Essays

It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations," opined Descartes, "that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own."1 The same is certainly true of academic disciplines. Fields other than our own may provide considerable illumination to assist in solving difficulties which appear intractable from within the discipline itself.

In the present essay, the contemporary hermeneutic dilemma in jurisprudence will be examined against the background of theological hermeneutics. The close historical relationship between the interpretation of texts in these two realms2 makes such comparison not only interesting but also potentially valuable for arriving at a more satisfactory philosophy for the interpretation of legal materials.

The Legal Landscape

Canons for the proper construction of legal documents were developed early in the history of the law and remain with us to this day. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Law lists the six "principal rules of statutory interpretation" as follows:

(1) An Act must be construed as a whole, so that internal inconsistencies are avoided.
(2) Words that are reasonably capable of only one meaning must be given that meaning whatever the result. This is called the literal rule.
(3) Ordinary words must be given their ordinary meanings and technical words their technical meanings, unless absurdity would result. This is the golden rule.
(4) When an Act aims at curing a defect in the law any ambiguity is to be resolved in such a way as to favour that aim (the mischief rule).
(5) The ejusdem generis rule (of the same kind): when a list of specific items belonging to the same class is followed by general words (as in "cats, dogs, and other animals"), the general words are to be treated as confined to other items of the same class (in this example, to other domestic animals).
(6) The rule expressio unius est exclusio alterius (the inclusion of the one is the exclusion of the other): when a list of specific items is not followed by general words it is to be taken as exhaustive. For example, "weekends and public holidays" excludes ordinary weekdays.3

In the law of contracts, the parol evidence rule sets forth the same hermeneutic philosophy : integrated writings cannot be added to, subtracted from, or varied by the admission of extrinsic evidence of prior or contemporaneous oral or written agreements; extrinsic evidence is admissible to clarify or explain the integrated writing, but never when it would contradict the writing.4 The construction of deeds follows the same approach : the parties "are presumed to have intended to say that which they have in fact said, so their words as they stand must be construed."5 And at the loftiest point of American constitutional interpretation the identical philosophy prevails; thus Chief Justice John Marshall in Gibbons v. Ogden:

As men whose intentions require no concealment, generally employ the words which most directly and aptly express the ideas they intend to convey, the enlightened patriots who framed our Constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said. If, from the imperfection of human language, there should be serious doubts respecting the extent of any given power, it is a well-settled rule that the objects for which it was given, especially when those objects are expressed in the instrument itself, should have great influence in the construction. . . . We know of no rule for construing the extent of such powers, other than is given by the language of the instrument which confers them, taken in connection with the purposes for which they were conferred.6

Concerning the interpretation of legal documents in general, Lord Bacon summed up aphoristically.7

Non est interpretatio, sed divinatio, quae recedit a litera.

Interpretation that departs from the letter of the text is not interpretation but divination.

Cum receditur a litera, judex transit in legislatorem.

When the judge departs from the letter, he turns into a legislator.

Modernly, Sir Roland Burrows drives the same point home with admirable clarity:

The Court has to take care that evidence is not used to complete a document which the party has left incomplete or to contradict what he has said, or to substitute some other wording for that actually used, or to raise doubts, which otherwise would not exist, as to the intention. When evidence is admitted in connection with interpretation, it is always restricted to such as will assist the Court to arrive at the meaning of the words used, and thus to give effect to the intention so expressed.8

Now it is certainly true that among contemporary thinkers in the fields of political theory and jurisprudence (philosophy of law) the classical hermeneutic approach just described has not received uniform approbation. The most radical of today's legal philosophies, the Critical Legal Studies movement, which reached its high water mark in the 1970's in the work of Roberto Unger and Duncan Kennedy, argues in deconstructionist fashion against the face-value of virtually all legal instruments; carrying American Legal Realism's doubts about the objectivity of legal operations virtually to the point of existential solipsism, CLS regards the legal interpreter as all-important, the text as infinitely malleable grist for the mill of political activism.9 But CLS has been decisively shown to be incapable of practical application in the legal field, since its position undercuts the very Rule of Law.10 The impact of CLS on day-to-day judicial activity has been virtually nil.

Professor Ronald Dworkin, H.L.A. Hart's successor in the chair of jurisprudence at Oxford, maintains that interpretation, in law and other fields, is essentially concerned with purpose -- "but the purposes in play are not fundamentally those of some author but of the interpreter. Roughly, constructive interpretation is a matter of imposing purpose on an object or practice."11 On the surface, this suggests that Dworkin is prepared to sacrifice the text to the interpreter, but he insists that "constructive interpretation" does not mean that "an interpreter can make of a practice or work of art anything he would have wanted it to be."12 The text or object of interpretation is a residual given which limits what the interpreter can do to it.

Moreover, Dworkin is so unhappy with American Legal Realism and so horrified by Critical Legal Studies -- and quite rightly, in our view -- that he has set forth his "one right answer" thesis : the view that, in deciding cases, judges can indeed arrive at a single correct answer, based objectively on the existing legal tradition.13 Such a view, inconsistent though it may be with Dworkin's concept of "constructive interpretation," nonetheless shows that he is at heart an objectivist who refuses to sacrifice the integrity of the legal documentary tradition to the subjective whims of the interpreter.

The most powerful contemporary theoreticians of legal hermeneutics are certainly those in the "original intent" camp -- thinkers who argue (as did Chief Justice John Marshall) that texts must be understood in their original sense, not twisted to fit the interpreter's agenda. Robert Bork, for example, admits to the difficulty of psychoanalyzing the Founding Fathers to discover what they really "intended" in framing the American Constitution (the dilemma thrown up by liberal constitutionalists such as Laurence Tribe), and so prefers the expression "original understanding" : "What we're really talking about [is] not what the authors of the Bill of Rights had in the backs of their minds, but what people who voted for this thing understood themselves to be voting for."14

If, however, trying to determine the "original intent" of the author over and above his text poses extreme problems (Sibelius, for example, was hopeless at explaining the true intent and significance of his Finlandia!), the same dilemma attaches to the original audience of the text : they, too, may have misunderstood it -- for any number of personal, societal, or cultural reasons.

Thus the most sophisticated academic analysis of legal interpretation would appear to focus on the Wittgenstein-Popper approach : the analogy of the shoe and the foot (interpretation is like a shoe and the text like the foot : one endeavours to find the interpretation that best fits the text, allowing the text itself to determine this). Here, "intent" or "understanding" is decided by the text itself.15

Such an approach fully supports the principle that the text must be allowed to interpret itself -- in the sense that when different or contradictory interpretations of it are offered, each will be brought to the bar of the text to see which fits best. Interpretations therefore function like scientific theories which are arbitrated by the facts they endeavour to explain : the facts ultimately decide the value of our attempts to understand them.16

In the Wittgenstein-Popper model, the interpreter of course brings his prejudices (aprioris, presuppositions, biases) to the text, but it is the text that judges them also. And the meaning of the text is not to be established by extrinsic considerations, for that would yield an infinite regress. (If the given fact or text has no inherent meaning and one must appeal beyond it for its true signification, then that must also be true of the extrinsic facts to which one appeals. "Bigger bugs have littler bugs upon their backs to bite them/And littler bugs have littler bugs/And so -- ad infinitum.") Of course, extrinsic considerations can be used to clarify ambiguity, but never to contradict the clear meaning of a text.17

Theological Hermeneutics

Paralleling the classic rules for the construction of legal documents is the traditional "historical-grammatical" approach to the interpretation of the Bible. As set forth in such classic treatises as Milton S. Terry's Biblical Hermeneutics, this interpretive philosophy holds that the scriptural text can be objectively known, that it has a clear, perspicuous meaning, and that that meaning can be discovered if the text is allowed to interpret itself, without the adulteration of the interpreter's personal prejudices. Professor Eugene F.A. Klug summarizes this approach, which dominated the field of scriptural interpretation at least from the Reformation18 to the rise of modern biblical criticism, as follows:

It is a fundamental principle to assume that there is one intended, literal, proper sense to any given passage in Scripture ('sensus literalis unus est'); also that the Scripture is its own best interpreter ('Scriptura Scripturam interpretat' or ' Scriptura sui ipsius interpres') . . . . The literal sense thus always stands first and each interpreter must guard against cluttering that which is being communicated with his own ideas, lest the meaning be lost.19

In diametric contrast -- and analogous to the Critical Legal Studies approach in the realm of jurisprudence -- is the so-called "hermeneutical circle" of Rudolf Bultmann and the contemporary followers of formgeschichtliche Methode and related higher-critical philosophies. Here, the text and the interpreter are locked together in such a way that a purely objective, "presuppositionless" understanding of the text is out of the question : the interpreter always brings his own understanding to the text, and interpretation is the product both of the text working on the interpreter and the interpreter working on the text.20 And this will be true not only of the current interpreter vis-à-vis the text but also of the original writer or editor of it : neither the events described in the text nor the resulting description of them can ever represent objective truth in any absolute sense. A text is ultimately inseparable from its Sitz im Leben in the widest sense of that term.

Philosopher Roy J. Howard thus sets forth "three important aspects of contemporary hermeneutics" : (1) "There is no such thing as presuppositionless knowing." (2) "Just as there is no uniform stance from which to begin thinking, so there is no uniform term in which to end it. Hermeneutics is willing to rethink the dialectical logic of Hegel but not to accept his conclusion of an absolute mind." (3) "Hermeneutics' recognition that intentionality is present and operative and effective on both sides . . . and in a dialectical way. This effectiveness might be resident in the social condition of the researcher (cf. Habermas and Winch) or in the very logic of his research activity (cf. Von Wright), or in the choice and manner of the questions he addresses to experience (cf. Gadamer)."21

What have been the consequences in the theological realm of this subjectivistic "hermeneutical circle" approach? In Old Testament studies, attempts to interpret the text by the use of extrinsic Near Eastern literature and so-called "literary forms" resulted in a fragmentation of the biblical books and the claim to multiple authorship and to non-historical editing and redaction. The same approach in Ugaritic and Graeco-Roman studies produced equivalent chaos : my professor of classics at Cornell University in the 1950's observed wryly that after seventy-five years of this sort of thing in Homeric scholarship "we have finally jettisoned that approach and have concluded and that if Homer didn't write the Odyssey, it was written by someone of the same name who lived about the same time." An attempt to produce a "Polycrome Bible" to show the various underlying biblical sources in colours entirely failed : the higher critics themselves could not agree as to where one supposed source left off and another began.

In New Testament scholarship, efforts to attribute the words and deeds of Jesus to diverse "faith communities" of the early church have likewise come to subjective grief. Robert Funk's "Jesus Seminar" in the United States has been reduced to voting with coloured balls on the gradations of genuineness of the sayings of Jesus contained in the Gospels. Ironically, the objective historical value of these materials rests as solid as ever : the problem lies in the hermeneutic applied to them. A.N. Sherwin-White, eminent specialist in Roman law, made the point trenchantly over against the higher critics :

It is astonishing that while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn in the development of form-criticism that the more advanced exponents of it apparently maintain -- so far as an amateur can understand the matter -- that the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written. This seems very curious when one compares the case for the best-known contemporary of Christ, who like Christ is a well-documented figure -- Tiberius Caesar. The story of his reign is known from four sources, the Annals of Tacitus and the biography of Suetonius, written some eighty or ninety years later, the brief contemporary record of Velleius Paterculus, and the third-century history of Cassius Dio. These disagree amongst themselves in the wildest possible fashion, both in major matters of political action or motive and in specific details of minor events. Everyone would admit that Tacitus is the best of all the sources, and yet no serious modern historian would accept at face value the majority of the statements of Tacitus about the motives of Tiberius. But this does not prevent the belief that the material of Tacitus can be used to write a history of Tiberius.22

Hermeneutic Lessons To Be Learned

Theological hermeneutics is today moving back to classical, "historical-grammatical" interpretation, based on the principle that texts must be allowed to interpret themselves.23 Attempts to give the subjective stance of the interpreter a normative role in the hermeneutic task proved catastrophic, for they left the text at the mercy of the interpreter's presuppositions and Sitz im Leben.

What can legal hermeneutics learn from its theological counterpart? Let us briefly suggest several lessons in conclusion.

(1) Even if past ages -- in particular, the rationalistic, enlightened, liberal western mind of the 17th and 18th centuries -- erred on the side of neglecting the subjective dimension, our century (what the Mentor philosophy series calls "the Age of Analysis") has moving to the opposite extreme. The objectivity of the external world and of textual meaning must be recognised. Even the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle would have been undiscoverable without the possibility of an objective investigation of the external world in which that principle is embedded! To confuse the meaning of a text with the subjective stance of its interpreter will assuredly destroy the hermeneutic endeavour. This is the error of comedian Robert Benchley, who spent the laboratory sessions of his biology course drawing the image of his own eyelash as it fell across the microscopic field -- or that of the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli, whose Martian "canals" may perhaps have been the veins of his own eye projected onto his telescope lens.24

(2) In the battle between the American Legal Realists and H.L.A. Hart on the one hand and Ronald Dworkin on the other, the latter is surely correct when he argues for "one right answer" in the interpretation of legal texts and in judicial decision-making. Principle, not policy, is the route to a sound jurisprudence, and the Wittgenstein-Popper test of "fit" means that among diverse and contradictory interpretations or judgments one principled answer will best accord with the text or textual tradition and thus provide the interpretation which in a very real sense may be said to have been created by the text itself.

(3) Subjectivity always remains a descriptive fact in interpretation. But it must never be elevated to normative status. Indeed, it is a mark of maturity that we learn in general to subordinate our subjective likes and dislikes to the nature of the external world as it in fact is. Texts -- in the legal realm and elsewhere -- must be allowed to say what they wish, not be forced to say what we want them to say. As classic biblical interpreter J.A. Bengel aphoristically put it : "Te totum applica ad textum : rem totam applica ad te."25

NOTES

1. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. Etienne Gilson (6th ed.; Paris : Vrin, 1987), p. 6.

2. Cf. the brief discussion of "Theological Interpretation" in Kent Greenawalt's Law and Objectivity (New York and Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 83 - 85; and, in general, Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1983), especially chap. 4 ("Theological Sources of the Western Legal Tradition"), pp. 165 ff. An interesting older reference is Per Olof Ekelöf, "Teleological Construction of Statutes," 2 Scandinavian Studies in Law (1958), 88-89.

3. Elizabeth A. Martin (ed.), A Concise Dictionary of Law (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 189. For a fuller discussion of these canons, see, inter alia : Herbert Broom, Legal Maxims, ed. W. J. Byrne (9th ed.; London : Sweet & Maxwell, 1924), chap. 8 ("The Interpretation of Deeds and Written Instruments"), pp. 342-444; P. B. Maxwell, The Interpretation of Statutes, ed. G. Granville Sharp and Brian Galpin (10th ed.; London : Sweet & Maxwell, 1953); Rupert Cross, Statutory Interpretation, ed. John Bell and George Engle (2d ed.; London : Butterworths, 1987).

4. Cf. Uniform Commercial Code, sec. 2-202.

5. Charles E. Odgers, The Construction of Deeds and Statutes (4th ed.; London : Sweet & Maxwell, 1956), p. 21. The cited statement offers a direct challenge to and refutation of the so-called "intentional fallacy" as commonly practiced in contemporary biblical interpretation; see John Warwick Montgomery (ed.), God's Inerrant Word (Minneapolis : Bethany, 1974), pp. 30-31, 41.

6. Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheaton 187-89 (1824).

7. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, II. 20. viii.

8. Roland Burrows, Interpretation of Documents (2d ed.; London : Butterworth, 1946), p. 13.

9. Roberto Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1986); Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987); Peter Fitzpatrick and Alan Hunt (eds.), Critical Legal Studies (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1987); and cf. Costas Douzinas, Ronnie Warrington, and Shaun McVeigh, Postmodern Jurisprudence (London : Routledge, 1993), especially chap. 3 ("Hermes versus Hercules : Hermeneutics and Aesthetics As Legal Imperialism"), pp. 55 - 73, 274.
10. See especially J. W. Harris, "Legal Doctrine and Interests in Land," in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Third Series, ed. John Eekelaar and John Bell (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 167-97.

11. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 52.

12. Ibid.

13. Ronald Dworkin, in Law, Morality and Society : Essays in Honour of H. L. A. Hart, ed. Hacker and Raz (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 58-83.

14. Robert Bork, interview in "Bork v. Tribe on Natural Law, the Ninth Amendment, the Role of the Court," Life, Fall Special, 1991, pp. 96-99. For his position in detail, see Bork, "Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems," 47/1 Indiana Law Journal (Fall, 1971); Bork, The Tempting of America (New York : The Free Press, 1990); and cf. Ethan Bronner, Battle for Justice : How the Bork Nomination Shook America (New York : W. W. Norton, 1989).

15. For examples of the contribution of Wittgensteinian analysis to legal hermeneutics, though centering more on the Philosophical Investigations than on the Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus, see Jim Evans, Statutory Interpretation : Problems of Communication (corrected ed.; Auckland, New Zealand : Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 16-19, 25-26, 29-30, 188.

16. See John Warwick Montgomery, "The Theologian's Craft," in his The Suicide of Christian Theology (Minneapolis : Bethany, 1970), pp. 267-313.

17. The corresponding principle of classical biblical hermeneutics in that extra-biblical materials may be used ministerially, but never magisterially, in the interpretation of the sacred text. On the English legal scene, the opinion prevails in some quarters that the recent House of Lords decision in Pepper (Inspector of Taxes) v. Hart and Others (Times Law Report, 30 November 1992) erodes the fundamental hermeneutic principle that statutes must interpret themselves, since it allows the record of Parliamentary debate ("Hansard") to assist in interpreting them. However, Pepper emphatically does not displace the classic rule, for the decision expressly makes "a limited modification to the existing rule, subject to strict safeguards." These are : (1) use of Hansard is allowed only "as an aid to construing legislation which [is] ambiguous or obscure or the literal meaning of which led to absurdity" and only "where such material clearly discloses the mischief aimed at" by the legislation; and (2) even in such instances, it is highly unlikely that any use can legitimately be made of a Parliamentary statement "other than that of the minister or other promoter of a Bill." Thus Pepper is little more than a gloss on the golden rule and the mischief rule of the classic canons of legal hermeneutics (see rules 3. and 4. in the list corresponding to note 3, supra).

18. The medieval "fourfold" interpretive scheme built upon a historical-grammatical foundation : the figurative, moral and anagogical levels of exegesis always had their starting-point in the literal meaning of the text. Thus the genuine differences between "Catholic" and "Protestant" hermeneutics must not be allowed to obscure their common foundation.

19. Eugene F. A. Klug, "'Sensus Literalis' -- das Wort in den Wörtern, eine hermeneutische Meditation vom Verstehen der Bibel," 12/5 Evangelium (December, 1985), 165-75.

20. Cf. Bultmann's seminal essay, "Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible?," conveniently available in English translation in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader : Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 241-48.

21. Roy J. Howard, Three Faces of Hermeneutics : An Introduction to Current Theories of Understanding (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1982), pp. 165-66. On the varieties of contemporary higher criticism, see Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes (eds.), To Each Its Own Meaning : An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application (London : Geoffrey Chapman, 1993).

22. A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament ("Sarum Lectures, 1960 - 1961"; Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 187. On the scholarly problems with form - and redaction-criticism, see the references in John Warwick Montgomery, Letter to the Editor, 3/12 Ecclesiastical Law Journal 45-46 (January, 1993); and John Warwick Montgomery, "Why Has God Incarnate Suddenly Become Mythical?," in Perspectives on Evangelical Theology : Papers from the 30th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, ed. K. S. Kantzer and S. N. Gundry (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Baker Book House, 1979), pp. 57-65.

23. See, for example, Gerhard Maier, Biblical Hermeneutics, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Wheaton, Ill. : Crossway Books, 1994), and Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Zondervan, 1992).

24. Cf. Montgomery, Suicide of Christian Theology, loc. cit.

25. J.A. Bengel, Preface to his manual edition of the Greek New Testament (1734). Translation : "Apply thyself entirely to the text : [then] apply the entire subject matter to thyself."

Defending the Hope That Is in Us: Apologetics for the 21st Century*

I. Where We Are & Why This Is Important

Christian believers concerned with defending the Faith once delivered to the saints need to recognise the unique cultural situation in which we find ourselves at the turn of the new millennium. This uniqueness stems from a combination of factors, by no means limited to increased secularism and secular self-satisfaction. The major factors are: (1) An enlargement of what Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan termed "the Global Village": the exponential increase in world communications, resulting in continual, unavoidable contact between believers and unbelievers. (2) Pluralism, to an extent unknown in past ages, even during the Hellenistic period; its consequence being a multiplying of sects, religious and philosophical viewpoints, and the interpenetration of worldviews (e.g., Eastern religions transmogrified into Western "New Age" orientations). (3) Increased sophistication on the part of religionists. Examples, among many, include Scientology's use of legal intimidation to stifle criticism of the movement, paralleling the employment of legal teams by multinational corporations to protect their public image [1]; also, al-Qaeda's use of highly sophisticated computer technology to further their integrist and terrorist agendas [2]. (4) A growing realisation, stemming in large part from the events of 11 September 2001, that all religions are not in fact "saying the same thing"óin spite of what we were told by generations of liberal clergy and comparative religion teachers.

Why are these considerations so important? Recognition of the current situation is vital because only by knowing it, will we direct our Apologetic to the real needs of the unbeliever. The bedrock principle here is:

[1] Apologetics # Dogmatics.

By this we mean that, whereas Dogmatics begins with God's special revelation of himself in Holy Scripture and expounds its content, Apologetics begins where the unbeliever is: "becoming all things to all people, that we might save some"ó"a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greeks" [3]. This does not mean, to be sure, that in Apologetics we alter the eternal message to fit the unbeliever's situation or needs. That message is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. Our methods of communicating the everlasting gospel will be developed, however, according to the personal, social, and cultural contextówhich never remains constant. If this fundamental distinction is not understood, either Dogmatics will be absorbed into Apologetics (to the loss of the gospel) or Apologetics will be swallowed up in Dogmatics (so that the defence of the gospel will make sense only to those who already believe it). The first of these errors is that of the religious liberal; the second is endemic among religious conservatives [4].

II. Avoiding 20th Century Mistakes

We have just observed that there are mistakes characteristic of the two chief theological polar-opposites. Let us now observe a few of the other particularly unfortunate errors of doctrinaire religious liberals and conservatives óas background to a discussion of how to move forward on a much more solid apologetic basis.

The Conservatives. The "Bible Christian" often sees no distinction between preaching and revivalism, on the one hand, and evangelism and apologetics on the other. He or she will use tracts which do little more than quote Bible passages; one thinks of R. A. Torrey's little booklet consisting of non-Christian questions, accompanied with Bible texts supplying the answers. The difficulty (should it not be obvious?) is that in the year 2002 one can hardly assume that the non-Christian is really a lapsed Christian who knows that the Bible is true but has fallen into a life inconsistent with it. With a plethora of alternative "holy books" (Qur'an, Bhagavad-Gita, Book of Mormon, etc., etc.), we presume at our peril that the unbeliever will simply accept whatever we quote from the Bible. The very term "Revival"óused so frequently in evangelical circles as equivalent to "Evangelism"óshows how unrealistically we view the condition of the average non-Christian today. In point of fact, we must demonstrate the revelational character of the Holy Scripturesóover against competing claims to inscripturated truth. And our personal "holiness" is hardly a proof of biblical revelationóany more than our failings remove from its veracity. As Luther nicely put it: the entire gospel is extra nos.

Some learned conservatives make the deadly mistake of confusing Apologetics with Philosophy. How do they do this? They spend their energies discussing questions which have little or no bearing on the truth of the faith or relevant to the acceptance of it. Example: the relationship of Time to Creation: could God have logically functioned before the creation of temporality? (At a meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society in the U.S.A. a few years ago, I made myself unpopular by citing St Augustine, who, when confronted with the question, "What was God doing before He created the world?," replied: "Preparing Hell for people who ask questions like that.") We are thus brought to our next axiomatic truth:

[2] Apologetics # Philosophy.

This is true not merely because, as apologist Edward John Carnell was wont to say, there are as many Apologetics as there are facts in the worldóthat is to say, Apologetics employs every true fact and every true discipline in its behalf: history, science, jurisprudence, literature, art. The particular reason why Apologetics must not be reduced to Philosophy is that the abstract questions of traditional philosophy are either purely formal, dealing with issues of logic and not with issues of fact, or are so arcane that they do not touch the central elements of the gospel (acceptance of the death of our Lord for our sins and His resurrection for our justification). The gospel is a matter of fact, and its acceptance will necessarily depend on whether the documentary records of Jesus ministry are sound; whether the testimonies to His life and work are accurate; and whether one can accept His claims and His resurrection from the dead. Important philosophical issues do indeed bear on this case (issues such as the legitimacy of miracle evidence), but the case is, in the last analysis, a factual one. Metaphysical problems can be discussed from now until just after the Last Judgement and the crucial question of the facticity of the gospel still remain untouched. And it is the gospel's factual truth which constitutes, and has always constituted, the heart of the Christian proclamation and the heart of the Christian apologetic.

Related to the error just discussed is the conservative tendency to think that the best apologetic strategy consists of showing that Christian affirmations are indeed philosophically "meaningful," i.e., not irrational or technically non-sensical. One of the most influential and important Christian philosophers of our time has succeeded in showing, for example, that the existence of evil is not logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient Deity. Fine! But logical possibility is hardly the same as de facto existence! There is nothing logically absurd in a claim that the Big Bang was the product of a Divine Burp, but that hardly means that such occurred.

There is no substitute for evidence in our defence of the faith. Life is bigger than logic; and, again and again, things apparently irrational have turned out to be true on the basis of the factual evidence in their behalf. Thus, the physical characteristics of light (particulate and undulatory) are mutually inconsistent, since waves are not particles and particles are not waves. But the evidence is incontrovertible, and so the Photon. The parallel issue of the Trinity will be assisted only peripherally by philosophical discussions of the meaningfulness of the concept. Our apologetic thrust must be the historical evidence that Jesus, in rising from the dead, validated His claim to Deity, and thus His affirmations that He and the Father are One [5], that the Holy Spirit is "another" (Gk., allos, "of the same kind qualitatively") as Himself [6], and that the church is to baptise in the name (one name) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. If these facts are genuine, we have put paid to the question. We do not understand the mechanismóany more than we do in the case of the nature of lightóbut that does not alter the factual character of things in the least.

The Liberals. We have already noted that the religious liberal's overwhelming tendency is that of accommodation to the secular climate, thus losing the message which he is endeavouring to communicate. Here is a sad example: In 1950, the Revd Leslie Badham published a solid volume of Christian Apologetics, titled, Verdict on Jesus: A New Statement of Evidence. Badham was a distinguished conservative churchman and a fine communicator. For some thirteen years he was Vicar of Windsor and Chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen (who has never been happy with broad-church liberalism). During his ministry he was equally at home in the pulpit and on the airwaves as a radio broadcaster. Verdict on Jesus was expanded in a second edition in 1971. After Badham's death, his son, presently Dean of Theology in the University of Wales at Lampeter, took over the book. There followed third (1983) and fourth (1995) editions, the text of which remained substantially that of the original author. However, Badham's son supplied new introductions to these editions, purportedly to update the book. The point of the original volume was to argue for the de facto reliability of the biblical accounts of the life of Christ and the consequent veracity of His claims. Badham's son, however, having accepted the so-called "historical criticism" of the biblical narratives, supports John Hick's position in his work, The Myth of God Incarnate, that incarnation is but metaphorical in character. "Hence," the reader is told, "it is possible to make a total faith commitment to Jesus as God Incarnate while believing that the language is true in a metaphorical rather than an ontological sense" [7]. This, of course, not only constitutes heresy by the standards of the Ecumenical Creeds of the Universal Church, but also entirely evacuates of meaning his father's powerful original argument for Christian faith. As I have maintained elsewhere in my critique of Hick's position: once one accommodates to the poor scholarship of the higher criticism, the loss of fundamental Christian teaching is logically inevitable and an effective Apologetic rendered impossible [8].

A second gross error of the religious liberal is to capitulate to Postmodern thinking in its the refusal to take seriously the objective character of external reality. It is the position of contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Derrida that to try to find a core of objective meaning in the world or in literary materials such as the Bible is a chimerical quest. There are necessarily as many valid interpretations as there are interpreters, we are told, and interpreters always approach objects of study from their own personal, cultural, and presuppositional viewpoints. Moreover, in the case of literary works, meanings are always multilayered and can never be fully understood by efforts to get at an author's original intention or purpose [9].

Such a perspective is, of course, very hospitable to the religious liberal, who has never had a serious view of the unity of the Scriptures; has always regarded the Bible as a product of diverse human cultural experiences; and has had a powerful tendency to substitute for the doctrine that God created us in His image a humanistic theology of our creating God (and theology) in our image.

Religious liberals have never seemed to see the fundamental illogic in the view that reality outside of usóincluding biblical narrativeóhas no objective meaning, and that each person can never go beyond the limits of his or her own "personal story" in understanding the world, the Bible, or religious truth. In fact, this approach falls into an infinite regress of solipsism if carried to its logical conclusion [10]. If the Bible (or anything else) has no objective meaning, neither do the writings and assertions of the Postmodernists! To communicate at all, we must assume that at least our own oral and written statements can be understood in the sense in which we have intended them. But if so, we can hardly claim that this is not the case for the communications of othersóincluding those of our Lord, who said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," and condemned those who perverted the clear word spoken by his Father through Moses and the prophets [11]. A sound Christian Apologetic requires a serious view of objective reality and of a Bible which does not speak with forked tongue.

Additionally, religious liberalsóespecially in Englandóreadily succumb to a "Via Media" style of thinking. By this we mean the ability not to come down too hard on any side of any disputed questionófor fear of offending someone, particularly the popular or lionised secularist. Here, again, the byword is accommodation: the utterly false assumption that Christianity can gain friends and converts by modifying its teachings to make them more palatable to the secular mindset.
Unhappily, this tendency is by no means limited to the religious liberal. In evangelical circles, especially in the United Kingdom and the European continent, it is becoming harder and harder to find those who will unqualifiedly affirm biblical inerrancy. "After all," we are told, "the word isn't mentioned in the Bible; and the gospel and Christian experience cannot be hurt by minor historical errors or contradictions in the Scriptures." To which we reply: neither does the word "Trinity" appear in the Bible, but we dismiss it at our theological peril. And: if the biblical writers cannot accurately describe the Temple in Jerusalem, for example, what makes anyone think that they are correct when they talk about the Heavenly Jerusalem? One would think that the former would be far less demanding than the latter! Did not our Lord say, "If I have told you earthly things and you believe not, how shall you believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" [12].

We also have the sad, mediating concessions recently made by some evangelical thinkers to the so-called "Openness of God" theology, whereby, in the supposed interest of preserving human freedom, God's omniscience is jettisoned. Certain charismatics, in particular, have thought that this provides a more human face for God and a more attractive Deity in the eyes of potential converts. Hardly! One ends up with a God who cannot promise anything on which poor sinners can dependósince He, no less than His creatures, is limited to statistical prediction of the future. One of the greatest genuine apologetic appeals continues to be that which, according to the Venerable Bede, converted the Northumbrians in the 7th century: the argument that our life, like that of a sparrow flying briefly into a lighted hall and quickly disappearing again into darkness, is one of utter uncertainty and that "if this new teaching has brought any greater certainty, it seems fitting that it should be followed" [13].

III. The Way Forward

To avoid the errorsóboth liberal and conservativeójust delineated, what must we do? How can we achieve a vigorous, sound Apologetic for the 21st century? Consider five minimal requisites.

First, there must be a vigorous attack on the utterly fallacious notion that one does not need Jesus Christ for a fulfilled life. It has often been observed that those who cannot be convinced that they are sick will not go to a doctor. We need to employ the writings of the existentialists (Sartreóand especially Camus [14] ) and of the depth psychologists and psychoanalysts to point out the misery of the human condition apart from a relationship with Christ. This should not be in the least difficult, since these thinkers have rung the changes on the meaninglessness of life and the void at the centre of the human heart. Carl Gustav Jung, to take one example, has analogised the human condition to that of the nursery character Humpty Dumpty: broken and unable to put himself back together again [15]. And, what is even worseóas Jacques Lacan points outó"The analysand's basic position is one of a refusal of knowledge, a will not to know (a ne rien vouloir savoir). The analysand wants to know nothing about his or her neurotic mechanisms, nothing about the why and wherefore of his or her symptoms. Lacan even goes so far as to classify ignorance as a passion greater than love or hate: a passion not to know" [16]. "How," the jocular question is put, "does a psychiatrist differ from a coal miner?" Answer: "The psychiatrist goes down farther, stays down longer, and comes up dirtier." One of the very few positive results of the 11 September 2001 horror was that it drove many Americans back to church (at least for a time!). Why? Because they were reminded of the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, and their inability to control their own destinies. The 21st century apologist needs to drive these truths home, based upon universal human experience.

In the second place, the effective apologetist must be willing to engage in an uncompromising, frontal attack on prevailing non-Christians worldviews. Liberal accommodationism has to be rejected out of hand. Any gains from compromise are trivial when compared to the lossesólosses in integrity and in the power of the gospel message.

How to attack secular viewpoints? Not on peripheral issues (their failure to live up to their own principles, for example), but at the presuppositional heart of their beliefs. The efficient way to destroy a condemned building is not to start on the roof, removing the tiles one by one; it is to blow up the foundations, after which the entire building will fall. Take the case of Marxism: its fundamental error is to assume that modifications in the means of production in society will produce "new men"óa proletariatócapable of creating a perfect, classless society [17]. But, through human history, modifications of the environment external to man have never changed man's selfish nature. The precise same fallacy lies at the heart of liberal western, utopian social planning. Tear down slums; replace them with clean, new buildings; put the same people into the new buildingsóand the buildings soon become slums again. As Jesus summed it up (and human experience entirely confirms this): "That which comes out of the man, that defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness. . . . All these evil things come from within, and defile the man" [18]. Only a personal, living relationship with Jesus the Saviour can transform the heart: "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" [19].

Moreover, we must not be afraid to attack the fallacious logic of non-Christian positions. Even though, as pointed out earlier, the refutation of unsound viewpoints does not establish the truth of one's own, it is vital to remove the false hopes which often keep non-Christians from even considering the case for Christianity. Take, as an obvious example, the Quranic picture of Jesus, contradicting the very essence of the New Testament description of Him as the unique Son of God, come to earth to die for the sins of the world. Since the New Testament testimony comes from eyewitnesses or close associates of eyewitnesses, whereas Mohammed's material appears on the scene six hundred years later, no-one with any historical sense would prefer the latter to the former [20]..

Another classic piece of non-Christian illogic is the oft-heard argument that belief in a creator God solves nothing, since one is still left with the question, "Who created God?" However, since an infinite regress solves nothing, one must stop the reasoning process either with the universe or with a Creator of the universe; and since the universe is patently contingent (nothing in it can explain itself), it is far more sensible to appeal beyond it to non-contingent, absolute, creator God than to deify the universe by pretendingómythologicallyóthat it really isn't contingent at all! Those who do the latter show that it is the unbeliever who is the myth-maker, not the theistódemonstrating, not so incidentally, that Freud had it exactly reversed when he asserted that believers in God mythologically create an illusion of divine existence. In point of fact, it is the theist who is the realist, and the atheist who creates the illusion that the world is self-sufficient, self-explanatory, and therefore absolute [21].

In the third place, besides being willing and prepared to press home the hopelessness and illogic of non-Christian worldviews, the 21st century apologist must offer positive, compelling evidence in support of the Christian claim. Note carefully the Apostle's language: "Be ready always to give an answer [Gk., apologia] to every person who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you" [22]. Merely preaching the good news or announcing the hope is never enough! One must always give a reason for the hope. This can be stated axiomatically:

[3] Apologetics # Preaching.

What kind of positive evidence is to be presented? The focus must be a demonstration of the soundness of our Lord's claim to be "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," so that the seeker can appreciate why He declared that "no man comes to the Father but by Me." We are not in the business of persuading people to become deists, theists, or members of particular religious organisations. We are in the business of persuading people to accept Jesus as personal Saviouróas the only One who can "save them from their sins." To make this case, there is no way to avoid arguing for the soundness of the New Testament documents, the reliability of the testimony to Jesus contained therein, and the facticity of His resurrection from the dead as the final proof of His claims [23].

Such argumentation can benefit greatly from, for example, Theodor Zahn's great commentary on the Gospel of John, establishing the Apostolic authorship of the book; and Adolf Harnack's reasoning to support the dating of the Synoptic Gospels within the generation of Jesus's crucifixion (the Acts of the Apostles must have been written before A.D. 64-65, since it does not record the death of Paul, its central personage; Luke's Gospel, by the same author, had to have been written before Acts; and Luke employed Mark as one of his sourcesódriving the date of composition of Mark back even farther). In general, the pretensions and the subjective, bad scholarship of the form- and redaction-critics must be fought on every front. Higher criticism is the single most deadly foe which the 21st century apologist must defeat [24]. To retreat into pietism or an Averroës-like doctrine of "two-fold truth" ("yes, the Gospels are historically unreliable, but no, our faith experience of Jesus remains firm") is to destroy all the credibility of the Christian message and eliminate any meaningful Apologetic for its truth.

A fourth essential requisite for an effective contemporary Apologetic is the willingness to address the most difficult issues troubling the unbeliever. So often, Christians offer pat answers to minor difficulties (reconciliations of the king lists in the books of Kings and Chronicles; explanations for the apparent tension between "faith" in Paul and "good works" in James; etc.)ówhilst ignoring or bypassing that which really keeps the non-Christian from becoming a Christian. We must be prepared to face such issues as the perceived irrationality and lack of justice in the world (the Holocaust; 11 September 2001). The unbeliever will balance these against our case for Jesus' claims, and may think that the horrors entirely outweigh any argument for "God in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." Here we will need to break new ground. For example, we can point out that the critical consideration is not the number of horrific events in history weighed against the single event of Jesus Christ (a matter of quantity), but the qualitative issue of whether, even if only one instance of evil and irrationality existed in human history, would that be consistent with the existence of a loving God coming to earth to die for a fallen race? Since love entails freewill, and since the God of the Bible reveals Himself as perfectly good, irrationality and evil (on whatever scale) will be the creature's fault, not the Creator's; and God's willingness to suffer undeservingly for us should fill us with gratitude, rather than eliciting criticism of his morality. Such argumentation may not exhaust the question, but it at least does not sidestep the non-Christian's genuine concerns.

Finally, the 21st century Apologist needs to take Apologetics far more seriously. He needs to incorporate Apologetics into every aspect of his or her ministry: every sermon, every class, every evangelistic activity. We have woefully neglected our responsibility to train our young people in the solid case for Christianity, and then we wonder why they depart from the faith under the influence of secular university instruction. We give our parishioners and our missionaries no foundation in the defence of the faith, and then wonder why our evangelistic efforts show so little fruit in a world where people have long moved beyond accepting something just because someone else believes it.

In a word, we need to return to our biblical and theological foundations to find the place which Apologetics should have in Christian ministry. That place is absolutely clear. We are to do as the Apostle did: "While Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, . . . in the market daily with them that met with him, Ö [and with] certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics. . . ." [25]. We are to become "all things to all people, that some might be saved, a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greeks"ówhich necessarily entails giving reasons for the faith, since that is what so many of our contemporaries, Jews and Gentiles, require before they will commit themselves to a faith-position. We must not reduce the faith once delivered to the saints to a cultic matter of inner experience and personal testimony. There are enough irrational religions and sects in our 21st century world without giving the unbeliever the impression that Christianity is just another one of them.

And so, a final (and, this time, positive) axiom:

[4] APOLOGETICS = ALWAYS GIVING A REASON FOR THE HOPE.

APPENDIX: THE AXIOM SET

[1] Apologetics # Dogmatics

[2] Apologetics # Philosophy

[3] Apologetics # Preaching

[4] APOLOGETICS = ALWAYS GIVING A REASON FOR THE HOPE

* An invitational lecture at the Hope for Europe conference of the Evangelical Alliance, held in Budapest, Hungary, 27 April-1 May 2002. John Warwick Montgomery, Ph.D. (Chicago), D.Théol. (Strasbourg) is Distinguished Professor of Law and Theology and Vice-President for Academic AffairsóU.K. and Europe, Trinity College and Theological Seminary (Indiana, U.S.A.); Emeritus Professor of Law and Humanities, University of Luton (England); Barrister-at-Law, England and Wales; and Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.

1. As an English barrister, I was consulted on the Bonny Woods v. Church of Scientology matter a few years ago. Woods and her husband were converted from Scientology to Evangelical Christianity and began a counter-cult ministry to assist others to leave Scientology. Thereupon they were sued for defamation by the Church of Scientology. With its vast financial resources, the Church could easily have bankrupted the Woods, even though the latter were in the right legally. Our strategy was to apply to the Court for discovery of all the foundational records of the Churchóon the ground that the only way to know if the Church had in fact been defamed was to find out what it really believed and practiced vis-à-vis its members and how it proselytised. As we expected, the Church dropped the action rather than revealing what it was up to.

2. Cf. Reuel Marc Gerecht, "The Gospel According to Osama bin Laden," Atlantic Monthly, January 2002, pp. 46-48.

3. Classically, to be sure, Dogmatics and Apologetics were treated as two of the three branches of Systematic Theology (the third being Ethics). Today, in theological faculties, Apologetic instruction has virtually disappeared. At best, it sometimes appears in bastardised form in courses in Philosophy of Religion.

4. See my book, Faith Founded on Fact (available, together with most of my Apologetics writings, from the Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada); website:www.ciltpp.com Sadly, the great Calvinist dogmatician Cornelius Van Til believed that his great apologetic accomplishment, over against B. B. Warfield, was to make the God who reveals Himself in Scripture the starting-point for Apologetics as well as for Dogmatics. Warfield, however, knew what he was doing: an Apologetic which insisits that the non-Christian start where the Christian starts is really no Apologetic at all. At best it is preaching; at worst it is simply counterproductive.

7. Paul Badham, Introduction to Leslie Badham, Verdict on Jesus (4th ed.; Wantage, U.K.: Ikon Productions, 1995), p. xv.

8. John Warwick Montgomery, "Why Has God Incarnate Suddenly Become Mythical?," in Perspectives on Evangelical Theology, ed. Kenneth S. Kantzer and Stanley N. Gundry (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1979), pp. 57-65; reprinted in C. E. B. Cranfield, David Kilgour, and J. W. Montgomery, Christians in the Public Square (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 1996), pp.307-316.

9. See, inter alia, Stuart Sim (ed.), The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (Cambridge, Englnd: Icon Books, 1998).

10. Two excellent counteractives to such thinking are: Noretta Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Leicester: Apollos/Inter-Varsity Press, 1998).

13. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, ii. 13. Cf. John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of Christian Theology (Newburgh, Indiana: Trinity Press, 1998), especially pp. 42-43. The great contemporary English Christian jurist Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone titled his second autobiography, The Sparrow's Flight; at his Memorial Service a poem of his composition was read at his request in which he referred to himself as just such a sparrow.

14. Though Camus is universally regarded as a secular existentialist, at the time he was killed in a car accident he was seriously considering Christian baptism from one of my students, then guest preacher at the American Church in Paris: see Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2000).

15. Cf. John Warwick Montgomery, Myth, Allegory and Gospel (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1974).

16. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 7.

17. See John Warwick Montgomery, "The Marxist Approach to Human Rights: Analysis and Critique," 3 Simon Greenleaf Law Review (1983-84), passim.

20. See John Warwick Montgomery, "How Muslims Do A;pologetics," 51 Muslim World (April and July 1961), reprinted in his Faith Founded on Fact (Nashville and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1978).

21. John Warwick Montgomery, Christianity for the Toughminded (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1973), pp. 21-34.

23. See John Warwick Montgomery, History, Law and Christianity (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 2002); Where Is History Going? Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of the Christian Revelation (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1969). Where Is History Going? has been published in German under the title, Weltgeschichte wohin? (Stuttgart-Neuhausen: Haenssler Verlag, 1977).

24. The German works of Gerhard Maier are particularly to be commended in this regard; in English, see his The End of the Historical-Critical Method, trans. E. W. Leverenz and R. F. Norden (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia, 1977).

Die Hoffnung, die in uns ist, verteidigen:
Apologetik für das 21. Jahrhundert*

Prof. Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

I. Wo wir sind und warum dies wichtig ist

Christliche Gläubige, die sich mit der Verteidigung des Glaubens befassen, der den Heiligen einst überbracht wurde, müssen die einzigartige kulturelle Situation erkennen, in der wir uns am Beginn eines neuen Jahrtausends befinden. Diese Einzigartigkeit kommt aus einer Kombination von Faktoren, die keinesfalls auf die Zunahme des Säkularismus und weltliche Selbstzufriedenheit begrenzt sind. Die wichtigsten Faktoren sind:
(1) Eine Ausdehnung dessen, was der kanadische Soziologe Marshall McLuhan als Ñdas globale Dorf" bezeichnete: das exponentielle Wachstum der weltweiten Kommunikation, aus der sich ein ständiger, unvermeidbarer Kontakt zwischen Gläubigen und Ungläubigen ergibt.
(2) Pluralismus, in einem in der Vergangenheit, selbst während der hellenistischen Periode, unbekannten Ausmaß; seine Folge ist eine Vervielfachung der Sekten, religiösen und philosophischen Ansichten, und die gegenseitige Durchdringung von Weltanschauungen (z. B., fernöstliche Religionen verwandeln sich in westliche ÑNew Age"-Richtungen).
(3) Steigend hoher Entwicklungsstand auf Seiten religiöser Gruppen. Einige Beispiele von vielen schließen die Verwendung legaler Einschüchterung durch Scientology, um jede Kritik an der Bewegung zu ersticken, ein und gleichen der Beschäftigung von Rechtsberatern bei multinationalen Unternehmen zum Schutz ihres Rufs in der Öffentlichkeit [1]; ebenso Al-Qaida's Verwendung hochmoderner Computertechnologie, um ihre integrationalistischen und terroristischen Programme zu fördern [2] .
(4) Eine wachsende Erkenntnis, die in großen Teilen aus den Ereignissen des 11. September 2001 stammt, dass alle Religionen genau genommen nicht Ñdasselbe sagen" ó trotz dessen, was uns Generationen von liberalen Theologen und vergleichbaren Religionslehrern gesagt haben.
Warum sind diese Überlegungen wichtig? Die gegenwärtige Situation zu begreifen ist unerlässlich, denn nur wenn wir sie kennen, werden wir unsere Apologetik an den wirklichen Bedürfnissen des Ungläubigen ausrichten. Das fundamentale Prinzip ist hier:

[1] Apologetik ist nicht Dogmatik

Damit meinen wir, dass während die Dogmatik mit Gottes besonderer Offenbarung seiner selbst in der Heiligen Schrift beginnt und ihren Inhalt darlegt, die Apologetik dort anfängt, wo der Ungläubige ist: Ñallen alles werden, damit wir einige retten" ó Ñdem Juden ein Jude und ein Grieche den Griechen" [3] . Das meint sicherlich nicht, dass wir in der Apologetik die ewige Botschaft ändern, um sie der Situation oder den Bedürfnissen des Ungläubigen anzupassen. Diese Botschaft ist dieselbe, gestern, heute und in Ewigkeit. Unsere Methoden, das immerbleibende Evangelium weiterzugeben, werden jedoch entsprechend dem persönlichen, sozialen und kulturellen Zusammenhang weiterentwickelt, der niemals gleich bleibt. Wenn diese fundamentale Unterscheidung nicht verstanden wird, dann wird entweder die Dogmatik von der Apologetik aufgesogen (wobei das Evangelium verloren geht) oder die Apologetik wird von der Dogmatik verschluckt (so dass die Verteidigung des Evangeliums nur noch für diejenigen Sinn macht, die schon daran glauben). Der erste dieser Irrtümer ist der des religiös Liberalen; der zweite ist heimisch bei religiös Konservativen [4].

II. Die Fehler des 20. Jahrhunderts vermeiden

Wir haben gerade gesehen, dass es Fehler gibt, die für die beiden bedeutendsten theologischen Extrempositionen charakteristisch sind. Lassen Sie uns nun einige der weiteren besonders unglücklichen Irrtümer der doktrinären religiösen Liberalen und Konservativen betrachten ó als Hintergrund für eine Diskussion darüber, wie man auf einer viel zuverlässigeren apologetischen Basis Fortschritte machen kann.

Die Konservativen. Der Ñbibeltreue Christ" sieht häufig keinen Unterschied zwischen Predigt und Ñrevivalism" auf der einen Seite, und Evangelisation und Apologetik auf der anderen. Er oder sie wird Traktate verwenden, die wenig mehr tun als Abschnitte aus der Bibel zu zitieren; man denkt an R. A. Torrey's kleines Heftchen, das Fragen von Nicht-Christen beinhaltet, zusammen mit Bibeltexten, die die Antworten darauf geben. Die Schwierigkeit (sollte es nicht offensichtlich sein?) besteht darin, dass man im Jahr 2002 kaum annehmen kann, dass es sich bei dem Nicht-Christen um einen verirrten Christen handelt, der weiß, dass die Bibel wahr ist, aber in einen Lebensstil verfallen ist, der mit ihr nicht übereinstimmt. Bei einer Fülle alternativer ÑHeiliger Bücher" (Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, Buch Mormon etc., etc.), gehen wir riskanterweise davon aus, dass der Ungläubige einfach alles akzeptieren wird, was wir aus der Bibel zitieren. Sogar der Begriff ÑErweckung" ó der in evangelischen Kreisen so häufig als Äquivalent für ÑEvangelisation" verwendet wird ó zeigt, wie unrealistisch wir den Zustand des heutigen durchschnittlichen Nicht-Christen betrachten. Genau genommen müssen wir den Offenbarungscharakter der Heiligen Schriften aufzeigen- gegenüber konkurrierenden Behauptungen schriftlich niedergelegter Wahrheit. Und unsere persönliche ÑHeiligkeit" ist wohl kaum ein Beweis für biblische Offenbarung ó genauso wenig wie unser Versagen ihre Glaubwürdigkeit aufhebt. Wie Luther es schön ausgedrückt hat: das gesamte Evangelium ist extra nos.

Einige gebildete Konservative machen den tödlichen Fehler, dass sie Apologetik mit Philosophie verwechseln. Wie machen sie das? Sie vergeuden ihre Energien, indem sie Fragen diskutieren, die geringen oder gar keinen Bezug zur Wahrheit des Glaubens haben oder die bezüglich ihrer Akzeptanz nicht relevant sind. Beispiel: die Beziehung zwischen Zeit und Schöpfung: Konnte Gott vor der Erschaffung des Zeitablaufs logisch funktionieren? (Auf einer Sitzung der Evangelischen Philosophischen Gesellschaft in den USA habe ich mich vor einigen Jahren unbeliebt gemacht als ich Sankt Augustinus zitierte, der, konfrontiert mit der Frage ÑWomit hat Gott sich beschäftigt, bevor Er die Welt schuf?", antwortete: ÑEr bereitete die Hölle vor für Leute, die Frage wie diese stellen.") Dies führt uns zu unserer nächsten axiomatischen Wahrheit:

[2] Apologetik ist nicht Philosophie

Dies ist nicht nur deshalb wahr, weil, wie der Apologet Edward John Carnell zu sagen pflegte, es so viele Apologetiken gibt wie Tatsachen in der Welt sind ó das heißt, die Apologetik setzt jede echte Wahrheit und jede rechte Disziplin für ihre Zwecke ein: Geschichte, Naturwissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaften, Literatur, Kunst. Der spezielle Grund warum Apologetik nicht auf Philosophie reduziert werden darf, ist, dass die abstrakten Fragen der traditionellen Philosophie entweder rein formal sind, sich mit Problemen der Logik und nicht mit Problemen von Tatsachen beschäftigen, oder sie sind so undurchschaubar, dass sie die zentralen Elemente des Evangeliums nicht berühren (Anerkennung des Todes unseres Herrn für unsere Sünden und Seiner Auferstehung zu unserer Rechtfertigung). Das Evangelium ist eine Tatsachenangelegenheit und seine Akzeptanz hängt notwendigerweise davon ab, ob die dokumentarischen Aufzeichnungen über Jesu geistliches Wirken zuverlässig sind, ob die Zeugnisse über Sein Leben und Werk stimmen und ob man Seine Ansprüche und Seine Auferstehung von den Toten anerkennen kann. Wichtige philosophische Themen betreffen in der Tat diesen Fall (solche Themen wie die Legitimität von Wunderbeweisen), aber letzten Endes ist es ein Fall, der auf Tatsachen beruht. Metaphysische Probleme können von jetzt an bis noch nach dem Jüngsten Gericht diskutiert werden und die entscheidende Frage nach dem Faktischen des Evangeliums ist noch nicht berührt worden. Und es ist die auf Tatsachen beruhende Wahrheit des Evangeliums, die das Herz der christlichen Verkündigung und die das Herz der christlichen Apologetik ausmacht, und immer ausgemacht hat.

Verwandt mit dem gerade diskutierten Irrtum ist die konservative Tendenz zu denken, dass die beste apologetische Strategie darin besteht, zu zeigen, dass christliche Erklärungen tatsächlich philosophisch Ñbedeutungsvoll" sind, d. h. weder irrational noch formal Ñun-sinnig". Einer der einflussreichsten und wichtigsten christlichen Philosophen unserer Zeit hat zum Beispiel erfolgreich gezeigt, dass die Existenz des Bösen logisch nicht unvereinbar mit der Existenz eines allmächtigen, allwissenden Gottes ist. Gut! Aber logische Möglichkeit ist kaum dasselbe wie de facto Existenz! Es ist nichts logisch Absurdes an der Behauptung, dass der Urknall das Ergebnis eines göttlichen Rülpsers war, aber das bedeutet kaum, dass so etwas geschah.

Es gibt keinen Ersatz für Beweise bei unserer Verteidigung des Glaubens. Leben ist mehr als Logik; und immer wieder hat sich manches anscheinend Irrationale auf der Basis eines zu seinen Gunsten geführten Tatsachenbeweises als wahr herausgestellt. So sind die physischen Eigenschaften des Lichts (teilchenartig und wellenförmig) miteinander unvereinbar, da Wellen keine Teilchen und Teilchen keine Wellen sind. Aber die Beweise sind unwiderlegbar, so wie das Photon. Das entsprechende Problem bei der Trinität wird nur oberflächlich durch die philosophische Diskussion der Bedeutsamkeit des Konzepts unterstützt. Unsere apologetische Stoßrichtung muss der geschichtliche Beweis sein, dass Jesus, indem Er von den Toten auferstand, Seinen Anspruch auf die Gottheit, für gültig erklärte, und ebenso Seine Beteuerung, dass Er und der Vater ein Einziger sind [5] , dass der Heilige Geist Ñein weiterer" (gr., allos, Ñqualitativ in derselben Art") wie Er selbst ist [6], und dass die Kirche in dem Namen (dem einen Namen) des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes zu taufen hat. Wenn diese Tatsachen wahr sind, haben wir unsere Frage beantwortet. Wir verstehen nicht den Mechanismus ó nicht mehr als wir ihn im Fall der Natur des Lichts verstehen - aber das ändert nicht im geringsten die tatsächlichen Eigenschaften der Dinge.

Die Liberalen. Wir haben schon erwähnt, dass es die überwältigende Tendenz des religiösen Liberalen ist, sich dem säkularen Klima anzupassen, wodurch er die Botschaft verliert, die er sich bemüht zu vermitteln. Hier ist ein trauriges Beispiel: 1950 veröffentlichte Pfarrer Leslie Badham einen umfangreichen Band über christliche Apologetik, überschrieben mit ÑVerdict on Jesus: A New Statement of Evidence". Badham war ein herausragender konservativer Kirchenmann und ein ausgesprochen kommunikativer Mensch. Ungefähr dreizehn Jahre lang war er Gemeindepfarrer von Windsor und Kaplan Ihrer Majestät der Königin (die niemals glücklich war mit dem kirchenweiten Liberalismus). Während seines geistlichen Wirkens war er gleichermaßen auf der Kanzel und als Radiosprecher im Äther zu Hause. ÑVerdict on Jesus" wurde 1971 in einer zweiten Auflage erweitert. Nach Badhams Tod bearbeitete sein Sohn, zurzeit Dekan für Theologie an der Universität von Wales in Lampeter, das Buch weiter. Es folgte eine dritte (1983) und vierte (1995) Auflage, deren Text im wesentlichen der des ursprünglichen Autors blieb. Wie auch immer, Badhams Sohn lieferte neue Einleitungen für diese Auflagen, erklärtermaßen um das Buch auf den neusten Stand zu bringen. Der springende Punkt des Originalbandes war das Argumentieren dafür die de facto Zuverlässigkeit der biblischen Berichte über das Leben Christi und die daraus folgende Glaubwürdigkeit Seiner Ansprüche. Badham Sohn, der die sogenannte Ñhistorische Kritik" an den biblischen Erzählungen akzeptiert hat, unterstützt jedoch die Position von John Hick in seinem Werk ÑThe Myth of God Incarnate", wonach die Menschwerdung lediglich metaphorischen Charakter hat. ÑFolglich", wird dem Leser mitgeteilt, Ñist es möglich, eine völlige Glaubensbindung an Jesus als dem menschgewordenen Gott einzugehen, während man gleichzeitig glaubt, dass die Ausdrucksweise eher in einem metaphorischen als in einem ontologischen Sinn wahr ist." [7] Dies stellt natürlich nicht nur Häresie nach den Standards der ökumenischen Glaubensbekenntnisse der weltweiten Kirche dar, sondern entleert auch das kraftvolle ursprüngliche Argument seines Vaters für den christlichen Glauben völlig von jeder Bedeutung. Wie ich an anderer Stelle in meiner Kritik an Hicks Position festgehalten habe: Wenn man sich einmal der armseligen Gelehrsamkeit der höheren Kritik anpasst, dann ist der Verlust fundamentaler christlicher Lehre logisch unvermeidbar und eine effektive Apologetik wird unmöglich [8].

Ein zweiter grober Fehler des religiösen Liberalen ist die Kapitulation vor dem postmodernen Denken in seiner Weigerung, den objektiven Charakter externer Realität ernstzunehmen. Es ist die Position heutiger Denker wie Jacques Derrida, dass es sich bei dem Versuch, einen Kern objektiver Bedeutung in der Welt oder in literarischem Material wie der Bibel zu finden, um eine schimärische Suche handelt. Es gibt notwendigerweise so viele gültige Auslegungen wie es Ausleger gibt, wird uns gesagt, und Ausleger nähern sich ihrem Studienobjekt immer von ihren persönlichen, kulturellen und vorher festgelegten Standpunkten. Darüber hinaus sind im Fall literarischer Werke die Bedeutungen immer mehrschichtig und können niemals durch den Versuch, die ursprüngliche Intention oder Absicht des Autors zu erfassen, völlig verstanden werden [9].

Eine solche Perspektive ist natürlich günstig für den religiösen Liberalen, der die Einheit der Schrift nie ernsthaft in Betracht zog, der die Bibel immer als ein Produkt der verschiedenen menschlichen kulturellen Erfahrungen ansah und der eine starke Tendenz hat, das Dogma, dass Gott uns zu Seinem Ebenbild geschaffen hat, durch eine humanistische Theologie zu ersetzen, nach der wir Gott (und die Theologie) zu unserem Ebenbild geschaffen haben.

Religiöse Liberale scheinen in der Ansicht, dass die außerhalb von uns liegende Realität ó einschließlich biblischer Erzählungen ó keine objektive Bedeutung hat, und dass jeder Mensch niemals über die Grenzen seiner oder ihrer Ñpersönlichen Geschichte" im Verstehen der Welt, der Bibel oder religiöser Wahrheiten hinausgehen kann, nie die fundamentale Unlogik gesehen zu haben. Tatsächlich mündet dieser Ansatz in einen abgrundtiefen Rückfall in den Solipsismus, wenn man ihn bis zu seinem logischen Schluss führt [10]. Wenn die Bibel (oder irgendetwas anderes) keine objektive Bedeutung hat, dann auch nicht die Schriften und Behauptungen der Postmodernisten! Um überhaupt zu kommunizieren, müssen wir davon ausgehen, dass wenigstens unsere eigenen mündlichen und schriftlichen Aussagen in dem Sinn verstanden werden können, den wir beabsichtigt haben. Aber wenn das so ist, dann können wir kaum behaupten, dass dies für die Mitteilungen anderer nicht gilt ó einschließlich jener unseres Herrn, der gesagt hat: ÑWer Ohren hat, zu hören, der höre." und verurteilte diejenigen, die das eindeutige, von seinem Vater durch Mose und die Propheten gesprochene Wort, verdrehten [11]. Eine gesunde christliche Apologetik erfordert ein ernsthaftes in Betracht ziehen objektiver Realität und einer Bibel, die nicht mit gespaltener Zunge spricht.

Zudem beugen sich religiöse Liberale ó besonders in England ó bereitwillig einem ÑVia Media"-Denkstil. Darunter verstehen wir die Fähigkeit, sich nicht zu sehr auf eine Seite einer umstrittenen Frage festzulegen ó aus Angst, jemanden zu kränken, insbesondere den populären oder gefeierten Säkularisten. Hier heißt das Schlagwort wieder Anpassung: die vollkommen falsche Annahme, dass das Christentum Freunde und Anhänger durch Veränderung seiner Lehren, um sie der säkularen Mentalität schmackhaft zu machen, gewinnen kann.

Unglücklicherweise ist diese Tendenz in keinster Weise auf die religiösen Liberalen beschränkt. In evangelischen Kreisen, besonders im Vereinigten Königreich und auf dem europäischen Festland, wird es immer schwieriger solche zu finden, die uneingeschränkt die biblische Irrtumslosigkeit bekräftigen. ÑSchließlich," so wird uns gesagt, Ñwird das Wort in der Bibel nicht erwähnt, und das Evangelium und die christliche Erfahrung kann nicht durch kleinere historische Irrtümer oder Widersprüche in der Schrift beeinträchtigt werden." Worauf wir antworten: Genauso wenig erscheint das Wort ÑDreieinigkeit" in der Bibel, aber wir geben es auf eigene theologische Gefahr auf. Und: Wenn die biblischen Autoren z. B. den Tempel in Jerusalem nicht zuverlässig beschreiben können, wie kann man dann annehmen, dass es stimmt, wenn sie von dem himmlischen Jerusalem sprechen? Man muss doch davon ausgehen, dass das erstere weit weniger anspruchsvoll ist als das letztere! Hat unser Herr nicht gesagt: ÑGlaubt ihr nicht, wenn ich euch von irdischen Dingen sage, wie werdet ihr glauben, wenn ich euch von himmlischen Dingen sage?" [12]

Wir haben seit Kurzem die traurigen, vermittelnden Zugeständnisse auch von einigen evangelischen Denkern gegenüber der sogenannten ÑOffenheit Gottes"-Theologie, bei der, in dem vermeintlichen Interesse, die Freiheit des Menschen zu schützen, Gottes Allwissenheit fallen gelassen wird. Insbesondere bestimmte Charismatiker haben gedacht, dass dies Gott ein menschlicheres Angesicht verleiht und in den Augen potentieller Konvertiten eine attraktivere Gottheit bietet. Wohl kaum! Das endet mit einem Gott, der nichts versprechen kann, auf das sich ein armer Sünder verlassen könnte ó da Er, nicht weniger als Seine Geschöpfe, auf statistische Zukunftsvorhersagen beschränkt ist. Einer der wichtigsten echten apologetischen Appelle bleibt der, der nach dem Ehrwürdigen Bede, im 7. Jahrhundert die Menschen in Northumbria überzeugte: Das Argument, dass unser Leben wie das eines Spatzen, der nur kurz in einen erleuchteten Saal fliegt und schnell wieder in der Finsternis verschwindet, in äußerster Unsicherheit besteht und dass, Ñwenn diese neue Lehre größere Sicherheit gebracht hat, es angezeigt erscheint, ihr zu folgen" [13].

III. Der Weg vorwärts

Was müssen wir tun, um die gerade geschriebenen Irrtümer ó beide liberale und konservative ó zu vermeiden? Wie können wir eine energische, gesunde Apologetik für das 21. Jahrhundert erreichen? Betrachten Sie fünf minimale Notwendigkeiten.

Erstens muss ein energischer Angriff auf die völlig abwegige Vorstellung stattfinden, dass man Jesus Christus nicht zu einem erfüllten Leben bräuchte. Man hat oft beobachtet, dass diejenigen, die nicht davon überzeugt werden können, dass sie krank sind, nicht zu einem Arzt gehen werden. Wir müssen die Schriften der Existentialisten (Sartre ó und besonders Camus [14]), der Tiefenpsychologen und der Psychoanalytiker benutzen, um das Elend des menschlichen Zustands ohne Beziehung zu Christus aufzuzeigen. Dies dürfte nicht im geringsten schwierig sein, da diese Denker bezüglich der Bedeutungslosigkeit des Lebens und der Leere im Zentrum des menschlichen Herzens für Abwechslung gesorgt haben. Carl Gustav Jung, um ein Beispiel herauszugreifen, hat den menschlichen Zustand mit dem der Kindergartenfigur Humpty Dumpty verglichen: zerbrochen und unfähig, sich selbst wieder zusammenzusetzen [15]. Und, was noch schlimmer ist ó wie Jacques Lacan gezeigt hat ó: ÑDie Grundposition des Analysierten besteht in einer Verweigerung der Erkenntnis, er will nicht wissen (ein ne rien vouloir savoir). Der Analysierte will über seine oder ihre neurotischen Mechanismen nichts wissen, nichts über das Warum und Wozu seiner oder ihrer Symptome. Lacan geht sogar soweit, die Ignoranz als eine Leidenschaft einzuordnen, die stärker als Liebe oder Hass ist: eine Leidenschaft, nicht zu wissen" [16]. ÑWie", lautet die Witzfrage, Ñunterscheidet sich ein Psychologe von einem Bergmann?" Antwort: ÑDer Psychologe geht tiefer, bleibt länger unten und kommt dreckiger rauf." Eines der wenigen positiven Ergebnisse des 11. September 2001-Grauens war, dass es viele Amerikaner zurück in die Kirche getrieben hat (zumindest eine Zeitlang!). Warum? Weil sie an die Zerbrechlichkeit des Lebens erinnert wurden, an die Unvermeidbarkeit des Todes und an ihre Unfähigkeit ihr eigenes Schicksal zu bestimmen. Der Apologet des 21. Jahrhunderts muss diese Wahrheiten auf der Grundlage der allgemeinen menschlichen Erfahrungen deutlich machen.

An zweiter Stelle muss der erfolgreiche Apologet bereit sein, einen kompromisslosen, frontalen Angriff auf die herrschende nichtchristliche Weltanschauung zu führen. Liberaler Ñaccommodationism" ist kurzerhand zurückzuweisen. Alle durch Kompromiss erlangten Vorteile sind im Vergleich zu den Einbußen belanglos ó Einbußen an Integrität und an der Kraft der Evangeliumsbotschaft.

Wie kann man säkulare Ansichten angreifen? Nicht bei Randthemen (z. B. ihr Versagen, wenn es darum geht, den eigenen Prinzipien gerecht zu werden), sondern an dem von Vorurteilen beherrschten Kern ihres Glaubens. Der effiziente Weg, ein baufälliges Gebäude abzureißen, beginnt nicht am Dach, indem man die Dachpfannen eine nach der andern herunternimmt; man muss die Fundamente sprengen, dann wird das gesamte Gebäude zusammenfallen. Nehmen Sie den Fall des Marxismus: sein grundlegender Irrtum besteht in der Annahme, dass Änderungen bei den Produktionsmitteln einer Gesellschaft Ñneue Menschen" hervorbringen wird ó ein Proletariat ó fähig eine vollkommene, klassenlose Gesellschaft zu schaffen [17]. Aber in der Geschichte der Menschheit haben Modifikationen der außerhalb des Menschen liegenden Umwelt niemals die selbstsüchtige Natur des Menschen verändert. Genau derselbe Trugschluss liegt im Herzen der liberalen, westlichen, utopischen Gesellschaftsplanung. Reißt die Slums ab; ersetzt sie durch saubere, neue Gebäude; bringt die gleichen Leute in die neuen Gebäude ó und die Gebäude werden schon bald wieder Slums sein. Wie Jesus es zusammengefasst hat (und die menschliche Erfahrung bestätigt dies völlig): ÑWas aus dem Menschen herauskommt, das macht den Menschen unrein, denn von innen, aus dem Herzen der Menschen, kommen heraus böse Gedanken, Unzucht, Diebstahl, Mord, Ehebruch, Habgier, Bosheit, Arglist, Ausschweifung,... Alle diese bösen Dinge kommen von innen heraus und machen den Menschen unrein" [18]. Nur eine persönliche, lebendige Beziehung zu Jesus dem Retter kann das Herz umwandeln: ÑIst jemand in Christus, so ist er eine neue Kreatur; das Alte ist vergangen, siehe, Neues ist geworden" [19].

Darüber hinaus dürfen wir keine Angst haben, die abwegige Logik nichtchristlicher Positionen anzugreifen. Auch wenn, wie oben ausgeführt, die Widerlegung nicht stichhaltiger Gesichtspunkte noch nicht die Wahrheit der eigenen erweist, ist es wichtig, die falschen Hoffnungen zu entfernen, die Nicht-Christen oft davon abhalten, die Sache des Christentums auch nur in Erwägung zu ziehen. Nehmen Sie als ein offensichtliches Beispiel das koranische Bild von Jesus, das dem elementaren Wesen der neutestamentlichen Beschreibung von Ihm als dem einzigartigen Sohn Gottes, der auf die Erde gekommen ist, um für die Sünden der Welt zu sterben, widerspricht. Da das neutestamentliche Zeugnis von Augenzeugen oder engen Vertrauten von Augenzeugen stammt, während Mohammeds Material sechshundert Jahre später plötzlich auftaucht, würde niemand mit dem geringsten historischen Sachverstand das letztere dem ersteren vorziehen [20].

Ein anderes Stück klassischer nichtchristlicher Unlogik ist das oft gehörte Argument, dass der Glaube an Gott nichts hilft, da man sich immer noch mit der Frage beschäftigen muss: ÑWer schuf Gott?" Da aber ein unendliches Zurückdenken nichts bringt, muss man den Argumentationsprozess entweder mit dem Universum oder mit dem Schöpfer des Universums beenden; und da das Universum offenkundig abhängig ist (nichts in ihm kann sich selbst erklären), ist es wesentlich vernünftiger, jenseits des Universums einen nicht-abhängigen, absoluten Schöpfergott anzurufen, als das Universum zu vergöttern, indem man ó mythologisch ó vorgibt, es sei in Wirklichkeit nicht abhängig! Diejenigen, die letzteres tun, zeigen, dass es der Ungläubige ist, der die Mythen erfindet, nicht der Theist ó und zeigen nicht nur beiläufig, dass Freud es genau umdrehte als er darauf bestand, dass an Gott Glaubende mythologisch eine Illusion göttlicher Existenz schaffen. Tatsächlich aber ist es der Theist, der der Realist ist, und der Atheist, der die Illusion erzeugt, dass die Welt selbständig, selbsterklärend und deshalb absolut sei [21].

An dritter Stelle, außer willig und bereit zu sein, die Hoffnungslosigkeit und Unlogik nichtchristlicher Weltanschauungen deutlich zu machen, muss der Apologet des 21. Jahrhunderts einen positiven, zwingenden Beweis zur Unterstützung des christlichen Anspruchs anbieten. Beachten Sie sorgfältig die Sprache des Apostels: ÑSeid allezeit bereit zur Verantwortung [gr., apologia] vor jedermann, der von euch Rechenschaft fordert über die Hoffnung, die in euch ist" [22]. Lediglich die gute Nachricht zu predigen oder die Hoffnung zu verkündigen, ist niemals genug! Man muss immer einen Grund für die Hoffnung angeben. Dies kann als Axiom vorgebracht werden:

[3] Apologetik ist nicht Predigen

Welche Art eines positiven Beweises ist vorzulegen? Der Fokus muss auf einer Darlegung der Zuverlässigkeit des Anspruchs unseres Herrn, Ñder Weg, die Wahrheit und das Leben" zu sein, liegen, so dass ein Suchender verstehen kann, warum Er erklärt hat, dass Ñniemand zum Vater kommt denn durch mich". Wir sind nicht dafür zuständig, Menschen zu überzeugen, Deisten, Theisten oder Mitglieder bestimmter religiöser Organisationen zu werden. Wir sind dafür zuständig, Menschen zu überzeugen, Jesus als persönlichen Retter anzunehmen ó als den Einzigen, der Ñsie von ihren Sünden erlösen" kann. Wenn man sich dafür einsetzen will, gibt es keinen Weg, eine Argumentation für die Zuverlässigkeit der neutestamentlichen Dokumente, die Vertrauenswürdigkeit des darin enthaltenen Zeugnisses von Jesus und die Tatsächlichkeit Seiner Auferstehung von den Toten als dem endgültigen Beweis Seines Anspruchs zu vermeiden [23].

Eine solche Argumentation kann z. B. von Theodor Zahns bedeutendem Kommentar zum Johannesevangelium profitieren, der die apostolische Verfasserschaft des Buches zeigt, und Adolf Harnacks Begründung zur Unterstützung der Datierung der synoptischen Evangelien in die Generation, die zur Zeit der Kreuzigung Jesu lebte. (die Apostelgeschichte muss vor 64-65 n. Chr. geschrieben worden sein, da sie den Tod von Paulus, ihrer zentralen Persönlichkeit, nicht berichtet; das Lukasevangelium, das vom selben Autor stammt, muss vor der Apostelgeschichte geschrieben worden sein; und Lukas nutzte Markus als eine seiner Quellen ó wodurch der Zeitpunkt der Abfassung von Markus sogar noch weiter zurückgeschoben wird). Im Allgemeinen müssen die Ansprüche und die Subjektivität, die schlechte wissenschaftliche Arbeit der Form- und Redaktionskritiker an allen Fronten bekämpft werden. Die höhere Kritik ist der einzige schlimmste Todfeind, den der Apologet des 21. Jahrhunderts besiegen muss [24]. Sich zurückzuziehen in die Frömmigkeit oder eine Averroës-ähnlichen Lehre der Ñzweifältigen Wahrheit" (Ñja, die Evangelien sind historisch unzuverlässig, aber nein, unsere Glaubenserfahrung von Jesus bleibt fest.), bedeutet jegliche Glaubwürdigkeit der christlichen Botschaft zu zerstören und jede bedeutsame Verteidigung ihrer Wahrheit zu beseitigen.

Ein viertes wesentliches Mittel für eine heutige effektive Apologetik ist die Bereitschaft, die schwierigsten Probleme anzusprechen, die den Ungläubigen beschäftigen. So oft bieten Christen vorgefertigte Antworten zu unbedeutenden Schwierigkeiten (das Vereinbaren der Königslisten in den Könige- und Chronikebüchern; Erklärungen für die offensichtliche Spannung zwischen ÑGlauben" bei Paulus und Ñguten Werke" bei Jakobus; usw.) ó während das, was einen Nichtchristen davon abhält, Christ zu werden, ignoriert oder umgangen wird. Wir müssen darauf vorbereitet sein, uns mit solchen Themen wie der empfundenen Irrationalität und fehlenden Gerechtigkeit in der Welt (der Holocaust; 11. September 2001) auseinanderzusetzen. Der Ungläubige wird dieses gegen unser Anliegen des Anspruchs Jesu abwägen, und mag überlegen, dass diese Schrecken jedes Argument für ÑGott in Christus, der die Welt mit sich selbst versöhnt" völlig aufwiegen. Hier werden wir Neuland betreten müssen. Zum Beispiel können wir herausstellen, dass die eigentliche Überlegung nicht darin besteht, die Anzahl der Schreckensereignisse in der Geschichte gegen das Einzelereignis in Jesus Christus zu setzen (eine Frage der Quantität), sondern in dem qualitativen Problem ob dies, selbst wenn nur ein einziger Fall von Bösem und Irrationalität in der Menschheitsgeschichte vorgekommen wäre, mit der Existenz eines liebenden Gottes, der in die Welt kommt, um für eine gefallene Spezies zu sterben, vereinbar wäre? Da Liebe den freien Willen mit sich bringt und da der Gott der Bibel sich selbst als vollkommen gut offenbart, sind Irrationalität und Böses (in jedwedem Umfang) Fehler des Geschöpfes nicht des Schöpfers; und Gottes Bereitschaft, für uns unverdient zu leiden, sollte uns eher mit Dankbarkeit erfüllen als Kritik an seinen moralischen Grundsätzen hervorzurufen. Eine solche Argumentation mag die Frage nicht erschöpfend behandeln, aber wenigsten umgeht sie nicht die ehrlichen Bedenken des Nichtchristen.

Zum Schluss muss der Apologet des 21. Jahrhunderts die Apologetik viel ernster nehmen. Er muss die Apologetik in jeden Aspekt seines oder ihres geistlichen Dienstes einbeziehen: jede Predigt, jeden Unterricht, jede evangelistische Aktivität. Wir haben unsere Verantwortung, unsere jungen Leute in den soliden Argumenten für das Christentum zu schulen, erschreckend vernachlässigt und dann wundern wir uns, warum sie den Glauben unter dem Einfluss der säkularen universitären Unterweisung verlassen. Wir geben unseren Gemeindemitgliedern und unseren Missionaren keine Basis in der Verteidigung des Glaubens, und dann wundern wir uns, warum unsere evangelistischen Anstrengungen so wenig Frucht bringen in einer Welt, in der Menschen lange darüber hinaus sind, etwas zu akzeptieren, nur weil jemand anderes es glaubt.

Zusammengefasst, wir müssen zu unseren biblischen und theologischen Grundlagen zurückkehren, um den Platz zu finden, den die Apologetik im christlichen geistlichen Dienst haben sollte. Dieser Platz ist vollkommen klar. Wir haben zu tun, was der Apostel tat: ÑAls aber Paulus in Athen auf sie wartete, ergrimmte sein Geist in ihm, als er die Stadt voller Götzenbilder sah. Und er redete zu den Juden und den Gottesfürchtigen in den Synagogen und täglich auf dem Markt zu denen, die sich einfanden. Einige Philosophen aber, Epikureer und Stoiker..." [25]. Wir sollen Ñalles allen werden, damit einige gerettet werden, ein Jude dem Juden und ein Grieche den Griechen" ó was die Notwendigkeit nach sich zieht, Begründungen für den Glauben zu geben, da es das ist, was so viele unserer Zeitgenossen, Juden und Heiden, fordern, bevor sie sich voll und ganz auf die Glaubensposition einlassen. Wir dürfen den Glauben, der einst den Heiligen anvertraut wurde, nicht auf eine kultische Angelegenheit innerer Erfahrung und persönlichen Zeugnisses reduzieren. Es gibt genügend irrationale Religionen und Sekten in unserer Welt des 21. Jahrhunderts, auch ohne dem Ungläubigen den Eindruck zu vermitteln, das Christentum sei lediglich eine davon.

Und deshalb, ein letzter (und diesmal positiver) Grundsatz:

[4] APOLOGETIK = IMMER EINEN GRUND FÜR DIE HOFFNUNG ANGEBEN

ANHANG: DIE GRUNDSATZ-SAMMLUNG

[1] Apologetik ist nicht Dogmatik
[2] Apologetik ist nicht Philosophie
[3] Apologetik ist nicht Predigen
[4] APOLOGETIK = IMMER EINEN GRUND FÜR DIE HOFFNUNG ANGEBEN

* Ein Einführungsvortrag bei der Hoffnung-für-Europa-Konferenz der Evangelischen Allianz, gehalten in Budapest, Ungarn, 27. April ó 1. Mai 2002. John Warwick Montgomery, Ph. D. (Chicago), D. Théol. (Strasbourg), ist Professor für Recht und Theologie und Vizepräsident für Akademische Angelegenheiten ó Vereinigtes Königreich und Europa, Trinity College und Theologisches Seminar (Indiana, USA); Emeritierter Professor für Recht und Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Luton (England); Rechtsanwalt, England und Wales; Mitglied der am Obersten Gerichtshof der Vereinigten Staaten zugelassenen Anwaltschaft.

1. Als englischer Rechtsanwalt wurde ich vor einigen Jahren in der Angelegenheit Bonny Woods vs. Scientologykirche aufgesucht. Woods und ihr Ehemann waren von Scientology zum evangelischen Christentum übergetreten und hatten einen gegen den Scientology-Kult gerichteten geistlichen Dienst begonnen, um anderen zu helfen, Scientology zu verlassen. Daraufhin wurden sie von der Scientologykirche wegen Diffamierung verklagt. Mit ihren gewaltigen finanziellen Ressourcen hätte die Kirche die Woods leicht in den Bankrott treiben können, auch wenn die letzteren legal im Recht waren. Unsere Strategie war es, bei Gericht die Offenlegung aller Gründungsunterlagen der Kirche zu beantragen ó auf der Grundlage, dass der einzige Weg zu erkennen, ob die Kirche tatsächlich diffamiert worden sei, ist herauszufinden, was sie wirklich glaubt und was sie gegenüber ihren Mitgliedern praktiziert und wie sie Anhänger gewinnt. Wie wir erwartet hatten, ließ die Kirche eher die Klage fallen als ihre Absichten aufzudecken.

2. Vgl. Reuel Marc Gerecht, ÑThe Gospel According to Osama bin Laden", Atlantic Monthly, Januar 2002, S. 46-48

3. Klassischerweise wurden Dogmatik und Apologetik natürlich als zwei der drei Zweige der Systematischen Theologie behandelt (der dritte ist Ethik). Heute ist die apologetische Unterweisung in theologischen Fakultäten praktisch verschwunden. Im besten Fall erscheint sie in verfälschter Form in religionsphilosophischen Vorlesungen.

4. siehe mein Buch, ÑFaith Founded on Fact" (erhältlich, zusammen mit den meisten meiner apologetischen Schriften, beim Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy, Edmonton, Alberta, Kanada); website: www.lights.com/caninst/. Traurigerweise glaubte der große calvinistische Dogmatiker Cornelius Van Til, dass seine bedeutende apologetische Leistung, gegenüber B. B. Warfield, darin bestand, Gott, der sich selbst in der Schrift offenbart, zum Ausgangspunkt sowohl der Apologetik als auch der Dogmatik zu machen. Warfield wusste jedoch was er tat: Eine Apologetik, die darauf besteht, dass der Nichtchrist dort beginnt, wo der Christ beginnt, ist in Wirklichkeit überhaupt keine Apologetik. Im besten Fall ist es Verkündigung; im schlechtesten ist es einfach kontraproduktiv.

7. Paul Badham, Einführung zu Leslie Badham, ÑVerdict on Jesus" (4. Aufl.; Wantage, V.K.: Ikon Productions, 1995), S. XV

8. John Warwick Montgomery, ÑWhy Has God Incarnate Suddenly Become Mythical?" in "Perspectives on Evangelical Theology", Hrsg. Kenneth S. Kantzer und Stanley N. Gundry (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1979), S. 57-65

9. siehe u. a. Stuart Sim (Hrsg.), ÑThe Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought" (Cambridge, England: Icon Books, 1998)

10. Zwei ausgezeichnete Gegendarstellungen zu solchem Denken sind: Noretta Koertge (Hrsg.), ÑA House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), und Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ÑIs There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Leicester: Apollos/Inter-Varsity Press, 1998)

13. Bede, ÑEcclesiastical History", ii. 13. Vgl. John Warwick Montgomery, "The Suicide of Christian Theology" (Newburgh, Indiana: Trinity Press, 1998), besonders S. 42-43. Der große zeitgenössische englische christliche Jurist Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone betitelte seine zweite Autobiographie "The Sparrow's Flight"; an seinem Gedenkgottesdienst wurde auf seinen W4nsch ein von ihm verfasstes Gedicht verlesen, in dem er von sich selbst als gerade solch einem Spatzen spricht.

14. Obwohl Camus allgemein als ein säkularer Existentialist angesehen wird, dachte er zu der Zeit als er bei einem Autounfall ums Leben kam, ernsthaft darüber nach, sich christlich taufen zu lassen von einem meiner Studenten, damals Gastprediger an der American Church in Paris: siehe Howard Mumma, ÑAlbert Camus and the Minister" (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2000)

15. vgl. John Warwick Montgomery, ÑMyth, Allegory and Gospel" (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1974)

16. Bruce Fink, ÑA Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), S. 7

17. siehe John Warwick Montgomery, ÑThe Marxist Approach to Human Rights: Analysis and Critique", 3 "Simon Greenleaf Law Review" (1983-84), passim

20. siehe John Warwick Montgomery, ÑHow Muslims Do Apologetics", 51 ÑMuslim World" (April und Juli 1961), nachgedruckt in seinem ÑFaith Founded on Fact" (Nashville und New York: Thomas Nelson, 1978)

21. John Warwick Montgomery, ÑChristianity for the Toughminded" (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1973), S. 21-34

23. siehe John Warwick Montgomery, ÑHistory, Law and Christianity" (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 2002); ÑWhere is History Going? Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of the Christian Revelation" (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1969). "Where is History Going?" wurde in Deutsch unter dem Titel ÑWeltgeschichte wohin?" veröffentlicht (Stuttgart-Neuhausen: Hänssler Verlag, 1977)

24. Die deutschen Arbeiten von Gerhard Maier sind in dieser Hinsicht besonders empfehlenswert; in Englisch siehe sein Buch ÑThe End of the Historical-Critical Method", übersetzt von E. W. Leverenz und R. F. Norden (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia, 1977

For a Russian version of this essay, download the Adobe Acrobat .pdf file HERE

God at University College Dublin

John Warwick Montgomery*

On 8 October 2008, the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin sponsored a debate on the motion “That this house finds it irrational to believe in God.” In the 19th century, philosopher and lay theologian Søren Kierkegaard warned against such occasions; in his Concluding Scientific Postscript he asked whether raising such a question was not like standing in the presence of a mighty king and demanding evidence that he exists.

Nonetheless, I accepted the Society’s invitation to head the “God side” in this debate. Why? For one thing because of the prestige of the Literary & Historical Society. It was founded in 1855—before University College itself—and by no less a personage than the great Christian apologist John Henry Newman. The Society remains the largest and most distinguished university society in Ireland—comparable to the Oxford Union and Cambridge Union debating societies in England. Among notables who have been invited to speak at the Literary & Historical Society: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, every President and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland since the founding of the Republic, Noam Chomsky, John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne, and Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam. It seemed to me that in that context God deserved a proper hearing—particularly in light of the secular reactions to a legalistic Roman Catholicism which have driven many Irish (for example, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) to radical unbelief.

There were to be three invitees on each side of the debate. Supporting the proposition: Dr Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist, currently senior research associate in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology; Fred Edwords, executive secretary of the American Humanist Association; and Dr Lewis Wolpert, English developmental biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society (who, the day of the debate, notified the Literary & Historical Society that, for reasons of health, he had to cancel; he was replaced by a substitute from University College).

I chose in support of the opposition Dr Angus Menuge, professor of philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin and fellow and diplomate of the International Academy of Apologetics, Strasbourg, France; and Dr Alistair Noble, chemist and intelligent design expert from Scotland.

The debate took place in a University College auditorium seating 400; roughly 350 students and faculty members attended. Each speaker was given 7 minutes to present his case, and this was followed by questions to the speakers from the audience, and, finally, the audience vote. The order was: Edwords followed by Menuge; Carroll followed by Noble; and the Wolpert substitute followed by Montgomery.

Edwords’ argument was simply that humanity is the highest value and that the notion of God is hopelessly confused (theism? pantheism? polytheism?) and thus irrational. Carroll, in line with his published article, “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” declared that there was no reason why the universe needed to have a beginning; indeed, when he had taught an undergraduate course on the history of atheism at the University of Chicago he had found that reason had little or nothing to do with whether students were believers in God or atheists. As a typical Californian, Carroll dressed informally and quipped that a good reason to disbelieve in God was the presence of Sarah Palin as Republican vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 election! The Wolpert stand-in presented the argument of Wolpert’s latest book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief: “Religious beliefs . . . all had their origin in the evolution of causal beliefs, which in turn had its origins in tool use.”

How did our “God team” counter these arguments?

Edwords’ claim that human values are enough left aside the critical need for an absolute ethic and inalienable rights. Water doesn’t rise above its own level—and standards deriving only from the human condition are inevitably limited and tainted by the human beings and societies formulating them. The humanist has no rational way of condemning, for example, the atrocities of the Hitler or Stalinist régimes, since the disvalues at the root of them were also human products. As Ludwig Wittgenstein declared in his Tractatus, “Ethics is transcendental”—meaning that values, to be absolute, would have to arise from outside the human situation. Moreover, as is well documented, atheistic régimes in modern times have committed vastly more atrocities and violations of human rights than can be attributed to believers in prior centuries—and the reason is clear: if there is no God, people have no inherent worth and can be manipulated (indeed, eliminated) with impunity to serve any political or ideological end. “Without God,” Dostoyevsky, observed, “all things are permissible.”

Carroll’s claim that the universe can rationally be regarded as infinite—as all there is—runs into gigantic difficulties, and we pointed them out. First, on the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Olbers’ paradox, etc., most cosmologists consider the universe to be finite. The Big Bang, supported by the Hubble/Doppler red-shift, is seen as the beginning of matter, energy, space and time, and thus requires an explanation (which God does not, since he is self-existent, having no beginning). Einstein himself moved from a belief in an eternal universe to an acceptance of Big Bang cosmology--viewing his own effort to correct his General Theory of Relativity to support an eternal, non-expanding universe as his “biggest blunder.” Indeed, an actual infinite constitutes an irrational notion (as mathematician Georg Cantor and logician David Hilbert have shown); it follows that the universe cannot have this property, whereas God, as a spirit, is not subject to such a restriction. Further, cosmologist Alan Guth, in an important article, has shown that “inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete,” i.e., that “inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of spacetimes.” So, even if the universe is perpetually “inflating,” it still had a beginning—which can only be accounted for by the existence of a transcendent God not bound by space-time considerations.

Moreover, as Martin J. Rees and others have so effectively shown, the universe is finely-tuned, requiring an intelligent creator. The so-called Anthropic-principle argument that this may seem to be the case only in our universe as compared with the infinite possibility of “multiverses” is little more than (as convert from atheism Antony Flew has well put it) an example of “escape routes . . . to preserve the nontheist status quo.” Why? Because the existence of universes other than our own has zero empirical evidence supporting their facticity; and even if they existed we would have no grounds for asserting that they would not be finely-tuned; and, finally, were there to be a multiplicity of universes, we would need a “multiverse generator” to explain them—which would simply push the need to assert God’s existence a step backward, in no sense eliminating it.

Fascinatingly, in private discussion, Carroll said that he was now trying to find a way to show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was not necessarily applicable universally—thus allowing for an eternal universe. This, to be sure, revealed Carroll’s underlying metaphysical bias—his commitment to reductionistic naturalism—and the great gulf lying between his atheism and scientific objectivity. Naturally, we are waiting with bated breath for his repeal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

My presentation came at the very end. My object was briefly to deal with Wolpert’s thesis and, more importantly, to pull together the arguments of the God-side.

The notion that tool-making led to an understanding of causation and that in turn led to belief in God suffers from two appalling logical fallacies: post hoc, ergo propter hoc (the fact that two things—here, causation and religious belief—happen together does not in any way show that the one produces the other), and the genetic fallacy (the idea that the origin of something determines its ultimate truth value). In the latter case, we should remember such examples as the discovery of ammonia by the alchemist Brandt whilst he was boiling toads in urine: the value of ammonia is not (fortunately) dependent on the circumstances of its origin. And suppose we found that mathematical ability had a strictly genetic basis: would that mean that mathematics was invalid? It follows that even if religious beliefs had their source in tool-making cum realisation of causation, this would say nothing as to whether those religious beliefs might in fact be true. One must determine whether the object of religious belief (God) is a reality—and that is an entirely separate question from the determination as to how beliefs come about psychologically or developmentally.

As for Wolpert’s reductionist-materialist account of the human mind and its beliefs, two further points were worth making. First, such scholars as psychologist Paul Vitz (Faith of the Fatherless) have argued that God-denial is a psychological aberration, explicable by the unfortunate experiences of the atheists holding that viewpoint. Secondly, there is powerful evidence that the mind and personality cannot be accounted for by the genetic uniqueness of the brain. Nobel Prize winner in physiology Sir John Eccles, in dialogue with Karl Popper, declared: “I am constrained to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.” The same point has been made by Mario Beauregard in his recent book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.

I then endeavoured to point up the common element in all the atheist arguments presented by the other side. They all were in fact variants on the celebrated comment of Laplace when Napoleon, having read Laplace’s groundbreaking L’Exposition du système du monde (1796), commented: “Your work is excellent but there is no trace of God in it.” Laplace: “Sire, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse” [I had no need of that hypothesis]. The issue of God’s existence is, at root, whether his existence is or is not needed to account for our world, our history, and our needs.

Fascinatingly (and this came up in the audience question time), the same point was made in the famous Flew-Wisdom parable: “Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees: “There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.' So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G.Wells' The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible c1imber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?'”

The striking thing about this parable is that one of its authors, Antony Flew—probably the most influential philosophical atheist of the 20th century—became a believer in God in 2004. Flew’s sea change was due to the force of the evidence for intelligent design, especially for the fine-tuning of the universe. The “eternally elusive gardener” was not at all as elusive as the parable suggested!

I concluded with what I see as the most fundamental and most relevant reason for the God hypothesis: the impossibility otherwise of successfully accounting for Jesus Christ. I observed that Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (another scientist giving the lie to Carroll’s claim that “cosmologist” is virtually synonymous with “atheist”) noted in the conclusion to his book, God’s Universe: “Jesus is the supreme example of personal communication from God. When the apostle Philip requested, ‘Show us the Father,’ Jesus responded, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’”

Jesus’ words and acts were reported by reliable, primary-source eyewitnesses in the New Testament records—documents “far better attested than that of any other work of ancient literature,” according to Sir Frederick Kenyon and other preeminent textual critics. In these solid historical sources, Jesus rises from the dead, attesting his claim to be God incarnate, come to earth to die for the sins of the world. Humean arguments against the miraculous fall by the wayside in the face of an Einsteinian universe open to the possibility of all events, including miraculous ones—Hume’s case having been decimated even by secular philosophers such as John Earman (Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles). Indeed, Archbishop Richard Whately—of Dublin fame—produced his wonderful satire, Historic Doubts Concerning Napoleon Buonaparte, having the theme that if the Humean arguments against the reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus were applied to Napoleon, one would have to deny his existence.

One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s sage observation in his Three Essays on Religion: “It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been super-added by the tradition of his followers. Who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings of Jesus or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.”

I emphasized that proof depends largely on what is to be proved and that there are conditions connected with a given object of proof. If someone in the audience were to deny the fact of electricity, I could of course provide abstract and theoretical arguments in behalf of its reality; but it would be more effective if I stuck his or her finger into a light socket! By the same token, the biblical accounts of Jesus claim that these texts are the very word of God—constituting the “power/dynamic (Greek, dynamis) of God unto salvation.” New Testament scholar J. B. Phillips said that translating those documents was like “wiring a house without turning the mains off.” And J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, said of the Gospel story: “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.”

Are you the audience willing to go to those documents? I asked. No more than a “suspension of disbelief” is required. If you do, you will not be able to account for Jesus apart from God—apart from his in fact being God. Some years ago André Frossard, a French journalist, published his autobiography with the title, Dieu existe, je l’ai rencontré [God exists: I’ve met him]. That can be your story as well.

Ponder two unsettling quotations. Pascal: “There is enough light for those who really want to see—and enough darkness for those with a contrary disposition.” And (inevitably) John Henry Newman: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

The audience voted to defeat the proposition. For them it was not the case that “this house finds it irrational to believe in God.”

* John Warwick Montgomery (Ph.D., Chicago; D.Théol., Strasbourg: LL.D., Cardiff), Professor Emeritus of Law and Humanities, University of Bedfordshire, U.K.; Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Christian Thought, Patrick Henry College, Virginia, U.S.A.; Director, International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights, Strasbourg, France; Barrister-at-Law, England and Wales; Member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court; inscrit au Barreau de Paris; websites: <www.jwm.christendom.co.uk> <www.apologeticsacademy.eu> <www.ciltpp.com>

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