on Evangelical blogging

I'm new to this (about a month) and I'm not sure anyone, except me, has ever read anything I've posted, or should.

But here's another try at relevance.

A couple of blogs I have read have a post on somehow increasing the presence of evangelical blogs. As an evangelical, on the face of it, that sounds like a good idea to me. However, on further thought, I'm not so sure. First question is, "why?"

If the why is to magnify Christ, and it works, then it's a good idea. No, a great idea. However, I'm not sure that some evangelical blogging really is about magnifying Christ. I have looked, a little, at what are claimed to be the most widely read evangelical blogs. Some of them read more like Republican blogs. Don't we have enough Red/Blue division already? I'm not sure that blogs like that magnify Christ.

A more fundamental reason for wondering about the value of evangelical blogging, per se, comes from the words of C. S. Lewis, who knew a little something about defending the gospel:

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians about other subjects--with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way around. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the re-conversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians. . . Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly. C. S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics," in C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, pp. 89-103. Quote is from p. 93.

I have had an experience which illustrates the truth of what Lewis said. Over twenty years ago, I was asked to teach a course in physics, after not having done so for more than fifteen years. I needed to brush up. So I looked, in standard academic sources, for reviews of good books on physics. One such, according to a review, was The Particle Play, by John C. Polkinghorne. It was, indeed, a good introduction to particle physics, an area I needed to learn more about. I was astonished to read this, nearly at the end of the book:

Mathematics, which essentially is the abstract free creation of the human mind, repeatedly provides the indispensable clue to the understanding of the physical world. This happening is so common a process that most of the time we take it for granted. . . . It seems to me a remarkable fact. . . . Israel developed the idea of the Word of God who was his agent in the creation of the world. The Prologue to St. John's gospel not only makes the astonishing identification of that Word with Jesus of Nazareth but also says that the Word is the true light that lightens every man. The use of mathematics to comprehend the universe shows a relation between the workings of our minds and the structure of the world. I believe that this is one aspect of what the writer of the Fourth Gospel is telling us. (John C. Polkinghorne, The Particle Play, Freeman: Oxford, England, 1979, pp. 125-126)

Here, indeed, was a good introduction to particle physics by an author who obviously had a Christian world view.

To paraphrase Lewis for the 21st century, the best way to influence the world through blogging is to create great blogs on baseball, physics, photography, housewifery, travel, and many other subjects, posted by bloggers with a Christian world view.

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The text above the asterisks was posted on January 25th, and has not been altered, except that I have colored the quotations.

This is my fourth post today, and I don't expect to keep that up, nor should I.

Another writer, not as well known (at least not yet) as Lewis, said much the same thing:

What makes for a good, Christian movie? In brief, a good, Christian movie is one that is well-crafted and true. A film that does not strive for artistic and aesthetic excellence cannot be a good film. It will be a shoddy or uneven film, making whatever story or message is being told almost impossible to digest, no matter how biblically sound it is. Likewise, a film that does not bear allusive witness to the truth cannot be a good film. This phrase "allusive witness" is intentional, for we are not suggesting the evangelistic film. We're suggesting rather the film that witnesses allusively, obliquely, to the splendor of goodness, the shabbiness of sin, the hunger to be forgiven, the yearning for the divine, the playfulness of creation—all things true—"What Is a Good Christian Movie, Anyway?" (Part 1) by David O. Taylor, posted 07/13/04

Lewis and Taylor are saying something important. The greatest real influence is made by excellence. May I achieve this, and not for my sake.