Apologetics in a Postmodern World 1

Last updated on: September 15, 2010 at 5:37 pm by Scot McKnight

Apologetics in a Postmodern World 1 2010-09-15T17:37:45-05:00 Scot McKnight

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A friend of mine was working on some apologetic topics and told me what they were. My observation, which I only mentioned in passing, was that what he was most concerned about was not what bugged my students. That is, problems shift and so apologetics shifts and that means that each generation, and perhaps more than once during a generation, brings forth new issues that Christian apologetics needs to address.

By common consent we live in postmodernity and above all that means that “truth is stranger than it used to be.” That means that knowledge and truth have shifted from an empirical basis toward a more subjective orientation. The shift means there is less attention to the object and more on the subject.

This series will examine a new book edited by Dallas Willard (not pictured), and we need sometimes to remember that he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. The book is called: A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions. The book is a collection of lectures from the Veritas Forum that have been held in universities across the nation. It is really a splendid collection of topics, lecturers and lectures.

This series will take up their topics, summarize some of what the lecturers said, and then sometimes take issue with them in order to foster some conversation here about the topic itself.

Apologetics, to begin with, has acquired a bad name for some. Why? Because it is often limited to and foisted upon rationalism and upon arguments and upon reason and upon logic — and that’s fine and apologetics concerns these items. But genuine apologetics goes beyond this, as Alister McGrath makes clear in his new book (The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind). It’s more than just reason: “Arguments do not convert,” he says. As he often does, McGrath illustrates his point by appealing to C.S. Lewis’ sense of meaning and imagination and beauty and joy that transcended reason.

The book by Willard, A Place for Truth, begins with the question of truth, and there are three lectures by three well-known apologists: Richard John Neuhaus, Os Guinness and Tim Keller.

Each of these lecturers knows there’s a problem with truth and truth claims in our world; none of them sketches the whole of the problem or offers a whole solution – who could in one lecture? Neuhaus focuses on “ironic liberalism” and “debonair nihilism.” In other words, he drives it to the bottom of despair and finds the likes of Nietzsche. Fair enough, but I didn’t see enough discussion of why postmodernists say what they say. Guinness says there is “no solid core today.” Well, fair enough … but a massive generalization that really doesn’t help us. It would be more accurate to say the core is under threat and lacks confidence.

Each of them knows that there is truth, that truth can be known, and that the truth is Jesus Christ. All three say this in eloquent ways.

But I find both Neuhaus and Guinness unacceptably dismissive of the nature of the postmodern struggle with truth. At times there’s almost ridicule here, as if in saying “postmodern” there was a snarl. My contention is not that the radical postmodernist — Richard Rorty (pictured) for instance — is right but that the postmodernist is not naive. Dismissive approaches compound the problem, they don’t resolve the issues.

Truth is an issue because of the collapse of metanarratives, the all-embracing and colonizing force of an empirical approach to knowledge, the belief/hope/commitment to that approach as something that will lead both to universal consent and to unlocking the meanings of life, and the force of the hermeneutical element to all of life. Language, so it is said, goes all the way down. The issue of hermeneutics doesn’t even emerge for Neuhaus or Guinness but it does surface indirectly in Keller.

But instead of posturing for arguments that are rooted in a kind of critical realism, which is found in such thinkers as Lesslie Newbigin (and others), where there is a humble respect for the hermeneutical problem and the truth claim-problem, both Neuhaus and Guinness seem to offer a robust assertion of a traditionalist posture about truth. They seem to make their case by insulting postmodernism. That won’t work. The problem I have with them is that they really don’t think the problem is a problem.

But what I found in Tim Keller was both a proper sensitivity and a proper confidence; his concern is the inevitable exclusivity in truth claims and that no matter what happens, exclusivity is claimed by all who propose truth.

Keller doesn’t back down, but he knows what he’s facing. So he begins by showing that postures against truth claims are fading away: you can’t hope it will go away (secularization theory is discredited), you can’t outlaw it (China’s Christianity proves that, you can’t explain it away (evolutionary biologists can’t because they create distrust in their own theories because they need to trust their own brains, the same brain that seems hard-wired to believe in God), you can’t argue it away (by saying all religions the same; but Christianity claims it is superior to other religions; if it is, it is; if it isn’t, then it is an inferior religion) … it’s not narrow, Keller says, to make an exclusive truth claim because everyone does that, even if it is the colonizing secularist who thinks no religion is true. And you can’t privatize it away because no matter where you go, you find we are all committed to transcendent beliefs.

Keller proposes that we distinguish privileged secularism from procedural secularism. The first says we can only argue on the basis of an enlightenment worldview; the second that the State can’t interfere and that everyone can argue in the public square on the basis of her or his beliefs. He then moves into the performance narrative vs. the grace narrative. The former prefers self-advancement and power; the second depends on Christ and weakness and that is the Christian truth.

We’re all fundamentalists, but the issue is what our fundamental is. The Christian fundamental is a Man dying on a cross for his enemies. There’s the truth.

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