She found a helpful and beautiful and simple way of saying something I’ve tried very hard to say many times myself in writing. What’s more, the Bible itself rejects that claim.… Most of the world’s Christians are neither white nor Western, and Christianity is getting less white Western by the day.Īt the cross, the most powerful man who ever lived submitted to the most brutal death ever died, to save the powerless. The same reasons make the claim that Christianity is a Western religion indefensible. But there are at least three reasons why no one in his or her right mind would claim that literacy is innately Western: first, literacy did not originate in the West second, most literate people today are not Westerners and third, it is frankly offensive to the majority world to suggest that they are literate only by appropriation. That approach makes for a lot of individual points of insight, and of telling argument.Ĭalling Christianity “Western” is like calling literacy “Western.” Western culture has undoubtedly been shaped by literacy, and Westerners have sought to impose literacy on others-often to the detriment of traditional living.
I’m in the process of wondering if the viewpoint is mainly a help for me (which isn’t a bad thing). As a presuppositionalist (who doesn’t like to ride the label, and who believes in the value of evidence because Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15), I observe that my own tribe’s arguments don’t always get that kind of honing… I don’t seem often to run into people who can really understand what I’m saying when I go presupp on them it’s all too philosophically demanding. Her twelve chapters-one per objection to the faith-are generally solid, evidentialisticky but sophisticated but lay-friendly treatments that have certainly been honed by actual use in the real world. She has an evangelical upbringing and a Cambridge education, a PhD in literature. In McLaughlin’s, it was through her work with the Veritas Forum. In Keller’s case, that was with young, upwardly mobile New York urbanites. Like Tim Keller in his The Reason for God, McLaughlin is delivering the fruit of her years involved in frontline Christian apologetics. So here I go: McLaughlin is easy to read, has done some good homework, has a compelling personal story, and writes with a British accent so clearly she is smart okay you can’t deny it.
Third, to be honest, was that Crossway was willing to give me a free copy in exchange for an honest review, no strings attached.
Second was the author: I read a piece of hers on TGC that I liked. I actually assumed it was a non-Christian book. What first attracted me to Rebecca McLaughlin’s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion was the title.
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