Staunch Christian Apologetics?

It's certainly not easy being a Christian nowadays. With the accelerating rise to power of science, of rationalism and the corresponding secular values everywhere, it seems that the entire cultural atmosphere is calculated to make life difficult for him. Is the Christian destined to lose? Perhaps. Perhaps not. To me, all is not yet lost. They may perhaps like to take consolation from the writings of some staunch Christian apologists like Alvin Plantinga ( God and Other Minds, 1967; The Nature of Necessity (1974), and the "warrant" series culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000) ) Lee Strobel ( The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity (2001) which offers replies to doubts of Christianity, including the problem of evil, the contradiction between miracles and science, whether God is worthy of worship if he kills innocent children, whether Jesus is the only way to God, and the church's history of oppression and violence; The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (2004), and The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ (2007) and William Lane Craig  Craig who wrote a book called "Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics". It ran to the third edition. It first came out in 1984. There was a second edition in 1994. The third came out in 2008.

Craig is described by J P Moreland of The Talbot School of Theology as "simply the finest Christian apologist of the last half century...He is one of a kind, and I thank God for his life and work C Behan McCullagh of The Philosophy Programme, La Trobe University, says of him: "With extraordinary erudition, he sketches the arguments of major thinkers of both past centuries and recent times and he presents his own reasons for concluding that traditional Christian doctrines about God and Jesus are credible."

The book is,  as Craig himself said, his "signature book". He also has a new web-based ministry called "Reasonable Faith" at http://www. reasonablefaith.org. In the third edition, he expanded the chapter on the existence of God into two and deleted a chapter on the historical reliability of the New Testament. He admits, as so many Christian fundamentalists do not, that "The overriding lesson of two centuries of biblical criticism is that such an assumption (referring to the mis-impression that a historical case for Jesus' self-understanding and resurrection depends upon showing that the Gospels are generally reliable historical documents) is false. The book, he says, is "intended primarily to serve as a textbook for seminary level courses on Christian apologetics", treating such topics or as he calls them  "loci commune (common places) of systematic theology", ie. the doctrine of scripture (de Scriptura sacra), creation (de creatione), sin (de peccato), christology (de Christo), soteriology (de gratia) ecclesiology (de ecclesia) and echatology (de novissimus). He also talks about such other important topics as loci de fidei (faith) )where he deals with the relation of faith and reason. In de homine, he deals with the absurdity of life without God,in de Deo, the question of whether God exists, in de creatione, with the questions of historical knowledge and miracles and in de Christo, with the historicity and resurrection of Christ.

What is apologetics? According to Craig, apologetics is "that branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide a rational justification for the truth claims of the Christian faith.": it is part of our expression of loving God with all our minds and serves to show to unbelievers the truth of the Christian faith, to confirm such faith to believers and to reveal the connections with Christian doctrines and other truths. It is, he says, " a theoretical discipline that tries to answer the question: What rational warrant can be given for the Christian faith ?". It is not training in the art of answering critics, debating or evangelism. Craig thinks that it is wrong for Christians to say that since others don't want intellectual answers but to see how Christianity is lived out, apologetics is irrelevant. This to him is both shortsighted and mistaken. He thinks that apologetic can play three important role nowadays:

1. Apologetics helps to shape our culture. While it is inevitable that the pursuit of knowledge by reason alone must lead to non-Christian conclusions either atheist or agnostic, he agrees with J Gresham Machen (Christianity and Culture) that "False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.". Craig thinks that anti-intellectualism and second rate scholarship now abound within Christian fundamentalism and thinks we ought to accept Gresham's advice that  Christians "should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity". `He does not agree with the postmodernist view that the traditional canons of logic, rationality and truth should be rejected and therefore that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate. He thinks that "the idea we live in a postmodern culture is myth" and that postmodernist culture is an impossibility because it is simply "unlivable." and further that "People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering and technology" but only relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. Apologetics is vital in fostering a cultural milieu in which the Gospel can be heard as a viable option for thinking people. He thinks that apologetics will make the gospel a credible option for those who seek God by giving them permission to believe.

2. Apologetics strengthens believers in their faith by presenting and making available some intellectually respectable argument for their faith. Craig thinks that the emotional approach whereby contemporary Christian worship concentrate on our emotional intimacy with God,  can only carry us so far but no further. He believes that at some point, the believer needs something more substantive. The contemporary Christians need to know about the speculations of theoretical physics and a bit of philosophy and biblical criticism so that he may deal with the well read man. He says, "if pastors fail to do their homework in these areas, then there will remain a substantial portion of the population--unfortunately the most intelligent and therefore most influential people in society, such as doctors, educators, journalists, lawyers, business executives and so forth--who will remain untouched by their ministry." He notes that many Christians do not share their faith with unbelievers because they are afraid that the non-Christians will them questions which they are unable to answer. Apologetics will provide them with good answers to typical questions and objections from non-believers.

3. Apologetics may help to evangelize unbelievers. Though many Christians think that nobody comes to Christ through arguments, Craig thinks that this is not a Biblical view. The Acts of the Apostles makes it clear that the apostles typically argue for the truth of Christian worldview, both Jews and pagans (e.g. Acts 17:2-3, 17; 19: 8; 28:23-24). When dealing with Jews, the apostles appealed to fulfilled prophecy, Jesus' miracles and Jesus' resurrection as evidence that he was the Messiah (Acts 2:22-23) and when confronted by Gentile, the apostles appealed to God's handiwork in nature as evidence of the existence of the Creator (Acts 14:17). They also appealed to the eyewitness testimony to the resurrection of Jesus to show that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ (Acts 17:30-31; 1 Cor.15: 3-8). To Craig, it is important to evangelize to intellectuals because whilst small in numbers, their influence is wholly disproportionate to their number e.g C. S Lewis who has been enormously influential amongst thinking people like lawyers, doctors and engineers etc.

Per Craig, there are two types apologetic: positive (which aims to present a positive case for Christian truth claims) and negative (which seeks to nullify objections to Christian beliefs). Positive apologetics itself may be further classified into two groups: natural theology (which relies upon evidence from Nature, as opposed to authoritative and divine sources, to support belief in God e.g the ontological, cosmological, teleological and moral arguments for the existence of God) and  Christian evidences which seek to show why a specifically Christian theism is true relying on e.g. fulfilled prophecy, the radically personal claims of Jesus,, the historical reliability of the the Gospels etc.) Negative apologetics is concerned with countering such atheistic objections to the existence of God as the incoherence of the idea of God, the problem of evil, objections to biblical theism in the form of biblical criticism and the objections of modern science to the biblical records. The problem of evil may thus be tackled by suggesting that some reasons for the existence of evil in the natural world. In short, the aim of positive apologetics is to show that some good reasons to think that God exists whilst negative apologetics point out that there is no good reasons to suppose that  Christianity is false. 

Whether thinking Christians will take time to learn theology is a ultimately a matter of  their own individual inclination and will. All I am trying to do is to bring certain books to to the attention of believers. Whether or not they shall read them is a matter of the gravest importance for the fate of their souls. Faith requires reason but reason does not necessarily require Christian faith.