Hansel & Gretel apologetics

I recently commented on two statements by William Lane Craig concerning inerrancy and original sin respectively. These are not isolated statements. From what I can tell, they reflect his overall apologetic strategy, which is grounded in his idiosyncratic religious epistemology.

Craig presents his basic strategy in Five Views on Apologetics (S. Cowan, ed.; Zondervan 2000) as well as Reasonable Faith (Crossway, 3^rd ed., 2008). This is how I’d summarize and evaluate his strategy:

A. Exposition

1. Knowing: The Role of the Spirit

i) Preconversion

“Therefore, we find that for believer and unbeliever alike it is the self-authenticating work of the Holy Spirit that supplies knowledge of Christianity’s truth” (RF: 47).

The Spirit’s “role is existential: he preveniently moves in the hearts of unbelievers to dissolve their sinful prejudices and open their minds to an honest consideration of the arguments and evidence” (FV: 53).

(Craig places this under “showing” rather than “knowing”.)

ii) Postconversion

“When a person becomes a Christian, he automatically becomes an adopted son of God and is indwelt with the Holy Spirit” (RF: 44).

“Such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God” (FV: 29).

“The testimony of the Spirit is even greater than the apostolic testimony” (FV: 32).

“When it comes to knowing one’s faith to be true, therefore, the Christian will not rely primarily on argument and evidence but on the gracious witness God himself give to all his children by the indwelling Holy Spirit” (FV: 36).

“What role, then, is left for rational argument and evidence to play in knowing the Christian faith to be true?…the only role left for these is a subsidiary role” (FV: 36).

2. Showing: The Role of Evidence

i) Argument from prophecy and miracles

“Jesus appealed not only to his miracles as evidence of his divine mission, but, as the Gospels portray him, also to fulfilled prophecy” (FV: 41).

“The witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus played a special role in the earliest Christian apologetic” (FV: 42).

“Thus, although arguments and evidence may be used to support the believer’s faith, they are never properly the basis of that faith” (RF: 46).

ii) Minimal Facts

“The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents” (RF: 11).

“Any historical argument for Jesus’ resurrection will have two steps: (a) to establish the facts which will serve as historical evidence and (b) to argue that the hypothesis of Jesus’ resurrection is the best or most probable explanation of those facts” (RF: 350).

“The case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus seems to me to rest upon the evidence for three great, independently established facts: the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith. If these three facts can be established and no plausible natural explanation can account for them as well as the resurrection hypothesis, then one is justified in inferring Jesus’ resurrection as the most plausible explanation of the data” (RF: 360-61).

iii) Retroactive authorization

“The significance of this event [i.e. the Resurrection] is then to be found in the religio-historical context in which it occurred, namely, as the vindication of Jesus’ own unparalleled claim to divine authority” (FV: 53).

Craig doesn’t develop this point, but I wonder if he’s piggybacking on John Warwick Montgomery’s spiral argument for Biblical authority.

B. Hansel & Gretel Go to Church

Craig’s apologetic strategy is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel. The Christian apologist is a good witch. The minimal facts are the gingerbread house that baits the unsuspecting unbeliever. Once the curious, unwary unbeliever goes inside, the door locks behind him, and the Holy Spirit zaps him, at which point he no longer needs the evidential candy and pastries, for he now has the self-authenticating witness of the Spirit. Conversion by entrapment.

On this view, it’s critical that the good witch do nothing alarming to scare away Hansel and Gretel. You mustn’t have Bible verses painted on the doors and windows, facing out.

Rather, you coax him inside–at which point it’s too late for him to back out. Like bagging a stray cat by using a saucer of milk.  

C. Evaluation

i) Craig’s theory concerning the witness of the Spirit resembles the Quaker doctrine of inner light. He seems to treat the witness of the Spirit as if it was an independent (indeed, superior) source of knowledge, apart from the word of God.

To what does the Spirit witness? Apparently, the Spirit doesn’t witness to the word of God.

Rather, the witness of the Spirit seems to bypass the word of God and directly inform the mind of the believer.

Maybe that’s not what Craig intends, but he leaves the relationship between Word and Spirit terribly unclear.

And this is quite artificial, for the Spirit bears witness to the word which the Spirit inspires. The Spirit bears witness to his own words­–the words he inspired. So there’s no reason to divorce the witness of the Spirit from the word of the Spirit.

ii) Biblical miracles prophecies are Biblical lines of evidence. In what sense can we rightly demote Biblical evidence to a secondary or subsidiary role?

iii) Likewise, the testimony of Scripture is properly the primary basis of Christian faith. The witness of the Spirit makes the witness of Scripture convincing.

iv) In fairness to Craig, he tries to justify his ranking system by appeal to 1 Jn 5:6-10. But his interpretation is quite dubious:

a) “Spirit/water” allude to the baptism of Christ (cf. Jn 1:29-34) while “blood/water” allude to the crucifixion of Christ (cf. Jn 19:34-36).

b) This doesn’t oppose divine testimony to apostolic testimony, for the knowledge of these historic events is contingent on apostolic testimony. The author of the Fourth Gospel appeals to his own, firsthand observation to vouch for the events. The Father and the Spirit bear witness to the Son, but that, in turn, involves the testimony of inspired eyewitnesses (Jn 14:26). And we have the same appeal in 1 Jn 1:1-3.

Divine testimony stands in contrast to uninspired human testimony, not inspired human testimony.

c) Indeed, it would be counterproductive for John to oppose divine testimony to apostolic testimony, for John’s opponents rebel against apostolic testimony–namely, John’s testimony. His opponents would like nothing better than pull rank on John by appealing to the (allegedly) superior testimony of the Spirit. Indeed, that’s what they tried to do (1 Jn 4:1). But the Spirit can’t outrank himself. The work of the Spirit in regeneration isn’t superior to the work of the Spirit in inspiration.

v) Instead of distinguishing between evidence and argument, I’d distinguish between prereflective (tacit, pretheoretical) knowledge and reflective knowledge. An inarticulate Christian may have good reason for what he believers, even if he lacks the skill to argue for his faith. But that is still based on evidence.

Put another way, the fact that showing falls short of knowing doesn’t mean that knowing falls short of showing. If, say, an OT prophecy truly shows Jesus to be what he claims to be, then isn’t that a way of knowing who Jesus is?

vi) Even at the argumentative level, if an argument is sound, then why can’t that figure in the basis of Christian faith? Put another way, as long as something is true, why can’t that truth be a part of what grounds our faith?

If, say, Jesus truly fulfilled OT types and oracles, then why is that truth unsuitable to form a cornerstone of our faith? Isn’t the Christian faith founded on revealed truths?

Put another way, if the evidence is truly evidentiary, if, say, an OT prophecy does, in fact, predict something about Jesus, then how can Craig treat that like a ladder which the climber can then kick aside once he reaches his destination? For it’s not just a means to an end. Rather, the fulfillment is internally related to the promise, and vice versa. You can’t dissolve the relation without losing the both ends of the relation. The truth of the fulfillment doesn’t obtain apart from the truth of the prophecy, and its true realization in the future event. Rather, the fulfillment is the upper story, resting on the lower story of the oracle (to change metaphors).

vii) Does the Spirit universally “dissolve the sinful prejudices” of unbelievers “to open their minds an honest consideration of the arguments and evidence”? If that were the case, then that ought to be manifest in their behavior. But most unbelievers don’t act that way. Just the opposite. Indeed, that’s why they’re unbelievers.

viii) Fact is, Scripture is meant to be divisive. Revealed truth has a polarizing effect–appealing to some, but repellant to others. It's that way be design. A Christian evangelist or apologist has no right to shortchange Scripture. 

ix) Many of Craig’s apologetic arguments have value in their own right, irrespective of his apologetic strategy. So I don’t say this to discount what’s worthwhile in his apologetic endeavors–which is considerable. Craig is a giant-killer. He has slain many enemies of the faith.

But the parts are greater than the whole. His apologetic method is predicated on a very distinctive–indeed, rather eccentric–religious epistemology. It’s best to treat his apologetic assemblage as a source of spare parts.