APOLOGETICS

Apologetics

Apologetics

Question 1

To avoid the errors—both liberal and conservative—just delineated, what must we do? How can we achieve a vigorous, sound Apologetic for the 21st century? Consider five minimal requisites.

First, there must be a vigorous attack on the utterly fallacious notion that one does not need Jesus Christ for a fulfilled life. It has often been observed that those who cannot be convinced that they are sick will not go to a doctor. We need to employ the writings of the existentialists (Sartre—and especially Camus ) and of the depth psychologists and psychoanalysts to point out the misery of the human condition apart from a relationship with Christ.

This should not be in the least difficult, since these thinkers have rung the changes on the meaninglessness of life and the void at the centre of the human heart. Carl Gustav Jung, to take one example, has analogised the human condition to that of the nursery character Humpty Dumpty: broken and unable to put himself back together again. And, what is even worse—as Jacques Lacan points out—“The analysand's basic position is one of a refusal of knowledge, a will not to know (a ne rien vouloir savoir).

The analysand wants to know nothing about his or her neurotic mechanisms, nothing about the why and wherefore of his or her symptoms. Lacan even goes so far as to classify ignorance as a passion greater than love or hate: a passion not to know.” “How,” the jocular question is put, “does a psychiatrist differ from a coal miner?” Answer: “The psychiatrist goes down farther, stays down longer, and comes up dirtier.” One of the very few positive results of the 11 September 2001 horror was that it drove many Americans back to church (at least for a time!). Why? Because they were reminded of the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, and their inability to control their own destinies. The 21st century apologist needs to drive these truths home, based upon universal human experience (Josh, 1990).

In the second place, the effective apologetist must be willing to engage in an uncompromising, frontal attack on prevailing non-Christians worldviews. Liberal accommodationism has to be rejected out of hand. Any gains from compromise are trivial when compared to the losses—losses in integrity and in the power of the gospel message. How to attack secular viewpoints? Not on peripheral issues (their failure to live up to their own principles, for example), but at the presuppositional heart of their beliefs. The efficient way to destroy a condemned building is not to start on the roof, removing the tiles one by one; it is to blow up the foundations, after which the entire building will fall. Take the case of Marxism: its fundamental error is to assume that modifications in the means of production in society will produce “new men”—a proletariat—capable of creating a perfect, classless society. But, through human history, modifications of the environment external to man have never changed man's selfish ...