Commenting on my Apologetics essay, Jed asks a couple of questions so good that they merit their own post in reply. Plus, it’s been a few days since there’s been a new post here, so why not, eh? He asks:

Not being a student of post modernist philosophy, am I correct in inferring that “modern” apologetics is, at least to a degree, a response to the worldview espoused by such as Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics, i.e. a sort of Heisenbergian view that we create our own reality by our interactions with, uh, reality? I’ve always wondered what would occur if simultaneous observations of two states of an electron were possible. Perhaps they’d cancel each other out, and we’d observe nothing?

Acknowledging the need for brevity in your paper, notably absent is the task of establishing not just the nature of truth, but that the Bible is the unerring truth. Perhaps this isn’t part of a “basic strategy”, but it seems quite basic to me.

Presumably a later paper will address this?

Did you get a good grade?

When I replied to Jed last Friday I hadn’t gotten my paper back yet. I still haven’t. So you, like me, will have to be patient in waiting to learn the one thing we all really want to know.

Beyond that, Jed asks two questions: what is “modern” (or perhaps modernist) apologetics, and why didn’t I spend any time defending the doctrine of Scripture?

I have to admit I’m not familiar with Capra, and that it is to my continuing shame that I am not better-read on modern physics than I am. However, this sort of thing isn’t what modernist apologetics would be about. To my knowledge no one every ascribed that label of “Modernist Apologist” to himself in the heady days of the nineteenth century, but we could certainly name individuals who made it their life’s work to defend the Christian faith against the attacks that occurred during what we could safely call the Modernist era. B.B. Warfield may be the exemplar of this class.

As I have lamented before, there is a trend underway to use terms like “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” in rather imprecise ways. Indulging in a bit of this trendy imprecision, we might say that the core of the Modernist impulse was to arrive at all truth through unaided, autonomous human reason. Once we tapped into the power of unhindered reason, all limits on our ability to understand the physical universe and ourselves were going to fall away, and we would eventually know all that was knowable. (George Will once described the political implications of this Enlightenment Eschaton thus: “When the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, then Pure Reason will be enthroned and everyone will agree about everything.”)

The libertarian right of the blogosphere may wonder what sounds so all-fired bad about this. Indeed, it seems to be the philosophy that animates Instapundit and his satellites. Its cogency in the minds of some notwithstanding, it was the enemy of nineteenth century Christian orthodoxy, and gave rise to defenses of the orthodox doctrine of Scripture, miracles, the Incarnation, and of course theism itself. On the whole it was relentlessly critical of Christianity, but the two systems shared a common view of truth: that it was objective, absolute, antithetical, and knowable to some degree or other. This allowed apologetic interaction to begin by discussing actual disputed doctrines, with less time spent negotiating the laws of logic or agreeing on whether knowledge is possible.

Now, recent thinkers have made the claim that the Church first illegitimately imbibed the Modernist zeitgeist it so hated, the fell asleep at the wheel as Modernity quietly died and Postmodernity arose from its ashes. Whether either of these claims is true, it is certainly the case that much of the Modernist view of truth has passed away, to be replaced by relativism of one stripe or another. This leaves us with the notion of “Postmodern” apologetics, or the defense of the Christian faith to people in a postmodern social and historical context. These people do not automatically believe that truth is objective, antithetical, absolute, and knowable, so the apologetic enterprise must begin by convincing them that it is. The rest of apologetics may be very similar to what went on 150 years ago under the regime of “Modernism,” which is a point I was trying to make in my paper. A few complications have arisen for the contemporary apologist, but the questions that actually rob people of sleep at night are no different than they ever were.

Now, why didn’t I defend the Bible? I was constrained not just by length, but also by intent. I was outlining the Christian worldview and suggesting a strategy for engaging today’s unbelievers, not providing my own top-down apologetic of the whole faith. This is a very practical limitation, since apologetics can’t proceed in the same way for all subjects. You may see the authority of the Bible as a central apologetic question, which means that any apologist taking the time to interact with you should address it. However, I would never waste my time engaging Andy on this topic. Why would he and I expend precious words on it, when we don’t even agree on theism? And if we could agree on theism, what about miracles? What about the character of God? The Incarnation? Inerrancy finds theological purchase in the mind committed to the foregoing; in the mind of the atheistic materialist it is foolishness and always will be.

This isn’t to say that you just have to jump in to inerrancy with no prior justification. It is merely to say that the gulf is too great in many cases to bother with the argument. Theism, miracles, the character of God, and the Incarnation can all be argued before inerrancy is in place¹. It would be better to share that common ground before we go arguing about whether the Bible should be tossed because it says that π is three.

That said, let me repeat that it is your questions that matter, not so much my suggested approaches to questions you may or may not have. Apologetics must be personal. It is an authentic interaction between real human beings on matters of ultimate importance. For it to be worth anything, I must address your actual questions in a way that is cogent to you. Now, getting back to my first point, you don’t get to invent your own rules of cogency, but the fact remains that there is no antiseptic method that I can apply rigorously to all subjects and expect positive results. Dealing with persons is a little looser than that.

Again, many thanks for your excellent questions. Keep it up.

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¹I am being pretty obviously old-skoo Princeton about this. Certain readers–and you know who you are, and how many kids you have–are invited to offer alternate takes on this, or just throw virtual rotten tomatoes at me.

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• Posted by Tim on Thursday, October 7, 2004 at 10:26:03 pm PDT
• Category: Theology
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