Apologetics Methodology, Part 2
By Paul Copan | Bulletin Roundtable
Today we feature Part 2 of our Roundtable on apologetics methodology, with Bulletin team member Paul Copan discussing his approach. If you haven’t already, have a look at last week’s post where David Baggett and Paul M. Gould wrote about theirs. In Part 3, coming up, Melissa Cain Travis will conclude our discussion.
Blessings,
Christopher Reese
Editor-in-Chief
Paul Copan
Many Personalized Pathways to Christ
The theologian N. T. Wright said that belief in God satisfies four basic needs: “the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.”[1] I appreciate this insight. In this spirit, my Worldview Bulletin colleagues and I have approached Christian apologetics in this same holistic, wide-ranging manner. Typically, if Christians think about apologetics at all, most of them assume apologetics is a rational defense of the faith. But if we are defending the Christian faith, shouldn’t we consider an array of reasons for embracing it to reach the whole person—not just the person’s intellect?
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) was once asked, “How many ways are there to God?” He replied, “As many ways as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one. In that respect there is ultimately one way, and everyone who is on the way to God is therefore in some sense also on the way to Jesus Christ.”[2] Indeed, as there are many pathways God uses to bring people to Christ, so there are many ways to defend the faith.
In Dallas Willard’s book The Allure of Gentleness (HarperOne), he referred to apologetics as an endeavor in doubt-removal—the removal of doubts that present serious obstacles to discipleship—so that a person may get on—or continue on—the path of following Christ: Apologetics is really about “aiding others in removing doubts that hinder their enthusiastic and full participation in the kingdom of the heavens and their discipleship to Christ.”[3] What kind of doubts are these? They may concern intellectual objections, troubling personal experiences, the assurance of salvation, or problematic expectations of how God should speak to a person.
Another way of looking at apologetics is this: it is both the art and the science of defending the Christian faith. We are pretty familiar with the “science”—that is, the objective reasons for belief in God, the resurrection of Jesus, biblical reliability, the possibility of miracles, and so on. The art is something on which I want to elaborate here. I’ll address two facets of it: (a) the personal and relational and (b) the imaginative.
The Personal and Relational
In his book Dialogical Apologetics (Baker), David K. Clark defines apologetics as an endeavor in cross-worldview communication. But, as David Naugle observes in his Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans), at the root of every worldview is a heart commitment. This means that the wise apologist will recognize that we can’t separate a person’s intellect from deeper, more personal and even spiritual concerns. This is why apologetics and prayer go hand-in-hand. We want to confront their idolatrous heart commitments that need challenging; indeed, they may even be utilizing intellectual arguments to support their own rebellion against God.
Related to the importance of being attuned to human hearts that are averted from God, I’ve found that it can be productive first to discover why a person may get angry at the mention of God. What is behind that anger? Often, exploring the personal stories of those hardboiled atheists, as C. S. Lewis called them, will prove far more productive than pressing ahead with intellectual reasons for believing in God. Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless (Ignatius) illustrates this effectively. He analyzes the background of the world’s leading atheists—those hardboiled ones like Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Dennett, Hitchens, and their ilk—and he observes the common element of a missing or defective father or father-substitute is in the background. That factor doesn’t disprove atheism, of course. To think thus would be to commit the genetic fallacy—assuming the truth or falsity of a viewpoint based on its causal origin. The point here is that more than the intellect may be involved in people’s objecting to God. Deep disappointment with an earthly father may work its way to doubting the goodness of a heavenly father.[4]
Engaging relationally with those who think differently than we do is critical. In their book, I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us about Their Path to Jesus (IVP Academic), Don Everts and Doug Schaupp note that the first threshold postmoderns cross in their journey to Christ is to move from distrust to trust. How does that happen? Through faithful, trustworthy Christians who live lives of integrity. They are the first display of Jesus—the “fifth Gospel”—before they will be interested in checking out the four canonical Gospels. Building personal relationships of trust with suspicious postmoderns is a crucial step forward.
Art, Literature, and the Imagination
Another way of engaging in apologetics is through the power of art and literature. C. S. Lewis has proven to be an important figure in this regard. In the previous section, we spoke of the need to build personal trust with postmoderns as the first step to helping them, by God’s grace, to trust Christ. Likewise, Lewis reminds us of another first step—a gateway: for some people, the imagination is a starting point to engage the will of the unbeliever.
For Lewis, imagination is the organ of meaning. Reason is the natural organ of truth. And the will is the command center. How does all of this work? The imagination provides a different way of seeing things. And if reason judges that what the imagination has come to see makes sense, then the will is better positioned to embrace it. Reason by itself may resist intellectual reasons for the faith, but the imagination helps redirect reason to help it see things from another point of view. Think of Nathan’s confrontation of David in 2 Samuel 12: rather than directly challenging David, Nathan tells an arresting parable that arouses David’s imagination and indignation, and David condemns himself by his own judgment. The use of imagination helped redirect David’s own reason and then his will.
Lewis wrote about helping to set the appropriate climate for both the intellect and imagination to open the door for conversion (through the exercise of the will prompted by God’s Spirit):
Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural. I do not in the least agree with those who therefore conclude that the spread of an intellectual (and imaginative) climate favourable to Christianity is useless. You do not prove munition workers useless by showing that they cannot themselves win battles, however proper this reminder would be if they attempted to claim the honour due to fighting men. If the intellectual climate is such that, when a man comes to the crisis at which he must either accept or reject Christ, his reason and imagination are not on the wrong side, then his conflict will be fought out under favourable conditions.[5]
In Lewis’s own experience, he had read George MacDonald’s Phantastes—a work of fantasy. Through it, Lewis experienced a “baptized” imagination. He himself discovered that through the doorway of imagination, Lewis’s reason—and eventually his will—were transformed.[6]
Another example is Louise Cowan (1916-2015), who had been a literature professor at the University of Dallas. She told her story of her earlier departure from the Christian faith and how rational arguments by themselves were insufficient. It was through reading the classics like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that she came to see how the Christian faith made such amazing sense of the depths of the human condition. She wrote:
At this moment I was standing at a crossroads. The Christian belief in which I had been reared had been seriously damaged during my college years and finally demolished ironically by a required course in religion that had brought about my complete capitulation. None of the biblical sources could be considered reliable, the experts of the day argued. And for me, once the seeds of doubt had been sown, the entire gospel was called in question.
Before literature came to my aid, I had perused theology in vain. Even the Bible was unconvincing. Not until a literary work of art awakened my imaginative faculties could the possibility of a larger context than reason alone engage my mind. I had been expecting logical proof of something one was intended to recognize. What was needed was a way of seeing. I had to be transformed in the way that literature transforms by story, image, symbol before I could see the simple truths of the gospel.
Above all else this seems to me the chief value of what we call the classics: they summon us to belief. They seize our imaginations and make us commit ourselves to the self-evident, which we have forgotten how to recognize…. Even for the things ordinarily considered certain, we moderns require proof. In this state of abstraction, we are cut off from the fullness of reality. Something has to reach into our hearts and impel us toward recognition.[7]
Along these lines, C. S. Lewis comments on the place of imagination and reason when writing the Narnia stories.[8]
I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.
But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.
While much more could be said, perhaps what we have pointed out here serves to illustrate the different ways God uses to bring people to himself. Though Jesus is the only way, there is a variety of means available to connect people to himself.
Notes
[1] N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), x.
[2] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later, Pope Benedict XVI), Salt of the Earth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 32.
[3] Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 9.
[4] See Vitz’s helpful summary of the arguments in his chapter in Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro, The Naturalness of Belief (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).
[5] C. S. Lewis, “The Decline of Religion” (1946), in God in the Dock, 221.
[6] C. S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare.” Rehabilitations and Other Essays, 1939. Available at: http://pseudepigraph.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/CSL-Bluspels-and-Flalansferes.pdf. Thanks to Michael Ward’s unpacking and implications of this essay in “The Good Serves the Better and Both the Best: C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Reason in Christian Apologetics” (Three Parts), Knowing & Doing (C. S. Lewis Institute): http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/The_Good_Serves_the_Better_and_Both_the_Best_Part_1_Full_Article.
[7] Louise Cowan, “The Importance of the Classics,” in Invitation to the Classics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 19-24.
[8] Lewis points this out in On Stories.
Four Views on Heaven
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In the familiar Counterpoints format, Four Views on Heaven brings together a well-rounded discussion and highlights similarities and differences of the current views on heaven. Each author presents their strongest biblical case for their position, followed by responses and a rejoinder that model a respectful tone.
Positions and contributors include:
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Restored Earth — emphasizes that the saved will live forever with Jesus on this restored planet, enjoying ordinary human activities in our redeemed state. (J. Richard Middleton)
Heavenly Earth — a balanced view that seeks to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the heavenly and earthly views. (Michael Allen)
Roman Catholic Beatific Vision — stresses the intellectual component of salvation, though it encompasses the whole of human experience of joy, happiness coming from seeing God finally face-to-face. (Peter Kreeft)
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Thanks for this discussion on method. Whether it was intended or not, parts 1 and 2 provide a succinct look at the two poles of apologetics: the argument(s) for the "thing," on the one hand, and the use of arguments to persuade, on the other; from David's emphasis on the arguments with a philosophical emphasis through Paul Gould's expansion into the aesthetic and cultural to Paul Copan's focus on persuasion. Disagreements over what apologetics is can result from not giving both poles their due. I picked up the attitude during my schooling years that it was all about arguments; if people didn't get it, they were just being "intellectually dishonest," and one could shake the dust off one's shoes and leave them for evangelists to deal with.
Louise Cowan's line, "I had been expecting logical proof of something one was intended to recognize. What was needed was a way of seeing," is not only quotable but keeps in view both of the poles. I think it's fair to point out that recognition can come through logical proofs; people are wired differently (and I don't think she would have differed, from what I heard from her at UD). I think we'd all agree, at least, that recognition is what we want to give people the chance to experience.