An introductory course on logic could really serve the cause of the gospel among younger generations …

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that I love to discuss, well, pretty much anything with young people. I love to get to know them, listen to them, ask questions of them (and then listen to their responses). I also enjoy challenging them (once relationship is established)—especially re: why they believe what they believe.

I hope that the young people in my life would all say that I love them and I am genuinely interested in them in persons (because I do and I am). I also hope that they would say that I dearly hold to certain beliefs—I would even die for them. And because I believe truth is truth and Jesus is Truth, my heartfelt desire is that they would come to believe in (with confidence and assurance) and lay hold of (with all of their intellect, emotion, will, and actions) all that the Scripture (consisting of the Old and New Testaments) reveals about God.

But.

While they are learning and while they are thinking and formulating and doubting and questioning … I also hope that they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they never have to profess to believe “The Sunday School Answer” just to earn my acceptance, approval, or love. I want them to be able to understand and articulate “The Sunday School Answer” (for those of us who are Presbyterians, we call this “catechizing our children“), but there is a huge gulf between knowing the words and citations and even being able to explain the words and citations and actually believing the words and citations.

And thus. In our family, and whenever I have the joy of spending time with other young people, we read a lot and we memorize a lot. We do. I believe we have to have a working, shared lexicon to even have intellgible conversations. So that’s a starting point; a stepping stone. But then, in the context of relationship (which is filled with testimony), we also have to move on to basic logic. I just don’t know any other way to discuss the claims of Christ or any other important topic. To know what we believe and why we believe it (and what we reject and why we reject it), we must move past “I think it means …” and “For me, XYZ means …” and actually discuss truth claims and validity and logical fallacies. Otherwise, how can we possibly learn biblical exegesis and hermeneutics?

But maybe that sounds scary and hard to you. Like when my friends (who can cook without anxiety attacks) tell me to just “add a pinch of this” and “throw in a few spices” and, you know, actually touch the dough. Or the raw meat. Or even the simple, unassuming vegetable. Touch it? Sprinkle tiny dried leaves on it? Apply heat? Aaaaaaaaaauuuuuugggggghhhhhhh! You’ve lost me! I can’t do it! Too hard. Too hard. Too hard.

Is that how you feel about logic?

If so, I’d love to come alongside of you (OK, virtually come alongside of you unless you live in Billings) and encourage you that even though it may feel very hard and even unattainable like cooking feels to me), you can learn a few basics and then gently direct the young people in your life to people who have a little more knowledge and expertise than you. That’s why we have the Body! We all have different gifts. The world would be super duper introspective and overly verbal if everyone were like me, but apparently we all be super duper hungry and craving a “REAL MEAL” too.

(The “Real Meal” standard is one I do SO try to attain, but usually fail. It means that I have an actual recipe in mind. I have purchased ingredients. I have done something TO those ingredients (like chopping or grinding) and combined them in some fashion. AND I have applied heat. Everything else—ordering takeout, opening a boxed lasagna from Costco, dumping a bagged salad or box of cereal into a bowl—may get a CERTAIN level of nutrition into my family, but I give myself NO CREDIT as a supposedly fulltime homemaker. That’s all just faking it and failing in my self-evaluation book. And we fake it a lot in our family. Well. Except that Fred really likes to cook and he’s a great cook—so we fake it a lot when I’m responsible for meals. But otherwise, we do OK. But back to the point …)

We can’t all be good with colors. We can’t all do math without fingers or iPhones. And we can’t all be philosophy professors or theologians. But we can all learn some basic logic.

My plan was to now point you to a bunch of great resources that you might want to consider to get started, but instead I’ve spent the better part of the last two hours on discipline issues. Yeesh.

So here are some of my old blog posts on this topic that contain some links you might want to check out:

And one (hopefully) encouraging and inspirational quote from Pastor Kevin DeYoung:

“More and more, I’m convinced that one of the chief apologetic aims in our day is to get people to think. An introductory course on logic could really serve the cause of the gospel among younger generations.”

Amen! And with that, I must scoot.

Hope your day has been a blessed one—

Your friend,
Tara B.