Engaging Unbelief
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Just finished reading Engaging Unbelief by Curtis Chang. Very interesting book. He looks at books by Augustine and Aquinas (City of God and Summa contra Gentiles) with the idea of seeing how they each did apologetics and how this might be useful for us in the face of post-modernism. He sees the context for each book as a useful parallel for today — each writer is facing a major change to the culture and is trying to engage that change. In both cases, Chang sees them taking a three step approach: entering the new story, re-telling it to bring out the unresolved plot-tensions or problems and then showing how it fits within the larger Christian story (‘a more compelling tale’), with the plot-tensions resolved. He then rounds up with thoughts on our current situation. Considering the book was written about 5 years ago, he does well in identifying issues (e.g. the now hot-topic of atonement theories), as well as kicking off interesting thoughts (e.g. ‘entering our challengers’ story will mean entering the movie theatre with them’). Definitely a book that should be more well-known.
Chang’s basic approach seems very incarnational: entering the stories of others and meeting them there. I like it a lot.
Of course, the other lesson from these books is that we have to be careful that our story captures those around us, not the other way around. The over-dependence of later Christians on Plato and Aristotle, suggests that, even if Augustine and Aquinas got it right those using their works later lost perspective. A similar problem to the one we see with modernism now. Better make sure we don’t make the same mistake with post-modernism, I guess…
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I forgot to add when I originally wrote this: I’m guessing this incarnational approach is close to what Paul meant when he said ‘To the Greeks, I become Greek’, etc…
Tags: apologetics, books, Engaging Unbelief (Chang)
One Response to “Engaging Unbelief”
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jonnyjpg Says:
September 7th, 2005 at 9:06 am
sounds excellent. i’d love to read it.
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