You Can Smell When You Can’t Say a Word
“Patricia French Cosmetics, created especially for Christian women.…”
Those words caught my eye, riveted my attention, in the midst of other ads for old books, folding tables, safes, and a fundraising dinner on a two-page spread in a Christian magazine. Or maybe it was the blonde, bare-shouldered woman in the ad.
What are “cosmetics created especially for Christian women”?
Maybe mud packs from the River Jordan.
Or Howfirma foundation cream, Whiter-Than-Snow cleansing cream, Charisma moisturizer.
Total Joy deodorant.
Skinner astringent.
My Salvation perfume.
Myrrh cologne.
Fuller’s soap (99 44/100 per cent pure).
Thou perfume.
Ephesians five-two-seven wrinkle cream.
Stick-on plastic fingernails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Thumbnail in contrasting ivy green.)
Barefoot cool stick-on plastic toenails, with the Four Spiritual Laws imprinted thereon. (Big toe: choice of Pat Boone’s, Andrae Crouch’s, or Tom Netherton’s photograph, all in living color.)
Come to think of it, I may be on the wrong track completely. Maybe these cosmetics have a special quality, something that sets Christian woman apart. Maybe if a non-Christian uses them, she’ll turn ugly, or her toenails will fall off.
That would be helpful. Then we could tell Christian women from non-Christian women by smelling them or looking at their toes.
EUTYCHUS VIII
Beware of Philosophy
Many years of frustration received an outlet through Norman Geisler’s article (“Philosophy: The Roots of Vain Deceit,” May 20) on the relationship between evangelicalism’s problems with inerrancy and her relative ignorance of philosophy. The article was excellent. It should be made to be a “forced reading requirement” for the tenure of all evangelical seminary professors. Graduating as I did from one of the evangelical bastions of the East, I have had firsthand experience of the dangers of ignorance, especially in the biblical departments where professors rejected “Aristotelian” thought forms as culture bound. The problem, of course, was that they accepted the “unculture” bound models of existentialism!
RICHARD E. KNODEL, JR.
Church of the Living Word
Volant, Pa.
Can Dr. Geisler state the philosophical credentials for propositional truth? If so, then … let him do it. If he can’t, then maybe it is he and his colleagues … of whom we should beware lest they spoil us through their lack of philosophy.
S. BOWEN MATTHEWS
Wilmington, Del.
If Professor Geisler would improve the quality of evangelical philosophizing, he should try harder to avoid the criticisms he delivers against others. In particular: (1) He implies that anyone with proper philosophical training will be able to divorce Kant’s idealism from Plato’s idealism and attribute modern theological difficulties to Kant and not to Plato. Historians of philosophy, however, have consistently emphasized the unbroken line connecting Plato and Kant. I myself delved into the linkage as represented by the ineffable neo-Platonic mystical tradition (see my Cross and Crucible, Nijhoff). Merely an examination of the index references to Plato in H. J. Paton’s monumental Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience will prove instructive—if only to show that Geisler is not much of a Kant specialist. (2) Geisler implies that I regard Wittgenstein as the philosophical savior of evangelicalism. Hardly. I have made entirely plain in my writings that Wittgenstein was no Christian, and I never suggested that he himself believed there could in fact be a “book on ethics that would destroy all the other books in the world.” As far as we know, Wittgenstein died an unbeliever who did not see how anything transcendental could in principle pass verificational tests. But I maintained—and I continue to maintain—(1) that Incarnational Christian faith can speak epistemologically to the very issues Wittgenstein thought insoluble, and (2) that Wittgenstein saw, far more clearly than most thinkers in the history of philosophy (including Geisler’s anachronistic Thomists), the limits of metaphysical inquiry apart from Incarnation. Feigl was right that “philosophy [in the sense of traditional metaphysics] is the disease of which analysis [the analytical techniques of which Wittgenstein was father] should be the cure.” … I received my degree with honors in philosophy (and Phi Beta Kappa) at Cornell, with E. A. Burtt … as my mentor, and I will always consider the experience most valuable. But, quite frankly, having observed at fairly close hand the effects of speculative philosophical studies on evangelical students—and the frequent neutralizing of keen apologetic minds in the process—I will be forgiven for suggesting that history, science, and the law (with their hardheaded concern for concrete facts) offer a better route to a solid evangelical world view and a proper perspective on the inerrant Scriptures than what Geisler practices philosophically.
JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY
Strasbourg, France
Geisler’s reconstruction of the philosophic problems underlying questions of inerrancy remind me of Francis Schaeffer’s endless circles each representing yet another philosophic construction destroying the former and claiming a brief reality of its own only to be done in by yet another. Geisler does not quite agree with Montgomery’s circle so he crosses it out and tries for one of his own.… By the time we’re through, each philosopher will get his chance to bear the blame for our “inerrancy problem.” Are we now to add this litany of philosophical errors to our confession …?
LERON HEATH
Valley Community Church
Pleasanton, Calif.
It was a fascinating article yet almost alarming. The unstated implication, as I read it, is that evangelical Christianity must produce one (or more) official secular philosophies, which must then be confessed in order truly to be a “Bible-believing Christian.” This would be the death of intellectually respectable evangelical Christianity, in my mind.
RUBIN L. LUETHE
Church of the Epiphany
Chehalis, Wash.
Geisler concludes by urging us to refute Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard and to heed C. S. Lewis. How does Geisler answer Dr. Paul Holmer’s highly acclaimed book C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Life and Thought, which indicates that Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Lewis fit together perfectly to provide us with the most adequate of Christian philosophies? I can’t locate a real analysis of Holmer’s book anywhere, just high praise. I don’t know how to evaluate his unusual view of Lewis’s epistemology. Many of us who are concerned about philosophy lack the education to handle it. Help, please!
KATHRYN LINDSKOOG
Orange, Calif.
The Well-Churched Inner City
There is so much in Keith Phillips’s article (“No Salt in the City,” May 20) that needs to be said—shouted from the housetop. If an earthquake would strike us here, on the South Side of Chicago, help would pour in. But when arson makes us look like a bombed-out city, we are left with the scars.
I don’t know where Mr. Phillips came to his figure of 95 per cent of the people living in the inner city being unchurched. That is where he is way off base. If there is a native, indigenous industry in the inner city, it is churches. Old streets of retail establishments become streets of storefront churches, liquor stores, bars, beauty shops and record stores. On any block that is commercial there will be from four to six churches or more. Then, of course, all of the churches left by fleeing whites have new names and readymade congregations who have moved in and established themselves. None but flourishing congregations can buy such buildings and maintain them. If being churched is it—or for that matter being evangelically churched—then the inner cities should be havens of righteousness. Sears and Chicken Unlimited cannot cut the mustard here, but new churches spring up and flourish. We mainline churches on the other hand have severe problems of survival.
CLYDE M. ALLISON
Emerald Avenue Presbyterian Church
Chicago, Ill.
Perhaps the Key
Klaus Bockmuhl’s article “Is There a Christian ‘Life-style’?” (May 20) contains probably the most profound idea concerning Christian sanctification: listening to God to act on his initiative. The article focused on John 5:30 … but let me also add the oft-quoted Revelation 3:20 as well as John 14:10. Perhaps “listening to God” is the key to mending the breach between charismatics and evangelicals.
GERALD J. ROTHAUSER
Director
RothLion Productions
Indianapolis, Ind.
