Death of Apologetics
Posted: March 5, 2011 Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: apologetics, belief, faith, theology 4 Comments »a·pol·o·get·ics
1) systematic argumentative discourse in defense (as of a doctrine)
2) a branch of theology devoted to the defense of the divine origin and authority of Christianity
After coming to sincere belief in Christ in 1998, I delved into Christian apologetics to find a rational foundation for my belief. I hoped that I would find arguments to help explain to others why it was reasonable for me to hold such beliefs. The funny thing about it all was that I never needed an argument to believe in the first place. It was all about religious experience, plain and simple. While a survey of different religions, philosophies, and worldviews helped me to see that Christian belief was not irrational relative to other positions, it also helped me to see that sincere Christian belief is transrational. Reason alone does not lead to Christ.
I’m fine with discussion on Christ but I take issue with apologetics on its nuance of defense. My problem is the implication of (1) Christ needing defense, (2) Christians needing defense, or that (3) Christ can be deduced from argument. First, God needs no defense. Second, Christians have no need to be defensive. Third, a deducible God is only an idea of God, not a person. God, as Christians know him, is a person who makes himself known in mysterious ways. Apologetics unintentionally implies that God as an idea is sufficient for sincere belief and is therefore misleading. God as a person needs no apology.
I’m not in complete agreement with you here. In one sense you are right. God does not rise or fall on our defense. Christian faith does not rise or fall on our ability to reason. And the third seems more a comment on natural theology, one which I agree with.
Yet Christians do believe certain things. We must maintain use of the argumentative arts in order to expose false teachers. In fact, I think apologetics, used within and without the Christian community, best serves the body by showing what is false.
But if I have read you right, one of your points is that apologetics is not a sufficient method for evangelism. On this I am wary. I think of men like Lewis who come to faith by reason. I would not quickly discount their accounts nor presume that God would have brought them in via some other method had not apologetics been employed.
If I read you correctly, I think that we do agree.
Questions are great food for conversation and evangelism. But apologetics, with its emphasis on defense, implicitly claims to have rational answers, which is not true. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the word “defense” but I don’t think that Christians have anything close to a rationally defensible position. Indeed, being Christian is not a claim to being smarter than everyone else. So if Lewis came to know God, he did so through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, not a successful defense of the Christian faith. So what I’m saying is that “apologetics” is by definition ridiculous. The same topics can be covered in a spirit of dialogue without being called apologetics.
Mason, I’d like to suggest the wariness you noted above is unwarranted.
As I think of C.S. Lewis I think of a man with both great intellect and great insight, but also great passion. While apologetics may have opened his mind to truth, I’ll suggest it also stirred his heart. We have in our minds the author of The Great Divorce and The Chronicles of Narnia–stories meant to stir the heart, capture the imagination, and call us to contemplate truth.
I want to suggest our heart and mind together are totally wrapped up in the process of coming to faith…and a shortcoming of apologetics can be its emphasis on the mind/reason.
We confess a God who loved–loved–the world so much he gave his son…He wants our love back.
What does “love back” mean in Scripture? Romans 10:9-10 offers explanation: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”
My limited knowledge of biblical languages may be my undoing on this point, but I’ll persist in case I’m right
–”Heart” in Scripture sometimes if not often/always connotes deep inner passion, and if this is at all the meaning borne here, I think we need to keep this in mind in our reckoning of our faith to each other.
Our belief is not, and I’ll say by design cannot be totally rational. We’re meant to leap in faith, meant to long to leap, every bit as much as we’re meant to long to fly into the arms of one we love. There’s no need to fly, there’s no technical explanation for the value of these acts that really captures the essence of what happens in them–it’s just what wells up when we know our hearts are meeting their captor.
I say the mind of Christ may well have captured Lewis’ heart one way or another. I think it’s okay to let some of the problems of faith–if not all of them–rest in the inexplicability of the reasons we love–especially the reasons we love back (as if being loved first wasn’t reason enough)!
Thanks for your thoughts Renjie. I agree with you completely.
The idea of a rational argument being used to create a foundation for belief is a relatively recent phenomenon of the past 200 years.
Before the enlightenment period, the majority who believed did not rely on arguments but rather on the experience of God and a commitment to belief (political Catholic dogma aside).
Our use of apologetics creates a rational, finite God that we can worship on our terms and gives us the audacity to think that we can know the truths of a God who is outside all of our schematic views.
That being said. God does meet us in countless ways, including faith through reason. This has served Christianity well in the past as evidenced by the conversion of C.S. Lewis
I do think however that the idea of using apologetics and reason as an evangelism tool is past its prime. There are new ways to tell the story….