John Frame may be in retirement, but his book-writing hasn’t seemed to slow down at all.
I’m Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance, and we’re pleased today to talk with Professor Frame about his newest book, Christianity Considered: A Guide for Skeptics and Seekers.
John, congratulations on your new book, and thanks for talking to us about it today!
John Frame:
Thank you, Fred, good to talk to you and your listeners.
Fred Zaspel:
First, tell us what your book is about and what you’re hoping to accomplish. And who is your intended audience?
Frame:
Well, for the last 50 years I’ve been teaching theology at the seminary level and also apologetics, which is teaching students how to defend the Christian faith. I’ve written some books that were directed to students, that is, directed toward the other apologists; but I’ve never written a book that addressed unbelieving readers, specifically. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, and so, for some years I’ve been putting together a book that I call The New Mind. Now, I’ve learned that titles belong to publishers, not authors. My publisher thought it would be better to call it Christianity Considered, and I don’t believe in getting into fights with publishers on things like that. They called it A Guide for Skeptics and Seekers and that’s fine with me. These are the people that I want to write to, and also Christians who want to bring the gospel to friends who are skeptical and seeking.
Zaspel:
Explain what you mean, by the way, the difference between the old mind and the new mind. You wanted to have it in the title, but you do deal with that throughout the book, so why don’t you explain that for us.
Frame:
Yes, that’s a major theme in the book. I think that a lot of times when the people read Christian books they’re looking for evidence, and they’re looking for facts and things like that. What I want to suggest is that even more important is to examine the way we think about the facts, the way we think about the evidence. And the Bible addresses that very clearly. The Bible says that we need to be born again, that we need to have a new mind, which is the mind of Christ. And so, I tried to make it clear that if we’re going to make any progress in understanding the rationale for Christianity, we need to give some attention to the way we think. And I propose right at the beginning that maybe what we need to have is a new mind, a new way of thinking altogether.
Zaspel:
You mention that traditional apologetics has failed often to show clearly what it was that made the preaching of Christ so persuasive to people in the first century. Explain that for us – and just how do you account for the gospel success in the first century?
Frame:
What led me to ask that question is that I’ve read a lot of apologetics books and you know they set forth theistic proofs, causal arguments, and things like that. Which is all very nice, but when I read the Bible I don’t find very much of that. I don’t find the theistic proofs. I don’t find people enumerating historical evidence. There are some passages, like 1 Corinthians 15, that do that; but I have a special way of describing that chapter. But it seems to me that there’s something very unusual going on in the pages of Scripture that made the Christian faith persuasive to a lot of the people who heard it. I mean, imagine yourself standing in the Greek Areopagus listening to Paul preaching a sermon, and all of a sudden… you know, you’ve never heard of God, you’ve never heard of the Hebrew God, you’ve never heard of Jesus Christ, but something about that sermon gets through to you and makes this new religion seem persuasive, something you could give your life to. And that’s very peculiar so I tried to explain what I think is going on beneath the surface there. Of course, it has a lot to do with the new mind; it has a lot to do with the supernatural event from God which transforms people’s values and transforms the way they evaluate evidence and the way they evaluate sermons and things like that. I think that gives us a series of questions that can lead us in very interesting and important directions.
Zaspel:
Near the beginning of your book you say that “One cannot be truly educated without taking some interest in Christianity.” That’s an interesting starting point – explain that for us.
Frame:
Well, of course, in the modern Western culture, it used to be that everybody understood that Christianity was a foundational element. We’ve been through the Catholic Church and the Reformation and all the religious debates and everything like that, then we get into the 20th century it seems that people have forgotten a great deal of that. People just want to be secular; people just want to live their own lives. I use the word autonomous a lot, and autonomous means to think and to act on your own without any kind of religious foundation. So, what I say in these early chapters is that people want to understand Western civilization if they want to understand how culture has developed. Even if they’re not interested in God, initially, even if they’re not interested in Christ, they should, if they’re just going to be educated, if they’re going to understand something about the culture around them, they really need to have some understanding about Christianity and what it is and what it teaches.
Zaspel:
You make a point to express your disagreement with postmodernism, and you spend some time insisting on the necessity of objective truth. What is it about postmodernism that is objectionable, and why and how is this important in your approach?
Frame:
Well, objective truth is simply the idea that there is truth. We have the word objective just to underscore some things, but if the term truth is to have any meaning at all, it has to be the opposite of falsehood. If you’re going to believe in anything that’s true, whether it’s religious or philosophical or scientific or historical or whatever it may be, you need to believe that there are such things as truths as opposed to falsehood. Now we’re going through a period in our intellectual life where even that very basic assumption is questioned. We’re going through a period where subjectivism is dominant, where people are more interested in feelings than in facts, where people say, well, there’s no such thing as objective truth opposed to falsehood, but there’s only truth for you and truth for me and those truths may be very different. They may be even opposites of one another. So I want to get that out of the way pretty quickly in the book, and that’s why I emphasize objective truth.
Zaspel:
Several times in discussing the nature of belief you mention the “web of trust” that underlies it. What is that all about?
Frame:
We need to understand what knowledge is. I’m working from a background of philosophy and epistemology. Epistemology is the science of knowing. And what is knowing, after all? Well, sometimes we think of knowing as just learning how to attach words to things. I come across a book and I learn to use the word book to designate the book, that kind of thing. That’s the way we teach children how to talk, and to some extent that’s okay. But, eventually, we learn that we really can’t learn anything, we can’t come to know anything, unless we trust somebody. Even a little child who learns how to use the word book to designate actual books, has to learn to trust the adult who gives him the words, gives him the names to use. And that’s true when you get to school. When I got to school, at some point I learned that Harrisburg was the capital of Pennsylvania. How did I learn that? Well, I’d never gone there; I’d never done my own research; I didn’t know anything firsthand about the capitol building in Harrisburg, but I trusted people. I trusted my teachers. I trusted people who had written the books, and so on. And when you get to college and you get into really controversial things like ethics and aesthetics and so on and so forth, again, you have to decide whom you’re going to trust. There’s some groups of people who hold one thing and some who holds the opposite thing and eventually you’re going to have to decide. Who are the experts here? Who are the people who have real knowledge? And that is the question, “Whom do I trust?” I think that knowledge always boils down to a matter of trust.
Zaspel:
I thought your chapter on “Believing, Willing, and Feeling” was helpful. Explain for us the relation of intellect, will, and emotion to believing.
Frame:
Through the history of philosophy, people have often represented reason, emotion, and willing as three faculties up in the mind, up in the head, that are battling one another for supremacy. I think there was a cartoon movie once that used that kind of premise, but we all know that that’s not the way it is. I mean, what I will, of course, is influenced by what I believe. I will, I decide, to do something because I believe that I have certain options and that this option is better than that option, so my intellect influences my will. And, of course, the opposite is also the case, because if I’m trying to figure out whether there was a Big Bang or not, scientifically, I have to make a decision. I have to will what I’m going to believe, there. I have to decide whether to believe this theory or that theory, whether to believe this scientist or that scientist. And that decision is a willful decision, and so that decision influences my belief. That’s why Paul says in Romans 1, that although God is clearly revealed, in the world people repress the truth in unrighteousness. Well, that simply means they’re surrounded by evidence for God, but they don’t want to believe it. And that decision not to believe it is a willful decision. That’s the case where the will is influencing the intellect, influencing what I believe. And, of course, the emotions get in there the same way. Plato used to say we should always govern ourselves by the intellect and not by the emotions. Well, we all know that we never do that. We believe what we feel like believing, among other things. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Having a belief is like having a feeling. I feel that Tallahassee is the capital of Florida – that’s the belief that I’m most comfortable with. And so, my feelings influence my beliefs and they influence my will and it’s all kind of mixed up together and you have to choose from a whole organic complex.
Zaspel:
This all relates to the “new mind” you were talking about earlier.
Frame:
Exactly, yes. The new mind is like the old mind, of course. The new mind is a combination of all of these factors, so that shows how complicated it is. It’s not just accepting a few new facts to put in your fact barrel, it’s a matter of changing your whole way of thinking. And that means changing your believing and your willing and your feeling all at once.
Zaspel:
Before we sign off, give us a brief overview of your book so our listeners can know what to expect.
Frame:
The book starts off with these kinds of epistemological observations, observations about knowing. And then we get into questions about the role of God in all of this. And basically, God is the one who we trust supremely. I mean, If we get into questions about who we trust at this level and that level, and who do we trust to decide who to trust and so on and so forth, we get to higher and higher levels of trust and somewhere there must be somebody that we trust absolutely. And that person is the one that we call God. So I develop that as an argument for God. And then we talk through the book about all the different elements of Christianity – whether God reveals himself to us by speaking, whether we have a holy book like the Bible, and what about the teachings of the Bible? What about Jesus? Jesus is the Lord who died for our sins and rose again and calls us to believe in him. So there’s quite a bit of material there about Jesus and who he was and what he does for us. Then we talk about the Holy Spirit, and we talk about the Christian life, the way we live as disciples of Jesus. I have chapters there about going to church and praying and taking sacraments, and all the different things that Christians do that are sometimes different from what non-Christians do. And then eventually we get to talking about the return of Christ and talking about what all of this means for the way we think and the way we live.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to John Frame about his new book, Christianity Considered: A Guide for Skeptics and Seekers. It may be aimed at the skeptic and the seeker, but it is a helpful resource for Christians also in learning evangelism in the contemporary world – all on a very accessible level.
John, thanks so much for your faithful ministry and for talking to us today.
Frame:
Fred, thanks so much for having me on.
