Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Steve Wilkens is a philosophy professor at Azusa Pacific University and author of a primer on key thinkers and philosophers titled, Good Ideas from Questionable Christians and Outright Pagans: An Introduction to Key Thinkers and Philosophies, published by InterVarsity. He is also author of Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics and co-author of Christianity & Western Thought.

Why should someone today care what philosophers have to say?

I don't think Christians have an embargo on truth. We learn all sorts of good and useful things from folks who aren't believers, and I think that's true also in the realm of ideas.

I have rather a modest appraisal of philosophy. I don't see it as a means of salvation, but I certainly see a lot of philosophers providing some useful tools for me to think through the various elements of my salvation. I believe that God has been gracious enough to give a lot of very wise people some insights into truth. And I want to grab that.

Why do you call some Christian philosophers questionableChristians?

I'm poking fun at us because quite often within the evangelical world the very fact that people engage in philosophy makes them questionable. They're questionable to people for a lot of different reasons. Within the church, it's enough that they are philosophers to bring them under suspicion.

Let's go through these questionable Christians. Tell me what you would say a major contribution of Augustine would be. What was the context of his philosophical inquiry, and what is its contemporary significance.

I love Augustine because his biography can be read through the lens of his struggle with trying to figure out how evil could exist in a world where there is a good God. He was very serious about that question, very committed to truth. And he went through two very distinct types of philosophies trying to resolve this before he came to Christianity and found the most satisfying resolution to this question of how you could have a good God and evil in this world at the same time.

His resolution says that when we talk about evil we're not talking about a thing that stands apart from love, but instead we're talking about love that gets distorted and misdirected. This grows directly out of his understanding of God as love and God creating the world in love and creating things that are lovable. Our simpleness is seen in the fact that we take this beautiful gift that God's given us, and then we use it in such awful ways.

Descartes is one that a lot of Christians would put in the questionable Christians realm because he said, "I think therefore I am." He had a high commitment to the importance of doubt, or whether we can be certain about anything. What was Descartes wrestling with in context, and why does this have contemporary significance today?

One part of the context is the situation with Galileo, who had built a crude telescope and looked into the heavens farther than any human had ever seen, made a few calculations, and found out that we don't have a geocentric universe. The earth isn't the center of things. And he published these findings and was thanked for his fine scientific work by being condemned by the Catholic church and put under house arrest and threatened with death if he wrote any more about the subject.

Descartes had come to the same conclusions using mathematical models. He had a manuscript in and a publisher brought it back right away because he didn't want to go through the inquisition himself. So here's Descartes, who is a committed Christian, but at the same time is very concerned about the way Christians were treating scientific discovery.

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48