The Danger of Apologetics Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: We've encountered a YouTuber who has a beef with Christian apologetics. Chris Cornthwaite has his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto, Master of Arts from the University of Western Ontario, Master of Divinity with distinction from the University of Western Ontario, and a lot more credentials. He was once in ministry, and was once a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. He's no longer in ministry nor in academia. He has rejected the small-town fundamentalism of his youth including Young Earth Creationism and things like that. Yet he says he still identifies as a Christian, in his words. We could get into identity politics, but we'll save a lot of that for another time. It's a really big deal these days – what you identify, how you identify. I’m curious how this might relate to your work on saving faith in your Systematic Philosophical Theology. Is it enough to merely identify as a Christian?

DR. CRAIG: I think there are two components of saving faith: what I call propositional faith and personal faith. Propositional faith involves belief in certain truth claims. For example, Paul in Romans 10 says "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved." So there are certain propositional facts that should be believed as part of being a Christian. But then, in addition to that, it's not just a matter of believing certain truths. James says, "Do you believe that God is one? Well and good. The demons also believe, and shudder!” So what the demons lack is not propositional faith; what they lack is that personal trust in God, personal trust in Christ. So it's important to have both of these – both the personal commitment of love and trust to Christ, but then also certain propositional beliefs.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, obviously it really jumped out at me when I ran across his video^[1] – the danger of apologetics. So let's look at what he thinks here. Here's the introductory clip. Let's go to clip number one:

CHRIS: I should say my name is Chris. I have a Master of divinity, a Master of arts and theology, a PhD in Christian origin. I was a youth pastor for 10 years, and I left Christianity for a long time because of Christian apologetics. So in this video I want to talk about why I think Christian apologetics is actually really dangerous to Christianity. I want to talk about how I think it's destroying a lot of people's faith and ultimately driving a lot of intelligent young people out of the faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: Wow. Well, that's quite an indictment. I've had conversations with people who think being an apologist means one who strives to make people who disagree with you look bad, and obnoxious polemics, and such. It might be the case that Chris has this narrow view of what it's all about.

DR. CRAIG: That could be part of it, but having watched some of the other clips I think he's also concerned that the typical apologetic arguments are really weak so that people who believe on the basis of these arguments are like sitting ducks when they go off to the university and sit under an intelligent professor who blows away those apologetic arguments. But I did notice in that clip that he said he left Christianity for a long time but apparently now I think he's back with a more intellectually informed faith, a deeper, more open-minded faith, which I think is just great. I don't sense in him any different beliefs than those that I have since I'm also not a Young Earth Creationist or a King James Version-only person. So I think what he's plumping for in this video is really what you and I already accept, namely an intelligent, intellectually engaged Christianity. What he's inveighing against is a very narrow popularistic form of Christianity.

KEVIN HARRIS:  Yeah, and Chris says that his first encounter with apologetics was Young Earth organizations when he was in high school then philosophical apologetics when he was in college. In this next clip he talks about his third encounter with apologetics. Clip number two.

CHRIS: The third exposure came while I started seminary, and this was ultimately what would be my downfall, and it wasn't philosophical apologetics. It wasn't really about Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. It was just about the Bible. It was that I got into reading the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, and I started to study the Bible. I had always been raised to believe that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired Word of God. You might use a word like univocality – it all holds together. You can understand – if you can understand it – you can understand everything. We have this really annoying word that people use when they talk about what is biblical or we're going to understand what things are biblically right for us to do. And I was pretty convinced that was a reasonable way to see the world. But when I went to study the Bible, and I started coming across contradictions, errors. I started to see the historical hands. I started to realize that the Gospels had different portrayals of Jesus. I started to realize that the Bible had been copied and recopied for thousands of years. I remember at this point reading a book called The Case for Christ and it was actually biblical scholars and Lee Strobel interviewing some biblical scholars and making a case for why the Bible was safe. I think that gave me like a really, really brief moment of peace, but the irony is that all of . . . reading people like Josh McDowell on biblical studies or Lee Strobel, like it was just so clearly obvious that these people were defending something that was ultimately indefensible – that the Bible was inerrant. Of course it's not. It was really an indefensible proposition. Once I came to realize that that proposition was actually a very modern proposition and that it wouldn't have made sense to anybody in the early Christian movement like manuscripts being copied and things being changed – slight changes, sure, you know this is what the text critics will argue. They're very small changes. They don't affect the meaning. Yet they are still changes, and if this is the inspired word of God and we don't even know what the originals said, this is a problem. So all of these sort of biblical criticism type things – I think that was where the dominoes started to fall.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, it sounds like perhaps an all-or-nothing approach to inerrancy. We hear that a lot. People have a certain view. It gets challenged when they go to college, and it can be very disturbing and sometimes rather devastating.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I was struck by this clip, but the problem that he's identifying here is not at all with apologetics. It's biblical studies that bothered him. They came to expose to him errors in the Bible. But here's a copy of Lee Strobel's book, The Case for Christ, and you look at it and the people that are in it – people like Craig Blomberg, Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Ben Witherington – these are respectable scholars. And the title of this book is not “The Case for Biblical Inerrancy.” It’s The Case for Christ. And you can have good reasons to believe in Jesus Christ without believing in biblical inerrancy. So I think that was just a fundamentally wrong assumption that he had at that time. What is really striking to me is that his assumption was even more fragile than biblical inerrancy. Even textual criticism was a problem for him. Now, for those who don't know, textual criticism is the work of scholars to reconstruct the original wording of the text. They cull through the thousands and thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and seek to establish and verify the original wording of that text. And the original wording of the text of the New Testament has been established to well over 98% accuracy. The number of words in the New Testament that are still uncertain are only about 1,400 words out of 38,000, and none of those words is of any doctrinal significance whatsoever. They're like the difference between saying “We write this that your joy may be full” or “We write this that our joy may be full.” It’s just a trivial matter of one letter. So he had indeed an extremely brittle, fragile faith that was easily destroyed even by the work of textual critics to establish the accuracy of the original text of the New Testament.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's an example. This is a quick clip. Listen to this next clip.

CHRIS: From there it went to the Ken Ham Answers in Genesis nonsense because I could read Genesis in Hebrew and realize there are really obviously two different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.

KEVIN HARRIS: So studying the Bible knocked out his Young Earth views. But if you would comment on the two accounts of creation in Genesis. That really upset his apple cart.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Be careful when people try to do this one upmanship on you by saying "Oh, I read it in the Hebrew in the Old Testament. I read it in the Greek." This is evident in your English language Bible. In fact, there are not two different creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2. This has been well explained by the commentator Claus Westermann in his magisterial commentary on Genesis 1 to 11. What Westermann explains is that Genesis chapter 1 is the story of the creation of the world – the heavens and the Earth and everything in it. Genesis 2 is the story of the origin of humanity on Earth. This is clearly not a different creation account because it includes nothing about the creation of the Earth or the sun and the moon and the stars. When you compare these stories to Ancient Near Eastern myths, what you will find is that there are various myths in the Ancient Near East that try to explain the origin of humanity – where did mankind come from? So, for example, in ancient Mesopotamian myths of human origins humanity was created by the gods basically to serve as slave labor for the gods – doing the work of digging the irrigation canals. Genesis 2 is offering a very different account of the origin of humanity where God creates Adam and Eve and cares for them, loves them, and wants to have a relationship with them. So it's just incorrect to contrast these as being two different versions of the account of creation. One is a creation account of the universe; the other is about the origin of humanity.

KEVIN HARRIS: He lists five ways that apologetics can be harmful. Let's look through these. Let's go to the first one. Here's clip number four.

CHRIS: So let's talk about this. How could Christian apologetics hurt Christians? I want to start with the one, I think, most obvious thing, and this is where Christian apologetics can actually create anger and violence among Christians. This is where Christian apologetics can get biblical scholars who are on YouTube death threats. Yes, it does happen. Christians are sending biblical scholars death threats. Figure that one out. Here's why I think this is happening. I think Christian apologists, and let's talk about specifically in the biblical studies realm of things because that's kind of my world. I think Christian apologists are convincing people that the evidence for the Bible – the evidence for the modern fundamentalist way of seeing an inerrant Bible – is so overwhelmingly obvious. You'll hear things like I was watching this Wes Huff/Joe Rogan thing and Wes just has this thing about “Oh, we just knew which books. Everybody agreed that these were the right books that we should have.” Nobody thought that. That's ridiculous. Like, sure there were some of the main like . . . we see a gradual movement towards the main books that should be in the New Testament, but there were other books, too, that people were reading as Scriptures.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, I've seen people get mad on social media if they disagree, but most of what I see is good-natured. I mean, people on the main theology and apologetics platforms, they're friends and they rib each other over their various views – the Calvinists, the Arminians. You know, good-natured ribbing. Chris has apparently encountered some really negative interactions, death threats.

DR. CRAIG: Honestly, I can't imagine what he's talking about. The people in Lee Strobel's book The Case for Christ that I listed a moment ago aren't like that. They're not angry people lashing out at others. So I need some specific examples here from Chris. This is not the world I live in. Who's he talking about? He can't be talking about people like Lee Strobel or Greg Koukl or Frank Turek or others in apologetics. Who's he talking about here? I don't know. This is not my lived world. But, in any case, this idea of anger and death threats and things like this – that's not unique to apologetics. That is not something that characterizes Christian apologetics uniquely. You might as well say that politics is bad or that sports are bad because people get riled up and angry and make death threats in those areas as well. So I think he's trying to label apologetics in a way that is unfair since the problem of anger and irascibility is much broader than that. Moreover, did you notice what his problem in this clip was? This really shocked me. It was canonicity! It was determining which books belong in the canon. Well, now, I don't know how that is a major problem. Before the end of the first century, all of the Gospels and Acts and all the letters of Paul were accepted as inspired Scripture and therefore as authoritative. And although there were some doubts expressed by some church fathers over, say, 2 Peter or the book of Revelation, these were not widespread. And there was never any question about including extra-canonical books like the gnostic gospels into the canon of the New Testament. The only question was: Were there books in the canon that ought to be excluded? But there was never a question that maybe we've left something out – that there's some extra-canonical book that ought to be in it. The reason this doesn't pose a major problem is that there is no Christian doctrine that is based on those disputed books. From the Gospels and Acts and the letters of Paul alone, you can establish all of the major doctrines of the Christian faith, and there is nothing that hangs decisively on these disputed books. So even though canonicity is interesting, and I do address it in Volume 1 of my Systematic Philosophical Theology, this should no more be a big problem for Chris than textual criticism is.

KEVIN HARRIS: He elaborates the point just a little bit. I want to go to this clip. Listen to this clip number five.

CHRIS: A lot of Christians come to the belief that there is an overwhelming support for the way that they as a modern evangelical fundamentalist there's overwhelming historical evidence for the way that you view the Bible. Therefore, what happens when you have biblical scholars who question that? The apologist has assured you that the way you believe is safe, so when biblical scholars question that, they must be doing that because they are vindictive. They must have a vendetta against Christianity. Maybe Satan's using them. Satan's using biblical scholars to try to trick Christians, to try to make them question that the Bible is inerrant. And their response predictably is anger and hatred towards biblical scholars. And if you as an apologist are doing work to convince people in the pews that they don't even have to listen to your own people who are going and being trained to study the Bible, that their beliefs are “safe” from academics, “safe” from biblical scholars, what the heck are you doing? You're doing something really, really awful. If anything, people should be encouraged to come and to see the complexity in the Bible, to see the questions and to see these legitimate questions. If the work that you are doing makes Christians so angry that they are sending death threats to biblical scholars, at some point you should really look in the mirror and wonder if you're doing good work.

KEVIN HARRIS: I can't help but think he's feeling the current political mood. Conservative leaders are accused in particular of fanning the flames of violence by polarizing the populace. But like you said earlier, is this a fair admonishment for those in evangelism and apologetics?

DR. CRAIG: I think it's just crazy to try to lay this blame on Christian apologists. The biblical scholars that he mentioned are among the ranks of Christian apologists, along with Christian philosophers and Christian scientists and historians. So, again, I have to ask: Who is he talking about who are getting lay people all worked up and angry about this. Without giving specific examples, these charges I just don't think stick.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let's stop right there. We're going to continue Chris's warnings and objections against Christian apologetics in part two on our next podcast. That's on the way. Before we go, check out this offer from Dr. Craig.

DR. CRAIG: Hello! This is William Lane Craig. Every spring at Reasonable Faith we have a spring campaign to raise funds for the ministry. Your giving to Reasonable Faith helps to support, for example, our Equip project which has just released a new course on doctrine of Scripture. We've also released a new video in our animation series on the attributes of God called “The Eternity of God.” This year I'm especially excited about our spring campaign because we have an extraordinary premium to offer those of you who become strategic donors at the highest level. We have three stages, or levels, of donors: $30 per month, $50 per month, and $100 per month. For those of you who are in the top tier, you will receive – free – a copy of Volume 1 of my newly released Systematic Philosophical Theology. This is a $65 value, and it will be yours free of charge for your sustaining donor membership in Reasonable Faith. If you've already got a copy of Volume 1, as many do, we also will be making available Volume 2A for a premium so that you can choose between Volume 1 or Volume 2, which I don't even have a copy of yet to show to you but will be released. We thank you for your interest and your support of Reasonable Faith, and I hope that you'll take advantage of this really wonderful offer this year to become a sustaining strategic donor and to join us in reading the Systematic Philosophical Theology.^[2]