As promised, here is my first paper for PR-501. It is my answer to the following question:

How does the general postmodernist approach to truth challenge the task of Christian apologetics in the contemporary world? Your answer should include the following four areas:

1. The nature, purpose, and justification of Christian apologetics. Give biblical support.
2. The importance of worldview for apologetics.
3. What the Christian worldview is.
4. A basic strategy for defending the Christian worldview (apologetic method) in the postmodern context.

If it strikes you as breathlessly terse at points, you’re on to something. You’ll also notice that it doesn’t so much end as it does run up against some invisible barrier: in this case the last line of the seventh page of double-spaced 12-point text with 1.25″ margins. I make many assertions that I would normally never leave unjustified in a blog post, but to do them justice might double the size of the essay, and that was just not allowed. (In all fairness, professors and their graders can only read so much text, and there are close to 100 people in the class. Length limitations are only humane.)

Finally, the preponderance of Doug Groothuis citations can be explained easily by noting that he’s the teacher of the class–and a very fine one at that.

Enough caveats. This is pretty much exactly what I turned in four hours ago, just HTML’d up a bit. Read and comment:

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It is the new received wisdom that we are experiencing a radical transition between intellectual eras. The old primacy of rationality, method, and word is passing away, replaced by an emerging world of community, radical pluralism, and image. We are told that the old apologetic paradigms that focused on winning arguments and proving absolute truth claims are relics of an oppressive, Modernist past to be cast off as we reshape the ancient Faith into terms set by atheistic philosophers in recent decades. Is this dramatic paradigm shift warranted? Do traditional apologetic fail to meet the challenges of the postmodern world?

A thorough interaction with all of the claims of postmodernist Christianity is beyond our present scope. Instead, this paper will examine the challenge posed to traditional Christian apologetic methods by the postmodern intellectual milieu, and will propose a strategy for apologetic interaction with the present generation of men and women in Western culture. The new intellectual consensus requires not a radical recasting of Christianity, but instead suggests several minor, evolutionary changes in the practice of apologetics. These changes consist primarily in a more thoughtful approach to postmodernity’s endemic pluralism, better preparation to defend the classical Christian view of truth, and a renewed emphasis on the Biblical priority of the relational context for apologetics and evangelism.

The Nature, Purpose, and Justification of Christian Apologetics
To pursue this improved strategy, we must understand thoroughly the nature and purpose of the enterprise of Christian apologetics. Doug Groothuis defines apologetics as “The rational defense of the Christian worldview as objectively true and existentially engaging.” Apologetics so construed is undertaken in order to bring glory to God, to reach the lost, to encourage doubting believers, and to aid in the sanctification of believers who seek to deepen their knowledge of God.¹We find ample Biblical justification for this endeavor. The classical proof texts in support of the antithetical defense of Christian claims are Peter’s command that believers should “�always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”² and Jude’s injunction to “�contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints”³ against false teachers in the church. Further, we find apostolic warrant in Paul’s overt apologetic interaction with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in the Aeropagus of Athens.⁴ Most persuasively we see a consistent pattern of rational argumentation in the interaction of Jesus with Jewish intellectual leaders and others to whom he ministered. Jesus very deftly escaped the horns of potentially life-threatening dilemmas (Mt 22:15-22), used a fortiori arguments in defense of his teaching on the Sabbath (Jn 7:21-24, Lk 13:10-17), appealed to evidence in defense of his uniquely messianic ministry (Mt 11:4-6), and used reductio ad absurdum arguments for a variety of purposes (Mt 22:41-46, Mt 12:25-27).⁵ Even a cursory survey of the Biblical witness gives the contemporary apologist substantial comfort with the tools of rational discourse when engaging hostile skeptics, false teachers, and seeking souls in the defense of God’s truth.

Against recent claims that postmodern people have moved beyond the “white male myth” of logic and propositional truth, we may observe that logic is tellingly employed even in the defense of these claims. As bearers of the imago dei, all human beings have the capacity and indeed the need for rational thought. We may be irrational and inconsistent at times, and sin may cripple the use of our rational faculties even unto our own deaths, but the basic capacity to work out our thoughts in a non-contradictory framework remains as an unchanging part of our nature. Changes in the intellectual climate, be they real or imagined, are powerless to alter this fact.

The Importance of Worldview for Apologetics
A hypothetical apologist in sixteenth-century France might have had to engage his interlocutors on matters of ecclesiastical authority, the doctrine of justification, what systems of civil government are most consonant with Biblical principles, or in the case of extraordinary cross-cultural outreach, possibly a discussion of the uniquely messianic role of Christ with a Jewish neighbor. Even in the latter case, he might never–given a long life of fruitful ministry–encounter anyone with a basic framework for understanding life that differed materially from his own. This state of affairs no longer obtains for any nontrivial case in the postmodern world.Because postmodernity is fundamentally pluralistic, the contemporary apologist must have a robust understanding of the concept of worldview and its effect on human thought. Sire defines a worldview as follows:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.⁶

More succinctly, a worldview is a collection of “words and concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action.”⁷ Every human soul of even nominal mental acuity is in possession of a worldview, be it true or false or consciously defended or passively breathed in without any examination at all. This worldview forms the semi-permeable membrane though which all words and concepts must try to pass before they are taken into the mind, finally arriving intact, significantly modified, or not arriving at all. It is antecedently obvious that effective apologetic interaction depends sensitively of the characteristics of this membrane, both as it occurs in the mind of the apologist and in the mind of skeptic, doubter, or false teacher.

Sire proposes that a worldview can be defined by its answers to the following seven questions (the proposed answers are illustrative, not exhaustive):

1. What is ultimate reality? God or the material universe?
2. What is the nature of external reality? Ordered or chaotic? Existing objectively or only as it is perceived by subjects?
3. What is a human being? A molecular machine or God’s image bearer?
4. What happens to a person at death? Annihilation, reincarnation, resurrection?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all? Because the same Divine Mind that conceived and created the universe also created our minds? Or is knowledge actually not possible?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong? By relative levels of pleasure and pain, by evolved survival mechanisms, or by revelation from God?
7. What is the meaning of human history? To perfect human society? To please God? Or is it meaningless? ⁸

Any given worldview-holder may be able to produce sophisticated, consistent, and defensible answers to all of these questions, or she may not be able to answer any of them in objective terms. However, she has and believes answers to all seven questions, even if she resorts to skepticism or agnosticism on any point. These answers will have a profound impact on how she receives the truth claims of Christianity (or any other sensory or conceptual input), so they and their relationship to the Christian worldview must be understood well by the apologist seeking effective communication and authentic interaction.

The Christian Worldview
Sire’s proposed worldview model can be applied effectively to Christianity. Indeed, if the aspiring apologist lacks the resources to study any other worldview–which privation would itself pose a severe handicap–knowledge of the Christian one is certainly a necessary condition of meaningful apologetic interaction. Starting from Sire’s answers to the questions of Christian worldview, we might propose the following:

1. Ultimate reality is the triune, transcendent, immanent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, sovereign God.
2. External reality exists objectively and is ordered, having been created ex nihilo to operate “with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.”
3. Human beings are volitional creatures created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore bear dignity and purpose that is otherwise alien to their nature.
4. Upon death, human beings face a single resurrection to a physical body which then experiences an eternal state of felicity with God or eternal torment.
5. We can know about the external world because the Mind that created it also created our minds in his image and likeness. In addition to this ability to discover the world accurately, God reveals knowledge to us using language.
6. Ethics finds its source in the character of a good God. What is right and what is wrong flow from his immutable nature; and these categories are knowable through conscience and revelation.
7. “Human history is a linear, meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity.”⁹

Speaking more succinctly, a Christian might describe the world as created ex nihilo by God, populated by God’s fallen image bearers who can be reconciled to their creator through the cross of Christ, and headed toward a point of historical consummation in which God’s utterly good purposes for his creation will be fully realized. Even this skeletal understanding can begin to provide a meaningful framework from which to engage postmodern men and women thoughtfully and sensitively.

A Postmodern Apologetic Strategy
Notwithstanding the urgency of recent calls for a radical reassessment of Christianity in light of the putative needs of postmodern people, human beings do not change much over time. Intellectual climates and prevailing attitudes change in readily observable ways, but the questions that rob men and women of sleep in the middle of the night are few and well-known. Likewise the immutable laws of consistent thought cannot change any more than we can begin thinking with our kidneys. Apologists can take heart that their subjects are still people, and people still reason the same way about essentially the same questions they did 2,000 years ago.Human society, in contrast, is evolving ever more rapidly. We must also be careful to discern how our generation’s seemingly fluid zeitgeist influences the thinking of those to whom we minister apologetically. The postmodern apologist is guaranteed to encounter a wide array of significantly divergent worldviews, totally unlike her hypothetical French counterpart of the High Middle Ages. This requires her to think in terms of worldview and to have a working knowledge of the worldviews she is most likely to encounter in her ministry.

The contemporary apologist should also expect to find fundamental disagreement on the nature of truth itself. Whereas the Bible views truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, engaging, specific, antithetical, and systematic,¹⁰ the typical postmodern is more likely to see truth as constructed, subjective, relative, trendy, and fragmented. While preparation in comparative worldviews may be the first educational task to be mastered by the apologist, agreeing on the nature of truth–and vigorously defending the Biblical view thereof–is surely the primary logical task in any given apologetic engagement. Without consensus on the Biblical view of truth, meaningful discussion and possibly even knowledge itself are ruled out.

Given a new sensitivity to the diverse worldviews likely to be encountered today and a readiness to defend an intellectually functional understanding of truth, the postmodern apologist is finally advised to engage in apologetics relationally. Postmodern men and women know what it is to be the target of a mass-market ad campaign, and they understand viscerally the utter insincerity and lack of personal concern entailed in such an appeal. To communicate to them unintentionally that they are the subject of some rote method or the target of a large-scale crusade in which they yet again a tiny part of the denominator of some impressive statistic is to ensure that our defense of Christianity will be rejected. Engaging them as persons, soul-to-soul, with authentic concern for the existential import of their questions, is a more Biblically faithful way to earn their hearing.

With these tools in hand, the apologist to the postmodern world can continue to approach unbelievers and doubters with confidence.

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¹Douglas Groothuis, Defending The Christian Faith class notes, Denver Seminary, 31 August 2004.
² 1 Pet 3:15 (ESV)
³ Jude 3 (ESV)
⁴ Acts 17:16-33
⁵ Douglas Groothuis, On Jesus, Wadsworth Philosophers Series, (United States of America: Wadsworth, 2003), 26-35.
⁶James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 17.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Ibid, 20.
⁹Ibid, 26-44.
¹⁰Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 65-79.

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• Posted by Tim on Tuesday, September 21, 2004 at 10:53:28 pm PDT
• Category: Theology, Philosophy
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