SPROUL: When I was a philosophy major myself, when I was an undergraduate in college, I
received all kinds of flak from my Christian friends who thought it was a leap into godlessness
to busy my mind with godless philosophy, and there was no end to the citations from the
sacred Scripture about "beware of godless philosophy."
But I came to the conclusion that you can't beware of something that you're not first
aware of it.
And I talk about having been converted to Christ in my freshman year in college.
And of course, that was the most significant event in my life—my conversion to Jesus.
I was just talking to my wife, Vesta, the other day.
Isn't it something that sometimes you can have a day in your life or a moment in your
life, that changes the entire course of your life forever?
And I said, I had such a day, when I was a college student.
I was a brand-new Christian.
I had to take Introduction to Philosophy as a requirement to satisfy social studies and
so on.
I was completely disinterested in it.
I sat in the back of the room and instead of listening to the lectures, I was reading
pamphlets that were copies of Billy Graham's sermons, because that's what interested me.
I wanted to know the Bible and nothing else but the Bible.
And one day my professor, who was the head of the philosophy department where I went
to school actually was a Christian, was giving a lecture on Augustine and Augustine's doctrine
of the creation of the universe, where Augustine talked about God's creating ex nihilo, through
divine fiat, or the divine imperative by simply saying, "Let there be," and reality came into
being.
I was so moved by that lecture that maybe it was an impulse, but I went from that lecture
room downstairs to the registrar's office and I changed my major to philosophy.
And that changed the whole course of my life and of my ministry, because the study of philosophy
helped me first of all understand the whole aspect of critical analysis and how to be
alert to logical fallacies and problems of that sort, and to learn the whole history
of theoretical thought, much of which has been used to help convey the truth of Christianity
to the whole world.
You know, the medieval university it was said that, "Theology was the queen of the sciences,
and philosophy was her handmaiden."
Well that's been true in my experience and in my teaching.
I've been very blessed to have been able to have that background in philosophy to help
me understand so much of what is involved in theological reflection.
Now at the same time there's much of philosophy, particularly contemporary philosophy, that's
a barren wasteland.
But it's a good thing to understand it and not be intimidated by it.
You know the one book that I read that I don't read critically in that sense is the Bible.
Because when I read the Bible, the Bible criticizes me.
I don't criticize it, but when I run into all kinds of apparent theologies like liberal
theology, I immediately see the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions that undergird
and have prompted these deviations from historic, orthodox Christianity.
So it's been a very great blessing for me to have that background in philosophy, so
I commend you for it.