Appendix A: The Question Of Apologetics
Since The God Who Is There was originally published, questions have been asked about my views concerning what is often called “apologetics.” I will try to clarify this under three headings: Apologetics, Rationalism, and Evangelism and Lifestyle.
APOLOGETICS
The answer as to whether I am an apologete depends on how the concept of apologete, or apologetics, is defined.
First, I am not an apologete if that means building a safe house to live in, so that we Christians can sit inside with safety and quiescence. Christians should be out in the midst of the world as both witnesses and salt, not sitting in a fortress surrounded by a moat.
Second, I would quote what has been a part of the text of The God Who Is There on page 148 from its original edition onward:
As we turn to consider in more detail how we may speak to men of the twentieth century, we must emphasize first of all that we cannot apply mechanical rules. We, of all people, should realize this, for as Christians we believe that personality really does exist and is important. We can lay down some general principles, but there can be no automatic application. If we are truly personal, as created by God, then each individual will differ from everyone else. Therefore each man must be dealt with as an individual, not as a case or statistic or machine. If we would work with these people, we cannot mechanically apply the things of which we have been speaking in this book. We must look to the Lord in prayer, and to the work of the Holy Spirit, for effective use of these things.
In the light of this I have been mystified at times about what has been said concerning “Schaeffer’s apologetics.”
I do not believe there is any one apologetic which meets the needs of all people. And as I said in the text of The God Who Is There, I did not (and do not) mean that what I wrote in that book should ever be applied mechanically, as a set formula. There is no set formula that meets everyone’s need, and if only applied as a mechanical formula, I doubt if it really meets anyone’s need—short of an act of God’s mercy.
Human nature being what it is, I am sure some people have read The God Who Is There or have come to L’Abri and have gone away thinking that what they have learned can be applied mechanically as a formula. I, and we at L’Abri, have tried to do everything we can to dispel this. The quotation I gave from The God Who Is There above says this clearly.
When we have the opportunity to talk to the non-Christian, what (if not the formula mentality) should be the dominant consideration? I think this should be love. I think these things turn on love and compassion to people, not as objects to evangelize but as people who deserve all the love and consideration we can give them, because they are our kind and made in the image of God. They are valuable, so we should meet them in love and compassion. Thus, we meet the person where he or she is.
Consequently, if I were with Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail, and the Philippian jailer said to me, “Sir, what must I do to be saved?” for me to start talking about epistemology would be horrible. I would say what Paul said: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved,” because the jailer was, on the basis of previous knowledge and events, ready for that answer.
Now on the other hand, if we are dealing with someone who has honest problems and who really believes that truth is truth—things are true and things are false (and that previously was the generally accepted concept almost everywhere)—it would then be a different need. In that situation, if he or she had questions on the historicity of Christ’s resurrection and so on, we would deal with those questions—because he or she already accepts that truth is truth.
What I try to do in The God Who Is There is to show that when we get to those holding the concept that there is no such thing as objective (or universal) truth, we can still keep talking. We can move further back and keep talking in the way they need. I do not believe that there is any one system of apologetics that meets the need of all people, any more than I think there is any one form of evangelism that meets the need of all people. It is to be shaped on the basis of love for the person as a person.
If we are to deal with people where they are (whether they can express their position in a sophisticated way or not), we have got to have enough genuine love for them and concern, as a human being, that we would take seriously what they are preoccupied with. We tend to give a person a prepackaged answer instead of having the compassion of Christ, which is to take the person where they are and actually step into their world in order to talk in a meaningful way to them. And if that world is that of the Philippian jailer, good; if it is that of the one who believes truth is truth, good; but if it is the person who is lost in relativity, we can give them the Christian answers there as well.
If people do not have “modern” intellectual questions, there is no need of dealing with such questions; but we must acknowledge that in our generation almost everybody has them. I walked out of a restaurant one morning a few weeks ago, and there was a girl sitting with a cup of coffee reading Skinner’s book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. She represents millions. We have millions and millions facing these questions, and in fact I think today the majority of the community have such questions. And they do not have to be university graduates. I have worked with shipyard workers, mill workers, all kinds of people (as well as, when I was younger, personally working on farms, a huckster wagon, in factories, and so on), and I am convinced that these people often have the same questions as the intellectual; the only thing is that they do not articulate them, or if they do articulate them it is not in the same terminology. I know these people, and I am convinced that the things we are talking about can be talked about to almost anyone—all one has to do is to shift gears in language. Incidentally, that too is love.
The middle-class family wonders why things have changed—they realize the problem of relativism, though they perhaps would not use that term. They are brought up against the relativism when their daughter goes off to sleep with someone, and it is clear that she does not see this as either wrong nor a surprising thing to do. They also see the law changing and do not know why, but are troubled. They too are asking the same questions. They too are either below “the line of despair” or comprehending its existence in some at least vague way. Love means dealing with them at the place where they are.
For the “modern person” we can keep talking in a way which helps because in contrast to the concept that everything is relative, we know that there are good, adequate and sufficient reasons to know that the Christian answers are truth. I do not believe that there is a leap of faith needed; there are good and sufficient reasons to know why Christianity is true—and more than that, that is the Bible’s insistence. The Bible’s emphasis is that there are good and sufficient reasons to know that Christianity is true, so much so that we are disobedient and guilty if we do not believe it.
The Christian system (what is taught in the whole Bible) is a unity of thought. Christianity is not just a lot of bits and pieces—there is a beginning and an end, a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence. Some of the other systems answer some of the questions but leave others unanswered. I believe it is only Christianity that gives the answers to all the crucial questions.
What are those questions? The questions are those which are presented to us as we face the reality of existence. God shuts us up to reality. We cannot escape the reality of what is, no matter what we say we believe or think.
This reality of which I speak falls into two parts: the fact that the universe truly exists and it has a form, and then what I would call the “mannishness” of man—which is my own term for meaning that man is unique. People have certain qualities that must be explained.
God has shut up all people to these things, and I always like to go back to the statement of Jean-Paul Sartre, though he had no answer for his own statement, and that is that the basic philosophic question is that something is there. Things do exist, and this demands an explanation for their existence. I would then go beyond Sartre’s statement to one by Einstein. Einstein said that the most amazing thing about the universe is that we can know something truly about it. In other words, it has a form that is comprehensible, even though we cannot exhaust it. And then I would say beyond that—no matter what people say they are, they are what they are; that is, man is unique as made in the image of God. Any system of thought, to be taken seriously, has to at least try to explain these two great phenomena of the universe and man. In other words, we are talking about objective truth related to reality and not just something within our own heads.
Now I would like to add a corollary to this: In Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and especially the extensive notes of the fifth chapter, there is a third thing, and that is the way the Bible measures up to history. Once we say that, this is very exciting. It is very exciting because other religions are not founded in history, they are “out there” somewhere, or you can think of them as inside of your own head—whichever way you are looking at it. On the other hand, the Bible claims to be rooted in history. Whether we are considering the history of the Old Testament, whether we are considering the history of Christ, including the resurrection, or Paul’s journeys, it is insisted on as real history. So now we have three interwoven parts. Usually I have dealt with the first two because I think they are the two which touch more the twentieth-century person, but the third is also there. We have to face the reality of the universe and its having an existence and having a form. We have to face the reality in the uniqueness of man. We are able to discuss the fact that the Bible is rooted in history.
I would repeat, God shuts everyone up to the fact of reality, and everyone has to deal with the reality that is.
When we turn to the Bible, the Bible says that on the basis of God’s created world and on the basis of who we are, there are good and sufficient reasons to know the biblical answers are true. People come to the knowledge that this is adequate on different levels, depending on their intelligence, their education, their personality, the way their mind works; but at some point they come to the place where indeed they have what to them should be good and sufficient and adequate answers.
So what you have is the flow of the totality of reality—instead of being focused on religious things only, it is religious things as a part of reality. And instead of this concept being contrary to the Bible, it is the way the Bible is written. It is not “just a religious book”; the Bible is rooted in space-time history and speaks of the totality of reality.
The glory of the Bible is that it is enough for every age and it is enough for every person. When you consider the early chapters of Genesis on through Deuteronomy, given about 1500 B.C. to Moses, it gave truth to those people in that day. Now we come to our age, and we know a lot that those people did not know about the cosmos, all kinds of things, and those same chapters (and the rest of the Bible) are enough to give truth to us. If Christ does not come back for another 500 years, the people then will know more than we do now, and the Bible will give truth to them. So whether it is the individual, no matter what his level of education, sophistication, etc., or whether it is the age we live in with the knowledge we have, the Bible is enough to give the answer to the questions raised by reality.
When people refuse God’s answer, they are living against the revelation of the universe and against the revelation of themselves. They are denying the revelation of God in who they themselves are. I am not saying that non-Christians do not live in the light of real existence. I am saying that they do not have any answer for living in it. I am not saying that they do not have moral motions, but they have no basis for them. I am not saying that the person with a non-Christian system (even a radical system like Buddhism or Hinduism or the modern Western thinking of chance) does not know that the object exists—the problem is that they have no system to explain the subject-object correlation. As a matter of fact, this is their damnation, this is their tension, that they have to live in the light of their existence, the light of reality—the total reality in all these areas—and they do live there, and yet they have no sufficient explanation for any of these areas. So the wiser they are, the more honest they are, the more they feel that tension, and that is their present damnation.
There is nowhere that people can go that they can escape the things of grace that God has given them to shut them in, in the reality that exists. And if we love people enough and we have compassion enough, we can usually find ways to talk to them, no matter how deep in the well they are. That is what I am saying. It is not that we use a universal formula to reach people, either in evangelism or in apologetics.
When we say a person is lost we usually think of evangelically lost, that he or she is a sinner and needs to accept Christ as Savior. But what we must realize is that these people do not know that they are lost evangelically. How could they? They do not believe there is right and wrong, they do not believe there is a God, they do not believe there is an absolute, there is no reason for them to think of themselves as a sinner. Few believe in guilt anymore. There is only “sickness” or “guilt-feelings” or “sociological nonconformity.” There is no such thing as true guilt. How much meaning does our talking about accepting Christ as Savior have for such a person? But our whole generation has a second sense of being lost which is valid, and that is they are without meaning in the world, without purpose, without morals, without a basis for law—no final principles, no final answers for anything. They know they are lost in this way. When we turn to the Bible, the Bible makes plain that indeed they are lost in both senses—they are lost evangelically; but without God they are lost in the modern sense as well.
This lostness is answered by the existence of a Creator. So Christianity does not begin with “accept Christ as Savior.” Christianity begins with “In the beginning God created the heavens [the total of the cosmos] and the earth.” That is the answer to the twentieth century and its lostness. At this point we are then ready to explain the second lostness (the original cause of all lostness) and the answer in the death of Christ.
In summary: God in his grace has shut us up by the totality of reality to the biblical answers—i.e., there are good, adequate and sufficient reasons to know that the Christian answers are truth—so much so that if we do not bow to those answers, the Bible says we are disobedient and guilty.
Those who object to the position that there are good, adequate and sufficient reasons to know with our reason that Christianity is true are left with a probability position at some point. At some point and in some terminology they are left with a leap of faith. This does not say that they are not Christians, but it means that they are offering one more probability to twentieth-century relativistic people to whom everything is only probability. They are offering one more leap of faith without reason (or with the severe diminishing of reason) to a generation that has heard a thousand leaps of faith proposed in regard to the crucial things of human life. I would repeat that what is left is that Christianity is a probability.
Of course, faith is needed to become a Christian, but there are two concepts concerning faith. The two ideas of faith run like this: One idea of faith would be a blind leap in the dark. A blind leap in which you believe something with no reason (or no adequate reason), you just believe it. This is what I mean by a blind leap of faith. The other idea of faith, which has no relationship with this, none whatsoever, is that you are asked to believe something and bow before that something on the basis of good and adequate reasons. There is no relationship between those two concepts of faith.
The biblical concept of faith is very much the second and not the first. You are not asked to believe in a blind leap of faith. The Bible teaches that there are good and sufficient reasons to know that these things are true. If you examine the ministry of Paul and also of Christ, you find they endlessly answered questions. There was no concept here of “Keep quiet, just believe”; it just does not exist. Paul answered the questions of the Jews, he answered the questions of the non-Jews, he was always answering questions; and the book of Romans certainly answered the questions of those without the Bible as well as of those with it.
There are good and sufficient reasons to know that these things are true. We have already dealt with the fact of reality and everybody having to deal with reality: (1) the existence of the universe and its form; (2) the distinctiveness of man; and (3) you can relate these to a third thing, and that is the examination of the historicity of Scripture.
But now we can ask another question. If it is so that there are good and sufficient reasons to know that Christianity is true, why doesn’t everybody accept the sufficient answers?
We must realize that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything. God is the Creator; we have nothing to do with our existence or the existence of other things. We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence. We do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything. In every other religion we have to do something—everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate—the whole spectrum. But with Christianity we do not do anything; God has done it all. He has created us and he has sent his Son; his Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore he bears our total guilt. We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.
But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing—it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness—not humanness as they were created to be human but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow.
People are living against the revelation of themselves. They are denying the revelation of God that they themselves and all reality are. They are denying it, and yet they have to live with it. When the person comes to see that there are good and sufficient reasons, then he or she is faced with a problem; either they bow before those good and sufficient reasons, and bow to the Person behind the reasons, or they refuse to bow.
It is not that the answers are not good, adequate and sufficient. Unless one gives up one’s autonomy, one cannot accept the answers.
RATIONALISM
At times some have said my way of discussing “apologetics” is a form of rationalism.
First, a definition of words is helpful: A rationalist is someone who thinks man can begin with himself and his reason plus what he observes, without information from any other source, and come to final answers in regard to truth, ethics and reality. In contrast to the words rationalist and rationalism, rationality concerns the validity of thought, or the possibility to reason.
Some who have said I am a rationalist also speak of my being Aristotelian—that is, that my thinking has been influenced by Aristotle. Those who do this usually (if not always) would hold the position that thought in terms of antithesis was originated by Aristotle. Thought in terms of antithesis means the concept that if a certain thing is true, the opposite is not true; or if a certain thing is right, the opposite is wrong. It would be well here for you to rethink all I have said about antithesis in The God Who Is There and also in Escape from Reason. In The God Who Is There, my note 5 on section 3, chapter 3, in regard to Heidegger, is important concerning this discussion.
Heidegger and others who hold the view that rational thought in terms of antithesis began with Aristotle have no historic basis for this. Rational thought as antithesis is not rooted in Aristotle, it is rooted in reality: first, the reality of the objective existence of God in antithesis to his now existing; second, the reality that God is a personal-infinite God to whom not all things are the same, in antithesis to an impersonal or limited God, or one who does not differentiate in the areas of truth or morals; third, the reality of the objective existence of that which God created in contrast to what he did not create; fourth, that which people do or make or paint or think, etc., in contrast to what does not exist. In morals, antithesis rests upon what conforms to God’s character, in contrast to what opposes it.
Further, our minds are so created by God that we think in antithesis, so much so that the only way a person can deny antithesis is on the basis of antithesis. It is not surprising that God made our minds to think in the category of antithesis, for this fits the reality of his existence and the reality of his creation.
When certain people speak of those who hold to rationality (in regard to the Christian answers being adequate and sufficient) as being Aristotelian or rationalistic, they themselves should go back and think through as to whether they are not trapped in irrationality, not only in this discussion but in other areas as well.
As I said above, a rationalist is a person who thinks man and his reason can come to final answers without information from any other source. No one stresses more than I that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals or epistemology without God’s revelation in the Bible. This is true in philosophy, science and theology. Rationalism can take a secular or theological form. In both, the rationalist thinks that on the basis of man’s reason, plus what he can see about him, final answers are possible. My books stress that man cannot generate final answers from himself. First, even without the Fall, man was finite and needed the knowledge God gave him (revelation). Second, on this side of the Fall this is even more necessary.
At this point I would suggest you reread my illustration of the torn book in The God Who Is There. As Christians, we do have the answers to the questions posed by reality. But we have not thought up these answers, we did not generate the answers, we are not the origin of the answers—we know them from God’s revelation. This is the very opposite of rationalism.
On the other hand, the Bible does not say man is a zero. This view would be that since the Fall man cannot do anything, he just sits there and suddenly there is a strike of lightning out of the sky and he is a Christian. But the Bible does not say that. As I have said, the Bible stresses that the individual is guilty before God if he does not bow in the light of the adequacy of the biblical answers to the questions posed by reality. The individual has the responsibility of bowing before the answers which reason indicates to be sufficient and necessary.
The work of the Holy Spirit and the responsibility I have as made in the image of God cannot be put into a Cartesian, mathematical formula. But that is different from saying, on one hand, that man can find the final answers by his finite (and fallen) reason alone, or on the other hand, that man as he now is, is a zero. The Bible rejects both of these positions.
And as we speak of the balance of the work of the Holy Spirit and the person’s responsibility to be humble enough to give up his or her autonomy to bow to the adequate answers, so also as we give the adequate and sufficient answers (which we did not generate, but which we have from the Bible), we must consciously pray for the Lord’s work as these adequate answers are given. Giving the answers does not stand in a dichotomy with our being careful not to minimize the work of the Holy Spirit. When I am talking to an individual or sitting on a platform talking to 5,000 people and answering questions, very often, more often than most people know, I am praying for them. There is no contradiction between such prayer with expectancy that the Lord will answer that prayer, and showing that the Bible gives such good, adequate, sufficient and necessary answers to the questions raised by reality that the hearers are truly disobedient and guilty if they do not bow.
EVANGELISM AND LIFESTYLE
People often say, “What are you?” and I at times have said, “Well, basically I am an evangelist.” But sometimes I do not think people have understood that does not mean that I think of an evangelist in contrast to dealing with philosophic, intellectual or cultural questions with care.
I am not a professional, academic philosopher—that is not my calling, and I am glad I have the calling I have, and I am equally glad some other people have the other calling. But when I say I am an evangelist, it is not that I am thinking that my philosophy, etc. is not valid—I think it is. For example, the answer I give in He Is There and He Is Not Silent, I think, is the real answer in regard to epistemology. That is not to say that all my answers are correct. Nor is it to say that the more academically oriented philosopher cannot deal with more of the necessary details. But what I am saying is that all the cultural, intellectual or philosophic material is not to be separated from leading people to Christ. I think my talking about metaphysics, morals and epistemology to certain individuals is a part of my evangelism just as much as when I get to the moment to show them that they are morally guilty and tell them that Christ died for them on the cross. I do not see or feel a dichotomy: this is my philosophy and that is my evangelism. The whole thing is evangelism to the people who are caught in the second lostness we spoke of—the second lostness being that they do not have any answers to the questions of meaning, purpose and so on.
We always should realize, and I cannot say it often enough, that Christianity is a creation-centered teaching. It is not that suddenly for some strange reason out of nowhere if you accept Christ as Savior you are in. That is a part of a total structure. Christianity is a system, and I would say that I have no apology for using the word system, though it must not be allowed to be a mere academic system or theoretical or dead intellectualism. In the proper sense of the word, God is systematic in His creation and revelation.
It has got to be the whole man coming to know this is truth, acting upon it, living it out in his life and worshiping God. But it is a system, it begins with the fact that there is a Creator, there is the God, the triune God who has existed forever. He has created all things, so there is nothing autonomous from him.
Thus apologetics, as I see it, should not be separated in any way from evangelism. In fact, I wonder if “apologetics” which does not lead people to Christ as Savior, and then on to their living under the lordship of Christ in the whole of life, really is Christian apologetics. There certainly is a place for an academic study of a subject called “apologetics,” as the defense and the credibility of Christianity, but if it does not lead the students to use that material in the way I have spoken about in the previous sentence, one can ask its value.
There certainly is a place for a study of philosophy as a scholarly discipline in great detail. That too can be a Christian’s calling. But if the total course does not give answers so that the students are left with more than probability in regard to Christianity, it is much less than a course in philosophy can and should be.
To me there is a unity of all reality, and we can either say that every field of study is a part of evangelism (especially useful to certain people in the world); or we can say that there is no true evangelism that does not touch all of reality and all of life.
There are those who would approve (and praise) the “lifestyle,” the emphasis on community, at L’Abri, but who would strenuously differ with what is taught here. Their disapproval usually falls somewhere under what I have dealt with above under the headings of Apologetics, Rationalism and Evangelism and Lifestyle.
Certainly there is no perfection of community at L’Abri, but we are thankful for what there has been (and is) in it of reality and beauty.
To us what there has been of the reality of community is living truthfully upon what the truth is. Without the certainty of that truth, and the content of that truth, the call for community would float in midair and be one more utopia. What there has been of the reality of community rests upon what is taught here.
Our calling is not primarily to an alternate lifestyle. Considering what the Bible teaches, what is crucial is not the word community, nor the form the practice of community takes.
Our primary calling is to truth as it is rooted in God, his acts and revelation; and if it is indeed truth, it touches all of reality and all of life, including an adequate basis for, and some practice of, the reality of community.
1981