engaging and persuasive, and helpful in motivating the argument. This is kind of low-hanging fruit. And if some may find it unnecessary because we always took the despair books and the doomscrolling dismissively without bothering to explain why, that actually underscores the value of the project. Somebody should explain why! We shouldn't all just assume that it's obvious why these bestsellers are wrong!
Christian resilience is a fascinating theme, in part because it's tied up with Christian apologetics. if you really wrap your head around the amazing way that Christianity has outlived nations, languages, civilizations, empires, philosophies, and every other normal product of human history (if there's a case to be made for any exceptions, they are very few), it's really hard not to see that as a reason to give Christianity more credence as a candidate for being true. if you're planning to explain Christian resilience without including truth among the best candidate reasons, I wonder whether that argument is possible without considerable distortion. The best explanation of Christianity's unparalleled resilience really is precisely that God is moving in history through the Church. That point has been made before, for example by GK Chesterton, but that's no reason not to make it again. On the contrary, it's convenient, in a way, that people have come along who are so naively despairing as to give you a pretext for re-engaging the pleasant task of marveling at Christianity is miraculous durability. :)
I basically agree, and it doesn't seem to me like much of a stretch at all to take all these natural-reason-friendly strengths as arguments for Christianity's truth and the efficacy of God's grace within them. I've made this argument before in relation to orthodoxy specifically. Because of course some people like to make the case for a pared-down version of Christianity: The faith as a whole is true but maybe a lot of dogma are the bad kind of human "accretion." The real core of the Gospel was found in the early Church and the later stuff is a perversion. (A common Mormon position, for instance, though by no means exclusive to them.) OK, maybe, but if you think that, you really should be a little perplexed when you notice how well all these irrelevant hubris-based accretions seem to be working for us.
I'm not really interested in rigorously maintaining a "grace-free intellectual square." But making arguments based in natural reason is perfectly, well, reasonable, and you can always move back and forth between more strictly philosophical and theological perspectives.
engaging and persuasive, and helpful in motivating the argument. This is kind of low-hanging fruit. And if some may find it unnecessary because we always took the despair books and the doomscrolling dismissively without bothering to explain why, that actually underscores the value of the project. Somebody should explain why! We shouldn't all just assume that it's obvious why these bestsellers are wrong!
Christian resilience is a fascinating theme, in part because it's tied up with Christian apologetics. if you really wrap your head around the amazing way that Christianity has outlived nations, languages, civilizations, empires, philosophies, and every other normal product of human history (if there's a case to be made for any exceptions, they are very few), it's really hard not to see that as a reason to give Christianity more credence as a candidate for being true. if you're planning to explain Christian resilience without including truth among the best candidate reasons, I wonder whether that argument is possible without considerable distortion. The best explanation of Christianity's unparalleled resilience really is precisely that God is moving in history through the Church. That point has been made before, for example by GK Chesterton, but that's no reason not to make it again. On the contrary, it's convenient, in a way, that people have come along who are so naively despairing as to give you a pretext for re-engaging the pleasant task of marveling at Christianity is miraculous durability. :)
I basically agree, and it doesn't seem to me like much of a stretch at all to take all these natural-reason-friendly strengths as arguments for Christianity's truth and the efficacy of God's grace within them. I've made this argument before in relation to orthodoxy specifically. Because of course some people like to make the case for a pared-down version of Christianity: The faith as a whole is true but maybe a lot of dogma are the bad kind of human "accretion." The real core of the Gospel was found in the early Church and the later stuff is a perversion. (A common Mormon position, for instance, though by no means exclusive to them.) OK, maybe, but if you think that, you really should be a little perplexed when you notice how well all these irrelevant hubris-based accretions seem to be working for us.
I'm not really interested in rigorously maintaining a "grace-free intellectual square." But making arguments based in natural reason is perfectly, well, reasonable, and you can always move back and forth between more strictly philosophical and theological perspectives.