©2015 Third Column Ministries
Jul 15, 2015
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Introductions
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Book for this class
Two editions of this book.
First edition 1997
Second edition revised and
updated 2014
Some chapters taken out
new ones put in
Old edition has an audio
book format
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The book covers 4+1 areas
• Why the mind matters in Christianity
• How to develop a mature Christian mind
• What a mature Christian mind looks like
• Guaranteeing a future for the Christian mind
• Appendix recommended resources
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Recommended Books
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The Problem
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Why this class?
• Why a class on loving God with all our minds?
• Why are you interested in this class?
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Discussion
What does “For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” (Proverbs 23:7) mean?
How doe we find out what it means?
What did the author mean in the original context?
We need to read it in context.
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When you sit down to dine with a ruler,
consider carefully what is before you,
and put a knife to your throat
if you have a big appetite;
don’t desire his choice food,
for that food is deceptive.
Don’t wear yourself out to get rich;
stop giving your attention to it.
As soon as your eyes fly to it, it disappears,
for it makes wings for itself
and flies like an eagle to the sky.
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Don’t eat a stingy person’s bread,
and don’t desire his choice food,
for it’s like someone calculating inwardly.
“Eat and drink,” he says to you,
but his heart is not with you.
You will vomit the little you’ve eaten
and waste your pleasant words.
Don’t speak to a fool,
for he will despise the insight of your words.
Proverbs 23:1-9 (HCSB)
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“There is no longer a Christian mind.”
- Harry Blamires
“Christians view humble
ignorance as being more
noble than a cultivated
mind.”
Richard Hofstadter Anti-
intellectualism in
American Life
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My people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge.
Hosea 4:6
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The Battlefield
“…thought control, as conducted through the agency of the national media
and related elements of the elite intellectual culture.”
Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, Thought Control in Democratic Societies
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"The battle for humankind's
future must be waged and won in the public school
classroom...between the
rotting corpse of
Christianity...and the new
faith of humanism.
Humanism will emerge
triumphant."
• John Dunphy; The
Humanist;
January/February, 1983
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College is a battlefield of ideas
FreeRepublic.com
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College is a battlefield of ideas
FreeRepublic.com
“[Professors] are rightfully
unimpressed with the inability of
most Christian students to
defend their beliefs.” Frank Turek
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"Unless one receives a strong religious grounding in a religious
school and /or religious home, the average young person in
the Western World is immersed in a secular cocoon. From
elementary school through graduate school, only one way of
looking at the world— the secular— is presented. The typical
individual in the Western World receives as secular an
indoctrination as the typical European received a religious
one in the Middle Ages. I have taught college students and
have found that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of
the most elementary religious arguments and concepts—
such as the truism that if there is no God, morality is
subjective— is total.“ – Dennis Prager
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Recent Studies
• Percentage of students leaving the faith while in college
61%
Barna
Study
2006
66%
Assemble
of God
Study
70%
LifeWay
Research
2007
88%
SBC
Family
Life 2002
35%Return to
faith later
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Not Equipped
• “…it’s not so much that Christian minds are lost at college —it’s that Christian minds rarely get to college. They rarely get to college because many parents and churches emphasize emotion and ignore the biblical commands to develop the mind, which means that most kids skip off to college equipped with nothing more than feel-good emotionalism.”
• Frank Turek
• “A tepid Christianity cannot withstand a rabid secularism.”• Ravi Zacharias
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Salt has lost it’s saltiness
“You might expect that parents who are born-again Christians would
take a different approach to raising their children than did parents
who have not committed their life to Christ, but that was rarely the
case.“
- WorldNetDaily.com
“For years we have reported research findings showing that born-
again adults think and behave very much like everyone else. It often
seems that their faith makes very little difference in their life.”
- Barna Group
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As a class we listened to an
interview by Peter
Boghossian, author of A
Manual for Creating Atheists.
Class discussion follows.
Listen to what Boghossian
says about Christians and
Faith.
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Listen to the interview by Peter
Boghossian, author of A Manual for
Creating Atheists Paperback
“Faith is an unreliable epistemology”
“The book helps talk people into a
reliable epistemology”
“God is a conclusion someone
comes to when they have an
unreliable epistemology:”
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Listen to the interview by Peter
Boghossian, author of A Manual for
Creating Atheists Paperback
“I am trying to lead people to live
thoughtful and examined lives”
“We are trying to move people to
the adult table”
He wants 10,000 to go and confront
people of faith “Intervention”
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Review
“The problem on the side of the
church is not lack of information.
The problem is desire to have that
information and awareness of the
problem a lack of information
causes. When someone abandons
the life of the mind, it is sad. When a
Christian does it, it is a travesty.”
Nick Peters
Deeper Waters Christian Ministries
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• Faith in vs. Faith that
• Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels
• by J. Warner Wallace
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Resources
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Recommended Books to start with
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Thank you for participating!
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