Kenneth Richard Samples - 7 Truths That Changed the World (Reasons to Believe): Discovering Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas

Historic Christianitys Dangerous Ideas

Who said anything about safe? Course he isnt safe. But hes good. Hes the King, I tell you.

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

T his line from my favorite book in C. S. Lewiss remarkable childrens series, The Chronicles of Narnia , makes it clear that Aslan, the Christ figure in the story, is not a tame lion. But his being dangerous does not rule out his profound benevolence.

Like Lewiss ferocious feline, ideas, including those of formal belief systems, can also be dangerous. And if Christianity encompasses ideas that are not safe, then is it not, therefore, a risky and even hazardous religion?

One of my longtime colleagues and friends, an atheist, agrees that historic Christianity includes dangerous ideas . From his atheistic point of view, however, the Christian faith affirms irrational and superstitious ideas that are not just unsafe but harmful. He believes these ideas are injurious both for those who believe them as well as for those who are affected by them. In fact, the emergence of the New Atheism movement was fueled by the conviction that religion is not merely false but indeed harmful .

In philosophy, theology, and science, provocative ideas that challenge the reigning paradigm reflect a radical shift in perspective. These ideas can have major implications for how people view reality, truth, rationality, goodness, value, and beauty, and they can sometimes contravene what many people believe. Not only do such revolutionary ideas threaten accepted beliefs, but they also contain explosive world- and life-view implications for all humanity.

Historic Christianity embodies numerous beliefs that are theologically and philosophically volatile (in the best sense of the term). The Christian faith contains powerful truth-claims that have transformed the church and turned the world upside down. Christianitys initial dangerous ideas started with twelve men (Jesuss apostles) and within three hundred years came to dominate the ancient Roman world. And for more than a thousand years after that, the historic faith dominated all aspects of Western civilization.

In the last couple of centuries, however, the world has been exposed to ideas that were dangerous in their own right. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwins theory of evolution and Friedrich Nietzsches God is dead proclamation challenged everything Christian society held dear. These profound and unsettling naturalistic perspectives have propelled the secularization of todays educational institutions of the Western world. Accordingly, the public square in the West also increasingly reflects such beliefs and values.

The late twentieth century also saw the rise in the West of a new radical pluralistic and inclusivistic perspective. Postmodern thinkingin reaction to both traditional religion and secularismreflects a mixture of relativism, subjectivism, and pluralism. Thus todays marketplace of ideas is a smorgasbord of skeptical, secular, and religious viewpoints. But traditional religion now competes with religious inclusivism and pluralism.

The historic Christian truth-claims presented in this book can, then, be viewed as having a renewed sense of danger. The reason is that much of society today knows so little about the specific beliefs of classical Christianity. Therefore, many people are unaware of historic Christianitys unique perspective on God, Christ, the world, humankind, values, death, and suffering. The advance and entrenchment of secularism over the last couple hundred years make these Christian ideas fresh and explosive. Not safe, but good.

This book is divided into seven sections that address seven of historic Christianitys dangerous ideas. Each section is composed of two chapters that set forth why historic Christian truth-claims are both dangerous and good. The following summary gives you a brief foretaste of how these revolutionary ideas are framed, explained, and defended. This book is intended as an apologetic for the Christian faiths central beliefs and values.