“But if a robust Christian faith could handle non-Christian learning without compromising, it was all too easy for Greek and Roman thought forms to creep into the cracks and chinks of a faith which was less and less founded on the Bible and more and more resting on the authority of church pronouncements.” — Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?

Schaeffer is speaking here about the changes taking place during the Middle Ages in which human reason began to be as important to the church as revelation. You can trace much of the destructive influence of this situation by doing even a cursory study on the history of the Catholic church. However, note the first sentence. The inference is that if we approach human reason (philosophy, science, etc.) while standing on the firm foundation of what Schaeffer calls a “robust” Christian faith we gain something. This begs the question , “What does a robust Christian faith look like?” (It also begs the question, “What is non-Christian learning?”, but we will defer that to another time.)

Paul gives us pictures of this robust faith throughout the New Testament. The robust faith is one in which the glory of God is the ultimate goal. The robust faith is concerned not with blind obedience to a set of rules (can you say Pharisee?), but with a transformation of the self as Paul speaks of in Romans, and again, this transformation is not for our ultimate good, but for the glory of God.

Indeed, if we take Paul’s example it could be said that the robust faith must embrace non-Christian learning in order to follow the directive that we are to always be “ready to give a defense”. Of course, by embrace we do not necessarily mean agreement. Paul was familiar with the non-Christian philosophy of the first century, and it could be argued that it is even more critical for the Christian apologist (that is all of us right?) today to have a clear understanding of the non-Christian philosophy surrounding us in order to combat ideas that are simply false. However, it is also important to remember that all truth is God’s truth, and God has not chosen to give a comprehensive revelation in the Scriptures. For instance, the Bible does not teach us the science of mathematics, yet we know that two plus two does indeed equal four.

In the end we we must constantly ask ourselves two questions as we interact with non-Christian ideas: “Is my faith a robust transformational faith with the glory of God as its highest goal?”, and “Is the non-Christian philosophy I am studying, and the way I am interacting with it helping to fulfill that goal?”