Daniel Craig: When I was doing some of my apologetic studies, my heart was just really thrilled with the truth of God's Word and the things I was learning about how to apply the truth of God's Word to everyday life. But I do have to confess that there was a pull for me in engaging the apologetics discussions with unbelievers, of really not wanting to come off as this quacky Christian. There's a desire to be accepted in the world's eyes as having something meaningful to say. And I think there's probably a lot of young people that have faced that tension. We see that Paul faced that tension. He says in I Corinthians 1:18, he says, "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness." So the message what we've got as Christians, unbelievers often find to be foolishness. And then as a young person when you go out to engage the world, you're coming up against philosophers like Rene Descartes to John Locke, Karl Marx, Emerson, Charles Darwin, these guys are way smarter than I will ever be. And so the question is, how do I respond?
Daniel Craig: And Paul's response here is, "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" So, he recognizes that they view it as foolish, but he doesn't pull back.
Kevin Swanson: No, he doesn't. And he doesn't wanna be respectable to the world. He doesn't care about that. He's beyond that, because he preaches Christ. And he sees the conflict between Christ and the philosophy of the Greeks there. And we need to see that, we need to see a strong thesis-antithesis collision between the ideas of Christ and the ideas of the world. And as Christian young people, it's crucial that they be raised and prepared to engage this battle of ideas, this world views in conflict and not just be trained to accept whatever the humanists, the Greeks, the transcendentalists, and the others will teach. So that's why World Views in Conflict, this brand new curriculum for senior high level high school studies, we wanna encourage liberal arts students to engage ideas. We don't wanna just see folks going towards science and math, we think liberal arts is important. But the problem with liberal arts, there hasn't been enough discernment. There hasn't been enough Biblical contrasts between that which the Greeks and the humanists teach and that which Christ teaches. And that's the purpose of this curriculum.
Daniel Craig: Probably some of those who are watching would be surprised to find out that schools like Harvard and Princeton actually started out as Christian institutions.
Kevin Swanson: They were all Christian colleges. Yes, all the way back to Oxford and Cambridge in the 11th century. But every single liberal arts college, I think without exception, all the way through Harvard and Yale and Princeton and on into some of the modern universities, the liberal arts Christian colleges always turn liberal. Why? Because there isn't that antithetical edge, that discernment that needs to be happening as we teach these courses. And that's what we do in this course. We start with the philosophies of the Greeks, the humanists, and we move on towards literary giants and then on into culture. These are ideas that young people will confront in this culture, guaranteed. If they have any access to culture, media, news, academia, anything else, if they interact with unbelievers anywhere in this world, they are gonna run into existentialism, naturalism, materialism, Marxism, egalitarianism. If they are not well-equipped biblically to handle these issues, they're gonna be in trouble.
Daniel Craig: Josh, you probably faced some of this tension in your own studies. I know you were instrumental in developing this course. What were some of the things that you wanted to bring to bear in this curriculum, to assist young people to walk through some of the same challenges that I'm sure you faced in really analyzing these literary and cultural giants?
Josh Schwisow: Well, I think what we wanted to show was that these basic important ideas of the philosophers work their way out in a great variety of ways that effect people in every day life. What you'll see with this curriculum is that you begin with the philosophers and you move your way to the great literary masters, some of the major literary works, and then you move to culture music, movies, art, and you see how these ideas...
Daniel Craig: Now that starts to get personal.
Josh Schwisow: Yeah. These are consequences of my daily intake of media, my daily interactions with others.
Kevin Swanson: Right. Towards the end, we have a cultural section where we're talking about the Beatles, we're talking about Steven Spielberg, we're talking about the favorite movies or the most popular blockbuster movies and the most powerful influential music that's produced by the cultural giants today.