{"id":61772,"date":"2017-07-25T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-07-25T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=61772"},"modified":"2017-07-24T19:16:05","modified_gmt":"2017-07-24T23:16:05","slug":"ct-holly-ordway-why-evangelism-requires-both-logic-and-loveliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=61772","title":{"rendered":"(CT) Holly Ordway&#8211;Why Evangelism Requires Both Logic and Loveliness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text\">As an apologist, I appreciate the value of the imagination in no small part because of the role it played in helping me come to Christian faith. I was once an atheist, and a hostile one, who agreed with the\u00a0<a class=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/2009\/march-online-only\/explainer-new-atheists.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">New Atheists<\/a>\u00a0that Christianity was not just false but irrational and harmful.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text\">Although I was not interested in apologetic arguments at the time, I had, without knowing it, been experiencing the work of grace through my imagination. As a child, I fell in love with the Chronicles of Narnia and\u00a0<span class=\"citation\">The Lord of the Rings<\/span>. At the time, of course, I didn\u2019t know that I was encountering God\u2019s grace through those books. Years later, as an atheist and graduate student, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on fantasy novels and had J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s great essay \u201cOn Fairy-stories\u201d\u2014with its powerful statement of the\u00a0<em>evangelium<\/em>, the Good News\u2014at the heart of it. When I became a college professor, I was deeply moved and intrigued by the writings of Christian poets. In time I realized that the faith of these writers was more complex and more interesting than I had thought, and I decided to learn more.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text\">Like C. S. Lewis, I had a two-step conversion. I came to belief in God but then struggled with the idea of the Incarnation. All the evidence pointed toward the Crucifixion and the Resurrection as historical facts, but I found that I was unable to\u00a0<em>accept<\/em>\u00a0the idea of Jesus as God incarnate. At that point, I turned very deliberately to the Chronicles of Narnia: I went looking for Aslan, the lion who is the great Christ-figure of the Chronicles. Through my experience of those stories, my imagination was able to connect with what my reason already knew, and I was able to\u00a0<em>grasp<\/em>\u00a0as a whole person that God could become incarnate. That imaginative experience removed the last stumbling block for my acceptance of Christ.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/women\/2017\/july\/why-evangelism-requires-both-logic-and-loveliness.html\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As an apologist, I appreciate the value of the imagination in no small part because of the role it played in helping me come to Christian faith. I was once an atheist, and a hostile one, who agreed with the\u00a0New<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=61772\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelism-and-church-growth","category-theology-evangelism-mission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61772"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61774,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61772\/revisions\/61774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}