The Limits of Traditional Apologetics

No reasonable person with a brain attached to their body is going to experience zero cognitive dissonance in their lives. The control beliefs we have, if they have any substance at all, are going to clash, often or occasionally, with facts on the ground. It may even be an index of the truth of those beliefs if they do. If we are intellectually and spiritually alive, meta-narratives at odds with our own will garner our attention and call the viewpoint we have adopted into question. Traditional apologists too often paper over such conflicts, offer answers where instead we should hold on to questions, and shut off inquiry rather than encourage it.  Or I should say pseudo-traditional apologists, since the Bible itself and great authors like Augustine, Maimonides and Aquinas do not sweep the substantive issues under the rug, but face them head on. 

Michael Patton has a post up with a list of 15 books/authors for those who “are having trouble with their belief.” My take: it is a list that lacks courage. I base this judgment on a theory of knowledge that is different than the one presupposed by Patton. On my view, the best way to think through one’s faith, to refine it and eliminate impurities, is to put it through whatever acid tests are available.  

If that is the case, it makes sense to read fearless authors, believers and unbelievers, who rush in where angels fear to tread. A few of the authors Patton recommends do this. C. S. Lewis does, in The Problem of Pain and elsewhere. But it is another kind of author, writers with nervous, penetrating minds like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, who are of the greatest help if the goal is to face life head-on and think through one’s belief (or unbelief) naked, as it were, before the evidence.

The popular apologists offer a weak brew compared to poets and authors of fiction. As long as one is able to think with one’s entire body as it were – a gift worth seeking – full immersion in the poetry of T. S. Eliot will provide a cold shower unlike that of any philosopher. After the shower, it is possible to warm up by a fire barely hinted at in the poem.

What if one wishes to get a handle on eschatology, on heaven and earth and how they relate to each other? By all means, read Flannery O’Connor’s Revelation. If one wishes to understand the concept of vicarious suffering, leave the dreary theologians behind, and read Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (touched on here). What if one is trying to make sense of war and peace, and the meaning, if there is one, to history? Read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (first orientation), and Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many and The Blue Mountains of China (touched on here). These are just examples.

Christians in a hurry reach for authors like Josh McDowell, Peter Kreeft, and Lee Strobel to relieve their doubts. Jews in a hurry read Shmuley Boteach for the same reason. But these authors are a poor substitute for the great authors. Don’t read Kreeft. Read Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. Read Tim Keller, but then go read Jonathan Edwards, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Berger, and Francis Collins on which he depends. Don’t read Boteach. Read Rambam and Ramban. These authors will teach you to think. That’s different from having someone else think for you.

On the concept of control beliefs, why it’s essential to have them, the more robust the better, for starters I recommend Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (2d ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984 [1976]). 

Comments

[Jeremy]

This is a very good post. Over the past number of years, I've developed a strong distaste for popular level apologetics literature. These materials usually pit one side of an argument against another and assume that other side has nothing of value to say. And more often than not, what one side says about the other is only a caricature.

[James Pate]

This reminds me of a post I wrote a few days ago---or, actually, I quoted a book by Norman Cohen that had a dialogue between a Jew and a Gnostic who was attacking the Jewish faith. It's based on primary sources. The Jew doesn't downplay suffering or close the book on the subject with an argument!

http://jamesbradfordpate.blogspot.com/2009/10/stubborn-faith-as-part-of-current.html

[James Pate]

I mean Eugene Mihaly wrote it. I read parts of a Norm Cohen book thereafter.

[Karyn]

Hi John,
This is a great post. Have you seen the book "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything" by David Dark?

Karyn

[Ros]

Goodness, I'd entirely forgotten about Shmuley Boteach. He was setting up L'Chaim in Oxford around the time I was an undergraduate. I didn't know he'd ever written anything.

[JohnFH]

Thanks everyone, for comments and suggestions.

Ros, Shmuley is quite the go-getter in debate these days, which I think you can find on youtube.

[James Pate]

Wasn't he one of Michael Jackson's spiritual advisers?

[JohnFH]

Did Jackson have Christian, Muslim, and Jewish spiritual advisors?

The reason I ask is that, as Oscar Wilde put it, life imitates art. If that is what Jackson did, it won't be long before Presidents and such follow suit.

[terri]

James...you're correct.

ugh...I can't stand Shmuley. He has taken the worst part of Evangelical Christianity's hunger for celebrity and "hipness" and given it a Jewish spin.

How can a spiritual advisor worth any salt sell tapes of conversations he had with his tragic, now-dead "advisee", all in what seems like self-promotion and early marketing for a book he plans on selling.

I find it creepy.

I guess this entire comment is off-topic, though.

[James Pate]

Hi Terri. I didn't know he was doing that. I liked an article he wrote about Michael Jackson, because it looked good and spiritual next to many of the Christians who were bashing Michael Jackson. Also, I didn't know he was a big-time apologist.

[Aaron Taylor]

I liked the post, but I thought you were a little hard Kreeft. For one thing, I think he's pretty good about teaching readers to think (The Unaborted Socrates caused a pro-choice friend to totally rethink his position). For another, he'd be the first to tell you (and often does) that Abelard and Aquinas are the ones folks SHOULD be reading. I've got a soft spot in my heart for him!

[JohnFH]

Hi Aaron,

We are actually on the same page. Kreeft writes very well, and is perhaps at his best in making people like Abelard and Aquinas come alive.