Status: In Revision
This book is the result of a journey. You could think of it as a biography of a sort.
I was raised in a Christian home. I became born again at the age of four. Being surrounded by Christian friends and family, I quickly learned the fundamentals of the Christian faith and incorporated them into my life.
I went to a secular public school, for both elementary and high school, but they provided little spiritual challenge for me. I was teased for my faith, of course, as many young Christians before me and after, but their remarks were of little concern. They mostly amounted to parroting secular slogans and then ganging up on me with particular stabs at my manhood and/or intelligence when I seemed unfazed. By the time I graduated, I still had a fairly good grasp on my faith and my walk with God was strong. I stepped into the world full of boundless optimism and bullish confidence in my convictions.
Then I went to college. That’s when everything changed.
I wasn’t facing the same caliber of skeptic anymore. I was no longer facing the class bully, whose dull, cow eyes would glaze over when I started talking about Biblical proofs. Or whose witty retort to my belief in abstinence before marriage was to call me “gay” before swaggering off in self assured victory. In college, they had answers to my answers. They answered my evidence with evidence and my retorts with well thought out retorts of their own.
And these were just my fellow students. This isn’t even to mention the steely eyed professors who saw me coming before I got out of bed that morning. These were men and women who had dealt with punks like me for years and probably destroyed the faith of a good lot of them. They seemed to summon answers to my questions with a speed and clarity that was alarming. For the first time in my life, I found my faith actually challenged.
And thus, the reason for this book was born.
The premise of this book is simple: Either the Christian faith can stand on its own two feet, or it can’t. If it can, then every objection should have an answer. If it can’t, then it deserves to fall. And so I waded into the sea of objections seeking truth, and hoping the cross was at the end of the road.
Furthermore, even if the faith is true, it must be defensible by the average man or woman on the street. You shouldn’t need three years of Bible college, a degree in philosophy and fluency in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to gain meaningful insights from it. Experts with such fluencies help and their authority shouldn’t be understated, but they should not be required. If they are, then all we’ve done is trade one mortal priesthood for another. The saving grace of Christ, who died to topple the priesthood and make priests of all men, is in vain.
That is the journey I brought to you in the original “The Battered Shield of Faith,” and I continue that journey in the second, revised edition. And I think the need for a second edition is more pertinent than ever.
In the second edition, I have revised and edited much of the work while leaving the core and intent of the original text intact. The result, I hope will be a book that is much easier to read and more impactful than the original.
I hope you will join me on my journey when I release the book on Amazon and other platforms.
God Bless,
Shaun
CalamusPress.com 