The End of Apologetics

Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context

Penner, Myron B.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441251091
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Christianity Today 2014 Book Award Winner 2013 Word Guild Award (Apologetics/Evangelism) The modern apologetic enterprise, according to Myron Penner, is no longer valid. It tends toward an unbiblical and unchristian form of Christian witness and does not have the ability to attest truthfully to Christ in our postmodern context. In fact, Christians need an entirely new way of conceiving the apologetic task. This provocative text critiques modern apologetic efforts and offers a concept of faithful Christian witness that is characterized by love and grounded in God's revelation. Penner seeks to reorient the discussion of Christian belief, change a well-entrenched vocabulary that no longer works, and contextualize the enterprise of apologetics for a postmodern generation.

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Apologetic Amnesia

When we suffer from amnesia, every form of serious authority for faith is in question.

Walter Brueggemann

Perhaps the best way to introduce what I mean by the modern apologetic paradigm is to illustrate it with a story. William Lane Craig is one of the more prominent and prolific Christian apologists, and he possesses an impressive array of academic credentials and accomplishments. He is a first-rate analytic philosopher, author, debater, and popular speaker. Craig opens his defense of his “classical” method of apologetics with a personal story of how he came to this methodology for defending the Christian faith—which Craig assumes is the method used by earlier Christian apologists who emphasized “natural theology.”[36] In many ways, the story he tells is the same one I want to tell about modern apologetics in general, as his narrative embodies three features of the modern epistemological paradigm of contemporary apologetics I wish to highlight in this chapter: (1) the disembedding of modern individuals from premodern ways of understanding themselves and the world that (2) gives rise to a new view of reason and (3) engenders new, distinctly modern forms of Christianity.

A Tale of Modern Apologetics

Craig’s story, as he puts it, hinges on “the age-old issue of the relationship between faith and reason.”[37] He confesses that for many years of his Christian life, this issue greatly perplexed him. He came to faith not because of “careful consideration of the evidence” but because of the quality of the lives of a group of Christians who shared the message of their faith with him. But as a teenage convert to Christianity, Craig was eager to share his new faith and immediately began to present arguments for becoming a Christian to his friends and family. He brought this evangelistic enthusiasm with him as he entered a well-known evangelical Christian college, expecting he would learn more arguments to bolster his evangelistic efforts. Instead, this particular college, he tells us, was characterized by a “theological rationalism” that encouraged students “to follow unflinchingly the demands of reason wherever it might lead.” To Craig’s dismay, the Bible courses he took at this college completely ignored evidences for the historical reliability of the Gospels, and he was taught in theology courses that none of the classical arguments for God’s existence were sound.[38]

This did not sit well with Craig, and he even began to question whether he was a true intellectual. He recounts how “frightened and troubled” he was when one of his theology professors remarked that he would renounce Christianity if he could be persuaded of its unreasonableness. This fear led to outright alarm as Craig discovered extremely intelligent students were leaving behind Christian faith in the name of reason. His encounter with Jesus Christ was so genuine and real, and his experience with Jesus had invested his life with such significance, that Craig simply could not throw it all away just because it was deemed irrational. “If my reason turned against Christ,” Craig told one professor, “I’d still believe.”

And so Craig went through what he describes as “a temporary flirtation with Kierkegaardian fideism.” As he understands Kierkegaard to say, Christianity is decidedly anti-intellectual: one is to believe Christianity because it is absurd.[39] This is a position, however, Craig could not maintain. He was rescued from Kierkegaard, he tells us, by reading. Two books in particular were important. First, E. J. Carnell’s Introduction to Christian Apologetics convinced Craig that “reason might be used to show the systematic consistency of Christian faith without thereby becoming the basis of faith.” Second, Stuart Hackett’s Resurrection of Theism stunned him by demonstrating there were, after all, persuasive arguments for God’s existence. In addition, Craig notes that popular apologetics books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict made it obvious to him that “it was possible to present a sound, convincing, and positive case for the truth of Christian theism.” So ended his dalliance with the Kierkegaardian notion that faith might be grounded in something other than reason.

However, because of his experience at college with people who lost their faith due to their confidence in reason, Craig still was not able to completely embrace the view that rational arguments and evidence constitute the essential foundation of faith—that is, until he hit upon a new scheme to describe the relationship between faith and reason, “namely, the distinction between knowing Christianity to be true and showing Christianity to be true.” He explains:

The proper ground of our knowing Christianity to be true is the inner work of the Holy Spirit in our individual selves; and in showing Christianity to be true, it is his role to open the hearts of unbelievers to assent and respond to the reasons we present.[40]

In Craig’s view, in order for me actually to know something, I must first have a belief about it; then my belief must actually be true; and finally that belief must be justified or warranted for me—so it is rationally appropriate for me to believe it.[41] Because genuine Christian believers have the witness of the Holy Spirit, not only are their beliefs in God true, but they are also always justified or warranted for them—whether or not they have evidence or a good argument to support it. Their belief, therefore, properly counts as knowledge for them. But appealing to this epistemic status[42]—or the way in which the belief is properly justified for them—does not make it so for others and is not a rational way to persuade others. So, speaking practically, the distinction between knowing Christianity is true and showing it to be true means that rational apologetics is required for the latter, while the former—which depends upon the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit—is the requirement for individuals to have good or proper faith. In other words, Craig believes he has hit upon a way of explaining how Christian faith is rational and genuine knowledge for a person, even when they come to faith through a means other than evidence and arguments—such as his own Christian conversion. By his account, God’s action to convince me of the truth of the gospel is itself a rational activity—but only for me. Rational argument and evidence will confirm this for me and then demonstrate (or show) the truth of my Christian faith to the unbelieving world.

Craig further explains that the goal of his apologetic effort—and all Christian apologetics—is to end the “epistemic standoff” between the believer and unbeliever by showing Christianity to be true.[43] This means the activity of showing Christianity to be true to others requires logic and evidence. Craig elaborates:

If, by proceeding on considerations that are common to both parties, such as sense perception, rational self-evidence, and common modes of reasoning, the Christian can show that his beliefs are true and those of his non-Christian friend are false, then he will have succeeded in showing that the Christian is in the better epistemic position for determining the truth in these matters. . . . The task of showing that Christianity is true involves the presentation of sound and persuasive arguments for Christian truth claims. Accordingly, we need to ask ourselves how it is that one proves something to be true. A statement or proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to reality—that is to say, reality is just as the statement says that it is. Thus, the statement “The cubs won the 1993 World Series” is true if and only if the Cubs won the 1993 World Series. In order to prove a proposition to be true, we present arguments and evidence which have that proposition as the conclusion. Such reasoning can be either deductive or inductive.[44]

The situation Craig describes, then, is something like this: Intelligent, informed Christians can show nonbelievers Christian theism is true—which genuine believers already know to be the case through the convicting work of the Holy Spirit—by presenting them with arguments and evidences that demonstrate the objective truth of the propositions (or statements) that express Christian beliefs. When these reasons for belief are combined with reasoned responses to challenges to Christian belief, they “show” or prove Christianity “is the most plausible worldview a sufficiently informed, normal adult can adopt.”[45] Apologetic arguments and evidences are extremely important to Craig because they are precisely what the Holy Spirit needs in order “to draw unbelievers to a knowledge of God by removing their sinful resistance to the conclusion of our arguments.”[46] Having hit upon this account of Christian faith and the role of apologetics, Craig has discovered a way of thinking about Christian faith that he finds at once intellectually and experientially satisfying.

Secular Apologetics

What first strikes me in Craig’s account of apologetics is his story can be told only by someone thoroughly immersed in the perspective of modernity. If we attend closely to the deeper assumptions at work in Craig’s account, we find Craig’s experience nicely illustrates what Charles Taylor refers to as our modern “condition of secularity.”[47] To say it briefly, this condition of secularity is what makes it possible for us—unlike our premodern predecessors—to imagine the world (and ourselves) in such a way that the existence of God, and a transcendent or “higher” realm that makes sense of our world, is optional. Belief in God is not at all intuitive in the modern condition of secularity, and any interpretation of our world or experience that includes God runs into constant challenges. For most of us, God’s existence is, in fact, inherently dubious and anything but self-evident. We require arguments and evidence for belief in God, and, failing that, we at least need a very good explanation (an epistemology perhaps) of how it is that belief in God is reasonable and counts as knowledge for us.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to this condition of secularity than the modern invention of the “public sphere” as one of the central features of modern society. Prior to modernity, people did not tend to think in clearly drawn lines between what was public and what was private in civil life, and there was no social space imagined in which individuals might exist in such a way that they are not at the same time acting, thinking, and speaking within both the political and religious spheres as well. Premodern societies, therefore, tend not to speak of the separation of church and state, because these institutions and the social spheres they represent are understood to be expressions of the same underlying reality, which transcends human time and space (the hierarchy of being).[48] To be sure, priest and king play different roles in premodern societies and they have different functions relative to this transcendence, but it is not as if one can understand social order and its rulers apart from the religious beliefs and practices that substantially shape it and give it legitimacy. So when I am fully installed in a premodern way of thinking, I have immense difficulty thinking of myself apart from social and religious terms (if this is possible at all).[49] My entire identity is fixed by its coordinates in socioreligious reality and cannot be understood without reference to my place in society and to God (or the gods) and God’s purposes. That is to say, the premodern world thought of social life not so much in terms of public and private, civil and religious, but more as a unity of these different elements.

So the modern public sphere is something different from anything else that precedes it, because it is imagined as a neutral, common space free and disengaged from either the political or religious sphere. It is envisioned as a kind of shared space in which people who never actually meet physically with each other nevertheless understand themselves to be engaged in discussion and capable of reaching a rational consensus.[50] This division of life into private and public is critical to the entire conception of modern life, as Taylor observes, because it enables modern societies to see themselves as capable of coming to agreement without having to appeal to political or religious authority. They imagine themselves to be engaged in “a discourse of reason outside power, which nevertheless is normative for power.”[51] If we look at the impact of the modern public sphere on Christian belief, then we can discern at least two very important effects: (1) it now becomes possible to imagine that questions about religious beliefs—for example, belief in God’s existence—can be settled objectively and neutrally, without appeal to sectarian interests; and (2) whatever beliefs about God (the gods, faith, etc.) I may hold, in modernity we may now suppose they are my private affair and of no concern to anyone else.

When Taylor describes the height of modernity—the Enlightenment—as “the Great Disembedding,” he has in mind the net effect of the modern condition of secularity and the creation of the modern public square.[52] The process of Enlightenment brought about (or was itself brought about by) a massive shift in how individual and corporate identities are imagined by individuals in modern societies, together with the practices that give shape to their identities. To put a finer point on it, the shift to modernity uninstalls the premodern self from the hierarchical cosmos of harmonized meanings and corporate socioreligious identity in which everything is well-ordered and has its place and reality is fundamentally enchanted, even mysterious.[53] Instead, the modern person is embedded in a different kind of “social imaginary”[54] altogether—one in which disenchantment, reform, and personal religion all go together.[55] It is the kind of worldview that is virtually unable to appeal to anything beyond the physical universe to justify belief or rational argument, and that places the responsibility for justifying beliefs on the individuals who hold them.

So we can say the crisis of faith Craig describes appears to be generated by his embeddedness in a modern world insofar as it requires that God’s existence is not intuitively plausible and that individuals are responsible to justify their beliefs rationally for themselves. The entire story of his intensely personal need to produce an apologetic for Christian faith that makes his personal experience intelligible in terms of “the demands of reason” signals that Craig’s is a profoundly modern experience. And perhaps most important, Craig imagines that his apologetic arguments are normative to society but take place in a public sphere outside political or religious power. They are “neutral” means of establishing the rock-bottom truth about things regardless of one’s vantage point or perspective. All things being equal (e.g., intelligence), the only hindrances to our understanding and beliefs are our evil intentions and the hardness of our hearts. And Craig imagines he is ...