Winners of 2005 Christian Worldview Essay Contest
The Trinity Foundation announced the winners of the
first Christian Worldview Essay Contest on September 1, 2005. (If you did
not receive the announcement, please sign up on the front page of our website
to receive email newsletters from The Foundation.)
The
First Place winner is Colin Kelly of Derby, Kansas. Mr. Kelly is a sheet metal
assembler for Cessna Aircraft and an Economics student at Wichita State
University. He writes that he enjoys "studying theology, particularly in the
Reformation and Puritan eras. I help lead a small Bible study at my church."
Mr. Kelly received an award of $3,000 and 15 books of his choice from
The Trinity Foundation.
Here
are some excerpts from his prize winning essay, "The Nature of Saving Faith"
:
"The five sola's of the
Reformation are the hallmark truths of authentic Christianity. These five
doctrines are so essential to the Christian faith, and are so interconnected
amongst themselves, that to eliminate one is to do irreparable damage to the
others. In a similar manner, to misunderstand one will inevitably lead to a
misunderstanding of the others. If we reject or modify sola Scriptura...we may
lose any objective basis for belief in the other four....
"These
men [Reformed theologians] made great progress in defining justification and
the relation that justification shares with faith, but in what has been a great
loss to the Christian community, rarely ever clearly defined what faith is or
how it operates.... In an interesting twist, whereas the doctrine of justification
is met with little variation amongst the truly Reformed, the doctrine of faith
seems to have produced several widely varying opinions. Some label it as a mystical
and ineffable experience, on which, in a fit of the ironic, they proceed to
write voluminously....
"Since
fiducia is often given an element of the emotional, it is interesting to see
what Christ says about the emotional responses that are given to the Gospel.
In Mark 4, Christ gives his explanation of saving faith by the Parable
of the Sower, where different people react differently to the Word. Among them
are those who, when they hear the news, receive it immediately with joy. They
hear it, understand it, and most importantly they react to it with an emotional
response: joy. But these are not the ones praised by Christ. Why? Because they
have no root in themselves.
"The
problems did not arise out of their understanding or their emotion; they had
both of these. These people really did not accept the truth. How do we know
that? There are two reasons: First of all, they are said to have no root in
themselves; they did not actually believe it. Like many today, they profess
truth, but did not assent to it. We can be sure that if they did accept
the truth, they would be saved, because of the second point: Those praised by
Christ in the parable do exactly that. They hear the Word and accept it. Some
hear and do not understand; some hear and respond with joy; some hear and let
the world continue to rule them; but none of these shall be saved.
"According
to Christ, you must hear the Word and accept it, and that is all.... In all
three [accounts of the parable in the Gospels] there is no mention of the
emotional, except the one failed case. The stress is laid on understanding,
accepting and keeping it....
"Martin
Luther also makes an interesting assessment about the place that love has
in faith. He argues that the Law primarily teaches love, since the whole Law
is summarized in two commands that demand love from us toward God first and
then to other men. If this is true, then the Law teaches us nothing but love.
The problem that Luther has with mixing faith and love is that it ultimately
mixes faith and law.
"
'Paul's argument there is that the only people who obtain justification and
life before God are those who believe, who obtain righteousness and everlasting
life, without the law and without love, by faith alone' (Commentary on Galatians,
149). He goes on to state, 'What the law does is to work, what faith does is
to assent to the promises.... By this distinction Paul here sets out separating
love from faith and teaches that love does not justify.'
"The
logical conclusion of what Luther is saying is something that many Christians
today need to heed. Many today argue that 'even though Mr. So and So doesn't
really believe in the Gospel like we do, he still has an incredible love for
the Lord, he has a strong personal relationship with God.' The only way
to properly respond is to say that the law can never justify. If
a man loved God with all of his mind, heart, soul, and strength, but rested
in that to save him, he would be punished with the rest of the world in Hell.
When we admit that men do not believe the true Gospel, that is, those who
hold to the Roman Catholic gospel, but that their love of God will save them,
we make a road to Heaven that has nothing to do with Christ and his righteousness....
As Luther concluded, 'Whatever is not grace is the law, whether it be judicial,
ceremonial, or the Ten Commandments. Therefore, if you could follow the law
according to the commandment to 'love the Lord your God with all your heart
(which nobody has yet done or can do), you would still not be justified before
God, for we are not justified by the law' (86)."
The Second Place winner is Zac Hensley of Homewood,
Alabama. Mr. Hensley is married and has one child. He is presently a Philosophy
student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
A
graduate of Hoover High School in Hoover, Alabama (where I "didn't even learn
what an antecedent to a pronoun was until my senior year"), Mr. Hensley has
been a Christian since 1999, being saved during his senior year in high school. While
attending a Southern Baptist Church, he was introduced to the work of Gordon
Clark. Mr. Hensley received an award of $2,000 plus his choice of 10 books
from The Trinity Foundation.
Here are some excerpts from his winning essay, "A
Response to Criticisms Against Gordon H. Clark's View of Saving Faith" :
"Gordon
Clark's teaching on the nature of faith is simple because the Bible's position
on the nature of faith is simple. Faith is belief. There is no mysterious,
subjective psychological state that one must experience. There is no mystic
trance that one must endure. There is only Christ telling us to believe His Word
in order to be saved. Yet, due to the reigning anti-intellectualism of this age
-- and perhaps because of unfounded fears of easy-believism -- Clark has
been assailed as one who teaches contrary to the Scriptures on this subject.
Theologians, who would otherwise be considered orthodox, get lost in metaphor
and criticize Clark for killing the mystery of faith by intellectualizing
everything.
"Doug Barnes seems
incapable of grasping this point. He says, 'The problem with a terrorist,
apparently, is that he simply hasn't thought through things appropriately. And a
thief, in Professor Clark's world, needs only to reform his thinking, and he
will cease his wicked ways.'
"That
is precisely correct. One could not state it better than this. The reason the
terrorist or the thief breaks God's law is that they do not believe it....They
do not think rightly about themselves, God, other people, the world.... They
think of themselves as autonomous, not having to give an account to God and
perhaps they think they are doing something good when they break His law.
There are many other wrong things that they think, and if they thought rightly,
they would act rightly....
"Clark's
main contention against many Reformed thinkers in this respect is that 'trust'
is either not accurately defined -- and thus useless -- or it is used as a synonym
for faith. If Clark's opponents want to claim that he does not hold to their
undefined definition of 'trust,' well and good; they must then prove that their
definition of 'trust' is the correct one. No one has done this.... The
problem arises when Clark's opponents want to claim that 'trust' is a component
of faith that is separate from understanding and assent and yet is not synonymous
with faith. This is where those confused souls retreat to metaphor and mystery...."
The
Trinity Foundation congratulates these winners for their fine work, and thanks
all those students who entered the 2005 Christian Worldview Essay Contest. We
hope that many more students will enter the 2006
Contest, which will focus on the book, Not What My Hands Have Done.