[Questioner] Dr. Craig I think I can speak for all of us in thanking you for your faithfulness
to God's calling and for equipping the body of Christ to share our hope and our
faith winsomely with the world. And I guess my question for you would be, in
light of... it seems like the culture is changing very fast right now, and it's
being manifested in the universities in particular.
I guess my question for you would be you've talked about philosophy
and philosophy departments as a beachhead to perhaps
re-engage with the university and re-engage with the culture, and I guess I
would just ask you, how do you see that project is going right now in light of
so much going on there? [Craig] What our brother is referring to is a renaissance of
Christian philosophy that's been going on over the last half-century or so.
Back in the 1940s and 50s there were virtually no Christian philosophers
visible in the United States, and books written by Christians in philosophy were
virtually non-existent. Same with apologetics, all you had maybe
was Cornelius Van Til and Gordon Clark back in those days. Today we are
awash in apologetic materials, and ministries, and literature, and videos, and
so forth, and I think this awakening among the grassroots in the churches of
Christian apologetics is part of the fruit of this renaissance
in Christian philosophy as it trickles down out of the ivory tower into the
pews, so to speak. And this is ongoing; I am very encouraged. I see a new
generation of young Christian philosophers coming up through graduate
school to take the place of the older philosophers that are retiring.
Alvin Plantinga said a few years ago that he thought that the number of
Christians among graduate students in philosophy was 50% greater than the
number of Christian philosophers that there are today. Now if that's even close
to true, that holds great promise to the future. Now to get back to a question
that was asked earlier I want to connect with, with the collapse of the mainline
denominations in the United States, like the Episcopalian Church, the Catholic
Church, Presbyterian Church, and so forth, what has happened is that Christianity
has lost its cultural influence in the United States, and more and more the
middle ground is emptying out. We're becoming more and more polarized.
You're either a secularist or you're an evangelical Christian, but that middle
ground of nominal mainline Christians is rapidly emptying out in our culture. What
that means is that if our culture is not to go down the drain, we have got, as
evangelicals, to win back that lost ground that the mainline denominations
have lost. We have got to beat the secularists at their own game; we have
got to be better scientists, better philosophers, better thinkers than them.
We need to be involved in politics, and in entertainment, and in sports, and all
the rest. I just so longed to see a revival in this country where
evangelical Christianity will grow and grow and begin to assume a position of
cultural influence that was once held by these mainline denominations back in the
1950s. In the most recent Pew studies that I've seen, evangelical Christianity
was the only group among Christian groups that is holding its own as a
percentage of the U.S. population, somewhere around 25 percent or slightly
more, whereas Roman Catholics and all these other
groups are just plummeting. But evangelicals are holding their own,
and we need to keep doing that, and to do better than that, by evangelizing, and
sharing the gospel, defending the faith, and seeking to be salt and light in a
decaying culture.