The Reason for God

Have a look at this Tim Keller lecture at authors@google. He presents his new book "The Reason for God."

What's the role of apologetics?

There are lots of different views of apologetics and their role in evangelism - from very sceptical to quite scholastic. Some people see them as the necessary first step to presenting the gospel, others view them as semi-heretical irrelevancies. Of course, a lot of this is tied up with your views of revelation, sin and new birth. For my money, I wonder whether the problem stems from the categorization of something that seems, in many ways, just a natural part of conversation about God.

Your present a statement about God and your friend says "I don't believe that - why on earth should I believe that?" You respond by saying "It says it here in the Bible". They say "But that's tautological - you're just trying to assume what you're trying to demonstrate." And you say, "Ah, yes but you have to appreciate the subtlety of my epistemology, which is rooted in reformed presuppositional methods.".......

Well, I guess it could go like that, and perhaps that is good sometimes. But the reality is that we all try instinctively to persuade people that what we believe is Truth. We don't just state it in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. We seek to influence them and show them the attractiveness or rightness of what we're saying.... In other words, we argue, persuade, reason. Now, of course, one can debate which arguments are good ones or not, but the point is that all preaching is in some form apologetic because we seek to convince people and not simply state truth. Thus, it seems to me that apologetics is really unavoidable as part of ministry if we understand it to mean an integrated persuasion of people to change what they're doing and rather do this.

Deliver us from Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins is continually his campaign against religion - now in political terms. He's seeing to help the victimized lobby of atheists in America to gain public political influence. Read about it here. I can't help thinking that Dawkins fails to appreciate the difference between religious and secularized. The US is much more religious than Europe (a shock to liberals) but still incredibly secular (a shock to religious people). I don't think Dawkins has all that much to worry about to be honest. The media constantly hype up the role religion plays in American politics. Just mentioning God does not mean that God is really taken seriously. Anyway, there is an (unusually) excellent comment on this in the Guardian which gives his whole approach a great critique. Here's a taster.

"I have been chided in the past for referring to the "militant" atheism of Dawkins and his like. But the desire for one's creed to spread, in order to make the world a better place, surely merits the label. Atheists reply that there is nothing dangerous or sinister in the desire to see more rationality, less superstition. Really? Dawkins was asked what he hoped an atheist bloc in the US might achieve, and this is the first part of the answer he gave: "I would free children of being indoctrinated with the religion of their parents or their community." Is this not amazing? I have seldom read a sentence that has induced such a sharp shiver of revulsion. This man evidently dreams of a state in which it is illegal to take one's children to a place of worship, or to say prayers with them as one puts them to bed."

The appeal of atheism

CS Lewis speaks in Surprised by Joy of the great appeal that atheism had for him...

"the materialist's universe had the enormour attraction that it offered limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster could overtake you in it. Death ended all...The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit. It was also perhaps not unimportant that the externals of Christianity made no appeal to my sense of beauty....Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music....But of course what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatredof authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer."

It is often the position taken by the evangelist that Christianity is inherently attractive and that if people think for a moment, then they will choose it. Now, I don't want to dispute that at all, and yet Lewis reminds us here of something else. The gospel will always be unattractive in many ways, and perhaps an evangelist's job is to explain as much why it is so darn unappealing. Understanding my dislike may after all lead to that dislike being removed. Lewis's awareness of his fear of Cosmic Interference helped him see why he disliked God so much, and played a role in engendering a desire for God in him.

Christ as the end of the story

Looking at Col 1:15-20 again this week in Bible study I was again very forcefully struck by Christ as the beginning and end of all things. This means that everything there is finds its suitable end and purpose in Him - every living thing, every element of culture, every story. Christ is the North Pole towards which everything is ultimately being drawn - even when they resist Him. Even in denying Him no-one can escape the fact that Christ is their purpose and goal. He is the end of all things.

So, Christ is always the end of every story, the ultimate answer to the question, the fulfilment of all things. All our aspirations are really about Him. This gives us an important nudge in apologetics. Preaching, proclamation and discipleship should be connecting all our stories with that one end of every story. We need to be seeking to understand how Christ is the Lord over every narrative and every search for meaning. Everything in ourselves, our culture and our world is screaming out for fulfilment in Him. The story may want to deny Him, but it cannot deny Him cos it's His world. This should give us tremendous confidence in speaking to individuals and our culture. Their hopes and dreams and accounts of the world can only find resolution and fulfilment in Christ. One day the reconciliation will be complete and every story and every hope and every search for meaning will find itself in Christ. What a day that will be!

Atheists, Easter and resurrection

See here a great article in the Telegraph from Alistair McGrath in response to AC Grayling and the recent attacks from atheists on religion. I think he models very well how to engage in a public forum.

Here is an excellent article in the Guardian by NT Wright on the resurrection.

Atheism

I listened to the Guardian science podcast interview with AC Grayling (well-known philosopher and atheistic sceptic) today. Find it here. It is basically a discussion on science and religion.

Now, my point here is not to disagree with everything that was said, for there is much that was said about science that any Christian would be happy with. But, on the other hand, the whole tone of it was militantly atheist.

1. The whole discussion was undergirded by the very typical secular atheistic assumption that it is only 'religious people' who have beliefs in need of any justification. It is almost as if atheism/naturalism just 'is' and needs no justification. It is de facto true. It is the 'religious person' who is biased, who must explain himself and who must give evidence. This kind of reasoning is so common that we don't really notice it - and as Christians we even accept it and scurry to defend ourselves. Reasons are demanded for belief in Christ, while no kind of justification for any other worldview/values is really offered. There is a kind of blindness to one's own assumptions as assumptions. They remain unquestioned even though they serve as the basis on which one doubts the gospel. I take this simply to be the extension of a sociological reality. It is always the minority who must justify themselves over against the majority secular culture. I think we need to be bolder at turning the argument around and asking "why is atheism etc so reasonable?"

2. At one point in the interview Grayling dismisses the need for morality to be based on religious belief. His criticism is directed against a command ethic i.e. do good so as to avoid punishment and gain a reward. He argues that many people do good without any notions of reward/punishment and, therefore, God must therefore be unnecessary and irrelevant. Now, the problem is that Christians can be prone to use this kind of argument. That is: 1. if there is no God then we can get away with anything 2. therefore, we need God. It's a kind of argument you find in Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov". I think that Christians must be careful here because a crude form of the command ethic is susceptible to Grayling's (and Kant's) criticism. If you only do good out of fear then really in what sense are you really doing good?

I think my response to Grayling would be more along the lines of how to coherently explain morality. If it's simply the result of evolution, how can it be anything but arbitrary? Yet, the whole force of ethics/morality is precisely that: it isn't arbitrary. A Christian, on the other hand, can point out that 1. we feel the absoluteness of right/wrong cos the universe is ultimately made by a moral God 2. the doctrine of creation explains why people do good without any explicit faith - we are made in God's image, live in God's world and can no more be totally amoral than we can be totally alogical 3. we are not saying that simply believing in God is a basis for goodness in a Biblical sense, as that can be mere religiousness (which will breed its own sin) 4. rather, living a 'good' life is not rooted in knowing what to do but in the Spirit and being supernaturally changed.

3. Scientific method works brilliantly in certain areas and poorly in others. It's great for shooting rockets into space and growing crops, but not great at giving meaning to life or telling me what is good/not good. Grayling seems to think that science is the greatest good we have ever had. He has great confidence in the scientific method - but science has given us Hiroshima as well as a cure for smallpox. Science tells us how stuff works but cannot tell us whether it is beautiful or kind or good.

Missional Preaching

Some thoughts about how normal, weekly preaching might win people to Christ.

1. Preaching needs to see an unbelieving world with all its objections and questions as its context, and not just the 'church'. We need to preach 'as if the whole unbelieving society was sat there listening to us'.

2. We need apologetics to be integrated in preaching i.e. taking objections to various elements of a sermon seriously and dealing with them in the sermon.

3. We need to be regularly dealing with the range of objections people have to Christianity.

4. We need to deconstruct the (post) modern world and show how its thought systems, attitudes etc do not work and are incoherent.

5. We need to show how people's longings and stories are truly met only in the gospel.

6. We need to listen very well to our culture before we speak. We need to understand who we are talking to and what their thinking is.

7. We need to show how the gospel defies people's assumptions - and so be counter-intuitive in our approach to people.

Richard Dawkins

Here is a sophisticated and witty critique of Dawkin's book by an internationally-acclaimed American philosopher, Alvin Plantinga. Well worth a read, though you may not like it if you are a 6 day creationist.

Have we found the bones of Jesus?

There's been much hysteria in the press after the release of a new documentary about the tomb of Jesus (and of course Mary Magdalene) being found. I have to say: this does get a bit tiring.... But, lots of people watch this kind of stuff and are either further confirmed in their unbelief or they have their faith rocked.

See here for the article in the Guardian.

See here for a thorough critique from a NT professor.