When it comes to what I research, one of the first challenges for me is to think through the following question:
“Why do you study something you don’t believe is true?”
These are my responses, in brief:
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- 1. Saying ‘it is such a godless area, why study that?’ is like saying ‘Saudi Arabia is such a hostile country; there are hardly any churches, you know. Why on earth would you go live and minister there?’
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- 2. I study it not because I believe it, but because I want to see where it leads those who do believe it.
A great deal of the secular academic landscape is filled not with bad reasoning, but with good reasoning that starts with bad assumptions. It tells us ruthlessly and uncompromisingly what the world would be like if there were no God. And that is an important thing to know. Christians study positions with bad assumptions not primarily to knock holes in them, though there are plenty of holes to be knocked, but to understand, along with the writers and thinkers themselves, where we end up if we take God out of the picture. It’s something like what Francis Schaeffer called “taking the roof off“, though often not as aggressively phrased as you sometimes find in Schaeffer. I prefer to call it “walking in someone’s shoes”, in the spirit of the proverb “Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes“. Before we wade in and pontificate as Christians on this or that position, it pays to step, as best we can, into the shoes of the one with whom we want to engage and see the world from their point of view: see what their animating values are; see what their unquestionable assumptions are; see what their ultimate goals are, and how they think they can get there. I’ve never come across a position that is evil in it’s own eyes (there may be such positions, but I suspect even if there were they would already have re-defined what is to be understood by “evil”), and until I can see the world through those eyes, and understand why a particular position makes the moves it does, why it thinks those moves are “good”, I don’t really have the right to engage with it.
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- 3. To reflect back on my own discipleship both to challenge and to be challenged by it.
This doesn’t always happen, but it happens often enough not to be dismissed. Just as I mentioned in the case of reading old books, reading people with a view of the world that differs greatly from a Christian view can often highlight our own blind-spots and compromises. The two dangers to avoid here are thinking that non-Christian writers always know better than Christians, and thinking that they never do.
