CHAPTER THREE From Assent to Commitment
CHAPTER THREE
From Assent to Commitment
How does assent to the truth of the Christian faith become a living faith in God, leading to the forgiveness and renewal of the sinner? How is truth related to transformation? The apologist and evangelist must be able to give an account of how a conviction of the truth of the gospel can become the bridge by which the transforming and refreshing presence of God may enter into the life of believing human beings. The apologist must be aware of the real constraints he or she will confront. Apologetics is at its best when it is aware of its goals on the one hand and its limitations on the other. With this point in mind, we may turn to an analysis of the manner in which apologetics functions in the overall process of a person’s coming to faith.
A. THE NATURE OF FAITH
Most people outside Christianity regard faith as some kind of belief. It is intellectual assent. It is accepting that certain things are true. To believe in God is to believe that God exists. To believe in Christianity is to believe that the ideas of Christianity are correct. In everyday English, which is still heavily influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, the word faith means something like “a lower form of knowledge.” The well-known story has the preacher declaring in his sermon, “That there is a congregation out there is a matter of fact; that they are listening to me is a matter of faith.”
But behind the word faith lies a host of vital ideas, deeply embedded in both the Hebrew and Greek languages and the Christian experience of God’s dealings with his people. And this means that the deceptively simple word faith, used in a Christian context, actually means far more than that same word used in an everyday context. We must ask our audience to set aside secular ideas of what faith is and listen to the Christian understanding of the word.
To someone outside the Christian faith this might at first sight seem to mirror the attitude of Humpty-Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, who said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” But this is a shallow reaction to a serious issue in linguistics. The point at issue here is familiar from twentieth-century philosophical debates, such as that arising out of the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life…The speaking of language is part of an activity, or form of life.”1 Modern linguistics, from Ferdinand de Saussure onward,2 has stressed the importance of communities.3 Dictionary definitions of words are not divine mandates, establishing the permanent and unique meaning of a word; rather, they are generalizations about the ways (plural) in which the word is used in the real world of human living, not prescriptions for the way it ought to be used in some ideal world.4
This applies also to the word faith. It has one meaning in everyday English and another in the language of Christianity. These meanings are recognizably related to one another—but they are different. We can begin to identify the similarities and differences by comparing the “everyday” and Christian meanings of the word.
a. Faith is about believing that certain things are true. Thus when we say that we believe in God, we are at the very least believing in his existence. Or if we say that we believe in the promises of God, we could mean simply that we recognize or accept that the promises really are there. In this sense, faith is basically assent. “I believe in God” means something like “I believe that there is a God,” or “I think that God exists.” Faith assents to belief in the existence of God and his promises. This is an essential starting point. Before we can begin to say anything about what God is like, we need to assume that there is a God in the first place.
Many people outside the Christian faith have the understandable, yet misleading impression that there is nothing more to Christian faith than this assent to God’s existence. To them, Christian belief is little more than running through a checklist of propositions—such as those contained in the creeds. But faith is more than assent.
b. Faith is trust. When I say that I believe in the promises of God, I am declaring that I trust them. It is more than a recognition that these promises exist; it is an awareness that they can be trusted and relied on. Faith is not something purely intellectual, enlightening the mind while leaving the heart untouched. Faith is the response of our whole person to the person of God. It is a joyful reaction on our part to the overwhelming divine love we see revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the simple response of leaving all to follow Jesus. Faith is both our recognition that something wonderful has happened through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and our response to what has happened. Faith realizes that God loves us, and it responds to that love. Faith trusts in the promising God.
The idea of “trust” is naturally linked with that of “faith” in everyday English. I can have faith in a friend, meaning that I trust him or her. Or I can have faith in the skill of an airplane pilot, meaning that I am prepared to entrust myself to him when I cross the Atlantic Ocean. Or I can have faith in the promise of a political party to bring about certain much-needed changes in society, as a result of which I will vote for its candidates in the next election. But there is still more to the Christian idea of faith than this. Christian faith has a component that is quite without parallel in everyday language.
c. Faith is entry into the promises of God, receiving what they have to offer. Having recognized that the promises exist and that they can be trusted, it is necessary to act upon them—to enter into them, and benefit from them. I may believe that God is promising me forgiveness of sins; I may trust that promise; but unless I respond to that promise, I shall not obtain forgiveness. The first two stages of faith prepare the way for the third; without it they are incomplete.
An analogy may make this point clearer. Consider a bottle of penicillin, the antibiotic responsible for saving the lives of countless individuals who would otherwise have died from various forms of blood poisoning. Imagine that
a. this bottle is sitting on my bedside table and that
b. I am suffering from blood poisoning. What are my options?
a. I may accept that this bottle of penicillin exists.
b. I may trust that it is capable of curing my illness, which otherwise will probably kill me. But I shall never cure my blood poisoning, unless
c. I act upon that trust and take the penicillin. If I do not, I shall die, accepting and trusting, but having failed to benefit at all from the resource which could have saved me.
It is this third element of faith that is of special relevance today. Just as faith links a bottle of penicillin to the cure of blood poisoning, so faith forges a link between the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the tragic human situation in which we find ourselves. Conceptual truth guides us to trust God, by reassuring us of the reliability of that commitment of faith. Faith then unites us with the risen Christ and makes available to us everything that he gained through his obedience and resurrection—such as forgiveness, grace, and eternal life. These “benefits of Christ”—to use Philip Melanchthon’s admirable phrase5—become ours through faith. They are not detached from the person of Christ, as if we could have them in isolation; rather, they are given together with his real and redeeming presence within us, brought about by faith.
Faith, then, is not just assent to an abstract set of doctrines. Rather, it is a “wedding ring” (Luther), pointing to mutual commitment and union between Christ and the believer. It is the response of the whole person of the believer to God, which leads in turn to the real and personal presence of Christ in the believer. Faith makes both Christ and his benefits—such as forgiveness, justification, and hope—available to the believer.
Christ, Calvin says, is not “received merely in the understanding and imagination. For the promises offer him, not so that we end up with the mere sight and knowledge of him, but that we enjoy a true communication of him.” Both the person of Christ and the benefits he won for us by his obedience on the cross and through his resurrection from the dead are made available to us by faith. Faith is like a channel that allows both the person and the benefits of Christ to flow into our lives. It is like an open mouth that feeds on Christ and his work in order that we might be nourished. It is like an empty, open hand, reaching out in order to grasp and hold the precious treasure of the risen Christ and his benefits.
Martin Luther draws the analogy between the quintessentially Christian understanding of the nature of faith and the marriage bond uniting husband and wife:
Faith unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches us, Christ and the soul become one flesh (Eph. 5:31–32). And if they are one flesh, and there is between them a true marriage—indeed, the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage—it follows that everything that they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ possesses, as though it were his or her own; and whatever the soul has, Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul’s.6
A human marriage is no legal fiction—it is a real and vital relationship between two persons that involves mutual commitment, a common life, and a sharing of goods. Precisely this relationship is established between the believer and the risen Christ through faith. The believer comes to be in Christ. A dynamic bond is forged between the believing human being and the redeeming Christ, bringing in its wake a partaking of all that he won for us by his obedience. Yet, to go back to our original point, this vital aspect of the Christian understanding of faith is completely missing from everyday English. The apologist must supply and explain it.
How does faith relate to the science of apologetics?
B. APOLOGETICS DOES NOT CREATE FAITH
The aim of apologetics is to create an intellectual and imaginative climate favorable to faith; it does not itself create that faith. Having stressed the potential value of a point of contact to effective Christian apologetics, it is now necessary to sound a note of caution. Apologetics is an excellent servant of the church; it can, however, too easily be allowed to become its master. An authentically Christian apologetics is an apologetics of reserve. That is to say, it is aware of its limitations and rigorously upholds the central Christian insight that it is none other than God himself who creates justifying faith.
How does the discipline of apologetics relate to each of the three components of faith discussed in the preceding section?
First, apologetics aims to persuade people that Christianity is true, whether this takes the form of total assurance through a watertight argument from first principles, or a recognition that Christianity is probably true through an inferential analysis of the world. In this sense of the word, apologetics has a major contribution to make to the birth of faith in that it can help people to believe that certain things are true.
But truth is no warranty of relevance or acceptance, nor is existence a guarantee of trustworthiness. The second task of apologetics is to create a climate of trust in which God can be seen as worthy of faith and commitment. And while apologetics can go some way toward creating this climate, its resources are limited. For example, part of the warranty of the trustworthiness of God lies in the personal experience of those who have already put their trust in him, and this experience itself must be regarded as brought about, at least in part, by God himself.
Third, faith concerns entering into the promises of God and receiving all that they offer. And here apologetics finds itself at the limits of its tether. It has, so to speak, led us to the door of faith. Now it must draw back and allow us to enter in. It is like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy: although able to guide Dante through much of his journey, Virgil eventually has to be left behind for its final stages. It is like John the Baptist, who points to Christ, showing us where he may be found. But we must find him ourselves. Apologetics assures us that there is a God to be found and that he is profoundly worth finding—then points us to where God may be met in Jesus Christ. Paradoxically, we then realize that all along it has been God who has been searching for us and God who finally comes to meet, greet, and accept us.
C. THE LIMITATIONS OF APOLOGETICS
The recognition that apologetics does not create faith raises the question whether there might be other limitations placed on its value. In practice, this turns out to be the case. To illustrate the kind of limitations we have in mind, consider one of the most important forms of Christian apologetics—historical evidentialism.
Historical evidentialism can minimize a significant obstacle to faith—the feeling that the New Testament is “made up,” lacking any real historical roots. It poses a powerful challenge to those who argue, usually on rather flimsy grounds, that Christianity is just some kind of wish fulfillment, by stressing the historical events that forced the birth of Christian ideas.
Historical evidentialism fulfills a vital and distinct function in the arsenal of the Christian apologist. An appeal to history is far less demanding than an appeal to reason; it is far more interesting, and it avoids the sense of abstraction that makes the more theoretical types of apologetics so dull. Historical evidentialism serves to reinforce confidence in the historical foundations of faith. It reassures insiders of the reliability of the gospel accounts of the great historical events on which faith rests. But what role does an appeal to historical evidence have to persons outside the faith? Will it enable them to come to faith?
It is here that historical apologetics is vulnerable. It describes events; the gospel concerns interpretations of events. Historical apologetics asks, “Did it really happen?” Yet the big questions of life concern meanings, not events. Indeed, it is fair to suggest that historical events continue to be remembered because of what they mean rather than what they are in themselves. The historical evidentialist approach tends to imply that facts anchor meaning, where the reverse appears to hold true. Suppose it was conceded that a man called Jesus of Nazareth really did live and die, and that there are inescapable reasons for supposing that he rose again. Would that constitute proof of the gospel? It would certainly eliminate a significant objection to the gospel. It would undoubtedly create an intellectual atmosphere favorable toward faith. Yet it would not prove the gospel, in that the gospel rests on a specific interpretation of those historical facts.
The complexity of the interaction between event and meaning has been well brought out by philosophers of history such as Raymond Aron, who wrote: “The brute fact of the assassination [of Caesar] would not interest anyone, unless it is put in its place within the totality brought about by the crisis of the Roman power, the resistance of the senatorial aristocracy to personal power, and so on.”7 Similarly, the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection depends on their being seen within the totality of Old Testament messianic expectations and certain patterns of divine activity in history.
An incident earlier in Caesar’s career illustrates the point rather well. In 49 B.C., Caesar led an army southward from modern-day France. At one point they had to cross an insignificant river—the Rubicon. Crossing it posed no particular difficulties and required no particular heroism. It was not like crossing a wide and raging torrent, such as those encountered by the American settlers as they moved westward. The act of crossing the Rubicon, in itself, was of no historical significance. But that river happened to mark the border of the territory governed directly by the Roman senate. As a result, crossing this international boundary was nothing less than a declaration of war by Caesar against Rome.
It is the “totality brought about by the crisis of the Roman power,” as Aron put it, that gives the crossing of the Rubicon its fully merited place in history.
We must therefore establish not just what happened, but also how the event should be interpreted. The totality that gives the event its meaning must be ascertained. Whether we are dealing with Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Jesus dying on the cross and rising again from the dead, the principle is the same. The historical significance of the event needs to be settled. It is at this point that purely historical apologetics, dedicated to establishing what happened, begins to falter. Events need to be supplemented with interpretation.
There is a significant gap to be bridged if we are to move from historical events to a specific interpretation of those events. That Jesus died and rose again might well be a matter of history; but that Jesus died and rose again in order that we might be reconciled to the living and loving God is the heart of the gospel itself. There is a clear link between historical fact and Christian faith—but that link needs to be firmly established by the apologist. It is not given; it needs to be made. Historical evidentialism thus lays the foundations for creating an intellectual environment favorable to faith in the “God of the Christians” (Deus Christianorum), to use Tertullian’s phrase. It does not, however, prove that such a God exists.
Related problems arise in other approaches to apologetics. For example, the five arguments Thomas Aquinas develops in support of belief in the existence of God go some way toward suggesting that it is reasonable to believe in a creator of the world or in an intelligent being who is able to cause effects in the world.8 Nevertheless, a decision to believe—what Kierkegaard called “a leap of faith”—is still required. We still have to show that this creator or intelligent being is the God whom Christians know and worship.
Indeed, Aquinas’s arguments could lead to some form of theist belief, that is, faith in the existence of a god rather like that favored by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, an Unmoved Mover, who is distant from and uninvolved in the affairs of his world. This point was made forcefully by the French writer Blaise Pascal, who was profoundly aware of the limitations of philosophical ways of thinking about God. Pascal believed passionately that philosophy had squandered the insight that the God of the Bible is intensely personal. After his death, a crumpled piece of paper was found sewn inside his shirt. The words on this piece of paper have become legendary; they are intensely relevant to our theme. “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars, God of Jesus Christ, my God and your God. Your God shall be my God.”
As Pascal intuitively grasped, the philosophical idea of God bears little relation to the God of Jesus Christ—our God. Somehow, the philosophical idea of God seems bleak and dreary, both in itself and in comparison with the joyful Christian experience of God. It reminds me of Mr. Edwards’ celebrated remarks to Samuel Johnson: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but I don’t know how; cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
Of course, philosophy has its uses, provided its limitations are recognized. To the Christian reader of Aquinas, his arguments are useful backup material for faith. While they do not prove that God exists, in terms likely to be treated as conclusive proof by those outside the Christian faith, they go some considerable way toward showing the internal consistency of the Christian faith and its ability to mesh with the real world of experience. But to someone outside the bounds of the Christian faith, they may well seem to point to less than this. Perhaps there is indeed a prime mover. Maybe there are reasons for thinking that there might well be a god of some sort or other behind the universe. But is this the same god as the God we find in the New Testament? Maybe there is a creator. But is that creator also the redeemer? (After all, gnosticism argued for the existence of two gods, one responsible for the creation of the world, and the other for the more significant work of redeeming it.)
Apologetics thus has its limitations. The responsible apologist will recognize this fact. You cannot argue people into the kingdom of God. Apologetics creates a climate favorable to faith; it does not create faith. It establishes a framework, making the “leap of faith” easier than it might otherwise be. But that step of faith eventually has to be made. The next section explores how the point of contact with the world becomes a point of departure from the world.
D. THE POINT OF CONTACT AS POINT OF DEPARTURE
A central question of relevance to apologetics concerns how the transition is made from a secular to a Christian worldview. Three main accounts of this may be offered.
The classical view is grounded in the notion of a universal rationality, of which Christianity is a part. Because Christianity is itself rational, it can be shown that it belongs within the sphere of reason. Thomas Aquinas is an excellent representative of this tradition with his repeated appeal to the writings of Aristotle to undergird his theological arguments. We could summarize this view diagrammatically as in figure 3.1. No conflict between Christianity and reason occurs. To be a Christian is to take up a specific place within a general rational worldview that places stress on such matters as the explanatory power of the hypothesis of the existence of a creator God.
The presuppositional view, associated especially with Cornelius van Til,9 stresses the utter discontinuity between secular and Christian conceptions of rationality. It must be stressed that van Til does not suggest that Christianity is irrational, as some of his less perceptive interpreters have claimed. Rather, Christianity possesses its own
Figure 3.1 The point of contact in classic apologetics
distinct rationality that does not overlap with secular rationalities. Judged from the standpoint of those secular rationalities, Christianity indeed seems irrational. But “irrational” here means “not conforming to secular rationality” rather than “devoid of reasoned consistency.”10 We could summarize van Til’s approach diagrammatically as in figure 3.2. There is no point of contact between secular and Christian rationalities.11 To be converted is to leap from the secular to the Christian outlook.
The creative approach, based on the notion of the point of contact, argues that secular and Christian rationalities, although distinct, overlap at points. Sin has a noetic influence in that it disrupts the continuity between secular and Christian outlooks; it does not, however, destroy their contiguity. The task of the apologist is to identify the areas of overlap in order to facilitate the transition from a secular to a Christian worldview. We could represent this diagrammatically as in figure 3.3.
It is thus possible to make the transition from a secular to a Christian outlook through the points of contact that act as bridges between the two. There is not so much a “no man’s land,” as an area of shared possibilities, a region in which there is room for ambiguity.
Figure 3.2 The point of contact in presuppositionalist apologetics
Figure 3.3 The point of contact in creative apologetics
The creative apologist will direct attention to this region with a view to exploring it and emerging within the context of a Christian worldview. This region could prove the vital bridge between a secular and Christian worldview, enabling someone previously committed to the former to make the critical transition to the latter.
But this transition still involves a step of faith. How are we to understand this?
E. THE DECISION TO BELIEVE
Throughout this book I have stressed that Christianity makes sense. I have been concerned to commend its attractiveness as well as its credentials and its credibility. Yet, in the end, a step of faith has to be made. But why?
Let’s look at a situation taken from real life, centering on Sheldon Vanauken, who studied English Literature at Yale and Oxford, where he came to faith in the spring of 1951, with some friendly guidance from C. S. Lewis. Vanauken’s dilemma was this: Christianity seemed probable; it seemed to have “a sort of feel of truth,” but there was a gap between the probable and the proved. How could that gap be bridged?12
Vanauken describes with stunning clarity the kind of thoughts that go through many people’s minds about the “leap of faith”:
There is a gap between the probable and the proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted certainty. I wanted to see him eat a bit of fish. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these. And I continued to hang about on the edge of the gap…It was a question of whether I was to accept him—or reject. My God! There was a gap behind me as well! Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble—but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God—but, by God, there was no certainty that he was not. This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it, and flung myself over the gap toward Jesus.13
Vanauken here provides a brilliant statement of the dilemma the creative Christian apologist addresses, while at the same time solving it in a highly personal and memorable manner.
Note the decision to believe. There is no contradiction here. Justifying faith is a decision to believe in God, trusting that the gospel promises are for real and that one day they will be seen to be for real. The decision to believe breaks the paralysis of indecision that otherwise hovers around the gap of faith. Vanauken puts it like this:
I choose to believe in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—in Christ, my Lord and my God. Christianity has the ring, the feel, of unique truth. Of essential truth…[But] a choice was necessary; and there is no certainty. One can only choose a side. So I—I now choose my side: I choose beauty; I choose what I love. But choosing to believe is believing. It’s all I can do: choose. I confess my doubts and ask my Lord Christ to enter my life. I do not know God is, I do but say: Be it unto me according to Thy will. I do not affirm that I am without doubt, I do but ask for help, having chosen, to overcome it. I do but say: Lord, I believe—help Thou my unbelief.14
Vanauken here appears to have stumbled on one of the most powerful insights of Christian theology. Justifying faith rests on our decision to believe—at least, what seems to us, from our human standpoint, to be our decision. Theology, with its more reflective standpoint, is able to discern the decision of God behind our decision; the movement of God toward us in advance of our movement toward him; God’s search for us beneath what we discern as our quest for him. Theology prevents us from rushing into the seductive conclusion that the way things seem to us is the way things really are. It affirms the prevenience of grace at every point in the apologist’s efforts. It insists that we discern and respect the guiding hand of God in every aspect of our journey to faith.
But apologetics is not actually concerned with the detailed unfolding of the theological drama that underlies an individual’s coming to the brink of faith. It is concerned with addressing the situation as perceived by the one standing on that brink. The theology can come in later. The apologist has but one thing to say: “Choose to believe! Make that choice! Decide for Christ!” And with that decision, the gap of faith is bridged. The task of apologetics is completed; that of theology has now begun.