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Pilgrim Bible Church Online Tacoma, WA (253)473-5657 [email protected] |
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Pilgrim Bible Church Online Tacoma, WA (253)473-5657 [email protected] |
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Introduction to Apologetics by Pastor Bryan Pollock Any discussion of evangelism would be incomplete without exploring the exciting though sometimes disputed domain of apologetics. Apologetics has to do with defending the faith against the unbeliever or the militant skeptic. The term derives from the Greek word apologia which means a "verbal defense". In Philippians 1:7 the Apostle Paul stated that he had been "appointed for the defense (apologia) and confirmation of the gospel." The verb form of this important word appears in Acts 26:2, "King Agrippa, I consider myself fortunate to stand before you today as I make my defense (apologeisthai) against all the accusations of the Jews." The basic idea behind the term involves a formal "courtroom defense" ( II Tim. 4:16). As a subdivision of Christian theology, apologetics is a "systematic, argumentative discourse in defense of the divine origin and the authority of the Christian faith" (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Walter Elwell, editor, pg. 68). But even though it is associated with Christian theology, apologetics is not the exclusive domain of the professional theologian. Peter commanded every believer to become an "apologist" and be "ready to give a reason" for the hope they have (I Pet. 3:15). Thus, apologetics has long been regarded as an important part of the church's evangelical witness. But to what extent is the believer to become an apologist in his or her evangelism? Stated another way, in "earnestly contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), how much "defending" of the faith will be required? This is an important question and one which has historically divided evangelicals right down the middle between two popular schools of thought: the Evidentialist and the Presuppositionalist. Evidentalism The Evidentialist contends that evidences in support of Christianity's truth claims are a necessary prerequisite to faith. Members of this particular school of thought, such as the popular Josh McDowell, believe that a direct appeal to the person's reason with the requisite amount of (hopefully compelling) archeological, historical and scientific evidence can break down barriers of unbelief and serve as a precursor to actual faith in Christ. While this particular school of apologetics has much to commend it, critics point out two major flaws in its approach: a seemingly high view of fallen man's critical faculty (intellect) and the age-old philosophical problem of evidence, specifically, just how much evidence is necessary to establish a truth claim as valid therefore trustworthy. The first of these charges may be summed up this way: Do we really reach a man's fallen heart through his equally fallen mind? Critics of the Evidentialist position believe that its view of man is too high given the profound effects of the fall on all of his faculties, intellect included (Eph. 2:3; Col. 1:21). This leads us to another vital question: What is the role of reason in leading someone to saving faith? It is important to interject at this point that the role of reason is not static, it differs from believer to non-believer. For the believer, reason does not tell him Christianity is true, that is the role of the Holy Spirit who is the self-authenticating witness to the truth of Christianity. This means that the internal witness of the indwelling Spirit of God is its own proof! It is unmistakable; it does not need other proofs to back it up; it is self-evident. In other words, the indwelling Holy Spirit gives the Christian certainty of the truth of Christianity (Rom. 8:15-16; I John 2:20, 26-27; 3:24; 4:13). Thus, "although arguments may be used to support the believer's faith they are never the basis of that faith. For the believer, God is not the conclusion of a syllogism; He is the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob dwelling within us. How then does the believer know that Christianity is true? He knows because of the self-authenticating witness of God's Spirit who lives within him" (Craig, Apologetics, an Introduction, pg. 19). For the unbeliever, however, reason must be persuaded that the Christian faith possesses a high degree of probability. That is the best that any rational arguments may prove given the nature of evidence and human reason, but this should not disturb us since "virtually all our knowledge is based on probability even the knowledge that other people exist or that the earth is round" (Craig, pg. 22). Again, certainty of the truth of Christianity can only be experienced by the true Christian through the witness of the Holy Spirit. How then does the apologist go about the task of persuading an unbeliever that Christianity is credible therefore worthy of the unbeliever's serious consideration? William Lane Craig suggests a two-pronged truth claim: Systematic consistency. As Craig explains, "By systematic I mean fitting all the facts of experience." He further elaborates, "To be true something must,...have the support of facts, whether historical, personal or scientific" (Craig, pg. 22). And it must possess consistency, that is, it must be consistent with the laws of logic and not be self-contradictory.
As noted earlier, an even greater problem for Evidentialism relates to the tentative nature of evidence itself, particularly as it relates to an infinite God. This problem is stated as follows: Since God is infinite there must exist by definition an infinite number of proofs or evidences for His existence. But man is finite and could theoretically exhaust his entire lifetime (along with a few hundred million lifetimes!) gathering all of the data he could about God and then sifting through it (just imagine the immensity of such a task!) and processing it without ever coming to any definitive conclusions about it! Why? Because he will forever be plagued by the dilemma of determining when the amount of evidence he has gathered can be considered sufficient to support the existence of an infinite God with a reasonable degree of certainty. Thus, the sheer weight of evidence for God could itself crush any possibility of reaching reasonable conclusions leading to a reasonable faith in Him. The Book of Ecclesiastes anticipated this problem long before the philosophers did (Eccles. 1:17-18; 3:11; 7:27-28)! Presuppostionalism The second major school of apologetics, Presuppositionalism, contends that no matter how great and compelling the evidence for Christianity, the problem is not a lack of reasons for faith, but the sinful presuppositions which keep the sinner clinging affectionately to his sins. These presuppositions, with which all are born, skew all evidence for God in unbelieving directions. Therefore what sinners desperately need is the gospel proclaimed plainly and simply. Only the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit can give a sinner a new set of presuppositions along with a new heart and a renewed will! Thus, the gospel does not pander to depraved presuppositions, it transforms them! The most famous evangelical apologist of this school is the Calvinist, Cornelius Van Til, former professor at Westminster Seminary. His system begins with the distinction between God's knowledge and human knowledge. According to Van Til, only God has true knowledge of the world as it actually exists. Thus, only God can give man true knowledge of the world. If man, who is fallen and whose powers of intellect and observation have been profoundly weakened by sin, attempts to know the world apart from God, he will greatly misunderstand it; his mind will distort the data of his observation. To know anything truly, therefore, we must presuppose the God of the Bible is the true God, "for once we assume that God exists and that His Word is true, we have a basis from which reasoning can truly proceed" (Dryness, Christian Apologetics in a World Community, pg. 61-62). Thus, as Van Til concludes, "the only possible way for the Christian to reason with the non-believer is by way of presupposition. He must say to the unbeliever that unless he will accept the presuppositions and with them the interpretations of Christianity there is no coherence in human experience" (quoted in Dryness, pg. 62). Without the mutual acceptance of the most basic truth claims of Christianity there can be no common ground between believer and non-believer, for even mutually observed objects are perceived differently revealing a cognitive divide that not even the most passionately argued proofs can bridge. For example, when the evolutionist and the Christian refer to a tree they aren't even talking about the same reality: for one the tree is a product of evolution, for the other the tree is a product of God's creative power. Thus, Van Til concludes that the best apologetic is a consistent and loving proclamation of the gospel that the Holy Spirit can use to convict of sin and bring to insight (Dryness, pg. 62). Before we analyze these two competing systems with a view to synthesizing them into a "middle way" or a "both-and" apologetic, let's explore some of the famous proofs for the existence of God normally associated with apologetics. Arguments Used For The Existence Of God There are three ways one can argue for the existence of God. First, the a priori approach, popularized most famously by Anselm of Canterbury, features a "proof" based upon a definition of God as infinite, perfect and necessary. This argument from the existence of God is also known as the ontological argument based on the science of metaphysics which investigates and explains the nature and essence of all beings, their qualities and attributes. The A Priori Argument Anselm's approach goes like this: God can not be conceived in any way other than "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" (quoted in Elwell, pg. 447). This knowledge is so basic to man that even the fool knows what he means when he says "There is no God" (Psalm 14:1). But if the most perfect being existed only in thought and not in reality, then it would not really be the most perfect being, for the one that existed in reality would be more perfect. Therefore, Anselm concludes, "no one who understands what God is, can conceive that God does not exist" (quoted in Elwell, pg. 447). In short, it would be self-contradictory to say, "I can think of a perfect being that doesn't exist," because existence would have to be a part of perfection. One would be saying,"I can conceive of something greater than that which nothing greater can be conceived"-- which is absurd (Elwell, pg. 447). The Ontological Argument The ontological argument for the existence of God has a long and storied history and still lingers today in modified form among certain philosophers and theologians. But because it requires careful logical thought, it lacks the persuasive punch it once had when careful thought was not just the pass time of the intellectual elite. In these irrational, emotional times, two other proofs offer more hope in connecting with the audience than Anselm's approach. These are called the cosmological and teleological arguments, and they feature an a posteriori approach to truth (arguments drawn from facts which one has observed). The Cosmological Argument The cosmological argument gained its greatest fame under the able Catholic scholar Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas, picking up where Plato and Aristotle left off, sought to explain the existence of motion in the cosmos. Assuming that rest is natural and motion unnatural (a belief he borrowed from the ancient Greeks), Aquinas reasoned that every moving body has to be moved by something outside of it. For a thing which has potential to move can not cause its own potential motion to become actual motion; some other thing must cause it to move. But this other thing must also be moved by yet another moving body, and so on. This series, however, can not go on infinitely as Aristotle believed, for in such a series the intermediate causes have no power of their own but are mere instruments of a first cause. Aquinas' basic hypothesis here is that there must be a first cause of motion in every causal series, so in order to account for all cosmic motion he postulated an obviously Unmoved Mover, the First Cause of all motion, who is God. By far the most interesting of Aquinas' so-called "five ways" (five proofs of God's existence) is the "third way", the argument from contingency. Taking a page again form the ancient Greeks, this time, Epicurus, Aquinas restated the Epicurean dictum "something obviously exists now and something never sprang from nothing." He then restated the Epicurean conclusion that being must be eternal, that an Eternal Something must be admitted by all. But this Eternal Something can not be the physical universe which is obviously contingent, changing and, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, subject to decay. How could a presently decomposing entity be eternal? If every present contingent thing or event depends on a previous contingent thing or event and so on ad infinitum, then you fall prey again to the absurdity of infinite regression which explains nothing. Therefore, for there to be anything at all contingent in the universe, there must be at least one thing that is not contingent i.e., something that is necessary (self-caused, self-sufficient and self-existent) from which all contingent beings derive their actual existence. This Absolutely Necessary Being is either a self-existent God or a self-existent universe. The late Carl Sagan in the old Cosmos series on PBS contended almost evangelistically for the second of these options. His famous introductory remarks betray the arrogance of his unbelief: "The cosmos is all that has ever been or all that will ever be!" But had Sagan taken a closer look, perhaps he, too, might have seen compelling evidence to the contrary. The universe is not behaving like a god at all! In fact, the universe is running down like a clock, or, more accurately, cooling off like a giant stove. Energy is constantly being diffused or dissipated and progressively distributed throughout the universe. Add to this the fact that scientists have never observed a "recharging" of this universal energy loss which means the universe like man himself is also heading for a date with death, known scientifically as a "heat death", a random degradation of energy through out the entire cosmos (Elwell, pg. 448). Thus, as Aquinas saw even without the Second Law of Thermodynamics to aid him, God, and not the universe, must be the Absolutely Necessary Being and hence the fountain of all other being in the world (Acts 17:28). Another version of the cosmological argument was advanced by the German mathematician/philosopher G.W.F. Leibniz. His approach asked a simple yet very profound question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" In other words, why does anything exist at all? Leibniz reasoned that there must be an answer to this question because "nothing happens without a sufficient reason" (quoted in Craig, pg. 65). But that sufficient reason cannot be found within the universe because everything within the universe is contingent upon something else and doesn't have to exist....Therefore, the reason for the universe's existence must be found outside the universe, in a being whose sufficient reason is self-contained; it is its own sufficient reason for existing and is the reason the universe exists as well. This Sufficient Reason of all things is God, whose own existence is to be explained only by reference to Himself (Craig, pg. 65-66). The Teleological Argument The argument from intelligent design or, the teleological argument, involves the famous proof that the patterns and contours of design observed in creation presuppose the existence of a Designer or Grand Architect of the universe whose creative hand can be traced in manifold evidences of purposeful adaptation of means to some end (telos). No one can deny the universe seems to be designed. Even the famous French skeptic Voltaire declared, "If a watch proves the existence of a watchmaker but the universe does not prove the existence of a great Architect, then I consent to be called a fool" (quoted in Elwell, pg. 449). Evidences of purposeful design abound, including the many features of the planet earth and the solar system which conspire to make our blue planet the only one conducive to life. The earth must possess the right size, its rotation must be just so, its distance from the sun must be within certain limits: too close, and the sun's radiant heat would turn earth's surface into an inferno like that of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun; but too far, and our earth would resemble the icy, barren world of a Pluto or Neptune. It must possess the exact sea to land ratio in order to sustain life, its tilt must be just so to insure the seasons, its atmosphere dense enough to shield the surface from the daily "missile assault" from outer space (asteroids and other planetary debris), and its crust thick enough to insulate us from the molten fires beneath our feet! All who confront such evidences as these are forced to conclude that the cosmos is either a plan or an accident, that it developed by design or by chance. But most have an innate repugnance to the notion of chance because it contradicts the way we normally explain things. Chance is not an explanation, but an abandonment of explanation (Elwell, pg. 449). And chance cannot create anything, because the same random nature that might theoretically align factors favorable to life and existence would just as randomly scramble those factors again and doom any possibility of creation by random chance. A tornado in a junkyard will never produce a Boeing 747! The Moral Argument One of the more recent arguments for the existence of God is that set forth by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Called the moral argument, it purports to show that God is necessary to make sense of morality and to insure that morality among men is grounded on a foundation higher than man himself. Kant sought to justify moral absolutes by postulating a god who could serve as the source of all morality. As one scans the civilizations of the past and present, one finds a remarkably well delineated conception of good and evil, of right and wrong, spanning the spectrum from sophisticated legal codes in advanced societies with their implicit morality to the tribal taboos of primitive man. Where does this universal notion of morality come from? To say that it is a product of our "societal conditioning" (a popular answer among anthropologists and sociologists) is inadequate. It does not explain how some of the greatest moralists in history have acquired their fame precisely because they "swam upstream" against the contrary currents of the prevailing morality of their own day and openly criticized the moral failings of their group or nation (Elwell, pg. 450). The argument of the anthropologist or the sociologist simply fails to account for the remarkable presence of the "reforming spirit" throughout history, and, "if social subjectivism is the explanation of moral motivation, then we have no right to criticize slavery or genocide or anything" (Elwell, pg. 450). The argument for the existence of God from the standpoint of universal morality has been given a new twist by Peter Berger in his book Rumor of Angels. Berger notes that some actions of certain men in the modern world have been so inherently reprehensible, so monstrously brutal and inhumane, that both the moral relativist and the moral absolutist have joined in condemning them with equal vigor and passion. Obviously, then, some deeds are not only evil, but monstrously so, and as such, they appear immune from any kind of moral relativizing. But, in making such high-voltage moral judgments, as when we condemn genocide and slavery, whether the relativist likes it or not, he is pointing to a transcendent realm of moral absolutes. Otherwise, all of our moralizing is pointless and groundless. A "preaching relativist" is one of the most comical of self-contradictions (Elwell, pg. 450). The "Argument From Absurdity" Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments for the existence of God, and, one in which numerous theologians and writers have made significant contributions, is the argument from absurdity. Life is absurd and unthinkable without God from many standpoints. First, there is the absurdity of man apart from God. The French physicist, mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote eloquently on this subject. Pascal observed that as man looks out around him, all he sees is darkness and obscurity. Moreover, insofar as his scientific knowledge is correct, man learns that he is an infinitesimal speck lost in the vastness of time and space. His brief life is bounded on either side by eternity, his place in the universe is lost in the immeasurable infinity of space, and he finds himself suspended, as it were, between the infinite microcosm within and the infinite macrocosm without. Uncertain and untethered, man flounders in his attempts to lead a meaningful and happy life. His condition is characterized by inconstancy, boredom and anxiety. His relations with his fellow men are warped by self-love; society is founded on mutual deceit. Man's justice is fickle and relative, and no fixed standard of value may be found. But despite this cosmic predicament, most men refuse (incredibly so!) to seek an answer or even to think about their dilemma. Instead, they lose themselves in escape (Craig, pg. 34). Pascal saw both man's depravity and his dignity in his cosmic plight. Even though he is insignificant where the universe is concerned, because man, the mere "reed" is a thinking "reed", he knows his condition. Though the universe might crush him like a gnat, he is still nobler than the universe because he knows that it crushes him while the universe has no such knowledge. Man's whole dignity consists, therefore, in thought; his greatness is perceived not in the solution to his predicament, but in the fact that man, in all the universe, is aware of his predicament. Writing in a similar vein, Loren Eiseley calls man "the Cosmic Orphan" (Craig, pg. 39). Mankind, according to Eiseley, is the only creature in the universe who asks, "Why?" Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. Since the Enlightenment, when he "liberated" himself from the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these cosmic questions without reference to God. But the answers he received were dark and terrible. "You are the accidental by-product of nature," man is told, "a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death" (quoted in Craig, pg. 39). Modern man thought that when he had succeeded in consigning God to the ash heap of history, he would free himself from all that repressed and stifled him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself (Craig, pg. 39). For if there is no God, then man's life becomes absurd. If God does not exist, then mankind is just "a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life" (Craig, pg. 45). The Consequences Of "Taking God Out Of The Equation" The awful scenario for man which emerges when God is no longer
part of the equation of existence has troubled even those philosophers who have played a
major part in His "demise". Even the "infamous" atheistic
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in 1886, wrote, "The greatest event of recent
times - that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is
beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe" (quoted in Paul Johnson, A History
of the Modern World, pg. 48), elicits alarm. In a work entitled The Gay Science,
Nietzsche wrote about a madman who rushes into a crowded marketplace in broad daylight,
lantern in hand, crying out, "I seek "'Whither is God?' he cried, 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?...God is dead....And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?'" Nietzsche, himself, apparently found little comfort in the implications of his philosophy. He predicted that someday men would realize the implications of their atheism, i.e., that the banishment of God would usher in an age of nihilism the central feature of which would be the annihilation of all meaning and value in life. But then, it would be too late to turn back from the abyss. The genie could never be coaxed back into the lantern from which the pen of philosophers like Nietzsche had liberated him. Writing in The Will to Power, Nietzsche warned, "Our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect" (quoted in Craig, pg. 46). The absurdity and meaninglessness of life without God has led to wholesale pessimism and despair. The French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, has written of the "nausea" of human existence, and in his play, No Exit, he depicts life as a hell from which there is no escape. The Effects Of Such A Philosophy On Mankind But by far, the greater hell is what such a philosophy tends to produce among men in society. Without God, tyrants, men possessing what Nietzsche called "the will to power", fill the vacuum left in the wake of the absent God, and they brutalize and butcher by the millions. Again, we're back to Kant's dilemma: if there is no God, then there can be no standards of right and wrong. The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. The plight of modern man cast adrift on the unfriendly seas of philosophical atheism and its always attendant relativism is vividly pictured by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians two: "...strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world " (vs. 12). And our tumultuous age in which atheistic relativism has clearly won the hearts and minds of a vast majority in academia, the press and the arts worldwide threatens to undermine the foundations of absolute truth and turn our contemporary world into the living nightmare so ominously portrayed by Isaiah: "For truth has stumbled in the street and uprightness cannot enter. Yes truth is lacking; And he who turns aside from evil makes himself a prey" (Isa. 59:14B-15). Open season it seems has been declared on the hapless soul who would dare to defend the "ancient paths" (Jer. 6:16; 18:15) and the eternal, unchanging verities of almighty God. Writing in his best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, professor Allan Bloom described the overall triumph of relativism in the American college classroom. He writes, "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative" (Bloom, pg. 25). And this is no casual belief, but one adhered to with an almost religious passion. Thus, one encounters an interesting reaction in the classroom if anyone dares to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Observes Bloom, "That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2+2=4." He notes that "The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it." And, he concludes with this devastating insight, "...this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness- and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings- is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all" (Bloom, pg. 26). Postmodernism The new religion of relativism, or what the late Walter Martin called "the riddle of relativism", dominates the world today in the form of postmodernism. But in order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to ascertain what preceded it historically. In other words, just what is postmodernism "post" to? Since the so-called "Enlightenment" when man succeeded on a broad scale in liberating himself from God, man has been the measure of all things. With the twin postulates of the Newtonian mechanistic universe whose deepest mysteries seemed tantalizingly within reach of man's intellect in Newton's day, and the postulate of the invincible intellect linking arms, modernism was born. In its theological form, modernism is, quite simply, good old garden variety liberalism, whose major impetus is always to see to it that the church maintain its cultural/ temporal relevance. The church, according to the liberal lie, must always strive to "roll" with the cultural, technological, scientific flow in any age. And, if need be, the church must be ready to either modify or to surrender entirely any tenet or article of belief that is not in step with the tenor of the times. Thus, modernism loves any thing that smacks of "the latest" innovation, fad or trend, or anything that partakes of the most recent in scientific discovery. This love of anything contemporary is a hallmark of modernism, and it has its roots in modernism's positive attitude toward knowledge. As Stanley Grenz notes, "This assumption of the inherent goodness of knowledge renders the Enlightenment outlook optimistic. It leads to the belief that progress is inevitable, that science, coupled with the power of education, will eventually free us from our vulnerability to nature as well as from all social bondage" (Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, pg. 4). Thus the messiahs of modernity are the enlightened "free thinkers" who lay claim to an almost god-like objectivity with the capacity "...to survey the world from a vantage point outside the flux of history" (Grenz, pg. 4). Their pronouncements and findings were unthinkingly accepted by the masses as the whole truth especially if they were regarded as "scientific", and not even the church was immune from the "golden calves" spawned by modernity. When the German "higher critics" began to "de-mythologize" the Scriptures and made the arrogant boast that their findings were "the assured results" of advanced scholarship, a sizable wing of the Protestant Church was swept away by their hubris and became liberal virtually overnight. And a church which surrendered the Bible to the "hatchet men" of higher criticism was in no position to stand against the evils of modernism as they were about to reach a kind of critical mass through the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegelianism Hegel is an Enlightenment hero who first popularized the dialectical approach to truth. This approach takes "polar opposites" (thesis and antithesis) and resolves them into a higher compromise (synthesis). According to Hegel, history is the arena where these elements wage constant warfare, and the emerging syntheses become the stuff of truth, even absolute truth. It should be observed that even this usage of the term "absolute" is relative itself, as Hegelian "truth" is in constant flux, ever changing, ever at the mercy of the constant clash between thesis and antithesis. This clash can be seen in the creation versus evolution debate in which the liberal wing of the church has opted to "sign on" to the compromise position of theistic evolution, a synthesis of the creation and evolution positions. But what is fascinating is what the Hegelian dialectic has done to the modernist conception of history itself. The French evangelical, Jacques Ellul, observes that, by means of the Hegelian dialectic, history, "...is habitually transformed in modern discourse into a value, a power which bestows value, and a kind of absolute" (quoted in Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, pg. 14). Thus, Hegel idolized the preeminent forces of history, those forces which had emerged victorious in the on-going dialectical struggle. It takes no great intellectual leap to see where this kind of thinking ultimately led Hegel. Listen to what Hegel said, "The State is the Divine idea as it exists on earth... we must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth... the State is the march of God through the world...."(quoted in Schlossberg, pg. 178). Thus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel became the drummer to whose beat the armies of Nazi Germany would march in but a few short years, as well as all the armies of all the tyrants in modern times! The Hegelian dialectic would fuel the utopian dreams of Soviet and Chinese Communism and would turn the twentieth century into the bloodiest century in all of human history, and all in the name of progress! The essential lie of modernism, given its idolatry of time and history and of inevitable progress, is that which is, ought to be! But in logic, this is known as the "is-ought" fallacy. It does not logically follow that that which is should of necessity exist. If this is indeed true, then it would be impossible to condemn the genocide perpetrated by rogue states and nations, and we would find ourselves plunged into the darkness of a moral relativism that would actually justify man's barbarism. The Effects of Modernism On The Church What has been the impact of modernism upon the church? Beginning in the early twentieth century, the church awakened to the liberalizing tendencies of modernism , and the fundamentalist wing of the church fought a pitched battle against it. This war culminated in the (in)famous "Scopes-monkey" trial (1925) which pitted Darwin's The Origin of Species and the Bible against each other in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom. Though the defendant, 24-year-old John T. Scopes, was found guilty of violating a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution in its schools, the real story swirled around the two famous combatants who squared off against each other in the courtroom and the competing worldviews both represented. In one corner for the prosecution stood the imposing Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a champion of anti-evolutionary forces; for the defense, the famous attorney Clarence Darrow. Bryan seemed to stand for traditional American values - a simple trust in the Bible, a commitment to "simple facts" and a distrust of new "hypotheses"; Darrow, for "enlightened science, modern thought and urbane culture" (quoted in Elwell, pg. 989). The trial itself lasted 12 days with the climax occurring on July 20 when Darrow surprisingly called Bryan as a witness for the defense. Over the objections of chief prosecutor Arthur Stewart, Bryan complied, and though the episode had nothing to do with the trial proper, in the words of church historian Mark Noll, "it had everything to do with the fate of popular evangelicalism in America" (quoted in Elwell, pg. 989).
As damaging as this landmark trial was to the cause of Christ, the greater damage done by modernism has come whenever the church has capitulated to it either through out and out compromise or unwitting compliance. In the "siren song" of "relevance" and in wanting to appear "hip", "in the know" and "with it", the church foolishly courts an even greater potential irrelevance. In the words of playwright W. R. Inge, "He who marries the spirit of an age soon finds himself a widower." A church marching in lock step with the philosophies of today will find itself "out of step" with the philosophies of tomorrow. This is precisely why the church is exhorted to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God (I John 4:1), and to "examine everything carefully and hold fast to that which is good" (I Thess. 5:21). The church should resist conformity to any prevailing philosophy and remain above the fray so as to maintain constant readiness to speak against the "doctrines of demons" (I Tim. 4:1) which are the sum and substance of any secular philosophy. Return to Pilgrim Bible Church's Homepage
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