Tag Archives: Apologetics

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Contrasting two approaches to religion: truth vs crutch

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I went to church today and we got a sermon from a guest speaker who espouses the standard felt needs / mysticism / Bible-verses-as-incantation-with-magical-powers view of evangelism.

I just thought that I would write it down while it was fresh in my mind. So below I’ll contrast my view of evangelism with what I will call the felt needs view of evangelism.

1) Who is to be evangelized?

My view: anyone, with an emphasis on people who are willing to listen to your evidence and change their mind on that basis

Felt needs view: People who are poor, ignorant, sick or who are grieving a recent death in the family, people who do not make decisions based on truth and evidence, but on emotions and superstition

2) What is the central issue in evangelism?

My view: the truth of the propositions, e.g. – does God exist, did Jesus rise from the dead

Felt needs view: making people feel good by telling them pleasing things that they have no basis for believing

3) How is the gospel preached?

My view: you explain the truth claims of the Christian faith then appeal to objective evidence, especially from science and history

Felt needs view: you knock on stranger’s doors and tell them how you used to be bad and unhappy and now you’re good and happy and you achieved this by reading the Bible, singing songs, attending church and believing things that you are not able to give an answer for

4) Why should we adopt your view of evangelism?

My view: Because this is the same view of decision-making that is used in the business world, the scientific world, or any other human endeavor where we must make careful decisions about things that matter. And what’s more, this method is Biblical – preparing a defense and presenting evidence IS the Biblical method of evangelism.

Felt needs view: once upon a time some Muslims had a death in their family and I baked them a cake and then they were all in my church 2 weeks later – all 13 of them! That really happened! Oh oh, and there was an old woman on a bus and she converted the bus driver when he annoyed at a red light by telling him that Jesus would turn the light green if he believed in Jesus, and then the whole busload of people converted, too! That really happened! You just have to “share” your faith with people who have an emotional need and tell children Bible stories when they are 6 and 7!

I work with a lot of people that I meet through my blog on their skills and evangelism. One of them had a message waiting for me in my inbox when I got home talking about how she had had a discussion with an annoying atheist who disapproved of her spiritual life. She used the following arguments on him: kalam, fine-tuning, moral, intelligent design, resurrection. He responded with no arguments. She was very excited about it and very comfortable in her faith, and he went away without an excuse. Whether he has a need or not, he knows that ought to adopt Christianity because it is true. She presented it as true and his emotional state was irrelevant to the discussion.

In contrast, consider where the felt needs approach to evangelism leads:

Schuller: Tell me, what do you think is the future of Christianity?

Graham: Well, Christianity and being a true believer–you know, I think there’s the Body of Christ. This comes from all the Christian groups around the world, outside the Christian groups. I think everybody that loves Christ, or knows Christ, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re members of the Body of Christ. And I don’t think that we’re going to see a great sweeping revival, that will turn the whole world to Christ at any time. I think James answered that, the Apostle James in the first council in Jerusalem, when he said that God’s purpose for this age is to call out a people for His name.

And that’s what God is doing today, He’s calling people out of the world for His name, whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world, or the Christian world or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they’ve been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light that they have, and I think that they are saved, and that they’re going to be with us in heaven.

Schuller: What, what I hear you saying that it’s possible for Jesus Christ to come into human hearts and soul and life, even if they’ve been born in darkness and have never had exposure to the Bible. Is that a correct interpretation of what you’re saying?

Graham: Yes, it is, because I believe that. I’ve met people in various parts of the world in tribal situations, that they have never seen a Bible or heard about a Bible, and never heard of Jesus, but they’ve believed in their hearts that there was a God, and they’ve tried to live a life that was quite apart from the surrounding community in which they lived.

Schuller: I’m so thrilled to hear you say this. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy.

Graham: There is. There definitely is.

If you don’t think that the gospel is about sin, and a man dying on a cross for those sins and then rising from the dead, then you think it’s about people’s feelings, and all that’s needed is for them to “believe” things that they have no reasons to believe, so that they will feel better about their need. Or, maybe they just have an emotional experience without believing anything about Christianity and that emotional experience helps their need. Being saved means having your needs met through belief in things you haven’t investigated. This is the approach of evangelism used by many today – even by some guest speakers in my church. Read comforting words, tell comforting stories, believe in things you can’t test or prove. Feel better. Avoid discussions and debates with people who have no needs and sufferings for you to exploit. If someone doesn’t have a need to believe things that are true, then you have nothing to say to them. Do you know where atheists get the idea that Christians believe nonsense because they need a crutch in order to feel better about their weaknesses? They get it from us. We tell them that. We do.

One thing this annoying sermon did do was to cause me to pray about legitimate obstacles to evangelism. For example, I prayed that the laws that encourage people to silence and coerced Christians would be repealed. I prayed that people would be less insular about their own religions and be willing to listen to others from outside their faith. I prayed that people would choose their religion on the basis of truth and evidence, and not because of where they are born and what their families and communities require. I prayed that people stopped identifying religion with nationalism, race and culture. I prayed that people would dedicate more of their time to investigating what is really true using logic, science and history. I prayed that people would investigate whether anyone made the universe for a purpose, what happens when they die, and what Jesus claimed about such things when he was here among us. I prayed that the schools and the culture would not spread lies about behaviors and speculative theories that encourage people to get into sinful lifestyles before they have had the opportunity to investigate religion on the merits. And I prayed that the New Atheist caricature of faith as blind belief in order to address felt needs would not be adopted by Christians, and even by charismatic visiting Christian speakers speaking in my church.

Mentoring

Eight tips for talking to non-Christians about Christianity

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From Stand to Reason – some excellent tactical advice from a master apologist.

Here’s the setup:

I overheard a conversation on the airplane coming back from my vacation in Wisconsin.  A Christian gentleman was vigorously sharing his faith with a gentleman in the seat directly behind me.  There are some things we can learn, both good and bad, from what I overheard and take his effort—which was a good one—and channel it in a little bit more constructive direction.

So I am going to give you eight points of application.

And here are my favorites from his list:

3.  Try to stay away from religious language, terminology, and religious affect. This person was very religious in his whole approach.  I think this is hard for us as Christians because we are brought up in a Christian environment and it’s natural for us to talk this way, but it sounds weird to people outside of that environment.  I think there are a lot of people who may be, in principle, interested in a bona fide, genuine relationship with God through Jesus Christ but who are not interested in the Christian religion as they perceive it.  This is where I think a lot of the emergent guys have a legitimate bone to pick with Evangelicalism.  Let’s try not to sound like Bible-thumping fundamentalists if we can avoid it, even if that’s what we are, because there’s no need to sound that way if it puts people off.  Find another way to communicate the message.  Just talk in a straightforward manner.  Be conscious of using religious language the other person may not understand or may think is strange.  Avoid all of that so they can hear the message you’re trying to communicate.

4.  Focus on the truth, not personal benefits of Christianity. I appreciated the gentleman’s approach in that he kept talking about truth.  One person he was talking to said he liked reincarnation.  The Christian man said that even if he liked reincarnation that that didn’t make it true if it’s not true.  Liking something is not going to change reality.  That’s a great point.  He was focusing on the truth claims of Jesus.  He wasn’t giving a bunch of promises.  He wasn’t saying, “Jesus is my ice cream.  He’s a great flavor.  Try him to see if you like him, too.”  Or, “Try Jesus because he’ll make your life so wonderful.”  Focus on truth and not personal benefits.

5.  Give evidence. This gentleman was giving all kinds of evidence for his seatmates to consider.  Good for him!  You should too.  You know why?  Because people in the Bible did, too.  Jesus, Paul, Peter, all the Apostles.  If you look at the details of how they communicated their faith they gave evidence for the truth of what they were saying about Jesus.  In fact, if you want to get the content of the Gospel, one of the most famous passages for the articulation of the Gospel is the beginning of 1 Corinthian 15.  Paul gives all kinds of evidence.  It’s all right there as he is explaining the Gospel.  We see that all through the New Testament.  So give evidences.  It’s appropriate.  People do respond to that even in a postmodern age.

I remember that I was once working in Chicago, and after a particular good apologetics discussion with a team of engineers, I apologized to them all for being so exclusive and a fundamentalist. These guys all had MS and PhD degrees in computer science from top schools like Stanford, Purdue, U of I, NIU and Northwestern. They said “you’re not a fundamentalist”. And I said, “but I am ultra-conservative in my theology!”. And they said “That’s ok – as long as you have considered different points of view and you have objective evidence, then somehow it doesn’t sound fundamentalist”.

I think that’s something that we need to work on. When Christianity is about truth, it’s open to investigation using public evidence. At work, I have explained the structure of DNA molecules in the office and had people rolling their chairs out of their cubicles to come and see me draw amino acid chains on a white board, and calculate the probabilities with a calculator. You can be a fundamentalist, without sounding like a fundamentalist. You just have to focus on public, testable evidence.

Look here:

Make religion about truth – not personal preferences. They respect that way of talking – as long as you bring the science and the history.

Mentoring

Douglas Groothuis’ 752-page Christian apologetics book is now under $22

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Christian Apologetics
Christian Apologetics

Looking for a good textbook on apologetics that covers everything you need to know? Check out Dr. Groothuis’ book. It’s now under $22 on Amazon.

Here are the chapters:

Part I: Apologetic Preliminaries
1 Introduction: Hope, Despair and Knowing Reality
2 The Biblical Basis for Apologetics
3 Apologetic Method: Evaluating Worldviews
4 The Christian Worldview
5 Distortions of the Christian Worldview–or the God I Don’t Believe In
6 Truth Defined and Defended
7 Why Truth Matters Most: Searching for Truth in Postmodern Times
8 Faith, Risk and Rationality: The Prudential Incentives to Christian Faith

Part II: The Case for Christian Theism
9 In Defense of Theistic Arguments
10 The Ontological Argument
11 Cosmological Arguments: A Cause for the Cosmos
12 The Design Argument: Cosmic Fine-Tuning
13 Origins, Design and Darwinism
14 Evidence for Intelligent Design
15 The Moral Argument for God
16 The Argument from Religious Experience
17 The Uniqueness of Humanity: Consciousness and Cognition
18 Deposed Royalty: Pascal’s Anthropological Argument
19 Jesus of Nazareth: How Historians Can Know Him and Why It Matters by Craig L. Bloomberg
20 The Claims, Credentials and Achievements of Jesus Christ
21 Defending the Incarnation
22 The Resurrection of Jesus

Part III: Objections to Christian Theism
23 Religious Pluralism: Many Religions, One Truth
24 Apologetics and the Challenge of Islam
25 The Problem of Evil: Dead Ends and the Christian Answer
26 Conclusion: Take It to the Streets

Appendix 1 Hell on Trial
Appendix 2 Apologetic Issues in the Old Testament by Richard S. Hess

Here’s a review of the book by Michael D. Stark.

Introduction:

Contemporary Christians interested in apologetics can now turn to another text that is bound to become one of the most-used textbooks in apologetics. Douglas Groothuis’ Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for the Biblical Faith (InterVarsity, 2011) may have more breadth both in content and wisdom than any apologetics text to date. The subtitle is justified as the book, over 700 pages and 26 chapters long (not including two appendixes), presents the need for apologetics and explores the main philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Unlike other apologetics texts, Groothuis includes chapters examining truth in postmodern society, religious pluralism, and a tactful approach to dealing with Islam. Furthermore, biblical scholars (and Denver Seminary colleagues) Richard Hess and Craig Blomberg build on an already strong text by writing chapters on apologetics in the Old Testament (Appendix 2) and a historical approach to the person of Christ and the gospels, respectively.

Here’s a snip from the review:

The chapter on cosmological arguments is superb and only further qualifies Groothuis as a proficient thinker. This chapter without question is the chapter I learned the most from. Groothuis engages very difficult scientific and philosophical concepts and communicates them in a way that even the beginner will be able to grasp. Though there are many different versions of the cosmological argument, the chapter hones in on the kalam cosmological argument as put forth by William Lane Craig. The kalam argument is superior to other cosmological arguments in that it supposedly secures the theistic doctrine of ex nihilo if the arguments proves successful (note: a minor quibble of this chapter is that Groothuis purports that the Thomistic cosmological argument does not endorse ex nihilo. I believe this to be false). This specific chapter was sensational – however I was left disappointed that no time was given to addressing the cosmological argument posited by Aquinas. In some respects, the Thomistic cosmological argument is the simplest form for people new to apologetics. The Thomistic version does not get into the technical issues of the metaphysics of time and Big Bang cosmology that the kalam version uses, nor does it require knowledge of the principle of sufficient reason that the Leibnizian version necessitates. While the kalam and Leibnizian versions are logical and sound arguments, they may confusing to people new to apologetics. Because of this, beginners ought to take the time to read this chapter slowly and more than once because of the finer technical details.

Chapters 12-14 are devoted to the design argument and issues relating to it. Groothuis opposes macroevolution and thus goes to great extent to battle Darwinism. Those interested in the philosophy of science will be drawn to these chapters. The chapter focused on intelligent design relies heavily on the work of William Dembski and Michael Behe. These chapters serve as a valuable introduction for those new to discussion between Christian and naturalistic sciences.

Chapter 15 is perhaps the most successful chapter of the entire book as it deals with the moral argument. It is my belief that the moral argument is the most successful argument for the existence of God as it appeals to everyone, Christian, atheist, and non-Christian religious persons. Ethical theory may perhaps be the most widely debated philosophical topic throughout history and thus Groothuis could have taken many approaches when discussing the moral argument. The way he structured his chapter, however, is nearly flawless. Building off his chapter examining truth in the postmodern culture (chapter 7), Groothuis correlates the denial of objective truth to the ridding of objective moral value. He unmercifully attacks moral relativism and brilliantly shows its dangers. He states that cultural relativism reduces to individual relativism, which, in turn, ultimately rests on nihilism. The setup of this reductio ad absurdum points the reader to a moral system that does not reduce to nihilism. Thus, a worldview that embraces objective moral truths must be embraced. Groothuis makes the claim that the source of objective moral truths is found in the absolute Being – God. Groothuis puts for the notion that God is the source of all perfect moral code because he himself is incapable of an evil act as it would be a contradiction of God’s Being.

I think that the big advantage you get from Doug Groothuis is his worldview. He has the most fully-integrated worldview of any Christian scholar I know.

I bought one copy of Dr. Groothuis’ book, but I gave it away. So I got myself another one. It’s a must have. My favorite four apologetics books are this one, “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview” by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, Michael Licona’s “The Resurrection of Jesus” and Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell”. I think that if you add Wayne Grudem’s “Politics According to the Bible” to that list, then that’s a very practical set of tools.