CHAPTER SIX A Clash of Worldviews

“Christianity is passé.” Clichés like this have become part of the staple diet of modern thought. For the last three centuries Christianity has been on the defensive. It has been confronted with a series of intensely anti-religious worldviews that have constantly sought to discredit Christianity, dismissing it as outdated and premodern. Reason reigns supreme in the modern world because it fails to conform to the intellectual standards laid down as self-evidently correct by modernity. Christianity belongs to the past.

Or does it? One of the most significant developments in the last decade or so has been the increasing realization that modern worldviews rest on distinctly vulnerable foundations. Diogenes Allen perceptively notes the “narrow view of reason and the reliance on natural science that are characteristic of the modern mentality.”¹ Yet modernity, he writes, is dead; we live in a postmodern world.

A massive intellectual revolution is taking place that is perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern world from the Middle Ages. The foundations of the modern world are collapsing, and we are entering a postmodern world. The principles forged during the Enlightenment (c. 1600–1780), which formed the foundations of the modern mentality, are crumbling.

Christian apologetics must address itself to this postmodern situation—a task which we shall undertake in the final section of this chapter.

But a more urgent task awaits the apologist. Apologetics must have the courage to declare that modernity—with all the allegedly fatal challenges that it brought to bear against the Christian faith—is dead. The apologist must be prepared to be like Nietzsche’s madman, who ran around shouting “God is dead! We have killed him!” Except that this time it is the modern worldview that is dead, killed off by its failure to live up to its own promises. In this chapter we will explore some of the reasons why the modernist outlook is dead and look at three of its most significant worldviews—or, more accurately, three variations on themes within the modern worldview. In a sense, we are carrying out three autopsies. Although for some these worldviews remain real options in today’s world, for most they are intellectual corpses; they once lived and flourished, but they are now laid out, cold and naked, on the dissection tables of intellectual historians.

What are the main features of this massive change in outlook that is now gaining sway in the Western world?² Four major developments may be singled out as having precipitated a crisis in confidence within the modern anti-Christian worldview.

1. The search for a universal rationality, so fundamental to the modern outlook, is now generally regarded as a dead end. There is no one single way of thinking that we can identify with reason and that would force us to acknowledge all other ways of thinking as “irrational.” Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have stressed that there are many ways of thinking, each with its own internal standards of rationality and concepts of evidence.³

2. The search for a universal morality, based on reason rather than on the Christian revelation, now seems bankrupt and sterile.⁴ This conclusion follows logically from the collapse of faith in a universal rationality. The title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s devastating critique of such Enlightenment-inspired projects is itself a telling argument against them. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The words immediately alert us to the historically undeniable fact that there is enormous disagreement on notions of rationality and concepts of justice. There is no single universal rule to which all others are subservient. The Christian approach to morality, like the Christian approach to rationality, has every right to be heard and respected in this new climate—not least because of its thoroughly realistic critique of human nature.

3. The touching Enlightenment belief in the goodness of human nature and the inevitability of human progress has received a series of rude setbacks. Where once it was believed that liberal education and the application of science would abolish the problems of the world, these beliefs are now treated with open skepticism. Knowledge itself is no longer seen as necessarily being a good thing. The shocking use to which science has been put—whether in the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or the chemical nerve agents developed to eliminate population centers—brings home the fact that knowledge can be used for evil as much as for good.

Human nature is tainted with evil. No worldview that ignores this can hope to be taken seriously anymore. And the atrocities of Nazism (and their parallels in the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors) raise a difficult question for the modernist. Is this the shape of the rational future? Is this what we can expect when traditional Christian values are abandoned? The moral question raised cannot be evaded.

4. Belief in God is no longer to be regarded as outdated or eccentric. The natural sciences, once hailed as the discipline that abolished God, now seem to be allowing him to return by the back door. “The embargo on the possibility of God is lifted” (Diogenes Allen). The new questions raised by the natural sciences about the order and existence of the universe raise the possibility of God. It is up to responsible Christian apologetics to make sure that these new questions receive Christian responses.⁵

This, then, in brief outline, is the new situation in Western culture faced by the Christian apologist. It is, in many ways, an enormously exciting situation. The old certainties are dead and gone. No longer does reason seem capable of delivering the insights we need in order to live, hope, and die. No longer does science by itself seem capable of making sense of the universe. The opportunities are there, and they must be exploited.

But old ideas die hard. Indeed, modernity seemed to believe that it could never become outdated. As Thomas C. Oden put it:

Modernity pretends that all futures are likely to reflect the assumptions of modernity. That in fact is one of the assumptions of modernity. Its advocates simply cannot imagine their own assumptions ever being transcended. This gives the odd pretense of permanence to the radical relativism and infinite mutability of modernity.⁶

The three sections that follow seek to identify the basic features and the fatal weaknesses of three modern worldviews that still receive a hearing today. A person-centered apologetic must be capable of responding to these outlooks, even if they are being increasingly rarely encountered in the modern world. They are still there, and the challenge they pose must be met with a reasoned and informed response.

But with the death of modernity, new challenges have arisen—challenges to which the Christian apologist must be capable of rising. Two are of special importance; one—postmodernism—is especially linked with academic institutions such as universities, while the other—neopaganism, often referred to more generally as the New Age movement⁷—has gained a significant, if relatively uncritical, hearing in vast tracts of modern Western society. Scorned by scholars and academics, neopaganism has nevertheless gained a significant committed following in the United States and Australia. To exploit the new opportunities that have arisen for Christianity in the New Age, the apologist needs to be able to handle rival worldviews competing for the same space.

But we begin with three worldviews which, in one sense, are dead, yet, in another sense, continue to live.

A. ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM

A radical statement of the rationalist gospel might take the following form. Reason is capable of telling us everything we need to know about the world, ourselves, and God (if there is one). One of the most graphic portrayals of this enormous confidence in reason is the frontispiece to the eighteenth-century rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff’s ambitiously titled book Reasonable Thoughts About God, the World, the Human Soul, and Just About Everything Else (1720). The engraving in question portrays a world enveloped in shadows and gloom, representing the old ideas of superstition, tradition, and faith. But on part of the engraving, the sun has broken through, lighting up hills and valleys, and bringing smiles to the faces of what we must assume to have been a hitherto rather gloomy group of peasants. The message is clear: reason enlightens, dispelling the fog and darkness of Christian faith, and ushers in the glorious light of human reason. Divine revelation is an irrelevance, if it exists at all.

At this point, we need to stress the difference between “reason” and “rationalism,” which may appear identical to some readers. Reason is the basic human faculty of thinking, based on argument and evidence. It is theologically neutral and poses no threat to faith—unless it is regarded as the only source of knowledge about God. It then becomes rationalism, which is an exclusive reliance on human reason alone and a refusal to allow any weight to be given to divine revelation.

Classical Christian theology, including all responsible evangelical theology, makes use of reason—for example, in thinking through the implications of certain aspects of God’s self-revelation. For example, consider the role of reason in exploring the relation between a functional and ontological Christology: if Jesus is our Savior, yet only God can save, reason suggests that Jesus must (in some sense of the word) be God. Yet here reason is reflecting on revelation, seeking to explore its implications. Rationalism declares that all thinking about God must be based upon human reason, thus immediately locking theology into the fallen human situation, with no possibility of being extricated from our confusion and distortion by God himself.

How did this remarkable—and, it must be said, totally misplaced—confidence in reason in matters of religion develop? Three stages can be identified, each leading naturally into the next one.

1. First, it was argued that the gospel is rational. Since the natural antithesis of rationality is irrationality, it seemed to many writers of the Middle Ages, such as Thomas Aquinas, that it is possible to demonstrate that Christianity makes sense. It rests on thoroughly reasonable foundations. For example, Aquinas argued that Christian belief in God does not involve some kind of intellectual suicide, and he suggested five lines of reasoning that showed that this belief was entirely reasonable. But Aquinas and the Christian tradition he represented did not for one moment believe that Christianity was limited to what could be ascertained by reason. Faith goes beyond reason, having access to truths and insights of revelation that reason cannot hope to fathom or discover unaided.

The noted historian of medieval Christian thought Etienne Gilson made a delightful comparison between the great theological systems of the Middle Ages and the cathedrals that sprang up throughout Christian Europe at this time. They were, he remarked, “cathedrals of the mind.” Christianity is like a cathedral that rests on the bedrock of human reason but whose superstructure rises beyond the realms accessible to pure reason. It rests on rational foundations, but the building erected on that foundation goes far beyond what reason can uncover. Thus John Calvin, a distinguished representative of this approach, suggested that reason was perfectly capable of arriving at a knowledge of God the Creator. But real knowledge of God—saving knowledge of God—can be had only through revelation. Knowledge of God the Redeemer is a matter of revelation, not reason. This knowledge does not contradict knowledge of God the Creator; it brings it to perfection by showing that the God who created the world now acts to redeem it.

2. By the middle of the seventeenth century, a new attitude began to develop, especially in England and Germany. Christianity, it was argued, was reasonable. But where Thomas Aquinas understood this to mean that faith rested securely on rational foundations, this new school of thought had different ideas. If faith is rational, they argued, it must be capable of being deduced in its entirety by reason. Every aspect of faith, every item of Christian belief, must be shown to derive from human reason.

An excellent example of this approach is found in the writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, especially in De veritatis religionis, which argued for a rational Christianity based on the innate sense of God and human moral obligation. This had two major consequences. First, Christianity was in effect reduced to those ideas that can be proven by reason. If Christianity was rational, then any parts of its system that cannot be proved by reason cannot be counted as “rational.” They have to be discarded. And second, reason was understood to take priority over Christianity. Reason comes first, Christianity comes second. Reason is capable of establishing what is right without needing any assistance from revelation. Christianity has to follow. It can be accepted where it endorses what reason has to say and must be disregarded where it goes its own way. So why bother with the idea of revelation when reason can tell us all we could possibly wish to know about God, the world, and ourselves? This absolutely settled conviction of the total competence of human reason underlies the rationalist depreciation of the Christian doctrine of revelation in Jesus Christ and through Scripture.

This approach to Christianity (or, more accurately, this form of Deism tinged with faintly Christian hues) treats God as an idea, a construction of the human mind. God is something that is posited, an idea we generate within our minds and then choose to call “God.” We have created this idea. It is the work of our own minds. Traditional Christianity argues that God cannot simply be posited in this crudely rationalist manner. God has to be experienced. He has to be encountered. He is one who engages us, and by engaging us, forces us to reevaluate our ideas concerning him. Yet the God of pure reason is trapped within the limits of human mind. And small minds make for a small God.

3. Finally, this rationalist position was pushed to its logical outcome. As a matter of fact, it was argued, Christianity does include some beliefs that are inconsistent with reason. And since reason reigns supreme, guess which is wrong? God, having been posited by human reason, is now deposed by his own creator. An excellent example of this rational critique of Christianity can be seen in relation to the doctrine of justification. This doctrine declares that we are accepted by God without having done anything to deserve it. Reason declared that we had to do something to merit our justification. Otherwise, God was simply being irrational. Therefore the gospel doctrine of justification by faith was wrong; the gospel was really about being able to merit our justification by our achievements. There is a certain sense in which Pelagianism is the most reasonable (in the sense of “rational”) of heresies!

A similar critique was made of an entire series of doctrines that were deemed to be irrational—for example, the divinity of Christ (how could Jesus be both God and man at one and the same time?), and the doctrine of the Trinity (how can one God be three persons simultaneously, without lapsing into crude logical contradiction?) One of the early American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, who was deeply influenced by eighteenth-century French rationalism (and French cooking—but that is another story)—poured reasoned scorn on the doctrine of the Trinity:

When we shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one and one is three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding, reared to mask from view the very simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples.

Jesus was really a very simple rational teacher who taught a very simple and reasonable gospel about a very simple rational idea of God. And at every point, Christianity chose to make things more complicated than they need be.

A direct consequence of this view was the movement in New Testament studies known as the “Quest of the Historical Jesus.” This quest, which dates from the late eighteenth century, was based on the belief that the New Testament got Jesus entirely wrong.⁸ The real Jesus—the “Jesus of history”—was a simple Galilean teacher who taught entirely sensible ideas based on reason. The New Testament erroneously presented him as the risen Savior of sinful humanity. Although the intellectual credentials of this movement have long since been discredited, the idea is still occasionally encountered today, as books published with sensational titles like The Real Truth About Jesus show.

It soon became increasingly clear that the “quest of the historical Jesus” was based on a naive view of the objectivity of human judgment, not to mention a quite unrealistic approach to history itself. These theologians apparently thought they were rediscovering the real Jesus; in fact, all they were doing was projecting their own ideas about the meaning of life onto Jesus. German theological professors, remarked one observant English critic, made Jesus look and sound just like a German professor of theology. Far from “rediscovering” Jesus, these writers were simply inventing a Jesus of their own making, one who uncritically echoed their own ideas, values, and hopes.

Perhaps the most famous demonstration of this disturbing point came from Albert Schweitzer. In his Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), Schweitzer erected a monument to this movement, which proved to be its gravestone. Like Mark Anthony’s funeral speech in Julius Caesar, Schweitzer’s proved to be a tribute with fatal consequences. With great skill, he showed how the great nineteenth-century attempts to rediscover the real Jesus were misplaced. All they had done was to clothe Jesus in their own ideas.⁹ A Kantian made Jesus sound just like a Kantian. A liberal made Jesus sound just like a liberal. And a rationalist made Jesus sound just like a rationalist. It was all rather like Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the emperor’s new clothes. Once someone had the courage to expose the delusion, everyone rushed in to join in the fun. The idea that the church had got Jesus completely wrong became little more than some kind of theological joke—a joke that is still told occasionally but gets fewer laughs every time.

But there is an important point underlying all this. Reason was held to be able to judge Christ. In his celebrated work Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Immanuel Kant argued powerfully for the priority of reason and conscience over the authority of Jesus Christ. Where Jesus endorses what reason has to say, he is to be respected; where he goes against or beyond reason, he is to be rejected.

So what is the outcome of all this? Quite simply that reason can deliver everything humanity needs. There is no need to listen to other voices once we have consulted reason. This is the rational person, so devastatingly parodied by Iris Murdoch, who “confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason.”¹⁰ By definition, the Christian cannot have anything to say that is at one and the same time distinctive and right. If it is distinctive, it departs from the path of reason—and thus must be untrue. To be different is, quite simply, to be wrong.

We have now outlined the development of Enlightenment rationalism and indicated its importance for Christianity. But what of the situation now, at the end of the twentieth century? A series of developments, of which we may here note a few, have damaged the credibility of this approach. The Enlightenment approach could be said to rest on the idea of the “immediately given,” whether in reason or experience. Knowledge rests on a foundation, whether this is self-evident truths, immediately recognized as such by the human mind, or immediate experience, deriving directly from contact with the outside world. But these foundations do not seem to exist.

We may begin by exploring reason itself. Surely human reason is capable of basing itself on self-evident first principles, and, by following these through logically, deducing a complete system? Just about everyone who favors this approach makes some sort of appeal to Euclid’s five principles of geometry. On the basis of his five principles Euclid was able to construct his entire geometrical system. Philosophers such as Spinoza were deeply attracted to this: maybe they could use the same method in philosophy. From a set of certain assumptions, a great secure edifice of philosophy and ethics could be erected. But the dream turned sour. The discovery of non-Euclidian geometry during the nineteenth century destroyed the appeal of this analogy. It turned out that there were other ways of doing geometry, each just as internally consistent as Euclid’s. But which is right? The question cannot be answered. They are all different, each with their own special merits and problems.¹¹

And the same turns out to be true of rationalism. Where once it was argued that there was one single rational principle, it is now conceded that there are—and always have been—many different “rationalities.” Enlightenment thinkers appear to have been shielded from this disconcerting fact by the limitations of their historical scholarship, which remained firmly wedded to the classical Western tradition. But this illusion has now been shattered. At the end of his brilliant analysis of rational approaches to reason, Alasdair MacIntyre concludes:

Both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to precisely what those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons. One kind of answer was given by the authors of the Encyclopédie, a second by Rousseau, a third by Bentham, a fourth by Kant, a fifth by the Scottish philosophers of common sense and their French and American disciples. Nor has subsequent history diminished the extent of such disagreement. Consequently, the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.¹²

Reason promises much yet fails to deliver its much-vaunted benefits. It is for such reasons that Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote scathingly of the “Robinson Crusoe dream of the historical Enlightenment, as artificial as Crusoe himself.”¹³ The notion of “universal rationality” is a delusion.

But what of experience? Surely the immediate data of sense experience can be the basis of certain universal knowledge? The great Austrian logical positivist Rudolf Carnap stated this classic Enlightenment belief (which he once held himself) with crystal clarity in a late autobiographical reflection:

We assumed that there was a certain rock bottom knowledge, the knowledge of the immediately given, which was indubitable. Every other kind of knowledge was supposed to be firmly supported by this basis, and therefore likewise decidable with certainty.¹⁴

But it is now generally agreed that there is no such thing as “knowledge of the immediately given.” This has been variously termed “the myth of the given” and “the theory-laden nature of observation.” “It is generally agreed that scientific knowledge is not read off nature but is a highly mediated relation to the natural world. Our observations are ‘theory laden,’ that is, they are made possible and are affected by our instruments and mental constructions” (Diogenes Allen).¹⁵

We may begin our exploration of this idea in a very elementary way.¹⁶ Consider a statement such as the following. When I see a red circle, I am seeing a red circle—this is a basic fact of experience, quite independent of theories. Observational knowledge, in other words, would appear to be perfectly capable of standing upon its own two feet, if I might use the metaphor. But this allegedly simple fact of observation actually rests upon a system of concepts—concepts such as redness and circularity. The observation thus rests on a conceptual framework.

A more rigorous and informed discussion of the idea, firmly grounded in the world of experimental physics, is found in Norwood Hanson’s work, especially in Perception and Discovery. Hanson’s central idea is that of what he refers to as the “theory-laden nature of observation.” He offers us the image of a pair of spectacles, worn behind our eyes, that affect our interpretation of what we see. We do not merely see things; we see them as something. Happily, he provides an illustration to make his point effectively. He suggests that we consider two observers, one located in the thirteenth, the other in the twentieth century observing the dawn. Both have the same visual experience. The same set of images impact upon their retinas. Yet, in a sense, they do not see the same thing.

The thirteenth-century observer, who intuitively assumes that the sun moves around the earth, sees the sun rise; the twentieth-century observer sees the horizon turning away. Now the point needs to be tempered with a certain degree of social realism. For example, a survey in Le Figaro not that long ago showed that about 30 percent of the French population thought that the sun went round the earth, thus making Hanson’s clear distinction between thirteenth- and twentieth-century images of the dawn a little hazardous. But we can see the point he is making: The knower is not passive but interacts with the data, assessing their significance and their rationality on the basis of previous knowledge.¹⁷

In many ways, Hanson merely echoes what are fairly standard ideas within the scientific community. One might cite Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work on entropy remains significant: “In my opinion, we cannot utter a single statement that would be a pure fact of experience.” Or one might turn to Niels Bohr, who wrote: “Any experience…makes its appearance within the frame of our customary points of view and forms of perception.” Nevertheless, Hanson has made a distinct and original contribution in that he has drawn out the implications of these considerations for what is too easily described as empiricism. Human experience, he argues, is not uninterpreted sense data because we view sense data through irremovable (although not necessarily unalterable) theoretical spectacles.

In effect, Hanson is arguing that any view of the world that regards “facts” as things or situations in the real objective world, while “theories” are logical or systematic compilations or explanations of the facts, is deficient. We do not simply see and then interpret. Interpretation is not “something tacked on to this visual impression. It is not an afterthought.”¹⁸ To put this more explicitly: Hanson argues that “nothing can constitute a fact unless understood in terms of some theory.”¹⁹

To illustrate this point, Hanson uses the well-known experimental proof that light has the characteristics of waves. A pebble dropped into water will cause a series of concentric waves that move away from the point of impact. If we drop two pebbles in water, a few inches apart, the two sets of waves will interfere with each other, and there will be a predictable interference pattern. We can do the same thing with light and show that light produces interference patterns.

The observer who, informed by theoretical knowledge, knows what to look for, realizes the significance of the interference patterns. This observer understands the rationality of the experiment and its intended purpose—and is thus able to make sense of its result. He does not merely see a pattern of light; he sees the pattern of light as an indication of the wave-nature of light. The untrained observer sees the same result—and yet does not see it. Hanson concludes his analysis as follows:

Mere looking, unguided by theoretical consideration of any sort, is from most scientific points of view wholly insignificant and without consequence. And this is another reason why the attitude of some philosophers who think that the business of scientists is primarily just to observe the universe at large, collecting a great body of facts before sitting down to think about their relations and interconnections, is so myth-eaten.²⁰

What is the relevance of this for our theme? To put it quite simply, it is very bad news indeed for all those who argue that human knowledge derives directly from experience without the interposing of theoretical frameworks. Another pillar of the Enlightenment worldview thus crumbles, incapable of bearing the theoretical weight placed on it by an increasingly tottering structure.

The Enlightenment vision thus fails. It proves impossible to establish a firmly established and indubitable starting point for human knowledge, from which a certain system of knowledge could be constructed. The Enlightenment criticized Christianity for basing itself on the person of Jesus Christ rather than on the permanent, universal, unshakable foundations of reason. Yet it is now generally conceded that no such unshakable and universal foundations actually exist. Just about all human knowledge rests upon a degree of uncertainty—which is all excellent news for Christianity.

The fact that we cannot prove that Christianity is true is no longer the crippling disadvantage it was once thought to be (which just goes to show how much intellectual fashions can change over the years). It merely places Christians in the best of intellectual company and marks them off from those who naively think that the really important things in life can be proved with certainty. Those who lack psychological maturity may need to cling to the illusions of certainty; the rest of us are content to learn to live in a world in which nothing important is certain and nothing certain is important.

But this critique of rationalism in no way invalidates an appeal to reason in Christian apologetics. It simply negates a hopelessly naive understanding of the potential of reason, in which one reaches inside one’s head a total understanding of the world and God. Reason is a starting point—a distinguished, useful, and eminently proper starting point. But it is only a starting point. Rationalism fails when it believes that reason can guide us all the way to the city of God—it merely sets us on the right road.

B. MARXISM

Until very recently, Marxism was a major challenge to the Christian faith. It competed for the minds of young men and women on the campuses of universities throughout the world. It seemed to pose an unstoppable threat to Christianity in large parts of the world where Marxist governments attempted to eliminate Christian faith in various ways. That now belongs to the past. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the popular appeal of the movement, just as the fall of the Bastille in 1789 marked the end of the French ancien régime and the dawn of the new revolutionary era (to which Marxism was heir).

But Marxism lives on in the universities, so often the home of lost causes. It continues to have an impact on many people. Its criticisms of Christianity continue to be voiced, even if they are taken with decreasing seriousness. And for that reason it is important for the Christian apologist to be able to respond to that criticism and to make criticisms in return. This section seeks to provide an account of Marxism and indicate both its appeal and its vulnerability.²¹

Before exploring the Marxist critique of Christianity itself, we may consider three basic ideas that are of central importance. Fundamental to Marxism is the notion of materialism. This is not some metaphysical or philosophical doctrine that affirms that the world consists only of matter. Rather, it is an assertion that a correct understanding of human beings must begin with material production. The way in which human beings respond to their material needs determines everything else. Ideas, including religious ideas, are responses to material reality.

This first idea flows naturally into the second. A number of factors bring about alienation within the material process, of which the two most significant are the division of labor and the existence of private property. The former causes the alienation of the worker from his product, whereas the second brings about a situation in which the interests of the individual no longer coincide with that of society as a whole. As productive forces are owned by a small minority of the population, it follows that societies are divided along class lines, with political and economic power concentrated in the hands of the ruling class.

Marx believed that the third consideration naturally followed from the first two. Capitalism—the economic order just described—is inherently unstable, due to the tensions arising from productive forces. As a result, it will break down. Some versions of Marxism present this breakdown as happening without any need for assistance. Others present it as the result of a social revolution led by the working class. The closing words of the Communist Manifesto (1848) seem to suggest this latter: “Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!”

In practice, Marxism had virtually no influence until the period of the First World War. This can be attributed partly to internal party problems and partly to the lack of opportunities for political expansion. The internal problems are especially interesting. The suggestion that the working class could liberate itself from its oppression and bring about a political revolution soon proved to be illusory. It rapidly became clear that Marxists, far from being drawn from the ranks of the politically conscious working class, were actually depressingly middle class (like Marx himself). Aware of this problem, Lenin developed the idea of a “vanguard party.” The workers were so politically naive that they needed to be led by professional revolutionaries who alone could provide the overall vision and practical guidance that would be needed to bring about and sustain a world revolution.

The Russian Revolution gave Marxism the break it needed, establishing itself in a modified form (Marxism-Leninism) within the Soviet Union. However, it proved unsuccessful elsewhere. Its establishment in eastern Europe after the Second World War can be attributed mainly to military strength and political destabilization. Its successes in Africa were due largely to the seductive appeal of Lenin’s carefully devised concept of “imperialism,” which allowed alienated elements within certain African and Asian countries to attribute their economical and social backwardness to the ruthless and systematic exploitation by the external agency of Western capitalism, rather than to any inherent deficiencies. The economic failure and political stagnation that resulted when such countries experimented with Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s soon led to disillusionment with this new philosophy.

In Europe, Marxism found itself locked into a spiral of decline. Its chief advocates increasingly became abstract theoreticians, detached from any working-class roots, with virtually no political experience. The idea of a socialist revolution gradually lost its appeal and its credibility. The publication of Marx’s German Ideology in 1932 (it had not attracted a publisher until then) revealed Marx’s muddled concepts of the future communist society. They proved totally inadequate for the needs of later Marxists, already discouraged by the failure of events to conform to Marxist theories.

As a worldview, Marxism was dead before the fall of the Berlin Wall provided its obituary. But its failure as a worldview must not lead to the conclusion that it has lost its critical authority. Few take its more pompous claims seriously, but its critical views remain important. Now we shall consider the Marxist critique of Christianity and see what remains of it.

In his later writings, Marx adopted the “progressive” scientific outlook so popular in the early nineteenth century. Religion in general, according to this view, is outmoded superstition. Since Christianity is a religion, it falls into this general category. Worse than that, it is a superstition that dulls the ability of the working class to rise up and overthrow the ruling class. It is the “opium of the people,” which enables them to endure their sufferings—when they ought to be throwing off the shackles that had condemned them to such suffering. This simplistic approach was adopted by many of Marx’s followers, especially Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s words on religion leave us in little doubt as to his views on its merits:

Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual intoxicant in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and blunt their desire for a decent human existence…The class-conscious worker of today…leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois hypocrites. He fights for a better life for himself, here on earth.²²

A more sophisticated (and interesting) approach to religion may be found in earlier works of Marx himself, such as the 1844 political and economic manuscripts. Religion has no real, independent existence. It is a reflection of the material world. “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”²³ There is an obvious and important allusion here to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, which we considered earlier.²⁴ Thus Marx argues that “religion is just the imaginary sun which seems to man to revolve around him, until he realizes that he himself is the centre of his own revolution.”²⁵ In other words, God is simply a projection of human concerns. Human beings “look for a superhuman being in the fantasy reality of heaven, and find nothing there but their own reflection.”²⁶

But why should religion exist at all? If Marx is right, why should people continue to believe in an illusion? Marx’s answer centers on the notion of alienation.²⁷ “Humans make religion; religion does not make humans. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of people who either have not found themselves or who have already lost themselves again.”²⁸ Religion is the product of social and economic alienation. It arises from that alienation and at the same time encourages that alienation by a form of spiritual intoxication that renders the masses incapable of recognizing their situation and doing something about it. Religion is a comfort that enables people to tolerate their economic alienation. If there were no such alienation, there would be no need for religion. The division of labor and the existence of private property introduce alienation and estrangement into the economic and social order.

Materialism affirms that events in the material world bring about corresponding changes in the intellectual world. Religion is thus the result of a certain set of social and economic conditions. Change those conditions so that economic alienation is eliminated, and religion will cease to exist. It will no longer serve any useful function. Unjust social conditions produce religion and are in turn supported by religion. “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against the world of which religion is the spiritual fragrance.”²⁹

Marx thus argues that religion will continue to exist as long as it meets a need in the life of alienated people. “The religious reflex of the real world can…only then vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature.”‘³⁰ In other words, when a nonalienating economic and social environment is brought about through communism, the needs that gave rise to religion will vanish. And with the elimination of those material needs, spiritual hunger will also vanish.

Feuerbach had argued that religion was the projection of human needs, an expression of the “uttered sorrow of the soul.” Marx agrees with this interpretation. His point, however, is more radical. It is not enough to explain how religion arises because of sorrow and injustice. We must change that world and thus remove the causes of religion. It is important to note that Marx regards Feuerbach as correct in his analysis of the origins of religion, even if he failed to discern how an understanding of those origins might lead to its eventual elimination. It is this insight that underlies his often quoted eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”³¹

This, then, is the outline of the Marxist critique of religion. But is it right? Can it be justified? Let us present a critique of the Marxist critique. The following basic points, which command general assent outside Marxist circles and increasing acceptance within them, are of fundamental importance.

a. Marx’s atheism is ultimately an unproved hypothesis.³²

b. Marx’s critique of religion is based virtually entirely on his views concerning its social function in nineteenth-century Germany and is therefore inadequate.

c. With the coming of the Communist state in various parts of the world, religion has not merely survived—it has prospered, despite the concerted efforts of the state to eliminate it and make events conform to theory.

d. Marx assumes that one can speak of “religion” in general and then proceed to criticize specific religions. Marx never shows any real familiarity with the specifics of Christianity, giving instead vague generalities about religion in general.³³

Marx’s critique of Christianity is actually a criticism of the institution of the established church in nineteenth-century Germany. But to criticize the church or its clergy hardly amounts to a cogent refutation of Christianity when most modern Christians would direct precisely the same criticisms against the German established churches of Marx’s period. Marx may even be an ally of the gospel at points by exposing deficient versions of Christianity. But the essential ideas of the Christian gospel remain untouched by Marx’s salvoes. What does Marx tell us about Jesus Christ that causes us to have anxiety about the gospel? Nothing. He has missed the mark. Marxism, once seen as the most credible alternative to Christianity in the Western world, is now itself passing into the history books.

C. SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM

“I believe in science,” wrote A. J. Ayer. “That is, I believe that a theory about the way the world works is not acceptable unless it is confirmed by the facts, and I believe that the only way to discover what the facts are is by empirical observation.”³⁴ Such views are still widely held, usually in tandem with the related notion that science eliminates the need to believe in God. Science, to the popular way of thinking, is capable of giving a completely objective and certain view of the universe, whereas Christianity rests on unproved ideas that cannot be believed with certainty.

This is not, however, a particularly reliable way of viewing the way in which science and Christianity relate to one another. One way of exploring the complexity of the relationship between Christian thought and the natural sciences is to identify areas in which the methods and presuppositions of the natural sciences illuminate aspects of Christian theology. To many people it seems questionable even to speak of such convergence. Many, still firmly in the grasp of a positivist worldview fostered by the polemical literature of the nineteenth century,³⁵ tend to regard theology and natural science as unequally-matched sparring partners rather than willing and compatible bed partners.

In fact, however, scholarship has done much to dispel such myths. For example, consider the popular conception of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as a purely scientific theory concerned with the explanation of the world, which posed a fundamental challenge to Christianity. This conventional and benign view of the author of The Origins of Species is belied by a critical study of Darwin’s own writings.³⁶ As is becoming increasingly clear, Darwinism achieved its popular success in England, not because of its scientific credentials, nor because of its potential threat to traditional Christianity, but because Darwin’s ideas happened to coincide with advanced Whig social thinking relative to matters of competition, free trade, and the natural superiority of the English middle classes and their social values. Darwin’s science thus provided a theoretical foundation for Victorian liberalism by endorsing its values and outlook. Far from being a genius out of time or a scientist concerned only with facts, Darwin emerges as someone deeply tainted by the social prejudices of his period (non-Europeans and women, for example, are both treated as nonentities) and whose scientific theories were closely linked with his social beliefs. A dedicated secular “Darwin industry” has ensured that the received view of Darwin is that of a lonely and heroic figure, struggling to find the truth in the face of religious bigotry. The truth is only now emerging through a vast corpus of letters, diaries, and notebooks recently published.

Although the popular impression of the monolithic hostility of Christianity toward the natural sciences still prevails among what I shall reluctantly—but, I fear, entirely accurately—call the more unreflective members of both communities (and many outside them), it is fair to suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in our understanding of the question at issue over the past thirty years, a shift that makes a real dialogue between the disciplines both possible and potentially fruitful. There has been a realization of the radical difference between “science” and “scientific materialism.” The former is a discipline, a way of investigating the structure of the physical world. The latter is a worldview that seeks to reduce everything to the level of observables, which—by definition—excludes God.

A helpful point of entry to this discussion is provided by the question of the evidential foundations of beliefs. The problem is well-known from Christian theology. It is possible to describe Christian theology as having a certain degree of coherence. For example, there is a well-established line of argumentation, going back at least as far as F. D. E. Schleiermacher and probably much further, to the effect that the Christian doctrines of God, the person and work of Christ, and of human nature, interact in such a manner as to give a consistent whole.³⁷ If “truth” is defined in terms of internal consistency, traditional Christian theology scores highly.³⁸

But what of its relation to the world outside? A theory may be internally consistent, but how does it relate to the world it purports to describe or depict? At this point, significant difficulties emerge. How can one have any degree of certainty that there is a God? Or, to take a characteristic question posed on the basis of nineteenth-century historiographical presuppositions, how can one be sure that Jesus, as he can be uncovered by historical research, bears any direct relation to the Christ of faith? To put it bluntly: how can a substantial theology be erected on the basis of unproven—and probably inherently unprovable—assumptions? It might be allowed that theology makes some kind of sense of the world—but its evidential foundations are insecure in that they have not been demonstrated to be beyond doubt.

Let us explore this with the help of a classic discussion of the point: John Henry Newman’s early lecture “Christianity and Scientific Investigation.”³⁹ What happens, Newman asks, if faith and experience seem to be in contradiction? Or if something that is known to be true seems to contradict a Christian belief? Newman’s response proceeds as follows. It may seem that faith and experience, or two matters of truth (one secular, one religious) seem to be irreconcilable. While truth cannot contradict truth, it may seem to contradict truth. Therefore “we must be patient with such appearances and not be hasty to pronounce them to be really of a more formidable character.” Why? Because it may turn out that one of the “truths” rests upon an error of reasoning or observation. It may transpire that the truths alleged to be in tension can, in fact, be readily reconciled through means at present unknown. In short, the apparent problem may be resolved through new theoretical or observational developments.

If the last sentence seems to echo the vocabulary of the natural sciences, it is because I have chosen to cast Newman’s ideas in terms calculated to heighten the parallel between Christianity and those sciences at this point. It is significant that the natural sciences are confronted with a similar problem, although it is a problem that is rarely discussed with the candor and frankness it deserves. The difficulty has long been recognized. It is discussed, for example, by William of Ockham in the fourteenth century. It is this. What I shall term the “positivist” view of science, which rests securely on nineteenth-century foundations, has as its leading assumption that scientific knowledge relates to the real, objective world—a world that is regular, constant, and uniform. Science is concerned with the uncovering and representation of the forms and patterns that occur in the natural world. Whereas philosophy and theology take recourse to conceptual speculation, the natural sciences engage directly with the natural world and are able to uncover its universal structure and pattern directly and unequivocally.

But how do we know that nature possesses regularity? How do we know that there are uniform structures and patterns throughout the totality of the natural order? Is this the conclusion of scientific research—or is it an essential assumption underlying this research? This question has been pursued vigorously by Norwood R. Hanson, especially in his work Perception and Discovery.⁴⁰ Hanson writes:

To gain knowledge of these principles by experiment and observation is to presuppose in the search the very existence of that for which we are in search. If the principles are true, we cannot learn of it empirically, for the essence of the principles is that their truth is presupposed in every empirical inquiry.⁴¹

In other words, having presupposed the uniformity of nature, this uniformity is duly disclosed.

An immediate objection might be raised. If nature were, in actuality, to lack uniformity, this would be disclosed by empirical observation. In other words, the assumption of the uniformity of nature is open to challenge by experimentation. This, it might be argued, is no dogma or axiom but merely a working hypothesis of essentially heuristic value that can be checked out as things go along.

Hanson, however, provides a series of examples, which suggest that this is not actually the case. The basic features of his conclusions can be summarized as follows. If an experimental observation indicates that nature is not uniform, there are several possibilities open to us:

a. The experiment is in error, a fact that will be disclosed by later research.

b. The observation can be explained by a refinement in existing understandings of the way things are.

c. Nature is not uniform.

Hanson’s point is that the third option is never taken seriously. There is a total commitment to the dogma of the uniformity of nature, which is not necessarily itself the result of empirical inquiry. It is an assumption that actually lies beyond challenge. Hanson argues that experimental evidence that appears to point to disuniformity is explained away by an appeal to present-day inadequacies in scientific technique and concepts.

The scientific community’s tenacious grasp of the principle of the uniformity of nature thus bears an interesting and illuminating relation to the Christian community’s belief in God. Both beliefs are regarded as foundational; indeed, for the Christian, they are even related, given the strong emphasis on the ordering of nature that is so characteristic a feature of the Augustinian tradition, especially in its Calvinist modifications. Yet neither, curiously, is entirely harmonious, if I might use the term, with observation.

Furthermore, each community is committed to the belief that it is defects in our existing understandings of reality that give rise to the apparent disharmony between theory and observation—whether it relates to the law of gravity (one of Hanson’s examples) or the existence of evil (a traditional bugbear for the theologian). John Wisdom’s parable of the garden tended by a mysterious gardener, leading to his dismissal of God through the “death of a thousand qualifications,”⁴² is of importance here. The natural scientist is obliged to hedge his or her belief in the uniformity of nature with so many qualifying and modifying statements that, like belief in God or an invisible gardener, it seems to become a remarkably tenuous belief. Is there any way in which this belief could be proven wrong?

This leads us to consider the contribution of Karl R. Popper. In his youth, Popper was actively concerned with the formulation of a criterion that would be seen to set science apart from the confusion and vagueness, not to mention downright polemicizing, of writers such as Marx and Freud. He believed he found the answer in a remark attributed to Albert Einstein. “If,” Einstein was reported as saying, “the red shift of spectral lines due to gravitational potential doesn’t exist, then the general theory of relativity is untenable.” Popper responded as follows:

Here was an attitude utterly different from the dogmatic attitude of Marx, Adler and Freud, and even more so from that of their followers. Einstein was looking for crucial experiments whose agreement with his predictions would by no means establish his theory; while a disagreement, as he was the first to admit, would show his theory to be untenable. This, I felt, was the true scientific attitude.⁴³

In other words, Popper is demanding that a belief should be capable of being stated in a form capable of being falsified. But is belief in the uniformity of nature actually capable of being falsified in the manner Popper suggests, when it is so clearly inextricably enmeshed in the assumptions underlying its empirical investigation?

Popper himself is sufficiently honest to recognize the point at issue. He writes in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced, for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable, or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between experimental results and the theory are only apparent, and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding.⁴⁴

The implications of this are clear. The doctrine of the uniformity of nature is actually treated as being beyond falsification. If the experimental results appear to contradict it, these results are, in practice, not interpreted as implying that nature lacks uniformity. The explanations considered more probable are either that the experiment is flawed or that subsequent experiments or developments in theoretical analysis will explain the result without the need to reject the notion of the uniformity of the natural world.

My purpose here is not to criticize Popper; it is to demonstrate what seem to be insurmountable difficulties in verifying or falsifying the central—indeed, we might say the foundational—assumption of modern natural science, which comes remarkably close to being an article of religious faith. (Martin Heidegger once challenged the German physicist G. F. von Weizsäcker on this point at a meeting of Marburg University alumni in 1959, and received the reply: “Science believes in the regularity of nature and it is rooted in this belief as firmly as a religious belief is rooted in a system of religion.”) Wittgenstein showed himself to be familiar with similar paradoxes in the world of philosophy (for example, Russell’s paradox) when he wrote: “The same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.”⁴⁵ It is not entirely clear which is the foundation and which is the superstructure, which the support and which the supported.

There are important parallels here with Christianity. Consider, for example, belief in God, which is of foundational importance to Christianity. That belief may reasonably be presented as an attempt to explain the nature of the world, and especially our place within it, consistent with the way the world is. It is not capable of demonstration or falsification in rigorously empirical terms. Yet, like the natural scientist who declines to abandon faith in the uniformity of nature on the basis of an experimental result, since he or she believes that this experiment will eventually be seen in a different light, so the theologian declines to abandon belief in God because of what might seem to be disagreement with experience at points—the problem of suffering being an example. When history is ended, the theologian asserts, and we are able to see things in the context of eternity, that problem will be seen in a totally new light—and be resolved. Is there really an enormous difference between the scientist and theologian at this point?

But what of the idea that science has rendered God unnecessary? As scientific understanding advances, will not God be squeezed out from the gaps in which Christian apologists have tried to lodge him? Curiously, the reverse seems to be taking place, as discussed in the section dealing with the ordering of the world as a point of contact.⁴⁶

D. FEMINISM

Feminism has come to be a significant component of modern Western culture. Although it is possible to argue that it is not so much a comprehensive worldview in itself, but rather a collection of loosely connected critiques of a series of male-dominated worldviews, it is convenient for our purposes to discuss feminism as if it were a coherent worldview in its own right.

At its heart, feminism is a global movement working toward the emancipation of women. The older term for the movement—“women’s liberation”—expressed the fact that it is at heart a liberation movement directing its efforts toward achieving equality for women in modern society, especially through the removal of obstacles—whether beliefs, values, or attitudes—that hinder that process.

Feminism has come into conflict with Christianity (as it has with just about every religion) because of the perception that religions treat women as second-rate human beings, in terms of the roles those religions allocate to women, as well as the manner in which they are understood to image God. The writings of Simone de Beauvoir—such as The Second Sex—develop such ideas at length. A number of post-Christian feminists—such as Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson—argue that Christianity, with its male symbols for God, its male savior figure, and its long history of male leaders and thinkers, is biased against women and incapable of redemption.⁴⁷ Women, they urge, should leave its oppressive environment. Others, such as Carol Christ and Naomi Ruth Goldenberg,⁴⁸ argue that women may find religious emancipation by recovering the ancient goddess religions (or by inventing new ones).

Yet the feminist evaluation of Christianity is not as clear-cut or as monolithically hostile toward women as these writers might suggest. Feminist writers have stressed how women have been active in the shaping and development of the Christian tradition from the New Testament onward and how they have exercised significant leadership roles throughout Christian history.⁴⁹ Indeed, responsible feminist writers have shown the need to reappraise the Christian past, giving honor and recognition to generations of faithful women whose practice, defense, and proclamation of their faith had hitherto passed unnoticed by much of the Christian church and its (mainly male) historians.

We may begin to explore the feminist critique of Christianity by considering the implications of the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption. Men and women are created in the image of God. Due to the Fall, the relationship between men and women has been disrupted and distorted through sin. The way things are is not the way things are meant to be. Indeed, a fundamental characteristic of responsible Christian theological reflection is a willingness to accept that the empirical situation cannot be allowed to control normative theological statements. As we noted in considering approaches to natural theology, it is necessary to concede that the results of a fallen human nature reflecting on a fallen creation can lead only to unreliable theological results. The oppression and domination of women by men, which has been the subject of so much feminist analysis, is an empirical reality that serves to emphasize the extent to which creation has fallen from its intended goal. In Christ, the process of reversal and renewal has begun.

In the light of this observation, let us turn to the criticism that the church has oppressed women in the course of its long history. Let us begin by noting that sin affects the structures of the church as much as it does the personal lives of individual believers. The Christian church, as human institution, is as prone to all the temptations and weaknesses of fallen nature as any other institution. The perceptive comments of Richard Holloway, writing from deep within the Scottish church establishment, need to be heeded (although the manner in which he expresses them would be found offensive by feminists, who would suggest that they betray a passive acceptance of women as polluting and carnal):

There’s a certain irony in Paul’s language about the church as the pure bride of Christ. In spite of the church’s white wedding dress, we know that she has been around, we know that she is not quite what she would like us to believe she is…The church is the bearer of momentous tidings that are confused and muddled by her own reputation and obvious imperfections.⁵⁰

Part of that confusion is a temptation for the Christian church, as an institution, to become corrupted by ideas and values that are part of the furniture of the secular world. For example, its bishops wear gold mitres and purple robes. In the ancient world, both gold and purple were symbolic of wealth and power. The church too easily assimilated such secular symbols to its own use: what, many within the churches asked, has a gold mitre to do with a crown of thorns? Or a purple robe with the blood-spattered loincloth of the dying Christ?

This accommodation to secular values can be seen at work in the way in which the original, and remarkably liberating, attitude of Jesus Christ himself toward women became corrupted and confused because the church adopted attitudes that had more to do with the attitudes of the (male-dominated) secular world around it. We may begin by exploring the attitude of Jesus himself toward women⁵¹—an attitude that, on the basis of any responsible Christology, ought to be an inalienable part of the heritage of the Christian church.

a. Jesus’ commendation of the single state as a legitimate calling for those to whom it was given stands in sharp contrast to traditional Palestinian views of a human duty to marry and procreate. As a result, women who chose to follow Jesus were able to assume roles other than those of wife or mother.

b. Jesus treats women as human subjects, rather than as objects or possessions. Throughout his ministry, Jesus can be seen engaging with and affirming women—often women who were treated as outcasts by contemporary Jewish society because of their origins (e.g., Syro-Phoenicia or Samaria) or their lifestyle (e.g., prostitutes).

c. Jesus refused to make women scapegoats in sexual matters—for example, adultery. The patriarchal assumption that men are corrupted by fallen women is conspicuously absent from his teaching and attitudes, most notably in his attitude toward prostitutes and the woman taken in adultery. The Talmudic recommendation that its readers (assumed to be men) should “not converse much with women, as this will eventually lead you to unchastity” is studiously ignored by Jesus, who made a point of talking to women (John 4 being an especially celebrated instance).

d. The traditional view that a woman was “unclean” during the period of menstruation was dismissed by Jesus, who made it clear that it is only moral impurity that defiles a person (Mark 7:1–23). Women could not be excluded from acts of worship for this traditional reason.

e. Women were an integral part of the group of people who gathered round Jesus, and they were affirmed by him, often to the dismay of the Pharisees and other religious traditionalists. Not only were women witnesses to the Crucifixion; they were also the first witnesses to the Resurrection. The only Easter event to be explicitly related in detail by all four of the gospel writers is the visit of the women to the tomb of Jesus. Yet Judaism dismissed the value of the testimony or witness of women, giving only men significant legal status in this respect. The greatest news that the world has ever known was thus first disclosed to women! Interestingly, Mark tells us the names of these women witnesses—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—three times (Mark 15:40, 47; 16:1), but he does not mention the names of any male disciples who were around at the time. (It might also be worth noting that it was a man who betrayed Jesus, and a group of men who crucified Jesus!)

f. The gospels frequently portray women as being more spiritually perceptive than men. For example, Mark portrays the male disciples as having little faith (Mark 4:40; 6:52), while commending women—a woman is praised for her faith (Mark 5:25–34), a foreign woman is commended for responding to Jesus (Mark 7:24–30), and a widow is singled out as an example to follow (Mark 12:41–44).

g. Christian baptism was for all, male and female. The traditional Judaism of the period ordained that only male children could receive the initiation rite of the people of God—circumcision. But in the church no distinction was to be made between male and female at this level.

It is difficult to appreciate how novel these attitudes were at the time. Jesus’ ministry represents an attempt to reform the patriarchal-ism of his day and to permit women to hold a new kind of authority in religious matters.

Possibly the most revolutionary aspect of Jesus’ approach to women is not that he associated freely with them and treated them as responsible human beings, not that he had women as friends and not that he allowed them to listen to his teaching; but rather that he taught them personally, indulging in theological conversation with them, encouraging and expecting a response.⁵²

It is hardly surprising that early Christianity proved to have a deep appeal for women. As one scholar observes:

It is probable that Jesus’ teachings attracted women in part because of the new roles and equal status they were granted in the Christian community. There were many cults in Greece and Rome that were for men only or, at best, allowed women to participate in very limited ways. Further, it is easy to see why women who were on the fringe of the synagogue community became Christian converts. Judaism offered women proselytes a circumscribed place at best, for they were faced with the Jewish restrictions that limited their participation in religious functions. While women were not allowed to make up the quorum necessary to found a synagogue, nor to receive the Jewish covenant sign (circumcision), these limitations did not exist in the Christian community.⁵³

Sadly, this became corrupted as Christianity came under increasing pressure to conform to, rather than to transform, secular stereotypes. But throughout its history, these original attitudes can be seen coming to life again. At the time of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers declared that all believers—whether male or female—were true priests of Christ.⁵⁴ Society was not ready for this new development—but its theological foundations had been securely laid.

This new emphasis on the potential roles of women was regarded with horror by many at the time. Cardinal Cajetan, charged with handling the Lutheran crisis in Germany, believed that the inevitable (and shocking) outcome of the new reforming movements was that women would become accepted as theologians. The French reformer Etienne Le Court was burned alive for teaching that women would proclaim the gospel. Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples pointedly dedicated his French translation of the New Testament “to all Christian men and women”; he had no doubts that its readership would—and should—include this hitherto marginalized component of the people of God. In his Women of the Reformation, Roland Bainton has given us a fine account of aspects of this important development, viewed through the prism of the lives of leading women of the sixteenth century.⁵⁵ In practice, the Reformation tended to adopt socially conservative approaches to the role of women, perhaps because of a reluctant social realism: society was not yet ready for this radical new social development, even if its theological basis had been securely and irreversibly established.

The church, as an institution, has too easily lost sight of these insights. Christianity may have liberated women—but, for many, the institution of the church seems to have ended up oppressing them. As the reformers of the sixteenth century observed, there was a need to demand that the church reform itself by returning to its foundations in the New Testament. The slogan ecclesia semper reformanda, “the church must always be reforming itself,” is a concise statement of this reforming agenda. The church must always reexamine itself and ensure that its patterns of behavior and belief correspond to its God-given models in Jesus Christ and in Scripture. The oppression of women in the past by the church is a matter of history; it is time that Christianity triumphed over the institution of the church at this point. For, as we have stressed, sin is structural, not just personal. The church itself, as much as individual Christians, is prone to sin. It is a reminder of how the past history of the church can become a present argument against Christianity—as well as an incentive to reform the church of our own day and age so that it can bear a more effective witness to our own generation.

But some feminist critics of Christianity wish to press their case further. Christianity itself—not merely the church—is profoundly oppressive to women because of its male concept of God. A religion committed to a male God will inevitably devalue and degrade women. This criticism seems to rest on a serious misunderstanding of the nature of theological language and Christian symbolism, which we may explore with profit.

There seems to be something about the human mind that makes images more memorable than concepts. The nineteenth-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once remarked that most Englishmen pictured God as an enormous clergyman with a long beard. Whether this is a helpful way of thinking about God is open to question, but it does draw attention to the fact that we need to visualize God in some sort of way. How often have we been reminded that a picture is worth a thousand words? The early fathers of the Christian church used to compare understanding God with looking directly into the sun. The human eye is simply not capable of withstanding the intense light of the sun. And just as the human eye cannot cope with the brilliance of the sun, so the human mind cannot cope with the fullness of God.

As every amateur astronomer knows, however, it is possible to look at the sun through dark glass, or in the early morning through a mist, both of which greatly reduce the brilliance of the solar disc to manageable proportions. In these ways, the human eye can cope with an object that is otherwise completely beyond its capacities. In much the same way, it is helpful to think of Scripture making available models of God: scaled-down versions of the real thing, which we are capable of comprehending and visualizing.

The scriptural models or pictures of God reveal God in manageable proportions so that the human mind can cope with him. As Calvin declared, “God accommodates himself to our weakness.” The scriptural models of God—for example, God as shepherd, rock, or king—are powerful and profound visual aids to our thinking about God, lending depth to what otherwise might be superficial, and the vividness of life to what otherwise might be dry and dull.⁵⁶

These models of God are firmly located in real life. Just as Jesus used real-life parables to make theological points (see pp. 26–27), so the writers of Scripture use models drawn from the experiential world of ancient Palestine to allow us insights into the nature and purposes of God. In that this society was male-dominated, many of the available models are male. For example, the idea of the authority of God could only be represented using male imagery—such as that of a father, a judge, or a king.

But other models are used. God is often compared to a (genderless) rock, for example, conveying the idea of strength, stability, and permanence. Feminine imagery abounds to describe God’s care and compassion for his people, which is often likened to the love of a mother for her children. But it is not the imagery that matters; it is what is being said about God that is of fundamental importance.

We can explore this point further by thinking about a situation familiar to many people who study science at high school. If you take some gas in a container of some sort and compress it, you find that the volume the gas occupies gets smaller as the pressure you apply gets greater. This observation, stated in mathematical form, is known as Boyle’s Law. If you think of the molecules of gas as billiard balls continually bumping each other, you find that you can predict this law. The smaller the space in which the billiard balls are forced to move (in other words, the volume), the more they collide with each other and the sides of the container (in other words, they exert more pressure). This model is sometimes known as the kinetic theory of gases.

But this does not mean that gas molecules are identical with billiard balls. It means that billiard balls are a good model for gas molecules, for two reasons. First, they allow us to picture what molecules are like. We cannot see the molecules because they are infinitesimally small. But the model allows us to visualize them, to form a mental picture of what they are like. It is not ideal, but it allows us to think of the molecules, to form a picture of them, where otherwise we could not picture them at all.

Second, it allows us to understand and explore at least one aspect of the behavior of those molecules. Obviously, it does not allow us to explain every aspect of their behavior, but it does help us to understand at least part of what is going on and to try to predict some other properties of the system.

It is like an analogy—and analogies are helpful, providing we remember that every analogy breaks down at some point. Models help us think about things we otherwise probably could not visualize at all and allow us to understand at least part of what is going on.

But a serious error can easily arise here. We may improperly identify the model with what is being modeled. To go back to the kinetic theory, it might be mistakenly assumed that gas molecules are billiard balls, when in fact gas molecules behave in certain respects as if they were billiard balls. Similarly, when we suggest that a suitable model for God is a father, we are saying that in certain respects God may be thought of as being like a father—for example, in his disciplining of his children. And in certain respects God is like a mother—for example, in his care and compassion for his children. But God is not male. God is not female. We must always remember that a model is both like and unlike what is being modeled—the important thing is to identify what the points of likeness are. To model God on a human father is not to say that God is male or that males are superior to females. The maleness of this language is, to use Calvin’s notion, an accommodation to human speech and ways of thinking—not a literal representation of God.

Of course, as some feminist writers point out, many male theologians do indeed think of God as being male. But this represents a criticism of their interpretation of Scripture, not of Scripture itself. As George Caird points out, “It is precisely when theologians have claimed biblical authority for their own beliefs and practices that they have been peculiarly exposed to the universal temptation…of jumping to the conclusion that the biblical writer is referring to what they would be referring to, were they speaking the words themselves.”⁵⁷

It is only if God is understood to be a projection, a result, of human culture that the objections raised by feminist writers have decisive force. Now it is true that many radical feminist writers subscribe to this theory of the origins of religion (associated with writers as diverse as Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud).⁵⁸ But it remains a hypothesis, not a fact. Traditional Christian theology speaks and knows of a God who reveals himself through human culture but is not bound by its categories. God is supracultural, just as he is suprasexual. There is all the difference in the world between saying that God is the product of a culture and that God reveals himself in and through a culture.

The Christian revelation declares that a father in ancient Israel society is a suitable model for God. But this is not equivalent to saying that God is male or that God is confined to the cultural parameters of ancient Israel. Mary Hayter, reflecting on such issues, writes:

It would appear that certain “motherly prerogatives” in ancient Hebrew society—such as carrying and comforting small children—became metaphors for Yahweh’s activity vis-à-vis his children Israel. Likewise, various “fatherly prerogatives”—such as disciplining a son—became vehicles for divine imagery. Different cultures and ages have different ideas about which roles are proper to the mother and which to the father.⁵⁹

To speak of God as father is to say that the role of the father in ancient Israel allows us insights into the nature of God, not that God is a male human being. Neither male nor female sexuality is to be attributed to God. Indeed, sexuality is an attribute of the created order that cannot be assumed to correspond directly to any such polarity within the creator God himself.

This analysis of the language of theology indicates that there are no grounds for maintaining that the Christian way of talking about God authorizes the oppression of women. It merely indicates the need for people to be informed about the status of theological statements and language.

Ultimately, whether theological vocabulary is masculine or feminine is of little consequence. The masculine terminology does not denote a male deity; the female terminology does not denote a female deity; nor does the mixture of masculine and feminine terminology denote an androgynous God/ess. Rather, the indications are that the God of the Bible uniquely incorporates and transcends all sexuality.⁶⁰

Indeed, the Old Testament avoids attributing sexual functions to God because of the strongly pagan overtones of such associations. The fertility cults of the prevailing Canaanite culture emphasized the sexual functions of both gods and goddesses. The Old Testament refuses to endorse the idea that the gender or the sexuality of God is a significant matter. As Mary Hayter puts it:

Today a growing number of feminists teach that the God/ess combines male and female characteristics. They, like those who assume that God is exclusively male, should remember that any attribution of sexuality to God is a reversion to paganism.⁶¹

There is no need to revert to pagan ideas of gods and goddesses to recover the idea that God is neither masculine nor feminine. Those ideas are already firmly embedded in Scripture and need to be recovered if Christianity is to address the new apologetic situation in Western society.

Feminism, then, is a powerful challenge to Christianity. Just as Marxism challenged Christianity to reconsider its attitudes toward the powerless, the poor, and the marginalized, so feminism challenges it to reconsider its attitudes toward women and to recover its original Christ-based attitudes toward them. Just as Marxism failed in its attempt to provide a credible alternative worldview to that of Christianity, so it seems that feminism will fail also. As a critique of Christianity, it has much to offer and much to say and deserves a careful hearing. But where it seeks to replace the gospel with its own secularized worldview, it seems certain to fail, having overstepped its resources and failed to recognize its own limitations. In the postmodern worldview, feminism is one voice among many, not the voice that relativizes everything else—an observation that brings us to consideration of that postmodern worldview in more detail.

E. POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernity is a broad concept that describes the general intellectual outlook arising after the collapse of modernity.⁶² Although there are those who maintain that modernity is still alive and active, this claim is becoming increasingly rare. Further, we need to note that modernity itself is a broad concept; the very idea of postmodernism might be argued to “presuppose that our age is unified enough that we can speak of its ending.”⁶³ Nevertheless, profound changes have taken place that warrant the concept of postmodernity. The trauma of Auschwitz is a powerful and shocking indictment of the “pretense of new creation, the hatred of tradition, the idolatry of self’ characteristic of modernity.⁶⁴ It is modernity, especially its compulsive desire to break totally with the past, that gave rise to the Nazi holocaust and the Stalinist purges. There has been a general collapse of confidence in the Enlightenment trust in the power of reason to provide foundations for a universally valid knowledge of the world, including God. Reason fails to deliver a morality suited to the real world in which we live. And with this collapse of confidence in universal and necessary criteria of truth, relativism and pluralism have flourished.

To give a full definition of postmodernism is virtually impossible.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, it is possible to identify its leading general features as they are likely to be encountered by the Christian apologist, especially on North American college and university campuses.

One of the main features of postmodernism is the precommit-ment to relativism or pluralism in relation to questions of truth. To use the jargon of the movement, one could say that postmodernism represents a situation in which the signifier has replaced the signified as the focus of orientation and value. In terms of the structural linguistics developed initially by Ferdinand de Saussure and subsequently by Roman Jakobson and others, the recognition of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and its interdependence with other signs marks the end of the possibility of fixed, absolute meanings. Thus writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard argued that language is whimsical and capricious and does not reflect any overarching absolute linguistic laws. It is arbitrary, incapable of disclosing meaning. Thus Baudrillard argued that modern society is trapped in an endless network of artificial sign systems that mean nothing and merely perpetuate the belief systems of those who created them.

One aspect of postmodernism that illustrates this trend (and reflects its obsession with texts and language) is deconstruction—the critical method that virtually declares that the identity and intentions of the author of a text are irrelevant to the interpretation of the text, followed by the observation that, in any case, no meaning can be found in it. All interpretations are equally valid, or equally meaningless (depending on your point of view). As Paul de Man, one of the leading American proponents of this approach, declared, the very idea of “meaning” smacks of fascism. This approach blossomed in post-Vietnam America, given intellectual respectability by academics such as de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller.⁶⁶

The lunacy of this position only became publicly apparent with the sensational publication of some articles written by de Man. On December 1, 1989, the New York Times reported the discovery of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi articles, written by de Man for the Belgian Nazi newspaper Le Soir. A scandal resulted. Was de Man’s deconstruction-alism an attempt to deny his own past? Was de Man himself a fascist, trying to escape from his own guilt? Nobody could very well argue that de Man had actually meant something different from the impression created by those articles. After all, the author’s views were, according to deconstruction, an irrelevance. No attempt could be made to excuse de Man by an appeal to his historical circumstances, for de Man himself had written that “considerations of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical viewpoint.” Deconstruction thus seemed to sink into the mire of internal inconsistency.

Apologetically, the question that arises is the following. How can Christianity’s claims to truth be taken seriously when there are so many rival alternatives? No one can lay claim to possession of the truth. It is all a question of perspective. All claims to truth are equally valid. There is no universal or privileged vantage point that allows anyone to decide what is right and what is wrong.

This situation has both significant advantages and drawbacks for the Christian apologist. On the one hand, apologetics no longer labors under the tedious limitations of the petty and asphyxiating Enlightenment worldview, fettered by the illusions and pretensions of pure reason. Christianity can no longer be dismissed as a degenerate form of rational religion. The severe limitations of the modern mentality are intellectually passé and need no longer be a difficulty for the apologist. Princeton philosopher Diogenes Allen summarizes this development well:

In a postmodern world, Christianity is intellectually relevant. It is relevant to the fundamental questions, Why does the world exist? and Why does it have its present order, rather than another? It is relevant to the discussion of the foundations of morality and society, especially on the significance of human beings. The recognition that Christianity is relevant to our entire society, and relevant not only to the heart but to the mind as well, is a major change in our cultural situation.⁶⁷

While intellectual dinosaurs still stalk our campuses, unaware that the days of a blind secular faith in human reason are behind us, the general atmosphere has changed. Christianity has as much right as any other belief-system to gain a hearing.

But with that advance has come a retreat. All belief-systems are to be regarded as equally plausible. Something is true if it is true for me. Christianity has become acceptable because it is believed to be true by some—not because it is true. The apologist will wish to stress that Christianity believes itself, on excellent grounds, to possess insights that are both true and relevant. How can Christianity commend itself on campus when the truth question is virtually dismissed in advance?

This is an instance of a situation in which the apologist must adopt a tactical approach in order to gain a strategic advantage. No Christian will wish to abandon a passionate commitment to the truth. Nevertheless, the postmodern situation demands that Christian truth-claims be, for purely tactical reasons, relegated to the background temporarily, in order to commend the claims of Christianity on grounds more acceptable in the postmodern worldview. Once the thin end of this apologetic wedge has penetrated the postmodern citadel, the truth-claims inherent within Christian faith may begin to make their presence felt, and their validity obvious. Let us explore this approach.

Christianity is profoundly attractive. The “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:3) possesses an attraction that exceeds anything the world can offer.⁶⁸ This is a celebrated theme of Christian theology from the patristic period onward, perhaps reaching a climax in the writings of Jonathan Edwards, and it should be fundamental to modern apologetics. If the world seems attractive, the Christian must ensure that God, as its creator, is seen to be even more attractive. The world reflects the attractiveness of its creator, as the moon reflects the light of the sun.

Two incidents from classical Greek mythology suggest themselves here. Homer introduces us to the Sirens, a group of women whose singing was so seductive that they caused sailors to crash their vessels through inattention to their duties. When Ulysses was attempting to sail his ship past the Sirens, he prevented the Sirens from causing any difficulties by the simple expedient of blocking his sailors’ ears so that they could not hear the captivating Siren song. Orpheus, on the other hand, was a skilled lyre player. His method of dealing with this kind of threat was rather indifferent. He played his lyre, the music of which proved so enchanting and fascinating that its beauty totally outweighed anything else.

The Christian apologist should be able to present God in his full attractiveness so that his rivals in the world are eclipsed. What are the attractions of God? The following would be important elements of this presentation, which the apologist could modify or supplement as seems appropriate:

The ability of God to satisfy the deepest human longings.

The overwhelming love of God, as seen in the death of Christ.

Relativism settles nowhere and nothing; faith in God anchors people, giving them stability and purpose.

To this should be added our analysis of the relevance of Christianity to life, including the arguments that Christianity meets three central needs.⁶⁹

The need to have a basis for morality. Christianity offers a worldview that leads to the generation of moral values and ideals that are able to give moral meaning and dignity to our existence.

The need to have a framework for making sense of experi ence, which correlates with the inbuilt human need to make sense of dungs.

The need for a vision to guide and inspire people. Life without a vision, or a reason for keeping going, is dreary, dull, and pointless.

Having thus established the attractiveness and relevance of God, the question of truth may be addressed. Once an attractive belief has been presented and its attractiveness conceded, the key question becomes: Is it right?

This brings us to the real challenge postmodernism poses to the apologist. Postmodernism has an endemic aversion to questions of truth. But the need to have the truth question on the agenda is relatively easily argued. One approach might be the following. To the postmodern suggestion that something can be “true for me” but not “true,” the following reply might be made. Is fascism equally as true as democratic libertarianism? Consider the person who believes, passionately and sincerely, that it is an excellent thing to place millions of Jews in gas chambers. That is certainly “true for him.” But can it be allowed to pass unchallenged? Is it equally as true as the belief that one ought to live in peace and tolerance with one’s neighbors, including Jews?

The moral seriousness of this question often acts as the intellectual equivalent of a battering ram, bringing out the fact that certain views just cannot be allowed to be true. There must be some criteria, some standards of judgment, that allow one to exclude certain viewpoints as unacceptable. Otherwise, postmodernism will be seen to be uncritical and naive, a breeding ground of the political and moral complacency that allowed the rise of the Third Reich back in the 1930s. Even postmodernism has difficulties in allowing that Nazism is a good thing. Yet precisely that danger lies there, as evidenced by the celebrated remark of Sartre: “Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man.”

This is an important point, perhaps the point at which postmodernism is at its most vulnerable. To lend extra weight to it, we may consider the consequences of the ethical views of Michel Foucault, generally regarded as one of the intellectual pillars of postmodern thought. Foucault argues passionately, in a series of highly original and creative works, that the very idea of “truth” grows out of the interests of the powerful. “Truth” can support systems of repression by identifying standards to which people can be forced to conform.⁷⁰ Thus what is “mad” or “criminal” does not depend on some objective criterion, but on the standards and interests of those in authority. Each society has its “general politics of truth,” which serves its vested interests. “Truth” thus serves the interests of society by perpetuating its ideology and by providing a rational justification for the imprisonment or elimination of those who happen to contradict its general outlook. And philosophy can too easily become an accomplice in this repression by providing the oppressors with rational arguments to justify their practices. Philosophers have allowed society to believe that it was persecuting its marginal elements on the basis of “truth” or “morality”—universal and objective standards of morality, of what is right and wrong—rather than on the basis of its own vested interests.

For such reasons, Foucault believes that the very idea of objective truth or morality must be challenged. This belief has passed into the structure of much of postmodernism. But is it right? Is not the truth that Foucault’s criticism actually rests on a set of quite definite beliefs about what is right and what is wrong? To give an illustration, throughout Foucault’s writings, we find a passionate belief that repression is wrong. Foucault is committed to an objective moral value—that freedom is to be preferred to repression. Just as Schaeffer demonstrated the inner contradictions of Sartre’s ethical agnosticism,⁷¹ so we have every right to point out that Foucault’s critique of morality actually presupposes certain moral values. Foucault’s critique of the moral values of society seems to leave him without any moral values of his own—yet his critique of social values rests on his own acceptance of certain moral values, which he clearly expects his readers to share. Why is struggle preferable to submission? Why is freedom to be chosen, rather than repression? These normative questions demand answers if Foucault’s position is to be justified, yet Foucault has vigorously rejected an appeal to general normative principles as an integral part of his method. In effect, he makes an appeal to sentimentality rather than reason, to pathos rather than principles.⁷² That many shared his intuitive dislike of repression ensured he was well received, but the fundamental question remains unanswered. Why is repression wrong? And that same question remains unanswered within postmodernism, which is vulnerable precisely where Foucault is vulnerable.

As Richard Rorty, perhaps the most distinguished American philosopher to develop Foucault’s dislike of general principles and normative standards, remarks, a consequence of this approach must be the recognition that

there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.⁷³

But if this approach is right, what justification could be given for opposing Nazism? Or Stalinism? Rorty cannot give a justification for the moral or political rejection of totalitarianism, as he himself concedes. If he is right, Rorty admits, then he has to acknowledge

…that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society, which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.”⁷⁴

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for Rorty, the truth of moral values depends simply upon their existence. And it is at this point that many postmodernists feel deeply uneasy. Something seems to be wrong here.

If the word truth continues to cause intractable problems, an alternative approach may be tried. Instead of asking whether Christianity is true, the postmodernist might be asked whether it can be regarded as credible. This is a direct invitation to discuss the foundations of Christian belief, not least the resurrection of Christ. Why should anyone believe that Christianity is credible? The question of the evidential basis of Christianity can thus be placed directly on the agenda.

Happily, there are indications that postmodernism is unlikely to remain a significant feature of our cultural landscape. But while it is, the apologist must be able to respond to its outlook. Much the same is true of the New Age movement, to which we now turn.

F. THE NEW AGE

One of the most important alternative belief systems in modern Western society is loosely known as the “New Age movement.”⁷⁵ This media-generated catchall phrase sweeps into its omnium gatherum a remarkably diverse number of late twentieth-century American (or perhaps one should say Californian?) spiritual practices and beliefs. In many ways, the New Age movement is a natural reaction to the efforts of a generation of pseudointellectual mainline Protestant writers and preachers who attempted to eradicate the supernatural, mystical, and transcendent element of Christianity in the name of some imaginary “universal rationality” or “global secular culture.” America got bored with the resulting liberal religion of platitudes and adopted the New Age instead.⁷⁶

This astonishingly complex movement knits together strands of contemporary concerns with the idea that there is a fundamental identity between the human and the divine self. To use a phrase strongly defended by many New Agers: “Every human being is a god.” Shirley MacLaine, publicly defending this key New Age doctrine in New York, was challenged by one of her audience: “With all due respect, I don’t think you are a god.” Her immediate response? “If you don’t see me as God, it’s because you don’t see yourself as God.” ⁷⁷

The attraction of this idea is enormous. If you are a god, you can make your own rules, and nobody can argue with you. Laying down the law is, after all, one of the privileges of divinity. Unlike Christianity, there are no Ten Commandments or Sermon on the Mount to provide moral guidance; the New Ager can rely on “the god within” to provide a conveniently undemanding ethic of self-fulfillment. (Interestingly, many New Agers profess to admire the religious teachings of certain Hindu gurus but are less than enthusiastic about the rigorous programs of abstinence and chastity linked with these teachings.) But deep within this approach lurks an obvious—some would say, fatal—contradiction. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, worshiping the “god within” turns out to be nothing more than self-worship.

These ideas are not new. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the New Age is that it seems to rest on some very old ideas. The paganism of late antiquity has been revived, merged with ideas drawn from native American religions, and supplemented by pantheistic ideas deriving from Eastern religions.⁷⁸ The revival of pagan ideas has reached such proportions that modern Christians can relate with the greatest of ease to New Testament accounts of Christian encounters with classical paganism. As David K. Clark and Norman L. Geisler perceptively remark of Paul’s Areopagus (or Mars Hill) sermon:

Christians today stand again on Mars Hill. In the first century, Saint Paul debated with two groups of Greek philosophers at a place in Athens called Mars Hill. Paul’s antagonists were the Epicureans and the Stoics. Like Paul, Christians today are locked in debate with both Epicureans and Stoics. When the American Atheists met in Denver recently, Madalyn Murray O’Hair declared that there is no God. Shirley MacLaine soon came to town to pronounce that she and all her listeners are gods. Shortly thereafter, in a Denver crusade, Billy Graham preached that Jesus alone is God. These well-known champions of three worldviews have rekindled that ancient Mars Hill debate.⁷⁹

So diverse is the New Age movement that it is pointless to speak of it having “doctrines.” It does not possess well-defined doctrines of God, generally believing that to define God is to limit him. It is perhaps more appropriate to speak of the movement having themes or attitudes, rather than definitely shaped belief systems. This feature of the New Age movement is perhaps one of its most frustrating features; open to endless variations, the movement cannot be defined with any degree of precision. The apologist is thus often obliged to adopt an ad hoc approach, responding to whatever variation on the movement’s themes happens to be encountered. What approaches may be adopted in responding to it?

One approach is to confront the logical and philosophical deficiencies of pantheism and panentheism. There are serious difficulties attending the religious outlooks of the New Age movement, which can easily be identified and addressed.⁸⁰ This approach has the advantage of intellectual sophistication and theological integrity. Nevertheless, it suffers from a weakness, characteristic of classical apologetics. The academic approach adopted often cuts no ice with the intended audience. The ideas and approaches are excellent, but the situations in which dialogue can and does take place preclude such detailed argumentation. Pantheism has a certain degree of resistance to logic, believing that the mystical nature of reality renders argumentation and logical analysis irrelevant. The approach adopted by the classical apologist is thus likely to be dismissed as inappropriate. The classical approach is, of course, enormously important for Christians wanting to reassure themselves of the coherence and credibility of the Christian faith in the face of the New Age challenge. But it has strictly limited potential in public debate, often casting the Christian apologist as pedantic and petty over against the openness of the New Ager.

The sort of simple and unsophisticated arguments that are likely to get home to New Age devotees are pragmatic and direct. If you are god, why are you so unhappy? What privileges does being a god confer? Does it make them immune from unemployment, from suffering or pain? From death? What hope does it give them in the face of the present reality of suffering and the future event of death?

The argument is not taking place in university seminar rooms but in the public arena. And that public is not interested in conceptual sophistication and finely honed technical arguments; it is interested in quickly grasped and easily understood points. Time is not on the side of the philosophically minded apologist who needs space to develop the concepts he presents—the attention span of skeptical New Age audiences is strictly limited. In the end, the debate with the New Age movement will not be won through philosophy but through the proclamation of Christ. The New Testament offers us invaluable guidance here, which we ought to accept with confidence. It sets before us a crisp, concise, and convincing approach, ideally suited to the New Age challenge—both in terms of the movement’s ideas and the opportunities available for confronting it. The resurrection of Christ may hold the key to engagement with the New Age.

I have to confess that I have found the approach adopted by Paul at Mars Hill to be far more effective than detailed philosophical debate. Let’s sketch the background before exploring the approach. The key question is this: How do we know anything about God? New Agers are reluctant to put a name to God. To define is to limit, and God is limitless. Your mind gets in the way of knowing God. Stop using it. Don’t evaluate. Don’t judge. Don’t think. Just experience God. There is no way of validating this experience. Just let it happen; what happens to you is God. You are God; your experiences are thus divine. Reason—especially someone else’s reason—is not competent to judge your firsthand experience.

Such approaches allow us to understand why many sociologists regard the New Age movement as a symbol of the collapse of Enlightenment rationalism. The total irrationality of the movement is one of its most striking features. It is locked into its worldview, allowing no means of entry for criticism or evaluation. But the movement, like classical paganism, is willing to dispute about God. Unlike the cold hostility of Enlightenment rationalism, the New Age is generally very receptive to religious ideas, acknowledging them as a potentially valuable contribution to the spiritual side of human existence. A dialogue is thus genuinely possible.

The apologist can argue along a number of lines. Let’s begin with a very simplistic approach. Consider near-death experiences, often exploited by New Agers as evidence both of the reality of the supernatural and of their own interpretation of the realm of “transcendent knowing, a domain not limited to time and space.”⁸¹ These accounts are related by those who are thought to have come very close to death yet to have survived to relate what they experienced. But none of these reports concern experiences of death, or of what exists after death. They are simply perceptions of what seems to happen close to death.

But what if someone were to die—really die—and return from the dead to tell us about the experience of death, and what lies beyond? Would not his or her witness be of first-rate importance? Would it not possess an authority totally lacking in any other? Would we not pay attention to such a person? The Christian has immediately gained a hearing for Christ and the message of the gospel in terms that make sense to New Agers. It may lack theological sophistication. It would cut little ice in a philosophy seminar. But the apologist must learn to adapt arguments and imagery to suit the audience. Learn to gain credibility in terms of the worldview of the New Age. Otherwise, you will not get a hearing.

A more sophisticated approach draws on the parallels between classical Athenian paganism and the New Age movement, and uses Paul’s Areopagus sermon in Acts 17:16–34 as a model (note how verses 24–28 echo ideas now prevalent within the New Age movement). Let’s consider Marilyn Ferguson’s words: “You have to be willing to have experiences and not have words for them.”‘⁸² But why? Why not be able to put one’s experiences of God into words? After all, we have already seen how words do indeed possess the ability to point to and communicate God.⁸³ Christ puts a name and a face to this God; the Resurrection establishes his credentials in this respect. To lapse into quasi-New Age language, Christ has broken through into the realm of transcendent knowing, making it knowable and available. Such an approach provides a point of contact in that it links into the New Age worldview, without endorsing it, in order to establish the authority of Christ—the Resurrection being of supreme importance. And the authority of Christ having been established, the apologist is in a position to begin introducing other key aspects of the gospel proclamation to his or her audience.

A third approach might be to argue along the following lines. The Resurrection shows that Christ has some superiority over the rest of us when it comes to knowing spiritual reality. So we should listen to him as to one who has penetrated far deeper into the transcendent realm of knowing than anyone else. Again, note the emphasis on the Resurrection. Christ has a spiritual authority which, you would argue, sets him above others, such as Shirley MacLaine. Why listen to Shirley when you can listen to Jesus? Jesus’ credentials are more impressive than hers! Shirley hasn’t died, let alone been raised from the dead, and thus has not had a firsthand account of transcendent spiritual realities. Thus, by operating tactically within a New Age worldview, you have set the scene for presenting the Christian gospel and eventually allowing your audience to break free from their existing worldview.

It will be clear that, because of its amorphous and irrational structure, the New Age presents the apologist with peculiar difficulties. The approaches outlined above are just some of the many ways into the movement. But the effort, though worth making, has difficulties. The most serious problem arises from the fact that New Age is generally committed to a syncretistic program of claiming Christ as one ascended master among many others. The uniqueness of Christ is denied. The Christian apologist must thus insist on the total qualitative distinction between Christ and any other religious teacher. Christ does not teach us—he transforms us, as no other ever has and no other ever can. The uniqueness of Christ, grounded in the event of the Resurrection and the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, is the most secure foundation of Christian apologetics at this point. It must not be compromised. The New Age is largely a reaction against the spiritual inadequacies of liberal Christianity; this same liberalism must not be allowed to deprive us of our most potent weapons against it. Liberalism got the church into this mess, but it does not possess the resources to get us out of it. Only orthodox Christianity has the apologetic and spiritual means to reclaim the lost ground. This point is a potent reminder that good apologetics rests on responsible and reliable theology.

But the best theological and spiritual arguments and insights can be compromised through lazy presentation and thoughtless application. Our concluding chapter aims to make the vital transition from theory to practice, as we move from textbook to application.

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