For the Hope that is in You: Christian Apologetics & the Biblical Story of Reality
For the Hope that is in You: Christian Apologetics & the Biblical Story of Reality CONTENTS The Apologetic Mandate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 Van Til: the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Approaches to Apologetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Story of Postmodernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Theological and Philosophical Implications for Apologetics . . . . 40 Responding to the ‘Post’ of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Methodological Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
The Apologetic Mandate Christians have always been called to give an apologia to anyone who might ask us why we believe what we believe. This biblical mandate is found in 1 Peter 3:15: 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. We have come to refer to this practice of giving an answer as ‘apologetics.’ The biblical scholar J. Ramsey Michaels explains what Peter meant by “make a defence” in his first century context: This term is used of a formal defense in court, against specific charges… an argument made in one’s own behalf in the face of misunderstanding or criticism (1 Cor. 9:3; 2 Cor. 7:11) … here in 1 Peter, the language of the courtroom is being applied to informal exchanges that can occur between Christian and non-Christian at any time and under varied circumstances.1
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The apostle keenly perceived that the church was on trial every day as a result of living for Christ in a pagan society, a situation that remains true in our own age. Thus every Christian is an ‘apologist,’ giving an answer to the question why they believe what they believe. This booklet is intended to equip Christians with a foundational, biblical understanding of apologetics in order to defend the Christian faith in the midst of the intellectual and practical challenges of our culture. How do we understand and articulate the biblical worldview? How should we respond to the natural man’s claim to intellectual and religious neutrality? What is the most effective method of preserving and advancing the truth, beauty and goodness of the gospel? In these pages, we seek to answer such questions by tracing the recent history of epistemology – the branch of philosophy that relates to how we know and what we can know –, and by providing a biblical and historical understanding of apologetics and its methods.
WHAT IS APOLOGETICS? Two basic mistakes are common when Christians come to consider the issue of Christian apologetics. The first is to think that apologetics is to be academically confined as a subset of church dogmatics and limited to answering a handful of somewhat abstract objections to Christian doctrines; the existence of God; the problem of evil in light of God’s being and attributes; objective moral truth in a diverse world of moral codes; the exclusive claims of Christ in a pluralistic society. Here, it is often thought, ends the task and scope of Christian apologetics. However, I believe we miss the significance and perennial relevance of apologetics when it is disconnected from the comprehensive 6
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Lordship of Christ and the reign of God. Far from being limited to answering a few common objections to the faith, biblical apologetics seeks to defend the Lordship of Christ and the hope of the gospel of the kingdom in every sphere and area of life. The second, related, mistake is to assume that, as a discipline, apologetics is of concern only to a small group of Christian elites, practiced in the style of a kind of Christian intellectual ninjutsu whereby opponents with tough questions are overcome and defeated; that is to say, it is thought of as a kind of evangelism for the educated. Because of this assumption, many Christians struggle with the apologetic mandate of 1 Peter 3:15, equating apologetics with fruitless, never-ending argumentation or an impossible demand to be expert in a vast range of academic fields. But this attitude has got the whole task back to front. Apologetics concerns all Christian people in our readiness to share and defend the hope of the gospel which begins, not with an elite education and preparation, but submission to the Lordship of Christ in the core of our being. Remember that the apologetic mandate comes not from Paul, the scholar, but from Peter, the fisherman. Furthermore, setting out the reasons for our hope in God and his reign is to be done in gentleness, humility and respect, so that we might have a clear conscience in regard to those who slander the faith, being put to shame by not only our words, but our conduct. This means we are to offer not primarily answers to certain isolated objections to certain Christian propositions, but a holistic defence of the Christian view of law, philosophy, education, art, science, politics, music, economics and each area of human endeavour. By limiting apologetics to answering a hand7
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ful of classic or common objections to Christianity, it is made to appear irrelevant to Christians who find that their friends are not asking such questions, and irrelevant for our contemporary culture if addressing issues that were of concern only to those generations deeply committed to the assumptions of modernity. A further consequence of this truncation of apologetics is that it unwittingly sponsors the dualism prevalent in modern Christianity, characterized by its retreat from the task of asserting and defending Christ’s Lordship over every area of life and thought. That is, where defending ‘the faith’ is limited to defending a handful of Christian doctrines that concern our ‘religious’ claims about God and Christ, we have tacitly endorsed an unbiblical division of the religious from the secular. So a Christian enthusiastic about defending the faith may expend great time and effort learning all the Christian theodicies (responses to the problem of evil), but not think it important to be able to defend a Christian vision of education, law, family, or culture. Good apologetics is just the defence of good biblical theology, the queen of the sciences, from which all other disciplines derive their meaning, significance and coherence. Without theology there is no unity in the diversity of studies. Without theology a true uni-versity is an impossibility. It must be admitted that those who balk at Peter’s apologetic mandate have not been helped by common definitions of apologetics with their unnecessary and unhelpfully sharp division of apologetics from biblical theology and the wider concerns of Christ’s total Lordship. Theologian Alister McGrath provides a typical example:
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In its basic sense, it is an apologia for the Christian faith...; apologetics aims to lend intellectual integrity and depth to evangelism.... The chief goal of Christian apologetics is to create an intellectual and imaginative climate conducive to the birth and nurture of faith...2 We see here the idea that apologetics is a kind of handmaiden to a more intellectual or robust approach to evangelism – its goal being to answer objections to the faith, thereby making people more receptive (a conducive climate) to the message of salvation. Now it is certainly part of the task of apologetics to give weight and intellectual integrity to our efforts in evangelism, for whenever we proclaim the gospel, we defend it. But there is surely more to apologetics than this rather truncated remit. The ‘hope that is in us’ which St. Peter calls us to defend, is not restricted to the reality of God’s existence, sins forgiven and individual salvation; our hope is in the Lordship of Christ and his total reign. It is this Christ we honour from the core of our being. The primary goal of apologetics is not to create, by argument, a mental climate conducive to faith, for we are incapable of making any sinner favourable to the claims of Christ; the Holy Spirit alone is able to do this. Rather, our task first and foremost is to glorify God by faithfully declaring and defending the truth. Then, by the grace of God and the omnipotent working of the Holy Spirit, we serve God’s purpose of bringing all thought into captivity to Christ, under his reign, making all men accountable before him, where every mouth is stopped (2 Cor. 10:46; Rom. 3:19).
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A more comprehensive, yet concise definition of apologetics, is offered by Cornelius Van Til: “Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life.”3 We see here, by contrast, the comprehensive character and wide application of the apologetic mandate. “The Christian philosophy of life” is all-encompassing and we are to seek to bring glory to God by vindicating it. We are defending an entire philosophy of life and thought that centres in the triune God. J. Gresham Machen wrote: The Christian cannot be satisfied so long as any human activity is either opposed to Christianity or out of all connection with Christianity. Christianity must pervade not merely all nations, but also all of human thought. The Christian, therefore, cannot be indifferent to any branch of earnest human endeavor. It must all be brought into some relation to the gospel. It must be studied either in order to be demonstrated as false, or else in order to be made useful in advancing the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom must be advanced not merely extensively, but also intensively. The Church must seek to conquer not merely every man for Christ, but also the whole of man. We are accustomed to encourage ourselves in our discouragements by the thought of the time when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. No less inspiring is the other aspect of that same great consummation. That will also be a time when doubts have disappeared, when every contradiction has been removed, when all of science converges to one great conviction, when all of art is devoted to one great end, when all of
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human thinking is permeated by the refining, ennobling influence of Jesus, when every thought has been brought into subjection to the obedience of Christ.4 This is the great task of Christian apologetics as it is integrated into every aspect of human endeavour – our priestly service to God is the defence and confirmation of the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord, and this Lordship is to pervade all human thought as each area is brought into relation to the gospel (Phil. 1:7). Having defined the nature and goal of apologetics, the rest of this booklet will analyse various approaches to Christian apologetics as they confront contemporary culture, and argue that Van Til’s presuppositional method is more biblically faithful, more effective in confronting unbelief, and a necessity for the development of a consistently reformed approach to the Missio Dei that addresses every sphere of life.
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