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Toolbox Apologetics

In the October 2004 issue of This Rock, Steven B. Cowan, a former grad school officemate of mine, wrote an article summarizing five major schools of apologetics as they exist within contemporary Evangelical apologetics. I then responded to analyze the degree to which they were compatible with Catholic apologetics, what Catholics could learn from the apologetics Evangelicals are currently doing, and what Evangelicals may be able to learn from us. One thing I suggested during the course of my article was a particular approach to apologetics that I call “toolbox apologetics.” 

One Step or Two?

As the “classical method” is applied in Catholic circles, apologetics is done in three stages: (1) The existence of God is proved; (2) The truth of the Christian faith is proved; and (3) The truth of the Catholicism in particular is proved. (Evangelicals often use exactly the same method; they just leave off step 3.)

Not everybody agrees that this is the best way to do apologetics, and so squabbles emerge as to which is the right way to do it. One rival approach, which has come to be called the “evidential method” in recent times, suggests a one-step approach, often taking the Resurrection of Christ as its starting point. If Christ was resurrected, the reasoning may go, then that was a supernatural act that requires an explanation. Jesus is the one best qualified to give us that explanation. He indicated that it was a miracle done by God to save the world from its sins and to prove that he himself is the Messiah. In the absence of a better, contrary explanation, we should assume that this is what the Resurrection was. Therefore, Christianity is true.

According to this method, one need not spend time on the classical method’s first step of proving God’s existence. Jesus’ Resurrection (which would come into play in the classical method’s second step) itself can be used as evidence that God is real. At this point the squabbling begins, with classicalists and evidentialists arguing back and forth whether the first step is really necessary or not.

I don’t want to rehash those arguments here. My point is simply to illustrate the kind of arguments over method that some contemporary apologists—particularly in the Evangelical community—get into. To be frank, the dispute seems rather silly to me. I like the classical method and am perfectly happy to use it, but it seems to me that the evidentialists are obviously right. You don’t have to prove the existence of God before you use something like a miracle to argue for his existence. Indeed, many of the arguments classicalists use to prove God’s existence themselves use miracles to argue for God. If you argue that the creation of the world or its continued existence or the order we see in it are all beyond the power of nature to produce, pointing to a cause outside of nature, then you are using a miracle to argue for God’s existence. It’s just a miracle of a different sort than Christ’s Resurrection.

This is just one of the disputes over method that occurs. If you want a good survey of the contemporary discussion of apologetic method, then get Steve’s book Five Views of Apologetics. It is a work any serious apologist should be familiar with. The book is a great resource for seeing how others are doing apologetics, and this of itself makes the book worth getting. The contributors to the book are also irenic and see value to each others’ approaches. But elsewhere the discussion of apologetic method often is marred by an assumption that there is a single “right way” to do apologetics. This to me seems counterintuitive.

Fatima’s Story

The fact is that people come to the faith from very different starting points and with very different concerns and questions. Let me give you an example.

A number of years ago I received an e-mail from a woman whom I will call Fatima. She lived in a non-Christian country and had been raised non-Christian. Now she was considering the Christian faith. She didn’t need the existence of God proved to her, for she already believed in that. What she needed was a way of deciding between her native religion and Christianity. These were the two “live options” she had before her, in William James’s terminology (see his excellent essay “The Will to Believe”). What could give her a reason to believe in one over the other? Hypothetically, she might have conducted a study of the historical credentials of the Gospels and decided that the former should be trusted when recounting the death and resurrection of Christ. She could have done this, but she didn’t show an interest in conducting a detailed analysis of the available historical evidence that might have a bearing on the reliability of these ancient documents.

She didn’t ask me in her e-mail about conducting such an examination, and it would have been wrong for me to try to force it on her as the “right way” to decide between Christianity and her native religion.

Instead, I took my cues from her to see what was foremost in her mind and try to answer the questions she felt were pressing upon her. She wanted to know what the Catholic faith teaches about the role of women. It was understandable that she would be curious about this. In her society women have very diminished status and often are mistreated in ways that can be traced to her native religion’s views and not simply to the culture. Fatima was feeling this acutely and was curious to know what the Catholic faith taught about women and their role. Indeed, Christian apologetics since the very beginning appealed to the superiority of Christian moral doctrine as evidence of Christianity’s divine origin.

The superiority of the Christian view of women might not be a sufficient reason to chuck her native religion in favor of Christianity, but it was a reason nonetheless, and God had led Fatima to the point of seeing this. It would have been wrong of me, as an apologist, to try to shoehorn Fatima’s unique situation into a pre-formed apologetic mold and to have ignored her concerns. To do so would have treated her with less than the respect she deserved and would have failed to respect the point to which God had led her. What I needed to do was answer the question she had at the time and then go from there, tailoring my presentation of the reasons for the Christian faith to her own particular case. I did, and Fatima eventually did embrace Christ.

Fatima Not Unique

But Fatima’s “unique situation” is not unique at all.

Anyone who spends time working with people undergoing conversions quickly learns that almost nobody proceeds through the step-by-step methodological manner that apologetics textbooks outline. This raises a question: Why are the textbooks written as they are? If nobody (or next to nobody) ends up converting to the faith by reading books like this, why write them in this fashion? The answer is that apologetics textbooks are not written for people converting to the faith; they are written to train apologists. Often the people meant to read them are students in seminary. Given this, it is understandable that they wouldn’t be designed to meet the needs of the ordinary person undergoing a conversion. They’re designed to meet the needs of academics, or at least semi-academics. One thing that such an audience finds desirable is a systematic approach, and so authors try to identify key junctures in the hierarchy of truths (God exists, Jesus is the Christ) and then argue for them in a systematic way.

A Life of Its Own

I think at some point, though, the process of writing apologetics textbooks took on a life of its own, and authors—at least to some degree—stopped writing for students and started writing for themselves and their peers. In other words, they started composing apologies for the Christian faith that were detached from practical application and designed to address the concerns of other professionals.

In Catholic academia there are not presently professors of apologetics (much to our loss), but in Evangelical circles there are. Catholic and Evangelical philosophers also have taken a significant hand in recent higher-level apologetics discussions. But along the way something was lost: the recognition that apologetics is fundamentally an applied science. Unlike physics or mathematics, which can have practical applications but can be as abstract as they like, apologetics is oriented to defending the faith in the trenches, to encountering real people and answering the real concerns they have as they find their way to the faith.

From this perspective, it is clear that any attempt to shoehorn all of apologetics into a single method is doomed to failure. Anyone who treats the ordinary inquirer to a cookie-cutter approach to apologetics will be frustrated at how little success he has in helping others toward the faith.

He will frustrate, confuse, and disrespect those he is trying to help.

The Toolbox

We need textbooks that train apologists to approach apologetics the way carpenters approach carpentry.

There is no single method for every building project. Each project is different and so poses its own challenges and problems that must be solved. As they tackle them, carpenters reach into their toolboxes. Sometimes the tools they produce get the job done; other times they don’t, in which case new tools must be tried. It’s a process of trial and error, relying on skill to suggest which approaches will likely be the most successful in dealing with the problem at hand.

The sooner apologists break free of the idea that there is a single model that should be pursued in apologetics, the more people will be helped on their journeys to the faith.

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