Archive: On Things Left Behind

By James V Heidinger II, Editor, Good News

Though we speak much of pluralism these days, at the same time I am hearing increasingly of theological liberals who cannot discuss theological issues with evangelicals for very long without becoming emotional, angry, accusatory, and—to put it bluntly—losing their cool.

One wonders, why the anger and cynicism? Why the hostility bitterly expressed toward various expressions of evangelicalism?

A partial explanation may come from an encounter C. S. Lewis had with men of the British Air Force in Norfolk, England, in 1941. Lewis was invited there to speak by Stuart Barton Babbage, then Chaplain of the heavy bomber squadron.

When advised that his audience would be mostly officers and few airmen, because the latter would experience considerable ostracism for attending religious services, Lewis decided he would share with them the cost of being a Christian.

After outlining the forsaking and denial of the Savior, culminating in the Crucifixion, Lewis went on to talk about what it had cost him personally as an Oxford don to follow Christ.

He remarked that one might expect to find within the university environment, and particularly Oxford University, a measure of tolerance and liberality, some recognition and acceptance of the sanctity of honest belief and conviction. Lewis noted that his liberal and rational friends had no objections to his intellectual interest in Christianity. Indeed, it was a proper subject for argument and debate. But his interest in seriously practicing it was going much too far.

With deep feeling, Lewis told the airmen he did not mind being accused of religious mania—he was accustomed to that. But what he was unprepared for was the intense hostility and animosity of his professional colleagues. There, in the academic community, Lewis unexpectedly found himself an object of ostracism, abuse. He could understand impatience but not indignation, criticism but not ostracism.

One is struck today by the intensity with which many church leaders reject the claims of evangelical faith. Few are ever neutral toward it. Rather, one senses an intellectual inoculation against evangelicalism which will scarcely allow objective investigation.

Yet, many of these same church leaders and theologians were reared in an evangelical environment as youth. Maybe this is a secret to their strange antipathy toward evangelical faith. That is, through college and seminary days they became convinced that evangelical faith was not intellectually defensible.

Maybe this is why many have joined the ranks of the scornful. It is a common defense mechanism we are all tempted to use to fortify ourselves in our own thinking—to deride unfairly that which we have chosen to reject.

Is it not inevitable, then, that when one has abandoned the faith of one’s father and mother, when one has forgotten the faith of one’s early childhood and church school days, when one views as indefensible the faith commitment that led one into the ministry in earlier years, when one smiles condescendingly at the naivete of the prayer-meeting faithful, when one has rejected the reliability and authority of Scripture, when one has denied the possibility of the supernatural in this aeon, or when one has embraced a lifestyle that contradicts the moral guidelines of Biblical faith—I say if these or any combination of these have transpired in one’s life, is not the normal and predictable response toward that which has been abandoned … scorn?