education in and of itself is not sufficient to deal with the deeper spiritual and emotional issues that can only be addressed through spiritual recourse.
Thanks for checking me on this, I don't want to overstate the impotency of education in my desire to make the bigger point.
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