7. Gateways for Apologetics
7
Gateways for Apologetics
Opening the Door to Faith
Apologetics can be likened to drawing curtains to one side so people can catch a glimpse of what lies beyond, or holding a diamond up to the light and allowing its facets to scintillate and sparkle in the sunlight. It’s about establishing gateways for faith—whether we think of this as opening doors, drawing curtains aside, turning on a light so people can see more clearly, or using a lens that brings things into sharper focus. The key themes are those of allowing people to see things clearly, perhaps for the first time; to discover insights that had previously eluded them; and to suddenly realize why people might find the Christian faith so intellectually persuasive and imaginatively compelling.
Apologetics is about building bridges, allowing people to cross from the world they already know to one they need to discover. It is about helping people to find doors they may never have known about, allowing them to see and enter a world that exceeds anything they could have imagined. Apologetics opens eyes and opens doors, establishing gateways for the Christian faith. So what gateways are we talking about?
Until quite recently, the dominant trend in apologetics was to use arguments in the reasoned defense of the Christian faith. Yet this was largely a response to a strongly rationalist culture, which saw conformity to reason as a criterion of truth. The use of arguments, as we shall see, remains an integral part of Christian apologetics and must never be marginalized. However, the waning of rationalism in western culture has made this less important than it once was, and created a context in which other aspects of the Christian faith need to be recognized—above all, its powerful imaginative, moral, and aesthetic appeal. Older Christian writers, particularly those who lived during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, placed a high value on biblical stories and images in teaching the faithful; the rise of modernity caused these both to be devalued, just as the later rise of postmodernity has led to a rediscovery of their power.
The recent growth of postmodernity has led to a new emphasis on the importance of story and image, both of which make a significant appeal to the human imagination. Anyone familiar with the history of Christian apologetics quickly realizes that both of these were used extensively as gateways to faith by earlier generations of apologists, particularly during the Renaissance. We need to retrieve such older approaches to apologetics as we develop a balanced approach to the commendation and defense of the Christian faith in our shifting cultural context.
We need to adapt our apologetics to our audiences, realizing there are several gateways of connection between the gospel and the human soul. The New Testament itself is obviously concerned with linking the gospel to the conceptual and experiential world of multiple audiences. If the soul thirsts for God “like a parched land” (Ps. 143:6), how can it be irrigated? Our task is to identify the possible channels through which the living water of the gospel can refresh and transform the human soul, and then use these channels faithfully and effectively. In this chapter, I shall use the image of a gateway to help us reflect on these varied approaches.
Gateways and Apologetics: Some Reflections
One of the most important images used by medieval theologians to discuss how the human soul is transformed by God’s grace is that of the sun and the shutter. A good example is found in the writings of Alan of Lille (d. 1203), who compares the human soul to a cold, dark room. When the shutters are thrown open, sunlight pours into the room, lighting and warming it. We open the shutters; the sun illuminates and heats the room. The opening of the shutters doesn’t really cause the room to become warm and light. It just removes a barrier to a force that is able to achieve this. The real cause of the change is the sun. We simply allow the light and heat of the sun to enter the room by removing an obstacle to their entry.
This image helps us grasp the theological point that we do not cause conversion. Alan argues that we are the ones who must throw open the shutters of our minds, so God’s grace can get to work in our lives. We simply remove an obstacle to God’s grace; it is divine grace that causes the renewal of our souls. Yet the image is also important apologetically. It reminds us that God is the one who converts people, while at the same time reaffirming we can aid this process by helping remove barriers and obstacles to the grace of God.
A gateway is a means by which our eyes are opened to the reality of our own situation and the ability of the gospel to transform it. To understand this important point, imagine that you are seriously ill; you have blood poisoning and will die within hours unless you gain access to the drugs that will cure you. But you don’t really understand what is wrong with you. Nor do you know a cure is available. Try thinking yourself into that situation. Now consider the following approaches, each of which is a gateway to your transformation:
The first approach is an evidence-based argument; the second approach is story, based on a personal experience the storyteller considers relevant to your situation. Each approach is very different from the other. Yet each acts as a gateway. How?
First, they help you to see things in a different way—the way things really are. Second, they allow you to appreciate what can be done to transform things. Third, they encourage you to make that critical step—to get the drug, take it, and become better.
What cured you was the drug. But without realizing your true situation—that you needed that drug—you would not have been cured. God’s grace is the drug; now that you are cured, you can help people see their need for that grace and can testify to its power. God converts and brings to faith; you are nevertheless a small (but real!) part of this process of healing. What you say can thus be a gateway allowing people to see things in a different way and begin to imagine a new way of thinking and living.
So what are these gateways for Christian apologetics? In this chapter, we shall explore some of the possibilities open to apologists. We begin with what is possibly the simplest way of doing apologetics: explaining what Christianity really is.
Gateway 1: Explanation
The best defense of Christianity is its explanation. In other words, if you want to defend or commend Christianity, it is best to begin by telling people what it is really all about. Many people have misconceptions of Christianity that get in the way of their coming to faith. One of the best examples of this is provided by the great theologian Augustine of Hippo, who came to faith after a long time of wandering in the philosophical wastelands. Augustine was a talented young orator from North Africa who fell in with the Manichaeans, a sect that was severely critical of Christianity. His knowledge of Christianity came primarily from its critics and was not particularly accurate. Augustine rejected Christianity as unworthy of consideration by someone as cultured and intelligent as himself.
Augustine was ambitious, and decided to try to make his mark in the imperial capital. Leaving North Africa, he traveled to Rome. Soon after his arrival at Rome, he was offered the job of Public Orator in the major northern Italian city of Milan. Aware that this could be the beginning of a significant career in the imperial civil service, Augustine accepted with alacrity. Yet he was also aware that his political advancement would depend on his rhetorical skills. Who could help him develop as a public speaker?
After his arrival at Milan, Augustine discovered that the local Christian bishop, Ambrose, had a reputation as a splendid orator. He decided to find out whether the reputation was merited. Each Sunday, he slipped into the city’s great cathedral and listened to the bishop preach. Initially, he took a purely professional interest in the sermons as pieces of splendid oratory. But gradually, their content began to take hold of him.
I used enthusiastically to listen to him preaching to the people, not with the intention which I ought to have had, but as if testing out his oratorical skill to see whether his fluency was better or inferior than it was reported to be. . . . I was not interested in learning what he was talking about. My ears were only for his rhetorical technique. . . . Nevertheless together with the words which I was enjoying, the subject matter, in which I was unconcerned, came to make an entry into my mind. I could not separate them. While I opened my heart in noting the eloquence with which he spoke, there also entered no less the truth which he affirmed.
As the story of Augustine’s long journey to faith makes clear, Ambrose (whom Augustine came to regard as a kind of theological hero) removed a major barrier to faith. He disarmed the Manichaean stereotype of Christianity. After listening to Ambrose, Augustine began to realize that Christianity was far more attractive and persuasive than he had realized. A barrier to faith was removed. Although it would be some time before Augustine converted to Christianity, his encounter with Ambrose was a milestone along that road.
Among the individuals whom we encounter in our apologetic ministry, there will certainly be some who have the most astonishingly misguided and muddled ideas about what Christianity is all about. These misunderstandings—some unconsciously picked up, others deliberately propagated—need to be identified and firmly yet tactfully disarmed.
We now move on to consider what is perhaps the most familiar gateway to faith: the use of reasoned argument.
Gateway 2: Argument
Classic approaches to apologetics emphasize the importance of reason in both establishing the intellectual case for God and criticizing alternative positions. We have already considered the role of arguments in relation to defending the existence of God, including:
Other arguments could easily be added to this list. Remember, such arguments are not to be understood as “proofs” in the logically rigorous sense of the term. What such arguments make absolutely clear is that there are good reasons for believing in God—or, to put it another way, that belief in God can be justified, even if it cannot be absolutely proven.
In its rigorous sense, “proof” applies only to logic and mathematics. We can prove 2 + 2 = 4, just as we can prove the whole is greater than the part. Nevertheless, it is important to avoid confusing “provability” with “truth.” In the early twentieth century, the great mathematician Kurt Gödel famously proved that, however many rules of inference we formulate, there will still be some valid inferences not covered by them. In other words, there are some true statements that we may not be able to show to be true. The philosophical implications of this are considerable.
Argument can also be used to critique the position of alternatives to the Christian faith—such as by showing they are rationally incoherent or lack a reliable evidential foundation. For example, throughout this work we have emphasized the capacity of the Christian gospel to make sense of things. In doing so, we are not restricting the appeal of Christianity to its rational dimensions. After all, it has rich emotional, moral, imaginative, and existential aspects, all of which must be deployed to the full by the responsible apologist. Yet there is no doubt that many have been, and continue to be, drawn to the Christian faith because of its ability to make sense of things.
But what of non-Christian alternatives? How capable are rival views of making sense of things? Are they empirically adequate—in other words, how good is their theory at making sense of observation and experience? In an earlier chapter, we emphasized the apologetic importance of showing how the Christian faith is able to make sense of observation and experience. The apologist must not simply affirm the excellence of Christianity in this respect, but point out the limitations of other approaches.
This kind of tactic was developed by Francis Schaeffer (1912–84), one of the most important North American evangelical apologists of the twentieth century. Schaeffer’s apologetic method emphasizes many of the points we have already made in this work. For example, Schaeffer rightly draws attention to relating to a specific audience, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach: “If we wish to communicate, then, we must take the time and the trouble to learn our hearer’s use of language so that they understand what we intend to convey.” The apologist must listen to the intended audience to learn their language, in order to communicate with them in terms they can understand.
Schaeffer himself seems to have realized the importance of listening to the ideas, concerns, and aspirations of his audience during his time as a missionary in French-speaking Switzerland in the late 1950s and 1960s. Based in a chalet (named L’Abri, from the French word for “shelter” or “refuge”) in the alpine village of Huemoz, Schaeffer acted as host to many students touring Europe, especially young Americans backpacking through Europe. He listened to their reflections on contemporary films and novels, or their take on the new philosophies of the age. How could the Bible be squared with the heady existentialist ideas of then-influential philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard? Having listened to these students talking about their ideas, Schaeffer realized he was then able to engage them on their own level and in their own language, using illustrations drawn from the world they had described to help them appreciate the plausibility of the Christian faith.
Yet Schaeffer’s most significant contribution to apologetics lies in the importance he attaches to identifying points of tension within non-Christian worldviews and exploring their wider implications. Worldviews rest on certain presuppositions. If these presuppositions are human creations, lacking divine mandate and authorization, they will be incapable of corresponding to the structures of the universe, which is God’s creation.
The more logical a man who holds a non-Christian position is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his own presuppositions.
Every person, Schaeffer argues, lives with a foot in each of two worlds—the real, external world, characterized by its depth and complexity; and an internal world of thought, shaped by a longing for understanding, love, and significance. If these two worlds stand in tension with each other, an individual cannot live meaningfully. There must be a correspondence between our experience of the external world and our internal world. The apologist, Schaeffer suggests, must therefore use reasoned argument to identify and expose the internal contradictions and tensions within non-Christian worldviews. These, he declares, rest on assumptions or presuppositions that are, in the end, inconsistent and incompatible with true human existence.
Every person we speak to, whether shop girl or university student, has a set of presuppositions, whether he or she has analyzed them or not. . . . It is impossible for any non-Christian individual or group to be consistent to their system in logic or in practice. . . . A man may try to bury the tension and you may have to help him find it, but somewhere there is a point of inconsistency. He stands in a position which he cannot pursue to the end; and this is not just an intellectual concept of tension, it is what is wrapped up in what he is as a man.
The apologist must therefore help an individual to realize this “tension” and feel its intellectual and existential force. This means helping him or her first to discover it, and second to appreciate its significance. Schaeffer suggests that people shield themselves from this tension by protecting themselves with a sort of intellectual cocoon, which prevents them from experiencing the disturbing realization that their ideas simply do not correspond to the way things really are. Using an image familiar to him from winter life in Switzerland, Schaeffer likens this intellectual cocoon to the roof of an alpine shelter, designed to shield travelers from avalanches:
It is like the great shelters built upon some mountain passes to protect vehicles from the avalanches of rock and stone which periodically tumble down the mountain. The avalanche, in the case of the non-Christian, is the real and the abnormal fallen world which surrounds him. The Christian, lovingly, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of the external world and of what man is to beat upon him.
Apologetics can thus be thought of as taking the roof off such a shelter and forcing our audience to realize their way of thinking is simply not capable of withstanding an encounter with the real world outside.
So how is this method to be applied? Schaeffer himself gives an example that illustrates the approach well. He was speaking to a group of students in a room in a college at Cambridge University. As the kettle boiled to make some tea, Schaeffer was challenged by an Indian student who argued that Christianity did not make sense. Schaeffer responded by asking him about his own belief system: “Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no intrinsic difference between them?” The student agreed. Schaeffer then narrates what happened next:
The student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian’s head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, “There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty.” Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.
Schaeffer’s approach is both versatile and rigorous, and can be applied to a number of situations. For example, consider the claims of Logical Positivism, a philosophical movement that achieved considerable influence in the English-speaking world in the 1960s. Logical Positivism declared all metaphysical statements—including statements about God—to be meaningless. The ground for doing so was a “verification principle” that restricted meaningful statements to propositions that were either true in themselves (such as “all bachelors are unmarried”) or confirmed by experience (such as “there were six geese on the front lawn of Buckingham Palace at 5:23 a.m. on December 1, 1968”). Yet the application of Schaeffer’s approach allows us to declare that the “verification principle” itself is meaningless, as it fails to correspond to Logical Positivism’s own criterion of meaning.
Or, more simply, consider the sound bite that is often encountered on North American university campuses: “You can’t be sure about anything.” This is intended to subvert “big picture” views of reality, such as that of the Christian faith, by implying we ought to be skeptical about those who make confident statements about life. But it is obviously a self-referential statement, which can be undermined and subverted by simply posing a question in response: “Are you sure about that?” The assertion is defeated by its own inner logic.
We must, however, avoid thinking that our task is simply to win arguments or to set out the rational credentials of faith. The Enlightenment has had an enduring impact on western culture, especially in generating demands for proofs for beliefs. As a result, Christian apologetics has often been presented simply in terms of developing effective arguments designed to persuade people that the Christian faith is true. Yet this can all too easily end up making Christianity seem like a list of dull facts and abstract ideas. There are three difficulties with this approach.
First, this approach is not well-grounded in the Bible. Truth, especially for the Old Testament, primarily designates reliability and trustworthiness. The apologetic issue is that God is a secure base, a place of safety on which to build the life of faith. The “true God” is not merely a God who exists, but a God who may be relied upon. A rationalist notion of truth as propositional correctness can too easily displace the biblical idea of truth as a relational concept.
Second, the appeal of the Christian faith cannot be limited to the rationality of its beliefs. As the writings of C. S. Lewis indicate, Christianity also makes a powerful appeal to the imagination. As a young man, Lewis found himself yearning for a world of passion, beauty, and meaning he had come to believe did not and could not exist: “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” His imagination told him there was a better world; his reason told him that this was nonsense. He therefore believed he had no option other than to confront the bleakness of a senseless world and his pointless existence.
In the end, Lewis discovered the rational force of the Christian faith. Yet his attraction to the gospel was based on his perception that it offered meaning, rather than propositional correctness. As Lewis later commented, “Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” Others locate the appeal of the Christian faith in the beauty of its worship, its capacity to engage the human emotions, or its ethical outcomes.
Third, this rationalist approach is deeply embedded in a modernist worldview. Yet throughout most of western culture today, modernity has been displaced by postmodernity, which inverts many of its core beliefs. An appeal to the intrinsic rationality of faith works well in a modern context, but in other contexts an apologetic approach based on argument and reasoning may well fail to relate with cultural aspirations and prejudices. As we shall see later in this chapter, postmodernity’s interest in narrative, rather than argument, offers important possibilities for biblically based apologetics, given the predominance of narrative forms within Scripture.
It remains of vital importance to assert and affirm the reasonableness of faith—without limiting faith to what reason can prove with certainty. The really big questions of life go far beyond what human reason is able to demonstrate. These are questions such as: Who am I? Do I really matter? Why am I here? Can I make a difference? Neither science nor human reason can answer these questions. Yet unless they are answered, life is potentially meaningless. As apologists, we need to show that the Christian faith offers answers to life’s big questions, answers that are reasonable on the one hand, and work in practice on the other. There are times when it is just as important to show Christianity is real as it is to show it is true.
Gateway 3: Stories
A feature of postmodernity that is of particular importance to apologetics is its emphasis on the importance of stories. Modernity was suspicious of the narrative as a means of encountering reality, and sought to repress or displace it through an appeal to rational argument or analysis, shorn of any links with the irritating inconveniences of historical contingency. We can see this with particular clarity in the field of biblical interpretation. As Yale theologian Hans Frei (1922–88) pointed out, the Enlightenment tried to bypass or marginalize the narrative character of Scripture, reducing its historical accounts and narrative forms (such as parables) to essentially timeless ideas. The narrative was seen simply as an irritating and inconvenient shell, obscuring the intellectual and moral kernel of Scripture.
Postmodernity has witnessed a reclamation of interest in the biblical story, including specific narrative forms such as the parables told by Jesus of Nazareth to teach about the kingdom of God. No longer is truth determined by argument; instead, stories are seen as having the capacity to establish a distinctive moral and conceptual identity. Christianity proclaims and inhabits a story-shaped world, with ideas and values grounded in and shaped by the narrative of God’s dealings with his people—supremely the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is thus neither simply nor fundamentally a set of ideas.
Since about 1970, there has been increasing interest in exploring the role of narrative in both theology and philosophy. In Anglo-American philosophy, leading writers such as Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor have taken up the basic themes of narrative with rigor and enthusiasm. Ricoeur has explored the way in which narrative is foundational to any understanding of the world and how humans live in it. MacIntyre argues that our life decisions are shaped and ordered by our sense of how they fit within a larger “story” (or tradition). He famously asserts that “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’ ” As we shall see, these approaches can be of enormous value to Christian apologetics.
There is now widespread support for the view that stories are the basic medium through which human beings view reality. Our way of seeing the world is a story that answers fundamental questions of existence, identity, and the future. These stories can give answers to what philosopher Karl Popper calls “ultimate questions.” By this, Popper intended us to understand the big “meaning of life” questions, such as those set out by Roy Baumeister. These concern identity, purpose, agency, and value, taking the form of questions such as: “Who am I?” “What is the point of life?” “What can I do to make a difference?”
The cultural and intellectual importance of this idea of a controlling and illuminating narrative has long been recognized. The technical term “myth” is often used in scholarship to refer to such controlling narratives, which offer explanations of reality and conferrals of personal and social identity. (The term “myth” is often misunderstood to mean “an untrue story,” which is not what is intended here.) As Lewis and others have pointed out, the word “myth” fundamentally designates a story told about the world that enables individuals to understand and act within that world. These “myths” are the lenses through which a given society looks at the world; they offer a framework upon which the multiple and often contradictory experiences of life may be resolved and correlated.
For Lewis himself, the Christian narrative—which he regarded as the God-given culmination and fulfillment of other human attempts at myth-making—offers the supreme vantage point from which to understand reality. The Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation makes sense of all other stories we tell about our identity and true goals. It is the master narrative, the supreme story, which positions all other narratives of human origins and destiny.
This point is emphasized by British New Testament scholar and apologist N. T. Wright, who points out that when we tell the whole story of the Bible we are both proclaiming the Christian view of reality and challenging its secular alternatives. By telling the story of the Bible
we are inevitably challenging more than just one aspect of the world’s way of looking at things (i.e., its view of authority and power). We are undermining its entire view of what the world is, and is for, and are offering, in the best way possible, a new world-view.
For Wright, the Bible challenges alternative ways of thinking and commends and embodies its own. It tells a story that answers four fundamental questions:
A similar view is encountered in the works of novelist J. R. R. Tolkien, noted both for his energetic defense of the necessary role of myth in making sense of reality and his own attempt to apply such thinking in his epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings. In this approach, the explanatory power of the Christian metanarrative is indicated by its ability to position, interpret, and account for other metanarratives. Like all narratives, the Christian story cannot be “proved” by objective rational or scientific means. It has to be judged by its ability to make more sense of things than its present or potential rivals; by its simplicity, elegance, and comprehensiveness; and by its capacity to make sense beyond its own intended focus.
So how does this new interest in narrative help us, as we seek to understand how to express the Christian faith to our culture? Let me offer some personal reflections. When I was younger, I used to believe that the best way to help other people discover the truth and excitement of Christianity was to argue with them—in other words, to persuade them Christianity was right and true. In short, I adopted what many would now call a “modern” approach. But today I would communicate the truth of the gospel in another way. I would tell the story of how I came to faith. Why? Partly because a story is much more interesting than any argument, but more significantly, my story shows that Christianity is real—in other words, that it has the capacity to change people’s lives, to give them new reasons for living and a firm hope for the future. A story is about a worldview that has been appropriated and that has the power to renew, transform, and excite. By telling my story, I am confirming the gospel is real in my life.
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We live in a world that is shaped by stories. “Grand stories” have the ability to make sense of the world and to position observers and events in a helpful relationship to each other. These stories are nets of meaning we spin, partly to capture and preserve our own experiences, and partly to capture the meaning we believe they convey or signify. Christianity tells one such story and New Atheism tells another; countless other stories are told by those with agendas to pursue, visions to share, or axes to grind. Narratives position realities by locating them within the framework of a story.
Having laid a theoretical foundation for emphasizing the importance of stories to apologetics, we now need to consider how to use them. We will begin shortly by looking at two stories told to bolster the authors’ cases against Christianity, and considering how they may be criticized.
Christian apologetics needs to critique other grand stories—such as secular metanarratives that subvert or marginalize Christianity. But it also needs to appreciate how it has stories of its own to tell. The Christian metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation helps us make sense of the world—as Lewis and others have demonstrated. But these are “grand narratives.” What of ordinary stories? How can these sorts of narratives be used in Christian apologetics?
The most obvious place to start is the parables. It is no accident that Jesus of Nazareth used stories to engage with his audiences. These stories were often grounded in the everyday life of the rural farming communities of first-century Palestine. They were immensely accessible stories that engaged the attention and imagination of their audiences. Each of these parables has considerable apologetic potential, which needs to be identified, appreciated, and above all used. The parables have the potential to be as powerful today as the day they were first told—if they are used judiciously.
The wise apologist will work through the main parables, asking these critically important questions: How might this story help me communicate the gospel? How might it help me connect with this audience? The issue here is not to clarify the parable’s imagery and vocabulary in the light of first-century Judaism, but to ask how it can be used apologetically right now.
An example will help to make this point clearer. Let’s consider the familiar gospel story usually referred to as the “parable of the pearl of great price.”
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:45–46)
Though sketched with the utmost verbal economy—a mere twenty-five words in the original Greek—the human imagination can easily work on this and appreciate its power. The story rings true to experience and proves easy to develop and apply. So how might we use it apologetically? Let me show you how I would use it, and leave you to work out how you could improve on this:
We’re all looking for something that is really worthwhile in life. Yet often we find that the things we expected to make us happy and bring us joy do nothing of the sort. So we find ourselves wondering if anything will ever bring us joy and peace. Jesus once told a story about this. A merchant finds a priceless pearl for sale, and decides that he will sell everything in order to possess it. Why? When the merchant saw that special pearl, he knew that everything already in his possession seemed dull and lackluster in comparison. Just as the brilliance of the sun drowns that of the stars, so that they can only be seen at night, so this great pearl allowed the merchant to see what he already owned in a different perspective. What he had thought would satisfy him proved only to disclose his dissatisfaction, and make him long for something that was, for the moment, beyond his grasp. And then he saw that special pearl. He knew he had to have it. He had discovered something of supreme value. Here is finally something worth possessing. Everything else he possesses seems of little value in comparison. Well, that’s what the Christian gospel turns out to be like, once you start to explore it. It’s something that is so wonderful that it trumps everything else.
Here, a biblical story is used to make an important apologetic point. However, biblical stories can also be used to generate frameworks of meaning or interpretation that can be used to make sense of life. The audience is invited to step inside the story and ask whether it seems to help make sense of their experiences and observations.
But not all biblical stories illuminate single points in this way. Others allow us to see our experience and observations of life in a new way. To illustrate this, let’s consider one of the great narratives of the Old Testament: the exile of Jerusalem to Babylon and the final restoration of her people to their homeland after the fall of the Babylonian empire.
One of the most important narratives of the Old Testament concerns the exile of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC. In 605 BC, the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar defeated the massed Egyptian armies at Carchemish, establishing Babylon as the leading military and political power in the region. Jehoiakim, king of Judah, rebelled against Babylonian rule. Judah was invaded by Babylonian forces, which was clearly interpreted by writers of the time as the execution of the promised judgment of the Lord against his faithless people and king. In early 597 BC, the king, the royal family, and the circle of royal advisors gave themselves up to the besieging forces. They were deported to Babylon along with several thousand other captives. A further wave of deportations took place in 586 BC. Only when Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BC would the people of Jerusalem be free to return to their homeland.
This powerful historical narrative is often used to make sense of the human situation. From a Christian perspective, the situation of Jerusalem in exile in Babylon is a symbol of the human situation. The people of Jerusalem did not belong in Babylon. They were in exile, longing to return to their homeland. Psalm 137 speaks powerfully of their longing to return and their memories of their native land: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (v. 1).
This framework makes sense of human life. We are not meant to be here. This is not our homeland. We really belong somewhere else. Deep within us, a memory of our homeland persists that nothing is able to eradicate. We have a longing to return to our homeland, and live in the hope that we shall one day be where we really belong. This framework speaks of our true origin and destiny, and makes sense of the deep yearning and longing captured by the “argument from desire.”
But what of stories told to challenge Christianity? Let’s look at two such stories that have tried to undermine the historical credibility of the traditional Christian account of the significance of Jesus of Nazareth: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). What are their approaches? And what responses may be offered?
Narratives invite us to imagine alternative worlds and compare them with our own: Which is the more plausible? The more attractive? Such rereadings of history often have polemic or moral motivations, such as a concern to portray a maligned historical figure in a better light, or a beloved figure in a worse one. Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius (1934), for example, provided a positive and sympathetic account of the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC–AD 54), traditionally regarded as a harmless idiot. Graves depicts Claudius as deliberately cultivating this appearance to fool others, thus ensuring his survival and ultimate triumph in a politically dangerous age.
Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster grabs and holds its readers’ attention through a deftly narrated plot, which retells early Christian history with such plausibility that readers are generally unaware of the radical revisions so subtly asserted. (Early printings of the work included the important subtitle A Novel. This was later dropped.) Brown’s controlling narrative is that of the church inventing and imposing its own view of Jesus as God through political machinations and the threat of violence. The emperor Constantine is portrayed as a Machiavelli, changing the nature of Christianity to meet his own political needs.
Brown spins a story of deceit and suppression, culminating in a denouement that exposes the “truth” and liberates people. Much of the story focuses on the history of early Christianity. According to Brown, the emperor Constantine wanted Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire and realized it needed to be reworked for the purpose. Jesus of Nazareth had to be elevated above the status of a rural peasant teacher. So Constantine declared Jesus was really God. This required fixing votes and fiddling with texts. Readers are introduced to these secrets by Sir Leigh Teabing, who is privy to their history. Nobody ever thought Jesus was divine, Teabing declares, until the Council of Nicaea in 325, when the matter was put to the vote. It only just scraped through. Cryptologist Sophie Neveu is shocked by these words, and says as much: “I don’t follow. His divinity?”
“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet . . . A great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
“Not the Son of God?” [said Sophie].
“Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
“Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”
“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.
Teabing explains how Constantine suppressed gospels that spoke of Jesus in purely human terms. Only those that pointed to his divinity were tolerated.
The novel’s readers are given access to what they are confidently and confidentially told are suppressed and dangerous facts about the history of the Christian church, focusing on the mysterious Priory of Sion, the guardian of a dark secret. Brown tells his readers it is factually correct that this Priory is a secret society founded in 1099 and still in existence to this day. Wrong on all counts. This organization was invented in 1956 by Pierre Plantard (1920–2000), a fantasist who spun increasingly elaborate stories about his invented community, linking it to earlier events in the Middle Ages and Holy Land. There’s nothing factual about it.
I am unaware of any serious historical defense of any of the leading ideas of The Da Vinci Code, all of which can be refuted with trivial ease. But that’s not the point. Brown tells a story that many would like to be true and invites them to believe it is so. Brown’s narrative subverts the traditional Christian account of things at a popular level, portraying it as resulting from the improper exercise of power and a desire to suppress the feminine elements of faith. The real truth about Jesus, we “learn,” is that he married Mary Magdalene and their daughter produced a royal bloodline in France. In responding to the many criticisms of rank historical inaccuracy made against the novel, Brown argued that he merely put words into the mouths of his characters and left readers to work out what to make of them.
The appeal of Brown’s approach derives mainly from its subversive significance. The Da Vinci Code is written in a somewhat clunky style, which most readers seem prepared to tolerate, given the fast-moving plot. The contrast with Philip Pullman’s 2010 work The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is marked. Pullman’s style, modeled partly on that of the King James Bible, possesses an eloquence that is strikingly absent from Brown’s clunky, leaden prose.
Pullman’s book offers an imaginative retelling of the gospel story, retaining the style of the original Gospels while radically altering their content. This reworking of the gospel narrative involves the introduction of a core hypothesis around which Pullman’s thesis is developed. Mary is represented as a simpleton, a girl with learning difficulties tricked into sleeping with a man who assures her he is an angel. She gave birth to twin boys—Jesus and Christ—whose relationship rapidly goes wrong.
Jesus went on to become a saintly man, an itinerant preacher who preached the coming of the kingdom of God and demanded moral transformation from his followers. Like a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant preacher, Pullman tells us that Jesus didn’t really perform miracles. He just made things happen naturally. The feeding of the five thousand? They just shared their sandwiches.
Jesus turns out to be a good, otherworldly figure who seems to have little traction on the realities of political power. Christ, however, is different. He encounters a mysterious character—The Stranger—who plants in his mind the idea of rewriting accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings to make them more appealing and enduring. The result is a mythical gospel, authored for fundamentally venial reasons by Jesus’s imagined twin brother. Pullman’s implicit suggestion is that Christ’s “improved” and doctored gospel underlies the Pauline literature of the New Testament.
The church is thus founded on the imagined gospel of Christ, not the lost historical realities of Jesus. Christ shrewdly appreciates the need for a metanarrative, a compelling worldview, to sustain the church over the vast timelines of history. Jesus having failed to provide one, Christ supplements this deficiency himself, contriving a story that will securely ground and reinforce an institution. Institutional invulnerability depends upon a divine mandate, ruthlessly enforced and ideologically secured. Pullman’s target, as in the His Dark Materials trilogy, is clearly the institutional church.
“The Stranger” eventually prompts Christ to betray his brother to death (and yes, Christ eventually turns out to be Judas Iscariot). The resurrection becomes a piece of theater in which the living Christ tries to pass himself off as the dead Jesus. The resurrection, needless to say, is invented by Christ to compensate for the depressingly ordinary death of Jesus. It’s a theme familiar to the readers of rationalist rewritings of the life of Jesus in the eighteenth century, given a new and historically improbable twist by Pullman.
And that’s the problem. Pullman’s polemical fable is so implausible that it fails even the most trivial criteria of historical authenticity. Pullman’s story is so convoluted it cannot be taken seriously as history. When constructing his own narratives, Pullman is a master storyteller. When reworking someone else’s story—especially one as familiar as that of Jesus of Nazareth—he struggles. The reconstructed plot is so contrived that even Pullman’s considerable stylistic gifts cannot carry off the complex storyline required to sustain his anti-orthodox agenda.
Pullman has clearly inserted himself in the biblical narrative, and he cannot be said to play a passive or silent role. This is perhaps most obvious and intrusive in the reworked prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, in which Jesus concludes—what a surprise!—that there is no God. Even Pullman’s voice becomes tedious and dreary at points such as this, particularly when he preaches vicariously to his readers, using a rather shrill, hectoring tone. It’s just not in the same league as His Dark Materials, and seems awfully preachy and predictable at points.
The far-fetched narrative of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is clearly intended to be subversive of institutional religious authority. Pullman’s intention is best seen in a question he posed in an interview shortly after the publication of his book: “If you could go back in time and save that man from crucifixion, knowing that that would mean that there would be no church, would you or not?” The argument here rests upon the presumption that the reader shares Pullman’s intense dislike for the institutional church, so evident in his earlier publications. But are things really that straightforward? And is historical truth really about what we would like to be true? And is the gospel really about an institutional church?
It is widely known that Pullman wants to undermine the basis of Christian belief. But how does this book advance his argument? The decidedly lukewarm response to this work on atheist websites indicates the ambiguous significance of this work. “But what’s the point of it?” one of my atheist academic colleagues asked me recently. “Who’s going to take this nonsense seriously?” These are good and obvious questions that frequently flitted through my mind as I enjoyed Pullman’s prose while struggling to suspend my disbelief in his cumbersome plotline. I have to confess I have yet to find a persuasive answer.
Gateway 4: Images
For postmodern writers, pictures, rather than words, are the supreme form of communication. Advertising corporations spend fortunes determining the best image for a company. They develop television commercials presenting images that make us want to buy certain products and not others. Many Christians—such as myself—prefer to use words (in my own case, especially the written word) to communicate and commend our faith. Yet we need to be aware that, in our postmodern context, images are seen as having special authority and power, transcending the limitations placed on words.
The human mind works by generating images—images that help us “picture” and make sense of the world around us. Images can be likened to mental maps, helping us to chart the territory of reality and identify our own place on the terrain around us. These images are enormously helpful to the apologist. Intellectual visions of the Christian worldview can often be expressed using images, which have the power to captivate the imagination. We learn to inhabit an image, working its angles and finding out how well it fits the realities of our world.
In this section, we shall explore several such images and examine how they can be used to commend and communicate the gospel. Some are drawn from Scripture, some from secular culture. The first such image is taken from a work of classical Greek philosophy—Plato’s Republic. (If you have read Lewis’s Narnia novel The Silver Chair, you will already be very familiar with this image, although you may not have realized its historical origins.)
Plato asks us to imagine a dark cave, in which a group of people have lived since their birth. They have been trapped there all their lives and know no other world. At one end of the cave, a fire burns brightly, providing them with both warmth and light. As the flames rise, they cast shadows on the walls of the cave. The people watch these shadows projected on the wall in front of them, wondering what they represent. For those living in the cave, this world of flickering shadows is all they know. Their grasp of reality is limited to what they see and experience in this dark prison. If there is a world beyond the cave, it is something they do not know and cannot imagine. Their horizons are limited and determined by the shadows and half-light. Yet they do not know that the cave is a prison, or that they are trapped. Only if they knew of another world could they make such a judgment.
Plato elaborates on this image in a number of ways. The people are chained and restrained so that they cannot move around the cave. They can only see the wall directly ahead of them. Behind them is a walkway, across which people walk, carrying various objects on their heads. The fire casts these moving shadows on the cave walls. The people on the walkway are talking to each other, and the echoes of their voices reverberate around the cave, distorted by its walls. The prisoners thus see moving shadows and hear echoes. They do not see or hear anything directly; everything is experienced indirectly and indistinctly.
Yet our interest here is not so much with Plato’s philosophical development of this analogy, but with its apologetic potential. How can it be used to commend and communicate the gospel in today’s world? Spend a few moments trying to inhabit this image. Remember, you must forget completely about the world we all know—the world of bright sunlight, fresh air, flowers, lakes, and trees. The only world you know is a dark cave. This is what defines reality for you. You see shadows and hear echoes. There is nothing else to see and nothing else to hear. The appearances become the reality.
Make sure you have understood that you do not compare the world of the cave with any other reality—the whole point of the analogy is that you have no knowledge of anything other than the cave. It defines reality for you. When you feel you have gotten used to the image, let’s see how it can be explored and applied apologetically.
Ask yourself this question: How could the people in the cave realize that there is another, better world beyond its dark, smoky walls? Think about this for a while, then continue reading when you’ve worked out some answers.
There are three obvious ways in which the people inside the cave might discover their true situation:
In what follows, we shall explore the apologetic potential of each of these, continuing to use the image of the cave as we do so.
First, someone might break into the cave from another world. They would tell us about what that other world is like, using analogies based on the cave. Even better, they might also offer to show us the way out. Or better still, offer to take us out. This approach is characteristic of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, which understands Jesus Christ as the one who enters into the world of human experience and history, both to show us how things really are and to enable us to break free from the world’s bonds and limitations. Although this theme is found throughout the New Testament, it is especially significant in John’s Gospel, as the following verses indicate:
The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory. (John 1:14)
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. (John 6:51)
The second approach holds that the world of the cave itself is studded with clues and indications that it is not the only world. Like the markings observed by Aristippus on the Rhodian shoreline (p. 122), the walls of the cave might be marked with signs pointing to its origins or true destiny. The cave might show evidence of design or of a complexity that raises fundamental questions about how it came to be there. Its walls might be decorated with designs or other clues to its origins and history.
Third, the observers of the cave themselves may already possess a deeply embedded instinct that there is another world. This might take the form of a deep conviction that there is more to life than the darkness of a smoky cave—or a strong intuition that they were destined for another place. Our desire for something that seems never to be satisfied is one of these hints—a hint that ours is not the only world, and that true fulfillment is not to be found within it. Our deep sense of a longing that is unquenched by our experiences in this world is a vital clue to our true situation and an invitation to discover the greater reality to which it points.
All three approaches are easily explored and explained using the controlling image of Plato’s cave. Each allows the apologist to explore an aspect of the Christian faith and discover how it connects with and makes sense of our experiences of the world, and of our own deepest yearnings and intuitions. This powerful image is easily incorporated into talks, sermons, or lectures, and can be developed in a number of highly creative directions. Other ways of exploring the image can easily be added to the three noted above.
So what other images might be used apologetically? Paul uses a series of powerful images in his letters to help us understand what Christ has done for us through his cross and resurrection. One of these images is that of adoption. Paul assures us that, through Christ, we have been adopted as the children of God (Rom. 8:23; Gal. 4:5). This image, drawn from Roman family law, is seen by Paul as casting light on the privileges and place of Christians in their relationship with God. It is an image that demands to be understood in our minds and appreciated in our hearts.
The image of adoption is relatively easy to understand. A family decides to grant a child not born within its bounds the same legal privileges as those children born within its bounds. The adopted children will thus have the same inheritance rights as the natural children. Christians may therefore think of themselves as having been brought within the family of God and granted the same legal privileges as any natural children. And who is the natural child of God? None other than Christ himself. Paul thus makes the powerful point that all God bestowed upon Christ as his Son will eventually be granted to us as children of God:
We are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8:16–17)
Therefore, the family marks of God’s children are suffering in this life and the promise of glory in the life to come. Glory lies beyond suffering, and we must learn to see suffering as a privilege to be borne gladly as a consequence of our new status as God’s heirs.
Yet the image of adoption also appeals to our imaginations and hearts, not just to our minds. It cries out to be imaginatively rendered, not just understood. Adoption is about being wanted. It is about belonging. These are deeply emotive themes, which resonate with the cares and concerns of many in our increasingly fractured society. To be adopted is to be invited into a loving and caring environment. It is to be welcomed, wanted, and valued. Adoption celebrates the privilege of invitation, in which the outsider is welcomed into the fold of faith and love.
The Pauline image of adoption resonates strongly with the deep human yearning to belong somewhere. We need to feel we are accepted and wanted. The importance of this point is frequently emphasized in the writings of Simone Weil. In her work The Need for Roots, Weil points to the importance of communities in anchoring personal identity: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Noted Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann takes this thought further when he points out that
the sense of being lost, displaced and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture. The yearning to belong somewhere, to have a home, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit.
The success of the American television series Cheers illustrates this point perfectly. The series, which was based on a bar in Boston, began in 1982 and ran for 271 episodes before ending in 1993. Its immense success centered on the strong sense of community it created. The bar was a place of small talk and smart talk, of refuge and welcome, in which everybody knew you. Outside the bar was a crowd of indistinct, unidentified people. But inside, you were a special person. You mattered to others. You belonged somewhere. The theme song for the series captured this perfectly: you want to be somewhere “where everybody knows your name.”
The apologist can thus work the angles of the Pauline image of adoption, pointing to its many levels of meaning. Not only does it illuminate the benefits that the death and resurrection of Christ bring to us; it engages a deep and hugely significant longing of the human heart—to belong somewhere.
Other biblical images could easily be developed apologetically—for example, God as shepherd, or Christ as the bread of life. Apologetics has a rich treasure chest on which to draw, using the imagination as a gateway to the human soul. The good apologist needs to refresh this treasure chest regularly, adding fresh stories and images.
Moving On
The four gateways discussed in this chapter are all important and highly applicable to apologetics. However, these are only illustrative, not exhaustive. Other gateways can easily be added. For example, the way in which Christians live and embody their faith can serve an important apologetic function. Many are moved to ask about faith when they realize that their friends seem to have something they do not—for example, a sense of peace or purpose, or a deep-seated compassion and love for their fellow human beings. “Where did that come from?” they ask, secretly wondering if they could possess it as well. The love of God is both embodied and proclaimed when Christians serve their neighbors or the world.
The way in which Christians approach death is an important witness to the transforming hope of the resurrection, which is of such importance to the Christian gospel. Living out the truth can be thought of as an “incarnational apologetic,” itself a powerful witness to that truth. We need more than just arguments; we need to show that the Christian faith is life-changing and life-empowering. As apologist Philip D. Kenneson wisely pointed out:
What our world is waiting for, and what the church seems reluctant to offer, is not more incessant talk about objective truth, but an embodied witness that clearly demonstrates why anyone should care about any of this in the first place.
Furthermore, Christian living is an important witness to the ability of the gospel to change lives. By being witness to our own story, we are indirectly witnessing that the gospel is real, not just something that is true.
More approaches could easily be listed. Each apologist can develop them further in the light of the issues he finds himself engaging, or cultural trends to which she feels she must respond. Some obvious examples of further genres with real apologetic potential include:
Having looked at ways in which we can commend the Christian faith and connect it to the lives of ordinary people, we must now consider how to respond to difficulties and anxieties people experience about faith. How should we respond to these?
For Further Reading
Carson, D. A. The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010.
Johnston, Robert K. Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.
Keller, Timothy J. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton, 2008.
Marsh, Clive. Theology Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Critical Christian Thinking. New York: Routledge, 2007.
McGrath, Alister E. Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011.
Nash, Ronald H. Faith and Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith. Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1988.
Peters, James R. The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal, and the Rationality of Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009.
Piper, John. Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010.
Sire, James W. Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004.
Wright, N. T. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.