Reasons of the Heart: Recovering Christian Persuasion (Hourglass Books)

Author: William Edgar
List Price: $9.99
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ISBN: 080105138X
Publisher: Baker Book House (July, 1996)
Sales Rank: 410,961
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
The best intro-level apologetic I've seen yet
I picked up Reasons of the Heart out of curiosity to see what is Edgar's approach to apologetics. I was happily surprised at the quality of this short book! He manages to cover a lot of ground in very little space -- the text of the book is just a little over 100 pages, plus appendices, indexes, etc. Yet it digs deeper than its size would indicate, asking the right intro-level questions and interacting fairly with many other theologies and philosophies. Edgar's writing is very concise and readable, making this book very useful for anyone from high school to graduate students, laymen and pastors alike. I heartily recommend it as a first look at apologetics and believe it will challenge the thinking and whet the apologetic appetite of any Christian.

Rating: 3 out of 5
Good, but ultimately unsatisfying
This is a pretty good book for a couple of reasons:

First, it interacts with the contemporary philosophical environment but without being tedious and difficult to understand.

Second, Edgar realizes that apologetics is both God-centered and audience-oriented, which allows him to avoid being caught in either a presuppositionalist or evidentialist foundationalist fantasy land of certitude.

However, I think that this book's strengths are also weaknesses in a way. While apologetics should be audience-determined in methodology, it should not be so in content. And Edgar, especially in the section on the problem of evil, seems to give up too much ground to unbelief. While he rejects the free-will defense normally used to combat the problem of evil, he leaves us with no other place to stand!

If you can't offer a plausible solution to the problem of evil, why even start doing apologetics?

Rating: 3 out of 5
apologetics without being stuck in rationalism
A concise primer on apologetics that does not focus on rationalism or evidentialism. Instead, Edgar starts with Pascal's famous quote, "We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart... The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." He begins with the reasons for apologetics and reaches back into the Old Testament even (usually overlooked, in my opinion) to build a case for apologetics as being part of the whole Christian life. He sees much hope in the postmodern condition where others see fear. He continues with opportunities for a whole life apologetic often missed by otherwise-attentive Christians: emotions like joy and fear, the sadness and misery of death, actions such as hospitality and integrity. These are all in his first part, titled 'Foundations' which he follows with 'Conversations.' Here, he doesn't neglect to deal with the barriers to conversation: the problem of evil, the scandal of particularity, etc. Throughout, Edgar writes faithfully from his Pascalian premise and quite well. His perspective is very Reformed, but not so much that someone from the other end of the pen (like myself) could not be amply rewarded by reading. Seems to me he is very strong at combining Pascal's attention to other-than-rationality with Francis Schaeffer's attention to consistency in a way that benefits thinking and living Christians in these post-modern (when will we have a better word than this?) times.



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