In When Athens Met Jerusalem, John Mark Reynolds demonstrated how Athens (Greek philosophical pursuit) prepared the way for Jerusalem (divine revelation) to launch Christianity in the first century.   As one commentator put it, Christian thought is incomprehensible apart from Greek philosophy.  Before Christianity hit the scene, and while Judaism was in its most corrupt state, the Greeks were beginning to ask, and attempting to answer, the biggest and most important questions in life.   Christianity was planted as a seed in the fertile ground of Greek thought at the time, and it flourished.  As Christian doctrine and biblical theology began to answer the questions the Greeks had been asking for centuries, Christianity then used Greek thought to formulate concepts, flesh out, and develop a further understanding of its own doctrines.  This is seen in the early church fathers who now had a ready vocabulary through which to communicate the deepest truths of their faith

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis is chiefly concerned with the ideas presented in “The Green Book,” a pseudonym for a British textbook which postulated a theorem denying objective values and truth.  The authors of The Green Book suggested that value judgments are no more than subjective reflections on personal feelings about certain matters rather than objective assessments of right, wrong, beauty, worth, good and evil, etc.  Lewis attacks this as a false philosophy.  Not only does he argue that there is objective truth and that it can be known, he submits that it is, in fact, already quite well known and exists in the form of what he calls the Tao.  The Tao is that set of universal values held by societies through the ages.   Some things are actually wrong, such as torturing babies just for fun.  Some things are actually beautiful, such as a waterfall.  These are part of the Tao.

In Souls in Transition, Christian Smith showed that emerging adults believe that feelings are truth.  We can also see that the ideas contained in The Green Book have taken significant root in Western Culture.  Lewis is right to fear that society will be lost and man will be abolished if we don’t turn from this course (a deference to subjectivity and an indifference to classical thought), revive our interest in objectivity and truth, and return to classical thought (philosophy, grammar, rhetoric and logic).  What the Greeks gave us in philosophy (love of wisdom) we have lost through our educational system.  If we do not love the truth, we cannot know it.  As I argued above, it seems to me that the primary battlefield is the mind.  The modern evangelical church has got to step up to the intellectual quality and intensity that our forbears once lived out.  The church is intellectually lazy and doctrinally ignorant.  We need to sharpen our axes, there is much wood to be cut.