James W. Sire addresses another excellent question from Micheal Hickerson, ESN Blog Contributor:
Should Christians worry if they find themselves enjoying or gaining insight from artistic, literary or academic works by people from other worldviews?
I know that this has been a question within the Christian world from the ancients to the present. Didn’t Tertullian (c. 160-230) ask, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?†But, though I was brought up in a modestly fundamentalist community, the question has always seemed strange to me. Why not? I respond. All truth is God’s truth.
But let’s say that we find ourselves falling in love with the works of Virginia Woolf or Albert Camus — which, by the way, I have. What then? What truth could there be in their explicit rejection of orthodox Christianity? Well, for one thing, no writer can reject all truth. It takes quite a bit of truth just to continue living. For another, all people have something true to contribute to our understanding of the world and its wonders. If nothing else, they contribute the knowledge and wisdom they’ve accumulated by living out the image of God in which they were created.
[Read more…] about Insights from works by people from other worldviews?