Where Everybody's Crazy

My tutor has been on at me again, trying to get me to think about apologetics and, in particular, street evangelism. I have a few doubts about street evangelism - primarily because I would not be doing unto others as I would have them do to me. I hate being accosted on the street. But I'm going to try it - or at least Speaker's Corner or some other non-accostative street work - so that I can crystallise my doubts into real objections. Let's not knock it too much until I've tried it.

But he got me thinking about apologetics. Now I'm not a big fan of apologetics, not at all; I thought there were two reasons why I didn't like it. The reasons I had before were: first, because it's possible for apologetics to intellectualize the Christian faith, reducing it to philosophical and logical propositions; second, because it's invariably done really badly, by people without sufficient grasp of philosophy, logic, epistemology, science and theology to put it all together. (And I include myself in that group of people, albeit reluctantly.) Frankly, most evangelistic sermons I hear make me less sure of my faith because I can argue against them better than I can argue for them.

For instance, a talk the other day by an apparently well-known evangelist fell fowl to two of my three favourite ways of deconstructing apologetics. First, he takes his particular philosophical and epistemological stance as a given - all right-thinking people are logical positivists, so we start within that viewpoint, using the Incarnation to show that a non-empirical God can still exist because he is made empirical in Christ. We deal with this by rejecting the premise; logical positivism is not how we see the world any more. Did the New Age pass Cambridge by somehow? The second tool is the weak anthropic principle. Of course we observe a universe that appears to be designed, you fool, because if it was fundamentally chaotic we wouldn't be here to observe it. Fish, barrel, smoking gun. (Or better, with the conditional probability argument.)

(The third deconstruction technique is pointing out that the evangelist is assuming the consequent and arguing from within the system; for instance, arguing for the historicity of the Christian faith based on the authority of the Bible, a fundamental document of that very faith. Conservative Evangelicals do that because they've typically been Christians for so long that they see no reason to refer to a "lesser" source than the Bible. As Richard says, to be a good apologist you need to be a good atheist.) (While I'm ranting and vaguely on the subject, why do people think that General Revelation - the standard but, I believe, erroneous reading of Romans 1-3 - makes it so apparent to non-Christians that there's a God and a moral order? Have they forgotten what it's like to live as a non-Christian? It's a seriously enlightening experience, I can tell you.)

So I thought that, if apologetic was so bad, what was I going to do about it? What kind of apologetic would satisfy me? And that got me thinking the tortuous question of why I still believe what I believe. It's a very good exercise to check that out every so often, especially if you thinking changes as rapidly as mine. I found it still comes down to the resurrection as ultimate authentication of Jesus's teaching. Take away the resurrection, and the Christian faith is dead; given the resurrection, it's basically a pushover. (Although I admit there could be arguments against that - after all, we don't worship Lazarus.)

This led me to hit upon what I really regard as the weakness of apologetics - not its intellectualism or incompetence, but its granularity. Because you're only trying to move people on in particular areas - say, moving people from atheism to theism - it's very easy to pick holes in the argument. But that's not what we consider incontrovertible; the incontrovertible truth from our perspective is the resurrection of Jesus from which everything else flows.

So for me all apologetics needs to be resurrection apologetics. I'm still going to go out onto the streets though; if only because it'll do me good to feel uncomfortable and be scared witless for a little while.