John H Armstrong

The Influence of C. S. Lewis on Head and Heart, Part 3

I have suggested that C. S. Lewis was a truly great evangelist and apologist, though a reluctant one in a profound sense. I want to conclude my sundry thoughts about why Lewis is so important to us by a few quotations from Lewis himself.In an essay title "Man or Rabbit," written in 1946, Lewis says:

Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you. Either that's true, or it isn't. And if it isn't, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal "sell" on record. Isn't it obviously the job of every man (that is a man and not a rabbit) to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug?

Think about this one for a moment. Though I think the modern atheists, called by themselves the Four Horsemen (e.g. Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) pose a threat to the faith of non-thinking people, or to people who are predisposed against Christ for whatever the reason, Lewis suggests that it is there job to "expose . . . this gigantic humbug" if that is what they think it really is. (They obviously do believe this if you read their work.) But note, he says this to make a powerful point. We who do believe must serve this "tremendous secret" with "full" effort and all our human energy. I think Lewis would welcome these four men onto the stage of modern debate and then seek to show listeners why their arguments may appear to be important but in fact they deny both the hunger of the human heart and the logic of clear thinking. But isn't there a real danger that we respond to the Four Horsemen by recommending that Christianity is good regardless of whether or not it is really true? This is the way I have heard some people argue against these four unbelievers. Lewis wrote an essay in 1945 titled, "Christian Apologetics." In it he says:

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience's mind the question of truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue "True--or False" into stuff about a good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland--or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine . . . their belief that a certain amount of "religion" is desirable but one mustn't carry it too far. One must keep on pointing our that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

So defending the faith requires us to use our intellects. For far too many this is a novel idea. We must see the challenge of the modern atheists, the so-called four horsemen, as a wonderful opportunity for presenting the truth of the faith, not simply lame arguments about the utility of our faith in our private lives. We must show that our faith makes sense of life as we really know it. It is rooted in claims that explain things cogently and in the kind of facts that make real sense of human history. Lewis, in the same essay, concludes:

I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.

Many Christians, in attempting to explain or defend the faith, fall into this very trap. The clear headed thinking of C. S. Lewis will help them avoid this ugly ditch.

The Influence of C. S. Lewis on Head and Heart, Part 2

My good friend Dr. Jerry Root teaches a class at the Wheaton Grad School on C. S. Lewis. In the catalog it is listed EVAN 694 but the title is "C.S. Lewis: Apologist to the Head and the Heart." This is a course I wish I could take and someday maybe I will. Jerry is not only an inspiring teacher but he is a great student of all things C. S. Lewis.

In his syllabus Jerry asks, "Why was Lewis so effective?" He answers, "In part, his effectiveness stemmed from his holism; that is, he spoke to the head and the heart." I could not agree more.

C. S. Lewis speaks to my heart in a way that few modern writers do. He wrote out of deep personal experience. He was, as some young people would put it, "real." His journey to the faith, recounted in his own moving story Surprised By Joy, and his subsequent growth into a deeper and more mature faith, are both inspiring and spiritually formative. 

But Lewis never sacrificed his profound intellectual skills to be a Christian. He had some serious intellectual barriers to faith and needed to resolve these in order to believe well. He worked at resolving these barriers all his life. I believe he worked at these out of a deep desire to answer his own questions. We just happen to be the beneficiaries of this work. In the process Lewis became adept at presenting the gospel to others and thus he became a kind of reluctant evangelist and world-renowned apologist. He was also a literary genius, employing a number of different genres. This is one reason why his work will remain useful well beyond one or two generations.

Jerry Root says that Lewis models for us a holistic approach to life that employed two approaches to knowing God. The first approach was romantic. This approach considers the qualitative aspects of one's relationship with God. This is the way of story and narrative. This is the way that employs imagination. This is also a reason why Lewis has a particular attraction for young adults more than ever. I have become impressed, much too late in my life I fear, that I never developed this approach well. I am presently writing an new series of ACT 3 Weekly articles (I encourage you to subscribe to these at www.act3online.com) that will show you how we cannot do good theology and real discipleship without using the gift of imagination. I think most academic theologians miss this by a million miles and this is a major reason why the church suffers under this kind of thinking. It gives good theology a really bad name in many circles. It is also a major reason why theology is employed as a weapon in debate more than as rich food to nourish the life and soul of the faithful. The romantic approach is the way of the heart. It accounts for the deepest longings of our heart. It wonders, and ponders and goes outside of the categories of thought that easily limit us.

Jerry Root says the second approach Lewis employed was rational. He was profoundly concerned with the reasonableness of Christianity. This is why he did the kind of apologetics that he did. He wanted to show, both to himself and others, that you need not throw away your intellect to believe the Christian faith. He was not a theologian but he was a master at this way of thinking and thus teaches more theology to ordinary folks than most theologians would accomplish in ten lifetimes.

These two approaches are not antithetical in any sense. They are complimentary and thus they are the two halves of a holistic understanding of God and of living the faith out in everyday life. This is also why Lewis is the "apostle of the modern Christian" in a profound way. Not only must we know God through both approaches but we must become efficient in ministering his gospel to others by using both. Some confuse all of this with intellectualism. This is a category mistake. All people, including those with no formal education at all, must use both their mind and their heart to truly love God. This is true because Jesus plainly taught that we must "Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). Lewis will truly help you do this.

The Influence of C. S. Lewis on Head and Heart

Some have referred to the late C. S. Lewis as "an apostle of faith and reason," or the apologist of "heard and heart." Lewis was arguably one of the great integrators of faith and learning in the 20th century. He also impacted my life deeply when I was a student at Wheaton College in the 1960s.

Before I transferred to Wheaton, from the University of Alabama, I only knew of Lewis because of his famous book Mere Christianity, which is really a collection of short presentations he gave over the BBC radio network during World War II. When he died, on the same day as President Kennedy's death, I did not take notice at all, since I was freshman in high school and had not yet even heard of him. 

Lewis remains as important as ever, indeed more important in my estimation, precisely because he was a serious thinker, a serious Christian and an intellectual who spoke clearly to ordinary people. This rare combination has made him a role model for me ever since I studied his work under the late Dr. Clyde Kilby (photo left), my professor at Wheaton who personally knew Lewis and then became one of America's early advocates of his writing. Through Dr. Kilby many of the manuscripts and remains of Lewis' life and work are now housed at Wheaton College at the Marion Wade Center. The Wade Center brings guests from all over the globe to study Lewis and is an important repository of English and apologetic work.

Lewis cannot be understood until you realize that he was first and foremost a Christian evangelist. The word evangelist has fallen on hard times in modern American Christianity. We almost cringe when we hear the term these days. But Lewis, the scholar, was an evangelist. He called himself a rhetor (one given to rhetoric, thus persuasion) and an evangelist (one who attempted to bring people to faith in Christ). Lewis told students, "Woe to you if you do not evangelize." A professor who says that today is seen as "over the top." We do not like too much passion about our evangelism. It makes us nervous. It sounds judgmental. Many emergent Christians almost never use the word. But then many evangelicals never talk about Jesus either, not even in church if you listen carefully enough.

Lewis as an apologist who engaged in direct evangelism. He wrote about the Christian faith and he sought to prove why it was intellectually reasonable. He did not try to prove the faith, in typical evidentialist ways, so much as he removed barriers to belief and helped those who were weak in faith to see that they could reasonably embrace Christ and remain intellectually honest. One British historian called Lewis the single most effective person proclaiming the gospel in England in the 20th century. I agree.

C. S. Lewis influenced me in my early attempts to do evangelism and apologetics precisely because his arguments made sense and helped me to see why and how my faith addressed the big issues of the time. He still does that for me. But he eventually did a lot more for me. About fifteen years ago I discovered C. S. Lewis as an ecumenist. I always knew about his ideas regarding "mere Christianity." But I never deeply explored them. His ecclesiology is not well-developed since he was not a theologian. But his profound insights into human nature, and the way people thought, helped him to see through the maze of church conflicts and then to make some rather profound observations that foster the kind of ecumenism I have come to believe in so deeply. In a letter Lewis once wrote:

It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell. "One fold" doesn't mean "one pool." Cultivated roses and daffodils are no more alike than wild roses and daffodils. 

On church division he once wrote a letter in which he said:

Disputations do more to aggravate schism than to heal it; united action, fortitude and (should God so will) united deaths---these will make us one.

In his famous Mere Christianity he wisely counseled:

Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.

More on Lewis in tomorrow's post.

The God Who Wasn't There: No Serious Threat to the Faith of Christians

The God Who Wasn't There is a 2005 documentary film on the "Jesus myth." It is the work of ex-fundamentalist Brian Flemming. I missed all the excitement about the film, if there was much. I recently discovered it on Netflix and since apologetics is a keen interest of mine ( I teach it academically) I thought it looked like a pretty interesting attack upon the “myth of Jesus.”

The film producers believe this documentary will do to religion what Bowling for Columbine did to the gun culture and Super Size Me did to the fast food industry.  Of the three films Bowling for Columbine was the most interesting but none of these films did a great deal to change minds or actions regardless of your view of their importance or their impact on the larger culture. Hype does not mean that minds are being changed regardless of what side you are on in a debate. Most "pop" documentaries are the ideological dreams of writers and producers who have an odd angle (conservative or liberal) and want to promote it. Really good documentaries, which I enjoy a great deal, are generally done by PBS.

The God Who Wasn’t There “irreverently lays out the case that Jesus Christ never existed.” This claim, which is not new, is advanced with the following claims:

1) The early founders of Christianity seem wholly unaware of the human Jesus. Jesus was a mythical figure and the details of his life were added more than five decades after his death. A case is made, using a simple time line, that since Paul wrote his letters first, and the four Gospels were written several decades later, that this time gap is just too huge to accommodate serious history.

2) The letters of Paul were written four decades before the first Gospel and Paul mentions none of the stories or details of the life of Jesus at all, not even quoting Jesus. (This is patently wrong!) He does mention the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension but only in a manner that sees them as taking place in a mythic realm.

3) The death-resurrection-ascension sequence of the Gospel events was common in pagan myths and other religions. Others stories mentioned in the Gospels also occurred in previous mythologies and religions and were simply copied by the early Christians.

4) The Jesus of the Gospels bears a striking resemblance to other ancient heroes and the figureheads of pagan savior cults.

5) Contemporary Christians are largely ignorant of the origins of their religion. Interviews are included to prove this point.

6) Fundamentalism is as strong today as it ever has been, with an alarming 44% of Americans believing that Jesus will return to earth in their lifetimes, 22% saying it will be in the next five years or so.

All of the above claims are not new, with the possible exception of number five. They were all made in antiquity (except of course numbers five and six) by brilliant critics of Christianity who used far better arguments than those employed by Brian Flemming. Ancient Christian apologists, two of whom Flemming cites out of their context, answered many of the very claims this film makes. Flemming presents most of this material as if it was really some new discovery that he wove together for this film! One Christian blogger noted: “Anyone with the most cursory knowledge of the early ecumenical councils will know of the fierce debates which took place on the humanity and divinity of Christ: the Creeds of the Church did not come from nowhere.” Amen!

The fifth assertion made above is accurate and thus may be the only thing in the film that I found worth seeing. (The film is so badly made, and poorly patched together with clips taken from several old films about Jesus, that any awards for cinematography would be a real joke!) Flemming cleverly uses about six different Christians, not scholars or serious apologists, to demonstrate that most Christians are ignorant of the origins of their religion. I have no doubt that he is right in this claim. But it proves absolutely nothing about his bigger claim that the Jesus story is a “myth.”

Flemming presents what he believes is overwhelming proof by using interviews with several popular atheists, including the infamous Sam Harris. The Los Angeles Times said the film is “provocative—to put it mildly.” I didn’t find it provocative in the least. If I wanted to undermine Christian faith I would look for something far more professionally and carefully made than this sad excuse for a credible documentary. It was a total waste of time to watch it.

If you want to know more about the film a simple Google search will reveal both fans and critics coming from a number of perspectives. Count me as another critic, not because the “Jesus myth” idea is not worthy of apologetic debate but because this film doesn’t make a serious contribution to that debate. Sadly, the film borders on buffoonery. I had hoped that I could find something here to use in one of my apologetics classes but this film is too easy to refute.

 

The Challenge of Pluralism

I wrote yesterday about the challenges being faced by the Episcopal Church (ECUSA). The question behind the question that I raised is the issue of pluralism. How dangerous is pluralism? For that matter, what is pluralism and why should serious Christians really care about this question?

Let's begin with the fact that not everyone practices the same religion. If this were not so we wouldn't need to consider the question of pluralism or Christian apologetics. Increasingly tolerance is being defined in various pluralistic ways, ways that present serious challenges to orthodox Christians and Christianity. But few bother to define what is actually meant by pluralism before they begin to throw the term around very widely. Some conservative writers have referred to me as a pluralist in spite of the fact that I affirm the creeds and councils of the Church and embrace the faith of a historic Protestant denomination. This gross misuse of the term has pushed me to come to terms with the several ways that this term is used, and abused, by modern Christians.

John G. Stackhouse, Jr., in his excellent book, Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford, 2002), writes: "Pluralism is a word we encounter all the time, but few speakers or writers pause to define what they mean by it. Pluralism has at least three definitions" (page 3). So what are the three kinds of pluralism Stackhouse sees as germane to serious apologetics?

1. Pluralism as mere plurality. In its most basic form pluralism is simply "the state of more than one." A supermarket presents a plurality of choices to shoppers. Sociologically a proliferation of goods and services, which characterizes all of modern society, is a state of pluralism.

This definition of pluralism is value-free. If there is more than one religion we then have a state of plurality, thus religious pluralism. One can even say that there is a kind of pluralism within Christianity itself since there are a number of versions of Christian faith and practice, not just one.

What has changed, especially in our new globalized context, is that religions exist alongside one another in places where once this could never have happened. Muslims live in my neighborhood and Buddhists attend schools in my community. Whenever someone refers to the number of religious choices that exist in their neighborhood as pluralism this should not mean they embrace another faith or condemn it, per se. It is simply an observable fact. By observing the fact, and embracing it rightly, we can foster peace among all people in the right way.

2. Pluralism as preference. This second use of the term goes a bit further. It affirms "that it is good that there is more than one" religion. Here the use of the term pluralism moves from sociology to theology, or maybe strictly speaking, to ideology. It goes from "what is" to "what ought to be."

But even here the term pluralism has various uses. I might express the wish that there should be several faiths side-by-side, believing that it is good for the larger community in which I live, without embracing another religion as ultimate truth. All of us prefer certain kinds of plurality. Plurality, even in matters of faith and practice, has its limits but a society may well function best where there is some measure of tolerance and respect for different expressions and beliefs deeply held within it. America, though not founded by Muslims for sure, is one society that can tolerate such beliefs in a meaningful way and not disintegrate into "tribal" religious conflicts. The "establishment clause" creates a society where this can happen in a healthy context that is still predominantly Christian. At the same time we can have a distinctly Christian influence within our culture if we are willing to live among others in faith and love. I personally hope that we will follow this course, though this is also being threatened in our time, more by secularists than by people of other faiths. 

3. Pluralism as relativism. This level of pluralism goes well beyond the first two. It says that no option is to be preferred to another and no faith is finally right as over against another faith. There are very different ways that people express this kind of pluralism when it comes to religion.

Some practitioners of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc. are convinced that they believe the right faith but then they are very uncomfortable in saying their faith tradition is the best one. This is a type of pluralism that leads to relativism, at least a "soft" type of relativism. There can be a naive relativism here if a person does not, to cite just one example, think Judaism (for example) is to be preferred to Nazism, a critical historical example.

A more sophisticated version of this kind of pluralism as relativism would say that all options are partially good and partially bad. They can all be "appreciated as more or less approximate versions of ultimate reality" (Stackhouse, page 6-7). There is a sense in which this is not relativism at all since people who think this way may still believe someone may hold a better view, or maybe even an ultimately correct view.

This relativistic thinking abounds in the religious realm. New Age faith and practice praises "all religions" (a very common practice in America now) while it still says one way of faith is to be chosen over another. This is what the philosopher John Hick does when he prefers Christianity but leaves the door wide open to all other faiths at the same time.

Radical pluralism argues that no one has universal, objective truth. This kind of pluralism, the sort that seems to be ripping apart older Christian denominations these days, argues that relativism is necessary to be truly open and loving. This becomes, as the late Allan Bloom said, "the only virtue." In this setting the "true believer, " regardless of what they believe, is in deep trouble. It is this sort of relativism that will not only destroy churches but whole societies. When there is no final judgment to be rendered about what is right and wrong, and all we have is competing systems of ethics and religious practices, the one person (or faith) we will not tolerate is the one who believes that they know objective, final truth.

Albert Einstein and the Modern Atheists

Albert Einstein was clearly a brilliant man. He was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws."

Einstein was asked other questions about his beliefs over the years. He tried to express his feelings as clearly as possible. In the summer of 1930, amid his sailing and time for thinking in Caputh [Germany], he composed a credo titled: "What I Believe." This credo was recorded for a human-rights group and later published. It concluded with an explanation of what he meant when he called himself religious, which he often did: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

No one who reads these words would think of Einstein as a Christian. He was not even a traditional theist. But this much is clear---Albert Einstein would find the popular writings of best-selling critics like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins utterly ridiculous.

We cannot “prove” the existence of God, if by prove you mean provide an equation or a scientific proof. But the reality of God is so obvious that people who do believe are anything but foolish knaves for their sense of the mystery we call God. I think Albert Einstein offered some pretty good evidence of this simple truth. 

Apologetics for Postmodern Evangelism

Thanks to all of my readers and friends who prayed for my class at Wheaton last week. I had twelve students for a five-day intensive graduate class in apologetics at Wheaton. This is my fourth year teaching this class. (I have taught several others; e.g. revival, spiritual formation, etc.) Each class has been a bit larger and thus it becomes a real challenge to me since I seek to use a method that involves all the class in open discussion and requires the students to present and defend their own views as we go along ("The Socratic Method").

This class included a pastor from Tanzania, a missionary to France, several InterVarsity staff, several pastors, several people in the world of business or commerce and one senior undergraduate student. It was a most unusual mixture of people and the Lord blessed us as we learned together. I use four text books and one supplemental guide plus numerous hand outs of readings from things I have collected over the years. Each day we looked at various subjects that touched upon the readings and the wider range of apologetics as it relates to evangelism in a postmodern context. The four books I used are:

1. Christian Apologetics in a World Community (Wipf & Stock, 1983), William Dyrness. This older book provides a general overview and seeks to meet challenges presented to the Christian faith by naturalism, Eastern religions, Marxism and the social sciences. It particularly addresses the question of evil, which plagues all true apologetical classes and books.

2. Reasons of the Heart (Presbyterian & Reformed, 1996), William Edgar. This little volume is one of my favorite overviews. It builds on the thought of Pascal. I recommend it for churches and sundry groups that desire a "basic" class and primer on this subject. Edgar has one of the best sections on evil that I know. He concludes, "We really cannot know why God allowed evil to enter his universe" (p. 103).

3. Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Eerdmans, 1986), Lesslie Newbigin. The core of my teaching is rooted in the thought of Lesslie Newbigin. No single 20th century writer has more influenced my thought and approach to authority, mission, evangelism and the church than the late Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998). You simply cannot read too much of his work.

4. Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Eerdmans, 1995), Lesslie Newbigin. This small book summarizes my own views of epistemology and certainty better than anything I have read. And it is very accessible to general readers. I highly recommend it to you if you are interested in holding a solid Christian worldview and learning how to understand faith and doubt properly.

Some of the questions we considered included:

1. What are the questions that the postmodern person asks that were not asked 25 years ago?

2. What specific influence does Hinduism have upon the "new-age" movement in the West?

3. How can we speak about apologetics in a way that makes it accessible to ordinary people?

4. How do we approach the issue of evil with unbelievers?

5. Does conservative and fundamentalist Christianity actually pose a major problem for serious apologetics in today's world and if so how do we deal with this problem?

6. Do Marxism and radical Islam have anything in common and if so how do we address these problems?

7. How do we respond to the "So What?" responses of many postmodern hearers?

8. Does our commitment to seeking justice and mercy in society act as a form of apologetics and if so how can we do this better?

9. How do we change every sphere of society?

10. In what ways is the Christian faith "public truth" as Newbigin cogently argues?

11. Is the community of Christ our greatest apologetic and if so what does unity and John 17 have to do with this in actual practice?

These and scores of other related questions were discussed throughout the week. It made for a stimulating and intensive time. I was given twelve of the best students I have ever had in any class and the though I am tired, and needed more rest this weekend than usual, I am refreshed by the experience.

Again thanks for your prayers and your support which allows me to teach a class like this one. The pay for teaching as an adjunct is so small that no one could do this for a living. Your investments in ACT 3 make it possible for me to train and shape leaders for the wider church community. For these prayers and gifts I am deeply grateful.

The Case for Christ: The Film

Former journalist and legal editor Lee Strobel (Chicago Tribune) has done perhaps more than any single modern writer to popularize the case for the Jesus of the Holy Scriptures. His book, The Case for Christ, is an award-winning, best-seller and his story is fairly widely known by this point in time. Lee was an atheist whose wife became a Christian and then she began to witness to him, sometimes ineffectively. (It is noteworthy that in the real story a group of people were praying for Lee during his search!) Lee decided to use his skills as an investigative reporter to search out the claims of Christ. He studied the historical accuracy of the Gospels, the personal claims of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. After nearly a two year struggle to come to grips with the evidence he then became a Christian. The rest of his life has been devoted to helping others answer these same questions, thus he became a popular apologist for the Christian faith.

The Case for Christ: The Film is a new DVD that features Lee Strobel and his wife telling their own story with the help of about a dozen scholars. Scholars featured here include Ben Witherington, Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, Mark Strauss, Craig Evans, Craig Blomberg, Mark Licona, Michael Rydelnik (a converted Jew) and the famous N. T. Wright. The point of this film is to show how a journalist investigated the most important story in human history to establish the truth or falsity of the New Testament record about Jesus. This video is superb in every way.

Strobel's story is told very well and his wife's part in it is crucial, in ways that some viewers might miss if they are not inclined to pay careful attention to the narrative itself. There is a special feature included on this DVD in which eight of the scholars tell their own story about Jesus and faith. This is worth the DVD on its own. N.T. Wright concludes that the biggest thing that has happened to him in the last ten years is his intense desire to understand how we relate faith to culture. I have followed almost the same course, but not with the same conclusions as the good Bishop Wright. To me this underscores the need for deeper real conversation in a context of respect. If the Church is polarized into the simple categories of left and right, politically or socially, then we will fail to properly engage the culture with the Lordship of Christ adequately.

Another great feature included on The Case for Christ: The Film is a feature presentation of all the prophecies of the Old Testament regarding the sufferings and death of Jesus and how they are plainly fulfilled in the Gospels. If you've never lined these biblical texts up and then seen the correlation this section will also prove extremely useful.

All in all, this is a superb resource and could be used privately as well as in groups. A class could easily profit from using this material over the course of several weeks of dialog/discussion.

Keen apologists will go on arguing that unbelievers cannot become convinced of Christ by the amount of evidence alone. But there can be no real doubt that evidence can play a significant role in clearing the way for the gospel to do its good work. An obvious benefit here is that Christians will find numerous answers to their own questions and thus be better able to live in the modern world. I highly recommend this video for these and other reasons.

Teaching Apologetics and Reaching Students with the Gospel

Sometimes a blogger runs the very real risk of sounding self-promoting, or even actually becoming self-promoting. I am acutely aware of these dangers. Blogs are understood by many as personal journals. Others see them as a place to put their essays on favorite subjects. Still others see them as a way to promote a cause. And some use them to sell, whether it is a candidate, a product or a religious special interest. I see this blog as a "think spot" where I can share what I am thinking about the Church, the culture and the way we live as moderns. This is why my blogs run all the way from issues of Christian faith, the renewal of the church and issues inside the Church to politics, music, art and film. Even college football and baseball gets blogged here since I love them both personally. (Sorry for you who do not love these items. You have my permission to skip them!) In some way I do all of this writing just because I just love to think and then write. It has become a habit, I hope not an obsession, though I have that tendency for sure.

Having said all this I received an email today from an Inter Varsity staff member who took my class in evangelism and apologetics this summer in Madison, Wisconsin. I taught there as a Wheaton adjunct professor and thus I was an extension of Inter Varsity via several schools such as Fuller, North Park and Trinity. This particular student serves at a major secular university on staff. This letter was a huge blessing to me when I read it this afternoon. I share it not to "puff" John Armstrong but to let you see another aspect of my life and ministry via ACT 3. I also have another reason that I will add at the end after you read the letter. Here is the letter, edited to fit this context and given without any names and places. (Italics are all mine.)

Dear John,

I hope that the start of 2008 has been good to you and your family. I again thank you for teaching the 12 of us IV staff this past summer. It was one of the greatest classes I have ever taken because I am applying what I know to this day. My love for apologetics and evangelism has grown tremendously since the class and as a result, has become something that my students are starting to embrace as well. We had 6 people respond to the gospel all of last year, praise God. But after this summer we as a fellowship decided to focus on evangelism even more. Because of that, 6 people responded to the gospel the very first week of school! It was amazing to see what God was doing. I think it had much to do with having a better grasp on the postmodern perspective.

Apologetics have been instrumental to me this semester because I have had many spiritual conversations that were able to go to a deeper level because I was able to answer questions that people had. Again, people on this campus are apathetic, but I was surprised to meet so many people that had a personal religion but didn't care about practicing it much. I especially met a handful of Catholics that didn't understand the concept of following Jesus with their whole lives. I also met two Muslims who were not fervent followers of their faith and were open to hear about Christianity. Because of the research that I have been doing in Catholicism and in the Islamic faith, I was able to talk to them on their level, allowing a deeper conversation and appreciation of where they were in life.  There was one thing that I realized more than ever: people are lost and are looking for a Savior even though they might not realize it. Thank you for helping me get more tools and resources in my arsenal in order to fully become the evangelist God has called me to be.

This semester is going to be filled with much excitement and much uncertainty. I am looking for people who would be interested in partnering with me in this journey as I learn how to engage and serve my campus with the gospel. I am looking for people that would like to get periodic updates of what is happening on campus and would pray for the campus and I am looking for people who would be willing to help me financially, so I can continue to do the work that God has given me to privilege to do. For some reason, as I looked back over the past 6 months I thought about our class and your teaching and realized how instrumental it is to me fervor in apologetics. I thought it would be an honor to humbly ask if you would partner with me in this call to reach college students with the gospel. I want to be on campus more than I am now and know that there is so much work to be done. Would you consider praying about helping me get one step closer to seeing that happen?

I know this is a long e-mail but thank you for reading it. I guarantee you it could have been longer. I hope you have been doing well and like I told you before in a previous e-mail, if you are teaching another class with IV in the future, please let me know because I would love to take it. Hope to talk to you soon. Take care and God bless.

I answered my student tonight and hope we can become even better partners for the gospel on his campus. He is a first-rate Christian man and doing a solid job in reaching out to non-Christians with integrity and care. I am the one who is honored to have taught such a good student. I hope his comments thrill you. I also hope you will pray for him as I do and then realize how very hard it is to reach people who are not yet Christians in the modern college campus setting. The world has truly changed and the Church has to change its approach without changing its message. This calls for a new apologetic that is not filled with the old certitudes of the past but the Christ-centered hope of the future which resides in the living Christ, not our systems. My student got that and you can see what a difference it made.

If you would like to read one truly useful book that gets this right then secure Lesslie Newbigin's classic little book, Proper Confidence. It was the kind of thought found there that impacted this student so deeply. You will not be sorry you read the book I promise you. It is my favorite book for exposing people to the right way to have confidence in the gospel in the age in which we now find ourselves seeking to live faithfully as Christians. It will both inform you and move you

The Jesus Story: Myth or History?

Ever since the first century non-Christians have insisted that the Jesus story was myth. The fact that they have a huge platform upon which to say the same thing in our day is the only real difference, at least from where I sit. And since I teach apologetics I think a great deal about this subject.

Authors Greg Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy wrote an impressive and large book several years ago titled: The Jesus Legend. They laid out the case for the historical reliability of the New Testament and subjected it to what they believe are the "industry standards" criteria for serious historians. They concluded that the Jesus Story is not legend. They have now released a condensed, or popularized, version of the same book: Lord or Legend? (Baker, 169 pages, $14.99). Boyd and Eddy do a very good job of using recent scholarly studies to show how traditions and stories are transmitted in oral cultures and then show why this is a good reason the New Testament can be trusted. I agree with their conclusions completely.

The question for me, as always, is rather simple: "How much does this kind of argument help us in presenting the gospel?" The standard argument says that these arguments do not convert but they prepare the minds of unbelievers to "hear" the good news. (A kind of pre-evangelism approach.)I do not doubt that this does happen in some instances. I know people who credibly claim this point about their own conversion accounts;  e.g., the famous apologist and Lutheran theologian John Warwick Montgomery who read a defense of the resurrection and then came to faith while a student at Harvard.

My question is not so much "Does this argumentation do any good?" I think that it does at times. My question is the emphasis we are now placing on this approach since we believe the modern world  demands that we do this before we can preach the gospel. I am not a full-blown fideist (someone who rejects the idea that reason contributes to faith in any meaningful way) but I do think very few people actually come close to the kingdom through this method.  There is a sense in which this approach, which attacks bad rational  arguments with better rational arguments, is like a bombing assault from the air. I rather think we also need to use approaches that act like submarines, coming from underneath bad arguments showing how the foundations of unbelievers are built on faith, and in this case on a faith that will not sustain a consistent and proper way of living in a meaningful universe.

One of the problems with the Boyd and Eddy approach is that they do not acknowledge all the literary and historical problems that do arise from a serious study of the New Testament. One does not have to agree with the silly critics, like Bart Ehrman for example (who is the child of a fundamentalist/evangelical education if there ever was one), to admit that there are some problems in the New Testament text. I just do not think this admission destroys the credibility or storyline of the gospel in any sense at all. We can admit problems without buying into naturalism, atheism or skepticism. What we need to give to this generation is an apologetic of community, love and truly living faith which I think is much more than an apologetic of rational argumentation. At the end of the day it is still true that "faith seeks understanding."

I think Boy and Eddy may help young Christians more than they actually help bring non-Christians into "the faith once for all delivered to the saints." That's my own approach but I am still thinking about this each day. I am open to more information and argumentation. A good argument should never be rejected because I already have embraced a weaker one that I like much better. One thing I know about apologetics: Fierce debates among Christians about apologetical systems are not useful to actually reaching non-believers.