5. Public Engagement: The Art of Apologetics
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Public Engagement: The Art of Apologetics
CHRISTIANITY, IN MY view, does not simply proclaim and enable personal and communal transformation; it is about the articulation of a moral, intellectual and spiritual vision with the capacity to capture the imagination and transform the mind of the wider culture. I have never seen theology as a retreat into a private realm of ideas, but rather as establishing the foundation for public engagement, allowing the relevance and vitality of faith to be explored and explained, often in critical dialogue with its cultural alternatives.
My own personal journey of faith has had a significant impact on my understanding of the purpose and place of theology. My teenage atheism arose partly because nobody helped me to see why Christianity was so interesting, or set out possible responses to the criticisms which I levelled against it. Theology, as I understand it, publicly articulates and defends an intellectually and imaginatively compelling vision of reality. In taking this position, I am firmly rejecting both the Pietist tendency to reduce Christianity to a privatized spirituality, and the Fundamentalist inclination to disengage from any serious conversation with secular culture, on account of the alleged risk of intellectual contamination.
Public theological engagement is best undertaken by individual people of faith who can speak personally on behalf of their grand vision of reality, rather than by bishops or church officials, who are inevitably seen as compromised by their institutional precommitments and the moral baggage of institutional history. This public engagement is based upon, but not limited to, three core areas of reflection.
1.Showing that Christianity is able to make sense of reality, leading into the perhaps more significant assertion that it is able to enable the transformation of personal and communal existence.
2.Engaging critical questions and concerns about faith that are seen to be significant for many in contemporary culture.
3.Offering a criticism of alternative worldviews or dominant philosophies (such as scientism), which often gain cultural ascendency through historical contingencies rather than intellectual necessity (a point stressed by Charles Taylor in his Secular Age).
All of these fall within the domain of what is traditionally known as ‘Christian Apologetics’, which has been an important area of Christian public engagement since the second century.
The rise and fall of the ‘New Atheism,’ which began in 2006 and fizzled out a decade later, demonstrated the significance of all three of these areas of discussion and debate for Christian theology. I was heavily involved in debates with leading ‘New Atheists’ in Britain and North America, alongside two other Oxford academics: John Lennox (Professor of Mathematics), and Keith Ward (a former Regius Professor of Divinity). While some theologians treat apologetics somewhat disdainfully as a deplorable recent innovation, I see it as an authentic, traditional, and appropriate enactment of theology, which ultimately rests on a deep immersion in the theological tradition on the one hand, and a familiarity with the concerns of contemporary culture on the other – especially when these are seen as hostile to faith.
In challenging the ‘New Atheism’, I focused on a number of issues that clearly needed to be engaged, both in terms of contesting the over-statements of some of its leading representatives, and offering an alternative way of seeing things. For example, both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are clearly critically dependent on the ‘warfare model’ of the relation of science and faith in framing their criticisms of the vague generality they call ‘religion’. It is easily shown that this model is a social construction of the late Enlightenment, given added cultural significance by the social circumstances of late nineteenth century England. In its place, I offered an ‘enrichment’ model, which many in those audiences found deeply attractive.
Both Dawkins and his ‘New Atheist’ colleague Sam Harris also depend excessively on a rather naive scientism in rejecting the need to take seriously moral philosophy or theology. Yet this position, which holds that the natural sciences alone are able to establish truth (pp. 63-4), is easily shown to be intellectually circular, and is ultimately a matter of personal belief rather than proven fact. Now most theologians would assent to both these criticisms. My point, however, is that these criticisms need to be made publicly, so that they can be part of a wider discussion. Non-engagement simply leads to the silencing of Christian perspectives in these wider cultural discussions, or entrusting them to amateurs.
For me, apologetics is best seen, not as a vigorous criticism of alternatives to Christian faith, but rather as a positive invitation to step inside the Christian ‘Big Picture’, and appreciate the quality of its theological rendering of reality and its capacity to make sense of things. Apologetics is an invitation to see things in a new way, which Christianity insists is both true and trustworthy.
Some apologists focus on demonstrating the truth of individual threads of this Christian tapestry of faith, offering detailed justifications of, for example, the existence of God. That is certainly useful – but like G. K. Chesterton before me, I hold that what really matters is the ‘Big Picture.’ In describing his own return to faith in 1903, Chesterton famously remarked that:
… numbers of us have returned to this belief; and that we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease. … We have returned to it because it is an intelligible picture of the world.
For Chesterton, the appeal of Christianity lies in its internal coherence and external correspondence with the experiential world of ordinary people. That, to me, is why theology is the best foundation for apologetics – and why the best apologetics is a public theology.
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G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News, ed. Julia Stapleton. 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), vol. 2, 24–6.