Wintery Knight comments on the story about Tim Lambesis coming out as a scam artist in Christian metal.
This is why my heroes in the faith are not athletes and artists. It’s possible for athletes and artists to be as solid in their faith as a J. Warner Wallace or a Tim McGrew, but scoring points on a sports field or singing songs on a stage is no guarantee of that. Biblical faith is about knowledge – justified true belief. Nothing about sports or music helps you to know whether your beliefs are true. Period.
I’m usually with WK on a lot of things when he isn’t being a statist, but this rings false. It’s true that sports or music don’t make someone’s religious beliefs stronger, but neither does having a bunch of facts and deductive conclusions*. There’s nothing to say an athlete or musician is any less knowledgable about their faith than a apologist.
It’s the curse of evidentialist apologetics mishedmashed with logical positivism, Hellenism, or scientism: knowing more “stuff” makes you virtuous (righteous, in this case). It’s Bonhoeffer on caffeine: my mission just has to be everyone else’s.
I have no idea who Wallace and McGrew are, so I have no idea why WK is holding them as a gold standard for Christian belief. I think WK is working backwards in that he’s seeing these two as knowledgable (no doubt they are) and concluding they must have strong belief. None of the people of faith in the Bible were apologists or theologians—at least not in the semi-formal sense we know it today. They created the stuff that apologists and theologians have talked about for centuries after.
* One can be correct about their beliefs without having the proper reasoning behind it (hello, Galileo). This is Epistemology 101, and I’m of the mind that God doesn’t care if you got your math wrong.