By S.D. Davis for Apostoic Venn.
People have always asked me the same question. Or more accurately, they’ve used a pretense to dismiss what matters most. “Why does logic even matter?” Among Christians the variant becomes, “Why does logic matter; since the gospel is what’s really important?”
This question refutes itself. Anyone who attempts to disprove the importance of logic, must invoke logic’s rules to do so.
P1: The Gospel is important.
C: Therefore logic is not.
This is nonsense.
The question is not “do we use logic?”, but: “how well, or how poorly do we use logic?” Therefore, I propose a different frame.
P1: Since we must use logic, as inevitably as we must breathe.
P2: Since it is better to do a thing well, rather than to do it poorly
C: Therefore, we should use logic well.
Paul saw this tension 2,000 years ago, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
To the Jews seeking a sign, Jesus brought signs and wonders. To the Greeks seeking wisdom, Jesus is the eternal Logic of God. But to modern Americans, who are off somewhere having a feeling about themselves, Jesus calls them to contrition, repentance, humility, poverty-of-spirit.
Admittedly Jesus has a way of presenting Himself to each of these cultures which shatters and disperses their preconceptions about Messiah and “the Unmoved Mover.” Nevertheless, there remained within both the Jewish and Greek worldviews, a point of contact for the Gospel to touch, take hold, and transform the hearer.
When we move in a world without wisdom, our Gospel (admittedly all-important) slides off the mind like so much water off a duck’s back. This is like the parable of the sower in which seed fell upon the path and birds came and immediately stole it away.
The work we do here at Apostoic is foundational work, preparatory work. We seek to plow and harrow so that our Gospel might yield thirty and sixty and a hundred-fold. Admittedly, the Gospel can do much in its own right to restructure a broken mind, but when the damage is as pervasive as what we see in America today, Apostoic employs very targeted remediation.
Thinking is important! If no rational wind has come to dry-out the deluge of feelings and relativism, our Gospel is like Noah’s dove, finding no place to rest.
If the gospel is a square-peg, the mind of our culture is a round-hole. There’s little-to-no place in the post-modern mind for the claims of the gospel to even make sense. Faced with this dilemma, we can proceed, in true Neanderthal-fashion, to press our square-peg harder into the round-hole. However, we cannot succeed without damage to either the peg or the hole, and what kind of success is that? At Apostoic, we enter this conversation with rasps and files to try to give corners to the round-holes. And like the rasp, we may sound annoying. It is not the nature of a challenge to be pleasant.
Normal humans grow over time in their understanding of their faith. Therefore, Apostoic sees knowledge and logic as nurturing to faith. Likewise where knowledge and logic are lacking, deformed, dysfunctional, we shall often find those same defects in the accompanying faith.
When some argue “Logic isn’t important; only the Gospel.” To me that sounds like, “Reading isn’t important, only the Gospel.” As surely as you need reading to decode the letters on the page, you need logic to understand the meaning of the sentences you just read.
When your mind is trained in logic, life becomes more contented. You stop being tossed by every cultural wind. You make wiser decisions in parenting, work, and relationships. You become resilient against the lie that “diversity is our strength” when incompatible people are forced together. But of greater importance is this.
Your witness for the gospel makes gains in effectiveness, because the potential to understand it is being regrown by the very seeds of logic you are planting. It is this work to which Apostoic Venn attempts to turn its hands, bringing readers and app users back to the fundamental language of the universe; the logic that used to be a prerequisite to all learning. We hope to encourage Christians to undergo this fundamental formation, that they might be better equipped, not only to faithfulness and stronger aversion to sinful living (always illogical), but to gain the ability to commend the faith intelligibly to others. When the listener is confronted with irrefutable axioms that address their very real intellectual and spiritual obstacles to faith, they experience a jolt, admitted or not.
That’s why Apostoic integrates biblical truth and virtues with Stoic reason; self-control, logical thinking, and the mental discipline that refuses emotional reactionism. Our parables expose distraction tactics, anger cycles, and forced-speech folly. Our Logic Slap app arms everyday believers with quick, memorable ways to restore reason in conversations. Every essay, every series on self-control from Man of Steel, every homily on filling time with good works is designed to turn the soil of post-modern relativism so the gospel can finally find a place to grow.
The gospel remains the power of God for salvation. But, we live in a time in which most minds have been shaped for decades by illogical repetitions, trained and disciplined in principles that simply cannot be; as were their parents and grandparents before them. In this environment, clearing and tilling the ground, seeding it with logic once more, is a matter of great urgency. Apostoic Venn exists to support this essential work.
Premise 1: Since the Gospel is the most essential knowledge for mankind
Premise 2: Since the Gospel is expressed in propositional truth statements
Conclusion: Therefore logic is needed in order for the gospel to be understood.
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