" BEWARE OF APATHESIM! - TIME TO REKINDLE OUR FIRST LOVE" - by Eric Metaxas and Stan Guthrie, Breakpoint.org, Sept 6, 2018;
http://www.breakpoint.org/2018/09/breakpoint-beware-of-apatheism/ [AS I SEE IT: Recently I came across how very few Christians actually spend time reading the Bible - not just each day but throughout the year! It's easy to say, "Well, I just don't have the time" or "I don't understand a lot of it." For me, that's been one of the benefits of giving up watching pro-football for the second year; I am amazed just how much more time I have to simply read the Bible and to look for helps when I don't understand something. (: (I'm also surprised by how much I really don't miss not spending several hours on Sunday watching pro-football.) I wonder how many of our excuses are just an unwillingness to MAKE time to get to know the Lord and His Word?! - Stan]
With apologies to Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists are old news. But we’ve [the Church's] got a bigger problem.
You remember them, don’t you? Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris? These so-called “New Atheists” drew crowds with their bombastic and occasionally clever attacks on God and theism. For a while their books were best sellers, “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great,” for example. But as atheist and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson recently wrote, “The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement.”
However, that’s not necessarily good news. Writing in The Public Discourse, Paul Rowan Brian and Ben Sixsmith warn of something even more insidious than atheism. Apatheism—that is, answering the “God question” with a shoulder shrug and a calm, “Whatever.” Brian and Sixsmith write, “With roots in the practical atheism and deism of the Enlightenment, ‘apatheism’ is embodied in French philosopher Denis Diderot’s famous remark that ‘it is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.’”
They cite K. Robert Beshears of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who says the West suffers from an “unholy trinity of apatheism”: a lack of reason to believe, supposedly because of science; a lack of motivation to believe, because someone else will worry about it; and a lack of will to believe, because religion “is just too much drama.”
The statistics suggest that they’re onto something. We’ve talked about the troubling “rise of the unaffiliated,” with 33 percent of twenty-somethings identifying as non-religious, or “nones.” If we’re tempted to say, “So what?”—maybe we’re part of the problem! You see, under the New Atheism, people were at least wrestling with the big issues of life and death. Now, too many of us can’t be bothered. All this brings to mind Jesus’ warning to the lukewarm, apatheistic church in Laodicea—that He was about to spit them out of His mouth.
So what to do about the New Apatheism? Many people don’t care about God because they don’t find Him compellingly beautiful, the summum bonum of human existence, as our Christian forebears did. They have no idea that this God is actively at work in history, and that we are part of His grand story. Why is that?
Perhaps we’re not very good at telling them the Christian story because we don’t know it that well ourselves. John Stonestreet often points this out when he speaks at colleges and churches: "We Christians too often fail to see how we ourselves fit into God’s grand narrative of the universe—from its beginning to its fulfillment when Christ returns and establishes a new heaven and a new earth."
I can recommend two easy-to-read, compelling books that can help you understand and better articulate that Grand Story. They are “The Story of Reality,” by Greg Koukl [https://colsoncenter.christianbook.com/reality-began-everything-important-happens-between], and “God’s Story in 66 Verses” by my BreakPoint colleague Stan Guthrie[[ https://colsoncenter.christianbook.com/verses-understand-entire-bible-focusing-verse/stan-guthrie/9781400206421/pd/206424].
Then there’s this: Perhaps because we don’t quite believe God and His amazing plan for our lives, we fail to live it consistently before a watching world. When the prophet Isaiah entered the temple, he was overcome with a vision of the Lord, exalted and seated high on His throne, with the angelic beings calling out, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” And you know what happened to Paul when he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. Who could be apatheistic after that?
How many visitors to our churches encounter the Risen Christ? Let’s face it—maybe they don’t because we’ve lost our first love and our holy fear of God, who promises to judge the living and the dead. May the Lord Jesus give us a fresh, world-changing vision of Himself—and may He give us the grace to lead others to His throne.
[italics and colored emphasis mine]
RESOURCES - As Eric encourages, let’s run from apatheism and continue to wrestle with “the big issues” as we demonstrate our love for God and neighbor, and our holy fear of the God who is sovereign over all.
"Apatheism: Engaging the Western Pantheon of Spiritual Indifference" - K. Robert Beshears | April 2016; https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:11094/datastreams/CONTENT/content
"Apatheism Is More Damaging to Christianity Than Atheism and Antitheism" - Paul Rowan Brian and Ben Sixsmith | Public Discourse | August 13th, 2018; http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/08/21919/
"10 reasons Americans go to church -- and 9 reasons they don't" - Daniel Burke | CNN | August 9, 2018; https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/09/us/pew-church-10-reasons/index.html
http://www.breakpoint.org/2018/09/breakpoint-beware-of-apatheism/ [AS I SEE IT: Recently I came across how very few Christians actually spend time reading the Bible - not just each day but throughout the year! It's easy to say, "Well, I just don't have the time" or "I don't understand a lot of it." For me, that's been one of the benefits of giving up watching pro-football for the second year; I am amazed just how much more time I have to simply read the Bible and to look for helps when I don't understand something. (: (I'm also surprised by how much I really don't miss not spending several hours on Sunday watching pro-football.) I wonder how many of our excuses are just an unwillingness to MAKE time to get to know the Lord and His Word?! - Stan]
You remember them, don’t you? Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris? These so-called “New Atheists” drew crowds with their bombastic and occasionally clever attacks on God and theism. For a while their books were best sellers, “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great,” for example. But as atheist and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson recently wrote, “The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement.”
However, that’s not necessarily good news. Writing in The Public Discourse, Paul Rowan Brian and Ben Sixsmith warn of something even more insidious than atheism. Apatheism—that is, answering the “God question” with a shoulder shrug and a calm, “Whatever.” Brian and Sixsmith write, “With roots in the practical atheism and deism of the Enlightenment, ‘apatheism’ is embodied in French philosopher Denis Diderot’s famous remark that ‘it is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.’”
They cite K. Robert Beshears of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who says the West suffers from an “unholy trinity of apatheism”: a lack of reason to believe, supposedly because of science; a lack of motivation to believe, because someone else will worry about it; and a lack of will to believe, because religion “is just too much drama.”
The statistics suggest that they’re onto something. We’ve talked about the troubling “rise of the unaffiliated,” with 33 percent of twenty-somethings identifying as non-religious, or “nones.” If we’re tempted to say, “So what?”—maybe we’re part of the problem! You see, under the New Atheism, people were at least wrestling with the big issues of life and death. Now, too many of us can’t be bothered. All this brings to mind Jesus’ warning to the lukewarm, apatheistic church in Laodicea—that He was about to spit them out of His mouth.
So what to do about the New Apatheism? Many people don’t care about God because they don’t find Him compellingly beautiful, the summum bonum of human existence, as our Christian forebears did. They have no idea that this God is actively at work in history, and that we are part of His grand story. Why is that?
Perhaps we’re not very good at telling them the Christian story because we don’t know it that well ourselves. John Stonestreet often points this out when he speaks at colleges and churches: "We Christians too often fail to see how we ourselves fit into God’s grand narrative of the universe—from its beginning to its fulfillment when Christ returns and establishes a new heaven and a new earth."
I can recommend two easy-to-read, compelling books that can help you understand and better articulate that Grand Story. They are “The Story of Reality,” by Greg Koukl [https://colsoncenter.christianbook.com/reality-began-everything-important-happens-between], and “God’s Story in 66 Verses” by my BreakPoint colleague Stan Guthrie[[ https://colsoncenter.christianbook.com/verses-understand-entire-bible-focusing-verse/stan-guthrie/9781400206421/pd/206424].
Then there’s this: Perhaps because we don’t quite believe God and His amazing plan for our lives, we fail to live it consistently before a watching world. When the prophet Isaiah entered the temple, he was overcome with a vision of the Lord, exalted and seated high on His throne, with the angelic beings calling out, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” And you know what happened to Paul when he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. Who could be apatheistic after that?
How many visitors to our churches encounter the Risen Christ? Let’s face it—maybe they don’t because we’ve lost our first love and our holy fear of God, who promises to judge the living and the dead. May the Lord Jesus give us a fresh, world-changing vision of Himself—and may He give us the grace to lead others to His throne.
[italics and colored emphasis mine]
RESOURCES - As Eric encourages, let’s run from apatheism and continue to wrestle with “the big issues” as we demonstrate our love for God and neighbor, and our holy fear of the God who is sovereign over all.
"Apatheism: Engaging the Western Pantheon of Spiritual Indifference" - K. Robert Beshears | April 2016; https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:11094/datastreams/CONTENT/content
"Apatheism Is More Damaging to Christianity Than Atheism and Antitheism" - Paul Rowan Brian and Ben Sixsmith | Public Discourse | August 13th, 2018; http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/08/21919/
"10 reasons Americans go to church -- and 9 reasons they don't" - Daniel Burke | CNN | August 9, 2018; https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/09/us/pew-church-10-reasons/index.html
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Praying Through the Open Doors World Watch List for persecuted believers:To learn more, please go to -https://www.opendoorsusa.org/take-action/pray/monthly-prayer-calendar/
Praying for Iran At #10 on the 2018 World Watch List and with a Church of 800,000 strong (out of 80.9 million), the main threat for believers in Iran comes from the government. The regime sees Christians, especially converts from Islam, as a threat and frequently imprisons believers for reaching out to Muslims— “crimes against the national security.” Throughout September, we’ll be focusing on our persecuted family in Iran. Please join us in praying with these secret believers.
September 9 | CENTRAL ASIA - Recently, a pastor was questioned and beaten by police to the point of unconsciousness. He is a faithful leader who has served the Lord for many years and asks for your prayers.
*Names changed to protect identities
September 9 | CENTRAL ASIA - Recently, a pastor was questioned and beaten by police to the point of unconsciousness. He is a faithful leader who has served the Lord for many years and asks for your prayers.
*Names changed to protect identities
Lack of reason, motivation, and will - very deadly indeed, especially the last one. I can imagine someone thinking to themselves, "Why would I want to get involved in religion, which has started wars and separated close friends? If any of it were true, then why do some many people disagree about it?" That's why it's great that this article has encouraged believers to return their first Love. When people walk in a way where it's obvious that they've been transformed by Christ, it makes others say, "Hey, whatever you have, I want it." It's not too late for all of us (believing or not) to stop being apathetic. Great article.
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