A New Apologetics is Needed

Today is June 28th which is a black letter day on the Church Kalendar, dedicated to St. Irenaeus, the second century Bishop of Lyons remembered for his Adversus Haereses, written against the Gnostic heresies of his day. Tomorrow, however, is the red letter Feast of St Peter and St Paul the Apostles, Martyrs. Both of these dates are appropriate for a brief discussion of Christian apologetics. This is a subject that ties in well with what we have been looking at last week, especially in Friday's essay about Critical Theory. The general theme of my last three essays has been the social science departments of the universities and how they have been functioning as indoctrination centres for far left ideology for much longer than many people realize. These were a continuation of an examination begun in May of how the universities have betrayed their foundations. Critical Theory, regarding which we only scratched the surface in my last essay, has from its beginnings in the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, spread throughout the humanities, turning these disciplines into instruments for instilling the kind of left-wing doctrine now manifesting itself as "wokeness." The founders of this transdisciplinary methodology made no attempt to disguise the fact that this was their goal - it is written right in to their account of Critical Theory as being distinguished from older forms of theory by its end of transforming its object, society as a whole, rather than understanding it. While obviously there is much in Critical Theory which somebody, like myself, who regards Sir Roger Scruton's observation that "good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created" as axiomatic, must oppose on political grounds, it also poses a specific challenge to the Church in the field of apologetics. Critical Theory, like its parent ideology Marxism is inherently hostile to the orthodox Christian faith and is a particularly effective tool of the enemies of the faith in that it inoculates those steeped in it against contrary evidence by making traditional forms of presenting evidence out to be part of the system of oppression that it seeks to overthrow, thus turning any traditional evidence-based argument raised against them into confirmation of their own position. The challenge in this for the Christian apologist is how to penetrate such a wall.

The reason that apologetics is a particularly suitable topic for today and tomorrow, is that St. Peter was the one who commanded that it be done, St. Paul is the best example in Scripture of someone who actually did it, and St. Irenaeus was a notable apologist among the Church Fathers.

The first thing that needs to be said about apologetics is that it does not mean the confession of wrongdoing and imploring of forgiveness. This needs to be stated emphatically in the present cultural climate, in which left-wing mobs are forcing people to make such public demonstrations, not for their sins, but for their skin colour, ancestry, and often sex and faith. There is a place - a prominent place - for confession and seeking forgiveness in Christianity, but never for any of those things. It is our sins, that we are commanded to confess in Christianity, and it is primarily God from Whom we seek forgiveness. Secondarily, of course, we are also commanded to seek the forgiveness of those we have harmed by our personal sins. This is enjoined upon us as individual believers as part of our living out of our faith, and collectively as a body is incorporated into our Church liturgy where it occupies a prominent place. Both Morning and Evening Prayer, the daily Offices in the Book of Common Prayer, open with a General Confession followed by a clerical pronunciation of God's absolution because it is only as penitent and forgiven sinners that we can enter into God's presence to worship Him in an acceptable way. For the same reason, a General Confession and absolution precede the liturgy consecrating the elements of the Sacrament in the order of Holy Communion. Obviously, confession of sin and forgiveness are central elements of orthopraxis. They are not, what is meant by apologetics.

The apology in apologetics is the same kind of apology in Plato's dialogue of that name. An apology was the speech on behalf of the defendant in the Greek court system. In Plato's Apology - and Xenophon's for that matter - we have an account of Socrates speaking in his own defence at his trial. He gives witty answers to the actual charges against him, suggesting that Aristophanes' play of a quarter of century earlier had so prejudiced Athens against him as to lead to these proceedings. The real issue, he maintains, is that he has annoyed his fellow citizens with his constant questioning. He gives an account of why he has pursued this path and concludes by saying that if he were to be offered release on promise to cease and desist he could not give it because "the unexamined life is not worth living." Condemned to death, he accepts his fate but warns the consequences will be worse for the city than for him.

Christian apologetics is the offering of such a defence of the Christian faith. It is to be distinguished from evangelism, which is the proclamation of the basic message of the Christian faith, the Gospel, the Good News that God has given mankind a Redeemer in His Son Jesus Christ, Who died for our sins and rose again. Evangelism has as its end that those who hear would believe and be brought into the Church. Apologetics is auxiliary to evangelism, not a substitute for it or an alternative means of seeking the same end. This cannot be stressed enough because the most basic mistake an apologist can make is to try and do the work of an evangelist through apologetics. Few, if any, have ever been argued into believing.

St. Peter commanded apologetics when he wrote "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ." (1 Pet. 3:15-16)

In the book of Acts we have multiple examples of this in the life of the Apostle Paul. In his speeches to the multitude in Jerusalem in Acts 22, before Felix the governor in Acts 24, and before King Agrippa, Berenice and Festus in Acts 26, St. Paul exemplified apologetics in the meaning that most closely conforms with St. Peter's words. Here, St. Paul had been accused of wrongdoing, and gives an account of his faith, in answer to the false accusations against him. This would be one of the primary tasks of the early apologists of the first few centuries before Christianity was legalized. Frequently, the Church would be accused of all sorts of things such as cannibalism and incest, and the apologists would answer these charges and defend the faith with the end of achieving peace and legal acceptance in the Roman Empire. However, attacks on the faith also took the form of philosophical arguments against its content. Apologists would also answer such arguments, and after the legalization of Christianity this became the primary task of apologetics. Interestingly, St. Paul also provides an example of this sort of apologetics in his address to the Stoics and Epicureans at the Areopagus in Acts 17, although he was not responding to a specific philosophical objection to Christianity so much as providing a philosophical explanation that he had been invited to give by the curious.

In St. Irenaeus we find an example of yet another role of apologetics - defending the orthodox faith against attacks from within by those teaching heresy. In the Scriptures, it is St. John who practices and enjoins this aspect of apologetics in his first two epistles. St. Irenaeus, although he was a bishop in what is now France, was raised in the Church in Smyrna in what is now Turkey. The bishop of that Church was Polycarp, who had been a disciple of St. John and ordained directly by him.

Apologetics has remained an important element of Christian theology ever since. It is divided into branches differently depending upon whether the criteria is the particular element of Christianity being defended or the particular methodological approach being used.

Today, the challenge from Critical Theory is demanding an answer from Christian apologetics. The apologetics of the last two centuries has been largely addressed to arguments arising out of the various strands of Modern philosophy that have descended from the English/Scottish, French and German branches of the so-called Enlightenment. The "Postmodernism" that arose in French art and literary criticism in the same period that Critical Theory was spreading throughout the humanities has also been addressed extensively, although perhaps to a degree unnecessarily because it is its own refutation. Critical Theory has not received adequate attention from apologists and, indeed, can be said to have largely been ignored by them. Dr. Neil Shenvi and Dr. Patrick Sawyer have made Critical Theory the focus of their defence of the Christian faith, but their work seems to be only in the last year or two, and there are few others. This seems extremely odd because when you look at the tensions that have existed between orthodox Christianity and other social groups in the West in the last two to three decades the arguments of the other groups have come in a Critical Theory framework. Considering that Critical Theory had dominated the humanities and social sciences, that the West is now in the grip of a neo-Maoist cultural revolution that spouts Critical Theory-derived slogans in which there have been calls for a Kristallnacht against stained-glass depictions of our Lord and Saviour, and many within the Churches are trying to incorporate this entirely un-Christian way of thinking, we need to do better than that.

Evidential apologetics is obviously worthless for this purpose. Evidential apologetics is the kind of apologetics that argues "Christianity is true because of such-and-such proofs." "Scientific creationism" is entirely a form of this sort of apologetics approach. It is useless against Critical Theory because of the latter's built-in explanation of all evidence, inductive or deductive, brought against it as being part of the system of oppression. Presuppositional apologetics might be better, but only slightly, at least without significant revision.

What is needed is a whole new apologetical approach that counters Critical Theory at the level of its own basic claims. The idea that oppression conveys moral, intellectual, and cultural enlightenment upon the oppressed ,is one example of Critical Theory's claims, Apologetics needs to be able to counter these claims without setting off the intellectual loop that translates any counter-argument into confirmation of the Theory. It is almost tempting to borrow from Nietzsche's master-slave morality distinction, which comes from the rival branch of the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition to that in which the founders of Critical Theory were steeped, but, of course, that is as anti-Christian a line of thinking as Critical Theory itself.

There is much work to be done in laying the foundation of a counter-Critical Theory apologetical approach. It would be well to emphasize again the distinction between apologetics and evangelism. People are seldom if ever argued into believing, and those who are trapped in Critical Theory behind its anti-argument wall, are even less reachable. Reaching them must not be our priority - we must leave that to the Holy Spirit, working through the Gospel, in answer to prayer. It is to prevent others from falling into the Critical Theory mind-trap that must be the goal of our efforts.

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One - Orthodoxy

Words often undergo changes in meaning over time. The changes can be slight or tremendous, ranging from a subtle alteration in nuance to a radical reversal in which a word evolves into its own antonym. This does not occur with every word, of course, and there are words whose meaning has remained stable, enduring the wear of centuries, millennia, and even the leap from one language to another.

Semantic shift has affected dogmatic or theological words as much as any other. There are several instances in which these changes have served as indicators of the weakening of orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy itself is an interesting example of this.

Within the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation orthodoxy used to refer to the essential Christian kerygma, stated dogmatically, and was understood to come in two tiers. First, and most important, was Catholic orthodoxy – the truths defined as orthodox in the Creeds of the early, undivided, Church. The second tier was Confessional orthodoxy, that is to say the truths defined as orthodoxy by the Confessions of the Protestant Churches – the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, the Augsburg Confession, Smalcald Articles and Formula of Concord of the Lutheran Church, and the Belgic and Helvetic Confessions and Heidelberg Catechism of the Reformed Church. Note that the degree of orthodoxy varies between these Confessions, as must inevitably be the case between Confessions that are not completely in agreement, and I have organized them in order from most orthodox to least. Note also that although the Canons of Dort are traditionally considered one of the Three Forms of Unity of the Reformed Church, they are not included because they only pertain to doctrines that have to do with the Reformed Church’s distinct view of predestination. Finally note that the Westminster Confession of Faith and all the other Confessions that have been modified from it are not included. The Confessions of seditious, regicidal, schismatics, however much truth they may contain and however well they might be worded, must never be regarded as orthodox.

In the last century there arose a “neo-orthodoxy” in the writings of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, a “paleo-orthodoxy” associated primarily with United Methodist theologian and Drew University Professor Thomas C. Oden’s project of recovering the consensus of the pre-Schism Patristic Church, a “Radical Orthodoxy”, a movement founded by High Anglican theologian and University of Nottingham Professor John Milbank, and a “Generous Orthodoxy” associated with Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church movement.

The first two of these were the efforts of former theological liberals to return to the orthodoxy that liberalism had abandoned. Barth notoriously failed at this – his “neo-orthodoxy” was an attempt to dress up existentialist philosophy in the language of Christian orthodoxy, but it fell short of the historical, orthodox, Catholic consensus on a number of points of doctrine, including the very foundation of the orthodox view of Scriptural authority, the doctrine of verbal inspiration, id est, that the very words of Scripture were inspired in the sense of being given to us or “breathed out” by God. Oden may have succeeded where Barth failed. In his last book Francis Schaeffer expressed a cautious optimism towards Oden’s project which was then in its infancy stage. Almost twenty years later Oden published his The Rebirth of Orthodoxy which would seem to have justified this optimism.

With regards to Radical Orthodoxy, it strikes me as being vulnerable to the same criticism Margaret Thatcher once made of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatism, i.e., that there is too much stress on the adjective and not enough on the noun. Radical Orthodoxy began with Milbank’s rejection of the sacred-secular divide in Theology and Social Theory (1990), a promising start, and grew into a more thorough critique of modern thought and thinking. It borrowed heavily, however, from the other critiques of modernity that are collectively known as “post-modern”, including the obnoxious and barbaric methodology of writing largely in overly technical neologism. This methodology was, of course, designed for the purpose of subverting language itself, since language is seen by the post-modern mind as an unjust tool of oppression which needs to be deconstructed. This idea cannot be reconciled with true Christian orthodoxy which requires fidelity to Him Who was introduced by St. John with the words Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Post-modernism, for all of its claims of skepticism towards the metanarratives of modernity, has demonstrated no ability to think outside of the box of modernity and has been interpreted as being merely one of the elements of modernity taken to extremes and turned on modernity itself.

While this is not entirely true of Radical Orthodoxy, the leading figures of which have drawn heavily from such pre-modern wells as Platonic philosophy, Augustinian and Medieval Theology, and the Patristic writings, especially of the East, its inability to escape the modern box is quite evident when one considers, as one is not supposed to in theological discussions but which convention I have little respect for, how its ideas are applied in the realm of the political. Although this school of thought began among High Anglicans it is hard to imagine any of them, transported to the seventeenth century, taking up arms on behalf of King Charles I. They would be far more likely to side with the Levellers, the Puritan fanatics who were too extreme even for Cromwell. Consider Milbank’s tweet when Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

If, however, you want a theological example, there is the book advocating universalism published by Yale last year and written by David Bentley Hart, a disciple of Milbank’s who converted from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. While some Westerners convert to Eastern Orthodoxy out of a sincere conviction that the Greek Church was in the right in 1054 AD and that all the Western Churches are schismatic there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church. I am not saying that all of those drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy out of Radical Orthodoxy are of the latter type but read Hart’s book – it is entitled That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation – and draw your own conclusion.

If Radical Orthodoxy has borrowed certain ideas and methodology from secular postmodernism, the Emergent Church has embraced the latter with both arms. The very expression “Emergent Church” points to the movement’s understanding of the Church, not as an institution founded almost two thousand years ago, which we of the present have inherited from the past, but of something yet to be, which is now in the process of becoming. This distinction does not correspond to the traditional distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ecumenical movement arose, the name of which pointed back to the unity of the early centuries prior to the schisms, and which had as its stated goal the restoration of this primitive unity. This movement, however, was extremely vulnerable to the criticism that its approach to Christian unity was the exact opposite of the Fathers of the earlier era. Whereas the latter promoted the unity of the Church by drawing up the ecumenical Creeds, so as to define orthodoxy and exclude heresy, which latter was the mother of schism, the ecumenical movement of recent years seeks an artificial sort of unity through a lowest-common denominator approach which avoids divisive and contentious doctrines however essential to historical orthodoxy they may be. The Emergent Church, in looking forward to the “Church” that is becoming in the post-modern age, has taken this ecumenism to the next level. Thus, McLaren’s “Generous Orthodoxy”, is not orthodoxy at all, that is to say, a canon of sound doctrine that identifies and excludes heresy, but something that seeks the exact opposite of this, the inclusion of as many, radically diverse, viewpoints as possible. It is the theological equivalent of multiculturalism and the cult of diversity.

To summarize, when “Orthodoxy” is qualified by “Neo”, “Radical” or “Generous” it is to one degree or another, a significant departure from historical and traditional orthodoxy, both the orthodoxy of the early Catholic Creeds and the orthodoxy of the Magisterial Protestant Confessions. Clearly the “orthodoxy” in the names of these movements means something different from what “orthodoxy” was understood to mean until the early twentieth century. This change in the meaning of the word is indicative of how the movements themselves have departed from historical and traditional orthodoxy. In the case of “paleo-orthodoxy”, “orthodoxy” appears to have retained its original meaning and is indicative of a movement that is trying to be genuinely orthodox.

Orthodoxy is not the only word that has undergone this kind of semantic shift. In the next entry in this series we shall, Deus Vult, consider how the meaning of the word “evangelical” has changed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and how this change indicates a departure from orthodoxy. We shall look at how in the eighteenth century this word came to indicate a highly individualistic, experience-based, approach to Christianity that is in many ways similar to a form of religious fanaticism that was condemned as heresy by Catholic orthodoxy in the Patristic era and which was strongly opposed by the orthodox Reformers. We shall also look at how the word “Catholic” has undergone a change in meaning in Protestant usage from the sixteenth century to the present. In the century of the Reformation, the orthodox Reformers – Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed – when speaking of the abuses they condemned, used such epithets as “Romish” and “popish”, but never condemned that which was truly “Catholic”, that is, belonging to whole Church, everywhere and in all ages, since Apostolic times. They rejected the papacy’s claim to be the locus of Catholicity and refused to use this ancient, Creedal, word as an exclusive description of the Roman communion. Today, Protestants, whether they be neo-evangelicals who have grown soft on the truths of the Reformation or fundamentalists blasting the errors of what they regard as the whore of Babylon, both tend to use the word Catholic in the way the Roman communion uses it, as an exclusive description of their communion. We shall consider how this is related to the change in meaning of evangelical, for they are related, and how both changes indicate a shift in evangelicalism to an extremely unsound view of Church history, one which is directly responsible for the revival of virtually every ancient heresy in the last two centuries.

In a third entry we shall, again DV, look at how the word fundamentalist has changed its meaning very quickly in the century since it was coined, moving from its original meaning of a sort of alternative, conservative, ecumenism to now denote a kind of radical separatism. We shall see how this change in meaning serves the purposes of those who wish to deny the obvious truth – that the view of Scriptural authority now associated with the word “fundamentalist”, that of verbal inspiration – has been Catholic orthodoxy since Patristic times. In relation to this we shall consider a different sort of semantic change – how, in the middle of the last century, we stopped referring to the English Vulgate – not an English translation of the Latin Vulgate but the English version produced by the English Church and adopted as its version of the Bible for over three centuries - by its proper name – the Authorized Version – and began calling it the King James Version in order to lower it, in people’s estimation, to the level of the myriad of inferior translations that have now glutted the market, none of which can ever achieve the status it once held, and how at best, even the best of them can only ever be a helpful secondary resource in the study of what shall ever be the true English Bible. We shall see how this belongs to a series of steps, beginning with eighteenth century evangelicalism’s departure from the evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformers, by which faith in Scriptural authority was gradually undermined from within.