2. Apologetics and Contemporary Culture
2
Apologetics and Contemporary Culture
From Modernity to Postmodernity
Apologetics always takes place within a specific cultural context. Christian missionaries to China and India soon discovered that the apologetic methods that seemed to work well in western Europe did not seem to be effective in Asia. It was necessary to develop new approaches that resonated with the cultural mood and patterns of thought characteristic of these regions. An apologetic approach that was very productive in one context might prove much less effective, and perhaps even counterproductive, in a different cultural environment.
Apologetics and Modernity
The dominant cultural environment of the West, from about 1750 to 1960, is usually defined as “modernity.” This outlook was shaped by a belief in a universal human reason, common to all people and times, capable of gaining access to the deeper structures of the world. Reason was the key that unlocked the mysteries of life, and argument was its tool of persuasion. Rational argument became the trusted tool of this cultural age. Christian apologists rapidly realized the importance of this development. The rational defense of the Christian faith became of paramount importance.
The types of apologetics Christian writers developed to engage modernity focused on demonstrating the logical and rational grounds of faith. True beliefs were based on correct assumptions, which were in turn based on rational rules of logic. Apologetics was thus primarily conceived as arguments based on logic, appealing to the human mind. While these approaches had many strengths, they nevertheless neglected the relational, imaginative, and existential aspects of faith. As we noted earlier, French philosopher and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously complained about this excessive focus on reason. What about the human heart? The heart had its own reasons for believing, he declared, which reason could not grasp.
One important result of the impact of rationalism on Christian apologetics was the downplaying of any aspects of Christian thought that were seen as “irrational” or “illogical”—such as the doctrine of the Trinity. Few eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Christian apologists defended this idea, believing it was something of a liability in the face of the hard rationalism dominating this age. The rediscovery of the theological importance of the doctrine of the Trinity and the birth of a new confidence in its foundations and coherence dates from after World War I, when the easy assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism had been dealt a significant blow by the irrationality of the First World War.
Yet Christian apologists generally responded well to the challenges of rationalism, and developed new approaches to apologetics that chimed in with the “spirit of the age.” This age produced some landmark works of apologetics. Edward John Carnell (1919–67) produced a work that became a classic evangelical reasoned defense of the Christian faith. Yet the passing of time has made the continued use of such works problematic, for two reasons:
One of the problems here is that rationalist approaches to apologetics tend to minimize the element of mystery within the Christian faith in order to make Christianity appear more accessible to reason. Yet the Christian gospel expresses some God-given ideas that lie far beyond the capacity of the human mind to discover by itself. In trying to win arguments with particular opponents, apologists sometimes buy into the assumptions of their adversaries. A tactical advantage can easily become a strategic liability. The danger of forms of apologetics that respond to rationalism is that they often end up importing rationalism into Christianity, rather than exporting the gospel into a rationalist culture.
The Rise of Postmodernity
In the early twenty-first century, western Christianity faces a cultural context more complex and varied than that known by apologists in the middle of the twentieth century. Individuals and Christian communities live in a postmodern world. The apologetic approaches that seemed to work so well in the 1950s and early 1960s seem out of tune with the cultural mood of a later generation.
The term “postmodernism” first made its appearance around 1971. It was initially used to refer to a new architectural style, but was soon applied to the world of ideas. Postmodernism came to refer to the growing cultural belief that modernity had failed and needed to be corrected. This feeling initially focused on the failures of “modern art” to engage with the human imagination, but rapidly extended to social issues and problems arising from a naïve belief in the inevitability of progress—such as the growth of industrialization and urbanization. It is important to note that this emerging movement did not choose to style itself “antimodernism.” Postmodernism is not a rejection of every aspect of modernity, but is seen by its advocates as an attempt to combine the best of the modern world with the best elements of classical traditions and eliminate the undesirable aspects of both.
Postmodernity has been severely criticized for its intellectual shallowness, especially its eclecticism. Who decides what we pick and mix from the past and the present? Postmodern authors, on the other hand, argue that the movement represents an attempt to move society and thought forward in a way that utilizes the best insights of the past but is not trapped by it. One of their main concerns is to fight the vast “totalizing schemes”—such as Marxism—that were so typical of modernity, and are now seen to constitute an intellectual and cultural straightjacket. As we shall see presently, this critique of such “uniformitarianism” is of major importance to Christian apologetics.
So how do we respond to this major cultural shift? Perhaps the first step is to get a sense of proportion about this development. Reflecting on the history of the church allows us to see this shift in its proper perspective. Every generation believes it stands at a critical point in history. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the early fifth century, remarked on how many people of his time longed for the good old days, when Christianity was given support and security by the Roman Empire. Bernard of Clairvaux, writing seven hundred years later, wrote of the sense of nostalgia many then felt for the time of Augustine. And many sixteenth-century writers commented on how much they longed to have lived at the time of Bernard of Clairvaux. Things were so much better then! We find it very easy to believe things were better in the past. We must remember that the past is easily idealized and romanticized, especially by those who feel alienated and displaced in the present.
Yet our task is not to be nostalgic about the past, but to deal with the challenges of the present, making use of past approaches to apologetics when they are helpful (as they so often are). Apologetics always takes place against a shifting cultural context. The gospel remains the same; the questions asked about it and the challenges it faces vary hugely from one cultural location to another. The tide of modernism swept in and is now receding. Postmodernism now seems dominant. But in a generation’s time, things may well seem very different.
There is no need for Christian apologists to be alarmed by the rise of postmodernity. The Christian faith possesses ample resources to meet this challenge. It’s just that we haven’t used some of them for generations, as they seemed inappropriate in a modernist worldview. The rise of postmodernity certainly brings some real challenges for Christian apologetics; yet it is clear that it brings some equally real opportunities. It is also clear that this new cultural mood offers challenges to churches in that it forces them to do some significant rethinking. Is this way of preaching the Christian gospel really the best way to do it? Is it too deeply embedded in an earlier worldview, so that it falls with modernity’s passing?
For many younger western apologists, Christianity seems to have become deeply enmeshed within the plausibility structures of modernity, that great period in European cultural history regnant from about 1750 to 1960. The rise of postmodernism thus provides the occasion for a review of this development. What some older writers seem to regard as theologically necessary may simply turn out to have been culturally convenient or historically contingent.
So how are we to explain, defend, or communicate the Christian gospel in this changing cultural situation? While I believe postmodernism is actually quite difficult to defend and sustain intellectually, I nevertheless accept that it continues to shape cultural perceptions. We have to connect with where people are, not with where we think they ought to be. In any case, I also believe it gives us new opportunities to preach and communicate the gospel, as I hope to show.
Some older apologists seem to think the best way of proclaiming the gospel in a postmodern context is to try and get people to go back to modernity. This is neither right nor possible. In this book, I will neither defend nor criticize either modernity or postmodernity. I shall simply take them as cultural “givens” shaped by the happenstances of history, and assume it is evident that both have their points of strength and of vulnerability. Postmodernity certainly offers us some challenges—but I believe they are challenges to which churches can rise, and from which they may benefit.
Apologetics and Postmodernity
So what are the core themes of this “postmodernism” of which we are speaking? It has become something of a sacred tradition to begin any reflections on how the church should live and witness in postmodernity with a detailed account of scholarly reflections on the historical emergence, philosophical roots, and cultural implications of postmodernism, sprinkled with judicious hints that the term is ultimately fluid and probably even elusive. Nevertheless, it is clear that something significant has happened in western culture during the last generation, even if its precise description remains hard to pin down.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of postmodernism is its rejection of what I shall call uniformitarianism—that is, the insistence that there is only one right way of thinking and only one right way of behaving. Postmodern writers see such attitudes as underlying Nazism and Stalinism, which they regard as the unacceptable public face of uniformitarianism. A demand for uniformity is held to lead to repression in that people are forced to fit into one single preconceived mold. To use the language of some leading postmodern philosophers, “the other” is relentlessly reduced to “the same.”
Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against these ways of thinking, which it regards as oppressive. In their place, a cultural mood has developed that celebrates diversity and seeks to undermine those who offer rigid, restrictive, and oppressive views of the world. It reacts primarily against modernism, which tried to reduce everything to a uniform set of ideas. This is seen as an attempt to control and master other people, a form of intellectual or cultural Stalinism, characterized by its refusal to permit diversity in our readings of the world. Human freedom, it is suggested, is dependent upon successfully identifying, challenging, and ultimately subverting such controlling “metanarratives.”
Yet it is fair to point out that postmodernism has its own family of distinct metanarratives, which are far from being above criticism. Indeed, some of these metanarratives have become the regnant orthodoxy within at least certain sections of western culture, raising fundamental questions for those who disagree with the “big picture” of reality it proposes. For example, consider the relativist who maintains that all points of view on a given topic are equally valid, even though they are apparently incompatible. This stance is ultimately grounded in an underlying understanding of reality (we might say a “narrative of reality” or metanarrative) that comes into clear and explicit conflict with other narratives of reality that regard reality as open, at least in principle, to public experience and discussion.
It is, in fact, not easy to give a definition of what postmodernity actually is. Its leading interpreters view it in quite different ways; indeed, some would say it is intrinsically and necessarily resistant to any form of definition. The best we can hope to do is to offer a description, or some kind of sketch, of postmodernity. In what follows, I shall draw on an illuminating and perceptive recent account of the leading themes of postmodernity from the pen of Kevin Vanhoozer, a leading evangelical theologian based at Wheaton College, Illinois.
Vanhoozer suggests that the complex phenomenon of postmodernity can be summarized in terms of four criticisms it directs against older ways of thinking:
Vanhoozer’s analysis is important, as it helps identify the stumbling blocks and suspicions some older approaches to Christian apologetics will encounter in postmodern contexts. Yet it is essential to appreciate two points:
We must realize we are free to develop apologetic approaches that are faithful to the Christian gospel on the one hand, and are adapted to our own cultural situation on the other. By doing this, we are repeating the method of “traditional apologetics” while responding to the changes in the cultural context toward which it is directed. We simply cannot use an apologetic approach developed to engage eighteenth-century rationalism to defend the faith to twenty-first-century people who regard rationalism as outdated and constricting!
For example, postmodernity finds appeals to rational argument problematic. But it is deeply attracted to stories and images. Furthermore, postmodernity is more interested in a truth that proves itself capable of being lived out than being demonstrated by rational argument. This helps us understand why “incarnational apologetics,” which emphasizes the apologetic importance of faithful living, has become so influential in recent years. As will become clear in a later chapter, we can easily rise to this new challenge, usually not by inventing new approaches to apologetics, but by recovering older approaches that the rise of rationalism seemed to make obsolete.
As we shall see, the rise of postmodernity may change some of the approaches we adopt—but it does not invalidate the tasks or intellectual foundations of Christian apologetics. The fundamental principles remain what they always have been:
The Approach Adopted in This Book
There are many different ways of doing apologetics. Some books use a “case study” approach, considering a number of objections or difficulties concerning the Christian faith. Each of these is then examined, and answers are offered. Other books appeal to the historical or rational evidence for faith. Others suggest that the world simply cannot be understood without reference to God. This book does not reflect the approach of any school of apologetics, but aims to equip its users to think apologetically, drawing on the best apologists to help explore the issues.
The basic approach of this book can be summarized in the following sequence of steps. Each of these will be explored in much greater detail later. At this stage, I am simply introducing them.
1. Understand the faith.
First, it is essential to have a good understanding of the Christian faith. This knowledge of the gospel, however, needs to be focused apologetically. We need to reflect on how the leading themes of faith can connect with people and engage with their experiences and ideas. This means trying to adopt an “outsider perspective” on faith, asking how an unbeliever might respond to core aspects of the gospel instead of focusing on the kind of discussions Christians might have among themselves.
For example, a biblical scholar might ask: “How does the parable of the Prodigal Son help us understand the relation of Jesus of Nazareth to Judaism?” The apologist asks a rather different question: “How does this parable help us relate to the world of the unbeliever?” The apologist will want to explore how the ideas, narratives, and images of faith can engage with the realities of everyday life.
2. Understand the audience.
Second, it is important to understand the audience being addressed. Who are they? My own experience is that audiences vary enormously—as they did in New Testament times. Compare the radically different approaches of Peter when addressing an audience of Jews (Acts 2) and Paul when addressing a Greek audience (Acts 17). The same gospel is commended and communicated in quite different ways, tailored to the worlds of those very different groups of people. Each audience has its own questions, objections, and difficulties that need to be engaged, just as it has its own “points of contact” and openings for faith.
To give some obvious examples: our audiences have huge variations in knowledge of the Christian faith. Some audiences have no knowledge of the Bible, and regard it as an irrelevance. Others retain a memory and affection for some biblical passages, such as Psalm 23:1, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Audiences have quite different cultural locations. Some have very modern perspectives; others are postmodern. Some love classic works of literature; others prefer to talk about the most recent shows on television. Some use very abstract ways of thinking; others think in terms of images or stories. In each case, we are forced to think about how we can best communicate the Christian faith in terms that will resonate with the experience and knowledge of our audience.
3. Communicate with clarity.
Third, we must translate our faith into a language that can be understood by our audiences. The great debates over biblical translation can help us here, as they focus our attention on the need to communicate its message to contemporary people. As C. S. Lewis wisely remarked: “Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow—Heb. 13:8) in the particular language of our own age.” Our privilege and responsibility is to express the timeless truths of the gospel using language and imagery adapted to our audiences. The apologist is thus someone who translates the realities of faith into the cultural vernacular.
4. Find points of contact.
Fourth, we need to identify points of contact for the gospel that are already embedded in human culture and experience. God has not left himself without a witness in history, culture, or human experience (Acts 14:17). Our task is to try to identify that witness (whether in nature, society, or a moral code), and use it as a point of contact for the proclamation of the Christian gospel.
5. Present the whole gospel.
Fifth, we must make sure we do not impoverish the appeal of the Christian faith by restricting it to what we personally enjoy or find attractive. C. S. Lewis emphasized how the apologist must make a scrupulous distinction between the “Christian message” and “one’s own ideas.” If we fail to make this distinction, what is presented to our audiences is not the Christian gospel but those aspects of the gospel we happen to regard as important and interesting. For Lewis, the temptation to focus on what we personally like or approve simply impoverishes the gospel. We end up promoting ourselves—when we are meant to be promoting Christ.
Nevertheless, the impact of the Christian faith upon our lives is itself important apologetically. Why? Because it witnesses to the capacity of the gospel to transform existence. Lewis’s point is that we must avoid presenting Christianity simply in terms of our personal preferences and focus instead on identifying its capacity to engage the deepest levels of human existence—our hearts, minds, and souls.
Nor must we needlessly inhibit the appeal of Christianity by limiting the means by which we communicate it. Many in western Christianity focus on its core ideas and see apologetics as the rational defense of Christian truth claims. Now let me make it clear that this is correct, as far as it goes. But this is not the whole truth. We need to go further, noticing how Scripture uses images, stories, and ideas to communicate its core message. For example, Jesus of Nazareth used parables to communicate the great themes of the kingdom of God. These stories were able to plant some core ideas in the minds of his audiences. How can we do the same today?
6. Practice, practice, practice.
Sixth, apologetics is not just about theory; it’s about practice. We need to be able to apply apologetic ideas and approaches in everyday life—in conversations, debates, interviews, or whatever interactions we have with other people. Apologetics is both a science and an art. It is not just about knowledge; it is about wisdom. It’s like a skilled and experienced medical practitioner, who knows the theory of medicine well. But she has to apply it to her patients, and that means learning how to relate to them—how to help them tell her what the real problems are, finding ways of communicating technical medical terms in ordinary language, and explaining how they can be addressed.
These six themes will be explored throughout the following chapters, as we reflect on the great themes and approaches of Christian apologetics.
Moving On
We have looked briefly at some initial questions concerning apologetics. The scene is set for a much fuller discussion that follows, where we will explore some of these themes in greater detail. We begin by considering the deep theological foundations on which Christian apologetics rests.
For Further Reading
Allen, Diogenes. Christian Belief in a Postmodern World: The Full Wealth of Conviction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989.
Craig, William Lane. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. Wheaton: Crossway, 2008.
Middleton, J. Richard, and Brian J. Walsh. Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995.
Newbigin, Lesslie. Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
Sire, James W. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004.
Vanhoozer, Kevin J., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.