Scot McKnight writes about Dallas Willard’s new collection of apologetic essays, A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Questions. Scot and many others like this kind of book. For me, it provokes more of a frustrated shrug.
First — looking at the Table of Contents of this book, it’s an odd collection of folks who don’t agree with each other on many important things. Francis Collins and Hugh Ross speaking of faith and science in the same book? Really a radically different apologetic between those two, even though they both agree on the age of the earth (Ross thinks the Bible is a scientifically precise document and its supposed scientific precision is what led him to faith).
This strikes me as problematic, not just fot the coherency of the book, but for the presumption about apologetics and truth that underlie the book. It still is in this rationalistic vein of evangelical apologetics, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for such arguments — as where McGrath pokes holes in the “meme” idea, for example. But if the Big Idea underlying the book is that Truth is One and Truth is Rational and The One Rational Truth is Accessible to All Through Reason — then it’s a huge problem to feature radically contrasting perspectives on what the truth is about something like whether Gen. 1-11 is a kind of embedded pre-science (Ross) or an allegory (Collins).
Second — even the general “fine tuning” arguments Francis Collins makes are not in themselves terribly convincing. I think they are convincing, or at least “helpful,” for someone starting from a position of faith, in order to support or show the coherence of faith. But taken strictly on the grounds of secular reason, they don’t really prove anything.
And this, once again, is the central problem with Willard’s style of apologetics: it presumes that the propositions of Christian faith are demonstrable at least in significant part through the exercise of natural reason. This just isn’t so (or as Barth would say: “nein!”). A genuinely Christian epistemology and apologetic must begin with the claim that “Jesus is Lord,” a claim known only through revelation, and then work outwards by employing reason to demonstrate the coherence, beauty, and correspondence to reality of that claim (or better, the contingency of reality upon that claim).
4 replies on “More Rationalistic Apologetics: Sigh”
So here’s something I’ve been wondering, is the purpose of apologetics evangelism? It seems like a great many apologists are attempting to build a rationalistic case for why the unbeliever should become a Christian. It seems to me that maybe you are saying something more along the lines of unpacking and more deeply understanding what one has already believed (Jesus is Lord) through revelation. Is that a fair assessment?
I’m not sure I’d say it that way. “Evangelism” is the proclamation of the Evangel in all its fullness, and this should involve demonstrating the truth of what is being proclaimed — its beauty, coherence, explanatory power, and so on. So in this sense “apologetics” is part of “evangelism.”
I do not, however, think that “apologetics” is part of “evangelism” in the sense of trying to convince people that rational arguments compel them to accept Christianity. This is, in part, because of my theological commitments about the nature of grace and faith: “faith” is only present in any person because of the prior gracious act of God through the Spirit. Nobody ever becomes a Christian because of “pure reason” — not even a person who think that has been the case in his or her own story.
The primary role of apologetics, then, IMHO, is to participate in what the Spirit is already doing as part of the process of producing faith. We can and should offer “reasons” to believe, but only with the understanding that such “reasons” will only ultimately be truly “reasonable” to a person in whom the gift of faith is being produced by the Spirit. The expectation that Christianity will be “reasonable” to human rationality apart from the Spirit’s work of producing faith is a product of the Enlightenment, not of the Bible or the Christian tradition.
To be fair, even most rationalistic apologists, e.g. William Lane Craig, essentially would agree with what I just said. However, IMHO many of them, particularly at the popular level, nevertheless operate as functional rationalists — more like William of Ockham than Augustine.
Thanks, that seems pretty consistent with my experience anyway. Do you think we have anything to do with the Spirit’s gift of faith? I can understand the functional rationalism if the Spirit’s gift of faith is entirely independent of us, since we just “do our thing” and it’ll stick if the Spirit’s working on that person. But if, on the other hand, we are an integral part of that production of faith, the Spirit at least in part working through us, then functional rationalism is missing out on that, it would seem.
Big question: monergism vs. synergism?! Honestly I don’t like these categories. I’d probably say, no, we have nothing to do with the Spirit’s gift of faith, and yes, we are responsible to exercise faith in response to the Spirit’s work…. and I don’t have a neat framework for putting that together!