In my last post on the subject of apologetics, I argued the true spirit of apologetics should be focused on laying out the place of Christian beliefs within the context of the life and community of faith.  Instead of trying to “convince” non-believers about the “reasonableness” of the historicity or phenomenology of some point of doctrine, I suggested that the “reasonableness” of Christian belief can only be fully realized in the articulation of these doctrines as emerging from the experience of the faithful themselves.  In this way, then, beliefs about the Incarnation, resurrection, etc. are not “truths” that necessarily exist independently of the profession of faith of the community of believers, but rather find their truthfulness and meaningfulness from the mission and identity of the body of Christ within the kingdom of God in the world.

I suggest that the purpose of apologetics was never intended to be about converting others to one’s way of thinking through logic and argumentation.  Rather, to recall the famous Petrine passage, Christians are to give an answer “…to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (I Peter 3:15).  The words in bold are important, for they frame the course that apologetics are to take.  The “answer” we are to give is fundamentally about the hope we have placed in Christ through the existential committing of our entire selves to the purposes of the kingdom of God through the act and life of faith.  And since the hope we have is rooted irrevocably within this faith, it is not something that can be principally about the utilization of logic and reason to bring about a change of mind and philosophical orientation in those who raise the questions.

The Theistic Argument

A perfect example of this is the question of the existence of God.  In popular apologetics, the “question of God” is one that has taken form in a variety of answers across the centuries. From Paul’s argument in the Areopagus, to Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, to the more recent Kalam cosmological argument supported by William Lane Craig, Christian theologians have made innumerable attempts to ground the “reasonableness” of theism in human logic, to widely varying degrees of success.  Given that we are still asking the questions and coming up with new answers, it’s clear that none of them have been answered satisfactorily.

But these arguments’ lack of success and “staying power” is not because they haven’t employed logic sufficiently.  To the contrary, I would argue it is simply because human logic is too limited to establish any argument about God in absolute certainty.  As human epistemology is necessarily boundary-limited by the parameters of the universe, logic is only capable of dealing with those things that pertain to the same domain.  As God is conceived of as “other-than” and “transcendent-of” the universe, the inability of human logic to apprehend the eternal nature of the divine is something that cannot be overcome by the same domain-limited logic.

This is not the most important point, though.  For even if one were to assume that logic is capable of exhaustively establishing the existence of God, what is gained from the perspective of apologetics?

The Outcome of a “Logical” Argument for Theism

To take a contemporary example, there are many who find promising avenues in the teleological argument for the existence of God, “proofs” which attempt to establish the nature and ontology of God on the basis of analyzing the “design” and history of the universe.  As scientists gain more and more data about the universe, there is increasing openness within some circles to the idea that the universe is somehow “ordered” by an intelligent creator, or at least grounded in some trans-universal rational principle. However, regardless of how seemingly convincing these arguments “from design” might be, their establishment does not de facto lead one to Christian faith, as if the “proof” of the idea of God on the basis of the ordered-ness of the universe encapsulates the Christian understanding of God.  There are many, like the British-born physicist Paul Davies, who are open to elements of the idea of theism because of the seeming force of the “rational” base of the universe.  Yet this openness to the idea of “God” or even, in Davies’ words, a “rational ground in which the whole scientific enterprise is rooted…a universe…with meaning or purpose underpinning it,” does not translate into “faith” or really anything remotely resembling it.

And here we come to the crux of the issue.  As I’ve been arguing, apologetics for Christian belief, for the vitality of the “content” of faith, is not something that can be established on the basis of human logic or any manner of phenomenological proof.  Moreover, I would suggest that Christians should be somewhat restrained in their attempts to do such things.  After all, to a Christian, the question of God’s existence is not one of logic or proof.  The force of theism within Christian belief does not derive from a “logically necessity” that the universe had to have a “first cause” (or any other ontological/teleological/cosmological argument). No, the meaningfulness of God’s existence is rooted in the revelation of Godself in the person of Christ.  This is the foundation for Christian faith not only in relation to the idea of the existence of a Creator, but also for how we think and theologize about God.  In this way, then, from the perspective of faith, all arguments for the existence of God are made ex post facto; Christians do not (or should not, at least) argue from the existence of God to the revelation of God in Christ; rather, the very revelation of Godself in Christ is the basis for how we approach understanding the nature and existence of God.  Apart from this unique understanding, the existence of God based on logical proofs does not begin to approach the meaningfulness of “God” within the complex of Christian belief.

The Crisis of Faith

Yet despite this seemingly self-evident conclusion, we find within popular apologetics a tendency to transform the very nature of faith into an act of intellectualism.  The “proofs” for this or that doctrine are offered up, not simply to convince antagonists of the “truth” of Christian belief, but also to provide a measure of surety to its professors that the content of their belief is ultimately logical and rational, that their “faith” is something demonstrable and provable on the basis of whatever philosophical worldview holds sway.

While those who do this are, I assume, well-intentioned, such an approach to apologetics, in my view, does irrevocable damage to the place of faith within the dynamic of Christian life and belief.  As mentioned before, the very nature of faith is that of crisis.  It is the call to commit one’s entire ontology–life, energy, soul, body, desires,etc.–to the sovereignty of a God whose existence cannot be encapsulated nor demonstrated on the basis of human logic and reason.  It is a call for the whole of one’s person to commit to a way of being that is “other-than” the patterns and paradigms of default human existence.  Such a call, such a life, is not something that can be entered into casually or partially.  To borrow the famous metaphor from Kierkegaard, faith is the total existential “leap” in which we abandon entirely our claims to ourselves and our abilities to “make” (understand, control, objectify) reality.  In this ultimate resignation, we commit ourselves rather to the unknowable darkness into which we leap, a darkness which is illuminated with divine light only after the plunge has been taken.

But if this is the true nature of faith, a life characterized by sheer existential crisis and the fundamental disavowal of any human ability to apprehend “truth” on the basis of its own powers, we see that attempts to integrate the fundamental nature of faith into the very paradigms that have been disavowed is ultimately self-destructive.  In “establishing” the articles of faith on the basis of logic, experimentation, historicity, and whatever other philosophical categories might hold sway, we ultimately emasculate faith, for it is no longer the wild, untamable force of crisis, but rather the comfortable conclusion of a ultimately self-justifying and self-deluding epistemology.

Is this Anti-Intellectualism?

So does this reorientation to faith-as-crisis mean that logic and reason in the articulation of belief are unimportant?  Is the life of faith essentially a call to anti-intellecutualism?  I would argue no, on both counts.

As I’ve stressed before, apologetics still has a very important role in the life of the Christian community.  My suggestion is simply that rather than utilizing logical, rational arguments to try to convince non-believers of the “rationality” of Christian belief over and against whatever-other-beliefs, the target of apologetics should be to articulate the place which Christian beliefs have in the life and faith of the believer.  So in the case of the idea of God, apologetics should not be about trying to use the power of sheer logic to convert non-theists to the acceptance of the idea of God (“Christian” or otherwise), but to rather lay out in an orderly and consistent way the place that theism has in the matrix of Christian belief, and how this article of faith informs the way Christians think about life, relationships, redemption, eternity, etc.  For questions of “origins,” we should be less interested in trying to scientifically (or psuedo-scientifically) establish particular interpretations of an ancient creation narrative, but should concentrate on allowing the meaning of this narrative to inform our understanding of God’s purposes and designs for creation and our place in bringing this to fruition.  And the list goes on and on…

If Christians are perceived as “anti-intellectual”, it is, I think, because so many have bought into the false paradigms of popular apologetics.  Within these approaches, logic and reason are ends in themselves, so in many cases the expression of Christian belief is forced into an artificial antithesis of other “logical” arguments. So whether one is speaking of origins, theism, sexuality, etc., many “Christian” conclusions can come off as “stupid” and “anti-intellectual”, not because the actual categories of faith are devoid of rational force, but simply because a flawed methodology has led to an equally flawed articulation.

But as we’ve seen, this is wholly unnecessary.  If we are truly about the work of apolgetics, we’d spend less time screaming and fighting trying to get non-believers to view “faith” as rational, and commit our energies to making sure that we have sufficiently articulated the meaning and place of Christian belief within the life of faith for ourselves.  After all, until we have come to grips with the crisis of faith and the place of Christian belief within it, we will never be “ready to give a reason for the hope that we have.”