Friday, October 17, 2014

Should You Not Do Apologetics Because God Is In Control?

Below are some excerpts from a good post by WinteryKnight. He's responding to a woman named Hope who made some comments related to apologetics. I don't know just how applicable WinteryKnight's comments are to Hope. I don't know much about her, and some of her comments seem more ambiguous than WinteryKnight suggests. But even if he's assumed too much about her and is hyperbolic at points, the general thrust of what he's saying is correct and should be said much more often and in a lot more places. If he's erring in one direction, he's doing so in response to a culture (and church) that's erring by a far wider margin in the opposite direction. More people need to talk like this (with the qualifications I've mentioned above):

I think her name is kind of ironic, since when it comes to her kids keeping their faith in college, “hope”, is all she has. I think this comment represents pretty well a very common attitude that Christian parents AND pastors AND church leaders have to the problem of children losing their faith….

First thing to notice is that anyone who says this is basically clearing the way for themselves to not have to do any work. Apologetics is work….

Practically speaking, I understand that this is what a person says when they want to rationalize not having to think, not having to read, not having to spend money, not having to acknowledge that some Christians know more than they do, not having to lift a finger to be a parent unless it feels good to them. They can be as self-centered and irresponsible as they want to be – which they would not be in any area that mattered to them – and then they can throw up their hands and say, “it’s not my fault”. You can easily imagine a case where a teacher told her students similar things – “I have no role in showing you what is true, you will have true beliefs about the material by sheer act of will, rational argument and evidence have nothing to do with this area of knowledge, I cannot control your beliefs about this subject, all I can do is pray for you to pass the tests”. Unless that teacher was unionized or tenured, she would be fired on the spot.

In fact, in NO OTHER AREA of life – not school, not work, not home-buying, not investing, not wedding-planning, not having the family over for the holidays, not planning a vacation, etc. – would this woman apply the method above, which is basically do nothing and pray. It’s very important to understand that. Hope will give her best effort in areas that matter to her, but when it comes to Christianity, she wants to DO NOTHING. However, this looks bad to other people – especially when her children run off to follow Richard Dawkins.

So she has to explain why DOING NOTHING was actually the right thing to do. She has to justify herself to her religious peers when her children repudiate Christianity in the strongest possible way. And this is her justification – she is spiritually superior, and not to blame. She wants to put a pious whitewash on her laziness, ignorance and cowardice. And to make other people who are not lazy, not ignorant and not cowardly feel unspiritual, to boot. That’s the real reason why so many Christian parents and leaders say things like Hope.

The worst part of this is dealing with these parents and pastors is actually after the damage has already been done. Even when they are staring defeat in the face, they still resist any attempts to try to get them to engage by learning apologetics. They will continue to resist reading anything, watching anything, listening to anything – it’s very rare that you get one to “turn on” to apologetics and become passionate about it. It’s amazing to me. They are able to marshal all kinds of arguments about the things they care about. I think I am particularly bothered by men in church who follow sports more than apologetics. Christianity is about reading the Bible and showing up in church. But all the real effort goes into memorizing rosters, draft picks, fantasy leagues and other trivia. It’s just depressing. Especially since men have the primary responsibility, either as parents or pastors. I really am not sure what to do about it, but it boils my blood to see the way these selfish grown-ups justify themselves with pious platitudes.

3 comments:

  1. Here are some comments I just left in WinteryKnight's thread:

    >>>>>
    I think one of the obstacles to people's acceptance of what you're saying, even though you're obviously correct, is concern about the implications for people we think highly of. If apologetics is so important, then what about my spouse, parents, grandparents, friends, etc. who have neglected apologetics? Does their neglect of apologetics suggest that they're bad people? It's difficult to apply your teacher analogy to the people we love most in life. The thought that your parents or grandparents deserve to be fired, so to speak, is sad, discouraging, and difficult in other ways. Were my parents bad parents if they neglected apologetics? I think what people need to realize is that we can criticize individuals, even ones we love as much as our spouse or parents, in one area without denying that they've done a lot of good in other areas. Just as we can reject the racism or erroneous political views of a grandparent without denying that the grandparent was good in many other contexts, the same is true with regard to apologetics. A parent, friend, or pastor we think highly of may be a good person in many ways, yet be guilty of neglecting the sort of apologetic work he ought to be doing. Instead of making excuses for people who have neglected apologetics, and lowering our standards in order to maintain a high view of those people, we should admit that they've been wrong about apologetics, acknowledge that they're good in other ways at the same time, and proceed in doing the work that needs done.

    I suspect that another obstacle to improving our apologetic efforts is the thought that not everybody can do it. What about people with a relevant mental or physical handicap, people who live in third world nations, etc.? But I doubt that WinteryKnight or anybody else who expresses views like his is denying that there are exceptions and that some qualifications need to be made. Rather, what's being addressed is what we should expect from the average person in a culture like the United States. We have high levels of literacy, a large amount of political freedom, advanced medicine and technology, etc. In that type of context, the sort of neglect of apologetics that we're seeing is pathetic. The church in the book of Acts had much worse circumstances than ours in many contexts, and they weren't living in the sort of information age we're living in (which makes apologetics more important in some ways), yet men like Peter, Paul, and Apollos were far more involved in apologetic work than the average American Christian and even the average American church leader.
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  2. Thanks for linking to this. You're right about me taking it a bit too far, but that's to make sure that people understand that I give a damn about this, and this situation is not OK with me. I have to deal with the people who have a lost decade spent binge drinking and hooking up and then realize they went wrong. I know it's their parents and the church who are to blame for it and I'm angry about it. Angry that the people who fail them think they are pious and correct for doing it.

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  3. Another comment I've posted at WinteryKnight's blog:

    >>>>>
    The issue of giftedness has come up more than once in this thread. It's true that different Christians have different gifts, as we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and elsewhere in scripture. But we all have a mind. And there are Biblical passages commanding or encouraging apologetic work that are addressed to believers in general or refer to an individual without any suggestion that the individual in question had some sort of gift for apologetics. If some people are gifted in some manner in apologetics, it doesn't follow that people without such a gift should be doing as little apologetic work as the large majority of Americans do. Similarly, even if you don't have, say, a gift related to prayer or a gift related to financial giving, you still should be involved in prayer and financial giving to some extent. If Americans have so much time for television, reading fictional books, reading non-fictional books on non-apologetic issues, their career, yard work, housework, movies, sports, video games, cooking, etc., why are we supposed to believe that they don't have the time or ability to read apologetic books or do other types of apologetic work?
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