Preaching, I wrote recently, is done "without apology".
Someone reading that couple of paragraphs rightly asked, "So what do you think about Christian apologetics?"
For those of you unfamiliar with it, Christian apologetics is the task of mounting a rationally convincing argument in defense of (apologia in Greek means "a defense offered at court") the Christian faith.
I think that's a misbegotten enterprise at best. But, on my more snarky days, I think it's crap. I have no room for a foundationalist, rhetorically-convincing logical argument that someone convinces our culture in a compelling way to rethink Christianity.
Which is an odd position for a Christian theologian and pastor to take.
So, over the course of the next couple of days, let me lay out why I think thus.
Today, I want to talk about the hollowness of apologetics as a whole.
I believe the Christian message is concerned with truth -- and that means universal truth. The gospel is nothing else than an announcement of the universality of a particular event in history. To say the word God is to speak of reality as a whole, and it is thus to speak a truth which concerns everyone without exception. To be a Christian is to be seized irresistibly by this truth, and so to become a witness, a subject militantly committed to the universal reach of this truth.
But to insist that as a witness I can offer a forceful rhetorical argument, complete with strong assertions in favor of the truth of the gospel actually, in my view, says too little! Christianity doesn't need logical proof. It demands my life: My very body has to be seized by the commands of Jesus in obedience. That's why, in the NT, witness is etymologically a martyr. The rhetoric of the Gospel can't be reduced to convincing speech. The Gospel demands a radical bodily gesture.
So, no, I'm not trying to tame preaching by saying it's done "without apology". There's no soft-spokenness here. Bearing witness is not always a nice business (when done properly, it ends in a bloody death). My point, rather, is that our gospel-speaking should look more like imaginative story-telling than like rational argumentation. It should sound more like an invitation and a summons to decision than like a proof which constrains and coerces.
What I'm arguing for, when I say that preaching is done "without apology", is answering Immanuel Kant with the radical epistemology of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. (Better to read Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship than McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, if you want to see what I mean.)
In his celebrated book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre rightly pointed out that there's no such thing as a "universal rationality". Every rationality is embedded into some tradition, some account of the world. That means there's no neutral rationality to which rival accounts can appeal for a verdict.
The crucial question as I see it, therefore, is whether the Christian message is itself transformed into something quite different when it is submitted to quasi-objective (Kantian) rational norms, or when it becomes an instrument of coercive reason; whether an apologetics of rational persuasion undercuts the fundamental character of the gospel as a call to decision and a summons to freedom.
Let me put it another way: If preaching means we offer some rational account that connects the Bible to our lives in a convincing way, where's the point of decision? Where's the persuasion that is at the heart of all the Apostles' preaching?
The Gospel is a call to conversion, not just a nice way of saying there's a reason to take the Bible seriously. It's wisdom can't be found by connecting it to psychology or "where we live". Preaching is a summons to a radical reorientation of life (which includes a reorientation of reason itself!), so that the whole world is now re-envisioned through the lens of the Gospel.
Preaching tries to persuade people that the Bible offers them a better story than the stories of nationalism or consumerism. To proclaim the gospel is to tell this "better story" -- a story which is, empirically, one narrative alongside others, but which functions as a kind of metanarrative, since its truth reaches out and comprehends all things within itself.
To grasp this story (with its own internal coherence and rationality), one must be grasped by it in a moment of decision. This decision is what the Gospel calls conversion. To clarify the nature of this decision is the task of apologetics -- not to offer an irrefutable defense for why the creation story disproves evolution or for why the resurrection is historically verifiable.
To illustrate what I mean here, I want to take up one of those questions -- whether the resurrection is historically verifiable -- in my next post.