Harry Blamires vs Randal Rauser; Amnesia is the New Opiate of the Masses

Randal Rauser has a celebratory post about Harry Blamires where writes:
Back in the early 1960s many people considered Harry Blamires, a budding Anglican theologian and literary critic, to be a younger C.S. Lewis. In his incisive book The Christian Mind: How should a Christian think?(1963) Blamires explores the question of how one’s Christian convictions ought to change the way one thinks. Like all great books, The Christian Mind has aged gracefully and its analysis continues to provide novel insight into the world around us.
Yes, indeed. I agree, but not in the way Rauser does. I think Blamires's book is an indictment on Rauser's ever changing chameleon approach to theology, something I'm sure Blamires would vehemently reject.

When I was in seminary at Lincoln Christian University (1979-1982) if there was one message Dr. James D. Strauss wanted his students to understand it was found in Blamires's book. The Bible verse most often quoted by Strauss was that "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Cor. 10:5). And there was only one way to do what Blamires was asking of us, which was best argued in Arthur Holmes's book, All Truth Is God's Truth.As I have said before, I agreed with Strauss then, and I agree with him now. The problem is that truly engaging the arguments of the scholars in the real world will undercut Christian thinking until there is no room left for Christianity, as it did with me.

Back to Blamires. Here is his diagnoses of the Christian intellectual malaise fifty years ago:
There is no longer a Christian mind. It is commonplace that the mind of modern man has been secularized. For instance, it has been deprived of any orientation toward the supernatural...It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the 20th century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic.

There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, the Christian ethic; a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality...But as a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion-- it's morality, it's worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which relates all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems--social, political, cultural--to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell.

My thesis amounts to this. Except over a very narrow field of thinking chiefly touching questions of strict personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world except for the purpose of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations. There is no Christian mind; there is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks.(pp. 3-4)
We have accepted secularism's challenge to fight on secularist ground, with secularist weapons and secularist umpire, before secularist audience and according to the secularist book of rules. (p. 117)
The thesis of this book is that the chances that the Christian mind will shake the foundations of secularist individualism are not very great at a time when secularism has all but shaken the Christian mind to pieces. (pp. 121-22)
Blamires offered a prescription for this malaise of course, but it either wasn't heeded or it can't be done at all.

Move forward thirty years. Has anything changed?

Mark Noll in his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mindreports in 1995 that: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind".

Doesn't look like it.

Move forward fifteen more years. Now we have a new problem, or so it's supposed.

Carl Trueman in his short 2010 book The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,argues that in today's world "religious beliefs are more scandalous than they have been for many years." The real problem isn't the lack of Christian thinking but rather that evangelicals no longer share a consensus on the gospel message.

Want to know why there isn't an evangelical consensus? It's because Christians want their theology to conform to the fashionable ideas of the day, says Blamires:
Who would think that Christian theology is a solid, object body of knowledge, in its essentials fixed and unchangeable? It is made to appear like a collection of capricious conjectures or majority opinions which change with the fluctuations of intellectual fashion. The notion that Christian teaching is in a state of perpetual flux, the notion of Christian truth has to be adapted to the needs of post-Freudian man, these are not at bottom otherwise rooted than the notion that examination papers have to be adapted to the capacities of postwar youth. (pp. 127)
Looks like it's going to get worse, if we can ever expect it to get better. The only drug that can effectively numb the minds of believers from the pain of it all, like Karl Marx's opiate, is amnesia, mind numbing amnesia. [Read the Link!]

I'm not an enabler, nor a drug dealer, nor someone who will let evangelicals sleep through fifty years of theology like Rip Van Winkle. No, I'm here to wake evangelicals up, hand them a cup of coffee, have them smell the roses, and then remind them. What we have here folks is little more than theological relativism, a theology that changes with the times, something Blamires would stand against. And yet Rauser admires Blamires. Keep in mind that Rauser teaches historical theology so he should know the history of theology to know this.

I'm not making this up folks.

George Orwell anyone? George Santayana? It's surely comedy fodder for George Burns (for us older folk) or George Lopez (for the younger ones).

Amnesia is now the new opiate of the evangelical masses. Karl Marx may have just missed the mark.

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