Philosophy (part 4)

Philosophy (Part 4)

Kevin Harris: If you’ve been listening to this program you know that apologetics is that branch of theology that defends the Christian faith; it gives reasons for why we believe what we believe. Dr. Craig, there has just been an explosion of Christian apologetics.

Dr. Craig: Oh, in recent decades it has been a transformation that has been going on. It is so exciting. The renaissance in Christian philosophy that is going on at the university is being paralleled by a renaissance of Christian apologetics at the same time on a popular level as well as on a scholarly level.

Kevin Harris: The laypeople are beginning to discover this field and also see that it is very necessary to reach this culture for Christ.

Dr. Craig: I think that is right – laypeople are finding this. When I first began speaking on American university campuses I was something of an anomaly. People didn’t really know what apologetics is. They hadn’t ever heard of defending the faith rationally. But now I find when I travel that everywhere I go there are these little apologetics groups springing up in churches and on campuses where people are reading books together and studying issues together of apologetic importance. There is tremendous grassroots interest in the churches and on the university campuses among Christians in learning how to commend their faith rationally.

Kevin Harris: There is nothing new about this. I mean, the early church fathers had to do this.

Dr. Craig: That is true. The early church fathers – there was a group of them that were known as the Christian Apologists, people like Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, and so forth. Apologetics has characterized the church down through its history. But among evangelicals during the 20th century we reached a very low ebb during the 1920s and 30s and 40s in which there were virtually no Christian apologetics being written. E. J. Carnell’s book in 1948 An Introduction to Christian Apologetics was like a rock far out at sea – the first indication that something new was coming on the horizon. In the years since 1948 we’ve seen a growing tide of interest in philosophy of religion and in Christian apologetics that is now just of enormous proportions.

Kevin Harris: It is such a rich field. It involves philosophy, theology, history, archeology, science, and so many different areas. Literature.

Dr. Craig: That is exactly right. It is tremendously rich. You’ll have, for example, Christian apologists who specialize in the area of philosophy – that’s my area for example. Or a J. P. Moreland or a Doug Geivett, for example. But then you have other Christian apologists who are working in the sciences – people like Hugh Ross or William Dembski or Michael Behe or Steven Meyer. Then others will be working in the area of historical apologetics – people like Gary Habermas or N. T. Wright, Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Craig Blomberg, Ben Witherington, and so forth. So it is a wide ranging field with many areas of specialization.

Kevin Harris: What I’ve noticed is that a lot of people in the church started studying apologetics as a hobby and discovered the importance of the field and how necessary it is and that the Bible actually tells us to engage in apologetics. 1 Peter 3:15.

Dr. Craig: Right. That says that every one of us should be prepared to give a defense to anyone who asks us a reason for the hope that is within us. Christians are beginning to discover the importance of being able to do that. I think that the increasing secularization of our society, and especially of our high schools, has motivated people as never before to begin to study apologetics so that they can give a reason to their non-Christian friends and to be able to stand up in class to their non-Christian professors and not look like an idiot, frankly, for believing in Christianity and in the Bible. So the increasing secularization in American society, I think, helps to evoke this sense of need among Christian parents and among Christian teenagers in getting trained in this discipline. [1]

Kevin Harris: Bill, we were just not taught to do this growing up in the church so often. In the 70s when I was growing up, and I attended all the large youth movement gatherings and everything, we just weren’t taught this area. Not until Josh McDowell came along with his book Evidence that Demands a Verdict; and for so many of us a light went off in our heads.

Dr. Craig: Yes, Josh had a real influence on my life, too. I went to four years at Wheaton College and although I studied Old and New Testament and systematic theology, I was never trained in being able to commend the historicity of the New Testament text. I was surprised that I was never taught this by my professors. It wasn’t until I read Josh McDowell that I realized that one could give historically credible reasons for thinking that the New Testament is reliable and an authentic record of the deeds and words of Jesus of Nazareth including his radical claims, his miracles, and his resurrection. So I think Josh had a tremendous influence in evoking the interest in the historicity of the New Testament text among many of us.

Other important early figures would have been C. S. Lewis, for example. Though not a philosopher himself, C. S. Lewis help to spark interest in Christian philosophy among many people. Francis Schaeffer, as well, was a man who had a deep influence on me and on many others. I think that, although people like Lewis and Schaeffer were not themselves great philosophers, they helped to evoke a generation of philosophers who would stand on their shoulders and do even better work, the work that they themselves could not do and thereby helped to spark this renaissance of interest in Christian philosophy and in Christian apologetics.

Kevin Harris: In the 1980s it seems that people began to discover Norman Geisler’s popular work.

Dr. Craig: Geisler also had a tremendous influence. He has been around for a long time. I recently spoke with him at the meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and he told me that when he first began to do apologetics he said there was virtually nothing written in the field of apologetics. If you wanted to read a book on apologetics, you had to get something by Gordon Clark or maybe a book by Cornelius van Til. But he said that was all there was. There was nothing else to read. Now, of course, we are just suffused with books on Christian apologetics. They are everywhere. The difference between the 1940s and where we are today in the 21st century is just like night and day. Norm deserves a good bit of the credit for having trained a good number of us – I was his pupil. And having inspired many others who did not study under him but who read his work and as a result have gone on in the field themselves. In fact, if I may say, just this past year Frank Beckwith, J. P. Moreland, and I edited a collection in honor of Norman Geisler called To Everyone An Answer, which is published by InterVarsity Press. It was a Festschrift – a celebratory volume – in honor of the life and work of Norman Geisler. It is a collection of essays on apologetics by many of us who appreciate the example that he set.

Kevin Harris: For so long, apologetics was characterized as going to the cults, going to non-Christian religions, addressing the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons from an orthodox historic position. That was what apologetics were. Dr. Walter Martin was the only one doing it.

Dr. Craig: I remember that. Back in the 60s Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults was the book that you would read to deal with people in other cults. And many people thought that that is what apologetics is – arguing with cults. Well, in fact, there is a far, far graver menace to Christianity than the cults and that is secularism. Just the increasing dominating secularism that has dominated Europe for centuries that has increasingly taken over Canada during the 20th century and that is encroaching upon American public life as well. This is the primary enemy that we as Christians need to be addressing; not simply Christian cults.

Kevin Harris: That enemy seemed to have snuck up on us in a sense because there was a time when we would only deal with the cults in our apologetics and our thinking and so forth and all the seminars dealt with that and we just blew off the atheists. We just wrote them off. Oh you’re an atheist? You are beyond hope. And didn’t deal with that segment.

Dr. Craig: I think that is right, Kevin. For some reason that was part of this intellectual retreat into these closets of fundamentalism that I have referred to on other occasions where Christians separated themselves from the academy and the university and from the public square and went into their own little Bible colleges and Bible societies, and their Christian publishers didn’t publish with non-Christians presses but only wrote books for Christians with Christian presses. As a result, we are not engaging the increasingly secular society in which we live.

Kevin Harris: Bill, would you agree with me that doing apologetics and the work of apologetics is a very loving thing to do. It is not about beating people up with your arguments.

Dr. Craig: Not at all, Kevin. It is respecting the unbeliever when the unbeliever has questions or objections. It is saying, “You deserve to be taken seriously and because I take you seriously I am going to do my best to answer your questions and your objections and to commend my Christian faith to you as the most rational thing that you can do.” [2]