The material in this post is part of the first ApologetiXperiment seminar held at Immanuel about two weeks ago ("What is Apologetics?"). It offers another two reasons why Christian apologetics is needed and important. Over the next days, I'll post some more material which aims to cover the major apologetic methods or approaches.
Yours,
The Scribbling Apprentice
A third reason underpinning apologetics is the need Christians have of shaping culture. Beyond the earliest years of the church recounted in the New Testament, the apostolic example of apologetics set the trend for outreach undertaken by well-educated men who were won to Christ. The work of scholars like Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Augustine eventually laid the foundations for global outreach and gospel growth as the predominantly pagan worldview was refuted and discredited. The same task faces Christians in every generation. J. Gresham Machen was able to write in 1913:
“False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed in winning only a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”[1]
We need to look beyond our immediate evangelistic contact to grasp the wider picture of contemporary Western thought and culture. In general, the culture we live in is becoming deeply post-Christian. This is a product of the Enlightenment, which kick-started the secularism that now permeates the whole of Western society. The hallmark of the Enlightenment was “free thought” – the pursuit of knowledge with the aid of human reason alone. While it’s by no means inevitable that such a pursuit should lead to non-Christian conclusions, it has been the overwhelming impact of the Enlightenment mentality that has led people generally to deny the possibility that there is a personal-infinite God who exists and can be known. As such, a theological worldview is generally viewed with suspicion or discounted as being irrelevant and unscientific. This has led to the view that Reason and Religion are in conflict with one another.
Today, generally speaking, the physical sciences are seen as the authoritative guides to our understanding of the world. As a result, the general assumption is that modern science supports a naturalistic worldview (one which discounts the existence of God) and the person who is honest and follows the pursuit of reason will end up a convinced atheist or agnostic.
According to Alvin Plantinga, there are three main contestants in the contemporary western intellectual world vying for peoples’ souls; “three fundamental perspectives or ways of thinking about what the world is like, what we ourselves are like, what it most important about the world, what our place in it is, and what we must do to live the good life” (Christian Scholarship: Need And Nature). These worldviews consist of what he terms 1) Christianity or Christian Theism; 2) Perennial Naturalism and 3) Postmodernism or Antirealism with Respect to Truth.
2. Perennial Naturalism arose in the Ancient world, articulated by thinkers like Democritus and Epicurus. However it was with the advent of the Enlightenment and Modernity that the most complete manifestation of this perspective emerged. Today it is often termed “scientism”. We normally associate such a viewpoint with the New Atheist aggressors (for example, fundamentalist Darwinists like Richard Dawkins).
On the basis of such a worldview, there is no God; we are insignificant parts of a giant cosmic machine that proceeds with blind indifference to all of us, our hopes and aspirations, our needs and desires, our sense of fairness and longing for justice. From the perspective of Perennial Naturalism all human phenomena, love, art, literature, music, play and humour; science, philosophy and mathematics; religion and morality are all to be seen as existing only as the result of the blind mechanism driving cosmic evolution. There is no fundamental, intrinsic meaning attached to human (or indeed, all biological) life.
3. According to Post-modernism or Antirealism, we ourselves are responsible for the basic structure of the world. This notion was first articulated in the Ancient world by Protagoras (“Man is the measure of all things”). It found its most persuasive advocate in Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) instigated a Copernican revolution in Western thought.
This worldview is anti-realist with respect to truth. In other words, “truth” is not grounded in any kind of objective reality that is independent of the knower. There is no theory-independent world or “thing-in-itself”. Our theoretical terms (especially those of science) do not refer to real entities “out there”. Truth is therefore constructed subjectively (in one’s own mind) and projected out into the “world”. Our mind constitutes and structures the world we inhabit. What matters is personal, private, internal, subjective interpretation and perception. Thus, all mental perceptions of the world (worldviews) are to be equally accepted and tolerated as valid interpretations of reality. Your version of reality is as “true” as mine. Objective truth is an illusion.
Needless to say, such a worldview results in a pervasive and all-encompassing relativism. Concurrently, any worldview which makes a claim to ultimate, universally binding truth (a “metanarrative”) is scorned as illusory and naïve. Alternatively, it is perceived as being motivated by questionable intentions (for example, the desire to manipulate and control others.)
“Post-modernism” is a common umbrella-term which captures an array of thought forms motivated by the above assumptions. Underpinning them all is the idea that “such fundamental structures of the world as those of time and space, object and property, number, truth and falsehood, possibility and necessity…are not to be found in the world as such, but are somehow constituted by our own mental and conceptual activity” (Alvin Plantinga, Christian Scholarship: Need and Nature). Fundamentally then, there would be nothing at all existing in space-time if it were not for the creative, mental structuring activity of people like you and me.
Although such a worldview seems quite ridiculous, it is widely accepted and is an extremely potent force in much contemporary thinking. In terms of such differing disciplines as recent philosophy of physics and theology, “it is said that there is no reality in itself and unobserved, or if there is, it is nothing at all like the world we actually live in.” (Alvin Plantinga, Christian Scholarship: Need and Nature). In ethics, this view takes the form of the idea that no moral law can be binding unless I myself (or perhaps society) issue or set the law.
Generally speaking, Perennial Naturalism vastly underestimates the place of human-beings in the universe. Post-modernism or anti-realism vastly overestimates it. According to Perennial Naturalism, we are no more than complicated machines determined by factors utterly outside our control. We cannot act or live with any more authentic freedom than can a car or a coffee-grinder or a washing-machine. Human dignity is profoundly under-valued. However, according to post-modernism/anti-realism, we confer the basic structure on the world and therefore essentially take the place of God. What the world is and what it is like is based purely on our personal preference. Indeed, the world itself is enabled to exist only on the basis of our mental activity.
These then, according to Plantinga, are the two basic perspectives that have filtered through Western culture and thinking. Besides a basic Christian worldview, they are the two basic thought-systems that vie for the allegiance of contemporary people.
These considerations are important because no one ever hears the gospel in a vacuum. It is always heard against the cultural backdrop in which we live. We live in a culture in which, generally speaking, Christianity is no longer seen as an intellectually viable option. The Enlightenment legacy has produced either a predominantly secular, naturalist outlook in many or a post-modern antirealist outlook in others. Both worldviews immediately baulk at the central claims of Christian truth. The vital task of apologetics is to engage such varied outlooks, shaping the intellectual climate in such a way that Christianity remains a live option for thinking men and women.
Finally, apologetics strengthens the faith of the Christian believer. As we grow in our understanding of the inherent rationality of our own beliefs and how they can stand up to scrutiny, we will grow in confidence as we seek to share our faith with unbelievers. “Nothing inspires confidence and boldness more than knowing that one has good reasons for what one believes and good answers to the typical questions and objections that the unbeliever may raise. Sound training in apologetics is one of the keys to fearless evangelism.” (William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith)
Furthermore, as we grow in the knowledge and understanding of the created world and humankind, the trustworthiness of the Scriptures and the Person of Christ – all central to the task of apologetics - we will be moved to deeper levels of worship, reverence and awe in the face of the glory of God whom we serve.
Footnotes:
[1] In the same article, Machen underscored the pervasive power of ideas and the need to combat them effectively: “What is to-day a matter of academic speculation begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity” (“Christianity and Culture,” Princeton Theological Review, 1913)
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