MysteriousFaith

An Apology for Apologetics

Apologetics are to the mind what spirituality is to the heart. Both have value, but both exist best in tension with the other. Each of us is the product of a complex interaction of in-born, familial and experiential realities. For some of us, uncertainty in a familial relationship as children created a very deep need to know the facts behind our beliefs.

An Apology for Apologetics

What exactly are Christians called to be: technically accurate in their beliefs (a kind way of saying “being right”) or living a life of unceasing love for others? Too many Christians feel that God loves them because they are right; frankly, the more “right” they are, the more God will love them. But this perspective is in strict contrast to what the Apostle Paul challenged us to be when he said “faith, love and hope, and the greatest of these is love.” Such a statement is too simply passed over as being of poetic and not apologetic significance. To dwell on what Paul said is to force ourselves to recognize not only how we are to interact with others, but, I would suggest much more importantly, the limitations to human knowledge. Paul told us that what mattered most was not what we believed (faith), not our projection of being validated in eternity (hope), but our love towards others and our God.

The Christianity of today is deeply rooted in its need to be right, perhaps because much that has been held to be absolute truth has become subject to increasingly complex analysis and questioning over the last several hundred years. Fundamentalists especially have built around themselves walls of Biblical inerrancy and infallibility to defend themselves against the advancing claims of modernity. These walls, being built increasingly tall and wide are none-the-less damningly brittle. No matter how tall and wide the walls of religion may be, science will continue to advance, eating away slowly what has been built up as fact, facts that require knowledge, and knowledge that supports belief. Fundamentalists rightly fear a world without religion, not purely as critics would suggest because they use religion to hide behind the most complex of life’s questions, but because they recognize the value of religion; its development of community, its emphasis on responsibility, and its attempt to force mankind to dwell on questions of origin.

As modernity advances, religions tend to become increasingly brittle, a recognition that I believe should color religious people’s own view of themselves. Religion, like most ideologies, is at its worst when it is backed into a corner. The corner religion finds itself in today is a combination of technology, forensic evaluation of Holy Scripture, and questions as to what in Holy Scripture is mythology and what is ultimate spiritual truth. Ultimately spiritual truth has nothing to fear from these challenges; however, religion has much to fear from them. As these things come together in the classic historical squeeze play, religions will react, forcing more and more strident definitions of who is “in” and who is “out”, what is “right” and what is “wrong.” The essentials of faith will become broader and more exclusive instead of a honed effort to determine what is essential to living a real life of faith. This realization should color how people view apologetics, the classic term used to define the means by which people defend their faith. Apologetics are important, and this essay in no way wishes to minimize their significance and their role in the life of faith. But apologetics are many times masks that hide greater difficulties and real unanswered questions, forcing to the forefront the brittleness of today’s life of faith - the questions of rightness of mind, not purity of heart.

Apologetics Rarely Acknowledge the Role of Faith

Christianity must be very careful as to what it attempts to prove, for we are called to a life of faith not of ultimate knowledge. Knowledge can puff up, but we are taught that only love edifies. Were absolute proof necessary for spiritual maturity, faith would not have a role to play in the development of our spirituality. Faith acknowledges the vague outlines of that which is ultimately unknowable - an inherent truth to mature spirituality that is embodied in the role mysticism should play in contemporary Christianity. For those Christians who believe they can easily explain ultimately unknowable truths like how Christ can be fully God and yet fully human or how we can be monotheists and yet believe in the Trinity, the real complexities behind these ideas has not been fully experienced or explored. More to the point, those that claim they can easily explain these ideas are perhaps unwilling to acknowledge that which is mysterious and unknown to them as well. If one agrees with my earlier argument that much within modern Christian fundamentalism is a response to the advancement of modernity and the need to have irretraceable ideas they can latch onto, the idea that mystery can not be accommodated makes sense. We shall return to this point later on in this essay. The point here is not simply to acknowledge the role that mystery should play in one’s faith, but to acknowledge that faith and ultimate knowledge are essentially incompatible ideas. Fundamentalists many times here wish to argue that what matters is not simply faith, but faith in whom?

Is there truth to the statement that what matters is not simply faith, but faith in specific ideas whose inherent value is greater than other ideas? Perhaps. Ultimately this is a question I am reluctant to answer for it asks me to speak of things that are not known to me and can only be rightfully seen as within the purview of God. This question of what object our faith must be placed within is deeply rooted in the relationship between faith as an entity and the object, salvation, which faith accomplishes. Here we might begin to ask ourselves what salvation is. Too many Christians see salvation as being fully worked out in the moment of death. Christians would do well to see salvation as being evidenced in the lives they lead now; in fact, I believe more Christians would be able to reach others if the outworking of salvation’s changed heart would be as significant as the protestation of salvation’s codified apologetics. What is said in word is easy, what is lived in deeds is hard. Christianity is, I believe now more than ever, not about what you say you believe; it is about your motives, your heart, and your deepest desires. It is here that Christianity works most profoundly, not in the wooden arguments for the factualness to the claims of Christianity.

The well known Gospel call is to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Certainly this call is to teach things unknown about Christ, about His teachings as to his Divinity and the afterlife. But how did salvation work its way out in His own life? Are we not to say that those words He spoke are of no greater value than the life He led? I think at times our need to embrace His divinity is so we can beat another over the head with the facts that prove His Godhood and not the reality of the life He led. Were we to embrace the facts of His life as much as we do the facts of His death and resurrection, our view of apologetics - what is proven by His life, would be forced to change. Do apologetics wish to prove His Divinity so it can reinforce His teachings on how the meek in spirit are to be viewed? I think not. Apologetics wishes to prove His Divinity so it can force others to admit that it is right and they are wrong. I do not need a theological dissertation on the historicity of Christ to prove that His teachings on the essential nature love should play within my life. I need a dissertation on the historicity of Christ to assuage my fears and my trepidations when I encounter one who does not believe as I do, yet evidences the spiritual maturity and responses I have convinced myself are the hallmarks only of those who believe in the facts exactly as I do.

This realization is, for me, one of the points of greater complexity in my own faith. As I have challenged myself to explore more religions, I am being deeply impacted by the spiritual truths I encounter in other faiths. Yesterday evening while reading Houston Smith’s The World’s Religions I ran across a passage from Buddhism’s The Book of the Great Decease when Buddha says “Work out your own salvation with diligence.” These words come from around 480 B.C., almost 600 years before Paul would record his own warning to the Christians of his age that they “work out their own salvation with fear and trembling.” I make no effort here to ascribe to one absolute originality and thus supreme truth; rather, I would point the reader towards a realization that here we can see two of the world’s great religious traditions, each talking in ages past where the migratory nature of ideas and words is not what it now is, and yet each speaking to the heart of their believers, asking them to work with diligence towards salvation. I think here both are urging their followers to personalize their idea of salvation. Here both assume we were not created by a distant God and that some meaningful truths can be discovered if we “work out” our beliefs in practice. Is this “working out” wholly intellectual, the realm of apologetics? I think not. Speaking as both of these passages do to people who were more tactile than we today are, I believe both related to how you lived. Do you live with the reality that you are a created being? Do you recognize your place in the cosmos and as a part of this realization treat others with genuine humility? The path of apologetics does not lead to either of these questions; it leads instead to the brittle box of “truth”, a reality that is limited to the mind of man and the walls of modern knowledge.

Apologetics Do Not Encourage Mystery in the Christian Life

I will soon embark on a more serious study of how progressive Christian theologians view other religions. One such book, S. Mark Heim’s The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends argues that each of the world’s religions will yield the result it ultimately proposes that is unique to itself. As an example, Christianity should provide in its purest form a full reconciliation with Christ and His teachings. Heim argues that, as another example, Buddhism’s ultimate spiritual teaching is to remove all vestiges of selfishness and personal desire. If this is your ultimate desire, then Buddhism will accomplish this. Others more educated in the world’s religions would take issue with Heim’s interpretation of the ultimate goals of each respective religion, arguing that ultimately each religion teaches personal morality and a personal responsibility to not have an ambiguous idea of our Creator. Within both of these areas much more is held in common than what is different, an idea that is inherently at odds with apologetics’ claim to have ultimately knowable, relevantly factual truths and that these facts are primary in the objective of religion. We may choose the cop out of claiming that such people who embrace truths between the world’s religions are relativists, or that they are unwilling to believe in the implications of ultimately knowable ultimate truth. But in reading the works of these men and women who struggle with pluralism, I see none of the equivocation and moral latitude their critics decry. Rather, I see a fundamental willingness to engage others, to be rightfully challenged, to look for the best in others, but most importantly to embrace mystery - recognition that some things are unknowable, that much of what constitutes religious belief will remain mysterious. “Every religion mixes universal principles with local peculiarities. The former, when lifted out and made clear, speak to what is generically human in us all. The latter, rich compounds of rites and legends, are not easy for outsiders to comprehend. It is one of the illusions of rationalism that the universal principles of religion are more important than the rites and rituals that feed them; to make that claim is like contending that the branches and leaves of a tree are more important than the roots from which they grow.” (Houston Smith, The World’s Religions, page 3)

What we say we believe in is too many times another way of hoping that God will love you because you are right as opposed to relaxing in the mystery of the Christian walk. Our beliefs are more about making God belong to us, than in what we must believe for us to belong to God. Within this mixed up ethic are the cynical roots of disbelief that those who see religion as a class based strictly sociological tool of those who need religion to speak for the unknowable mystery of death.

We may hope, we may rightly have faith, but we may not know. This is the reality of spirituality on this side of the veiled curtain of eternity. The ultimate truths of spiritual maturity will not be found through the dedicated study of apologetics. This study will ultimately yield contact with those who do not believe as you do, who remain inflexible about the truths they hold dear but that contrast yours. What is so obvious to you as absolutely knowable is to them clearly false and misguided. Apologetics will never allow you to embrace what both religions hold in common; spirituality will weigh the balance of the good of either heart and touch lives through how it changes your view of yourself, your responsibility to others, and your motives - things apologetics sets aside as being immaterial.

Apologetics Negate the Value of Changed Lives and Loving Hearts

Dualists separated the soul from the body. But we are more complex than even that understanding affords: we are not simply soul and body; we are heart, intellect and body. My heart has within it my motives and intentions. My mind is how I rationalize these things. My heart is reflexive, it responds instinctively with thoughts of prejudice, anger, hostility or selfishness. My mind explains to me why these thoughts are valid; where they come from and why they matter to me. My heart is what I am born with, my mind is the tool I can use to change my given predilections, unfounded fears, and psychological traumas. My heart is motive, my mind is reason.

To read this essay one may take away that I see no value in apologetics. That is not the case. I fear little more than religious zealots who have spent no time reflecting on the historicity of their claims or of the factualness of their beliefs. However, apologetics is currently the most vibrant part of the Western Christian life of the mind, being poorly balanced against the equally necessary philosophical life of the mind. Both occupy the mind, and rightfully so, for they answer important questions about where our beliefs come from and whether or not we can afford to believe them.

Apologetics are to the mind what spirituality is to the heart. Both have value, but both exist best in tension with the other. Each of us is the product of a complex interaction of in-born, familial and experiential realities. For some of us, uncertainty in a familial relationship as children created a very deep need to know the facts behind our beliefs. Having intimately known uncertainty about the love of a family, our religious beliefs reflect a deep seated need to be able to explain the facts of Christianity. If we can know the facts are true, we can believe that the love promised us by Holy Scripture is as factually accurate as apologetics have allowed us to believe about the historicity of Christ. Our need to believe in the facts of Christianity is deeply rooted in our need to believe in the ultimate spiritual truths of love, acceptance and eternal peace. We choose to believe that the path to the most genuine of love is through the mind, and perhaps for some this is the case. But for too many, the pursuit of love - our heart’s greatest desire - is halted at the doors of apologetics. We embrace facts and run from mystery. Why? Because at the most fundamental of levels, mystery beckons to the familial experience of being unloved. How could we ever live with mystery in our beliefs, if our initial motives for religious pursuit were rooted in fear of the unknown? I think we do ourselves well to realize the limitations of apologetics and the life of the mind and instead to dwell on the realities of changed hearts and motives.

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• November 17, 2004

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