Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a definite melting down of the assurance of faith. Secularization makes the Christian faith seem less real, privatization makes it seem merely a private preference, and pluralization makes it seem just one among many.

Worldliness is always a spiritual myopia. It falls for the spirit and system of the age and fails to correct itself through the correcting lenses of the perspective of the global (the Church in other continents), the historical (the Church in other centuries), and above all, the eternal (the Word of God across all places and times). Over

As Francis Schaeffer pointed out (and his whole apologetics turned on this point), "The more logical a non-Christian is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions."41 There

what matters for each of us is the adequacy and truth of what we come to believe is the meaning of life—and therefore the source from which we derive our sense of identity, purpose, ethics and community.

The faithfulness principle (of the conservative) and the flexibility principle (of the liberal) are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary if Christians are to follow their instructions and remain simultaneously "in" the world but not "of" it.

The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.

With the excesses of the gender revolution the revolt against terms and categories becomes a revolt against reality, and all the rest of us are pressured to deny the obvious, believe in the incredible, and go along with the charade of the emperor's new clothes. ("Only a woman can get pregnant," but such truisms are now held to be false and offensive.)

Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.