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Title: The Consequences of Ideas, Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World.

Author: Sproul, R.C.

Format: Hardcover: 224 pages

Publisher: Crossway Books; 2000

ISBN: 1581341725

Review Date: April 23, 2007

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Book Description: If you think philosophy is irrelevant to your daily life, think again. You need only observe the world around you to discover how substantially the ideas of history's thinkers affect us still. You can hear it in the beliefs of your non-Christian friends. In the media, your music, your children's classrooms. You can see it in our public policies, on every bookstore shelf, in the way we understand our very existence--even in the church. We like to believe that we create our little worlds from scratch and then live in them. But the reality is, we step into an environment that already exists, and we learn to interact with it. The game has been conceived long before us; the rules and boundaries already decided. We may be amused when René Descartes labors so long in order to conclude that he exists, or puzzled by Immanuel Kant spending his life analyzing how we know anything. Yet these men were not simply contemplating minutiae. The foundational thinking of philosophy tries to lay bare all of our assumptions, revealing our false and sometimes dangerous beliefs so that we may arrive at a coherent worldview. The greater our familiarity with the ideas that have shaped our culture over the centuries, the greater our ability to understand--and influence--that culture for Christ. From ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle to Christian philosophers like Augustine and Aquinas to the molders of modern thought such as Kant and Nietszche, R. C. Sproul traces the contours of Western philosophy throughout history and demonstrates the massive consequences these ideas have had on world events, theology, the arts, and culture--as well as in our everyday lives.

Review:

If you are like most modern Christians, you probably question the value of philosophy.  I see it every day where I help out with college ministry.  I find the general consensus amongst college students (Christian and non-Christian), is that philosophy is something that is not very practical.

However, for the last few years, I have been realizing that philosophers really are the ones that rule our culture.  This is not to say that people are conscious that they are doing a certain action because they have an ideology that produces that action (i.e. I have never heard any body say: I am going to do this because Plato or Nietszche said such and such and it applies as so.)  But once you begin to understand some of the basic schools of thought that have shaped our civilization, you will see, as Screwtape said, we are used to having half a dozen contradictory and competing philosophies dancing around in our heads.

I have heard Christians say, "The only difference between a hero and a fool is the out come."  Some people my give a knowing nod at such a statement, and my even have sympathies along such a line of thought.  But the worldview behind such a statement is straight out of Nietszche's thought.  It is called the disunity of the virtues.  The disunity of the virtues is an idea that states a man will only ever have one virtue, and none of the other virtues will temper it, so he might as well act with the one virtue he has, for good or bad it doesn't matter, as the action is important.  This is directly against the philosophy of Jesus and Paul on this subject, not to mention other great thinkers such as Plato and Aquinas.  Now while the comment was casually made, and as such probably does not cause any harm, it betrays a very non-Christian worldview that has taken root in the mind of a Christian.

Another example is Darwin.  The theory of evolution has philosophical baggage attached to it.  Certain assumptions that are present in the thought.  Some of them for the good, some of them for the bad.  But Darwin's practically rules from the grave in many sectors of our society.  Even though he is dead and pasted to dust, there are those who will give their lives defending him, that is how strong his influence on them, and by extension our society, is.

When the Christian becomes aware of the market place of ideas the shapes our world, there is often a feeling that it is to large and to powerful for him to do anything about.  This is where The Consequences of Ideas can help.  Sproul starts with the earliest Western philosophers and traces their influence on later generations.  At around 200 pages, the book is no where near comprehensive, and Sproul even admits in the ending chapter that there are more thinkers he would have liked to add.  His out lines of each thinkers philosophy is not very detailed either.  But he does give you the broad brush strokes and the meat of what each thinking was trying to say.  (Something I was grateful for, as I once had a philosophy teacher who would get hung up on some aside in Plato's dialogues, so we would be on the main body of the text for a few days, and a week or two down some rabbit hole that most of us did not have enough background to understand, much less appreciate).

In the last chapter, Sproul touches on the way that Dewey has affected our modern education system.  Dewey had become disillusioned with many of the questions of philosophy, and was instrumental in helping our public school system move from a classical to a more "modern" method.  He despised epistemology (the theory of how we know things are true) and thought it was useless.  Thus, he thought logic and rhetoric should be removed from the curriculum.  In some ways, he was a forerunner of our information age, an age where we have access to an untold amount of information, but we lack the tools and character to know how to sift through all the chaff and pull out the kernels.  While not comprehensive, The Consequences of Ideas will help you begin to map out the different sectors of thought that are shaping our culture.  Once you have that information, then you will be more adapted to be able to apply the Gospel to each school of thought, in a way to help each adherent begin to question the assumptions of their world view.

For readers who are interested, there is also a Bibliography to find more detailed information on each of the people and subjects discussed in the chapters.