The Beauty of the Faith: Using Aesthetics for Christian Apologetics

By Joseph D. Wooddell

Nearly everyone finds beauty compelling, so Christian apologists should devise ways to present an "aesthetic Christian apologetic." Nearly all apologists admit that the beauty of a life well lived and the beauty of the Christian community (along with the use of media and the arts) are not only helpful for apologetics but essential in a postmodern culture. In fact, it is frustrating to see how many apologists mention the need for such an approach but go on devoting most of their energies to traditional approaches. This book is different. It clearly shows the pros and cons of traditional approaches and offers a fresh perspective as well, arguing that beauty is the most compelling apologetic, and suggesting ways to implement such an approach. It demonstrates how Western culture arrived in its current unfortunate situation and uses both Scripture and figures like Athenagoras and Jonathan Edwards to challenge current views on apologetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781498271486

Book preview

The Beauty of the Faith

Using Aesthetics for Christian Apologetics

Joseph D. Wooddell

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The Beauty of the Faith

Using Aesthetics for Christian Apologetics

Copyright © 2011 Joseph D. Wooddell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Foreword

What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reason.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

With the rise of postmodernism, those tasked with defending that faith once for all delivered over to the saints face a new and daunting challenge. For whatever separates various postmodern perspectives from one another, they speak with one voice concerning Enlightenment accounts of rationality. In so doing, they eschew such accounts, seeing them as naively optimistic about our ability to arrive at truth. As is well known, postmodernism takes a skeptical view of knowledge and sees truth in any objective sense as unattainable. Knowledge being beyond our kin, the best one can do is construct an account of the world which serves one’s own purposes.

In the Enlightenment’s wake, Christian apologists formulated their appeals in keeping with the spirit of their age. And, of course, that meant defending the faith with arguments which have purchase for those who embrace modernity. In short, such apologists trimmed their sails to the intellectual winds of the day, seeking to attract unbelievers with reasons which they would find attractive. As modernity wanes, however, the arguments and reasons useful for wooing a modern audience have become passé at best, counter-productive at worst.

Since postmodernists have weighed modern accounts of rationality and found them wanting, apologetic strategies devised for earlier generations fail to impress them. For such sophisticates, Christianity appears unattractive. It fails, as Nietzsche indicates, to satisfy their taste; and postmodernists need no further reason to reject it. So reject it they do.

Those intending to present the gospel as good news for postmodern man must therefore find ways of attracting him which do not presuppose an epistemology which he rejects. In short, they must find ways of helping postmodernists see the beauty of the faith. The book you now hold in your hands seeks to do just that. It seeks to chart a course for the apologist who wants to negotiate the brave, new waters of postmodernity, to speak to postmodern audiences on their own terms without also abandoning the absolute, exclusive truth of the Christian account of things. No doubt such an enterprise is ambitious; even more certainly, it is needed.

Plato long ago suggested that beauty, goodness and truth are not only inextricably linked but in fact identical with one another. If this suggestion has merit—and I believe it does—then helping others see the beauty of the faith turns out to be another way of helping them see its truth. In what follows, the author casts a vision for apologetics which exploits this connection between beauty and truth, a vision perfectly suited to the apologetic challenges of the day.

Douglas K. Blount

August, 2010

Crowley, Texas

Introduction

This book is an attempt to help solve a particular problem. The problem is that people are lost. The solution is that they need to be found. Given the terms just mentioned (lost and found), it should be no surprise that this book is written for Christians, for the Church. It is not intended to convert unbelievers. Unbelievers certainly are welcome to read and interact with it, but for those seeking an answer as to why they should embrace the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3 ), C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Miracles would be a better read. Actually, they should probably just start by reading the Bible, visiting a Bible-believing church, and talking with a trusted friend who is a believer. But I digress. This book is for believers, and it is intended as part of the solution for the problem of lost humanity, bringing them into the faith, or helping them to see the need for submitting their lives to King Jesus. It will prove instructive, however, first to see how humanity fell into the situation in which it currently finds itself. For it is often the case that solving a problem (or preventing similar problems in the future) includes understanding how the problem arose. In the following paragraphs I attempt a short summary of biblical and Western history. Historians will say there are gaps, errors, generalizations, and the like, but such is inevitable with broad summaries.

God created the world perfect, and we (all of us humans, as we were in Adam) ruined it back in the garden. Satan tempted us, of course, but we are still blameworthy. Since then God has been working toward restoring humanity to a right relationship with himself. Unfortunately, many have been fighting against God along the way. Those who died in the flood had become wicked and corrupt. Those scattered at Babel had become prideful, disobeying his command to proliferate. God established and preserved a people (called Hebrews, Jews, or Israel) through Abraham, from which a redeemer would come. Israel’s patriarchs committed various sins, as did Moses and several of the judges, not to mention the other nations and their evil hearts and behavior. After the kingdom split, Israel and Judah’s kings were rarely devoted to God, and God delivered them over to their enemies. All this time God had been speaking to them, calling them to repentance, through the Law and the prophets. Into this context (specifically that of the Roman Empire) came Jesus the Messiah, who was both the Son of God and God the Son (for God exists eternally as Trinity: three persons, one nature). The second person of the Trinity took on human nature, was born of a virgin (who herself was descended from King David, as was her husband), lived a perfect life, established a following, preached repentance and the kingdom of God, died for humanity’s sin, actually rose from the dead, ascended back to the Father, and established the Church, sending the Holy Spirit to dwell in believers. From its inception the Church (and individual churches) had problems from within and without. However, either through persecution and scattering or as a consequence of gaining the political upper hand, Christians attempted to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. Missionaries have continued the task to this day. In the fourth century AD, Constantine legalized the faith, and for over a thousand years the Church experienced both great prosperity and sinful tendencies. Then in relatively short order (a couple hundred years), beginning around the fourteenth century the West experienced the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the resultant birth of modernity.

Renaissance literally means rebirth. There was a rediscovery and rebirth of literature, art, architecture, and the like. More and more people were becoming literate, and with the introduction of the printing press came the opportunity to read and learn for oneself, including reading and learning about the Christian faith. The great reformers (Martin Luther and others) read the Greek New Testament and began challenging the Catholic view of justification (what it means to be, and how we become, right with God) and indulgences (purchasing forgiveness and/or time out of purgatory for oneself or one’s loved ones), to name just two issues. Non-Catholic denominations were born. Through the invention and use of the telescope and advances in other areas of cosmology, people such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo showed that the earth was not the center of the solar system. As a result of these religious and scientific developments two major assumptions (the authority of the Church and the centrality of the earth, and thus of humanity) were summarily rebutted. In relatively short order, from the premodern to modern eras, man went from a philosophical and theological method of faith and trust to one of doubt and skepticism. This doubt and skepticism, and the desire for certainty—so as not to be duped again either by religion or science—became the order of the day, especially in religion and philosophy. Human reason and/or science (depending on one’s epistemology or theory of knowledge), as opposed to faith or religious authority, became the supposed means to certainty. Regarding the aforementioned doubt and skepticism, Descartes (seventeenth century) established a philosophical method which has been dubbed nothing less than a method of doubt, whereas Augustine and Anselm’s method (fifth and eleventh centuries, respectively) had been a method of faith—in fact, faith seeking understanding.

Empiricists (those who believe knowledge begins with sense experience, and that the mind begins as a blank tablet) and rationalists (those who believe in at least some built-in or a priori knowledge) each had both Christian and non-Christian adherents, but even the Christians (Descartes and Locke, for example) were thoroughly modern. That is, discovering how we know anything at all (epistemology) took precedence over what we obviously know about the nature of reality (metaphysics). Rather than claiming, for example, to know that one sees a tree outside, the modernist softens the claim to seeming to see a tree. He is fearful of making his truth claims too dogmatic, for he might be dreaming or deceived in some way. The modern quest for a certainty based on reason and/or evidence has rightly been dubbed a failure. Premodernists would have asked, Why all the fuss? That is, they would claim to know things without necessarily knowing how they know them. The modernist disagrees. He claims one can’t be said to know anything for certain without knowing how one knows it; it must be provable.

Actually, I would argue that this isn’t always possible. For in fact, some items of knowledge are foundational (for the modernist and for everyone else), and thus need no proof. Foundational beliefs, for example, can be self-evident (i.e., true or false by definition, as with logic, math, and geometry), incorrigible (i.e., cannot be doubted, for they are about one’s own mental states), or evident to the senses. One major problem with the modernist account of what can and cannot be known is that things such as memory beliefs, beliefs based on testimony, and belief in other minds, not to mention belief in God, would not necessarily count as knowledge. Another problem with the modernist account or method of attaining knowledge is that it does not measure up to its own criteria. In other words, the three foundational criteria (above) are not themselves self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses, nor are they based on beliefs that are. This sort of criticism of modernism has been well established by Alvin Plantinga in his book Warranted Christian Belief, so I shall not belabor the point here. For our purposes, suffice it to say that modernity has been too strict in what it defines as or requires for knowledge. The logical consequence of such a view is obvious, and it actually happened: many thinkers became skeptical, relativistic, nihilistic (believing that life is meaningless), and/or solipsistic (believing that I, the speaker or thinker, am all that exists, and all else is illusory).

Thus were born existentialism in the nineteenth century and postmodernism in the twentieth. As with modernism, existentialism and postmodernism each have both Christian and non-Christian adherents. Kierkegaard is probably the most famous Christian existentialist (Dostoyevsky is another) and Nietzsche the most famous non-Christian (Sartre is another). Existentialism is all about passion, choice, and freedom, while postmodernism is even more ambitious and ambiguous. Jean-Paul Sartre famously described existentialism as valuing existence over essence. In other words, that I exist (as a passionate, freely choosing subject) is more important by far than what I am, or what God or the universe is. In philosophical terms, existence over essence probably amounts to something like ethics over metaphysics. Of course, for the premodernist, metaphysics (truths about the nature of reality, including God and humanity) rightly grounds everything else. Currently, people like Carl Raschke and the late Stanley Grenz are well-known Christian postmodernists, and the late Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous non-Christian postmodernist. Jean-François Lyotard has given the most popular definition of postmodernism: incredulity toward metanarratives, where a metanarrative is understood as an overarching story that makes sense of everything else in the world. For Christianity, of course, the metanarrative, or story, that makes sense of all else is the gospel or the Scriptures in some sense, the great story from creation to consummation. For the non-Christian postmodernist, there are no authoritative metanarratives, only individual narratives: your story and my story, or the stories of our respective communities.

As one might suspect from the foregoing, existentialists and postmodernists are typically very much at home with all sorts of relativism. They are happy with moral relativism, the idea that there is no objective or absolute right and wrong; right and wrong are based on individual or community choice. They are also happy with epistemological relativism, the idea that knowledge and truth are relative, again, to individuals or communities. Of course, many existentialists and postmodernists would deny the charge of being relativistic. If one were to point out, however, the inconsistency of their denial of such a charge, and at the same time their holding to views which are clearly relativistic, they would normally just shrug their shoulders and reply with something like, Yeah, I guess I’m inconsistent. In fact, I once witnessed just such an exchange between a renowned Christian philosopher/apologist and a well-known Christian postmodernist. During a panel discussion of one of the postmodernist’s essays, the philosopher/apologist accused the postmodernist of being self-contradictory at several points. As an audience member, I asked what the postmodernist thought of the charge, to which he simply replied, Not much. Does such a charge bother you? I asked. Not really, he replied.

This answer of not much to the question of what the postmodernist thinks of his own logical inconsistency betrays the main difference between existentialism and postmodernism on one hand, and premodernism and modernism on the other. The postmodernist has jettisoned logic or at best only