CHAPTER FOUR What Keeps People from Becoming Christians?
CHAPTER FOUR
What Keeps People from Becoming Christians?
Having laid the foundations for apologetics, we must now turn to deal with the problems that the apologist can expect to encounter in the great marketplace of ideas. What stops people from coming to faith? A central task of apologetics is to identify the general pressures that persuade people not to believe. These problems are not simply intellectual. They include cultural pressures, historical memories, and personal feelings—all of which vary enormously from one situation and one individual to another.
Furthermore, the question needs to be particularized: “What stops this person from coming to faith?” After all, the response to the first question is the aggregate of responses to the second. Effective apologetics is oriented toward individual situations—whether of persons or of communities. Instead of trying to give an exhaustive account of the issues that have prevented people from coming to faith in the past, it asks specific and focused questions. What is it that stops this person from coming to faith? What factors prevent this group of people from responding to the gospel?
Michael Green makes this point with characteristic clarity, drawing upon his considerable experience as an evangelist. He also points to the close relationship of apologetics and evangelism:
I think of one of the atheists I met who became one overnight through the death of the father whom he idolized…I think of another celebrated atheist, with whom I was due to debate. During the dinner beforehand, it became evident that the cause of her atheism was a series of terrible experiences in a Catholic school as a youngster. Another was a survivor of Auschwitz. Another was brought up in a strongly anti-religious home, and had imbibed his parents’ attitude uncritically…We must be people-centered in our approach and discover, if possible, what lies behind the atheist front. It may of course be sheer reasoning, but I have found that rarely to be the case. Whatever the cause, we need to find it out before we can hope to deal with the person appropriately.1
Effective apologetics rests on knowing, or being willing to discover, what the real problems are. Once the specific difficulty has been found, it may be addressed directly. Experience suggests that eight main groups of problems may be identified, each demanding a different approach.
A. INTELLECTUAL BARRIERS TO FAITH
Some people have difficulty in accepting Christianity because they see real intellectual obstacles in their path. Many of these are familiar to anyone involved in apologetics. “How can I believe in God, in the face of human suffering?” “Science has made Christianity irrelevant.” “The idea of Jesus Christ being divine is a logical contradiction.”
It must immediately be recognized that some of these intellectual barriers are more imagined than real. “I could never be a Christian because of the problem of suffering” can mean two quite different things:
a. Having thought the matter through carefully, it seems to me that there is a real problem posed to the intellectual coherence of the Christian faith because of the existence of human suffering.
b. I don’t want to get involved in a discussion about Christianity, which could get very personal and threatening. But I don’t want to admit this, as it might seem to imply that I lack intellectual courage, stamina, or honesty. I can save face by letting it be understood that there are good grounds for my rejection of Christianity. So let me select a problem…suffering will do very nicely. Anyway, it will stall the efforts of this guy who’s trying to convert me.
For the apologist to launch into a sustained defense of Christianity over the issue of suffering would be of genuine interest to the first person, but not to the second. It might alter the first person’s mind; it would probably make no difference to the situation of the second. The questions that the discerning apologist must learn to ask here are the following:
a. Which is the real barrier—the presenting intellectual difficulty, or something else?
b. If it isn’t the intellectual problem that keeps this person from coming to faith, what is? Quite possibly the real problem nestles somewhere amid the remaining difficulties noted in this chapter.
For some, then, throwing intellectual problems at the Christian evangelist is like a warplane ejecting flares to divert heat-seeking missiles. It is a decoy meant to divert a deadly attack. But intellectual difficulties nevertheless constitute a real problem for some people, and answers must be given to their difficulties. The following major intellectual difficulties will be dealt with in the rest of this book.
a. “Christianity is a hangover from the intellectual dark ages. It no longer has any place in the modern world. It is impossible to live in the modern world and be a Christian.” This sort of attitude is expressed well in a comment made by the anthropologist Max Müller in 1878:
Every day, every week, every month, every quarter, the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have at last been found out and exploded.2
The worldview that led to this attitude has long since been discredited. However, we give full consideration to the issues as follows:
b. “The idea of ‘a god’ is simply some kind of wish fulfillment. Because we feel the need for a god, we promptly invent one. The entire Christian faith thus rests on a simple delusion.” We shall consider this objection on pages 94–100.
c. “The existence of suffering makes nonsense of the idea of a loving God.” This is often a real difficulty for people who have faced bereavement or who know suffering firsthand. This is then no mere intellectual riddle—it is a perfectly proper question about life. We shall consider this objection on pages 100–108.
d. “There are many religions, all making truth-claims. Christian ity is just one among many. Why should I pay attention to it, rather than to them?” This question is not “modern”—it is as old as Christianity itself. It has been a fact of life for Christians in India and the Arab nations for more than a millennium, even if Western culture has only recently discovered it. This difficulty is especially obvious in a multicultural society such as Britain, Australia, or the western seaboard of the United States and Canada, and it clearly demands an answer. We shall consider this problem on pages 108–19.
e. “Christianity rests on a series of unjustifiable, outdated, and objectionable ideas that cannot be taken seriously in the modern world.” The three such groups of ideas that are usually singled out are:
A point should be made before proceeding further. Of all the world’s religions, it is Christianity that has been subjected to the most intense, persistent, and critical examination over the last three hundred years. It has survived in the most hostile of cultural and intellectual climates. Aggressively secularizing publications—such as The Myth of God Incarnate (1977)—often give the impression that something has recently happened to make Christianity unbelievable. The word modern is bandied around as if the very word discredited Christianity. But modernity is over. Although this fact has yet to permeate into the darker recesses of the Enlightenment, the Western world has entered into a postmodern situation (see pp. 175–81). And this development has brought exciting new possibilities for Christianity as well as new difficulties. But one thing is clear. The idea that Christianity is obsolete has itself become obsolete. It has a curiously dated feel to it, like a relic of a bygone era. The person who mechanically repeats the parrot cries of earlier generations—”science has disproved Christianity”; “Christianity is irrelevant in a world come of age”—has become stranded in a time warp. It may take some time for this fact to filter down from the opinion-makers to popular writing, but it has happened. There has been a major shift of ideas, which we shall be exploring further in this book. It is a shift in favor of faith.
B. THE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
History holds the key to understanding the present by asking how the present came into being. Attitudes within the present are shaped by past forces. To understand the past is thus to cast light on the present. We live in the present, learn from the past, and look to the future. And some of the barriers to faith in the present have their origins in the past of an individual or community.
One of the most common historical barriers to faith relates to the institution of the church. The growth of anticlericalism in Europe on the eve of the sixteenth-century Reformation is a case in point.3 There can be no doubt that there were some very dedicated and effective priests in the late medieval church, faithfully dedicated to ministering to their people and their needs. But they were more than outnumbered by others who brought the institution of the church and its ministers into disrepute. Case after case can be listed. But two common themes underlie them.
First, priests became alienated from the communities they were meant to serve. To give but one example, in early sixteenth-century France, the upper clergy tended to be drawn from noble families who were immune from the social and financial pressures facing ordinary folk. The clergy were exempt from taxation, from prosecution in the civil courts, and from compulsory military service. As a major landowner, the church had no difficulty in providing for its clergy, even in periods of severe economic recession and food shortages that plagued the feudal French economy at the time. The result was perhaps inevitable. A large section of the community—what we would probably refer to as the middle class—became disaffected with the church. They were receptive to the new and radical ideas of the Reformation partly because of their alienation from their own church.
Sadly, this is not something restricted to the sixteenth century. My own church—the Church of England—seems to be suffering from more or less the same thing today. It is seen as being very white and middle class. It does not seem to relate naturally to the concerns of other groups. Independent black-led churches have sprung up to fill this vacuum. The charismatic movement is making inroads into working class areas, being able to relate better to their experiential needs. The Church of England, with its very “bookish” liturgy, often gives the impression of being ill-prepared to interact favorably with this culture. This reminds us of the need to ground our ministry firmly in the needs, hopes, and abilities of the communities we serve.
But second, the events on the eve of the Reformation show up a disturbing tendency: Christianity tends to get identified with the institutional church. The truth and relevance of the gospel become dependent on the quality of its institutions and ministers. In theory, people were merely protesting the shortcomings of the medieval clergy and the fallibilities of the church. In practice, they ended up rejecting medieval Catholicism. Ideas were judged, not on the basis of whether they were right or wrong, but on the basis of the quality of the individuals and institutions who embodied them.
Much the same thing may be seen during the French Revolution, when Catholicism was rejected in favor of secularism largely because of a popular hatred of the church and its clergy. The French church has still not recovered from its eighteenth-century reputation. And, to take a more modern example, consider the fate of Marxism in Europe in recent years. Is Marxism true? Most modern Europeans would probably answer, Who cares? We have seen the effects it has on individuals and institutions. Whether it is true or not, we do not want anything to do with it.
Experience suggests that people can cope surprisingly well with many of the intellectual problems raised by Christianity—for example, the problem of evil. But when they have to face up to a Christian leader who preaches fervently against certain practices, only to indulge in them himself, their faith can be severely undermined. It is not internal theoretical problems that really bother most people—it is the way in which Christianity relates to life in general and to individuals and institutions in particular.
Classical apologetics, which aims to demonstrate the rationality of the Christian faith, often conveys the impression that Christianity is a set of ideas that some people accept and others reject. Yet Christianity is about ideas incarnated in history, about the embodiment of values in real life.
I do a lot of work on university campuses, and very often I hear comments like this. “Christianity can’t be much good. A friend of mine is a Christian, and it hasn’t done much for her. She’s not an especially nice person.” Now part of me wants to respond by saying, “Well, just think how dreadful she would be if she wasn’t a Christian!” But the remainder of me responds by registering how the gospel is being evaluated, not on the basis of its ideas, but on the basis of its effects on people and institutions.
This is an excellent example of “condemnation by association.” The gospel is being rejected, not because of any problems with its rationality, but because of its past associations. The institution of the church and the Christian faith itself are very easily amalgamated in people’s minds. The failings of the church thus come to be projected onto Christianity itself. Take the remark “Christianity is oppressive.” In fact, the gospel is profoundly liberating. But historically, the institution of the church has indeed often been deeply oppressive toward certain people, such as German peasants at the time of the Reformation.
The apologist thus needs to become aware of the associations that may linger, unidentified and unchallenged, in the subconscious memory of an individual or community, and that occasionally rise to the surface in a consciously articulated anti-Christian form. Christianity may have undesirable associations in the minds and memories of certain people, which may be entirely restricted to these individuals and have no validity outside those specific lives. These associations are personal, not universal. They need to be identified and disarmed—a process that demands knowledge of, and commitment to, that person.
The task confronted by the apologist here is that of exorcising the past. The associations that Christianity possesses for people need to be brought to conscious articulation. People need to be helped to see how their attitudes toward the gospel are being shaped by other people and events, rather than by the gospel itself. There is a need to confront the past and to end its negative influence over the present. But how?
First, we need to stress that historical and personal associations do not have any necessary or direct bearing on whether a position is true or not. It may be that a friend of mine, who is utterly charming and caring, believes passionately that the world is flat, whereas another, whom even the most generous critic would regard as combining the charm of Attila the Hun with the intellectual ability of a frog, believes with equal passion that the world is spherical. The latter friend’s view is correct, even if he is something of a pain. Negative personal or historical associations do not necessarily mean that a belief is wrong.
But then it might reasonably be objected that Christian faith ought to make people nice. It ought to elevate them above their former selves. It ought to change them and lead to positive historical and personal associations. The existence of bad Christians thus raises a question, not so much about the intellectual credibility of Christianity, as about its moral and spiritual power and relevance. If Christianity is so good, why doesn’t it make Christians nicer than they are?
This is an important objection, and it needs to be taken seriously. I shall respond to it by drawing on the resources of a neglected minor classic of modern English theology—D. R. Davies’ On to Orthodoxy,4 the personal reflections of a disillusioned liberal. The idea that Christianity is basically a religion of moral improvement, to be judged by its positive moral effects on individuals and society, has its roots in the liberal Protestantism so characteristic of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
This version of Christianity tended to emphasize the perfectibility of human nature and the ability of the gospel to achieve this perfection. It inculcated the notion of human evolution toward moral perfection with such force that the idea of Christianity as a moral improving agent for human society became widely accepted inside and outside Christian circles and continues to have influence today.
But then came the First World War, which shattered the idea of human perfection. As Davies puts it:
The Great War caught Liberal Christianity unawares. It was an event for which it was totally unprepared. It administered a nasty jar to its whole scheme and outlook. It broke in on it like a gangster in a drawing room full of old maids sipping their afternoon tea. It took the lid off that human nature of supposed fundamental goodness, and there emerged something which couldn’t be squared with the roseate dream of an inevitable progress into perfection. Something had gone wrong somewhere!5
What had gone wrong was that the idea of sin had been abandoned by liberal Christianity as some kind of unnecessary hangover from an earlier and less enlightened period in Christian history. “The idea that there was in human nature an element of deliberate defiance and rebellion against God, against the good, fell out of the scheme of modern life. The traditional Christian idea of the sinfulness of man…was abandoned.”6 As Davies witnessed the development of Fascism and Communism in Europe, his conviction of the radical grip of sin on human nature intensified. His personal statement of faith opens as follows:7
(1) I believe that man is radically evil, that sin is of the very texture of human nature.
(2) I believe that, owing to that original, inherent sin, man is incapable of creating a just society…that he is cursed by a fatal contradiction which ordains that the power by which he advances in civilization nullifies and destroys his progress.
(3) I believe that, if left to his own resources, man is doomed to destruction.
For Davies, this was an entirely realistic and entirely Christian estimation of the situation. It corresponds well to the classic Augustinian presentation, given new directions by the sixteenth-century reformers such as Luther and Calvin. For Luther, human nature is incurvatus in se, “bent in on itself.” There is a radical deformity in human nature on account of sin—and that deformity expresses itself at the social, political, religious, and personal levels. Sin causes sins—not merely personal sins, but structural sin, built deep into the very fabric of human institutions and agencies.
Academic theologians, who have generally provided liberal Christianity with its intellectual resources, have found it relatively easy to overlook human sin, largely because they are shielded from many of the harsher realities of that sin. For them, sin might express itself in minor, irritating lapses of manners: plagiarism of ideas, the irritability of colleagues in the faculty lounge, or the unreliability of publishers and editors. Sin in the ivory tower is a petty affair—but in the grim and ugly world of corrupt city councils, tyrannical governments and genocidal armies, sin is real. It is significant that the people who have tried to put sin back on the Christian agenda have been pastors—people who experienced the darker side of life, such as Reinhold Niebuhr’s experiences in the automobile plants of Detroit.
Christianity thus has to contend with sinful people. As Martin Luther put it, Christians are simul iustus et peccator—righteous yet sinners at one and the same time. We are like ill people under the care of a competent physician: although we believe passionately that we shall one day be cured, the fact remains that we are ill at the moment.
It is the intractability of human sin, rather than any deficiency in the gospel, that underlies the fact that there are bad Christians. Sadly, sin is so pervasive that the Christian church tends to obscure Christ as much as she reveals him. It is only by the grace of God that the attraction of Christ and his gospel breaks through the tainted witness of the institutional church. That there are Christians who are not especially good is a testimony to the reality and power of human sin; that there are Christians who are especially good is a testimony to the reality and power of divine grace.
These observations apply especially to Christian leaders—a point made powerfully in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, or, more recently, in Susan Howatch’s novels Glittering Images and Ultimate Prizes. Richard Holloway, a bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church, comments perceptively on the impact of sin and human frailty on the public representatives of the gospel:
Professional Christians, church leaders or preachers, become terribly aware that they are walking contradictions, licensed frauds. On the one hand, as public figures we represent the Christian message, and people project on to us their own expectations and longings…And yet we know that we are, in fact, not anything like the stained glass window that some people imagine us to be, want us to be, or think we ought to be. Inside we are just as full of doubts, fears, anxieties, lusts, longings, as everyone else.8
Holloway stresses how easy it is to assume that admiration of an ideal implies an ability to conform to it. Yet experience suggests that many of the ideals that we most admire lie beyond us and cannot be achieved by our frail and fallen human nature.
We are here in the middle of all this confusion, knowing how inappropriate we are as vessels of God’s disclosure and yet also knowing that in all sorts of ways that is precisely what we are. God does use these frauds, these very flawed and confused creatures, to address, comfort, challenge and console people. Back we come again to the ambiguity, the ambivalence. We are still very much flesh, blood and galloping neuroses, yet through all that God reaches people.9
Grace does not abolish sin, in individuals or institutions; it enables God to work through that sin. Grace does not destroy our frailty, making us into spiritual superheroes; it transfigures that frailty, enabling God to make his treasure available through our earthen vessels. Sin is for real, crippling our efforts to become like Christ; grace is equally for real, allowing God to achieve wonders through what little we have to offer him in the way of self-improvement.
Since sin is a pervasive and perennial feature of human existence—including Christian existence—it is helpful to approach negative personal or historical associations from this standpoint. They are a witness to the power of sin in the world and in Christian believers and institutions. They are a demonstration of our need for grace and forgiveness: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). The real test is whether Christianity makes a difference—whether the “after” is superior to the “before.” And it is your task, as an apologist, to make sure that you do not unintentionally cause anyone to make negative connections between you and your Christian faith. Your lifestyle as much as your message are part of your case for Christianity.
There is, however, another point that must be made. I make it with a degree of sadness and reluctance. At least some of what passes for Christianity in the world is a pathetic distortion of the real thing. Nominal Christianity—a form of Christianity that retains its outward beliefs, while its life-force has been spent—is among the worst enemies of the Christian apologist. The spiritual and moral deadness that often lingers around such forms of Christianity can be deeply oppressing and cause the most negative associations in the minds of individuals. And sadly, these associations are often imprinted on young peoples’ minds at a most impressionable age. If I could draw on my own experience as an apologist, there seems to be nothing like Roman Catholic boarding schools for turning out committed atheists.
Inoculation against dangerous diseases such as polio and typhoid involves the introduction of a harmless or dead form of the bacteria of an otherwise deadly disease into the human bloodstream. This causes the body to produce antibodies that will defend it against future attacks by the virulent form of the disease. Christianity is a disease against which it is very easy to become inoculated. There are many dead and decaying versions of it that build up people’s resistance against the real thing. There is much truth in the old Latin proverb, corruptio optimi pessimum est, “there is nothing worse than the corruption of the best.”
If this seems to be a genuine difficulty for the person to whom you are speaking, you will probably have to be quite honest with them and tell them that they may well have been unfortunate enough to encounter a dead and unrepresentative form of Christianity. To judge Christianity by this standard would be to condemn falling in love on the basis of watching a tired and failing marriage in which the partners are simply going through the motions of living together, all love and loyalty having long since deserted them. Ask them for another chance—and show them the real thing.
C. THE PROBLEM OF RELEVANCE
A common response to rational justifications of Christianity runs like this. “What you say may well be reasonable. It may well be true. But it lacks any real relevance to life. Why should I be interested in such irrelevant ideas, even if they are true?” This problem highlights a deficiency in classical apologetics that is primarily concerned with the rational justification of faith. Truth is no guarantee of relevance.
A colleague of mine is a dedicated philatelist with a most impressive collection of postage stamps. He is perfectly capable of telling me everything I could possibly want to know about the watermarks of stamps issued during the reign of Queen Victoria by the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. And while I have no doubt about the truth of what he is telling me, I cannot help but feel that it is an utter irrelevance to my life.
Many people feel the same way about Christianity. Two matters give rise to this difficulty: A failure to grasp what the “benefits of Christ” actually are, reflecting a failure on the part of the apologist to particularize the gospel in the situation of that person or community, and a serious misunderstanding of the nature of faith.
First, the apologist cannot be content to mumble vague generalities about the gospel, adopting a “to whom it may concern” approach that blunts the force of the gospel. The specificity of the gospel to the life of an individual is too easily compromised through a failure to think through its relevance in a given situation. The gospel does indeed talk about—and offer!—liberation. But from what does a person need to be liberated? From bondage in Egypt? From the fear of death? From slavery in the Old South? From famine? From the paralyzing power of guilt? If the gospel seems irrelevant it is because of our failure to take the trouble to make it relevant. There is nothing wrong with the gospel; the weak link in the chain lies with those whose task it is to contextualize it, to anchor it in the situations of real life. We shall explore this further on pages 189–211.
Second, there has been a failure to explain what that deceptively simple word faith actually means. As we saw earlier,10 faith has three main elements.
It is only the first of these three components that immediately suggests itself to those outside the Christian faith—and which thus prompts the question, “How can believing that something is true totally change you?” The apologist must be prepared to explain the Christian language and the spiritual realities to which it points.
The relevance of Christianity can be grounded in a number of key areas of life:
a. The need to have a basis for morality (see pp. 39–42). Moral values reflect an understanding of the nature and purpose of the world and of the human beings in it. As the moral philosopher Basil Mitchell observed, “Any worldview which carries with it important implica tions for our understanding of man and his place in the universe would yield its own distinctive insights into the scope, character and content of morality.”11 The relevance of morality is obvious; societies and individuals need moral values and personal ideals to govern the way in which they act. Anarchism, once eminently fashionable among those pipe-dreaming, cultured, middle-class intellectuals of the 1930s, fortunate enough never to have experienced the results of anarchy, holds no hope for anyone. Christianity offers a worldview, which it declares to be true on the best of authorities, and which in turn leads to the generation of moral values and ideals that are able to give moral meaning and dignity to our existence.
b. The need to have a framework for making sense of experience. For example, is suffering something arbitrary, or does it serve a deeper purpose? Psychologists have stressed that there seems to be an inbuilt human need to make sense of things—a phenomenon known as “attributional processes.”12 If there is this basic need to attribute meaning to human events and experiences, it is clearly important to base these interpretations of the world of experience upon as reliable cognitive foundations as possible. The science of apologetics stresses the trustworthiness of the cognitive foundations of Christianity, while the art of apologetics seeks to show how this framework may make sense of experience. Reliability and relevance thus go hand in hand within effective Christian apologetics.
c. The need for a vision to guide and inspire. The utter dreariness of a world without ideals points to our need for inspiration. Yet the vision of a classless society certainly proved capable of inspiring commitment and purpose among those who believed in it; sadly, it has proved to be a mirage. Yet nobody can deny its power to inspire, guide, and encourage those who once took it seriously.
Christianity offers a vision—a vision of God’s gracious intervention in our sinful lives, of his forgiveness of our sins through the death of Christ, of the continued presence and power of God in our lives, and of our final entry into the glory of the kingdom, where we share in the resurrection of Christ. That vision keeps us going and keeps us hoping—yet it is a vision grounded in the hard-headed realism of the gospel. The science of apologetics stresses that this vision is no mirage but can be embraced with seriousness and confidence; the art of apologetics is concerned to show how this vision can transform the drabness of our world. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” (Alexander Pope)—but that hope must be for real. The gospel offers a hope that is anchored in the rock of a trustworthy God, who has moved heaven and earth in order to persuade us that he is indeed worthy of our trust, and whose son Jesus Christ died in order that we might be worthy to stand in his sight.
So is there really a problem about the relevance of the gospel? Christianity can be profoundly relevant. But a relevant worldview, as we stressed, must be a real worldview! Christianity has a relevance that far transcends that of an inherently interesting set of ideas. People get bored with ideas. Ideas age rapidly and lose the novelty value that once proved their chief attraction. But Christianity is not simply offering new ideas, though new ideas abound within it. It offers to renew us, to captivate us by transforming us, to make available to us the riches of the power and presence of God, and the dynamic vitality of the risen life of Christ, which can even now break into and revolutionize the dullness of humdrum human life. Here is no mere textbook packed with ideas; here is a love affair, a relationship, something that will last and that will go on renewing itself until the day when the limitations of life on this earth are finally abolished. And, as experience shows, it has a remarkably high coefficient of relevance to real life—if rightly understood.
D. MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY
But Christianity is, as a matter of fact, rarely understood by those outside its bounds. In fact, this is probably one of the greatest tasks confronting the apologist—to rescue Christianity from misunderstandings. Just as the second-century apologists (for example, Justin Martyr) had to persuade their readers that Christians did not eat each other or indulge in sexual orgies at their meetings, so their modern successors must identify and neutralize the prevailing distortions of the gospel. We shall explore this further in what follows.
There is every possibility that a rejection of Christianity—whether a deliberate decision to have nothing to do with it or a vague or unconscious hostility toward it—is actually the rejection of a caricature or distortion of Christianity that has been rejected, while the real thing has escaped unnoticed.
History provides numerous examples of individuals whose misconceptions of Christianity posed a barrier to their coming to faith. An excellent example is Augustine of Hippo.13 Augustine was a talented young orator from North Africa who was trying to make his mark in the political hothouse of Rome in the late fourth century. He seemed to have some success. Soon after his arrival at Rome he was offered the job of public orator in the major northern Italian city of Milan. Aware that this could be the beginning of a significant career in the Roman civil service, Augustine accepted with alacrity.
As a young man, Augustine had become involved with Mani-chaeism, a cult that aimed to make sense of the riddles of life and the hopes and fears of human beings. Although its precise details need not detain us here, it is important to note that, although similar to Christianity at points, it was radically different at others. For example, it taught that the God of the Old Testament was malicious and evil, having nothing to do with the God of the New Testament. It was the God of the Old Testament who was responsible for all the evil and suffering of the world. The Old Testament, therefore, was irrelevant to Christians, as it concerned a God inferior to that of the New.
Manichaeism was highly critical of Christianity and frequently misrepresented it. Augustine’s understanding of Christianity was highly colored by Manichaean polemic. His youthful rejection of Christianity was actually the rejection of a stereotype, a misrepresentation. But he did not know that.
On his arrival at Milan, Augustine discovered that the local Christian bishop, Ambrose, had a reputation as a splendid orator. He decided to find out whether the reputation was merited. Each Sunday, he slipped into the cathedral and listened to the bishop preach. Initially he took a purely professional interest in the sermons as pieces of splendid oratory. What orator can resist picking up tips, unacknowledged, from another? But gradually their content began to take hold of him.
I used enthusiastically to listen to him preaching to the people, not with the intention which I ought to have had, but as if testing out his oratorical skill to see whether his fluency was better or inferior than it was reported to be…I was not interested in learning what he was talking about. My ears were only for his rhetorical technique…Nevertheless together with the words which I was enjoying, the subject matter, in which I was unconcerned, came to make an entry into my mind. I could not separate them. While I opened my heart in noting the eloquence with which he spoke, there also entered no less the truth which he affirmed.14
As the story of Augustine’s long journey to faith makes clear, Ambrose removed a major barrier to faith. He dismantled the Manichaean stereotype of Christianity. Yet, interestingly, all that Ambrose did was to preach the gospel regularly. He seems to have known nothing of the spiritual situation of Augustine, even if he had been aware of his presence in the congregation. Regular preaching of the gospel can undoubtedly pay unexpected dividends.
Among the individuals whom we encounter in our apologetic ministry there will certainly be some who have the most astonishingly misguided and muddled ideas about what Christianity is all about. These misunderstandings—some of which will have been picked up unconsciously, others deliberately propagated—need to be identified and firmly yet tactfully disarmed. How?
Let us imagine that as you are talking to someone about Christianity, you become aware that he or she is resistant to it. Invite the person to tell you what he or she thinks Christianity is all about. And listen carefully. This conversation could provide the basis for important discussions for a long time to come as it allows the person involved to speak about what he or she thinks Christianity is all about and why he or she finds it unacceptable.
Be prepared to ask the person where his or her ideas came from. Also be prepared to present alternatives—alternatives that are more reliable, just as they are more attractive.
E. THE HUNGER FOR ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY
“Unless you can prove that to me, I won’t accept it!” Many conversations on the claims and relevance of the Christian faith often come to a dead end with statements like this. The demand for proof, for demonstration beyond conceivable doubt, is unquestionably one of the most problematical (and often one of the most common) predicaments the apologist is confronted with. But these conversations need not—in fact, they should not—end here. The demand for absolute certainty opens the way to what could be a most fruitful exploration of the limitations placed on any kind of human knowledge—knowledge about God included.15
What sort of things can we know with absolute certainty?16 Vast tracts of human knowledge would have to be set to one side as lacking this characteristic of certainty. Among them, we would have to include historical and scientific knowledge.
a. Historical knowledge. I may believe, firmly, that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, or that the Declaration of Independence is to be dated from 1776. But I could be completely wrong. My belief rests on eyewitness reports, which may rest on confusion or misunder standings, or even represent deliberate fabrications. I was not present at either event, and therefore I lack the ability to verify their accuracy. I have to rely on the accounts of other people—accounts that may be flawed. Of course, I might try to persuade myself that these reports are entirely to be trusted. But I cannot say with absolute certainty when these events took place. At best, I could say that they almost certainly took place then.
It is surprising how few people have actually thought about this point. The apologist could do far worse than ask a question such as “When did Julius Caesar die?” and immediately follow this up with, “And how do you know this? Are you sure?” An important point is being made, even if in a trivial way.
b. Scientific knowledge. The laws of physics would initially seem an excellent example of things we know with absolute certainty. The situation is far from simple, however, as Nancy Cartwright points out in her provocatively titled book, How the Laws of Physics Lie.17 We shall explore some of the issues further (pp. 160–66). But let us explore one problem here, to illustrate how misleading this simplistic approach to scientific theory actually is.
First, we need to recognize that those laws are not prescriptive; they are descriptive. They do not prescribe what nature must be like; they describe what nature seems to be like. They attempt to summarize past observation and predict the future. This prediction is based on the assumption that the future will continue to be like the past, and that what happened in one situation will happen again (or in a recognizable variation) in a different situation. But this raises the problem of induction, probably one of the most difficult areas of the philosophy of science.
Scientific inductivism rests on three principles:18
a. The principle of accumulation, which lays down that knowledge grows by accumulation of well-attested facts.
b. The principle of induction, which asserts that it is possible to infer laws of nature from observations and the results of experiments.
c. The principle of instance confirmation, which declares that our belief in the plausibility of a scientific law is directly proportional to the number of instances of observation of the phenomenon to which the law refers.
These might seem superficially credible. But as Rom Harré points out in his magisterial survey of philosophies of science, “inductivism will hardly stand a moment’s serious criticism.”19 In particular, the idea that the laws of nature describe a situation with absolute certainty is absurd. One can certainly talk about varying degrees of probability in the natural sciences, but any claim to certainty is laughable. For example, an entire series of quite different “laws of nature” can be inferred from any set of facts. Inductivists, aware of this problem, appeal to the “principle of parsimony”—in other words, to the belief that the simplest theory has to be right. But sadly, the history of science shows that it is often the more complex laws that are to be preferred, leaving theory at odds with experience.
All these points are familiar to anyone versed in the philosophy of science. Yet most people have a popular and mythical conception of science that bears little relation to the reality. For them, science is capable of uncovering the mysteries of the world, laying bare its laws and principles with absolute certainty—and thus totally overshadowing Christianity’s claims to truth. In reality the situation is rather different and much more exciting. But we shall return to this in a later chapter (pp. 160–66).
So neither the historian nor the natural scientist can demonstrate things with the total certainty that our critic demanded at the opening of this section. Does that mean that historians and scientists are skeptics, wallowing around in a quagmire of uncertainty and confusion? Certainly not. All those whose task it is to make sense of experience use broadly the same principle: You find what seems to be the best explanation of things, knowing that you are unlikely ever to be able to prove that it is the best explanation, and continue to work with it until something happens to make you change your mind. Probability, not certainty, is the law of the life of experience.
I cannot prove that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. I cannot prove that all the oxygen molecules in my study will not suddenly migrate somewhere else, causing me to drop dead from asphyxiation. I would even have difficulty in proving, to the satisfaction of philosophersphers such as David Hume, that other people actually exist. Nor can I prove that God exists. But I can quite happily live my life on the basis of these assumptions without letting this lack of absolute certainty cause me any real difficulty. All of us, Christian and non-Christian, have to make assumptions about life. But they are hardly ever grounded in the hard-nosed certainty that critics of Christianity seem to want and expect. Christians are in the same boat as everyone else—and that boat shows no signs of sinking.
It might be objected that these examples are drawn from the world of experience. Both history and the natural sciences draw on the data of sense experience. And experience is notoriously difficult to interpret, as the recent debate over interpretation-free immediate sense experience has demonstrated.20 But why not appeal to reason instead of experience? This would result in a type of knowledge in which total certainty is possible. Here are three examples:
All of these are true, although the second might take a moment’s thought to register. The first two are true because of the definitions of their terms. By definition, a whole is greater than its part. By definition, a man cannot marry his widow’s sister because he must have died before his wife acquires that status. The third is a comforting and familiar illustration drawn from the world of mathematics.
Could we not have certain knowledge about other things, by an extension of this method? Why should we not have a knowledge of everything that matters by using our reason and establishing a series of self-evident truths upon which we could build? This approach has been tried and has failed miserably. The dream of finding self-evident truths, known with total certainty, and on which an entire system of beliefs could be erected, is now seen as a delusion. (We shall explore this further on pp. 147–155.) But the following point can be made at this stage. All our knowledge about anything that really matters is a matter of probability. The things that we can be really sure about seem rather trivial and petty. Is knowing that the whole is greater than the part going to change your life? Is knowing that five and five make ten going to bestow upon you the secret of eternal life—or will it just help you chronicle the ticking away of your years, leading to an inevitable death?
Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, once wrote: “I am an atheist who has lost his faith.” There is no paradox here, no contradiction. Atheism, like all other worldviews, is a matter of faith. It rests on the belief (not the proven certainty) that there is no God. There is no proof—philosophical or experimental—that there is no God. The atheist’s decision is a matter of faith, even if that atheist fails to realize that this is the case. The Christian faith is thus in excellent company. When it comes to the big things of life—like believing in the Christian faith or believing in democracy—we live on the basis of probability, not certainty. Anyone who disagrees probably has not given it very much thought. Christian faith is a risk because it cannot be proven. It is not a state of calm and easy security, but is more like an adventure, a ceaseless battling with troubles. The “tranquility of faith” (Luther) is set in the midst of conflict and turmoil, not apart from them. But Christian faith rests on history, reason, experience, and revelation, a formidable quartet that, like the four legs of a well-balanced table, gives security and stability to the life of faith.
F. PRIOR COMMITMENT TO ANOTHER BELIEF SYSTEM
Some people are searching for the meaning of life, for personal fulfillment, and for a belief system that will make sense of the world and their place within it. Others believe that they have found them and need search no longer. The outcome of their quest is often Christianity—often, but not always. So how does the apologist cope with a situation in which there is already commitment to a rival belief system?
At first, it might seem that all is lost. Yet, curiously, it is perhaps easier to enter into a creative dialogue with, for example, an atheist or a Marxist than with an agnostic, because at least the former believe something, whereas the latter sits permanently on the fence of ideas, taking refuge in the ambiguities of life to justify a perpetual stance of indifference and noncommitment. The atheist is prepared to concede—no, that is too negative a word, to celebrate—the need for commitment and the existence of evidence to move one in the direction of that commitment. In other words, the atheist recognizes the need to come off the fence and the fact that there are factors in the world of human experience and thought that suggest which side of the fence that ought to be. At present, the atheist happens to sit on the godless side of that fence. That, however, is not a permanent state of affairs. Dialogue is possible.
It must be recognized from the outset, however, that this dialogue may be long and difficult, involving patience as much as intelligence, and loving care as much as argument. The difficulties are well illustrated by considering the way in which belief systems relate to experience. At first sight, it might seem that anything in the world of experience that contradicts a worldview or belief system instantly negates it. The belief system collapses when confronted with a single event in the world of experience that is at odds with the theory. But in practice it just is not that simple.
The Harvard philosopher Willard van Orman Quine has provided us with what is undoubtedly one of the finest accounts of the way belief systems or worldviews relate to experience:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics…is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges…A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions adjustments in the interior of the field…But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.21
In other words, experience often has relatively little impact on worldviews. Where experience seems to contradict a worldview or system of beliefs, the most likely outcome is an internal readjustment of the system rather than its rejection. In fact, it might even be suggested that some worldviews are so constructed that they are incapable of being falsified on the basis of experience. Quine notes this point with characteristic clarity:
Our system of statements has such a thick cushion of indeterminacy, in relation to experience, that vast domains of law can easily be held immune to revision on principle. We can always turn to other quarters of the system when revisions are called for by unexpected experiences.22
Quine’s analysis is important in relation to Christian apologetics. It casts light on the difficulties likely to be faced by the apologist who is dealing with people with prior commitments. A worldview is not simply a collection of beliefs, the disproving of any of which automatically and necessarily leads to the worldview instantly becoming incredible. Rather, it consists of a cluster of ideas, a network of interacting beliefs, often with a considerable degree of flexibility and lack of precision. An argument that appears to dent the system badly is absorbed through the considerable “cushion of indeterminacy.” Events from the world of experience that seem to show up fatal weaknesses in the system do not lead to the rejection of that system but to “adjustments in the interior of the field.” Disconfirming experiences or negative arguments call into question the internal elements of the system, not the system itself.
Freudianism and Marxism are excellent examples of theories that can account for just about everything that happens, without the need for modification. The situation is neatly illustrated by the often-told story of the man who visited his Freudian analyst. If he was early, the analyst concluded that he was anxious; if he was on time, he was compulsive; if he was late, he was resentful. The theory accounted for everything. It was precisely this inability to be refuted by experience that prompted Karl Popper to develop his celebrated theory of falsification. Irrefutability might seem to be a virtue; in reality, it is a vice.
How then can one refute a worldview? How can one begin to penetrate the “cushion of indeterminacy” that protects vulnerable ideas from exposure and contradiction? The following suggestions may prove helpful.
1. Explore the Issue of Historical Erosion
What seems permanent often proves to be temporary. This is one of the great insights of the Old Testament prophets. Surveying the great empires of the ancient world, each of which seemed so permanent a feature of the political landscape, the prophets stress their utter transitoriness. Thus Isaiah proclaimed the future collapse of Babylon (Isa. 47:1–7). What was here today could be gone tomorrow.
This sense of shattered permanence is evoked to near-perfection by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poem Ozymandias. Shelley tells of a monument in an ancient land:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
This ruined monument turns out to be all that remains of a tribute to the power of a long-dead king:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Yet nothing remains of these works. The words ring empty. The monument is a sad testimony to past glory and present ruin, decay and insignificance:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This same historical perspective needs to be applied to worldviews. In their heyday, they seemed permanent, destined to abide forever and remain a serious threat to Christianity until the end of time. With hindsight, they are shown up for what they really are: systems confined to a narrow band of history.
The words of Tennyson in In Memoriam are an eloquent summary of the situation in the eyes of the Christian apologist:
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day, and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee.
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
If you read the writings of the second-century apologists, such as Justin Martyr, you soon begin to realize that the worldviews they regarded as a serious challenge to faith just are not around any more. The threat of yesterday is often deposited in the trash can of history today.
Christianity has been around for two thousand years. Its main rivals in the Western marketplace of ideas today are recent inventions. For how long will they remain a serious threat? In the 1960s we were told that Marxism was here to stay. If Christianity was going to survive, it would have to adjust to this situation and get used to the idea. Christianity would have to be permanently on the defensive against this greater, more resilient, and more intellectually respectable belief system.
The dramatic destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the remarkable disintegration of the Communist Party in Moscow in the summer of 1991 showed up the superficiality of this judgment. Marxism collapsed, the myth of its permanence and superiority exposed. Although Marxism will probably remain significant in universities for some time, given the social role of those institutions as homes for lost causes, it has lost its popular appeal. What one generation invented, another discards. What proved liberating to one generation proves oppressive to another. Intellectual fashions change.
The point of this approach is clear. In dealing with a rival belief system, it is perfectly proper to inquire about its historical pedigree. How long has it been around? What reasons are there for suspecting it will continue to be around in a hundred years’ time? Christians are notoriously bad about asking awkward questions like this, probably because their faith makes them such nice people. But these questions need to be asked—persistently. The dreadful thought that today’s present certainties might be tomorrow’s past curiosities undermines the credibility of worldviews with remarkable speed.
2. Examine the Evidence for the Belief System
In theory, people ought to hold to a particular worldview because of the force of the evidence offered in favor of that worldview; in practice, it tends to be nothing of the sort. Often, individuals adopt a belief system because it happens to be fashionable among their peer group or because it annoys their parents. The age-old theme of son revolting against father (Luke 15) often finds its expression at a deeper level—the children’s rejection of the belief system of their parents. Thus, to give one example, German literature around the time of the French Revolution is dominated by the theme of young men totally rejecting the old outlook of their parents and embracing the secular worldview of the French Revolution with enormous enthusiasm.
But a day of reckoning awaits, with its hard questions. Why this belief system? Sure, it is fashionable—but is it credible? Sure, it makes a statement about your independence from your parents—but is it right? Will your children end up rejecting your belief system, simply to make a statement about their independence? And what does that say about the merits of what you believe? Questions like this have to be asked at some point. You can begin that process of questioning.
To illustrate the questions that need to be asked, we may look at the classic criticism of Marxism made by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism,23 provocatively dedicated to “the countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.” Popper’s point is this: Marxism claims to rest on a scientific analysis of history that shows that it is inevitably moving toward socialism. And given the historical inevitability of socialism, one can speed things up by working toward socialism, thus making the inevitable happen sooner. As Marx puts it in his preface to Das Kapital, one “can shorten and lessen the birthpangs” on the road to socialism. But, Popper points out, the evidence for this “historical inevitability” is specious. It cannot be taken seriously. History shows nothing like the patterns that Marx detected and on which his theory ultimately rested. The entire edifice of Marxism may therefore be said to rest, not merely on a mistake, but on something that is obviously a mistake.
This is illustrative of a general approach. Belief systems ultimately rest on something. Your task is to find out what and to begin to challenge those foundations. One of the most interesting features of intellectual history is that worldviews very often linger on long after their theoretical foundations have been demolished and discredited. The base has collapsed. The superstructure remains, at least for a while. You “can shorten and lessen the birthpangs” (Marx) of the process of breaking with that worldview by helping people see that they are presently committed to a dying and decaying philosophy. Christianity offers ideas with a distinguished past—and an assured future. Perhaps they might like to reconsider?
3. Examine the Presuppositions of the Belief System
All belief systems rest on presuppositions. In The God Who Is There Francis Schaeffer develops this point as follows:
Let us remember that every person we speak to…has a set of presuppositions, whether he or she has analyzed them or not…It is impossible for any non-Christian individual or group to be consistent to their system in logic or in practice…A man may try to bury the tension and you may have to help him find it, but somewhere there is a point of inconsistency. He stands in a position which he cannot pursue to the end; and this is not just an intellectual concept of tension, it is what is wrapped up in what he is as a man.24
The basic point Schaeffer makes is of considerable importance to a person-centered apologetics. It is quite possible that a person’s life is actually based on a whole set of unrecognized presuppositions, which your gentle and patient inquiry can bring to light. Experience suggests that such gentle explorations can sometimes be devastating in that they expose the inner contradictions and confusions within someone’s outlook on life. A crisis may result in which faith can be born.
Schaeffer provides a number of examples of cases in which exposure of contradictions and tensions within worldviews has important (and negative) implications for their credibility. We may note two. The first relates to a discussion group Schaeffer was leading at Cambridge University, attended by a young Sikh.
He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problems of his own beliefs. So I said, “Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no intrinsic difference between them?” He agreed…The student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian’s head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, “There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty.” Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.25
The essential point here is that persistent questioning exposed the inner contradiction within an alternative belief system. The same point emerges in a more celebrated example, which Schaeffer skillfully deploys against the ethical nihilism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s fundamental point was that ethics is an irrelevance. If there is any ethical component to an action, it lays in the exercise of choice, not the moral decision reached. This famous attitude attracted considerable attention. Then Sartre signed the Algerian Manifesto—a protest against the continuing French occupation of Algeria. Events in the real world called into question his ethical views.
[Sartre] took up a deliberately moral attitude and said it was an unjust and dirty war. His left-wing political position which he took up is another illustration of the same inconsistency. As far as many secular existentialists have been concerned, from the moment Sartre signed the Algerian Manifesto he was regarded as an apostate from his own position, and toppled from his place of leadership of the avant-garde.26
This illustrates Schaeffer’s point that Sartre and other nihilists “could not live with the conclusions of their system”—and so points to the need for the apologist to explore what the logical conclusions of a given system might be. “The more logical a man who holds a non-Christian position is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his own presuppositions.”27
Schaeffer develops this insight further by analyzing the way in which worldviews construct shields to protect themselves against the real world. The apologist must remove that shield and allow the harsh realities of the real world to raise questions about the credibility of that system.
It is like the great shelters built upon some mountain passes to protect vehicles from the avalanches of rock and stone which periodically tumble down the mountain. The avalanche, in the case of the non-Christian, is the real and the abnormal fallen world which surrounds him. The Christian, lovingly, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of the external world and of what man is to beat upon him.28
Just as Sartre’s views proved untenable when confronted with the crises and situations of the political world, so other worldviews, according to Schaeffer, can be discredited in similar ways. Discovering the implications of an outlook is of major apologetic importance, as is a willingness to explore them, gently and lovingly, with those who cling to them.
These, then, are some suggestions for engaging in critical yet creative dialogue with those already committed to worldviews. Accounts of, and responses to, six major worldviews, each a powerful rival to, or a potential critic of, Christianity, are provided in a later chapter as follows:
G. THE PROBLEM OF PERSONAL INTEGRITY
Getting people to change their minds might seem a simple matter. All it involves is giving up one set of opinions and adopting another in their place. The main task of the Christian apologist then is to persuade people that Christian ideas are right—or at least better—than non-Christian alternatives. And the rest will follow as a matter of course.
Sadly, reality is rather different. Apologetics deals with real people—with human beings who often have deeply held views, a fierce sense of loyalty, and an enormous reluctance to admit that they are wrong about anything.
Suppose you are talking to a lifelong atheist about his ideas. The superficial agenda may be about whether or not God exists. But beneath the surface, there may be a conflict going on within this person, unnoticed. Thoughts like this might be flashing through his mind: “I’ve been an atheist for twenty-five years now. That’s a long time. And everyone knows that I’m an atheist. If I change my mind now, people will laugh at me. I’ll lose face. My personal reputation is tied up with my atheistic views. I’m locked into this situation. Somehow, my atheism and my personal identity have become mixed up with each other. If I change my mind on this one, I’ll somehow be condemning my whole past.” The apologist can very easily reinforce such prejudices through a tactless and insensitive approach to the matter.
A major contribution to the resolution of this problem has been provided by the Harvard Negotiation Project. Based at Harvard University by leading academics such as Roger Fisher, Willison Professor of Law, this project has concentrated on ways of resolving difficulties without losing face or compromising personal integrity.29 The same principles that are used in international peace negotiations or for the resolution of conflicts within or between major business corporations can be adapted for use in Christian apologetics. I have conducted a small pilot project among Oxford University students over the last few years and have been greatly encouraged by the results. What follows is the Harvard Negotiation Project, as adapted at Oxford for the purposes of Christian apologetics. It rests on two simple principles:
We shall explore these points briefly, with illustrations.
1. Separate the Problem from the People
Someone—let’s call her Elizabeth—outlines a position. It happens to be vulnerable at a particular point; there is a defect that has been overlooked. Someone else—let’s call her Laura—then launches into an attack on this position, exposing its weakness. Elizabeth has now been put in a difficult position, feeling that her personal standing will suffer if she concedes the point. She digs her heels in and defends her position. But in reality it is no longer the position that she is defending; it is her personal integrity. Laura has attacked Elizabeth as much as Elizabeth’s ideas. The person and the ideas have become so closely linked that they are now inseparable. A similar problem can easily arise in apologetics, especially when the person you are talking to has a well-established reputation as a non-Christian.
A person-centered apologetics can cope with this difficulty precisely because it recognizes individual needs and problems. The basic strategy is as simple as it is effective: separate the person from the idea. Help the other person see that there is no necessary connection between their personal identity and the ideas they hold at the moment. Let’s look at two different approaches. The first is likely to reinforce the unhelpful link between people and their ideas; the second will weaken that link. Suppose the discussion has been about the Resurrection, which your friend declares himself to have difficulties with. Consider these two responses, and try to imagine how your friend would feel in each case.
a. Well, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. These objections just aren’t important. I can’t take them seriously, and I don’t think you’ve even bothered to think about them. I’m sure that if you were to think about them longer, you’d see that. Let’s go through these so-called objections that you’ve just made, and I’ll show you how unimportant they really are.
b. I can understand how you must feel about this. In fact, I once felt much the same way myself and can really sympathize with you. And it is a difficult thing to sort out, isn’t it? Actually, I’ve changed my mind since then and see it in a different way now. Let me try and explain the way I see it.
Both these responses are stereotypes. The first is abruptly rude and the second nauseatingly sweet. But the contrast makes the point. The first approach links person and ideas; the second seeks to drive a wedge between them by making it clear that a person’s ideas are detachable from their personal integrity. We shall explore this point further in what follows.
2. Make It Easy for Them to Change Their Minds
People find it difficult to change their minds if they are made to feel it is a win-or-lose situation. Bad apologetics creates the impression that changing your mind is equivalent to losing an argument. And nobody likes losing arguments—especially in public. Roger Fisher and William Ury, explaining how the principles of the Harvard Negotiation Project may be applied, make this point as follows:
Often in a negotiation people will continue to hold out not because the proposal on the table is inherently unacceptable, but simply because they want to avoid the feeling or the appearance of backing down to the other side. If the substance can be phrased or conceptualized differently so that it seems a fair outcome, they will then accept it…Face-saving involves reconciling an agreement with principle and with the self-image of the negotiators. Its importance should not be underestimated.’30
How can this basic principle be applied? Two major strategies have proved to be useful in apologetic contexts.
1. Do Not Present Christianity as a Confrontational Option
To put this in plain English, do not force your conversation partner to enter into a win-or-lose situation. That is, do not present Christianity as being right (which immediately implies that your conversation partner is wrong, and thus provokes a confrontation). Instead, present Christianity as being attractive, explaining why. Christianity gives you hope in the face of death, a sense of peace in the presence of God, a new perception of personal dignity, and a revitalized sense of purpose (to name but a few of the many attractions of the gospel).
What perception does this create on the part of your dialogue partner? That you are concerned to offer him something which you have found valuable and exciting. You are not telling him that he is wrong; you are offering him something of value. Just as one beggar might tell another where to find bread, so you are offering to make available something you have found to be relevant and helpful. The negative impression you avoid creating is that of defeating your colleague in an argument. The positive impression you succeed in creating is that of caring for your colleague. And is this not one of the fundamental impulses underlying all good apologetics—a sense of love and compassion for our friends?
This does not mean that we avoid Christian claims to truth. Part of the attraction of Christianity is that it is both exciting and true. But it means being aware that truth-claims can, through human weakness and fallibility, very easily be presented or perceived in seriously confrontational terms. You can talk about the truth of the gospel when this seems appropriate; by this stage, your dialogue partner may not find this a problem anymore.
Earlier we noted the wisdom of Francis Schaeffer’s strategy of confronting rival worldviews—for example, by pointing out their internal inconsistencies. Yet even this process of creating a climate of uncertainty need not be dangerously confrontational. It is important to confront and challenge ideas rather than the person who holds them. For example, suppose you are speaking to someone who is committed to Marxism (see pp. 156–60). Compare the following approaches.
• Marxism is wrong, and I don’t see how anyone could take it seriously anymore. Only someone who is dangerously out of touch with things would find it credible.
• I’ve always had some problems with Marxism, I’m afraid. Maybe you could help me here. For example, why is it that Marx argued that the coming of the revolution would make religion disappear, yet the coming of Marxism to certain countries during the twentieth century seems to have led, if anything, to a revival of religion? I’d like to know.
The first is likely to be counter-productive, implying that your friend is a fool. The second is much more positive and affirming of your friend, who is presented as someone who can help you think through a difficulty you have had. But it has a potentially lethal sting in its tail in that it raises certain serious inconsistencies between theory and experience, which have led many former Marxists to abandon their political faith. You could begin that process of erosion of confidence with your friends—while you affirm, rather than devalue, their personal worth.
2. Use Yourself as an Example of Someone Who Changed His or Her Mind
Clearly, this approach depends on your having once been a non-Christian and having subsequently changed your mind. If this is the case, you can help your dialogue partner to see that personal identity and ideas are separable. Furthermore, you can help the other person to explicitly acknowledge the problem and to clear the way for its resolution. Take the simple series of statements: “I used to think that Christianity was something of an irrelevance. But I had the courage to change my mind. And I’m glad I did.” You acknowledge the problem, indicate that facing and resolving it is a matter of courage, and bring home that the outcome of that decision was positive. The instinct to “save face” is thus outweighed by the greater human instinct—to do something courageous, and which is seen to be courageous. Little things often matter a lot in apologetics; too often they get overlooked.
This also applies to the final barrier to faith we shall consider in this chapter.
H. A SENSE OF GUILT OR INADEQUACY
Perhaps surprisingly, a genuine obstacle to faith on the part of many people is an awareness of sin, or a sense of deep and irredeemable personal inadequacy. For people in this position, it is of relatively little comfort to know that Christianity is true and that it is relevant to their situation. Their problem is that they are convinced that they are simply not capable of relating to God. “If God knew what I was really like,” they often argue, “he wouldn’t want anything to do with me. How can a holy God want to have anything to do with a sinner like me?” Others are convinced that their total insignificance places them outside the sphere of the gospel of grace. It applies to someone else but not to them.
This problem is not often addressed by textbooks on apologetics, perhaps because it seems out of place in a discussion of the rationality of the Christian faith. But our person-centered approach demands that it should be considered. It really is a barrier to faith for some; therefore it must be addressed by the responsible apologist. Happily, experience suggests that it is an obstacle that is relatively easily removed. We shall deal with these matters briefly, as they represent well-worn paths in Christian evangelism. The basic points you need to stress are the following:
a. God already knows exactly what you are like (Ps. 139:1–6). There is no question of deceiving God, as if he somehow thinks you are a thoroughly respectable and righteous person, when in reality you are nothing of the sort. The entire gospel rests on the supposition that God knows exactly what we are like—and loves us nonetheless.
b. The gospel is meant for sinners (Mark 2:17). Realizing that you are a sinner is thus the precondition for forgiveness, not a reason for excluding you from faith. The Scottish pastor and writer John Duncan was conducting a communion service one Sunday. When he came to administer the wine to the congregation, a sixteen-year-old girl hesitated, then refused to accept it. She motioned with her hand, indicating that she did not feel able to share in the cup. Realizing that the girl felt unworthy to receive it, Duncan reached out, laid his arm on her shoulder, and said: “Take it, lassie. It’s meant for us sinners.” The wine is a symbol of God’s forgiveness of sins through the death of Christ—real forgiveness of real sins. Recognizing the full extent of your sinfulness does not disqualify you from the grace of God—it indicates how much you need it.
c. Sin is a barrier to God—but a barrier that has been broken down by God. The penalty of sin has been cancelled, its power has been broken, and its continuing presence is being diminished, through the cross of Christ. You have been saved from the penalty of sin, you are being saved from the power of sin—all because of what Christ achieved on the cross. It remains for us to accept and appropriate all that he did, through faith in him.
In this chapter we have begun to explore some of the obstacles to faith and have made some suggestions about how these barriers can be rendered less effective. The two chapters that follow deal with certain more specific areas of difficulty. We begin by dealing with a series of individual difficulties that often cause people to hesitate to accept the Christian gospel.