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Why I Still Talk to Jesus -- In Spite of Everything

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The Apologetics Lie my Daddy and Me Used to Tell

The Apologetics Lie my Daddy and Me Used to Tell

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 9:56 am by Frank Schaeffer

The Apologetics Lie my Daddy and Me Used to Tell 2015-06-29T09:56:15-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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A Facebook friend sent me a note and a link to one of my dad’s old speeches he’d given in 1982 at Coral Gables Church. I spoke there too back in the bad old days of my far right activism. I re-watched the talk. Dad mentioned the projects we’d worked on together several times. It was good to hear his voice. But… while so much of what Dad said was so well said, there is so much I’ve grown to fear and disagree with.

It all boils down to this: apologetics. Dad was relying on a broken idea.

Here’s the note that got me thinking:

HI Frank. When you get a chance please speak to the video below that’s been making the rounds of conservative Christianity. Myself, I embrace the civil rights of all without exclusion. However, my former tribe will be vigorously calling down God’s wrathful judgement on the SCOTUS ruling. I think they have it all backwards for I believe they have been the very persecutors of gays whom they believe are condemned and abandoned of God. But by refusing to accept gay rights they wish to now extend their acrimony, their bigotry, and their discrimination all in the name of God. Rather than accepting the court’s action as pleasing to God they believe it is a sacrilege to God. So here’s the vid… thx! http://www.christianworldview.net/2012/06/dr-francis-schaeffer-speaks-from-the-grave-to-the-u-s-supreme-court/

Here’s my stab at “speaking to” not just this video, but a MUCH BIGGER issue, as he asked. Note that in the talk Dad didn’t speak to the issue of gay rights the note talks about, in fact Dad was always very open to gay men and women who traveled to his ministry of L’Abri. But the note is correct: by extension the religious right and the Republicans will use Dad’s words against people who embrace not only gay rights but all human rights– ahead of so-called Biblical Christianity.

It all goes back to something called “Apologetics.”

Here’s the deal as I see it: Christianity works well— until it doesn’t.

Islam works well— until it doesn’t.

Atheism works well— until it doesn’t.

Buddhism works well— until it doesn’t.

Hinduism works well— until it doesn’t.

Judaism works well— until it doesn’t.

Communism works well— until it doesn’t.

Democracy works well— until it doesn’t.

Agnosticism works well— until it doesn’t.

Philosophy works well— until it doesn’t.

Science works well— until it doesn’t.

Apologetics (Greek ἀπολογία, speaking in defense of a truth claim) is the practice or method of defending a religion (or other world views) through the use of specific information thought to cast light on the argument and “prove” it. The apologetic “method” takes what works well in a system of belief to be used to defended it.

My father was an apologist. I was raised on this word. Today I distrust it.

For instance take Dad’s claim that “Christianity produced the freedoms we enjoy in the West.” This is used by many people to somehow try to prove that Christianity itself is true. But such apologetic proof is part of a whole system built of secondary details, a kind of sleight of hand that hides the central fact of the human condition: ultimate unknowing that I talk about in my most recent book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace.

Bluntly: to say “being a Christian” makes you happy doesn’t mean the doctrines of the faith are true anymore than saying that the sincerity of a million nice and kind Muslims on a Haj makes Islam true. Something can give a shape to a life or offer comfort but that doesn’t make it true.

The problem is that an attempt to defend faith or a political system by accumulating details of history into a whole argument is like saying that a surgeon who operated on you must know everything just because the operation was a success. Such “proofs” are bogus and the work of people desperate to project certainty about things that actually can’t be proved. That surgeon may have saved your life but he may also still be an idiot in every area of his life other than surgery. Or maybe every other patient died.

Whole systems of thought and philosophy are spun out of thin air based on no more than a list of secondary proofs. This is the legacy of CS Lewis, Francis Schaeffer and GK Chesterton. It is what religious schools and seminaries are there for: to concoct arguments out of details that supposedly prove the whole. It is also the legacy of secular apologists like Carl Sagan who argued that because the Universe is huge therefor we are insignificant, a belief that all-too conveniently “confirms” a purely material view of existence.

There are always flaws to this sort of apologetic argument be they from Sagan or my late father. First, the whole story is never told. Second, the tangential “evidence” never cuts to the heart of the matter. For instance my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer, always used to site the freedoms we have in America as proof that Christianity is true because it worked so well. When pressed in discussions Dad always admitted that this “freedom” also included slavery so “was not perfect.” But in speeches during his right wing phase at the end of his life, not to be confused with his years of moderation that proceeded his “pro-life” 1970s phase, he’d leave out inconvenient truths.

Slavery wasn’t an oversite and it wasn’t a minor point. It’s like saying that Germany was great during the Nazi era “except for the Holocaust and the war” Or… “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

Dad’s apologetic premise was false. The “freedoms unique to the founding of Christian America,” owed more to the Renaissance and Enlightenment than to the churches. Jefferson, the slave holder, knew that and so did John Adams, the Christian anti-slavery critic of the vile trade. Both went to France. Both read Voltaire. Both held views that were an amalgam of Christianity and secular political philosophy. Both shaped their views more according to geography than principles. Context weighs more than belief.

And note when the purely religious version of the sort of reformed faith Dad held was applied in the modern era in South Africa—by Calvinist Christians who shared Dad’s basic theology—apartheid was one result. And this too was “Bible-based.” The Afrikaners used the same biblical texts that the slave-holding South used. But Dad, like all of us would pick and choose what “Bible” to follow while saying he believed all of it.

There is a bigger problem with the apologetics “method.” Even if the result of some action is both good and clearly based on religion or a secular ideology, this doesn’t make the other truth claims of that world view true. High speed rail works wonderfully in communist China, that doesn’t make the government any less oppressive, the country any less polluted and Communism any more “true.” Knowing a great man who is a Catholic priest doesn’t make the Roman Catholic truth claims true anymore than being raped by another priest discredits the whole Church.

Where the left and right and believers and secular people all too often fail is to fail to hold their apologists’ feet to the fire of the actual history of their beliefs not to mention to the fire of the stupidity of the core doctrines. For instance, liberals give a silly pass to Islam and to secularism. Conquest isn’t the exception to Muslim history and identity, but the norm. Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao weren’t details of history, they were one aspect of militant secularism in action that consistently defines it.

Conservative Christians give the same free pass to the so-called Christian West. Roman Catholic Belgium WAS genocide in the Congo. Bach’s reformation Germany ended in a holocaust. These weren’t anomalies but the norm when false certainty was applied to culture.

Race-hatred, slavery and bigotry wasn’t s footnote in “Christian” America any more than it was in slave-holding and slave-trading Islam. It WAS (and is) Christian America. It was and is the Islamic world.

Colonialism wasn’t an oversite. It WAS the Christian West. Secularism too becomes an oppressive religion when it too claims all-knowing wisdom. Just ask human rights activists in China. According to a New Yorker article just ask the relatives of people in Belgium who have recently been euthanized by over-eager pro-euthanasia enthusiasts who now euthanize “terminal” mental patients, even some who are just suffering from depression, under laws passed in the name of self-determination and “humanism.” These same humanists are pressing for laws now to euthanize children as detailed in the New York Times.

Apologetics fails on two levels. It’s never consistent and it is a false argument anyway. That Islam produced a few nice moments in Cordoba Spain doesn’t tell us anything more than say the fact that Rembrandt was a reformed Calvinist believer tells us about whether or not what he believed was true. Cordoba was nice. Rembrandt painted great art. Does that make reformed Dutch Christianity of apartheid South Africa true? Does that make the truth claims put forward by the Saudi royal family about the inevitability of world dominance by “the only true faith” of Islam, true? Do the humanists in Belgium who sincerely believe they are ending the suffering of someone depressed make their claims true?

Conversely when the New Atheists tell us—in their own version of theology—that all wars are religious wars so all religion is bad they make the same mistake my father made but in reverse. Even if religion led to war that is not an argument that demolishes all religions’ truth claims.

Here’s the reality as I see it: human primates are violent because of how we evolved not because of religion. Assholes are assholes whatever they say. Good people are good however we label them. And actually wars start for many reasons other than religion. Atheists too have been oppressors and not because of atheism but because of the fact that they are semi-evolved primates like the rest of us, more ruled by genetics than free will.

Face it: we are all in the same boat. Good things happen because we are human primates, for instance altruism evolved as a means of survival (be nice so people are nice back and don’t club you) before Jesus told us to be nice. Just because he articulated this very good idea well doesn’t mean everything else in the Bible is true.

One other thing: This cuts both ways. There may be a God with or without the blessing of evolutionary psychology. Reason too is not so reasonable. Deal with it.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon

Follow Frank on Twitter www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer See Frank’s paintings http://www.frankschaefferart.com/ Follow Frank on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16 Contact Frank at http://www.frankschaeffer.com/

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