Notes
Notes
Introduction
[]. G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936), 229.
Chapter 1 Getting Started
[]. The great Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) argued that the gospel rightly caused a “scandal” to modern people on account of doctrines that challenged contemporary myths about human nature and destiny—such as the doctrine of original sin. See Emil Brunner, The Scandal of Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946).
[]. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 153, 155.
[]. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 11.
[]. For useful reflections, see John G. Stackhouse, Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–205.
[]. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 52.
Chapter 2 Apologetics and Contemporary Culture
[]. Edward John Carnell, An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948). For an analysis, see Kenneth C. Harper, “Edward John Carnell: An Evaluation of His Apologetics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 20 (1977), 133–46.
[]. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Theology and the Condition of Postmodernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–24.
[]. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 151.
Chapter 3 The Theological Basis of Apologetics
[]. Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), xix.
[]. Richard S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 73–75.
[]. For some important representative accounts, see Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James, eds., The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical & Practical Perspectives (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004); Peter Schmiechen, Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009).
[]. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 152–53.
[]. For an excellent introduction, which offers the apologist many helpful approaches and analogies, see Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[]. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 63.
Chapter 4 The Importance of the Audience
[]. James C. Walters, “Paul, Adoption, and Inheritance,” Paul in the Greco-Roman World, ed. J. Paul Sampley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 42–76.
[]. See Romans 8:15, 23; 9:4; Galatians 4:5; Ephesians 1:5.
[]. See the classic study of Robert F. Zehnle, Peter’s Pentecost Discourse: Tradition and Lucan Reinterpretation in Peter’s Speeches of Acts 2 and 3 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971). Although dated in some respects, the work remains an important analysis of the text itself and its underlying strategy.
[]. See W. S. Kurz, “Hellenistic Rhetoric in the Christological Proofs of Luke-Acts,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42 (1980), 171–95.
[]. See the classic study of Bertil Gartner, The Areopagus Speech and Natural Revelation (Uppsala: Gleerup, 1955).
[]. Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[]. See the important analysis in Bruce W. Winter, “Official Proceedings and the Forensic Speeches in Acts 24–26,” The Book of Acts: Ancient Literary Setting, ed. B. W. Winter and A. D. Clarke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 305–36.
Chapter 5 The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith
[]. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 21.
[]. Austin Farrer, “In His Image,” Remembering C. S. Lewis, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 344–45.
[]. Letter of 1949 to Edward Sackville-West, cited in Michael de-la-Noy, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West (London: Bodley Head, 1988), 237.
[]. See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988); Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990); John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995).
[]. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 63–110.
[]. See Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
[]. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 183.
[]. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 6.
[]. Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 2–5, 161–62.
[]. Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion,” London Review of Books, October 19, 2006.
[]. Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
[]. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53 (1980): 719–38, quote at p. 730.
[]. Julia Kristeva, The Incredible Need to Believe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 3.
[]. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 5. For criticism of this approach, see Alister McGrath, Why God Won’t Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011).
[]. C. S. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 213–14.
[]. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 290.
[]. Ibid.
[]. Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), 26.
[]. Ibid.
[]. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 147.
[]. Brian Leftow, “From Jerusalem to Athens,” God and the Philosophers, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 191.
[]. John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (London: SPCK, 2008), 85–86.
[]. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 197.
[]. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1995), 133.
[]. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” Faith and Philosophy: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 16–93.
[]. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: Pimlico, 2003), 208–13. The curious title of this important collection of essays reflects a famous dictum of Immanuel Kant: “Nothing straight was ever made out of the crooked timber of humanity.”
[]. See M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 196.
[]. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 189. I reflect further on the importance of this approach in Alister E. McGrath, Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox), 2011.
[]. Ibid.
[]. The best studies are Paul Humphreys, The Chances of Explanation: Causal Explanation in the Social, Medical, and Physical Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and James Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[]. For a good discussion of Aquinas on this point, see William E. Carroll, “Divine Agency, Contemporary Physics, and the Autonomy of Nature,” Heythrop Journal 49 (2008): 582–602.
[]. Helge S. Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[]. See especially Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).
[]. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
[]. Michael Friedman, “Explanation and Scientific Understanding,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 5–19; Paul Kitcher, “Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World,” Scientific Explanation, ed. P. Kitcher and W. Salmon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 410–505.
[]. For example, Margaret Morrison, Unifying Scientific Theories: Physical Concepts and Mathematical Structures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[]. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 28.
[]. William S. Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1.
[]. Richard Shweder, “Atheists Agonistes,” New York Times, November 27, 2006.
[]. Ibid.
[]. A point famously emphasized by Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
[]. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 87–89.
[]. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 85–90; quote at p. 89.
[]. See especially Walter Schmithals, The Theology of the First Christians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 122–23, 146–51. See further Raymond Pickett, The Cross in Corinth: The Social Significance of the Death of Jesus (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 213–16; and Edward Adams and David G. Horrell, eds., Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004).
Chapter 6 Pointers to Faith
[]. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions VII.x.16.
[]. Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 262.
[]. For a thorough exploration of the scientific issues and their apologetic implications, see Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 109–201.
[]. Richard Swinburne, “The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. John Leslie (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 154–73; Robin Collins, “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument,” Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 47–75.
[]. Martin J. Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (London: Phoenix, 2000).
[]. Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 60–65.
[]. Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982): 16.
[]. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God, 34–42.
[]. Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics and the Language of Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 83.
[]. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (London: Penguin, 1992), 77.
[]. John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (London: SPCK, 1988), 20–21.
[]. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 1–14.
[]. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 26.
[]. Charles A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 22.
[]. Augustine, On the Trinity XVI.iv.6.
[]. Audio recording available at http://media.premier.org.uk/misc/4b519ce0-5a9e-4b1d-86ca-8def12ebd5c1.mp3.
[]. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 65.
[]. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 194 n.6.
[]. Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii.
[]. Ibid.
[]. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 3–8.
[]. Ibid., 24.
[]. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Collins, 1978), 19.
[]. Philip E. Devine, Natural Law Ethics (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 32–34.
[]. Augustine, Confessions I.i.1.
[]. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 113.
[]. Ibid.
[]. See Lewis, Mere Christianity, 134–38. See also a similar argument in C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London: Collins, 1965), 94–110.
[]. For Lewis’s approach, see Peter Kreeft, “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, ed. Michael H. MacDonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 249–72. More generally, see John Haldane, “Philosophy, the Restless Heart, and the Meaning of Theism,” Ratio 19 (2006): 421–40.
[]. Augustine, Confessions I.i.1.
[]. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 136–37.
[]. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 530.
[]. Avihu Zakai, “Jonathan Edwards and the Language of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning,” Journal of Religious History 26 (2002): 15–41.
[]. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1.
[]. Lewis, “Weight of Glory,” 94–110.
[]. Ibid., 97.
[]. Ibid.
[]. Ibid., 98.
[]. Ibid., 105.
[]. Ibid., 100.
[]. Ibid., 106.
[]. Ibid., 108.
[]. Ibid., 107–8.
[]. Ibid., 107.
[]. See Paul Elmer More, Christ the Word (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927).
[]. Lisa Miller, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
[]. John Cottingham, Why Believe? (London: Continuum, 2009), 47.
[]. For comment, see the classic studies of Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); and T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969).
Chapter 7 Gateways for Apologetics
[]. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber & Faber, 1967).
[]. Augustine, Confessions V.xiii.23–xiv.25.
[]. James Robert Brown, Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to the World of Proofs and Pictures (London: Routledge, 1999, 71–78); George Boolos, “Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable,” Mind 103 (1994): 1–3.
[]. For a highly influential discussion, see John Lucas, “Minds, Machines and Gödel,” Philosophy 36 (1961): 112–27.
[]. For two good assessments of Schaeffer’s approach, see Thomas V. Morris, Francis Schaeffer’s Apologetics: A Critique (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987); Bryan A. Follis, Truth with Love: Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006).
[]. Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, vol. 1 (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1982), 130.
[]. Ibid., 134.
[]. For a good analysis, see Morris, Francis Schaeffer’s Apologetics, 21–22.
[]. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 132.
[]. Ibid., 140.
[]. Ibid., 110.
[]. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 138.
[]. C. S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 158.
[]. See Roy Baumeister, Meanings of Life (New York: Guilford Press, 1991). Baumeister’s analysis of the importance of questions of identity, value, purpose, and agency is of major importance to Christian apologetics.
[]. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Biblical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
[]. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985), 216.
[]. Baumeister, Meanings of Life.
[]. N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7–32.
[]. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 132.
[]. See Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2002); Jeffrey L. Morrow, “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Christian for Our Times,” Evangelical Review of Theology 29 (2005), 164–77.
[]. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 233.
[]. Brown is totally wrong on all these points. See, for example, Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23–24.
[]. The best account of the fabrication of this myth is Massimo Introvigne, Gli Illuminati e il Priorato di Sion (Milan: Piemme, 2005). An English summary of this work is available at http://www.cesnur.org/2005/pa_introvigne.htm.
[]. Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010).
[]. You might enjoy reading the interesting study of William G. Johnson and Marcia K. Houtman, “Platonic Shadows in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles,” Modern Fiction Studies 32 (1986), 75–87.
[]. For a detailed discussion, see Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[]. James C. Walters, “Paul, Adoption, and Inheritance,” Paul in the Greco-Roman World, ed. J. Paul Sampley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 42–76.
[]. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge, 2002), 43.
[]. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2002), 1.
[]. Bill Carter, “Why ‘Cheers’ Proved So Intoxicating,” New York Times, Sunday, May 9, 1993.
[]. Philip D. Kenneson, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 155–70.
Chapter 8 Questions about Faith
[]. For apologetic motifs in the New Testament, see Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 1–25.
[]. One of the best is the comprehensive account by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). Every apologist can learn much from this work.
[]. My discussion of the different approaches of Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis to suffering is relevant here: Alister McGrath, “The Cross, Suffering, and Theological Bewilderment: Reflections on Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis,” The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 57–69.
[]. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1949), 4.
[]. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), 42.
[]. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1962), 21. The official English translation of the title of this work is not quite correct; it is better translated as “Anxiety in Culture” (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).
[]. See Armand Nicholi, The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Free Press, 2002).
[]. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 265.
[]. Freud, Future of an Illusion, 35.
[]. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 91.
Chapter 9 Conclusion
[]. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 159.
[]. See Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1978); Diana Glyer, The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007).