InCONTEXT Magazine 2015 by Andy Bannister

inCONTEXT The Canadian Apologetics Magazine | VOL. 4

$4.00 inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

TURNING THE TABLES

A Coherent Life by Ravi Zacharias

AIM FOR THAT

HAYSTACK by Andy Bannister

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN STORY? by Rick Manafo

Confronting the Challenge of Apathy

Turning the Tables by Os Guinness

by Cameron McAllister

God and Higher Education by Alycia Wood

WHY APOLOGISTS SHOULDN’T ANSWER QUESTIONS

by Abdu Murray

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE | VOLUME 4 | rzim.ca

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

For over 30 years Ravi Zacharias International Ministries has been reaching and challenging those who shape the ideas of a culture with the credibility of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Distinctive in its strong evangelistic and apologetic foundation, the ministry of RZIM is intended to touch both the heart and the intellect of the thinkers and influencers of society through the support of the visionary leadership of Ravi Zacharias. RZIM addresses audiences all over the world in the arenas of academia, business, government and churches. Through open forums, closed door sessions, training events, community outreach, youth apologetics, and various media (including radio, Internet, and social media), RZIM seeks to meet people where they are culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. In RZIMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s affirmation of the sacredness of every human life as Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation, it is also leaving a significant footprint in the area of compassion and aid through its humanitarian arm called Wellspring. For a more comprehensive and detailed description of our global ministry team and initiatives visit rzim.ca

For inspiration or resources Find us at rzimcanada

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Andy Writes I cut my first apologetics teeth at London’s Speakers’ Corner, spending many a Sunday afternoon balanced precariously on top of a stepladder, debating and dialoguing with the many Muslims, atheists and other assorted skeptics who gathered around to engage us. Questions and objections to Christianity flew like guided missiles and so I quickly developed the idea that apologetics was all about data. Filling one’s mind with detailed answers to every conceivable question and then, loaded for bear, firing back answers onto hecklers, questioners, and random members of the public.

question: “What’s wrong with being a hypocrite?” My questioner stared back, open mouthed. It seems she had simply assumed a moral value and had never thought about how, as an atheist, she could defend it. I gently followed up by saying, “What you seem to be saying is that Christians don’t always do a good job of following Jesus. And I’d agree. But have you looked at whose standard you’re calling us back to?” Often our skeptical friends hold assumptions they can’t justify and asking good questions can expose that. In this issue of InContext Magazine we explore this idea, looking at some ways we can gently help especially our atheist friends begin to question their assumptions—and as we do that, help to connect them back into the bigger and only story in which those assumptions (justice, meaning, morality, dignity etc.) make sense. You see there was one last thing I said to the atheist who asked about hypocrisy: I pointed out that Jesus would agree with her. When you read the gospels, Jesus spends a very good deal of his time challenging the religious leaders of his day for not living up to what God had called them to be. “So,” I said, “when you accuse religious people of hypocrisy, you might want to notice who you’re standing next to. Perhaps you and Jesus need to have a conversation about this.”

The problem with that approach to apologetics is it can put many people off—indeed, it feeds some of the negative views of apologetics I often hear from Christians: “I’m not intellectual enough.” “Apologetics is for those with a PhD.” “Apologists think they can argue people into faith.” It took me a long time before I learned that often the most powerful form of apologetics is asking questions—gently probing at somebody else’s worldview to expose where it breaks down. Too often our skeptical friends assume they get to ask the questions and we get to answer them: but sometimes when you turn this around and ask questions back, it can take the conversation in new directions.

I hope you enjoy this issue of InContext Magazine and that it might lead you to discovering new ways of engaging in fruitful conversations with friends, family, neighbours and colleagues.

At a recent Q&A, a student came to the microphone and announced, “My problem with Christianity is that the Church is full of hypocrites!” How to respond? Should I have given a rhetorically polished defence of the Church, warts and all? I sensed in my spirit that this wouldn’t have helped, so instead I asked a

Dr. Andy Bannister

Canadian Director, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

5 7

A Coherent Life Ravi Zacharias

Aim For That Haystack Andy Bannister

Confronting the Challenge of Apathy

19 28

Turning the Tables

God and Higher Education

Why Apologists Shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Answer Questions

Cameron McAllister Os Guinness

What Is It About the Christian Story? Rick Manafo

Alycia Wood

Abdu Murray

inCONTEXT Magazine A communication vehicle of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Canada Canadian Director | Dr. Andy Bannister | andy.bannister@rzim.ca Editor | Rick Manafo | rick.manafo@rzim.ca Graphic Design | Aaron Holbrough | aaron@thecreativespace.net Cover Art | Adam Holbrough | adamholbrough@icloud.com Print | Turnhill Graphics Mailing Address: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Canada 315-50 Gervais Drive, Toronto, Ontario M3C 1Z3 Telephone: (416) 385-9199 Toll Free (Canada): (800) 803-3829 Fax: (416) 385-9155 Web: rzim.ca | Twitter: @rzimcanada

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

A Coherent Life By Ravi Zacharias

Sociologist Daniel Bell once said that “culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives.” However, to define culture in such terms may well be outdated now. Some years ago I recall lecturing at an American university in the Midwest when a student stormed up to the microphone and bellowed, “Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea,” she said.

Sadly, more and more it seems that one’s body and proclivities are the defining reason for being—even though such a philosophy of life is ultimately unlivable. That is how intense I believe this struggle in thinking and in living has become. Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault may well be the definitive bookends of the twentieth century. Both were brilliant yet tragic figures. To some the name of Michel Foucault may not be familiar. He was a leading French intellectual who by virtue of a very promiscuous life died at the age of 57. He was a lover of Nietzsche’s writings, who ironically had died at age 55, in the wake of what, some biographers think, was his pitiful bout with venereal disease that even resulted in fits of insanity.

I replied by reminding her that all I had done in that instance was to present a sociologist’s definition that culture sought coherence. “Ah! Words! Just words!” she shouted back.

Ironically, and irresistibly, even the irreverent find it impossible to live without denunciation—and all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. They may speak in anger against those who call for moral reasoning but become even angrier when they are on the wrong end of someone’s immorality or when they come up on the receiving end of injustice. Put simply, the moral law—an absolute point of reference—does not disappear by attempting to silence God or frame reality as we wish. The logic of this position simply makes life logically unlivable. Hedonism is the legitimate offspring of relativism. Meaninglessness is the offspring of an exhausted array of indulgence. And it is in this place where again and again, we have witnessed the heart of many soften to the gospel. As I have said before, we’re living in a time when I think G.K. Chesterton’s dictum has proven to be true. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure—and we have spent ourselves in this indulgent culture with nothing left to expend or experience. There is now a vacuum

“Let me ask you this then,” I said. “Do you want my answer to be coherent, or may my answer be incoherent?” Some laughter rippled through the auditorium. She herself was stymied for a few moments. “But that’s language, isn’t it?” she retorted. So I asked her if language did not have anything to do with reality. “Must words not point to a referent? If you are seeking an answer that must be coherent, but culture itself does not have to be, from where do you get this disjunction?” You could sense the turmoil within, and indeed later on I was told that this individual was a rather outspoken person whose way of life was radically aberrant from the normal. Her whole struggle for coherence was rooted in her very physiological dissonance. That made her confusion more understandable.

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE at the heart of our culture and there is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no overarching story to life by which all the particulars can be interpreted.

Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.

The unintended consequence in this vacuum is a deep hunger for the spiritual, for something that transcends the here and now and brings coherence to the various expressions by which we live. In fact, in virtually every part of the world, students linger long after every session to talk and plead for answers to their barren lives. All the education one receives does not diminish that search for inner coherence and a storyline for one’s own life. I can picture many of their faces and I read hundreds of letters that come, confessing to a spent life and a bankrupt heart.

~G.K. Chesterton

Beyond the search for individual meaning is a search for community, for a community that shares, bears, and sustains a relationship of trust and greater purpose. Only in the gospel message can that truly be found with togetherness that culminates in worship. That is true coherence that blends the particular realities with the bond of the sacred. In that relationship, both individuality and community are affirmed. The worship of the living God is what ultimately binds the various inclinations of the heart and gives them focus. A community of hearts and minds united in spirit and in truth binds the diversity of our culture, the diversity of our education, the diversity of our backgrounds, and brings us together into a corporate expression of worship. That reality ought to be an urgent call to the body of Christ, to the church, before a watching world, for one of the most powerful witnesses in a discordant culture is a community united in joy and worship. You see, the most dramatic truth about the gospel is that it contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive and compels us to drastically redefine what we mean by life. Indeed, Jesus turns the tables on the way we define reality, declaring, “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matt 16:25). Jesus contradicts our routine in the way He countered the disciples, even as He headed towards the Cross. They were the ones marked out for death. He, “the dead one,” was really the living, rising to life as He said. And over 2000 years later, He alone still brings an inner coherence and a peace that nothing in this world can satisfy. The woman at the well with a shattered past found that out, and so did the brilliant Saul of Tarsus whose credentials did not bring him that purpose until he met the Living Jesus. May we find that truth in our lives and in our churches.

Ravi 6

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

AIM FOR THAT HAYSTACK!

(Why Psychological Arguments Against Religion Fail) ANDY BANNISTER The little Cessna bounced perkily in the cloudless skies above Oxford, making us passengers feel like peas in a tumble dryer. “This is going to be fun!” my friend Dave enthused, gazing excitedly out of the window. “Fun?” I asked sardonically. “Yes! And a great way to raise money for charity, too. I love charity skydives, it puts the ‘fun’ into ‘fundraising’.” “Or ‘funeral’,” I muttered under my breath. I had spent my life avoiding skydiving, feeling a natural suspicion of any sport in which progress comes more through natural selection than practice. Indeed, I still wasn’t sure quite how I’d gotten talked into this. Maybe it was the talk of embarrassing photos from university days being released onto Facebook or the guilt-trip laid on me that whilst I dithered, untold thousands were suffering. The Oxfam rep who had signed us up had grinned and said: “Think of it as a win-win. If you live, you raise thousands of pounds for the starving. If it all goes badly wrong, the John Radcliffe Hospital get your organs.”

back to the present. “Time to go!” said Dave. He had skydiven1 many times before, so we were due to perform what’s called a tandem jump. Apparently this doesn’t involve plunging to your doom on a bicycle made for two, but being strapped to the front of a bearded psychopath whose first word on leaping from the plane was “Geronimo!” The wind whistled past my ears, we span on multiple axes several times before we levelled off and the whole of Oxfordshire opened out beneath us. I resisted the urge to throw up. I am of the opinion that the human brain is designed to deal with geography in small chunks: this is your village, this is the next farm etc. A concept like this is the entire darned county is too much for our minds to process at once. “What a view!” shouted Dave from somewhere behind me. He glanced at his watch, one of those clever gadgets that tells you everything apart from the time. Apparently it included a vertical speed reading. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “We’ve achieved terminal velocity”. “Have you ever reflected on how profoundly

A buzzer sounded loudly in the plane, pulling me 1

Before linguistic pedants tell me that’s not a word, you try conjugating the verb ‘to skydive’.

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE unhelpful a term that is?” I called back. Well, the vertigo, nausea and sheer general terror aside, the free-fall part of the jump went well. The view was, I had to admit, spectacular and there was something exhilarating in flying like a bird. Even if the bird in question was one plummeting like a kakapo with concrete blocks strapped to its feet. “Right,” shouted Dave, “time to think about landing. I’ll aim for that haystack, over there, at about two o’clock.” “I’m sorry,” I yelled back, “You’ll do what?” “I’ll aim for that haystack. Down there in that field behind the cemetery.” “I realise I’m a newcomer to this,” I replied with as much politeness as the fear and the rushing of the wind would allow, “but wouldn’t, er, a parachute be a better option?” “Parachute!” Dave spluttered back, in the same kind of tone as if I’d suggested a wet herring. “Oh, puuurrrrleeease, you’re not one of those people who believe in parachutes?” “Well, I was kind of hoping you were too, before I strapped myself to you and leapt out of a plane.” “Parachutes are for the weak!” “Happy to be counted among the weak,” I admitted. “Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines, that’s my motto.” “Why would you want a parachute?” Dave thundered. “Oh, let me think now—what about this for a starter: because it makes you feel better knowing you can just yank the rip cord and float down to safety …” “I see your problem,” yelled back Dave. “That’s a psychological attachment you’re carrying there.” “You mean my attachment to life?” “No, no. Your view of parachutes. Parachutes clearly make you feel good, probably because you’re afraid of death, or perhaps because you have fond childhood memories of seeing pictures of them, or attaching them to toy soldiers and playing with them.2 But just because something makes you feel good, doesn’t make it true, does it? Now, where was that haystack …?” ⌘

and our prejudices, who we love, what we buy, which sports team we support—can all be explained on the basis of our upbringing, our hopes and fears, our psychology. Given that psychology is so ubiquitous, it’s little surprise that it has found itself into the God debate, with some atheists quick to appeal to psychology to explain away religion. Psychology, it is claimed, can explain sects as well as sex. A friend of mine tells a story of getting into a London taxi cab one Sunday after church. The driver took one look at her Bible, sneered dismissively and then launched into a tirade against Christianity. “Religion is a psychological crutch,” he ranted, “it’s something for weak, pathetic people who don’t have the self-reliance, courage or strength to take responsibility for their own lives.” My friend, being English, politely responded: “Well, thank you for that.” Whereupon the driver, realising he had probably just blown any chance for a tip, tried to recover with: “What’s a nice girl like you need religion for anyway?”3 Or as was once said to me by an American university student: “You’re English and so you’re naturally repressed and dour.4 No wonder you choose to believe in God, it simply makes you feel good.”The claim that religious beliefs can simply be explained by psychology is an idea most commonly traced to Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who today is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis.5 Along with sex, religion was a topic that fascinated Freud and for him, it was all a psychological projection: people believe in God because they project their hopes, desires and fears into the sky, for instance creating a heavenly version of their earthly fathers, somebody who is a loving and protecting guardian. We are also afraid of death and mortality, so we project the idea of heaven and an afterlife. You get the idea. This is a theme frequently returned to by contemporary atheists: for example, here is former Muslim Alom Shaha, author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook:

We’re told that everything from our politics to religion–can be explained on the basics of our upbringing, our hopes, our fears, our psychology.

Death gives birth to gods; without death, there would be fewer gods, if any … Inventing a god is a coping strategy that has been adopted by people since prehistoric times, and it is understandable.6

Psychological arguments seem to be everywhere these days. We’re told that everything—our politics

Most of my childhood memories actually concern attempting to setting fire to things; to this day I can’t see a packet of Swan Vestas matches without feeling a warm glow.3 3 The story is told in Amy Orr-Ewing, Is Believing in God Irrational? (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2008) 43. 4 “I think you’ll find that’s the Scots,” I tried to interrupt. 5 His wife also revolutionized women’s undergarments with the invention of the Freudian Slip. 6 Alom Shaha, The Young Atheist’s Handbook (London: Biteback Publishing, 2012) 26-27. 2

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE Now on one level, I’d want to begin by accepting that his argument has a point. Being a thoughtful type I do often find myself reflecting on my own mortality.7 Now I’ll be generous at this point and allow Alom a bit of free pass on the question as to why only the human animal thinks about death and needs consolation when faced with our mortality: after all, squirrels, aardvarks and fruit bats seem to get along perfectly fine without asking themselves troubling existential questions. Thus we are faced with the puzzling brainteaser of how it is that evolution, if that is the only game in town, has produced something quite so magnificently odd as human beings, wired to look for ultimate meaning, purpose and comfort, even though they are not to be found in the materialistic universe in which atheists believe we inhabit. If Alom were to find himself lost in the deserts of the Arabian Empty Quarter, stumbling around desperately looking for water, his craving for hydration wouldn’t mean that every sparkling glimmer on the horizon was an oasis—mirages may be more common than not. But surely his thirst should tell him that there is such a thing as water. So what is it, in short, that has “set eternity in the hearts of men?”

deny not only pygmy pachyderms, but ice cream, landscapes, and sex.9 Of course, the same point works with negative things too. There are many things the thought of which make me feel fear or disgust: Star Wars episode one, death, my tax return and the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, to name but four. But just because I feel bad about those things, doesn’t tell me anything about whether or not they are real. If there were an argument from the sheer awfulness of The Phantom Menace to the non-existence of George Lucas, I am sure that some undergraduate philosophy student and film buff would have discovered it by now. That’s all very well, I can hear potential detractors cry, but aren’t you just being absurd? After all, we know that ice cream, mountains, sex, bad movies, and tax returns actually exist. So the comparison to God is a poor one. Well, not so fast, Socrates. Things are not nearly so straightforward as you might imagine. First, a moment’s thought will remind you that we have to trust our minds, our consciousness, our senses every day for our encounter with the world. You don’t have first-hand experience of the ice cream: how it looks, tastes, and smells are all sensations mediated to you through your mind. Now I happen to think that our minds are, most the time, generally reliable.10 But it’s nevertheless possible that you could be mistaken, deceived, deluded, or that you might actually just be a brain in a jar, wired up to electrodes stimulated by a mad scientist who is simply manipulating you to conceive of the ice cream. We take more of the world on trust than we often realise. Second, there’s the question of how we interpret reality. Consider the example of a mountain. When I stand on the summit of Kidsty Pike in the Lake District and gaze at the vast sweep of the Eastern Fells, my reaction is instinctive: that is a beautiful view. But what is beauty? Can we measure it? Can we touch it? Is there an equation that can calculate how beautiful said view really is? Clearly not. Well then, does that mean that when I say “that’s a beautiful view”, I’m merely describing my personal preference, my psychology? That doesn’t

What is beauty? Can we measure it? Can we touch it? Is there an equation that can calculate how beautiful said view really is?

But let’s now turn from death to delight. It most definitely is the case that Christianity sometimes does make me feel good. Now I realise that admission would see Alom leap to his feet and proclaim: “Exactly! That’s my very point! But Andy, just because something makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that it’s true.” To which I would want to respond: precisely. You cannot deduce whether or not something is true, or whether something exists, from how you feel about it. For instance, the thought of mint choc chip ice cream, mountain views, and sex makes me feel good.8 So, too, does the thought of rollerskating bonsai elephants and personal teleportation devices. See the problem? You cannot use how I feel about something to determine its existence—there are imaginary things the thought of which I enjoy and there are also real things whose contemplation brings me pleasure. If one were to be a consistent psychological sceptic, one would thus have to

Especially when watching The X Factor or when driving through Norfolk, which often causes me to ponder, “Is there more to life than Diss?” Not all at the same time, mind you.10 9 Although that might explain why multiple studies have shown that atheists have less children than religious people: see e.g. Ed West, ‘A nightmare for Richard Dawkins: statistics show that atheists are a dying breed’, The Telegraph, 18 September 2009 (http://blogs.telegraph. co.uk/news/edwest/ 100010450/a-nightmare-for-richard-dawkins-statistics-show-that-atheists-are-a-dying-breed/). In a presentation at the Explaining Religion Conference (Bristol University 2010) Dr. Michael Blume said: “We have found not a single case of a secular population retaining replacement fertility rates of more than two children per woman for a century.” 10 Well, maybe not George Lucas’s mind when he thought that Jar Jar Binks was a good idea. 11 If you are philosophically minded, you might enjoy Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) or C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 2001 [1944]). 7 8

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE seem right either. Otherwise it would be equally true to declare that the overflowing rubbish bins around the back of the local Tescos are “beautiful”, if somebody happens to think so. Beauty has to be more than mere opinion, otherwise we’re just playing word games. So if beauty isn’t a material thing and it isn’t a subjective, personal, psychological projection, what is it? Well, perhaps that’s a discussion for another time;11 suffice to say that the question of existence isn’t simply a case of squawking “Must see it! Must see it!” like some kind of philosophical parrot. So what about God’s existence? Well, I’d want to suggest that there is a wealth of evidence that you can engage to explore that question, ranging from philosophical and scientific arguments, to moral and ethical arguments, to arguments from literature and history, as well as from personal experience. There are a myriad of books that cover this ground—but this book is not intended to be one of them.12 My point is simply this: that what you feel about God doesn’t answer the question as to whether there is a God. You may love the idea of God, or you may hate the idea of God—but that simply describes your emotions and psychology and tells us nothing about his actual existence. ⌘

simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.14 There’s a refreshing honesty to Huxley’s admission that he’d worked out that if Christianity was true, it would have some entailments—especially moral entailments—to which he was not willing to submit. Faced with that, what’s a young man, full of the joys of spring and with a packet of wild oats ready for sowing to do? Well, deny the whole thing. By claiming the world was God-free, meaning-free and moral-free, Huxley could do entirely as he wished. But the key point is that he was led to his atheism not by the careful hand of reason but by the horny hand of lust—Huxley was a rebel and proud of it. Other atheists who have reflected carefully on their motives have similarly admitted that their atheism is not so much rational as emotional; here, for instance, is philosopher Thomas Nagel:

There are times, however, when psychology can be very helpful. Whilst it cannot tell us whether my belief in mint chocolate chip ice cream or Richard Dawkins’ belief in evolution is valid, it can explore some of the reasons why we believe those things. Perhaps the real reason why I am so drawn to frozen green dairy products with chocolaty bits in them is because deep down I’m convinced that it’s actually a health food.13 Maybe the reason why Dawkins really believes in evolution is primarily because it annoys creationists and there’s nothing he enjoys more than a hearty argument. Those examples help us to get at something quite important: it is possible to believe in things—real, existing things—for entirely wrong or incoherent reasons. Most of the time when it comes to the ‘God question’, I’d suggest that our deeper motives are hidden, although sometimes they surface and the person is willing to acknowledge them. I admire the candour of an atheist like Aldous Huxley, for example:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.15 A desire for personal autonomy is psychologically very understandable (anybody who has parented teenagers will know the signs instantly) but it’s a perfectly bad reason to be an atheist. At the same time, let’s be fair and acknowledge that both today and throughout history Christians have sometimes similarly professed faith in God for woefully bad reasons. “Because it makes me feel good” is a fine example. Even if it turned out that believing in God made you feel miserable, depressed and nervous, even if every Bible were shipped with a packet of

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was

You might start with N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (New York: HarperOne, 2006) and if you’re super keen, progress to William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Editors), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 13 You don’t see cows suffer from cholesterol issues and cocoa is, after all, a plant. 14 Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941) 273 15 Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 130. 12

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist

The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments

Andy Bannister “Clears Away the Weeds of Bad Arguments” and “Tugs on the Loose Threads on the Cardigan of Skepticism” “Intellectual, provocative and laught-out-loud funny.” — Paul Woolley “A breath, a gust, a positive whoosh of fresh air. Made me laugh, made me think, made me cry. The words bounce across the page.” — Adrian Plass The Pew Research Center announced earlier this year that atheists in America have nearly doubled in just seven years, but Andy Bannister, Lead Apologist for Ravi Zacharias Ministries in Canada, has been on the receiving end of anti-faith arguments for longer than that. Andy grew up in England, home of celebrity scientist Richard Dawkins and advertising slogans like “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life,” which were plastered across London double-decker buses. Andy responds to God’s naysayers in a witty and winsome way. You’ll enjoy reading this book and will have the urge and confidence to share it with others who refuse to be mired in the muck of bad arguments.

Order at your local bookstore, or online at chapters.ca and amazon.ca 11

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE Prozac, that wouldn’t change whether or not God is real. However, there are yet worse reasons to believe in God, I’m afraid. For instance, sometimes people have grabbed hold of religion because they have seen in it a way to achieve power, as was once pointed out by Karl Marx in this very famous paragraph:

Whether or not either charge sticks is largely by-theby, for neither soundbite answers the question: but which worldview, atheism or theism, is actually true? Nevertheless, there is perhaps one contribution that psychology can contribute here that may offer a clue. You see, it has often struck me that if Christianity were mere wish-fulfilment, just a psychological projection, then those who dreamt it up had pretty impoverished imaginations. Were I inventing a religion, dreaming up a deity from first principles, I have some pretty good hunches which direction I’d go. Let’s posit a god who is distant and doesn’t interfere too much; if one must have moral commands, let’s construct some that are pretty easy to keep, more along the lines of “Thou shalt not poke aardvarks with a stick” and “Thou shalt not dry thy underpants in a toaster”. Let’s also ensure that my à la carte religion blesses me with the freedom to spend my time and money as I wish, with no constraints. Finally, let’s bolt on the promise of a lowentry-condition heaven that is full of wine, women and song (a heaven open to all who are as good as me, but ideally not to those who aren’t—well, you know, decent or who Look a Bit Funny). Were I inventing a religion out of whole cloth, I think that’s what I (and I suspect most people) would shoot for. In contrast, what do we have in Christianity? A religion that demands our heart, mind and soul: “Take up your cross,” said Jesus, “and follow me”. “Take up my what?” Either the first Christians could really have done with a couple of advertising executives and a social media consultant among the apostles, or else the sheer difficulty, the way that Christianity cuts against our ingrained tendency to orbit gyroscopically around our own egos, tells us something.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.16 The nineteenth century was an age before the invention of modern anaesthetics and so opium was widely used as a painkiller. Marx was making the point that for the poor, this was precisely how religion functioned, alleviating their pain and distracting them from their decrepitude with the promise that everything would be okay in the hereafter. Indeed, he argued, the rich elites use religion as a tool of power this very way, keeping the oppressed satiated with promises of heaven. Religion can be used as a tool of social control in other ways, too, excluding those who don’t think in the right way (i.e. like you do) in order that you might marginalise them. Now if you’re an atheist reading this, you may be nodding happily in agreement, however there’s not much breathing room to be smug. It’s sobering to notice, for example, that during the eighteenth century, wealthy businessmen and politicians fought to keep Christian missionaries out of British India, for fear they would instil into the Indians the dangerous idea that all men are equal.18 Whilst a bit closer to our time, one can see how communism—the atheistic political system for which Marx helped to provide the intellectual scaffolding—became a powerful tool of exclusion: “Only we have the truth, because we are on the side of the people.” And today, we see a similar trend in much of the New Atheism, whose advocates love to demonise, ridicule and marginalise those who do not think like them. ⌘

“Christians are people who are afraid of the dark!” the skeptic sneers. “Atheists are people who are afraid of the light!” the Christian retorts.

One of my heroes has long been the German Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, arrested during the Second World War and eventually killed by the Third Reich for the stance that he took against them. Bonhoeffer had an unnerving knack for writing paragraphs that can make one feel profoundly uncomfortable, such as this one:

Overall though, appeals to psychology simply don’t get us very far when it comes to questions of ultimate truth: “Christians are people who are afraid of the dark!” the skeptic sneers. “Atheists are people who are afraid of the light!” the Christian retorts.

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own

Cited in David McLellan (editor), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 72. Or the Twilight novels, the reading of which achieves much the same effect. 18 See Ernest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics: The “Clapham Sect” and the Growth of Freedom (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976 [1953]) 65-94. 16 17

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands.19

and shudder!”20 If God were to come at your whistle and perform a personal miracle, just for you, right here, right now, what would you do precisely? What would follow next: a mere re-ordering of your personal philosophy and the shipping of a few atheist books to the nearest charity shop? Or a life of commitment and service, the laying down of everything—in short, the waving of the white flag and the rebel’s complete surrender? Perhaps the heart of Russell’s difficulty was not so much an evidence problem as a commitment problem.

Bonhoeffer is making the point that the heart of Christianity lies not in the idea that we invent, project, create or choose God—if we did that, what we would have is a God of our own making, one who looks suspiciously like us. (Indeed, if you are religious, a sure sign that you’ve done just this is that the God you claim to believe in spends most of his time benevolently blessing all of your own prejudices, desires and ambitions.) Instead, if God is really real, then we have to approach him on his own terms. I’ve sometimes wondered, when push comes to shoving religion off the cliff, if this is the chief problem with God for some atheists—he simply refuses to be domesticated. If God would simply come on my command, jump when I whistle, and keep the hell out of those areas of my life that I’ve clearly marked with the equivalent of “Police: Do Not Cross” tape, then it’d be okay and maybe we could talk. But of course, such a bite-sized god, whatever he might be, certainly would not be worthy of anything other than our pity and disdain. Why not just go the easier route and invest in a dachshund rather than a deity.

Psychology fails as a weapon to attack Christianity with. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a helpful tool, reminding us (if ever we needed reminding) that human beings are, well, very human and that we believe in things passionately and deeply for all kinds of reasons. Indeed, our motives are usually mixed and we would do well to reflect on them honestly, especially when it comes to our deepest beliefs, desires and ambitions. One psychological problem, common to us all, is that we are, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, such “half-hearted creatures”. We play around with money, sex and power, invest so much time chasing after the wind, especially in this digital age—fooling with Facebook, toying with Twitter, gazing goggle-eyed at Google—that we find it hard to lift our eyes to the bigger questions. We are too easily pleased with ephemera, like a child content to play forever with mud pies in her sandpit because she cannot conceive of what is meant by the offer of a holiday at a seaside.21 If Christianity is true, it is the story of how God offers us transformative forgiveness, infinite joy, and everlasting peace—but it will cost us something: the price is our autonomy and our pride. By all means, reject Christianity because you have examined the evidence and concluded it is false. But don’t walk away because you are rebelling at a deeper level and merely hiding behind the fig leaf of bad arguments. For if your self-deceit runs that deep, I suggest you need something more potent than even the most skilled of psychologists can offer you.

The late Bertrand Russell, one of the most doggedly indefatigable atheists of the last century, was once asked what he would do if he died and found himself standing before the Almighty, who demands to know why Russell did not believe in him. Russell replied that he would look God in the eye and say: “Not enough evidence, sir!” I’m often told versions of that story by sceptics, sometimes personalised in more pointed form: “If God appeared in front of me and did a miracle right here, right here, right now, I’d believe in him instantly”, I was once told by a student. Now perhaps you sympathise with this idea. If God instantly created a pink rhinoceros in your office, filled the lavatory with an angelic choir, or made the clothes of every atheist in the world instantly disappear, you’d believe. To which I’d want to ask: really? Forgive me, but I think I need to call your bluff. (Or perhaps buff, if you’re one of the naked atheists, shivering and trouserless). You see belief isn’t really what God is looking for. As the New Testament itself memorably puts it: “Even the demons believe in God

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This article is a chapter taken from Andy Bannister’s latest book, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist. For more information go to www.theatheistwhodidntexist.com. See ad on page 11.

Twitter:@andygbannister andy.bannister@rzim.ca

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010) 137. James 2:19. 21 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1980 [1949]) 26. 19 20

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CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGE OFAPATHY CAMERON MCALLISTER

“I found it hard, it’s hard to find/Oh well, whatever, never mind” –Kurt Cobain

from the broader culture. Passionate rejection is one thing, bored dismissal quite another.

Three Major Kinds of Apathy in North America

There are three kinds of apathy prevalent in North America today: Soft Apathy, Affected Apathy, and Hard Apathy. Soft Apathy is reinforced by safety and comfort, and tends to operate with a market mindset, conveniently reducing everything it encounters to one of many possible options. Personal preference, rather than truth, is the deciding factor here. Soft Apathy reclines and waits to be entertained.2 This is the same mindset that informs our endless browsing on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, and the same slack-jawed indecision that cripples us in the teeming aisles of our local supermarkets. Notice that this kind of apathy is only possible in a context of relative comfort and stability. Introduce an element of danger or tragedy, and the center can’t hold. Even a minor injury can be enough to puncture the panoply of options that conceal life’s seriousness from us.3

In apologetic circles, we prepare for informed discussions about matters of truth and conviction with those who don’t share our views. After all, 1 Peter 3:15 isn’t just a suggestion, it’s a biblical command to offer a defense for the hope that is within us to anyone who asks. Implicit in Peter’s apologetic injunction is also the assumption that inquisitiveness on the part of non-believers is the natural response to Christians. This raises an awkward question: How come so few are asking questions? Timothy Keller has said that in the West we have been inoculated against the gospel, given just enough of a dosage to make us immune to Christ’s actual claim on our lives. As Dallas Willard used to say, “Overfamiliarity breeds contempt.” Many people in our North American context assume they already know the gospel. The good news is seen as old news, and this poses a significant challenge to anyone who wishes to explore this vital subject with those outside the church. Though Christianity still inspires a good deal of public ire1, there’s a startling lack of interest

Affected Apathy is more serious. Engendered by deep-seated hurt, disappointment or disillusionment, Affected Apathy is a carefully cultivated affectation that tends to hide behind irony, cynicism, or

Even here, much of the public outrage belies a deep sense of apathy. A repeated criticism of the New Atheists concerns their willful ignorance of the actual content of the religions they denigrate. For a particularly unsparing treatment of this shortcoming, see David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013),19-28. 2 For a lively and informative treatment of our entertainment-saturated age, see Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. (London: Penguin Books, 2005) 3 Comedian and talk-show host, Jimmy Fallon, recently injured his finger after tripping on a rug in his home. The injury required 6 hours of microsurgery and kept Fallon in the ICU for 10 days, during which time Fallon “lost it” and started “reading books on the meaning of life.” One can only hope it takes a less painful form of encouragement for each of us to “lose it” and pursue the question of life’s meaning… The story is available online http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/192232/in-intensive-care-jimmy-fallon-read-mans-search-for-meaning (Accessed August 23, 2015) 4 This kind of apathy is particularly common among teenagers. 1

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE The Imagination as Apathy’s Antidote

pessimism (or a combination of all three), rarely risking vulnerability. Caring is risky; this kind of apathy plays it safe.4 What needs to be borne in mind is that this kind of apathy usually stems from hurt and arises as a defense mechanism. A person suffering from this kind of apathy may feel that they have given all they have to give only to be repaid with continual back-stabbings and heartache. Thus, they choose to view life as a farce, an absurd pageant on a flimsy stage.5 This is no surprise. Failure is writ large in our leaders, our churches, our homes, our lives. Affected Apathy proposes that we laugh instead of weep. Why? Because life is meaningless, and it ultimately doesn’t matter. Though this is clearly the path of least resistance, it’s understandable why so many choose it. Unlike Soft Apathy, Affected Apathy doesn’t have an easy solution. A person must heal before they can recover the courage to hope for meaning.

This cultural malaise infects the tone of many of our conversations. When it comes to discussions with people outside the church, many of us would rather hear, “I think you’re wrong” than “I just don’t care.” Most of us prefer the confrontation to the impasse, antagonism to apathy. Strong reactions can be unwieldy, but at least they’re usually occasioned by a shared investment in the subject. But what do you do when the investment is completely one-sided? What do you do when you’re the only one who cares? See if this sounds familiar: You’re having a casual conversation with a friend or acquaintance. It’s going well. There’s a steady flow to your discussion. There’s no hard work involved. No awkward pauses, no uncomfortable interruptions. You decide that the moment is right to take things in a more serious direction. You tread softly into the territory of your religious faith. As soon as you give verbal expression to the name of Christ it’s as though invisible shades are

Hard Apathy occurs when Soft and Affected Apathy have hardened into a chronic condition. In Hard Apathy, the profound and the trivial trade places, so that a person suffering from this condition is no longer able to care about what truly matters. They may weep about the impending separation of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy (the end of an era!), while ignoring the wreckage of their own marriage. This is the most formidable type of apathy because a person suffering from this condition is completely committed to impermanence.

We’ll have to use our imaginations if we want to be liberated from the morass of apathy. pulled down over each of your friend’s eyes. Though they haven’t physically moved away from you (yet), they’re suddenly many miles away. And you seem to be yelling across a vast chasm, and you can almost see your words visibly dropping to the ground before they reach your listener’s ears.

In biblical language, what this means is that the she has made the “world, the flesh, and the devil” her exclusive pursuit. This is what is meant by the profound and the trivial trading places. Hard Apathy cares only for the transient, while turning a blind eye to the eternal. Scientific Naturalism, with its barren commitment to matter as reality’s sole constituent, fits snugly into this category. The geneticist Richard Lewontin boldly declares that the naturalist’s credo is to establish that “materialism is absolute…no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated… for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”6

This is putting the matter dramatically, but talking to others about Jesus is dramatic business. My use of the word “drama” is deliberate, by the way. We’ll have to use our imaginations if we want to be liberated from the morass of apathy. We can’t make people care about Jesus, but we just might be able to pique their interest. What I wish to suggest to you is that imagination holds an important key to our confrontation with apathy. The word “drama” may take us a step in the right direction, but the word “imagination” is liable to be greeted with immediate suspicion. Many of us think that the worlds of fantasy and make-believe constitute the sole province of the imagination, that imagination, though certainly an admirable quality

Soft Apathy is easily cured; Affected Apathy takes serious work; Hard Apathy takes a miracle. At this point, it may be prudent to remind ourselves that it is only the Holy Spirit Who is capable of un-hardening the human heart. We are messengers, not messiahs.

Affected Apathy is the stock-in-trade of many postmodern writers (Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, etc.), as well as most of our popular sitcoms (Modern Family, Arrested Development, Big Bang Theory, to name a few). 6 Thomas Nagel draws attention to this quote in his book Mind and Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49. 7 Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 15 (italics mine). 5

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE in children and artists, is recreational at best, a flight from reality at worst. Is this true? Does imagination never move beyond dreams and fantasy? Are “creatives” the only people with imagination?

factual, seem meaningless to us. Dostoevsky, who spent time in a Siberian labor camp, once proposed that futile labor is the most severe form of torture he could imagine being inflicted on the prisoners. “But if, let us say, he were forced to pour water from one tub into another and back again, time after time, to pound sand, to carry a heap of soil from one spot to another and back again—I think that such a convict would hang himself within a few days or commit a thousand offences in order to die, to escape from such degradation, shame and torture.”9 The cruel ingenuity of this project resides in its perpetual fusion of teeth-grinding effort and worthless work. The facts of this state of affairs are transparent to all involved. It’s precisely the lack of meaning, however, that Dostoevsky believes would prove lethal for many of the prisoners.

In his superb book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Malcolm Guite defines the imagination “as an active, shaping power of perception exercised both individually and collectively, and as a faculty that is capable of both apprehending and embodying truth. Like reason, its twin faculty, our fallen imagination is shadowed and finite, but like reason it is also, under God’s grace, illuminating and redemptive. Imagination informs reason and is in turn informed by it.”7 There’s a wealth of insight here, but I want to highlight three of Guite’s key assertions: 1) The imagination is a faculty shared by everyone; 2) The imagination can grant us access to truth 3); The imagination is not necessarily opposed to reason.

The New Yorker recently profiled a fascinating new app. Known as Days of Life, its “application” is to tell you how long you have left to live. Feed it your

One common objection to the imagination is that many people don’t see themselves as particularly imaginative. Some people have it, others don’t. The unvoiced assumption seems to be that the imagination is the exclusive property of children, artists, and the people who work at Pixar Studios. Presumably, those with more analytical or practical dispositions would rather pursue a more direct approach to evangelism. But we need not operate with such an emaciated conception of the imagination.

Your life becomes part of that grand narrative; your life becomes a story. Imagination is the compass in your hands, the vision guiding your steps. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons that the words “journey,” “story,” and “epic” have become so ubiquitous.

Perhaps thinking of the imagination in terms of its practical application in our lives will give us a better purchase on this vexed topic. C.S. Lewis says, “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”8 This forms an ideal compliment to Guite’s earlier definition. Your imagination provides you with a set of coordinates that enable you to place yourself meaningfully within the narrative of existence. Your life becomes part of that grand narrative; your life becomes a story. Imagination is the compass in your hands, the vision guiding your steps. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons that the words “journey,” “story,” and “epic” have become so ubiquitous. I remember a friend exclaiming to me loudly, “I’m Frodo Baggins! My life’s a journey, a quest, an epic!”

date of birth, gender, and country of residence, and it rewards you with a final countdown of sorts. Mark O’Connoll, the author of the piece, offers this vivid distillation: “And, suddenly, you’re looking at your life in pie-chart form: a handy infographic of personal transience, an illustration of how close you’re getting to being dead. It’s the Quantified Self in its most reductive form.”10 Tellingly, this little tool is filed under the “productivity” folder of the app store, the idea being that this little mortality alarm will increase your motivation to get stuff done. Though most of us won’t experience the horrors of a Siberian labor camp, some of us may feel like the “Quantified Self in its reductive form”. Many men and women in North America are quietly enduring a crisis of meaning. They experience their lives as little more than a monotonous succession

At this point, we need to distinguish between fact and meaning. There are many events that, while

C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 265. Fyodor Dostoevsky, House of the Dead (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 43. 10 Available online at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/deathwatch (accessed August 21, 2015) 8 9

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE of days, a rote maze of empty obligations. They are not lacking for facts. In fact, they’re hemmed in by facts. What they lack is meaning. I belabor this point to illustrate the indispensable service that the imagination performs for everybody. No matter how unimaginative you believe yourself to be, a nexus of meaning is motivating your actions and the imagination is the organ that taps into this nexus of meaning. The effects of this vital service can be felt when we take satisfaction in our work, discover a natural talent, set a particular goal—it can even be something as ordinary as opening a savings account, or studying a blueprint. Though the imagination doesn’t preclude fantasy and escapism, a healthy imagination always works in conjunction with the truth, and this brings us to our next point.

LOVE IS THE MOST POWERFUL APOLOGETIC Wellspring International is a critical extension of RZIM, where we live out what we communicate and defend. Through a process of due diligence, the vision of Wellspring is to identify and financially equip existing organizations aiding women and children at risk, as well as to provide individual scholarships to support education, healthcare, and basic living needs.

The imagination can and does grant us access to truth. Even though The Lord of the Rings doesn’t report events from recorded history, few would contest the fact that timeless truths about courage, friendship, and heroism abound in its pages. Similarly, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Dante’s Divine Comedy function as fictional vehicles for timeless truth. Christian men and women are pilgrims on a spiritual journey to a heavenly city. This imaginative approach to truth-telling is entirely consonant with Scripture. Think of the rich imagery of Psalm 23 or the countercultural revelations of Christ’s parables. From time immemorial, imagination has been a reliable servant of the truth.

It is our privilege to aid organizations that embody four principle aspects we believe are vital to this effort: RESCUE, liberating individuals from destructive environments; REHABILITATION, offering programs that provide treatment and healing for physical and emotional needs; RESTORATION, a period of respite, and renewal, that they may embrace a new hope (removed comma) and freedom, claiming confidence and independence; RE-ENTRY, providing homes, vocational training and job opportunities. Initiatives supported include: those working in the sextrafficking industry, children at risk and women seeking to achieve their full potential through education and vocational training.“We are here to lift the intellectual veil that casts a blinding shadow upon the eyes of the thinker.

Guite names the imagination as reason’s twin faculty; the two are not necessarily opposed. A healthy imagination will interpret reason’s data, and provide a proper context for the facts. The imagination is the ambassador between the head and the heart. When it collaborates with its twin faculty of reason, it casts the facts of our lives in a meaningful light, a light that makes sense of our place in this world. This is something we can’t live without. A Christian undergoing a particular trial has the twin consolations of solidarity and an eternal perspective: Christ endured the gamut of human suffering upon the cross, and thus we can share in His suffering knowing we are not alone. But we are also heartened by the knowledge that Christ is returning to “make all things new.” Though a healthy imagination certainly doesn’t eliminate pain, it can challenge its finality by putting it in a larger perspective, one that includes a God who will “wipe away every tear.”

Not all shadows are imagined; some are real. The pain and suffering of people is real. Wellspring is ‘practical apologetics.’ Love is the most powerful apologetic. It is the essential component in reaching the whole person in a fragmented world. The need is vast, but it is also imperative that we be willing to follow the example of Jesus and meet the need.” – Ravi Zacharias

The Persuasive Power of Holiness So where does that leave us with regard to apathy? 1 Peter 3:1 says, “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the

wellspringinternational.org 17

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE is both meaningful and compelling. This is how the Christian imagination—seeing one’s faith in a meaningful light—can draw others in. The stark truth is that nobody will ask you questions unless they find you interesting. Holiness may not be fashionable, but it’s always interesting.

conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct.” I have no wish to embroil myself in theological controversy. Rather, I’ve chosen this passage to highlight the phrase “so they may be won without a word.” I think we are living in a culture of men and women who must be won without words. The words will come, of course, but first our Christian lives will need to function as visible words to a world that has forgotten how to ask the right questions. I recently spoke with a lady who works for a sizeable hedge fund in Manhattan. She told me that at one point her boss bluntly asked her, “I went to better schools than you, and I make more money than you, so why are you happier than me?” This is a profoundly apologetic question. In fact, I think the most important apologetic question for us to anticipate these days will be some variation of this boss’s tactless outburst. In essence, he was asking, “What makes you tick?”

I have argued that Christianity is unique not only for the comprehensive sweep of its truth, but also for the way it makes sense of a person’s life. This is its imaginative appeal. Maybe this hasn’t been your experience in the church. Maybe this article reads like notes from a far off country. On the other hand, maybe you find yourself in the grip of apathy, and have found a convenient way to compartmentalize your faith so that it never interferes with your wishes. Such a task is easily accomplished in our world of limitless distractions. Let me be clear: If you’re Christian life isn’t meaningful to you, chances are you probably won’t be able to make it meaningful to anyone else. So I’ll end with a simple question: Is your Christian walk meaningful to you?

Pascal says, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.”11 This admonishment is an invitation to holy living. In our jaded age, the testimony of our lives is the message that will reach the lost with the greatest urgency. The Apostle Peter says much the same before he gets to the apologist’s favorite verses: “To sum up, let all be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil, or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead; for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing. (1 Peter 3:8-9)” In order to confront the challenge of apathy, our convictions must be lived before they’re spoken. The other-worldly behavior being described by Peter is an open invitation for questions.

Cameron McAllister Speaker/Writer - RZIM Twitter:@CamMcAllister7 cameron.mcallister@rzim.org

Christianity is unique not only for the comprehensive sweep of its truth, but also for the way it makes sense of a person’s life. This is its imaginative appeal.

If we hope to persuade men and women of the veracity of Christianity we must show them that Christianity is more than a “belief system,” a set of “proofs,” or a “worldview”; it is life itself, life as it is truly meant to be lived. The ultimate exponent of what abundant life looks like is Jesus of Nazareth. Friedrich Nietzsche laments that we are “human, all too human.” But it is Christ who reminds us that the problem is not that we are “human, all too human.” The problem is that we are not human enough. Our world operates with a tragically narrow understanding of what it means to be a person. We are called to imitate Christ, to learn to live just as He does. This is what discipleship means. We can expect questions if we follow Christ’s example. When a person’s life reflects his or her assumptions, the truth of those assumptions is cast in a light that

Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Penguin Classics,1966), 12.

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Turning the TABLES Os Guinness

What does it take to get a generation to see the consequences of the philosophical positions they hold—philosophies that are neither true nor in the best interest of their own proponents? One approach suggested G.K. Chesterton was to “hold a pistol to the head of Modern Man. … not … to kill him. but to bring him to life.”1

The former, further from God’s reality, must face their dilemma. The latter, closer to God’s reality, must find a diversion. People at both poles are equally resistant to God. Their different forms of unbelief reject God and the gospel in different ways, so both of them require subversion either through the negative strategy or the positive strategy.

Chesterton’s approach is an example of the broadly negative strategy of “table turning.” This strategy turns on the fact that all arguments cut both ways. It therefore proceeds by taking people seriously in terms of what they say they believe and disbelieve, and then pushing them toward the consequences of their unbelief. The strategy assumes that if the Christian faith is true, their unbelief is not finally true, and they cannot fully be true to it. At some point the falseness shows through, and at that moment they will experience extreme cognitive dissonance, so that it is no longer in their best interest to continue to persist in believing what they believed until then. When they reach this point, they are facing up to their dilemma, and they will be open to rethinking their position in a profound way.

The broad negative strategy of table turning comes into its own when people are closed to God and his truth in one of two ways. First, there are the great majority of people who are spiritually closed in a general sense, in that they are fully satisfied with what they believe already. They would see themselves as contented atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Wiccans or whatever, and they feel they have no need to look for anything else. In many cases they might not be opposed to the Christian faith, and their closed hearts could be better described as satisfied rather than hostile, though for quite other reasons they might be both satisfied with what they believe and hostile to the Christian faith too. Second, there are other people who are spiritually closed in a different and more particular sense. They are closed because they have specific objections to the Christian faith, and therefore believe that these objections make faith unthinkable and not worthy of consideration. Marxists, dismiss religion as the “opium of the masses,” Freudians see it as a matter of “wish fulfillment,” and logical positivists view it as “nonsense.” All of these have dismissed the Christian faith by relativizing it—those who are satisfied by their having no need for it, and those who

St. Paul describes the heart of all unbelief as a way of “suppressing the truth.” As such, unbelief cannot be other than partly true and partly false, though each unbeliever will have responded to the tension by taking it in either of two directions. Some, usually the few, will have been more consistent in rejecting God, and therefore ended further from God and his full reality. Others, usually the majority, will have been less consistent in rejecting God, and therefore ended closer to God’s reality.

G. K. Chesterton, Manalive (Los Angeles: Indo-European, 2009), 78.

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE raise objections by seeing it only through the prism of their objections.

anyone to decide between them? The Christian answer lies in the nature of truth as understood by the Bible. While it is natural that all beliefs appear meaningful and adequate to those who believe them, and so long as they believe them, all those that differ from God’s truth will always fall short in one of two ways in the end. Their beliefs will prove either constricting or contradictory.

Peter Berger counsels that the best way to counter such relativists is to “relativize the relativizers,” and so turn the tables on them.2 Arguments, you remember, cut both ways. Relativism would indeed be devastating if it were true, but relativism is always inconsistent, and relativists always cheat at some point. They relativize the views of others, but not their own. They relativize the past, but not the present. They relativize us, but not themselves. Their relativism is always an escape, but not a solid position that can be examined.

On the one hand, the beliefs of unbelief become constricting when they are experienced as internally consistent but incomplete, and thus too small to explain the full range of the unbeliever’s experience of life and the world. On the other hand, the beliefs of unbelief can chafe when, in spite of their greater comprehensiveness, they contradict aspirations that are central to the unbeliever—which in the worst cases makes them self-refuting, a problem Chesterton calls “the suicide of thought.”

When confronted with such relativism, many Christians “speak Christian” more slowly and loudly, pronouncing the objectivity of their claims in ever more earnest, labored and emphatic ways. And when they still fail to get their point across, they mask their frustration by issuing dire warnings of the consequences of disagreeing with them. The result is mutual incomprehension and stalemate.

To relativize the relativists through table turning is to apply to relativists (and skeptics) the relativism (and skepticism) they apply to others, thus pushing them out toward the negative consequences of their own beliefs.

Chesterton and Berger show us a better way through turning the tables. When it comes to belief and unbelief, we need to remember that, while no thoughts are unthinkable and no argument is unarguable, some thoughts can be thought but not lived. We humans are finite, so our unbelief, like all our purposeful actions, can never take into account all the factors that we would need to consider to make truly wise decisions. There will always be unforeseen and unintended consequences, so that our best ideas will often miscarry, and some may prove very damaging. When we are talking of unbelief, there will always be unintended consequences. Unbelieving beliefs will never be truly adequate because unbelieving knowledge is never fully adequate and not finally true.

As Berger points out, the strategy rests on two assumptions. Relativism and skepticism are different: the former claiming that truth is dependent on the person, and

All thoughts can be thought but not all thoughts can be lived. the latter that truth is unknowable, but they each entail a hidden double standard—they are both inconsistent and incomplete. They each pour the acids of their relativism and skepticism over all sorts of issues, but jealously guard their own beliefs. The second assumption is that there is a link between consistency and clarity. The task of countering relativism, Berger writes, is to “see the relativity business to its very end.”3 Press skepticism and relativism to their consistent conclusions and the result is surprising. Far from paralyzing thought, skepticism and relativism are themselves relativized, the debunker is debunked, and what emerges is an almost pristine realization of the importance of truth.

This insight is what helps us surmount two barriers that lie across our path at this point. The first problem stems from the fact that every worldview, even the falsest or the silliest, is comprehensive on its own terms. This means that it not only claims to explain all reality within its framework, but it also explains the falseness of all other worldviews. Thus the Hebrews attacked idolatry as the projection of empty “nothings,” and Ludwig Feuerbach returned the compliment by arguing that faith in God itself was a projection based on nothing. So how then does someone decide between the worldviews and their competing claims?

Again and again the lesson is simple: all thoughts can be thought, but not all thoughts can be lived. So we should never stop halfway with skepticism, but insist on pressing ideas uncompromisingly to their conclusion. When hearts and minds collide with the wall, they will have reached the limits of their position and may then be open to rethinking.

Second, there is the added problem that every conceivable argument either has been or will be put forward by someone, somewhere, sometime. So once again, how is

Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 42. 3 Ibid., 40. 2

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE In this sense reality is what we run into when we are wrong, for when we are right there is no wall to run into— only the freedom to run. “There are times,” Vaclav Havel wrote, “when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”4

of what W. H. Auden called “Christian heresies”—they hold to beliefs that could not have come into existence except in a culture founded on the Jewish and Christian faiths.5 If Baal and not YHWH is God, then follow Baal, Elijah cried, and offered the prophets of Baal the first opportunity to verify their god. Elijah knew that pious calls to return to God would have fallen on deaf and divided ears. He had to mount the challenge on their grounds.

Prophetic Subversion Table turning grows from the heart of our understanding of the biblical anatomy of unbelief, and of what it takes to subvert unbelief. We can appreciate the importance of this strategy at several levels. First, turning the tables is God’s own characteristic response to disobedience and unbelief. When humans abuse, suppress and exploit the truth, God becomes the fierce unmasker of lies, the grand iconoclast tearing down idols, and the radical debunker of myths. Three times in the seminal passage in Romans St. Paul says, “God gave them over” (Rom 1:24, 26, 28). Those who rebelled against God chose to follow the lusts of their hearts, their degrading passions and their depraved minds, so God gave them over to these very things. Their choices had consequences. Sin was the punishment of sin. They had judged themselves.

For if YHWH is God, then Baal is not, and the fastest way for the people to see it was to push them toward the false faith that was bound to be falsified by reality. The disproof came first and cleared the ground for the proof, for with the false falsified, the true could be verified. “The Lord—He is God! The Lord—He is God!” was the people’s conclusion with heartfelt conviction (1 Kings 18:39). Third, the same logic runs down the Christian centuries, though it is not unique to Christians. Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist intellectual, tried to follow the same practice. “Do not stop halfway, but follow the idea uncompromisingly to its conclusion; the sparks produced by the collision of your head with the wall show that you have reached the limits.”6 But from Jesus onward, the dynamic is crystal clear in Christian proclamation. “The tree is known by its fruit,” Jesus said—not by its seed (Mt 12:33). If you had tried to persuade the prodigal son to return home the day he left home, would he have listened? If you had spoken to him the day he hit the pigsty, would you have needed to persuade him? Always “see where it leads to,” St. Augustine advised when dealing with false ideas.7 Follow it out to the “absolutely ruddy end,” C. S. Lewis remarked with characteristic Englishness.8 “Push them to the logic of their presuppositions,” Francis Schaeffer used to say. Too many varieties of unbelief are halfway houses. Too many unbelievers have not had the courage or the consistency to follow their thoughts all the way home.

Many times God does the debunking by turning the tables directly. He gives people over to what they choose. He

Many times God does the debunking by turning the tables directly. He gives people over to what they choose. drives people—or simply leaves people—to the logic of their own bad choices. When Israel rejected God’s kingship and wished to have a king for themselves like the surrounding nations, God’s response was “Take them at their word and appoint them a king” (1 Sam 8:22 REB). Their choice was wrong, and their choice would have disastrous consequences, but the best way to make them see it was to push them to the logic of their choice. The Lord says, “I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart to walk in their own devices.” (Ps 81:11‑12).

It is time for the new atheists to face that challenge. Their boast has been that from Democritus and Lucretius onwards, they are the ones who face up to the nature of reality unflinchingly, however bleak it may prove to be. Nature, Lucretius said, was breathtakingly beautiful, though blind, soulless and purposeless. But the fact is that again and again they cheat—holding that certain things were true simply because they have to be. 9

Second, the same dynamic lies at the heart of prophetic subversion. Turning the tables was exactly the prophet Elijah’s famous challenge to Israel in the ninth century. The great crowd of the people listening to the prophet were fence sitters, just as many modern people are advocates

In a similar way, the painter and avowed atheist Francis Bacon insisted on giving a central place to chance and mystery. He rejected all explanations and interpretations

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (New York: Routledge, 1985), 41. W. H. Auden, quoted in Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 9. 6 Georg Lukacs quoted in Istvan Meszaros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin Press, 1972), 52. 7 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 345. 8 C. S. Lewis, Undeceptions (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 213. 9 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1951), 12, 66; emphasis added. 4 5

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE of his work. If it was clearly understood that the paintings said nothing and meant nothing, and he himself had nothing to say, each viewer had the freedom to make his own response. In short, our brave new atheists live as if such things as freedom are true because they need them to be. Put more simply, they cheat.

a conversation with him on the train between London and Oxford, when we found ourselves the only people in the compartment. Although then retired and knighted as Professor Sir Alfred J. Ayer, he was candid about the failure of his principle. “I wish I had been more consistent,” he said to me. “Any iconoclast who brandishes a debunker’s sword should be required to demonstrate it publicly on his own cherished beliefs.”

Last, table turning lies at the very heart of the dynamic of Christian conversion. Death comes before life, law before grace, conviction before regeneration, and so the good news is the best news ever to those who know they are in a bad situation. Looking back over his earlier pagan life with gratitude, Augustine prayed, “You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to lead me to look for others unallied with pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for . . . you smite so that you may heal.”10

Ayer’s false demand has both ancient precedents and modern counterparts. Celsus insisted that Christian teaching must pass the “Greek proof,” and be assessed by the philosophical standards of the day in order to show that it was reasonable. Similarly, in our more scientific age, many people demand that all claims to truth must undergo strict verification procedures if they are to be given the hallmark of truth, despite the fact that many

....what if people are to push us as Christians to be true to what we say we believe?....

Needless to say, no one comes to believe in God because of table turning or through any purely negative arguments. What they do is disbelieve what they believed before, and they then become seekers who are open to the possibility of faith. True faith itself never grows from such negative arguments. It has to be based on what is positive—first, a positive conviction of the adequacy of Christian faith, second a positive conviction of the truth of the gospel, and supremely, a positive encounter with Jesus himself.

things they trust and value could never pass such test— history and love, for a start. The same challenge could be equally thrown back to Feuerbach and his dismissal of faith as a projection, Marx and his scorn for faith as the flowers on the chains, Freud and his debunking of faith as wish fulfillment, and Dawkins and his often stated creed that all religious beliefs are only irrational. In each case the debunker’s sword appears to have morphed into a boomerang and their dismissals have recoiled on themselves. The same is true of Nietzsche and his long baleful influence on our generation. If truth is only a matter of perspective, are his own books no more than his own perspective? If truth is only an expression of a resentmentbased will to power, are we to judge his own claims by his own criteria?

Hoist On Their Own Petard Yet Again In a world congenial to skepticism, skeptics love to play the skeptic’s card nonchalantly as if it were the royal flush that trumped all other cards and could not be countered. For many, it has become the skeptics’ way of hanging out a “Do Not Disturb” sign. But of course, the simplest response is to turn such skepticism back on itself. When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate in the 1960s, an Arctic chill still hung in the air that froze any serious appreciation of faith. One source had been the Vienna Circle’s philosophy of logical positivism and the celebrated “verification principle” of A. J. Ayer at Oxford University. Only that which could be tested by the five senses could be verified as true, he insisted. Theology was therefore “nonsense,” or as it was famously said, “The word G‑O‑D is less meaningful than the word d‑o‑g.”

Logic and Life The enormous power in table turning is obvious, but it raises questions too. An immediate one is what if people are to push us as Christians to be true to what we say we believe? The answer, I will argue, is that we should welcome it. On the one hand, the outcome of our not living true to our faith is hypocrisy. And on the other, living in truth is the biblical way of saying that we are living the way of Jesus more closely, and therefore being faithful and becoming more like him. The more practical question here is, how in fact do we push people toward the logical consequences of their unbelief?

The trouble for Professor Ayer was that his verification principle could not verify itself—it was self-refuting. For to accept as truth only what can be tested by the senses is a principle that cannot itself be tested by the senses. So it too is nonsense by its own criteria. Ayer’s approach, he later admitted, was a “blind alley.” Years later I enjoyed

Augustine, Confessions 2.2, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 44.

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE

Something For Everyone

The 2016 RZIM Canada Summer School is designed to help you engage and grapple with some of the tough questions and challenges to the Christian faith and to equip you to respond in ways that connect the head, heart and imagination. Perhaps those questions concern God and science; or the problem of evil; or sexuality; or violence and the Old Testament; or the uniqueness of Christ in a world of other religions. Questions like these and others can be challenging, frustrating, even intimidating: but at the same time, they can also be incredible opportunities to reach the questioner behind the question and connect the individual with the person of Christ. The RZIM team and other world-class teachers are prepared to help you work through topics like these and many more; offering sessions on how you can share your faith more effectively and confidently when talking to those who do not share your worldview and belief, or even those who are apathetic or who claim not to have any questions. Summer School is open to people from all backgrounds and experience—from young to young at heart. It all happens July 10-15 in beautiful Langley, British Columbia. Be a part of helping people connect the dots between the Gospel and life. Hope to see you there.

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inCONTEXT MAGAZINE Some simple considerations may be helpful. First, we should always remember that the full consequences of a person’s position have to be seen in life and not only in words. It is important to take a person’s worldview seriously, but it is a mistake to confuse persons’ worldviews with them as people, or even their world-and-life view with them. The fact is that very few people are perfect, card-carrying examples of what they say they believe. Each person is their own version of their world-and-life view lived in their own way, and it is that living person we must deal with, not an idealized textbook example of a worldview. It is therefore a mistake to think that when we talk of the “logic” of someone’s position, we are referring to the strictly logical, the rational, the intellectual and the verbal.

generation has taken the openness further, to the point of chaos. We don’t want that for our daughter.” In a beautiful way, both he and his wife realized that somehow they loved their little girl even more than they loved each other, and wanting the very best for her, they were open to faith as never before. The challenge of the gospel had touched the treasure of their hearts and opened them at a level never touched before. When the young Augustine sought out Ambrose of Milan to learn from his rhetoric, the bishop was wise enough to see that Augustine needed more than arguments to draw him to faith. He needed to live more in order to think more deeply, so Ambrose even brushed off the earnest entreaties of Augustine’s mother Monica. Later, Augustine saw the wisdom of what Ambrose had done.

Very few people are strictly and consistently logical, so to catch their smaller inconsistencies is merely to annoy them and put them off. Jesus spoke of “the treasures of the heart,” the things that are deep in the center of our lives that matter to us supremely and that we guard most tenaciously. Our challenge is to find the treasures of people’s hearts, and then to find contradictions that mean everything to them at that level.

My mother asked him, as a favor, to have a talk with me, so that he might refute my errors, drive the evil out of my mind, and replace it with good. He often did this when he found suitable pupils, but he refused to do it for me—a wise decision, as I afterwards realized. He told her that I was still unripe for instruction because, as she had told him, I was brimming over with the novelty of the heresy. . . . “Leave him alone,” he said. “Just pray to God for him. From his own reading he will discover his mistakes.”11

Many years ago I was asked to make a case for the Christian faith at a university in the north of England. A professor lingered behind after the lecture, eager to talk further. He said that neither he nor his wife had shown the

This point matters for Christian apologists in two particular situations. One is when we make the mistake of attacking a straw man argument, and not the real position of the person we are talking to. The other is when we speak to people who are hurting. “But what does your argument prove?” Job protested to his heartless friends. “Do you intend to reprove my words, when the words of one in despair belong to the wind?” (Job 6:25‑26).

Looking for the treasure of the heart, and therefore for the consequences of logic in life, is not an assault on logic, but on its misuse.

Looking for the treasure of the heart, and therefore for the consequences of logic in life, is not an assault on logic, but on its misuse. It may be that a person’s head is muddled, but more often the problem is that people’s heads are not where their hearts are. Even logic can be put at the service of the crooked timber of our humanity. For logic alone can easily be made into a diversion, and can therefore become a shelter from God and his truth.

slightest interest in faith before, and their interest in talking to me had nothing to do with my lecture. Indeed, they had been notoriously resistant to students sharing their faith with them over many years. He was in his mid‑fifties and his wife was fifteen years younger. For years, the professor said, he and his wife had practiced a very open relationship. He had slept with other women and she with other men. But then, to their surprise and delight, they had had a baby daughter. And almost immediately they both realized they did not want to bring her up with the ethics by which they had lived. “We have always had an open marriage,” he said, “but the younger 11

Unbelief can be extremely logical, but like an elephant trudging around and around in its moat in a zoo, such logic can be circular thinking that has got itself into a bad rut. Chesterton often came up against this vicious circle in people he engaged, and he used his wit and humor to get round it. “The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in

Ibid., 3.12, page 69.

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.”12

the style of the question and the medium in which it is raised, the point is the same: to probe the consequences of unbelief, and to challenge people to follow the logic of their ideas through to the end. Some Christians have won an insufferable reputation for always dispensing answers, even when no one has a question. Raise questions well, and we will be known for the searching questions we raise, to which the good news can be looked to for the only satisfactory answers. “I should therefore like,” Pascal wrote in Pensées, “to arouse in man the desire to find truth.”15

Once again, that point cuts both ways. Forty, fifty and sixty year‑old Christians may also be trudging around in the same old ruts that their younger selves laid down in their college years. But the truth is that they shouldn’t and they needn’t, for if the Christian faith is true, it will be proved true the wider and wider the experience of life it engages. But that is not so for unbelief. George Orwell wryly dismissed H. G. Wells, the rationalist, as “too sane to understand the modern world.”13 Like Augustine on the journey that later led to faith, many people do not need more fresh arguments. They need fresh air.

Their Prophets, Not Ours The third consideration is that, just as it is more effective to argue on the other person’s ground, so it is wiser to argue from the other person’s prophets, rather than our own. This is not only a matter of familiarity but authority. When St. Paul was in a synagogue, he preached from the Torah, but when he addressed the Athenian philosophers on the Areopagus, he quoted pagan poets from long before Jesus—the sixth-century B.C. Cretan poet Epimenides (in whom “we live and move and have our being”) and the third-century B.C. Greek poet Aratus (“for we are indeed his offspring” [Acts 17:28 ESV]). Looking back again, St. Augustine understood the crucial role that pagan philosophers had in undermining his earlier paganism. After reading Cicero’s Hortensius, he wrote, “All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.”16

Questions That Raise Questions A second consideration is that we should always use questions to raise questions. Questions have their own subversive quality, which we will explore later, but there is a special role for questions in table turning. Far too much Christian evangelism and apologetics is based on the assumption that almost everyone is open, interested and needy—when most people most of the time are quite simply not. As Harry Blamires complained decades ago, “they cater for those who are already believers, half believers, or discontented unbelievers. They cater abundantly for uninstructed believers, for people on the brink of Christian self committal, and for those who are uneasy in their atheism, their agnosticism, and their ill defined theism.”14

Reflecting on how the pagan philosophers had been so instrumental in his journey toward faith, Augustine commented, “These books served to remind me to return to my own self.”17 Many centuries later, Pascal drily counseled the same course for anyone searching for God: “Make them look for him among the philosophers, skeptics and dogmatists, who will worry the man who seeks.”18 Chesterton expressed the same point in his own inimitable way. He had been struck by the “odd effect of the great agnostics arousing doubts deeper than their own.”

If this is so, it means that in our age most people are untroubled rather than unreached, unconcerned rather than unconvinced, and they need questions as much as answers—or questions that raise questions that require answers that prompt people to become genuine seekers. The goal is to use questions to raise questions, and so to puncture whatever are the walls of indifference, and to do so in a style and language that speaks to the person we are engaging with. This means that we raise questions where people are. So if only a minority read serious books, we are raising questions in our serious books only for a minority. It also means that some media are better at raising questions than others, just as others are better at answering them. Films, plays, sketches, poems and cartoons, for example, are often better at raising questions than serious books, though the same books gain the edge when it comes to answering questions.But whatever

I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. … The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatsoever; and when … I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll’s atheistic lectures the

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image, 1959), 21-22. George Orwell, quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1982), 428. 14 Harry Blamires, The Faith and Modern Error (London, SPCK, 1964), 1. 15 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 60. 16 Augustine, Confessions 1.16, page 36. 17 Ibid., 3.4, page 58. 18 Pascal, Pensées, 53. 12 13

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE second, that they are living in the world of God’s reality. So whatever they claim, we can be sure that there is both truth and falsehood in their belief, and the tension can be found somewhere.

dreadful thought broke across my mind, “Almost thou persuades me to be a Christian.” I was in a desperate way.19 I learned this lesson when I wrote my first book, The Dust of Death, which included a chapter reviewing and critiquing the influx of the Eastern religions in the 1960s. I included the story of Issa, the eighteenth‑century Haiku poet from Japan. Through a succession of sad events, his wife and all his five children died. Grieving each time, he went to the Zen Master and received the same consolation: “Remember the world is dew.” Dew is transient and ephemeral. The sun rises and the dew is gone. So too is suffering and death in this world of illusion, so the mistake is to become too engaged. Remember the world is dew. Be more detached, and transcend the engagement of mourning that prolongs the grief. After one of his children died, Issa went home unconsoled, and wrote one of his most famous poems. Translated into English it reads,

As we talk and the conversation goes deeper, there will come a point at which the fact of the tension goes beyond providing us with a meeting point and becomes a potential pressure point. It then reveals where the treasure of the person’s heart is and where their beliefs clash with the safeguarding of the treasure. Often, though not always, we become aware of the pressure point before they do—though it is always a matter of spiritual discernment, and it is rarely evident at the outset of a conversation or relationship. We have to take the time to get to know people, to love them, to pray for them and to listen to their stories. Then, like the builder of a stone wall who takes a stone and tap, tap, tap, taps it gently until he hits the fault line and it splits easily, we have to find the fault line in the other person’s thinking.

If you have ever witnessed someone who is close to or at the danger point in their selfexamination before God, it is a sobering moment.

At some point the person will recognize the tension because it touches the treasure of the heart and it matters. The tension will then have gone from a meeting point to a pressure point to a danger point. This last term comes from Nietzsche, who observed how people refuse to face the logic of their philosophy squarely. Instead, they duck and weave like a boxer, and try to bounce off the ropes when backed into a corner of their own making. Nietzsche was impatient with such thinkers. He attacked Jacob Burckhardt because he would not look nihilism in the white of the eye. He referred to the Swiss historian’s lectures with “their profound thoughts, and their silently abrupt breaks and twists as soon as they touch the danger point.”20

The world is dew. The world is dew. And yet. And yet. The entire logic of Buddhism is in the first two lines, whereas the yearning of a father’s heart cries out in the last two lines. Over the years since then, I have met a score of people who were on the road to the East either physically or spiritually, but were stopped in their tracks and turned around by that story in my book. The brief mention of a single one of their own prophets was worth more than hundreds of pages of Christian argument, and so it often is.

If you have ever witnessed someone who is close to or at the danger point in their self-examination before God, it is a sobering moment. Only God knows when that moment truly and completely comes. We will not always know, and it is not our business to know, but it is surely the moment when, before God, they know that from then on they are without excuse. They have seen the truth, they know the truth, and they are responsible to the truth that they now know. All fig leaves are stripped away, and all alibis exposed. In their heart of hearts they know where they stand, and they are fully responsible for the decisive moment of truth.

Our Knees or Our Heels What can we expect when we pray for people, and then probe and push them gently but firmly toward the place where they can see the unwelcome logic of their position? At first, we will not know where the tension in their worldview can be found. Whatever people say about God—whether they ignore him, deny him, hate him, or scorn him—we always know two things about them: first, that they themselves are made in the image of God; and

Needless to say, the moment of truth does not mean that everyone is persuaded by the truth, for even at that point they always have the final choice: to fall on their knees or to turn on their heels. For those who fall on their

Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 84. Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Gersdorff, November 1870, quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (London: Penguin, 1961), 70; emphasis added. 19 20

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE knees, it is the moment when their unbelief is shown up as inadequate, when they face up fully to the reality that shows it up, and when they accept the logic of God’s truth that points undeniably to God himself.

doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult, they complain that you are making their heads turn round, and that it is all too complicated, and that if there really were a God they are sure He would have made religion simple.22

The opposite response is equally possible. A person can turn on their heels. Like a boxer bouncing off the ropes or a yachtsman changing tack, someone can try to evade the logic and sidestep the evident force of the truth. A feature of such maneuver is that people often go from one extreme to the other, with switched arguments and about‑turns that are baffling. Chesterton encountered this tactic repeatedly:

For those who turn on their heels, our work is far from over, though the core objection is clearer. For these people the prospects are sober and the reason is plain. At that point we must either retrace our steps and seek to do a better job at turning the tables. But for those who fall on their knees, the prospects are bright. At that point the work of the apologist is finished and the very different, simpler and more positive work of the evangelist can take over. The good news is good news, and the party may soon be on for the return of the prodigal son or daughter.

One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world or the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not at once be so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it.21

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As well as being an author and social critic, Os Guinness is a senior fellow of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a member of the RZIM speaking team.

C. S. Lewis commented on the same response: Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try and explain the Christian 21 22

Twitter: @OsGuinness

Orthodoxy, 156-57 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 47.

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inCONTEXT MAGAZINE I was one of the rare Italians who, approaching midlife, had never been to Italy. But I finally took my family on a “heritage trip.” In Rome, we visited the Vatican museum that holds some of the world’s finest paintings and sculptures. Room after room revealed beautiful murals by artists like Angelico, Gozzoli, and Raphael. After what seemed like an eternal walk, navigating long corridors and several flights of stairs, we entered the Sistine Chapel. We were crammed in with hundreds of other people looking exactly where Michelangelo intended for us to look—up.

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We learned that before Michelangelo painted that famous ceiling, it had originally been a painting of a starry sky, which I’m sure would have been quite beautiful. But I imagine as Michelangelo looked up at that ceiling he said, “Stars are nice, but it doesn’t tell us much. There’s so much more. Let me tell you a real story—a story that has changed history.” And he went on to paint the narrative of God and humanity.

theCHRISTIAN

STORY? Rick Manafo

I wondered if people would have lined up in the same way to see a painting of stars? Well, maybe they would. After all, we live in a world that has turned its attention to the stars—both in the heavens and in the entertainment world. We’ve settled for a certain picture of what’s out there, when there is one that tells a much bigger story. Now, you might not consider yourself a theologian, but we are all theologians. Theology is a reflection on God’s story. So, let’s stand back from the mural of the Christian worldview and see the big picture. When I hear how some people describe their perceptions of God and their inability to believe in such a God—judgmental, vindictive, monstrous, possibly right wing—I must say, I don’t I believe in that God either. Some would say that my background gives me a significant predisposition when it comes to holding the worldview I do. I grew up in a Christian home. I had loving parents and siblings. I never felt unloved. I was never abused. But while I loved my family and friends, sometimes I felt like a black sheep when it came to matters of faith. I realized why young adults don’t hang around churches and why they shrug off matters of faith. It’s because they have preconceptions and questions and they feel like no one cares to sincerely address them. They feel like black sheep for inquiring. They want to know, if under the social and ecclesiastical layers of faith, there is something worth believing. No one wants to live his/her life for a fairy tale. I also find it interesting that Christians, probably more than anyone else, are accused of being hypocrites. Could it be that there is an understanding that the underlying beliefs of Christianity—the Jesus way— aren’t always lived up to?

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE Some believe we can elevate every idea to the same level—that one belief is as relevant, or maybe as irrelevant as the other. We give every kid a trophy, whether they’ve won the game or not. We want to make everyone feel special. That may be a pleasant sentiment, but it doesn’t really help us determine what works and what doesn’t—what is right and what is not.

In his famous song, Imagine, John Lennon suggested a world where we could move away from the tyranny of God and religion and create an ideal world where “all the happy people live for today … with no need to kill, no need to die.” An admirable thought. But John, “Why should we live as one? Why is what you imagine better than what I might imagine? What’s wrong with killing or hunger or greed?

It was Neal Donald Walsh who proposed that the Are religion and belief in God the reason we can’t worst thing religion did was to say that any one thing live as one? Was not the prayer of Jesus that his or ideological idea is followers demonstrate better than another. But the beauty of the gospel I’d like to suggest that by being ‘one?’ Isn’t a The problem with Christianity is that it the Christian narrative world without pain or is not taken to its extreme. People don’t just might be a “better” death or suffering or tears one. something that God go the extra mile, they don’t give the imagined a few years cloak off their back, they don’t turn The Christian story makes before John Lennon ever sense of life as we know the other cheek, they don’t sell all they did? it. N.T. Wright says that, have and give to the poor. “The Christian story History has shown us claims to be the true that when rejecting story about God and the the existence of God is world.” It has a strong imposed on a society, things can get pretty ugly. If ring of truth about it and is not in the realm of Flying you really play out the world-without-God scenario Spaghetti Monsters, Pink Unicorns or Flying Teapots. long enough, it leads to a society that works off the It’s a story that tells us about the people we see when personal preference of the powerful. Twentiethwe look in the mirror and the world we walk into Century Communist Russia, China, and Cambodia every day—that human existence and relationships are some examples that come to mind. are based on more than just the firing and misfiring of atoms. It tells us why we’re in this condition and Some say that if you take any worldview to its doesn’t excuse human shortcomings and depravity. extreme then you have a problem. The problem Instead, it offers a solution for it. It doesn’t deny human with Christianity is that it is not taken to its extreme. suffering. It recognizes, empathizes and actually People don’t go the extra mile, they don’t give the enters into it. It doesn’t overlook human conflict cloak off their back, they don’t turn the other cheek, but acknowledges it and sets a higher standard by they don’t sell all they have and give to the poor. which to live in a reconciled community. It deals with They don’t love God with all their hearts and their poverty by giving every human being ownership of it neighbor as themselves. and commands us to respond. Atrocities attributed to Christianity throughout history It answers the big questions of life: Where did we were not a result of people living out the Christian come from? What does it all mean? How should we worldview—they occured because they didn’t. They live … and why? And finally, where is it all going? are NOT a reflection of the teachings of Christ. Do we just disappear or burn up or freeze into nonexistence? Consider the problem of evil and suffering that God is so often accused of ignoring or allowing. Now, These are questions that beg an answer from every take God out of the equation—does that solve your religion and worldview, not just Christianity. Although problem? What’s left? Now all you have is a problem Christianity is the one most often put on the hot-seat, with no recourse—with no one to appeal to but those mainly due to its definitive and hopeful answers. involved in the problem. Oppression, sickness, natural disasters and accidents still exist with no hope in sight The Christian story reminds us that God is not a gapand no one who cares to hear the cries for help. filler until people learn enough to push him out. After all, in order to phase God out, would God not have to be there in the first place? When we write God off we are left in a predicament. Why does anything mean anything? Leo Tolstoy said, “To say that my life is a particle of infinity not only fails to give it any meaning but destroys all possible meaning.”

The Christian scriptures point us to someone to whom we can appeal and who cares. Take a moral lawgiver out of the equation and we have no solid grounds for calling anything wrong. We might see rape or torture or child abuse as not being pleasant

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE or socially advantageous, but without a moral law, there’s nothing to prove they are wrong. The Christian worldview maintains that people have value and that God gives them that value. Without God, we have no reason to ask, “Why did such and such happen? or Why shouldn’t it happen again?”

to share with them. When you cut off life it’s called death. But even, cut off from that ideal relationship, God offered men and women a way by which they could remain connected with God. People were invited to participate tangibly in worship and observances and to experience a sense of closeness and belonging—still broken—but still belonging.

The Christian story is a comprehensive one, beginning with a creative, designing and interactive God, who puts the world into existence. Timing and logistics of creation aside, the Bible says that “In the beginning God” did all of this.

God gave the people laws that said, “Even in your broken state, you don’t have to live broken lives. So don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie about each other, take the time to honour God. Do these things and God will honour you—God will bless you.” God was inviting them to life.

Genesis 1:1 sets an entire worldview in motion. It tells us that Someone put all this together and therefore there is purpose behind it. It gives us hope that the One behind it all can fix what’s broken and restore it to what was intended.

Instead of being grateful to God for the opportunity to live up to what we were created for, we replied, “How dare you tell us what to do? Leave us alone, God. We’ll take it from here.” Human beings turned an invitation to life into a burden.

The Scriptures also define God as a community— Father, Son and Holy Spirit—making God relational within “God’s self” before the earth or human beings ever came into existence. The words, “let us create,” are God saying, “let’s create other personal beings who are able to create and love and respond to the love of others and experience the oneness of community as we do and to be in relationship with us.” It’s what separates us from the animal kingdom.

But God never gives up. Time and again, the invitation is extended, “I’m calling you to life. I have better plans for you than you could ever make for yourselves. I created you, I want the best for you … I love you.” In fact, one of the images given to reflect God’s relationship with Israel was that of marriage— one of those “better or worse” scenarios—one that was more times than not, worse than better.

God’s intention was a seamless relationship. But that relationship was broken. Our first parents disregarded what God had asked of them and decided to do things their own way.

God set up a sacrificial system in order to display what death caused Only God could turn the tables on by sin looked like. But death by becoming human and facing no sacrifice would be death head on for all humankind. enough to solve the human problem. Only one thing would turn When they ate of the fruit God had specifically told that story around. Only God could turn the tables on them not to, it wasn’t just a bad dietary decision. It death by becoming human and facing death head was a breech of trust. God didn’t say, “Ok, you see on for all humankind. That’s where Jesus comes in. all these trees in the garden? There’s one from which John 3:16 says, “God loved the world so much that you should not eat, but I’m not telling you which one. he sent his only son.” You’ll find out what happens when you do.” God wasn’t playing Russian roulette. Some believe that God, like a watchmaker, designed and put what we see around us together, then God was specific, “If you eat of this tree you will surely wound it up and let it run while going off to practice die” and they, in turn, were specific in their breech. his golf swing. But Christ coming to earth puts a cog This wasn’t an “oops” or a “blip”. This was more like, in the gears of that theory. God coming to earth in “God, I’m calling your bluff!” And human beings went the person of Christ demonstrates how invested God from walking with God—to hiding from God. It was is in the world. not a pleasant day for anyone and had tremendous consequences as it affected the whole human race. That personal investment through Christ’s death and But the first thing God did was to call them out of resurrection freed the world from the grip of death hiding to begin restoring the severed relationship. and offered certain hope for eternal life. The tendency to do our own thing and disregard God’s desires for us is called sin and restoration from it takes more than just kissing and making up. Sin cuts people off from the intimacy and life God wants

In fact, the ideas most people have of heaven and the afterlife—that ‘better place’ through pearly gates in which there is no pain or sorrow or suffering— has been extrapolated or borrowed from the

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE Christian story. If not for the Christian story, validated by the person of Jesus Christ, we would only have Eastern thoughts of reincarnation, the nihilistic fate of naturalism or the Ancient Greek idea of people living on in the memories by those who are still living.

be associated with Jesus, why would they want to be with Jesus for eternity? Eternal life isn’t a right. There is no eternal life outside of Jesus and no other worldview offers it with certainty. That’s why the Christian story is so beautiful.

The Qur’an (written centuries after the Bible) seems to borrow some of those ideas. However, Islam does not guarantee reception into paradise. The fate of the Muslim is determined on the individual’s scorecard and on the final decisions of an arbitrary god—who, depending on divine disposition, might grant an evil person entrance.

The Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich said, “If you want to change society, then you must tell an alternative story.” The Bible tells that alternate story. It explains our existence beyond what we can learn in a laboratory. It informs us of meaning that cannot be seen under a microscope. It offers us a greater hope—of life that is not stymied by death. So while naturalists and other evangelists of hopelessness turn their attention to the stars, be reminded that a grander, more beautiful story has been painted over them.

Eternal life is something only offered by the God described in the Christian scriptures. The wages of sin is death. Look around, we can agree on the wages. But the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ. Sin writes one ending to our story. God writes an alternative ending. People teach their children that if they want a gift from Santa Claus, that it’s best to be nice and not naughty, because only the nice get the gifts. The naughty get the lump of coal. (That’s actually more of a Muslim scorecard type worldview). Eternal life is a gift. Eternal life is life with God forever, where Jesus is Lord of everything. Now, if someone doesn’t want to

Rick Manafo Twitter:@rickmanafo rick.manafo@rzim.ca

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GOD

AND HIGHER

EDUCATION ALYCIA WOOD

Where one goes to university is a major decision. I am sure we can all remember the pressure we were under in high school as we considered options for higher education. For many, the only option for the “exact right one” was the cream of the crop—the Ivy League.

shield that represents Yale has a picture of a Bible with the words “light and truth” written below it.

Over the past several years I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at various Ivy League schools in New England. If you have ever been to one of these institutions, you can appreciate the beautiful architecture—often their construction dates back to the very early years of North America. Many of these schools carry with them not only a sense of history, but also an historical reverence for Christianity—indeed, a full acceptance that the understanding of God is vital to one’s learning experience.

“Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let everyone seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

Consider Yale University, situated in charming New Haven, Connecticut. Yale was founded in 1701 with the intention of establishing a university, “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.” In line with this thinking, the beautiful

I wonder how many have passed under this gate never having read these words.

Then there is Harvard University, founded in 1636, which has these wise words inscribed over one of the entrance gates:

As one walks around the Harvard campus, it is difficult not to take note of the inscription above Emerson Hall (named after author and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, which later became popular as the

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE building where many parts of the 1970 movie “Love Story” were filmed). It reads, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Is this inscription a verse from the famous poet? If you answered “No,” you made your Sunday School teacher proud as this is a direct quote by King David from Psalm 8:4.

Isn’t it like going to the doctor and being handed prescriptions for eight different drugs when you have no symptoms of illness at all? It’s a fair question. And the answer I suggest can be hard to swallow, as the solution I propose is not immediately welcomed. Not only does God seem to be an unlikely cure, but even more problematic, it’s believed that He’s simply not needed. And so the underpinnings behind resistance are made evident. How can the gospel be shared with those who are so closed to it? As Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked, “We have educated ourselves into imbecility.” Perhaps we began that trip in our educational institutions. But is all hope lost for these prestigious centers educating humanity? Thankfully, not yet.

But in spite of their history, some universities have long abandoned a necessity for the Divine. No longer is the teaching of Divine commands recommended in order to better determine how a government should rule. Or even in the sciences, to know why life exists as opposed to just how. God’s relevance in education is deemed unimportant because God is not relevant in life.

Depreciation of the role of the Divine in education is not the sole fault of the Ivy League. This view is now prevalent in universities all over North America. I’m happy to say that my overall experiences at the But the impact that New England schools have on Ivy League schools have been positive, but they have society can be evaluated by looking at many of the also taught me a great deal. In this day and age of world’s influencers. American presidents, including Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, information Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John F. of all sorts is at our fingertips. If we want to know how Kennedy and numerous members of Congress are to make a fruit tart from scratch we can simply type Ivy League graduates. it into the search engine One school in particular and countless recipes has produced 47 Nobel appear. The same can Laureates, 32 Heads of be said about questions “What do I need God for?” Isn’t it State, and 48 Pulitzer regarding God, Jesus like going to the doctor and being Prize winners. A speaker and Christianity. handed prescriptions for eight at a large conference However, in spite of the in Boston earlier this availability and breadth different drugs when you have no year stated, “In many of information, many symptoms of illness at all? ways, America’s history people do not take the begins in Boston. New time to investigate the ideas continue to reign claims of Christianity or supreme in a city that prides itself on education and any religion for that matter. I am frequently informed intellectualism.” New England has been, in a way, that Christianity is “a bunch of fairytales”—that there graced with the privilege of expanding its influence is no evidence, the theology has not been thoughtfar past its universities’ walls. But pushing God to the through, the Bible is outdated and corrupted, and side has come at a cost. Christians believe in blind faith. Many people are surprised to learn, as we engage in conversation, In my two years working in New England, the topic I that Christianity makes some legitimate truth claims have most often been asked to address is, “Why do that should be considered. I need God?” This is true not only of New England, but of other states and provinces in Canada where I remember participating in a lengthy conversation I have been asked to speak. When students enter with a group of students who rejected any notion of college, many feel like their lives are just fine. Their anything needing to be objectively right or wrong and family is doing well, they haven’t experienced insisted that such ideas were mere social constructs. tremendous pain or suffering, and they are beginning I’ve sat through many similar conversations and the next exciting stage of life. Life is pretty good. listened as students presented very shaky arguments Then at freshman fairs (that part of orientation where as to why we should live a certain way. There was incoming students discover and sign up for as many one occassion, however, where someone conceded groups and clubs as they can) they run into campus that their worldview did not adequately answer the ministries and meet people who invite them to weekly question of objective truth. That particular student meetings so that they can get to know who God is. happened to be the head of the Secular Humanist And then it hits them, “What do I need God for?” Society on his campus. We had wonderful discussions

inCONTEXT MAGAZINE over the course of several weeks. He came from a non-Christian background, but became a Christian in middle school. His faith held firm until it began to unravel in his later high school years. Although he ‘lost’ his Christian faith, he still enjoyed listening to the arguments presented by Christians and was always up for healthy dialogue about our differences.

While she is a Christian, she admitted her struggles with doubt. The questions she asked me were fair and honest and quite common for those who are truly trying to discern truth. After a long conversation, it was beautiful to see her leave the coffee shop more confident in her faith.  While the message of Christ may not make its way onto new engravings on the plaques of these universities, the old ones still remain. There are certainly people attempting to do away with the Divine. However, many of the conversations I have remind me that God, truth and meaning are still being sought after and needed. The Gospel may no longer be in textbooks or classroom lectures, but God still resonates in the depths of the human heart. And that is better than anything that a 300 year-old engraving can do.

One of these discussions was about morality. A situation occurred where an atheist in the group argued against the notion of objective morality. The head of the Secular Humanist Society responded honestly that he believed certain things were right and wrong objectively, but he didn’t know why he felt that way. He knew he was being inconsistent with his worldview in saying that morality was not subjective, but he also knew his agnosticism offered him no answer as to why he intrinsically felt that there has to be a moral law. I also clearly remember an event I attended in Canada at another well-respected school. The topic for that evening was “Why I am not an atheist” and was given by Andy Bannister to a lecture hall packed with students from various worldviews. Expectedly, the talk provoked a lot of questions from the audience. But it was the last question that captured my attention. A student stood up and made a comment that I think rings true for many of our youth. He simply said to Andy that so often people assume that atheists are atheists because they think it is the most compelling argument. But in reality, some atheists simply don’t know what else is true.

Alycia Wood is a speaker with RZIM and has been addressing university audiences in the New England area, including at MIT and Harvard. She has addressed major issues surrounding faith to diverse audiences that include men’s and women’s prisons.

This young man’s honesty struck me in a profound way. He wasn’t an atheist because he wished it were true. He wasn’t an atheist because it brought him the most joy. He also wasn’t an atheist because atheism answered all the questions of life. He essentially was an atheist by default. He landed on it because he struggled to know if there were any answers out there that offered a plausible alternative to atheism.

Twitter:@AlyciaWood88 alycia.wood@rzim.org

While it may be surprising, the voice of this young man is echoed by many of our youth. I’ve found that students are often open to discussing Christianity with me because they are delighted to engage in intellectual conversations with a “religious” person. I also enjoy talking to the Christian students on campus who are searching for ways to better communicate with their friends. How do I reach my friend who is a Muslim? How do I talk to my friend who is a biology major?

For an online version of inCONTEXT Magazine go to rzim.ca

And I especially love conversations like the one I recently had at a local coffee shop with a young Harvard student. She attended one of my talks and is very involved with the Christian ministries on campus.

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WHY APOLOGISTS SHOULDN’T ANSWER QUESTIONS By Abdu Murray

Christian apologists shouldn’t answer questions. Shocking? Permit me to explain. Ask any apologist to provide a biblical case for using apologetics in evangelism and he or she will likely open with 1 Peter 3:15, which says, “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (ESV). I frequently opened with that verse because it includes the Greek word apologia, which means defense, and apologetics is primarily about defending the Christian faith. But I’m going to take a bit of a risk. Let me tell you why I’ve chosen to focus on another verse, one that reminds me not only to provide a defense of my faith, but to offer it’s credibility in a way that stirs the mind and touches the heart.

time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” My goodness, even as I type the words and read them aloud I’m struck by how resplendent they are with guidance for those wanting to communicate the Gospel’s credibility. It’s even difficult to start plucking the fruit that hangs low from that passage. But here are a few observations. First, Paul tells us we are to use wisdom as we walk or act “toward”’ outsiders. I love that Paul was inspired to use that word, “toward”. We are not to be passive in how we deal with non-Christians. We are not to sit back and wait for their question, should they come. We are to be actively engaged, approaching nonChristians with the Gospel. Now, this doesn’t mean that we need to accost people with the Bible and challenge their worldview at every turn. We don’t need to act “oversaved”, as comedian Michael Junior has mused.2 We need only be intentional in our effort to let our light shine with the kind of wisdom that allows us to be thoughtful, making the best use of the time, or in other words, seizing the opportunity.

In the oft-cited passage, Peter tells us to provide a defense of the faith--an apologia--when asked for the reason that we have hope. Apologia is used at least eight times in the New Testament and it is used to connote a defense addressing some aspect of faith. (See Acts 22:1, 25:16, 1 Cor. 9:3, 2 Cor. 7:11, Phil. 1:7, 16, 2 Tim. 4:16). The point, of course, is that 1 Peter 3:15 isn’t the only verse where this incredibly important word, apologia, is found. Nor is 1 Peter 3:15 the sole verse that tells us how to engage in apologetics. In fact, the Bible teems with passages urging us to use sound arguments and material outside the Bible to persuade others of the Gospel and defend it. Interestingly, those passages don’t even use the word apologia.1

And Paul beautifully tells us how to do it. While we can use arguments, we shouldn’t be argumentative. “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt,” Paul tells us. Can we accomplish this graciousness while bludgeoning someone else with logic or by pointing out their self-defeating statements or fallacious reasoning in arrogant or self-agonizing ways? Paul, as Jesus did before him, used arguments to touch people’s hearts and minds. Sometimes people walked away. But that reflected more their attitudes when confronted with uncomfortable truths than it reflected the tone of Paul’s or Jesus’ words.

In Colossians 4:5-6, history’s premier evangelist— the Apostle Paul—tells us that we must “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the

Consider for example Acts 17 (Paul uses arguments and evidence to persuade Jews and later refers to Greek philosophers to make a point about God to the Gentiles); Acts 19:8 (Paul uses “persuasive arguments to win people to Christ); Col. 2:4 (using profound teaching to prevent ourselves from being “deluded with plausible arguments”); 2 Cor. 10:5 (we are called to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God”). 2 I chuckle when I think of Michael’s illustration of a Christian sitting at a table and being asked by someone if the adjacent seat is saved and the “oversaved” Christian says “no, but are you saved!?”. 1

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inCONTEXT MAGAZINE But the last word of this passage is really what anchors it as the scriptural guide for my evangelism, using apologetics. Paul implores us to use wisdom and speak graciously so that we can know how we “ought to answer each person.” When we are wise and gracious in how we speak with those who think differently, we will learn something about them. We will then be closer in knowing how to answer them. But would we know that by speaking or automatically falling into “answering questions” mode? Typically, someone who is speaking or giving

of listening for the actual answer. That way we will actually know and understand the point of view of the person with whom we are trying to share. Then we can tailor our response to a person’s questions more effectively and graciously. Which brings me to the final word in Colossians 4:5-6, which I believe anchors the entire passage and punctuates why apologists shouldn’t “answer questions”. I realize that might sound strange given that I spend a lot of time in question and answer sessions in public forums and believe the Gospel is the source for the answers we’re all looking for.

If we are wise and gracious in our questions, we will learn a great deal about how to reach someone with the credibility of the gospel.

Paul tells us in Colossians 4:6 that we are to equip ourselves not to answer each question, but to answer each person. Questions don’t need answers. People need answers. Neither Jesus nor Paul answered questions, they answered people. In Mark 10:1722 when the rich young man asked Jesus what he needed to do to gain eternal life, Jesus responded to him by addressing the man’s assumptions and issues that kept him from the true Gospel. And in verse 21, we read that Jesus loved him and provided such a penetrating answer that it caused the man to selfreflect. Apologists aren’t in the answering questions business. We aren’t like Lucy from Peanuts with a booth that says “Questions Answered: 5¢.” We are to model what Jesus and Paul did: answering people, not questions.

a lecture doesn’t really learn anything in the midst of their proclamations. Their intention is to impart something to someone else. But this passage says that we can come to know (i.e., learn) how to answer people through the wisdom and graciousness of our speech. How? The answer is implied. We ought to ask sensitively, wisely, and graciously worded questions. This changes the paradigm somewhat, doesn’t it? Apologists are used to answering objections and challenges. But perhaps we ought to start out asking some questions of our own. Questions are the tools for gaining knowledge. And if we are wise and gracious in our questions, we will learn a great deal about how to reach someone with the credibility of the Gospel. As a trial lawyer, I would ask questions as the primary way to actually present an argument. Questions extract information from people and expose people to their own assumptions and misconceptions. I won’t get into the detail here about how to do that (I recommend Greg Koukl’s Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions for more on this), but I do want to say something about the manner in which we ask questions.

About 10 years ago I began my ministry offering the credibility of the Gospel to skeptics through sound apologetics, but I often found myself wrapped up in answering questions at speaking engagements. It was when I took stock of what I was doing and how I was doing it that I began to see that it is not my job to answer questions (doesn’t that sound boring anyway?). My job—my calling—is to answer people who are struggling with questions. Now I focus on what I call the “Two E’s”: Engaging skeptics with the credibility of the Gospel in ways that touch the heart and the mind; and equipping Christians to do the same. The Gospel touches the mind and the heart in credible ways. Intentionally or unintentionally, the people who explained the Gospel to me took heed of Paul’s words. They didn’t answer my questions. They answered me. And thank God they did.

When practicing law, I would ask questions in a direct way to “nail a witness down” so that they couldn’t back out of a statement or position later. But I would also ask questions with a genuinely inquisitive tone, genuinely wanting to hear their side of things. Asking questions just to get prepared to make a snappy response can be quite obnoxious and off-putting. We will end up sacrificing winsomeness on the altar of cleverness. We must ask a question with the intent

Abdu Murray is a senior itinerant speaker with RZIM addressing audiences all over the world. Twitter:@AbduMurray abdu.murray@rzim.org

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“For over thirty years, our team has devoted itself to discussing matters of faith with people of different faiths and assumedly none. We believe that the message of Christ has the power to change people’s lives and, in turn, our world. If you have any comments or questions about anything you’ve read, feel free to contact us . Email, tweet or call—we’d love to continue the conversation.”

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