Apologetics for the Twenty-First Century E-Book

Louis Markos

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 513

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The vibrant and persuasive arguments of C. S. Lewis brought about a shift in the discipline of apologetics, moving the conversation from the ivory tower to the public square. The resulting strain of popular apologetics—which weaves through Lewis into twentieth-century writers like Francis Schaeffer and modern apologists like William Lane Craig, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel—has equipped countless believers to defend their faith against its detractors. Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century uses Lewis's work as the starting point for an absorbing survey of the key apologists and major arguments that inform apologetics today. Like apologists before him, Markos writes to engage Christians of all denominations as well as seekers and skeptics. His narrative, "man of letters" style and short chapters make Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century easily accessible for the general reader. But an extensive and heavily annotated bibliography, detailed timeline, list of prominent apologists, and glossary of common terms will satisfy the curiosity of the seasoned academic, as the book prepares all readers to meet the particular challenges of defending the faith today. 

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“Providing an overview of almost a century of Christian apologetics, Lou Markos’s volume Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century moves all the way from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to postmodernism, the New Atheists, and former atheist Antony Flew’s newly found belief in the existence of God. Covering the relevant authors as well as their ideas and works, Markos writes in a popular, highly readable style that could be viewed as a conversational journey through each of these topics. Those interested in apologetics will find several major items of significance in this far-reaching and fast-paced text.”

Gary R. Habermas, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology, Liberty University

“This is a terrific book. I’ve read hundreds of books on the defense of the faith in recent years, and this is a stand out. Professor Markos uniquely weaves together theology, literature, history, science, and philosophy to produce a work of apologetics that is both erudite and thoroughly accessible. I enjoyed every page of it.”

Craig J. Hazen, Founder and Director, MA Program in Christian Apologetics, Biola University

“It is in some ways shocking that every generation of Christians has to remind the broader culture that we in fact have arguments and reasons for our faith. But given the cultural hegemony and intellectual ubiquity of atheistic materialism and the way it has shaped our understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful, it should not surprise us that our antagonists want to maintain that faith and reason are adversaries rather than, as John Paul II put it, ‘like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.’ Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century is a readable antidote to a conventional wisdom that is indeed conventional but not wise.”

Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University

“Lou Markos has joined the top rank of commentators on the work of C. S. Lewis and is a powerful apologist for the Christian faith in his own right. His command of the two great streams of Western thought—Christianity and classics—has enabled him to develop a winsome, sophisticated, and convincing body of work.”

Robert B. Sloan Jr., President, Houston Baptist University

“Happily, the discipline of apologetics is having something of a renaissance today. In the mix, it would make no sense to neglect the considerable significance of C. S. Lewis. He brought about a great resurgence of interest in the defense of the faith. Louis Markos has done us a great service by posting Lewis’s work in dialogue with the issues of the day, some which were surely contemporaneous with the Oxford pundit and some coming to prominence a bit later, though still issues he would have enjoyed engaging. This volume will help readers see how Lewis would have dealt with the issues of our day. In the end, it will remind readers of the vitality of the claim that the Christian faith is true.”

William Edgar, Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, PA

“Louis Markos is the Platonic form of the Christian college professor. His love of the Scriptures and his broad mastery of the Western tradition of the humanities makes him the model for a new generation of apologists rising from the universities. His lectures have been a great success with students young and old at the university and with the global audience of The Teaching Company. Readers will discover he is just as delightful in print as he is when roaming the front of a classroom.”

Hunter Baker, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Union University; author, The End of Secularism

“Louis Markos has proved once again that he is one of today’s foremost Christian apologists. Writing with the eloquence and accessibility that characterizes the work of his mentor, C. S. Lewis, he makes the rational case for faith with potency and aplomb. Mirroring the Bible in its structure, Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century begins with an “old testament” (part 1) in which the works of those latter-day prophets, Chesterton, Lewis, and Sayers, lay the foundation for the “new testament” (part 2) in which today’s apologists defy and defeat the “new atheists” and other fashionable dragons. Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century shows Markos to be a twenty-first century apologist of the first and highest order.”

Joseph Pearce, Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of Literature, Ave Maria University, Florida; author of books on leading Christian writers, including C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and J. R. R. Tolkien

“Drawing on the rich resources of leading twentieth-century apologists, Louis Markos has crafted a brilliant work of Christian defense. Like Lewis and Chesterton before him, Markos uses his literary wit and scholarly precision to capture both heart and mind as he presents Christian arguments and evidences. Whether you are a skeptic, seeker, or solid believer, your faith will grow as you read this book!”

Chad Meister, Professor of Philosophy, Bethel College; co-editor, God is Great, God is Good

APOLOGETICS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

LOUIS MARKOS

Apologetics for the Twenty-first Century

Copyright © 2010 by Louis Markos

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Studio Gearbox

Cover photos: C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers and G. K. Chesterton: Used by permission of The Marion E. Wae Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. A. W. Tozer: Used by permission of The Christian and Missionary Alliance. Lee Strobel: © Liberty University Francis Schaeffer: Crossway

First printing, 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Italics in biblical quotes indicate emphasis added.

All Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-1448-7

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-1449-4

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-1450-0

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2465-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Markos, Louis.

     Apologetics for the twenty-first century / Louis Markos.

          p. cm.

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-1-4335-0588-1 (tpb)

      1. Apologetics—History—21st century. 2. Apologetics—History— 20th century. I. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963. II. Title.

BT1103.M36      2010

239—dc22                                                     2010014307

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

This book is dedicated to the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship: for instilling in me a heart for evangelism; for giving me my first training in apologetics; for teaching me how to lead Bible studies; and for afording me the opportunity, at an IVCF Bible study, to meet the most important person in my life,

CONTENTS

Preface 11PART ONE THE LEGACY OF LEWIS AND CHESTERTON1 Apologetics: What It Is and Why It Has Become So Popular 172 The Things That Could Not Have Evolved: C. S. Lewis Argues for the Existence of God253 From Theism to Christianity: C. S. Lewis’s Case for Christ 334 The Only Possible World: C. S. Lewis on the Problem of Pain415 The Greater Weave: C. S. Lewis Defends Miracles 496 The Psychology of Sin: Why C. S. Lewis Believed in Hell 577 More Than Balder, Not Less: C. S. Lewis and the Apologetics of Myth658 The Journey Back Home: How G. K. Chesterton “Discovered” Orthodoxy739 From Cavemen to Christians: G. K. Chesterton’s Précis of History8310 The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy Sayers Makes the Trinity Make Sense9111 The Preapologetics of Francis Schaefer 9912 Apologetics American Style: The Legacy of Josh McDowell 107PART TWO MAKING THE CASE FOR FAITH IN A (POST)MODERN WORLD13 The Existence of God I: Arguments fom Logic 11914 The Existence of God II: Arguments fom Science 12715 The Existence of God III: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People13716 The Bible Tells Me So: Defending the Authority of Scripture 14517 In Search of the Historical Jesus 15518 The Case for the Resurrection of Christ 16519 Why Christ Is the Only Way: Christianity and Other Religions17520 Beyond The Da Vinci Code: Answering the Neo-Gnostics 18521 The Return to Myth: Apologetics for Postmoderns 19522 Intelligent Design: Beyond the Big Bang 20523 Answering the New Atheists 21524 How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind225APPENDICESTimeline 235Glossary 223Who’s Who 242Annotated Bibliography 247

PREFACE

Since the dawn of Christianity, philosophers and theologians from Paul to Augustine to Aquinas to Luther to Pascal have sought to defend the faith from its detractors and to demonstrate that Christianity both “makes sense” and has the power to explain the nature of God, man, and the universe. People who make such a defense are known as apologists (from the Greek word for “defense”), and though no generation of believers has been without them, the twentieth century saw a vast increase in the number of working apologists, an increase that has continued unabated into the third millennium. In this book I will survey both the major apologists and the major arguments that have come to the defense of historical, orthodox Christianity over the last century. Throughout the book, my focus will remain on the more popular (as opposed to academic) strain of apologetics that finds its greatest single source in the work of C. S. Lewis, that is written in lay terms, that does not require previous training in philosophy, theology, or biblical studies, that seeks to find common ground between believers and nonbelievers and between different Christian denominations, and that maintains a pragmatic, this-worldly edge.

After an introductory chapter in which I define what apologetics both is and is not, discuss how the triumph of secular Enlightenment modernism has fueled the recent explosion of apologetics, and give reasons why C. S. Lewis remains the most successful apologist of the twentieth century, I will move swiftly into a six-chapter survey of Lewis’s major apologetic works and arguments. I will begin in chapter 2 by tracing Lewis’s attempt to demonstrate that both our yearnings for something that transcends the natural world and our built-in understanding of the moral code (what he calls the Tao) are observed phenomena that cannot be explained solely by recourse to natural, physical, or material processes. Having established the centrality of the Tao to Lewis’s apologetics, I will go on in chapter 3 to present Lewis’s argument that our inability to follow the Tao leads directly to the Christian solution. I will discuss here as well Lewis’s most famous apologetical argument: Christ could have only been one of three things—liar, lunatic, or Lord. In chapters 4 and 5 I will present Lewis’s answers to the problem of pain and to the modern denial of miracles. In the former, Lewis will help us understand our status as fallen creatures; in the latter, he will help us see that miracles, far from violating the laws of nature, reveal God’s greater design. Just as skeptics argue that the presence of pain and suffering in our world contradicts the Christian teaching that God is a God of love, so do they argue that such a God could never confine a person to hell. Chapter 6 will be devoted to explicating Lewis’s argument that, given the nature of God and his gift to us of free will, the existence of hell is not only theologically but psychologically necessary. Finally, in chapter 7 I will consider how Lewis championed the mythic elements of Christianity as arguments in favor of its universal truth and power. Specifically, I will analyze Lewis’s belief that Christ was the myth made fact and will demonstrate, through a brief look at the Chronicles of Narnia, how Lewis was able to unite reason and imagination in his fiction.

Chapters 8 and 9 will be devoted to studying the two major apologetical works of G. K. Chesterton, a man whose witty and literate defenses of Christianity exerted a lasting influence on Lewis. First I will consider how, in Orthodoxy, Chesterton contrasts the gloominess and self-contradictory beliefs of modernism with the robust health and paradoxical truths of Christianity. I will then turn my attention to Chesterton’s wholly unique survey of Christian history, The Everlasting Man. Through a close reading of this classic work, I will show how skillfully Chesterton critiques modern evolutionary thought, presents Christ as the culmination of the ancient world, and defends the church’s defense of orthodoxy. Chapter 10 will shift the focus to a third British apologist who shared the wit, imagination, and wide learning of Lewis and Chesterton—Dorothy Sayers. In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers offers an intriguing analogy between the triune nature of God and the human creative process that both substantiates the reality of the Trinity and sheds light on the origin of evil and free will.

Chapters 11 and 12 will move the book back across the Atlantic to consider the work of two key American apologists who set the stage for most of the apologetics that would follow. An overview of the apologetics trilogy of Francis Schaeffer will help explain his argument that after the Enlightenment, science, logic, and reason became divided from religion, revelation, and faith. Josh McDowell’s highly influential More Than a Carpenter, as well as his influential and very American apologetical style, will be the focus of chapter 12. I shall show how McDowell, in all his works, puts a heavy emphasis on biblical reliability, the claims of Christ, and the testimonies of experts and converts.

In the second half of the book, I will shift my focus from specific apologists to general apologetic themes and arguments. Rather than analyze single works, I will borrow more generally from the work of such key apologists as Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, Gary Habermas, Alister McGrath, J. P. Moreland, Phillip E. Johnson, William Dembski, Francis Collins, Don Richardson, Alvin Plantinga, and N. T. Wright. Chapters 13, 14, and 15 will all offer different perspectives on the arguments for the existence of God. I will begin by focusing on more classical arguments borrowed from the worlds of philosophy and logic. Next I shall seek out arguments from the world of modern science, particularly the discovery that the universe is not eternal but was created at the big bang. Finally, I shall wrestle again and more fervently with the issue that turns the most people away from God: the problem of pain.

Chapters 16, 17, and 18 will take up one of the key concerns of apologetics: the defense of the Bible as an accurate witness to the work of the divine in the world. First, I will present arguments for the overall reliability of the scriptural record. Second, I will consider specifically the historicity of the Gospels and the claims of Christ. Third, I shall survey the many arguments that have been marshaled to the defense of the most important historical claim of Christianity—that Jesus Christ, after lying dead for three days, rose bodily from the grave on Easter morning.

In the final six chapters of the book, I will zero in on some of the recent developments in apologetics. Thus chapter 19 will contrast Christianity with other world religions and argue for the exclusivity of the gospel, while chapter 20 will expose both the errors and dangers of the growing interest in the Gnostic gospels, an interest evidenced in the success of and controversy over Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. That the issues raised in chapters 19 and 20 are such pressing ones bears witness to the rapid growth of postmodern thought in America. In reaction to that growth, chapter 21 will consider new approaches that apologists have taken to reach postmoderns who yearn for spirituality but are strongly suspicious of religion, especially “institutional” religion.

Chapters 22 and 23 will enter into two of the major apologetical battlefields of the last decade—the arguments that the intelligent design movement has leveled against Darwinism and then the rise of a new and more aggressive form of atheism. Finally, in chapter 24 I will take a close look at the conversion to deism of the octogenarian atheist philosopher Antony Flew and the book he wrote to document his conversion: There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Although this book was conceived and written as a single, unified manuscript, it does incorporate some ideas and passages from my previously published work. Several years ago I published two works (the first a lecture series, the second a book) that discuss, among other things, the apologetic arguments and approaches of C. S. Lewis: The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis (The Teaching Company, 2000), and Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Broadman & Holman, 2003). There is, of necessity, some overlap between several portions of those two works and several portions of chapters 2–7 of this book. Readers who wish to explore further the apologetics of C. S. Lewis are encouraged to consult these works. Portions of chapters 11, 19, and 24 have also appeared before, in altered form, as, respectively, “Apologetics for the 20th Century: The Legacy of Francis Schaeffer,” in volume 22, Number 2 of Faith and Mission; “An Open Letter to Lovers of The Da Vinci Code,” in the November/December 2007 issue of Saint Austin Review; and “Holy Probable: A Review Essay of There Is a God by Antony Flew,” in the May 2008 issue of Touchstone.

I have dedicated this book to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, but I would like to acknowledge as well the kind support and encouragement of a number of administrators at Houston Baptist University: Robert Sloan (President), Paul Bonicelli (Provost), Diane Lovell (Dean of Arts and Humanities), Robert Stacey (Dean of Honors), and Matthew Boyleston (Chair of English). I would also like to thank HBU for awarding me the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and the title of Scholar-in-Residence, awards that have given me the necessary time and opportunity to bring this book to completion.

PART ONE

THE LEGACY OF LEWIS

1

APOLOGETICS: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT HAS BECOME SO POPULAR

In 399 B.C., Socrates was charged by the Athenian assembly with corrupting the youth and advocating foreign gods. In response, the seventy-year-old philosopher dragged himself before the court to answer the charges leveled against him. His speech before the indignant citizens of Athens was recorded by his star pupil, Plato, and published under the title of “Apology.” Anyone who has read Socrates’ witty, impassioned, and wholly unapologetic plea will realize quickly that apologia in Greek does not mean hanging one’s head low and meekly saying, “I’m sorry.” It means simply “a defense,” and that is what Socrates presented to his accusers: a reasoned defense of the origin of his teaching (he was instructed to do so by the Oracle of Delphi) and of the manner of his teaching (to question all people who claimed to be in possession of the Truth).

Nearly five centuries later, Peter called on his fellow believers to be as bold as—but a bit less abrasive than—Socrates in defending their faith in Christ: “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense [apologia] to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). Following in the tradition of Socrates and Peter, the modern Christian apologist neither apologizes for his beliefs nor relies solely on emotion when confronting those who consider his divine calling to be either false or fanatical, delusional or dangerous. Instead he presents—boldly but not harshly—a defense of Christianity that squares with reason, logic, and human experience. That is not to say that apologists believe they can reason themselves into Christian faith, but they do believe that faith can be a reasoned step rather than a leap into the void. Christianity, in short, makes sense; as a system of belief it appeals to the whole person—body and soul, heart and mind.

DEFENDING THE FAITH

Though apologists approach their defense of the faith from a number of different angles, a full apologetic must include at its core a defense of the central and defining doctrine of Christianity—namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was not just a good man or an inspired prophet but the unique Son of God. This doctrine, known as the incarnation, holds that Jesus was not half man and half God, but fully human and fully divine. Around the incarnation may be grouped the other essential doctrines of the faith: that God, though One, exists eternally as three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Trinity); that we are all born with a sinful nature and exist in a state of rebellion against God and his Law (original sin); that Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross brought us back into a right relationship with God the Father (the atonement); that Jesus rose bodily from the grave (the resurrection); that he will also return bodily (the second coming); and that all who are in Christ will join him in the final resurrection of the dead. To these key, nonnegotiable doctrines may be added two more: that God is the Maker of heaven and earth; that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God. Many apologists (I among them) would add more qualifications to these last two, but no orthodox apologist would reject them in this form.

These then represent the core doctrines of the Christian faith, doctrines that receive clear expression in the creeds of the church and that comprise the basic tenets of what C. S. Lewis famously dubbed “mere” Christianity. From the time of the apostles, the main task of the apologist has been to defend these doctrines from detractors both within and outside the church. More often than not, this defense has been mounted in the form of a dialogue in which the apologist answers key questions used by skeptics to cast doubt on Christianity. A list of the major questions that apologists since Paul have sought to address would include the following: 1) If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why are pain, suffering, and injustice in the world? 2) How can Christians believe in miracles when events like the parting of the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the virgin birth, and Jesus’ walking on water clearly violate the laws of nature? 3) How can a God of mercy condemn people to hell? 4) How do we know we can trust the accounts of Jesus’ life that are recorded in the Gospels? Over the last three centuries these questions have become increasingly more bitter and strident in tone, often taking on the form of outright accusation and ridicule: 1) Isn’t the story of a dying and rising God just a myth for ignorant pagans and modern children? 2) Isn’t religion just a crutch and wish fulfillment for people too weak to deal with reality? 3) Hasn’t science disproved Christianity and shown it to be false? 4) Hasn’t the church done more evil than good and inspired more hypocrisy than any other institution in history?

The best apologist will not shy away from difficult questions like these but will address both the questions themselves and the anger, guilt, despair, and confusion that often lie behind them. And he will do something more. He will show that Christianity embodies a worldview that is coherent, consistent, and universal, one that not only answers tough questions in isolation but presents a unified vision that makes sense of all aspects of our world, ourselves, and our destinies. Indeed, one of the main tasks of the apologist is to defend Christianity from competing worldviews—whether they be religious, political, or philosophical—that claim the ability and the authority to define the nature of reality: communism, materialism, secular humanism, Islam, Hinduism, pantheism, atheism, nihilism, etc.

Of course, Christian apologetics does not treat all other belief systems as inherently false. Oftentimes apologists will begin by establishing common ground between Christianity and other monotheistic faiths (Islam, Judaism, deism, Unitarianism). Especially in our own day, many apologists find that they cannot even begin to defend the deity of Christ before mounting a defense of the existence of a single, personal God who is the Creator of the universe and the Author of morality. At other times apologists will agree about the nature of the problem—that guilt must be expiated (paganism); that modern man lives in a state of alienation (Marxism); that we must find a way to control our base instincts (Freudianism)—but disagree about the origin of the problem and its ultimate solution. At its best, the task of the apologist is a deeply humanistic one; it seeks not to abandon the physical, the human, and the ordinary for some abstract world of ideas but to redeem the physical, the human, and the ordinary so that they might be glorified.

Many today confuse apologetics with another branch of Christianity with which it bears much in common—evangelism; but the two pursuits are quite different in their focus and approach. An evangelist like Billy Graham shares the gospel message that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that he died for our sins, and that we can only find salvation by confessing our sins and placing our faith in the risen Christ. Evangelism comes from two Greek words, eu (good) and angel (news), which, when translated into old English, become “god-spel” or “gospel.” An evangelist, then, is someone who literally spreads the good news (or gospel). Good evangelists will present this good news in a way that makes sense, but they are less concerned than the apologist with presenting a reasoned defense. Evangelism sticks more to the emotional than to the rational, more to the practical than to the philosophical; it seeks a decision that will lead to a change of heart rather than an intellectual assent to a particular or universal truth. Evangelists tend not to argue for such things as the existence of God or the authority of Scripture or the possibility of miracles; they simply take them for granted, focusing instead on their message. Whereas the evangelist is first and foremost a preacher, the apologist is essentially a teacher. The latter works more like an attorney presenting a case, the former like a pastor giving comfort and counsel.

Midway between the evangelist and the apologist are a number of writers and speakers whose main concern is with winning back some portion of the American public to a true engagement with the God of the Bible. Some, like Bill Hybels, Thom Rainer, and Rick Warren, offer guidelines for sharing the gospel with unchurched people living in a secular society who yet yearn for spirituality and purpose. Others, like Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Jay Sekulow, and the late Richard John Neuhaus, are culture warriors who seek to secure a legitimate voice for the Christian worldview in the public square and to revive waning Christian ethical and sexual mores. Like these modern-day Wilberforces, apologists do seek to restore the intellectual integrity of the Christian worldview, especially within academia, and there are branches of apologetics that offer a reasoned defense of traditional sexual morality (see, for example, John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body); but apologetics as such refrains from civil engagement and partisan politics. Still apologetics is essentially “conservative” in its quest to preserve the creeds of the church in the face of “liberal” attempts to strip Christianity of its supernatural elements and its universal truth claims and to replace the Christ of faith with a “historical” Jesus.

Closer to the apologetics enterprise are writers like Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Arthur Holmes who seek to reintegrate faith and learning within the academy and to convince their more skeptical colleagues that Christianity rightly understood does not stifle but enhances the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, scientific study, and scholarly research. Close as well are writers like John MacArthur, John Piper, and Charles Ryrie who hail specifically and intentionally from within a single Christian denomination and who argue eloquently for the truth of their theological and ecclesiastical distinctives. Although some of these writers—especially those who hail from Reformed Calvinism and dispensationalism—have contributed much to the apologetical enterprise, in this book I will keep my focus firmly on the central concerns of apologetics and on those elements of Christianity that all orthodox believers share.

WRESTLING IN THE SHADOW OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Since its founding, the church has been blessed by a long line of apologists who have carefully crafted philosophical and theological defenses of Christian orthodoxy. Chief among these are Paul, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, and Jonathan Edwards. In the earliest phase of the church, apologetics consisted more often than not of clarifying Christian doctrine over and against the claims of heretical sects like the Arians (who denied the deity of Christ) and Docetists (who denied his humanity). Medieval apologetics—best summed up in Aquinas’s Summa and its aesthetic counterpart, Dante’s Divine Comedy—sought to unify all thought under the glorious reign of the queen of the sciences—theology; for them, beauty, goodness, and truth were all one, and the theology of the Catholic Church was the glue that held them together in timeless harmony. They in turn were followed by Reformed apologists who sought to purify the doctrines of the church of later “accretions” and to present a forceful, systematic doctrine that would appeal to people who increasingly judged truth not by authority and tradition but by their own consciences.

Modern apologetics, though influenced by all three groups, is in great part a reaction to the secular Enlightenment’s attempt to separate faith from reason and to refound everything, from philosophy to theology to ethics, on rational principles. Beginning in the eighteenth century and climaxing in the two centuries that followed, Western thought increasingly adopted an antisupernaturalist paradigm that insisted that everything could and should be explained solely on the basis of natural, material, physical processes. Henceforth divine revelation and miracles would remain off-limits, at least for those engaged in serious academic pursuits. Though this Enlightenment-born paradigm does not necessitate atheism, most of the major Western thinkers since Hume have treated God as an unnecessary hypothesis. He may very well exist, but we certainly do not need him to explain anything.

Let us consider briefly some of these founding fathers of the modern world. Hume restricted knowledge to empirical observation, encouraging his philosophical heirs to ignore spiritual subjects about which nothing could be known otherwise. Kant grounded morality in the categorical imperative rather than in the Ten Commandments, thus providing human ethics with a rational, as opposed to supernatural, foundation. Darwin proposed a method, natural selection, by which our body could have evolved apart from divine intervention. Freud followed, doing the same for human consciousness, which he saw as rising out of a deep, material unconsciousness rather than descending from the great I AM. Marx reduced philosophy, theology, and aesthetics to economic forces, arguing that religion, the arts, and even consciousness itself were mere products of material socioeconomic forces over which we have no control. Nietzsche did away with Plato’s notion of the Forms, arguing instead that beauty, truth, and justice are not divine touchstones but man-made products that shift every time the power structure of society shifts. Saussure robbed language of its transcendent, God-given status, making it too a product of deep structural forces that control our words and our thoughts. And the list goes on and on.

Although the basic teachings of Christ continue to be respected, this post-Enlightenment paradigm has slowly displaced the Christian worldview as the foundation of modern thought and culture. As a direct result of this shift, the traditional doctrinal claims of Christianity have been removed from the realm of objective truth and deposited in that of subjective feeling, causing an artificial rupture to form between empirical “facts” and spiritual “values.” Slowly, stealthily, systematically, the truth claims of Christianity have been edged out of the academic arena and the public square into a private, airtight compartment. Rather than persecuting Christianity directly, as was done in the former Soviet Union, the Western democracies rendered it irrelevant as a vehicle for discerning the truth about the human condition.

True, the majority of Europeans and Americans continued to adhere to the beliefs and practices of Christianity, but they allowed the secular elite to do the thinking for them. The faithful guarded their religious space and left the academy, the public schools, the arts, the media, and the government to fall under the sway of secular humanism. In a sense they “cut a deal”: leave us our faith and we will cede reason to you. In return, the secularists cut themselves loose from their moorings in Christian morality and morphed into radically autonomous individuals accountable neither to God nor to the wider faith community.

And then an English professor at Oxford named C. S. Lewis entered the arena. Though by no means the first Christian writer to challenge the Enlightenment split of faith and reason—Cardinal Newman and G.K. Chesterton, among others, preceded him—Lewis was the spark that ignited the Christian revolt against the secular status quo. If it is true, as atheist writer Richard Dawkins once quipped, that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, then it is equally true that Lewis made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian while still living in a modern, post-Enlightenment world. Inspired by Lewis, a growing number of apologists over the last half century have sought to defend the intellectual integrity and consistency of Christianity. Without discounting the centrality of faith, modern apologists have set themselves the task of exploding the Enlightenment myth that Christian truth claims have no logical, objective content. Neither reactionaries nor obscurantists, they accept that we live in a secular age and that medieval Christendom is past; but their acceptance only heightens their commitment to guard the rational, universal status of these truth claims against the corrosive forces of skepticism, rationalism, and relativism.

I have already laid out, in the preface, the organizational scheme that I will be following in this book. Rather than repeat that scheme, I will end this introductory chapter by defending my choice to devote six of my twenty-four chapters to the arguments of a single apologist, C. S. Lewis. Here are my “top ten” reasons for doing so:

1) It is no exaggeration to say that every modern apologist has been influenced in some way by Lewis. Whether they were brought to faith by reading Mere Christianity, emboldened by his witness, or influenced by his key arguments, the last two generations of apologists owe a strong and enduring debt to Lewis.

2) Lewis was an atheist for half his life and therefore knew the kinds of arguments that modern skeptics most need to hear. Indeed, he once said of his apologetic works that he had tried to write the kinds of books he wished he could have read during his atheist years.

3) Rather than base all of his proofs on the Scriptures, Lewis sought proofs outside the Bible by which he could establish common ground with nonbelievers.

4) He argued both for Christianity and for theism, and he understood clearly the difference between the two. Though the last two sections of Mere Christianity defend specifically Christian doctrines, the first two argue for theistic beliefs that most Jews and Muslims share.

5) Rather than reject the systematic logic he was taught during his atheist years, he took that logic and put it in the service of Christian apologetics.

6) With the courage and tenacity of a modern-day Galileo, Lewis boldly questioned the key tenets of modernism. Rather than confine himself to surface arguments, he dug down deep to uncover and critique the foundational assumptions of naturalism and secular humanism.

7) Lewis, who was an English professor rather than a theologian or clergyman, was always careful to balance reason and emotion. In the apologetic works of C. S. Lewis, the reader encounters arguments from both the head and the heart.

8) Unlike most of his contemporaries in the academy, Lewis wrote in personal, lay terms that spoke directly to his readers. Though one of the most learned men of his age, Lewis actually wanted to be understood. His commitment to clarity has helped inspire dozens of apologists to imitate his crisp, highly readable style.

9) Rather than come up with exotic new theories about Jesus or the Scriptures or the doctrines of the church, Lewis contented himself to repackage the traditional claims of Christianity in a fresh, nonjudgmental way.

10) Though himself a committed Anglican, Lewis the apologist remained doggedly nondenominational and kept his focus on mere Christianity. For this reason, his books are read and distributed by Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Pentecostals alike.

2

THE THINGS THAT COULD NOT HAVE EVOLVED: C. S. LEWIS ARGUES FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

Whether you consider him a great world leader or an opportunistic dictator, a reformer, or a tyrant, Napoleon was a man who understood well the consequences not only of actions but also of ideas. Perhaps that is why when Pierre Laplace explained to his emperor the nebular hypothesis, Napoleon responded with a philosophical, rather than a scientific, question: “Where is there room in all this for God?” Laplace’s reply (“I have no need for that hypothesis”) has proven prophetic in its assertion that the post-Enlightenment thinker can explain all things without recourse to a divine creator or regulator of the universe. As we saw in chapter 1, those who embrace the modernist paradigm feel confident that all things can be explained solely on the basis of natural, physical, material processes.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, few European academics questioned, at least out loud, the ability of the modernist paradigm to provide evolutionary explanations for all natural and human phenomena. During his atheist years, Lewis acquiesced wholeheartedly with this paradigm, considering academics who brought God or religion into the discussion to be sloppy medieval thinkers. After his conversion to theism (at age thirty) and Christianity (at age thirty-two), however, he began to question the all-sufficiency of the modernist paradigm and the naturalistic worldview that supported it. In such books as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain, he identified a number of phenomena in our world that could not have evolved by natural processes alone and that therefore demanded a supernatural source.

THE ARGUMENT BY DESIRE

“O Lord, you have made us for yourselves,” muses Augustine in the opening lines of his Confessions, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Though we are, by nature of our physical bodies, members of the animal kingdom, there is that within us that which is not and cannot be satisfied by the natural world alone. Our desires and yearnings transcend the physical confines of our world and of our bodies, leaving us restless in a way that no animal has been or ever could be. According to Lewis, the reason for this strange perpetual restlessness is that we all possess an inbuilt sense of joy that drives us toward God.

Lewis’s own long journey to faith, documented powerfully in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, began in early childhood through a series of seemingly mundane and yet spiritually intense moments of supernatural insight. When he was only a small child, his elder brother, Warren, showed him a makeshift toy garden that he had just fashioned inside a biscuit tin. It was a quick and unlovely affair, but when Lewis gazed upon it, he was suddenly filled with a sense of moist green places, an intimation, the elder Lewis felt, of Eden. Sometime later, while reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin, Lewis was troubled by what he called the Idea of Autumn. A third experience occurred when he gazed by chance upon some words from a book of Norse mythology. As the words from Squirrel Nutkin opened his eyes to the fullness of the autumnal season, so the words from this book transported him to cold northern places. In all three cases, the experience itself was swift, but it left the young Lewis with a sense of longing for something beyond himself and beyond the limits of his world.

At times Lewis used the German word sehnsucht (longing) to refer to these moments, but he more often referred to them simply as joy. By sharing with his readers these moments of joy, Lewis the apologist invites us to explore our own moments of joy and to question the source of our deepest longings. As citizens of the modern world, we have been taught—consciously or unconsciously—by Freud and his heirs to interpret our spiritual longings as either a sublimation of more primitive emotions or a product of wish fulfillment. But why and how could unconscious nature produce in us a conscious desire for something that transcends the natural world? On the foundation of our shared experience of joy, Lewis rests one of his most appealing and original apologetics for the existence of God: the argument by desire.

Just as the fact that we experience thirst is proof that we are creatures for whom the drinking of water is natural, so the fact that we desire an object that our natural world cannot supply suggests the existence of another, supernatural one. The desire does not guarantee that we will achieve that other world—if stranded in the desert, we will die of thirst—but it does suggest that we are creatures who are capable of achieving it and who were in some sense made to achieve it. We would certainly think it strange if a woman who had lived all of her life in Kansas and had never seen or heard about the ocean or the mountains were suddenly to be possessed by a desire to walk on a beach or scale the side of an ice-capped peak. And yet we do not think it strange that creatures purportedly fashioned by material processes alone should yearn for something outside those processes. Water cannot rise above its source, and if we were indeed the products of nature alone, then we should not be able to rise, in body or “soul,” beyond the limits of our earthbound mother.

In the conclusion of his Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis, expanding on his argument by desire, offers what I consider the finest apologetic for the immortality of the soul. Is it not odd, Lewis asks, that we are continually surprised by the passage of time? We see someone we have not seen for years and are surprised to see that he has grown; we find it impossible to believe that the children we bore have “suddenly” matured into adults and left us to start their own families. It is not vanity or a fear of growing old that triggers these moments of temporal vertigo. We simply do not know where the time “went” or how it could have escaped us without our noticing it. Given the fact that we have never known anything but past, present, and future and that time is the element in which we live, it is strange indeed that its passage should come to us as a perpetual surprise. Our continual shock at its passage, Lewis suggests, is tantamount to a fish being surprised by the wetness of water. That, of course, would be a strange thing, since water is the element in which a fish lives out its existence. But it would not be a strange thing if that fish were destined someday to be a land animal. If our surprise at the passage of time teaches us one thing, it is this: we were not made for time but for eternity, for another mode of existence in which all abides in a perpetual present.

I would add to Lewis’s profound insight that not only time but space itself is finally an alien thing to us. Our mind constantly struggles with the spatial limits of our world, yearning to shatter the physical constraints that hem us in. Why, our mind wonders, can we not move things toward or away from us by the power of our wills? I have often joked, half seriously, that the greatest intimation of heaven that our modern world affords is the remote control—for with it we suddenly possess a ten-foot arm that can magically alter the world around us while we sit motionless in our chairs. If the modernist paradigm is right and we are products of natural processes that “know” only the time-space continuum, then we simply cannot explain our deep and unshakable sense that the twin tyrannies of time and space should have no dominion over us.

Apologists today, following the lead of Lewis’s argument by desire, often take a slightly different approach. Borrowing a phrase from Pascal, they speak of all people as having a God-shaped vacuum in their hearts. We try to fill that vacuum with all manner of earthly things, but nothing can quite fill it. Whether we try to fill it with “bad” things like drugs and promiscuity or “good” things like patriotism and mother love, we inevitably find that the aching within persists. Only when we come to understand, as Augustine did, that we were made by and for God and that the emptiness we feel inside comes from a lack of intimacy with the divine do we realize that only Christ—the God who became man—can fill the hole in our hearts.

ETHICS, RELIGION, AND REASON

Lewis begins his central apologetical work, Mere Christianity, by asking a seemingly random question: When two people disagree about something, why is it that they argue about it? Lewis’s question may seem innocuous enough, but behind it lurks another observed phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by natural evolutionary forces alone—one that not only suggests but demands a supernatural source.

The only way two people can argue about something, Lewis explains, is if they accept a common standard from which to make their argument; in the absence of this standard, they can only fight. Modernists can hem and haw all they want, but the fact of the matter is that we are, by nature, ethical animals. We know that real ethical standards exist and that we are obliged—not by the law but by our own inner consciences—to live by them. Yes, we break the standards on a daily basis, but the fact that we nevertheless expect other people to treat us in accordance with those standards is proof of their reality and their binding nature. We do not live in a morally relative universe but in a world of shoulds and oughts. Even a self-professed relativist will get angry if someone cuts in front of him in line. And if that other person were to counter that he came from a culture where cutting in line is acceptable, the relativist would surely reject the argument as fallacious.

If real moral and ethical standards did not exist, there could have been no Nuremberg trials after the fall of the Third Reich. The only reason that the court was able to convict Nazi war criminals was because of the existence of two indisputable facts: 1) moral standards exist that transcend nations and cultures; 2) the Nazis were aware of those standards and broke them anyway. We do not put a pit bull on trial if it kills a child, for the pit bull is not a moral agent. But human beings are moral agents living in a moral universe and can thus be punished for making wrong decisions and acting on them. Sometimes, of course, a criminal will be exonerated by reason of insanity, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Our obligation to adhere to ethical standards is primary, and though the moral centers of our brains can be temporarily impaired by mental illness or an overwhelming moment of passion, we as a species are defined not by relativism but by commonly held moral standards.

Lewis insists that these standards are universal and cross-cultural, and to make his point linguistically, he chooses to refer to this universal law code by an Eastern rather than Western word: the Tao. All societies, Lewis argues in The Abolition of Man, have a basic understanding of the Tao, and to back up his bold assertion he offers an appendix in which he lines up the law codes of over a dozen ancient peoples from the Greeks and Romans to the Babylonians and Egyptians to the Norsemen and the Native American Indians. When he does so, it quickly becomes clear that all ancient cultures have a basic understanding of what Jews and Christians call the Ten Commandments.

Those who first hear Lewis’s assertion of the universality of the Tao will often balk, for modern anthropology has been very effective at convincing us that morality varies wildly from tribe to tribe. But it doesn’t. The supposed upside-down morality of isolated tribes in Africa or New Guinea turns out, in the end, either to be largely invented by overzealous anthropologists or to be the result of a fact about our fallen world that is often overlooked. For whatever reason, our world is populated by a small but significant number of psychopaths and sociopaths. Well, what is true for individuals is often true for tribes as well. Yes, there are a few tribes out there who seem to dwell outside the circle of ethical norms, but the aberrant behavior of these sociopathic groups no more disproves the universality of the Tao than the existence of paraplegics disproves the fact that legs were made for walking. Since Freud, our society has suffered from a sort of mental and moral amnesia. We really have come to believe that normalcy no longer exists and that everyone has a phobia or a neurosis. It is not so.

What might be called the argument by exception embodies the strong-est rebuttal to Lewis’s claim that the Tao is universal and cross-cultural. But there are others. Some moderns dispute Lewis’s claim by arguing that the Tao is not a transcendent code implanted in us by our Creator but the invention of charismatic prophets and teachers. In response, Lewis reminds his critics that the true role of prophets and teachers is not to invent the Tao but to remind us of the Tao that we already know but fail to heed. Indeed, those who do attempt to make up their own moral codes are generally false prophets and cult leaders. Even Jesus himself did not “invent” the Law but fulfilled and perfected it.

Other critics of Lewis claim that the Tao is not a gift of divine revelation but a product of natural instincts. Lewis concedes that we have natural instincts for survival, procreation, and so forth, but then asks what we do when two such natural instincts come into conflict. To solve this conflict we must appeal to a third thing (tertium quid in Latin) that transcends both instincts; that third thing is the Tao. Finally, in response to the critique that the Tao cannot be divinely given since we must teach it to children, Lewis reminds us that we also must teach children the mathematical tables. The analogy is an important one, for math and morality share something in common: the Tao, like the Pythagorean theorem, is not something that we make up but something that we discover.

In The Problem of Pain and Miracles, Lewis discusses two further phenomenas that not only could not have evolved but that come to us through discovery rather than invention. The first, interestingly enough, is religion. Although anthropologists and other modernists argue that religion finds its true source in an uncanny fear of the unknown that evolved from our natural, primitive fear of physical danger, Lewis says this is unlikely. To equate fear of physical danger with fear of the unknown is to play fast and loose with the word fear. Our fear of a tiger is not quantitatively but qualitatively different from our fear of a ghost; the one could not simply have evolved into the other. To put it another way, the difference between the two fears is not one of degree but of kind. And to try to fudge by saying that our fear of the unknown evolved from our reverence for the tribal chief is to put the cart before the horse. The real question is not whether reverence can evolve into a sense of the sacred, but where the reverence came from in the first place.

No, says Lewis, the true origin of religion is to be located in a numinous fear of the supernatural, a fear that is unique to humans—the only animals on our planet who are afraid of their own dead. But that is not the whole story. To move from primitive religions based on fear to more sophisticated monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a second qualitative leap must occur for which there is no evolutionary mandate. True theism does not arrive until the God who inspires in us numinous fear is united with the God who created and directs the Tao. There have been and continue to be both nonmoral religions and nonreligious morality. We encounter the first in pagan cults that mix human sacrifice or ritual prostitution with a deep sense of the holy and the sacred. We encounter the second in Stoics and Buddhists who seek to live a life of rigorous moral discipline but do not worship a God outside of themselves. According to Exodus, however, there was a climactic moment in the history of religion when the God who thundered on Mount Sinai, provoking abject fear in the people of Israel, revealed himself to be the same God who gave to Moses the tablets of the Law.

Religion then, Lewis argues, demands a supernatural source, but then so do science and the rational principles upon which science rests. For the modern naturalist who considers evolution to be an all-sufficient explanation, nature is the whole show, a total system that can account for everything that is; no other explanation is needed. But if that is true, Lewis reminds us, then naturalism, which expresses itself through laws and principles that transcend nature, is itself self-refuting. Just as no one can say absolutely that everything is relative, so the scientific and philosophical statements of the naturalists are rendered meaningless by the naturalist claim that our minds are the mere products of a random movement of atoms.

Human reason rests not on empirical observations but on abstract principles that lie outside the system of nature in a supernatural realm of eternal oughts and givens. Indeed, our reason so transcends nature that, by use of our reason, we can alter nature herself. True, animals can make simple cause-effect (inductive) connections (“when the bell rings, I will be fed”), but they can go no further. Only humans can make logical (deductive) leaps based on the existence of preexisting (a priori)principles that lie outside of nature. Indeed, the seemingly empirical statement, “if I study nature, I will discern her laws,” rests upon our prior knowledge that nature is real and ordered and that we can trust our senses and our reason.

Within each one of us, Lewis concludes, there must exist a supernatural entity called reason. Yet that supernatural reason must itself have a greater supernatural source since our reason often sleeps and can be impaired by such physical substances as alcohol. Lewis’s answer to this logical conundrum is that behind and above our limited, individual self-consciousness (“I”) there must lie a greater, eternal Self-consciousness (I AM). Remove the I AM—the name by which God revealed himself to Moses at Sinai—and the human “I” loses both its origin and its ability to sustain itself. For consciousness, like joy, morality, and religion, is ultimately a gift from above. The modernist evolutionary paradigm cannot account for it.

3

FROM THEISM TO CHRISTIANITY: C. S. LEWIS’S CASE FOR CHRIST

In the previous chapter, we saw that Lewis’s argument by desire, his claim that the Tao is universal and cross-cultural, and his contention that religion and reason could not have evolved by natural processes alone all point to a supernatural Being or Force who dwells outside the confines of our space-time continuum. But what kind of a God is this Being/Force? What proof do we have that the divine Source of joy, morality, religion, and reason is equivalent to the God of the Bible?

In Mere Christianity Lewis argues that once we accept the existence of god(s), we are left with two competing versions of what god is like: either he transcends nature (theism proper) or he is immanent in nature (pantheism). In the former scenario, God dwells above and apart from his creation; in the latter, he lives in and through his creation and has no separate existence apart from it. Though both options may seem at first to be equally valid, only the former is compatible with our experience of the Tao. Only a God who is separate from his creation can function as the Guide and Embodiment of pure moral goodness. If pantheism is correct and God is indistinguishable from his creation, then he can be neither good nor evil—he can only be an amoral spiritual force. In pantheistic religions, the gods do not live outside time and space but are themselves born out of the primal (material) chaos; they do not embody either a holy or universal standard and thus cannot serve as the source of our idea of the good.

But what if, Lewis suggests, the dualists are right and there are not one but two gods: a good god who is perpetually at war with an equal and opposite bad god. This option also sounds reasonable until we realize that it runs into the same problem as the argument that the Tao is a product of natural instincts—namely, the problem of the third thing (the tertium quid). If the two powers are equally strong, then how can we say which is the good one? In the absence of a higher standard (a tertium quid) by which to judge the two competing powers, we cannot determine which is good and which is evil. In that case, the Tao is lost, and we are left to rely on might makes right—on fighting rather than quarreling.

No, concludes Lewis, the most rational option is that the Source of the Tao is a single good transcendent God who created the world but is not himself a part of it—precisely the God who is described in the Bible.