Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century

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Contents

APOLOGETICS: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT HAS BECOME SO POPULAR

In 399 B.C., Socrates was charged by the Athenian assembly with corrupting the youth and advocating foreign gods. In response, the seventy-year-old philosopher dragged himself before the court to answer the charges leveled against him. His speech before the indignant citizens of Athens was recorded by his star pupil, Plato, and published under the title of "Apology." Anyone who has read Socrates' witty, impassioned, and wholly unapologetic plea will realize quickly that apologia in Greek does not mean hanging one's head low and meekly saying, "I'm sorry." It means simply "a defense," and that is what Socrates presented to his accusers: a reasoned defense of the origin of his teaching (he was instructed to do so by the Oracle of Delphi) and of the manner of his teaching (to question all people who claimed to be in possession of the Truth).

Nearly five centuries later, Peter called on his fellow believers to be as bold as — but a bit less abrasive than — Socrates in defending their faith in Christ: "but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense [apologia] to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). Following in the tradition of Socrates and Peter, the modern Christian apologist neither apologizes for his beliefs nor relies solely on emotion when confronting those who consider his divine calling to be either false or fanatical, delusional or dangerous. Instead he presents — boldly but not harshly — a defense of Christianity that squares with reason, logic, and human experience. That is not to say that apologists believe they can reason themselves into Christian faith, but they do believe that faith can be a reasoned step rather than a leap into the void. Christianity, in short, makes sense; as a system of belief it appeals to the whole person — body and soul, heart and mind.

DEFENDING THE FAITH

Though apologists approach their defense of the faith from a number of different angles, a full apologetic must include at its core a defense of the central and defining doctrine of Christianity — namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was not just a good man or an inspired prophet but the unique Son of God. This doctrine, known as the incarnation, holds that Jesus was not half man and half God, but fully human and fully divine. Around the incarnation may be grouped the other essential doctrines of the faith: that God, though One, exists eternally as three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Trinity); that we are all born with a sinful nature and exist in a state of rebellion against God and his Law (original sin); that Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross brought us back into a right relationship with God the Father (the atonement); that Jesus rose bodily from the grave (the resurrection); that he will also return bodily (the second coming); and that all who are in Christ will join him in the final resurrection of the dead. To these key, nonnegotiable doctrines may be added two more: that God is the Maker of heaven and earth; that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God. Many apologists (I among them) would add more qualifications to these last two, but no orthodox apologist would reject them in this form.

These then represent the core doctrines of the Christian faith, doctrines that receive clear expression in the creeds of the church and that comprise the basic tenets of what C. S. Lewis famously dubbed "mere" Christianity. From the time of the apostles, the main task of the apologist has been to defend these doctrines from detractors both within and outside the church. More often than not, this defense has been mounted in the form of a dialogue in which the apologist answers key questions used by skeptics to cast doubt on Christianity. A list of the major questions that apologists since Paul have sought to address would include the following: 1) If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why are pain, suffering, and injustice in the world? 2) How can Christians believe in miracles when events like the parting of the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the virgin birth, and Jesus' walking on water clearly violate the laws of nature? 3) How can a God of mercy condemn people to hell? 4) How do we know we can trust the accounts of Jesus' life that are recorded in the Gospels? Over the last three centuries these questions have become increasingly more bitter and strident in tone, often taking on the form of outright accusation and ridicule: 1) Isn't the story of a dying and rising God just a myth for ignorant pagans and modern children? 2) Isn't religion just a crutch and wish fulfillment for people too weak to deal with reality? 3) Hasn't science disproved Christianity and shown it to be false? 4) Hasn't the church done more evil than good and inspired more hypocrisy than any other institution in history?

The best apologist will not shy away from difficult questions like these but will address both the questions themselves and the anger, guilt, despair, and confusion that often lie behind them. And he will do something more. He will show that Christianity embodies a worldview that is coherent, consistent, and universal, one that not only answers tough questions in isolation but presents a unified vision that makes sense of all aspects of our world, ourselves, and our destinies. Indeed, one of the main tasks of the apologist is to defend Christianity from competing worldviews — whether they be religious, political, or philosophical — that claim the ability and the authority to define the nature of reality: communism, materialism, secular humanism, Islam, Hinduism, pantheism, atheism, nihilism, etc.

Of course, Christian apologetics does not treat all other belief systems as inherently false. Oftentimes apologists will begin by establishing common ground between Christianity and other monotheistic faiths (Islam, Judaism, deism, Unitarianism). Especially in our own day, many apologists find that they cannot even begin to defend the deity of Christ before mounting a defense of the existence of a single, personal God who is the Creator of the universe and the Author of morality. At other times apologists will agree about the nature of the problem — that guilt must be expiated (paganism); that modern man lives in a state of alienation (Marxism); that we must find a way to control our base instincts (Freudianism) — but disagree about the origin of the problem and its ultimate solution. At its best, the task of the apologist is a deeply humanistic one; it seeks not to abandon the physical, the human, and the ordinary for some abstract world of ideas but to redeem the physical, the human, and the ordinary so that they might be glorified.

Many today confuse apologetics with another branch of Christianity with which it bears much in common — evangelism; but the two pursuits are quite different in their focus and approach. An evangelist like Billy Graham shares the gospel message that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that he died for our sins, and that we can only find salvation by confessing our sins and placing our faith in the risen Christ. Evangelism comes from two Greek words, eu (good) and angel (news), which, when translated into old English, become "god-spel" or "gospel." An evangelist, then, is someone who literally spreads the good news (or gospel). Good evangelists will present this good news in a way that makes sense, but they are less concerned than the apologist with presenting a reasoned defense. Evangelism sticks more to the emotional than to the rational, more to the practical than to the philosophical; it seeks a decision that will lead to a change of heart rather than an intellectual assent to a particular or universal truth. Evangelists tend not to argue for such things as the existence of God or the authority of Scripture or the possibility of miracles; they simply take them for granted, focusing instead on their message. Whereas the evangelist is first and foremost a preacher, the apologist is essentially a teacher. The latter works more like an attorney presenting a case, the former like a pastor giving comfort and counsel.

Midway between the evangelist and the apologist are a number of writers and speakers whose main concern is with winning back some portion of the American public to a true engagement with the God of the Bible. Some, like Bill Hybels, Thom Rainer, and Rick Warren, offer guidelines for sharing the gospel with unchurched people living in a secular society who yet yearn for spirituality and purpose. Others, like Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Jay Sekulow, and the late Richard John Neuhaus, are culture warriors who seek to secure a legitimate voice for the Christian worldview in the public square and to revive waning Christian ethical and sexual mores. Like these modern-day Wilberforces, apologists do seek to restore the intellectual integrity of the Christian worldview, especially within academia, and there are branches of apologetics that offer a reasoned defense of traditional sexual morality (see, for example, John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body); but apologetics as such refrains from civil engagement and partisan politics. Still apologetics is essentially "conservative" in its quest to preserve the creeds of the church in the face of "liberal" attempts to strip Christianity of its supernatural elements and its universal truth claims and to replace the Christ of faith with a "historical" Jesus.

Closer to the apologetics enterprise are writers like Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Arthur Holmes who seek to reintegrate faith and learning within the academy and to convince their more skeptical colleagues that Christianity rightly understood does not stifle but enhances the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, scientific study, and scholarly research. Close as well are writers like John MacArthur, John Piper, and Charles Ryrie who hail specifically and intentionally from within a single Christian denomination and who argue eloquently for the truth of their theological and ecclesiastical distinctives. Although some of these writers — especially those who hail from Reformed Calvinism and dispensationalism — have contributed much to the apologetical enterprise, in this book I will keep my focus firmly on the central concerns of apologetics and on those elements of Christianity that all orthodox believers share.

WRESTLING IN THE SHADOW OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Since its founding, the church has been blessed by a long line of apologists who have carefully crafted philosophical and theological defenses of Christian orthodoxy. Chief among these are Paul, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, and Jonathan Edwards. In the earliest phase of the church, apologetics consisted more often than not of clarifying Christian doctrine over and against the claims of heretical sects like the Arians (who denied the deity of Christ) and Docetists (who denied his humanity). Medieval apologetics — best summed up in Aquinas's Summa and its aesthetic counterpart, Dante's Divine Comedy — sought to unify all thought under the glorious reign of the queen of the sciences — theology; for them, beauty, goodness, and truth were all one, and the theology of the Catholic Church was the glue that held them together in timeless harmony. They in turn were followed by Reformed apologists who sought to purify the doctrines of the church of later "accretions" and to present a forceful, systematic doctrine that would appeal to people who increasingly judged truth not by authority and tradition but by their own consciences.

Modern apologetics, though influenced by all three groups, is in great part a reaction to the secular Enlightenment's attempt to separate faith from reason and to refound everything, from philosophy to theology to ethics, on rational principles. Beginning in the eighteenth century and climaxing in the two centuries that followed, Western thought increasingly adopted an antisupernaturalist paradigm that insisted that everything could and should be explained solely on the basis of natural, material, physical processes. Henceforth divine revelation and miracles would remain off-limits, at least for those engaged in serious academic pursuits. Though this Enlightenment-born paradigm does not necessitate atheism, most of the major Western thinkers since Hume have treated God as an unnecessary hypothesis. He may very well exist, but we certainly do not need him to explain anything.

Let us consider briefly some of these founding fathers of the modern world. Hume restricted knowledge to empirical observation, encouraging his philosophical heirs to ignore spiritual subjects about which nothing could be known otherwise. Kant grounded morality in the categorical imperative rather than in the Ten Commandments, thus providing human ethics with a rational, as opposed to supernatural, foundation. Darwin proposed a method, natural selection, by which our body could have evolved apart from divine intervention. Freud followed, doing the same for human consciousness, which he saw as rising out of a deep, material unconsciousness rather than descending from the great I AM. Marx reduced philosophy, theology, and aesthetics to economic forces, arguing that religion, the arts, and even consciousness itself were mere products of material socioeconomic forces over which we have no control. Nietzsche did away with Plato's notion of the Forms, arguing instead that beauty, truth, and justice are not divine touchstones but man-made products that shift every time the power structure of society shifts. Saussure robbed language of its transcendent, God-given status, making it too a product of deep structural forces that control our words and our thoughts. And the list goes on and on.

Although the basic teachings of Christ continue to be respected, this post-Enlightenment paradigm has slowly displaced the Christian worldview as the foundation of modern thought and culture. As a direct result of this shift, the traditional doctrinal claims of Christianity have been removed from the realm of objective truth and deposited in that of subjective feeling, causing an artificial rupture to form between empirical "facts" and spiritual "values." Slowly, stealthily, systematically, the truth claims of Christianity have been edged out of the academic arena and the public square into a private, airtight compartment. Rather than persecuting Christianity directly, as was done in the former Soviet Union, the Western democracies rendered it irrelevant as a vehicle for discerning the truth about the human condition.

True, the majority of Europeans and Americans continued to adhere to the beliefs and practices of Christianity, but they allowed the secular elite to do the thinking for them. The faithful guarded their religious space and left the academy, the public schools, the arts, the media, and the government to fall under the sway of secular humanism. In a sense they "cut a deal": leave us our faith and we will cede reason to you. In return, the secularists cut themselves loose from their moorings in Christian morality and morphed into radically autonomous individuals accountable neither to God nor to the wider faith community.