June Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 1

Reflections on a Trip to the UK | Reflections on Eternal Life

Welcome, friends! In this June issue of The Worldview Bulletin, Paul Copan reflects on his recent trip to the UK and the many Christian scholars he interacted with there. Paul Gould encourages us to use social media wisely and to view our lives in the context of our citizenship in heaven rather than the ephemeral things of earth. Melissa Cain Travis continues her series critiquing David Hume’s objections to inferring design in nature, and David Baggett also continues his series examining Bart Campolo’s departure from the Christian faith, and his father, Tony Campolo’s, revised beliefs about biblical teaching on sexuality. We conclude with a collection of interesting news and notable book deals!

For the Kingdom,

Christopher Reese

Editor-in-Chief

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Contents

Part One

1. Some Reflections on Our Time in the UK

   by Paul Copan

2. Thinking About Heaven

   by Paul Gould

Please see the second email for Part Two of the newsletter.

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Some Reflections on Our Time in the UK

By Paul Copan

On Thursday, 30 June, my wife Jackie and I headed back to the United States after seven remarkable weeks in the UK. I’ve had the opportunity to speak in different settings:

·       Lecturing at the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society;

·       Preaching at evensong at Hertford College (Oxford University);

·       Giving a talk in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Scriptorium—the meeting place of younger scholars who come for research, community, worship, and discussion; and

·       Presenting a philosophy of religion paper at the Tyndale Fellowship’s Conference last week in Hoddesdon, England.

Julia Cameron

During this time, we’ve also met with our friend Julia Cameron, who specializes in the history of evangelicalism in the UK. She is the publisher at Dictum Press, and has written books about the late theologian John Stott, John Stott’s late dedicated personal assistant Frances Whitehead (whose car Julia presently drives!), and the exemplary and inspiring Cambridge pastor and scholar Charles Simeon. She has also written to preserve the memories of major evangelical British leaders, writing obituaries in key newspapers and other publications for John Stott, J. I. Packer, Michael Green, Michael Griffiths, and so on. We have enjoyed getting to know Julia over the years and love her dedication to truthfully preserving the rich heritage of evangelical Christianity in the UK.

By the way, she has written an excellent book on a Reformation walking tour of Cambridge and Oxford—not to mention a fascinating and highly informative Oxford tour book, written from the perspective of her cat Simeon. So when you come to the UK, make sure you have these excellent books in hand to better inform you as you travel.

The Duffield Library

Julia took us to visit the home of Gervase (pronounced “Jer-viss”) and Elizabeth Duffield in Appleford (Oxfordshire). They have over 70,000 books in their collected library—not to mention a printing press and a book bindery for antiquarian books. We visited all of the many buildings on the sprawling property, each one filled with books double-stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling.

Also, Gervase worked closely with fellow-Anglican evangelicals J. I. Packer and Roger Beckwith, and we were able to see the room in which these dedicated scholars regularly sat discussing how to promote an evangelical influence within the Anglican Church through the advancement of scholarship, service on committees, and cultivation of strategic alliances with Anglo-Catholics in the General Synod. A specialist in the Reformation (for example, see here and here), Gervase has an impressive and unique collection of books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has an extensive corpus of Puritan writings as well as all of the many editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs since it was first published in 1563. It was a treasure house—truly, like no library we’ve ever seen.

Tyndale House and Fellowship

Gervase was also involved in the early days of Tyndale House—an evangelical study center, which brings me to another important part of our visit here.

I had the opportunity to present a paper at the annual Tyndale Fellowship conference (22-24 June); this scholarly gathering has a number of different study groups, and I participated in the Philosophy of Religion section. Having been vice-president and president of the US-based Evangelical Philosophical Society, I greatly enjoyed my time with evangelical UK philosophers who presented papers and engaged in rigorous discussion. Daniel Hill (University of Liverpool) is chair of this group. He and I spoke of building stronger bridges of cooperation across the Atlantic through building of relationships and greater collaboration when possible.

Daniel kindly gave me T. A. Noble’s fine book, Tyndale House and Fellowship: The First Sixty Years, which I’ve been reading with much fascination. It talks about Tyndale House/Fellowship’s founders, whose work I have known, read, and appreciated over the decades: F. F. Bruce, Donald Wiseman, Geoffrey Bromiley, Sir Norman Anderson, J. I. Packer, Derek Kidner, John Wenham, and (though not an official academic, still an influential statesman) D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. They were involved in the early days of Tyndale House in Cambridge—this evangelical scholarly research center established during a time when evangelicals weren’t recognized as having any intellectual or scholarly gravitas. But Tyndale House changed that, and British evangelical scholarship became highly influential in academies around the UK, which had a significant ripple-effect around the world. Tyndale House has brought great benefit to both the academy and the church.

As I’ve been reading this book, one theme that persists is the importance of patient and rigorous scholarship. Martyn Lloyd-Jones warned against the dangers of subjectivism and experientialism that can so easily displace the objective truth of God’s Word and the careful study of it. Evangelicals have often gotten into subjectivist and revivalist frames of mind; emotion rather than diligent study of Scripture and hoping for revival without persistent dedication to the life of the mind and scholarship.

C. S. Lewis stressed this in his “Learning in War-Time” essay:

If you attempted to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.... You are not, in fact, going to read nothing, either in the Church or in the [front] line: if you don't read good books, you will read bad ones. If you don't go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally. If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions.

I could say much more, but this is a sampling of my summer experience in England and some of my reflections on it: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.

Image by Abdulhakeem Samae from Pixabay