Practically Misunderstanding Apologetic Surveys
There are two equal and opposite misunderstandings about apologetics that will guarantee that it is never studied, or seldom practiced.
On the one hand, there is what I call “fortune cookie apologetics,” which attempts to reduce the science of apologetics to the art; and, in so doing, cheapens even the art into a mass-marketed set of canned answers. On the other hand, there is the dismissal of apologetics as a “modern” invention where in times past Christian thinkers were simply masters of philosophy and history and science and so forth. So, the debunkers tell us, apologetics became a kind of user-friendly and superficial bandaid on the brains of the church.
The pragmatist rushes apologetics into something so “practical” that its user will be a ready delivery man with no quality to his product; the postmodernist reopens the unbridgeable chasm between the specialist and the layman. As always, every lie is a twisted truth. Therefore, it would be wise to consider what is right and what is wrong with these two laments before I suggest a more excellent way.
Pragmatism and “Fortune Cookie Apologetics”
I always found fortune cookies an odd thing. Everytime I ate at a Chinese restaurant as a kid, for some reason I expected the message to be different this time. I was hoping for something actually insightful, such as, “The winning numbers in the New York State Lottery are …” or something of the sort. Never. It was always something like, “You have a sunny disposition.” Huh? I suppose it took a few years for it to dawn on me that these were produced at some distant factory and that there were thousands of the same “fortune” being opened by many people, most of whose dispositions were closer to a lump of coal.
But did you know that this sort of product is exactly what many Christians are expecting in a course on apologetics? It is understandable. We do not feel the motivation to have answers until we are pressed by a skeptic. Once we are, we zoom ahead from being totally disinterested to being totally flustered. Suddenly we demand answers more than the skeptic does.
The customer turns to the pastor or teacher with the often unspoken request: “When my agnostic co-worker says X, I say what?” or “My daughter came home from college talking about how the Bible was written by mere men and in a patriarchal and pre-scientific setting … Help!” which really amounts to that first formula. In other words—Give me a bag of those fortune cookies, preacher!
Yet the faithful curator of apologetics ought to offer something that is far better than canned answers. Hopefully he has wisdom. Here is the first nugget of wisdom. In the real world, the mass-marketed pre-baked responses don’t work. Even if they function as good initial answers, your unbelieving friend or struggling family member will have a response to your response, and so on with another. Pretty soon, you will reach into that bag and will have run out of fortune cookies.
There is a better way, but it will require a season of study. That is hard work, and that explains at least part of why we take the easier route. The other explanation is the quintessential American philosophy of pragmatism, with its maxim: If it works, do it!
But wisdom asks: “Works for what? How do we know that what we are presently working on is the right thing?”
If it is the bottom line we are after, here is a better one: There is no substitute for mastering the subject matter itself. We cannot want to “know what we are talking about” and simultaneously avoid studying that reality which any of those areas are actually about.
Postmodernism and “Apologetics as Modern”
On the other end of the spectrum—perhaps even partly as a response to that pragmatic reductionism—is the argument that apologetics itself is an illegitimate field of study. Some who make this case may acknowledge that apologetics is a necessary exercise. They are not denying that Christians interact with non-Christians concerning the truth of the faith.
What they are saying is that Christians used to do this by means of each of the diverse fields of study themselves, whether philosophy, science, history, law, or the text of Scripture as compared with other religious texts. Such critics do have a point. Their diagnosis is correct. It is their medicine that will kill the mind.
Besides that, we seldom realize how criticisms of this or that “modern” phenomena can strike the critical ax too far down to the roots into something that is actually quite pre-modern, and in fact something very Christian. Thus everyone from the followers of Barth to the Emergent Church informed us that doing systematic theology in general, and the doctrine of inerrancy in particular, were the result of “modernist anxieties” to regain certainty in response to unbelief. Likewise the pietist and the progressive have recast natural rights (e.g., life, liberty, property) as an “Enlightenment invention.” Something altogether inseparable from Christian truth became hitched to the wagon of the church’s own modernization.
Most Christians did not have a sufficient grasp of history to sense that something was off about these deconstructions. Sadly, otherwise conservative, orthodox believers can make this same mistake about things like apologetics.
It is true that apologetics has functioned as a kind of pragmatic “catch-all” enterprise to help the layman “catch up” to an increasingly hostile intellectual environment. At the very least, this can give the consumer of such material the impression that he or she is going deeper than is in fact the case. But my first response to that is: So what? Let us assume that is true. I want to show a better way to think about getting beyond both of these extremes.
Apologetics Surveys as a “Vocation Fair”
So that there is no false advertising, I want to be perfectly clear to any student in one of my apologetics classes: You will not leave this class a master of apologetics, nor of any subject that will be covered. That might seem like a let-down. But that is not the purpose. Nor am I suggesting that we should become the proverbial jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.
Instead, think of an introduction to apologetics as just that—an introduction, or better yet, an invitation, or even orientation. Think of one of those “vocation days” that are hosted by high schools, or even in various tables at a homeschool convention.
Now think of each subject canvased in an apologetics survey as one of those tables. The teacher is a tour guide across the exhibits, and the authors of the books he commends are those exhibitors behind each table. They have material that will go deeper than the tour guide has time to explore. And each of the guests who visit will naturally be more attracted to one table, or a few, over others, just as surely as one who is called into a certain line of work will naturally gravitate to that table and pick up those brochures for that school or that group.
If we treat the science of apologetics in this way, not only will we be more realistic about the art of apologetics, but we will also find ourselves possessing more mastery over the problem of evil, or evolutionary theory, or textual criticism, and so forth—each according to the interest that is piqued or the need of the hour in those we know wrestling with doubt. We will no longer be setting ourselves up for failure as apologists.
