With Ravi Zacharias in the news, at least in the Christian world, I thought sharing some of my thoughts on apologetics culture and apologetics in general might be apropos. This post will not be about Ravi, per se, but instead I will use his vocation as an ‘apologist’ as a springboard into a discussion about Christian apologetics, and how I think they are typically theologically damaging.

Zacharias was a sinner, like all of us. Not all sins are equal, per se. They are before God in the sense that he has dealt with them eternally through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; but sins, in their existential acts clearly have range. Zacharias’s sexual immorality was of a sort that was not only immoral before God and humanity, but was also criminal. He now stands before God for these many episodes of egregious sinful acts; but God is ultimately gracious. Be all of this as it may, Zacharias was known as a cultural commentator, and Christian apologist. As a Christian apologist one of his mainstays was to argue for the existence of God; this is the mainstay of all Christian apologists. They all attempt to counter their atheistic and agnostic counterparts by demonstrating through a cadre of veritable ‘proofs’ that God exists. I have a problem with this though; particularly as a Christian. I will admit that the argument from contingence, with reference to God’s existence, is hyper-compelling, in regard to, at the very minimum, demonstrating that the cosmos, the universe as a whole, requires a Creator-God. This particular argument, in my view, though, is a very Christian Dogmatic and theological argument; in other words, it flows quite organically from the Patristic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. In this sense, I find this ‘proof’ to be compelling insofar that it finds its ground in an antecedent and revelational source; namely in and from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Some might argue that this is how Thomas Aquinas’s ‘5 Proofs for the existence of God,’ in his Prima Pars, functions; viz. as an ultimately theological offering that is grounded in revelation, and not speculation. I beg to differ on that, but that will have to be considered at a later time.

I have a concern with the notion of God that Christian apologists ‘prove,’ precisely because, in my view, he becomes contingent not on the finitude of the cosmos, per se, but instead on the wit and capaciousness of said apologist. In other words, the god that can be proven by anyone of us is No-God at all; this-God is only really a projection from our collective wits and speculations about the type of being required in order to construct the universe as we personally experience it, both individually and collectively. The Christian, by definition, does not start where so-called Christian apologists start in their quest to prove God; the Christian notion of God starts and is only grounded in their Lord’s reality as revealed to them in Jesus Christ. The Christian does not reason to God anterior to their relationship with Him as their Lord and Savior; indeed, the Christian way is just the inverse. The Christian, again, only knows God as God of God in and through the God revealed in the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. We know God as Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit insofar that the Son came for the sins of the world. Insofar that the Son came for the sins of the world, indeed, to elevate humanity and creation itself to the altitudes the triune God had always already envisioned; it is in this in-so-far that the Christian comes to have capacity to know that God “exists.” They come to know God exists as they come into union with Christ, and as a result participate in Christ and thus the triune Life. It is in His Self-revelation that the Christian gains the capacity to epistemically know God; it is as the ontology of God accommodates Godself with the ontology of humanity, in the intersection of the hypostatic union, that a theological epistemology is formed in such a way that the Christian now has capacity to think God from a center in Himself, in Christ. As Thomas Torrance might say at this juncture, the Christian now has the epistemic capacity to participate in the ‘depth dimension’ of the living God who is necessarily and scandalously triune.

The God of contemporary apologists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries does not come with this depth. When we can discursively reason our way to God in a way that is abstract from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ, what kind of god have we connived? And yet this sort of speculative modality dominates evangelical apologetics culture. The god proven in this sphere is really nothing more than a philosophical monad. This god has no Lordly purchase in the lives of those who submit to Him. The only purchase arrived at by submitting to this god must be self-generated through a hyper-piety that must rise to some sort of rarified occasion of worshipping some-god it feels obliged to venerate; but only after this god has been first self-generated by the intellection of a “properly” motivated human cadre of thinkers and desirers. It is ironic to me, because what I am referring to, in general, is the god of so-called “classical-theism” (which itself is a contemporary designation in an attempt to classify how the orthodox of yesteryear, and presently, have thought God). The god of classical theism, in the main, the god proven by apologetical efforts, in interesting ways, is rather modern; insofar that modernity is entailed by a ‘turn-to-the-subject.’ It isn’t hard to imagine how Friedrich Schleiermacher et al. came to a place, a very pietistic place, wherein he attempted to think God from the subject; wherein he attempted to think his way to an antecedent object known as God. Yet, even for Schleiermacher God is only an object of veneration wherein the human knower might know God by an antecedent human activity of ‘feeling’ a ‘sense of dependence’ on this God. My point is not to get too reductionistic, it is only to highlight the idea that no matter what period we find ourselves in, vis-à-vis theological development, there almost always seems to be this inner-drivenness to concoct a conception of God from a turn-to-the-self rather than a turn-to-God’s Self-revelation as the principled basis for thinking God through and through.

I am against apologetic’s culture. It has destroyed more “Christian” lives than it has saved, in my view.