Newfrontiers Student Worker Day 07 (2) - Andrew Wilson

In what was the last Student Worker Day from Newfrontiers, the Holy Spirit inspired hearts and the Word of God was taught faithfully. There were the usual opportunities to meet new people and renew old friendships, and all of this made in a fantastic day in Oxford.

After the main session and lunch came a choice of three seminars.

• Apologetics: Defending The Faith
• Preparing For Graduation: What Next?
• Sex, Women, Baptism & CUs: Finding Answers To Tough Issues

I chose the first, which Andrew Wilson had renamed Scarecrows & Scripture. Andrew is an elder at King's Church Eastbourne and is an excellent teacher - ironically, even having done FP Impact which Andrew helps oversee, I don't know this from my GAP year experience. More from other contexts.

He started by quoting an idea from Francis Schaeffer of an "intellectual staircase" - the idea that the philosophers and thinkers in a society start to produce new ideas (or mostly rehashed ones in a new format) and given time, these trickle down into art and music, and eventually affect education and finally the culture at large. This can take decades. It's important for us to be able to engage with new ideas as they emerge so that in 15 years time when the big arguments in the culture start, we've already know the pros and cons, the arguments for and against.

Putting his title in context, he said that scarecrows are being put up in the culture which scare people away from the Bible and Jesus. These scarecrows tend to look scarier than they are. And the first indication that a person has been influenced by a scarecrow is that they can't give a reason why they believe (or don't believe in) something.

The seminar was split into two, looking at a culturally popular book in each half: The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It was very fast moving and contained more information than I could process (think Wayne Grudem's main session at Together On A Mission 06), let alone write down!

But his purpose wasn't to convey information, but to stir faith. To look at the information (on The God Delusion) he said, look at his new book Deluded By Dawkins (I first heard about this at Tim Suffield's blog) which engages with the factual innaccuracies in Dawkins' work.

One of Dawkins' biggest mistakes is to move from his strength in science and rationality to embark on a critique of the Bible, which is, by academic standards, done shockingly. It is good to see Christians not making the same mistake. By sticking to our strengths (the Bible and our knowledge of it) it is far easier to show Dawkins' work for what it really is.

So, this post has not been in any way a representation of what Andrew said, but a brief summary. He succeeded in stirring faith in me, and also hungry to engage people in discussion of Dawkins' book.