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Exploring Approaches to Apologetics

Transcript - CA513 Exploring Approaches to Apologetics © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 07 of 24CA513

Roots of 20th Century Thought

Exploring Approaches to Apologetics

Let’s pray together. Our Lord in heaven, we’re grateful for the privilege of representing You on earth. We thank You for the truth You have revealed and for how substantial it is. We pray that as we seek to understand the people’s thinking that we would seek to reach with the gospel of Christ, that You will grant us discernment. Teach us by Your Holy Spirit for Jesus’ sake, amen.

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the return to the Greek classics led to Renaissance Humanism. Different Renaissance movements revolted against the authority of all the supernatural values of biblical revelation that had been defended by Augustine and Aquinas. Thinkers from this period wanted to work with reason unrelated to revelation. Some of the leaders of the Renaissance hoped that Christianity would be eradicated from European civilization. As a result of the Protestant Reformation, however, Christianity became very strong again. In the sixteenth century, leaders of the Protestant Reformation—Luther and Calvin—called Christians back to their roots in the biblically-revealed sources of morality and salvation.

The Reformers returned to the written revelation, which began one of history’s greatest centuries of Christianity’s expansion. The authority of Scripture was again defended as above the authority of the latest scholarly uses of reason that were in rebellion against the Word. Luther’s apologetic was not dependent on the humanists, the knights, the peasants, or the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. It was not dependent upon the hierarchy or the pope. Luther’s defense of Scripture was directed more against the nominal church than non-Christians. And Luther’s justification for his faith rested on the Scriptures only. He denounced the rationalist excesses of theologians and philosophers of his time. Reason without special divine illumination, he said, is blind.

We do not look to Luther for answers to question as to why the Bible rather than other sacred writings. This apologetic

Gordon Lewis, Ph.D. Experience: Senior Professor of

Christian and Historical Theology, Denver Seminary, Colorado.



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question was not a live one for him. Calvin’s apologetic also is directed mainly against the Roman church and not those who call themselves non-Christians. He rejects the distinction of Thomas that independent reason can know that God is but not what God is. The knowledge Calvin considers is a knowledge of acquaintance with what contributes to God’s glory and our benefit. And where there is knowledge of this kind, there is worship. But in the Augustinian tradition utilized, the evidences of miracles and fulfilled prophecies served as instruments of the witness or illumination of the Holy Spirit to the truth of special revelation. But again, Calvin presupposed that the Bible is what it claims to be. The German Enlightenment of the eighteenth century presupposed then the omnipotence of human reason rejecting revelation and human sinfulness. Supposedly, humans had come of age and no longer needed the help of revelation. Moving right along, the need for apologetics in our times must be traced to movements at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

What is the context addressed by Christian apologists in the twentiteth century? Many have been concerned about liberal theology. Influenced by the Enlightenment, many Christians became critical of the Bible’s infallible authority, human depravity, the exclusiveness of Christ, and the transcendence of the Trinity. Negative conclusions of Bible critics came first against the italics indicating words added by translators to make good English in the King James Version. In 1833, Thomas Curtis in a letter to the bishop of London made various charges of inaccuracy against modern English translations. The misrepresentations of Curtis were exposed and refuted on behalf of Oxford University by W.H. Turton, who seems to have been the first to use the word “inerrancy.” Turton argued that though absolute inerrancy is impracticable in any printed book, yet all the modern editions, those for instance which have been printed since the year 1820, have been proved to be as correct, as unwearied, as incessant industry can make them.

Inerrancy had not been affirmed of copies or translations of the biblical autographs or translations to begin with. Divine revelation and inspiration came to the authors, not the copyists and print setters. But in 1891, Charles A. Briggs’ inaugural address at Union Seminary in New York openly opposed the inerrancy of the autographs, the original writings of Scripture by their prophetic and apostolic authors. Briggs said, “I shall venture to affirm that so far as I can see, there are errors in the Scriptures that no



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one has been able to explain away.” He raised such difficulties as harmonizing the chronology of Kings and Chronicles and maintaining the unity of Isaiah. At that time, however, the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America required all candidates for ordination to affirm as “essential and necessary” the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, second the virgin birth of Christ, third that Christ offered up Himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, fourth that Jesus arose from the dead with the same body with which He suffered, and fifth that Jesus worked mighty miracles which made changes in the order of nature. Briggs was suspended from ministry in the Presbyterian Church which had ordained him about twenty years before around 1870.

In 1924, the Auburn Affirmation became a landmark of the influence of liberalism. One hundred fifty ministers who claimed to hold most earnestly to the five doctrines required of Presbyterians signed the Auburn Affirmation. It said that these are not the only theories allowed by the Scriptures and are standards as explanations. Antithetical to their earnest belief inerrancy, they added “The doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture intended to enhance the authority of the Scriptures in fact impairs their supreme authority for faith and life.” That indeed seemed contradictory to their most earnest affirmation of that doctrine.

So by regarding five fundamental doctrines at the heart of the uniquely Christian faith, merely possible theories, the deity and miracles of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, and the authoritative Bible, slipped away. Having denied depravity already, people did not need regenerated natures. And so they set out to alleviate human problems by changing their environments. Union Seminary disassociated itself from the Presbyterian Church USA, and its graduates spread Briggs’ and others’ liberal views in it and other major denominations. Feeling the strength of modernism or liberalism, in 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon entitled, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The first Presbyterian Church of New York put Fosdick out of its pulpit, but then he moved across town to preach at New York’s Riverside Baptist Church. Some liberals suggested that Scriptural concepts were inspired and true but not the words expressing them. And that led fundamentalists to emphasize verbal inspiration on the ground that the views of Christ, prophets, and apostles attributed both the wording expressing the thoughts and the thoughts to God.

Other liberals said that biblical references to the cosmological world picture were passé but that its moral teaching, like the Golden



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Rule, remained normative. So fundamentalists emphasize that the verbal inspiration was plenary or full and complete, insisting that all parts of the Scriptures were equally from God. Much liberal thought then moved away from considering God as personal and transcendent. That meant the denial of anything supernatural in the birth, work, or resurrection of Jesus. Prophecies were dated after the events they were said to predict. Evidences of the supernatural and miraculous no longer guaranteed the reliability of Scriptural assertions. The classical Christian conviction of a supernatural and formative revelation inscripturated in the Bible also became passé. Jesus was no longer supernaturally the sinless, eternal Logos in human flesh, and the Bible was no longer the errorless Word of God in human words. And the construction of a defense of the truth of the liberal doctrines was considered intellectually unnecessary.

Naturalistic philosophy then is the second major concern of apologetics in the twentieth century. It is very closely related to liberalism, but it is the philosophical worldview behind the theology or religion of liberals. In place of a biblically-founded theistic worldview with a transcendent God distinct from the world but active in it, liberals and others adopted a worldview with pantheistic assumptions that God is not transcendent but immanent exclusively within the world. The assumptions of the modern mind were developed by John Herman Randall in a book entitled, The Making of the Modern Mind published in 1940. The biblical doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of humans was replaced with a view of our essential goodness. The biblical doctrine of creation was replaced by a religious and cultural evolution and an uncritical faith in the inevitability of evolutionary progress. An assumed absolute uniformity of natural laws meant that there could be no miracles and nothing supernatural in the origin of the universe or the life and teaching of Jesus.

A priori, independent of any sensory experience, all uniquely revealed changeless truths of a plan of redemption and of supernatural inspiration were ruled out of court. Thus it became commonplace for higher critics to rearrange the text of Scripture through many alleged documents and redactions to fit the theory of a gradual religious development of ideas. The Bible became a merely human testimony to the fallible religious ideas of certain periods of history rather than God’s revealed witness against people through prophetic and apostolic spokesmen. The Bible was allegedly true in its essentials, which became fewer and fewer, but not in matters related to scientific or historical investigation.



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The merely immanent God of the naturalists was disclosed not in the Bible but in the latest theories of modern philosophy and psychology. Ministers preached on the assured results of modern critical scholarship as more authoritative than texts from the Bible.

Liberal spirituality in the first half of the twentieth century was quite different. Instead of bowing to a transcendent God and authoritative moral laws, they bowed to nature and nature’s laws as described by the latest scientific theories. Instead of searching Scripture for life’s highest values, they turned to the latest psychology or sociology. The good was whatever came naturally, for human nature was inherently good. But it was prudent to see whether it fit with the prevailing legal codes. People gave up the search for truth and became satisfied with fantasies that in the media now seemed to get more and more gross.

The 1900s began with a naturalistic worldview dominating education in general and even Christian education in particular. In seeking to be relevant to the culture of our times, leaders in colleges and seminaries worked under the influence of several additional assumptions undermining a biblical worldview, the inevitability of progress, unbridled optimism therefore about the future discoveries of modern science and of socialism as the politics of the millennium. Liberals triumphantly announced the alleged agreement of all the scholars. They ruled out the demonstrated scholarly abilities of those who disagreed with them.

The naturalists in Christendom no longer defended a supernatural creation or catastrophic judgments like those of the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah. They repudiated the divine initiative in Israel, actual predictions of a coming Messiah, Christ’s miraculous incarnation, conception, sinless life, atoning death and bodily resurrection. They emphasized the Golden Rule, doing good to all people who were in social need. And since their natures did not need regeneration, they thought, the world would be improved by cleaning up the slums and improving the physical setting.

Initial responses to a naturalistic worldview—Dr. Ralph Kuyper, professor at Denver Seminary a few years ago, when a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. at New York University, after class one day asked him: “When are you going to ever get over reacting against your father’s faith?” Whatever the psychological motivation may have been for Randall’s Making of the Modern Mind, his basic



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assumptions needed an answer with sound logical arguments. In 1946, Carl Henry responded to Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind with a book entitled, Remaking the Modern Mind. Henry pointed up difficulties in assuming the inevitability of progress, the inherent goodness of man, the uniformity of nature, and all the gods of the rapidly changing space-time universe. Then he pointed out that revelational theism never offered itself as an escape from rationality. He insisted that God addressed revelation to human beings not simply through the emotions or the will but through the intellect.

Furthermore, he claimed, it answers most of the problems and leaves a smaller residue of unsolved difficulties than humanism. Inconsistently, naturalists in a universe shorn of all infinites, all values, all of a person’s uniqueness, continue to prattle about “the infinite value of human personality.” Only if we are created in the image of an infinite God rather than of an amoeba or a rabbit does human personality have inherent and lasting value. And only then does justice for Nazi war crimes and morality matter significantly. When sin rules unvanquished and death stalks the world, the Hebrew Christian view will remain relevant. But few crises in history so much as the present one have laid bare that relevancy.

Not only is nature real, so also are the demands of morality laid upon us by God who is righteous. Moral laws are not merely humanly-devised customs from varied cultures but expressions of an eternal, unchanging moral order. Henry also added the demand by God and redemption by God stand together in any effective attack on the problem of morality. Apart from the moral guidelines of God’s revelation in human consciousness, Eastern and Western civilizations would have collapsed long ago.

In 1947, Carl Henry was one of the first evangelicals to point out that Christians who held the basic truths of Christianity also had a message and ministry for the socially needy around the world. Some of his friends suggested that it was not a good time to “perform surgery” on fundamentalism. But he maintained that the hour is ripe now if we seize it rightly for a rediscovery of the Scriptures and of the meaning of the incarnation for the human race. In the preface to his The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, Henry added:

Even beyond this, I voice my concern because we have not applied the genius of our position constructively to those problems which



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press most for solution in a social way. Unless we do this, I am unsure that we shall get another world hearing for the gospel that we can continue for a generation or two even as a vital missionary force here and there snatching brands from the burning. I do not question that possibility. But if we would press redemptive Christianity as the obvious solution to the world’s problems, we had better busy ourselves with explicating the solution.

Not many apologists heeded this call for a full-orbed apologetic like Augustine’s City of God. Another type of naturalism that occurred in our times was in the field of philosophy. Logical positivism in the secular, philosophical realm was popularized by A.J. Ayers’ Language, Truth, and Logic. And that book still has a great influence. It maintained positions like this. First, all knowledge that purports to be factual or about reality must begin with sense data and must be verified or at least be verifiable. Second, all assertions about God and other metaphysical realities are meaningless. There is no empirical method of determining their truth. As non-empirical propositions with supposed existential import, they are pseudo assertions. Third, Ayer maintained that all normative assertions whether positing moral, aesthetic, or religious values, are scientifically unverifiable and are also classified as non-cognitive discourse. To say you acted wrongly in stealing that money is not to say anything more, he thought than to report you stole that money. Value judgments were simply expressions of feeling with no objective validity whatsoever. As expressions of mere feelings, they do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. We may feel that our own system of values is superior, but we cannot bring forth any arguments to show that superiority. Logical positivism challenged not only Christian values but all normative or objective values. It denied the validity of any objective significance to any values in any culture.

Let me ask you, “Are value judgments simply subjective expressions of feelings?” There have been several ways of answering that position which is still very prominent among relativists. First, there is quite obviously for the positivist more than a personal feeling being expressed in the thought which so characterizes his viewpoint. “You ought never to say never, or you ought never to say ought.” It is apparently a categorical imperative that no one regardless of his feelings should declare that there is an objective character to value judgments. But this position which is normative for positivist and non-positivist alike is incompatible with their own theory. If there is but one such value judgment that does not rest upon A.J. Ayers’ personal preferences, then the universal



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claim of the positivist is not sustained. And such a universal and necessary statement could not be sustained by limited empirical evidence anyway.

Second, a proposition which fairly represents the positivist view is you must accept science regardless of your personal feelings. If words mean anything, Russell and Stace seem to be saying I ought to accept science wherever it leads me. I do not read well I like science, but of course your tastes may be different. Neither could rise to the eloquence of enjoining people to give up all their satisfying illusions in favor of the repelling dismal facts if they were not persuaded that the issue involves an imperative.

Third, the positivist position would be represented by saying you must seek the benefit of all mankind. Be cooperative and tolerant. You simply ought not be selfish. The response in the descriptive terminology of C.S. Lewis goes like this:

They write with indignation like men proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself and not at all like men recording that they personally like mild beer but some people prefer bitter. Yet if the oughts of Mr. Wells and Franco are both equally the impulses which nature has conditioned each to have and both tell us nothing about any objective right or wrong, whence is all the fervor? Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we ought to make a better world, the words ought and better must on their own showing refer to an irrationally-conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn.

The consistent results of a positivist view of values are graphically portrayed by the same writer.

But the naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called real value. Now that I know my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese, now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham, do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong and it’s grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature, I suppose I shall obey it. When it is weak I shall put my money into cheese. There can be no reason for trying to whip up and encourage the one impulse rather than the other not now that I know



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what they both are. The naturalist must not destroy all my reverence for conscience on Monday and expect to find me still venerating it on Tuesday.

All of this is the result of a fourth epistemological assumption which might read like this: All types of objects must be verified by the scientific method. That makes no difference for the positivist how different the nature of values may be from the nature of chemical elements. They must all be subjected to a methodology devised for working on material objects. Though ultimately all truth is one, it seems only reasonable that the nature of the subject under investigation should determine the method of investigation. In what way can the data of love or joy be reduced to a measurable quantity? How long is hope? How much does peace weigh? Yet these values are the most real things we know. Would not the individual be axiologically foolish to forfeit faith in the things which really count that he might have the paltry privilege of analyzing sentences which count for little? That word axiologically by the way is from the Greek axios for values. It has to do with the science of values in ethics.

Are value judgments simply the expression of feelings then? Our answer must be no. It is true that feelings are associated with such judgments and they may be very strong feelings. But it is not true that there are no normative elements as well. The positivist, in seeking to maintain that value judgments are subjective alone, must assume normatively that you should not say ought, that you should accept the dictums of science, that you should seek the benefit of all mankind, and that there is only one method of verification regardless of what is to be verified. These value judgments are not for the positivist matters of individual difference of taste. And, therefore, his theoretical position is insufficient. There is more to value judgment than mere expression of feelings.

In the light of the moral crisis in America and the worldwide conflicts which may possibly wipe out our present civilization before their resolution, the strong words of Dr. Carnell are justified in the opinion of this speaker. And with them we conclude this point:

Whoever continues to repeat the stupid claim that sentences about justice, honor, chastity, self-control, piety, holiness, and love are non-cognitive, should be laughed at, laughed at good and hard. He shows not only a want of education but also a want of common sense. There are standards so ultimate to all meaning



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that all else is judged by them. How then can they be judged by a subordinate method? If science is not good, what is it good for? And if science is not true, why should one believe it?

Logical positivism was not just an attack on the knowledge of ethics and values, but also on the metaphysical reality of the Christian God. It was an attack on all views of ultimate reality. A.J. Ayer wrote:

There can be no way of proving that the existence of a God such as the God of Christianity is even probable. No sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent God can possess any literal significance. All utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. The atheist’s assertions that there is no God are equally nonsensical. Neither type of sentence that God exists or God does not exist conveys a meaningful assertion. Similarly, statements about a person’s soul or spirit whose essential attributes are non-empirical is alleged to be an unintelligible notion.

Ayer claims that his statements about apologetics appealing to experience of God are equally nonsensical or non-verifiable. That is, nothing can be said in their defense. The arguments from testimonies to religious experiences, he says, are altogether fallacious. And those philosophers who fill their books with assertions that they intuitively know this or that moral or religious truth are merely providing material for the psychoanalyst. Part of the challenge of apologetics at the end of the twentieth century is to show that language about values and about God’s existence is both meaningful and true. Our talk about morality is not just venting or evoking feelings.

There is some objective validity to the assertions that murder, rape, and abuse and theft are morally evil. I think the answer to A.J. Ayer is not to dismiss the ideas of verification but to expand the data in view of our experience of non-sensory information like the demand for our human rights, the oughtness of justice, and the need for love. We are not mere computers with sense data software. We have the software for dealing with values and their changeless source and support. And not even the logical positivists escaped making normative value judgments.

Another type of naturalist is that of the communist, but their materialism could well deserve extensive consideration. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union



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of the Soviet Socialist Republics, we will not spend a lot of time with dialectical materialism. By way of a brief evaluation then, consider some problems with the naturalistic panaceas. First, matter is not eternal. Useful energy is subject to entropy. That is, the useful energy of the universe is running down like an automobile battery. How could it have been eternal? No scientist today affirms the claim of the philosophers of naturalism that matter is eternal. Second, methodologically materialists are incapable of explaining ultimate origins. What really explains the big bang at the alleged beginning of the physical universe? Third, all materialism makes matter more than matter is to avoid belief in a non-material human soul or spirit or a divine spirit. Fourth, naturalists assume the inevitability of progress. But this is far from secure since the possibilities of atomic destruction. Few today believe that everything is getting better every day in every way. Fifth, naturalists assume the thing to be proved. They presuppose the uniformity of nature and reinterpret any data indicating supernatural predictions or miracles to fit their theory. Sixth, naturalism assumes the inherent goodness of humanity, whatever goodness may mean, but has an inadequate base of intrinsic moral values like human rights and justice since values are mere expressions of relative taste if not of individuals of societies.

Of the inherent tendency to evil in nature, Reinhold Niebuhr said, “No doctrine held in history has ever been better supported by an abundance of empirical evidence.” You have to listen only to the news and the media these days for continued documentation such as Niebuhr alluded to. Seventh, scientists with naturalistic assumptions tend to overlook their own uniqueness as critical observers of nature. In their desire to discover “things” they overlook the value of the human or his ability to know anything at all that corresponds to nature. And furthermore, they overlook the moral obligation they all feel to report the evidence they find with intellectual honesty. That is a universal and necessary value in every university and every intellectual endeavor that is worth considering.

Eighth, secular humanism tends to dehumanize persons by reductively explaining them in terms of atoms, energy, or impersonal environmental stimuli. Humans are responsible agents, accountable to their governments and accountable to themselves, and accountable ultimately to God for their decisions morally. We cannot just excuse our evil thoughts, words, and actions by reducing them to automatic responses to necessary


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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stimuli. People laugh at those who claim “the devil made me do it”. And similarly, we have to laugh at those who say “Nature made me do it” or “The society made me murder this person or rape that one.” Secular humanism has reduced a person in the terms of the founder of the Playboy empires to the image of a rabbit rather than the image of God. And we wonder why our culture today is faced with a moral crisis and why children are going to school armed with guns. We have lost the value of one life in our concern for secular responsibility in science.

Ninth, with no moral imperatives or absolutes, naturalists have no adequate base for respecting the rights of others and especially the rights of minorities. Oh, the naturalists and humanists may speak in glowing terms of highly regarding all humanity as the supreme or ultimate value in the world. But when it comes to loving an unlovely neighbor, they do not have the power to enable them to fulfill the second greatest commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Tenth, naturalism cannot justify defense of a universal or necessary intrinsic value of justice for individuals or nations. That concern for justice in the East and the West for individuals and for nations and the United Nations is not a relative taste of a few individuals. It is a universal and necessary obligation that is laid upon every human being in every culture. And the naturalists have no explanation of such universal and necessary demands or absolutes.

Eleventh, naturalists lack an adequate base for showing mercy and love. Jesus said in contrast that one soul is worth more than the whole world. A theistic view we will see as we study the apologists will be maintained to provide a better account of ultimate origins, the intrinsic value of one human person because created in the image of God and the fact that we can know anything at all; for we were created to know love and serve God as well as one another and have dominion over the earth. Christian theism also proposes a better account of the fact that as conscious of right and wrong, life has meaning and purpose, that we are not what we ought to be, and that we are accountable for our conduct and will be judged according to our works. Furthermore, Christian theism provides the more coherent and viable antidote to our moral predicament in the biblically disclosed incarnation, person, and work of Jesus Christ.

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