Apologetics Beyond Reason

Why Seeing Really Is Believing

James W. Sire

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830896493
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Theology

"Look carefully. Listen closely. Do you see? Do you hear? There are a million signposts pointing toward the specific truth of God in Christ. I've seen many of them. But God is speaking to you too. Look and see. Listen and hear." In this accessible and engaging work, veteran apologist Jim Sire gives us eyes to see the myriad "signals of transcendence" all around us that point to the specific truth of God in Christ. Focusing on the power of good literature—even from those who deny the existence of God—enables us to perceive and testify to God's reality in ways that rational argument alone cannot. "While reason can be very helpful in pointing us to God and helping us in our apologetics, what compels and convinces people is more multidimensional, " says Sire. "What is needed is a more holistic apologetic that not only includes truth but also goodness and beauty." All inspiration is rooted in God the Creator, and some of God?s truth lies buried until an artist exposes it. Good literature, written from a Christian standpoint or not, displays multiple examples of our human understandings of God, the universe and ourselves. It testifies to the existence of a transcendent realm and often, in fact, to the truth of the Christian faith.

1

The Past as Prologue

God Adumbrations in Many Daily Forms

Consolers cannot always be truthful. But very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity. This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age. I will say that to me this does not feel elderly. Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death. If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care? There one would receive no further information. One’s ape restiveness would stop. I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms.

Mr. Artur Sammler to Dr. Govinda Lal in Saul Bellow’s Mister Sammler’s Planet

“God adumbrations in the many daily forms”1: this could be the subtitle to this book. It’s what Mr. Sammler wants. Mr. Sammler, an elderly Jewish refugee from World War II in Poland, walks and thinks his way through the streets of New York. He has not given up on immortality. But he’s willing to live with what he most wants to keep—his “God adumbrations in the many daily forms.”

I am not so willing to give up immortality. I rest myself in the hope of glory, “Christ in you,” as the apostle Paul said. Indeed, the presence of Christ signaled those God adumbrations Mr. Sammler so enjoyed.

Mr. Sammler was old. So am I. Mr. Sammler’s life was messy—much messier than mine. But mine has been messy enough. In fact, no human life, even in retrospect or sub species aeternitatis, ever looks straight and narrow. And because of that, neither does any effective apologetic for the Christian faith.

An Initial Definition of Apologetics

I will begin my story and the story of this book with the slightly revised, broad definition of apologetics that opened my Little Primer on Humble Apologetics:

Christian apologetics lays before the watching world such a winsome embodiment of the Christian faith that for any and all who are willing to observe there will be an intellectually and emotionally credible witness to its fundamental truth.2

This notion of apologetics serves for both seekers and believers. Then I added this:

The success of any given apologetic argument is not whether it wins converts or strengthens the faith of any given believer, but whether it is faithful to Jesus. The reasons that are given, the rhetoric that expresses these and the life of the apologist and the larger community of faith must, then, demonstrate their truth.

This definition is broad based. It says nothing about which reasons count and which sorts of rhetoric are useful. In this book, I want to say something about both. You will not find here either an exhaustive catalog of proper reasons and reasoning or a demonstration of proper rhetorical principles. Rather, I have focused on a small, eclectic collection of both.

The Complex Map of Apologetics

One background for this book is the history of apologetics and its range from complex argument to direct perception, from elaborate scholarly tomes to brief conversations with friends, from the rhetorical forms of auto­biography, novel, poetry, drama and essay to blogs, radio spots and YouTube clips. I’m an old guy, but I still remember a brief radio drama from the National Council of Churches, broadcast sometime in the 1950s or 60s. I present it from memory it the sidebar.

Popular Apologetics

A visitor from a nearby church knocks on the door of a house of a neighbor. “Good afternoon, sir,” he says to the man who answers the door. “I’m John Buck from the big church down the street, First Church of the Resurrection. I’d like to invite you to join us in worship next Sunday. It’s at 9:30 and we’d love to have you.”

“Hmm. Next Sunday, you say? Well, I’ll be golfing then.”

“No problem. We meet every Sunday to sing and get to know each other. It’s interesting and sometimes even fun, especially when you stay after the service for coffee and donuts. How ’bout the next Sunday? I’d be glad to walk down with you and your family and introduce you to some pretty nice people.”

“Oh, that won’t work either. Our family is leaving for vacation on the Friday before that.”

“Oh, sure, I understand. How ’bout when you get back?”

“Well, I’ll be pretty tied up getting our new ad campaign going at work. That’ll involve several weekends.”

“And after that?”

“Gosh, I could be dead by that time.”

“That’s right.”

This ad, of course, focuses on getting a hearing for the gospel, but, simple as it is, it contains an implicit apologetic.

Judeo-Christian apologetics is as old as Job and as new as the latest clever tweet or YouTube clip. For the purposes of this book most of the history in between can be left to others. But one section—the past seventy years or so—is highly relevant to what I am trying to accomplish now.

I grew up in an age when most thoughtful people placed confidence in reason, not just in commonsense everyday reasoning but in reason as a path to sure knowledge, both the abstract knowledge of philosophy and theology and the earthbound knowledge of science. I read the major Christian apologists then popular with thinking Christians. They included philosophically oriented theologians like Carl F. H. Henry, Edward John Carnell and Bernard Ramm; philosophers like Gordon Clark, Gordon Lewis and Arthur Holmes; and literary scholars and writers like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton.

Along the way I also read the work of those they inspired—Norman Geisler, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Ronald Nash, and later Alister McGrath, Lee Strobel and Tim Keller. As editor for InterVarsity Press, I oversaw the publications of rationally grounded apologists like Douglas Groothuis, Clark Pinnock and several clever followers of Lewis and Chesterton (like Peter Kreeft and Paul Chamberlain). Except for Lewis and Chesterton and, to a lesser extent, the work of their followers, the evangelical apologists of the 1960s and after usually took on the limitations imposed by the modern acceptance of the autonomy of human reason. While they well knew that the human ability to reason requires a firmer foundation than the naturalism that was inherent in this assumption, they wanted to start on a common ground. The ground they chose was the trust that modernity placed in the ability of reason to reach true conclusions.

Their rationalist reasoning took several forms. Some of their arguments began with principles that many people took as self-evident, added other truths (principles and empirical evidence), and argued with sophistication for the existence of God, the deity of Jesus, the historical reliability of the narrative accounts in Scripture and the resurrection of Jesus. They addressed intellectual objections to their arguments and answered tough questions arising from the traditional Christian faith (the problem of evil, epistemological relativism, alternative claims of other religions, the challenges of science, etc.). Sometimes they turned challenges on their head, arguing, for instance, that the results of modern sciences such as the physics of astronomy make the notion of a personal Creator more likely than any alternative explanation.

For those in our culture who put their trust in human reason, these apologetic approaches have worked well. Many Christians today read and benefit from them. Without them, thoughtful Christians would have too few resources to analyze the clever arguments and glossy lifestyles presented by our culture’s media, its pundits, its fraudulent experts and its passionate prophets of health and wealth.

But many in our postmodern world have come willy-nilly to distrust reason, and the arguments of the modern Christian rationalists now seem irrelevant, doubtful, lifeless. The approaches of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton avoided this fate by clever and imaginative grasps of the paradoxes of the human condition. The value of human reason for them was to permit a conclusion to be wrested from within a framework of paradoxes. It took account of the human desire for simplicity, tied the reader in knots and then showed how Christian faith both accounted for the knots and then untangled them. Their work has attracted readers from across the intellectual spectrum from the simple to the sophisticated.

But highly sophisticated rational apologetics itself is limited to those who can understand it. I, for example, don’t understand why the kalam cosmological argument succeeds.3 I suspect that there are legions of intelligent people like me. I’ve pondered the argument, I think I understand it, but I keep seeing objections I don’t think have been answered. Of course, the problem could well be my own inability to grasp the argument, rather than a weakness of the argument itself. In any case, the kalam argument doesn’t work for me.

There is another limitation in many arguments Christians use to prove the rationality of belief in God. The God who is “proved” is only a transcendent, impersonal God, maybe a Creator, but not necessarily personal. Only a God whose existence is important to human understanding or human flourishing is worth troubling about. The arguments may support deism as a worldview but be silent about the existence of a fully biblical God. Of course, such arguments can be stepping stones to a fuller argument for the God of the Bible. And that’s no small matter.

Actually, some of my own arguments of a less sophisticated type lead first to the existence of a vague transcendence on which further arguments can build. So take my criticism of the kalam argument with a grain of salt. We must grant value to arguments for the existence of the transcendent God, even if not the fully biblical God.

There are many sophisticated arguments that I do understand, not by any means completely, but well enough to be satisfied that they support a Christian worldview. I am not complaining about rational apologetics as such but about what often seems to be assumed by many who use it—to wit, that it is a highly effective approach and should work even if it doesn’t.4

In the late 1960s and 70s a new sort of apologetics arose from the lectures and publications of Francis Schaeffer. Instead of arguing from so-called self-evident principles, he began by recognizing the role of culture, especially painting and literature. He identified the presuppositions—the unstated foundation of cultural artifacts, values and ideas—that were either assumed or promoted by literature and painting. Then he showed how those ideas failed to account for the rich fabric of human being and human life, what in the 1970s he could still call “the mannishness of man.” Working from the Bible down and from the culture up, he understood the mindset of the counterculture and showed the profound relevance of Western culture to our understanding of God. Schaeffer wanted to show that the God who is really there is not any of the gods of the day—the mystical constructs of emotion and desire.

On the one hand Schaeffer, like Carl Henry, relied on the ability of the human mind to reason rationally. He justified this by explaining the biblical foundation for human reason: human beings are made in the image of God and, even in their fallen state, retain the ability to reason—not from the inside out but from the outside in—from Scripture and God’s revelation in nature. He insisted that there was such a thing as “true truth” but moderated that with the notion that one can know some but not all of such truth. His was a chastened rational apologetic, a version of presuppositionalism that spanned the gap between modern rationalism and the birth and then the burgeoning of postmodernism.

Working to and from the existentialists, C. Stephen Evans in his first book crafted an approach paralleling Schaeffer’s.5 And Os Guinness expanded Schaeffer’s approach with his recognition of the value of thinking in the categories of sociology as well as philosophy.6 Today, moreover, there are apologists who take a humble stance concerning the value of rational argument. Some of this movement can be seen, I hope, in the books I have written.

A Confession Good for My Soul

Now let me turn to my own place in the story of recent apologetics—a mini-autobiography via bibliography.7 I offer it as a retrospective—where my mind, for good or ill, has been. It partly explains why I am finally willing to say that everything points to God. The view may be eclectic and eccentric. You judge. You use your reason, the good sense God has given all of us. Ah, but do it kindly, please.

My early books were largely grounded in modern rationalism, but as I lectured and wrote, I came to see two things—the growing failure of arguments to move students and others toward Christian faith and the rising possibility of doing apologetics with attention to why people today actually do become Christians.

My first book to strike a chord with readers was The Universe Next Door: A Worldview Catalog (1976). It came from twelve years of teaching world literature from Homer to Camus and English literature from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. I learned the notion of worldview from Donald Clark at the University of Missouri, where I studied and taught from 1958 to 1964. The book that emerged combined a history of worldviews with a host of illustrations from the great literature of the world. I used the definition and comparison of worldviews to show the superior ability of Christianity to explain our experience and thus offered an apologetic for the Christian worldview.

How to Read Slowly (1978) explained how to read literature “worldviewishly,” that is, how to detect and evaluate the views of reality explained by or adhered to by authors. This book was not an apologetic in itself, but it was a step toward understanding the apologetic character of literature. And Scripture Twisting (1980), deriving from my frustration with wild and often foolish misreadings of the Bible by those promoting a heretical Christianity or alternative religion, belongs to a subspecies of more scholarly works focused on the correct reading of Scripture.

Meanwhile, The Universe Next Door was well received by a wide group of readers—students, teachers and apologists. Even some teachers who were not Christian use...