Thursday, October 04, 2007

Evangelism with a touch of Logic

So I am teaching Logic... That is with a heavy emphasis on Evangelism... Pastor/Principal Sutton always reminds the teachers of all the steps of a good lesson plan and usually places an emphasis on the Attention Getter step. The Attention Getter for me usually is how am I going to tie it into Evangelism. The great thing though is that I have not had to think too hard on that thought. And now I would like to share one lesson now with you...

In one of the most recent lessons we were studying about Superimplications and Subimplications. They are two distinct but similar relationships. One (Subimplication) tells us that if a person says that, "All trees are green." Then we can imply that there are no non-green trees. Assuming that the first statement is true.

The other (Superimplication) says that "No, some trees are red." This automatically makes the original statement false. Application: When preaching someone the Gospel, we are sure to convince a person that they are a sinner. Then we continue on to tell them that sin sends people to hell. Then we ask that first real conclusion question: "Do you deserve hell?" and the typical response is, "No" Our original statement is that (This is just for Evangelism, not saved people) All sin is Hell-sending. But the person says, "No, My sin won't send me to hell. I am not that bad of a person." Re-worded they are saying: Some sin is hell-sending.

In logic it is okay to go from saying All to only Some, but it is a no-no to say that Some goes to All. If you can show that only Some is true, then you prove the All statement to be false. That is what unintuitively (That word was for PJV) is going on in the back of their minds. It is a wrong way of thinking, bad logic, bad logic. We need to correct it and the only way to do that is to go back to the All statement and prove it to be true. Are we all sinners? Do we all sin? Are you part of all? Does sin send people to hell? Do you sin? Are you part of people? I know it can sound demeaning and childish at times, but some people, myself included at times, need to go down a few notches and remember the simple facts of salvation. We need to preach those facts, pray for God to work with those facts that He provided us to use, and above all else, not make it so muddled and complicated like so many religions have already done. But that's another post.