Until the Enlightenment the churches were on the whole quite secure in their own positions. The apologist, speaking from the stable platform of official Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, had only to refute the adversaries and convince them of their errors. With the rise of deism, and even more, under idealism and liberalism, the lines between defense and attack became increasingly blurred. The type of Christianity that some apologists sought to defend appeared to many of their colleagues as a betrayal of the tradition. With thinkers such as Lessing, Hegel, Strauss, and even Harnack, it is hard to know to what extent they are to be regarded as objectors and to what extent as upholders of the faith.
By the beginning of the twentieth century it is possible to speak of two basic types of apologetics: a defensive type that seeks to argue unbelievers into submission to the faith as traditionally understood and a revisionist type that seeks to forge a new synthesis between religious and secular knowledge. The thoughtful apologist is likely to be situated in a no-man’s land between conservative Christians and radical unbelievers. The new types of apologetical theology that develop in the twentieth century—from Catholic Modernism and Protestant liberalism in the early decades to Christian existentialism in the fourth decade and secular Christianity in the sixth decade—are sources of scandal and conflict within the churches themselves.
Blondel and the Modernists
The most vital center of apologetical thought at the turn of the century was undoubtedly France. The general atmosphere was, like a century earlier, anti-intellectualist.1 The exorbitant claims of positivistic science no less than those of the Enlightenment provoked a reaction against the objectivity of the calculating mind. The dominant philosophy in university circles was a neo-Kantianism that excluded belief from the sphere of competence of critical reason. Protestant fideism, which reached its highest apex in the theology of Auguste Sabatier and Eugene Menengoz, maintained that faith rested upon no rational foundations.2 From across the English Channel came the ideas of the English statesman Arthur J. Balfour (1848—1930), who contended that people’s fundamental attitudes are determined by authority—a very broad term that in his usage included instinct, custom, and environmental conditioning.3 To this was added the influence of the American pragmatist William James (1842—1910), who in various books translated into French called attention to the affective elements in faith and to the roots of religion in the psychology of the unconscious.4
In Catholic apologetics new movements attuned to the times were led by Leon Olle-Laprune (1839—1898) and Fernand Brunetiere (1869—1906). The former, a professor at the Ecole Normale in Paris, wrote a doctoral dissertation on moral certitude in which he stressed the free and voluntary character of faith; he advocated Catholicism on the basis of its harmony with the deepest aspirations of the human heart.5 Brunetiere, a renowned literary critic who became a convert to Catholicism, wrote the preface to the French translation of Balfour’s work. Here and elsewhere he spoke of the “bankruptcy of science” and its incapacity to furnish guidance for life. “One does not demonstrate the divinity of Christ”, he wrote; “one believes it or one does not.”6
It was in this anti-rationalist neo-Kantian atmosphere at Paris that Maurice Blondel (1861—1949) began his career as an apologist. His first publication, dedicated to his director of studies at the Ecole Normale, Olle-Laprune, was his dissertation, L’Action.7 Strictly speaking it was a philosophical, not an apologetical, work. It addressed itself to the problem whether and how the question of the supernatural can legitimately present itself to an intellectual formed according to the demands of contemporary philosophy. Blondel attempted to show that human action, rigorously analyzed, inevitably raises questions regarding human destiny and the meaning of human life. The human will at its deepest level aspires to a fulfillment beyond anything this world can give. All of us crave for a communion with God that we cannot obtain by our own efforts. Every attempt to give ourselves to God without His giving Himself to us turns out, on examination, to be illusory and superstitious. Hence we must humbly wait and dispose ourselves to receive a share in the divine life, should God graciously invite us into communion with Himself. Philosophy cannot establish the reality of the supernatural gift, but it can show that the idea of such a gift holds a necessary place in the total logic of life.
Toward the end ofL’Action Blondel has some discussion of the manner in which we might recognize and assimilate the thought and life of God, were the gift to be made. Without humility and abnegation we would not be disposed to receive. The presence of the supernatural, moreover, cannot be established by stringent proofs of a quasi-mathematical kind but only by a type of experimentation. If we act as though we had faith, we may discover through the expansion and intensification of our lives that there are sufficient reasons for affirming the reality of revelation.8
In 1895 the editor of the Annales de philosophie chretienne wrote an article, “New Tendencies in Philosophical Apologetics”, in which he presented L’Action as a rejection of all metaphysical approaches to apologetics in favor of one that was purely psychological. This partial misrepresentation of his thought provided Blondel with an occasion to set forth his views on apologetics. He replied in a lengthy “Letter on the Requirements of Contemporary Thought in the Field of Apologetics. . . .”9 The article consists of three main parts, the first two of which are pertinent to the present inquiry. Part 1 deals with current methods of apologetics. It begins with a general statement to the effect that apologetics should not opportunistically content itself with specious arguments that are practically persuasive but should limit itself to speculatively valid arguments that can stand the test of criticism. Then Blondel proceeds to criticize five forms of apologetics currently in use:
1. Scientific apologetics occupies itself with seeking to harmonize the conclusions of the positive sciences with the dogmas of the Church. This effort (Blondel may have had the work of Duilhe de Saint-Projet in mind) rests on the fallacious assumption that science is seeking to give a picture of reality whereas in fact science is using symbols functionally for pragmatic aims. This method, therefore, is a waste of time.
2. Others such as Paul de Broglie seek to establish Christianity as a historical fact, as though it could be known by ordinary historical testimony. This method erroneously presupposes that the supernatural can be scientifically verified. Furthermore this approach fails to explain why one does not have the right to ignore the Christian fact, since it is necessary for everyone to disregard many other alleged facts.
3. Still others such as Chateaubriand and Olle-Laprune wish to prove Christianity on the ground that it is a source of cultural and moral benefits. This argument, says Blondel, has value for those who have some inner experience of Christianity, but it fails to establish that Christianity is more than a human doctrine. For nonbelievers such an inventory of spiritual treasures is meaningless and even irritating.
4. Georges Fonsegrive (1852—1917), in a conference titled “The Conditions of Modern Apologetics” (Annales, 1895), had called for recognition of “the identity between Catholicism and life”. This identity, even if established, would point only to the natural truth of Catholicism. Fonsegrive, moreover, made some unfortunate statements about the “parallelism” between dogma and the natural order that suggested that the two orders never interpenetrated.
5. The seminary textbooks rely chiefly on the order and completeness of the Thomistic system but fail to show that that system meets contemporary questions and needs. Thinkers of our day, however, are justified in demanding that religious truth should be not only coherent in itself but also perfective of humanity.
In Part 2 Blondel expounds his own method. He begins by asserting that modern thought takes for granted the principle of immanence, namely, that “nothing can enter into a man’s mind which does not come out of him and correspond in some way to a need for development.”10 To meet this exigency Blondel proposes what he calls the “method of immanence”. In the rest of the section he summarizes in substance the dialectic already developed in L’Action. If we seek out the implicit affirmations that underlie all our actions, we will see that philosophy cannot avoid the question of the supernatural. “Only practical action, the effective action of our lives, will settle for each one of us, in secret, the question of the relations between the soul and God.”11 If we act in accordance with our best lights, grace will enable us to experience that it is good and reasonable to believe.
Blondel was often accused of contradicting the doctrine of Vatican Council I on the motives of credibility. Partly to offset such charges he wrote, under the name of his friend Canon François Mallet, three articles comparing his system with that of Cardinal Dechamps.12 He praised Dechamps for recognizing that the moral dispositions are not merely extrinsic and preparatory but permanent and constitutive for the approach to faith. He found in Dechamps his own conviction that “apologetics must tend not only to make us know and believe but. . . also and primarily to make us be and act more and better.”13 Elsewhere Blondel praises Dechamps for his recognition that the Church provides an atmosphere in which the sacred fire of faith can be effectively transmitted.14
In many of his writings Blondel deplored the extrinsicism of the conventional argument from miracles. The miracle, he complained, is treated as a mere label “simply detached from the facts and placarded at the entrance of the dogmatic fortress”.15 For Blondel there was an unbreakable connection between the nature of the miraculous deed, its significance, and its evidential value. To recognize a miracle it is not sufficient that it be perceived as anomalous and enigmatic. Christian miracles move people to belief insofar as they are expressive symbols of God’s extraordinary goodness in extending His offer of friendship to man.16
Influenced by the philosophy of indeterminism and by the scientific theory according to which all physical laws are merely statistical, Blondel vigorously rejected the definition of miracle, rather commonly accepted since the time of Hume, as an exception to the laws of nature. For him there could be no strictly scientific demonstration of miracles. As exceptional events, produced and intended by God as signs, miracles could not be recognized except by persons who were attuned by suitable spiritual dispositions. For those properly prepared, miracles could be conducive to Christian faith: “Miracles, then, are miraculous only in the eyes of those who are already prepared to recognize the divine action in the most ordinary events and acts.”17
Blondel’s views on the recognition of miracles excited a long and heated controversy in France.18 He was energetically attacked by conservative Catholic apologists such as Abbe Hippolyte Gayraud and especially by the Dominican Salvador Schwalm, who accused him of subjectivism and immanentism. He was defended, on the other hand, by his disciple Lucien Laberthonniere (1860—1932). This young and eloquent Oratorian priest made some rather extreme statements in opposition to authority and enduring dogma. Suspected of Modernism, he was silenced by ecclesiastical superiors with the result that he never fulfilled his early promise.
Wounded as Blondel was by the attack from the right, he was even more gravely harmed by the acclaim he received from the theological left. Alfred Loisy (1857—1940), writing under the pen name Firmin, praised him for reviving the true Augustinian concept of miracle, which Loisy then proceeded to use in support of his own fideism. “Miracle”, he wrote, “is the train of the world, contemplated by faith, which alone penetrates its enigma.”19 In much the same spirit the Bergsonian philosopher Edouard Le Roy (1870—1954) proclaimed that miracles, instead of generating faith, are engendered by it.20 Blondel was much disturbed by Le Roy’s exaggerations and answered them under the pen name of Bernard de Sailly in an article entitled “La Notion et le role du miracle”.21 He insisted again that the miracle is an objectively real occurrence that solicits faith and actually leads on to faith in the case of those who respond to it with the interior prompting of grace.
The Modernists, with Loisy at their head, were strongly influenced by various evolutionary, pantheistic, vitalistic, and pragmatistic currents in contemporary thought. They looked upon faith primarily as a feeling or experience rather than as adherence to any definable truth. In their view apologetics ought to lead people to the experience of the Catholic religion rather than seek to persuade them by arguments that that religion is true. According to Loisy, “The profound and universal reason for faith is nothing but the conformity of religion with the needs and aspirations of man.”22 While admitting that arguments could be given, Loisy maintained that these arguments sufficed only to give probability and were not the true reason for assent.
George Tyrrell (1861—1909), an English Jesuit who shared with Loisy the theological leadership of the Modernist movement, likewise espoused a vitalist apologetic, influenced by pragmatism. Purely objective and abstract arguments, he held, are ineffective. For apologetical evidences to win acceptance, they must be connected with a person’s religious life. An affective apologetics, which dwells on the beauties and advantages resulting from religion, to some extent fills this need, but its appeal is a mere seduction and temptation unless one can show that what is beautiful and satisfying is also true. Tyrrell’s thesis is that everyone is equipped with a religious sense “whose developments, healthy or unhealthy, furnish an experimental criterion of belief, one whose verdict is often not less considerable than that of a strictly intellectual criterion”.23 Applying the “criterion of life, of spiritual fruitfulness”24 he seeks in his Lex orandi to give an experimental proof of Christianity. The true reason one adheres to Christianity, he asserts, cannot be stated in apologetical arguments. “The reasons we give to our mind are but after-justifications of an impulse that derives, not from reason, but from the sympathetic intuitions of the Spirit of Holiness.”25 The touchstone, in the last analysis, is the collective verdict of the spiritual experience of the Church. Lex orandi est lex credendi.
Church authorities feared that Modernism at least in some of its most prominent representatives was leading toward naturalism, if not toward pantheistic monism, and was disfiguring the gospel. The reaction of Rome was strong; it uprooted some wheat with the tares. The encyclical Pascendi in its discussion of apologetics appeared to condemn not so much Loisy as Blondel. Of the apologetics of Modernism it stated: “The goal that it sets for itself is this: to lead a man who lacks faith in such a way that he undergoes that experience of the Catholic religion which, according to the Modernists, is the sole foundation of faith.”26
The encyclical goes on to deplore the views of those Catholics “who, while rejecting the doctrines of immanence, nevertheless use it for apologetics and thus dangerously speak as though human nature possessed not only a capacity and suitability for the supernatural order—as Catholic apologists, with due reservations, have always shown—but a true exigency properly so called”.27
Another Vatican document, the Oath against Modernism (1910), reaffirmed with added emphasis what Vatican Council I had taught concerning the demonstrability of the existence of God and added with regard to the signs of revelation: “I admit and recognize the external signs of revelation—that is, divine facts, and primarily miracles and prophecies—as most certain signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion, and I hold that these signs are excellently suited to the understanding of all ages and all men, even those of today.”28 The atmosphere of suspicion and heresy-hunting brought on by these condemnations made it difficult for moderate Catholic scholars to express their views openly and frankly until almost the middle of the twentieth century.
Credibility and Apologetics: Scholastic Controversies in France
The controversy about miracles provoked by Blondel was only part of a far-reaching discussion of the motives of credibility and the nature of apologetics. The current textbooks and the seminary tradition at the time distinguished very clearly between two orders: natural and supernatural. The assent of faith, it was agreed, was gratuitously elevated and hence supernatural; but as a free moral action it had to measure up to the norms governing all such actions, including the norm of prudence. The prudence of the act was guaranteed by the reasonableness of the decision to believe. According to the standard authors this could be shown by an apologetical demonstration that did not rest upon any supernatural subjective aids.
By substituting a logic of action for a logic of objective inference and by utilizing God’s interior call to communion with Himself as an ingredient in the apologetic process, Blondel struck at the foundations of the accepted approach. Many felt that he was undermining the rational character of the act of faith and the possibility of scientific apologetics. Some Scholastic authors, however, sought to give the apologetic of immanence some status, at least secondary or supplementary, within a basically traditional approach. The most important effort along this line was that of the Dominican Ambroise Gardeil (1859—1931).
Gardeil’s approach29 is built upon a distinction between the normal and the exceptional approaches to faith. In the normal case, he holds, the prudence of faith is guaranteed by a speculatively certain judgment of credibility that relies on external evidences as judged by the natural light of reason. This judgment may be rigorously scientific or it may be a matter of ordinary knowledge, not rigorously methodical. The task of apologetics is to establish in a general way the credibility of Catholic dogma by arguments that are valid in themselves and capable of being appreciated by persons competent to follow historical and philosophical evidences. Apologetics, while it seeks to demonstrate the credibility of the Christian religion by stringent proofs, does not refuse to employ “topical” arguments that have merely probable force.
Gardeil, however, admits that there are persons who by reason of their lack of ability, their ignorance, or their prejudices are incapable of appreciating the objective arguments of credibility. For these too, he says, faith is possible thanks to various subjective helps that by motivating the will to believe compensate for the lack of objectively valid reasons. It is the merit of “subjective apologetics”, he holds, to have underscored the appetibility of revelation. Gardeil distinguishes three types of subjective apologetics—basically those respectively of Blondel, Olle-Laprune, and Brunetiere. First, there is the “apologetics of action”, which moves people toward faith by bringing out their incapacity to beatify themselves. Second, there is “moral apologetics”, which calls attention to the harmonies between faith and moral aspirations. Third, there is “fideist apologetics”, which prompts people to act on the hypothesis that faith is valid and thereby makes them more susceptible to the impulses of grace. Subjective apologetics, Gardeil believes, is too individual a matter to constitute a strict science; neither is it capable of furnishing objectively sufficient reasons for holding that Christianity is a divine revelation; but it should not be denied all place in apologetical literature. Gardeil suggests that there should be a special practical discipline adjoined to apologetics that would study the subjective conditions that can better dispose untutored persons or those confused by modern agnostic philosophies to receive the gift of faith.
A disciple of Gardeil, Ambroise de Poulpiquet, went beyond him in refusing to regard the affective and subjective elements in the approach to faith as mere “suppleances”, whose function would be to compensate for a lack of intellectual capacity.30 For anyone to arrive at faith, he argued, the will must be drawn by the desire to believe. A complete apologetics should therefore include both intellectual and affective elements. Whereas Gardeil had defined apologetics as the science of the credibility of Catholic dogma, Poulpiquet defined it as “the demonstration of the credibility and of the appetibility of dogma”.31
The mediating positions of Gardeil and Poulpiquet were received with great interest on all sides. Traditionally oriented theologians such as the Jesuits Jean Vincent Bainvel and Henry Pinard de la Boullaye felt that in the case of the “simple”, these authors had not sufficiently saved the reasonableness of faith. Pinard objected against both Gardeil and Poulpiquet that moral and spiritual impulses were not destitute of evidential value. Poulpiquet in addition failed to safeguard the unity of apologetics. This unity could be restored if credentity, rather than credibility, were taken to be the formal object of apologetics. “We define apologetics as: the rational justification of the duty to believe.”32
For his part, Blondel was dissatisfied with the concessions made by Gardeil and Poulpiquet. In a brochure initially published under the name of B. de Sailly33 he protested that Gardeil had driven a wedge between intellect and will, between credibility and appetibility, between objectivity and subjectivity. He separated men into two classes: those who believe (as St. Thomas’s demons do), because coerced by the evidences, and those who believe without an adequate rational basis, on the basis of “subjective supplements”. Why should the “faith of demons” be treated as the ideal or even the normal case? Poulpiquet had advanced beyond Gardeil in perceiving that the internal and volitional elements as well as the external and intellectual are normally necessary, but he went astray in constructing two kinds of apologetics, the one without motive power and the other without light.
In a number of important articles on the theology of faith published between 1910 and 1914, the young French Jesuit Pierre Rousselot (1878—1915) gave a more traditional expression to some of Blondel’s theses regarding the evidences of credibility.34 Appealing to St. Thomas’s views on the active dynamism of the intellect toward truth and on the role of connaturality in the knowledge of moral and spiritual matters, Rousselot found a basis in Scholasticism for the Blondelian doctrine that subjectivity plays an essential role in the discernment of signs. Rousselot went so far as to declare that without the subjective attunement of supernatural grace it is impossible to perceive the revelatory significance of the signs of credibility. He held that the judgment of credibility is temporally simultaneous with the act of faith itself. In his view, therefore, it is a serious error to limit apologetics as Gardeil and the modern Scholastics did to the establishment of a purely natural credibility. While giving Blondel credit for making great advances, Rousselot preferred not to rely on Blondel’s arguments from the soul’s restlessness toward the divine as “an interior fact”. For Rousselot the function of grace was not to provide new evidences but to give man the “eyes of faith”, thanks to which he could interpret the supernatural significance of the external evidences and grasp their probative value.35
While many theologians recognized that Rousselot had made an important contribution by pointing out that grace is normally at work in anyone who is approaching the decision of faith and that grace has an illuminating effect on the mind, Rousselot was vigorously attacked for his denial that there could be a purely natural judgment of credibility, and particularly for his efforts to attribute this doctrine to St. Thomas. While the principle of reciprocal causality was indeed a Thomistic one, Thomas does not seem to have held that faith and the judgment of credibility are mutually causative of each other. According to many competent scholars, St. Thomas taught that it was possible, without the help of grace, to achieve a firm and objectively founded judgment that Christianity is a divine revelation.36
After Rousselot’s death many of the ablest Catholic theologians made use of his theological insights for the renewal of apologetics. His influence was very great upon Jesuit apologetical theologians such as Joseph Huby, Joseph Bonsirven, Jules Lebreton, and subsequently Guy de Broglie, Henri Bouillard, and Felix Malmberg. Outside the Society of Jesus, theologians such as Pierre Tiberghien and Eugene Masure applied Rousselot’s principles to apologetics. Tiberghien in his Does Science Lead to God?37 argued that the scientific and philosophical arguments for the divine origin of miracles are never conclusive unless the subject studying the evidences is enlightened by grace. Masure in The Apologetical Highroad38 warmly approved of the apologetics of immanence. It was too little, he held, to call it—as some Blondelians had—a “threshold apologetics” (apologetique du seuil); rather it was an “apologetics of the crypt”, sustaining from below the entire structure of the evidences of credibility. He agreed with Tiberghien that miraculous signs do not have supernatural significance except for those who, thanks to the impulses of grace, are restless for personal communion with God.
A further problem much discussed by Catholic theologians in the early twentieth century concerned the relationship between apologetics and theology. Gardeil, followed by Xavier-Marie Le Bachelet,39 made a distinction between apologetics or “apologetical science” on the one hand and apologetical theology on the other. Gardeil explains: “Apologetical science moved from outside to inside, from reason to the credibility of the object of faith. Apologetical theology will move from inside to outside, from the object of faith and from its credibility, presupposed as beyond dispute, to the rational arguments that can defend these.”40
Gardeil’s eminent pupil Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877—1964), in several articles published in 1919 and 1920, developed an alternative position, which he restates succinctly in the Prolegomena to his manual, Revelation Declared through the Catholic Church.41 The apologist, he maintains, is not an inquirer but a defender of the faith. As a believer he makes use of the authoritative theological sources—Scripture and tradition in its various forms—to establish what revelation is and to what extent it can be rendered evident by external signs. Drawing upon his resources as a theologian the apologist is able to give his discipline the unity, order, integrity, and depth without which it would be defective as a science. While apologetics is a theological science, it differs from sacred theology properly so called insofar as the apologist does not presuppose faith in his readers and consequently does not argue from articles of faith. Under the direction of faith the apologist constructs arguments that are valid before natural reason.42 In establishing apologetics on a firm theological basis Garrigou-Lagrange made a clear step forward, but unfortunately his apologetical method remained imprisoned in the narrow rationalistic framework of the Roman textbook tradition. In the second volume of his manual he applied a step-by-step deductive approach to the question of Jesus as a divinely authoritative teacher.
The Refutation of Rationalism
In the early part of the century the reliance of apologetics on the teaching authority of Jesus Christ made it more urgent than ever to refute New Testament scholars such as Strauss, Renan, and Harnack, who questioned the divine claims and the miracles of Jesus. Many Catholic apologists therefore concentrated on the problem of Jesus.
The Swiss Capuchin Hilarin Felder (1867—1951) produced a prodigiously learned refutation of rationalist exegesis entitled Christ and the Critics.43 After first vindicating the historical value of the New Testament sources this work establishes successively the messianic consciousness of Jesus, His divine consciousness, His intellectual and moral perfection, His miracles, and His Resurrection. Felder claims to conduct his investigation by the objective techniques of scientific history. Early in his work he proves to his satisfaction (if not to that of the reader) that the Gospels are “in their full extent and in the strictest sense of the word, historical authorities and scientific evidence”.44 Once this is granted he has a relatively easy time proving the absurdity of the difficulties raised by critical exegetes. After overthrowing the adversaries one by one, he arrives at the triumphant conclusion: “And just as only that study of Christ which confesses the Messiahship and divinity of our Saviour can lay claim to the spirit of Christianity, so only can such a study claim to follow a scientific method. Every christological conception which regards Jesus as a mere man is, if historically considered, a fanciful monstrosity.”45
A more nuanced approach along similar lines was developed by the great French Jesuit Leonce de Grandmaison (1868—1927). Assigned by superiors in 1899 to teach a new treatise, “De Christo legato”, he did so for more than ten years before composing his important article “Jesus Christ” for the Apologetical Dictionary of the Catholic Faith.46 In a preliminary section on method, he specifies that the problem of Jesus is to be solved apologetically not by faith itself but by an objective, critical approach that treats the Gospels as though they were merely human historical documents. In the first portion of his article he establishes that the Gospels are reliable historical sources. Then he goes on to demonstrate that Jesus presented Himself as a divine-human mediator, as Son of God. In a third section he shows that Jesus vindicated His claims by miracles and prophecies and, in the closing section, that the Father bore witness to Jesus by raising Him from the dead. Although the Resurrection, considered from the point of view of faith, transcends the dimensions of historical fact, it must be treated in apologetics, according to Grandmaison, in its human and historical dimensions.
In the last years of his life Grandmaison expanded this article into his great work Jesus Christ: His Person, His Message, His Credentials.47 A remarkable feature of this work is the series of valuable excursuses on special problems in exegesis and the history of religions.
Grandmaison wrote with such a splendid combination of learning, style, and devotion that his work is simultaneously instructive, delightful, and inspiring. But in the light of a later generation it seems regrettable that he felt obliged to confine himself within the straitjacket of positivistic historiography. He shows some embarrassment in trying to handle, by the method he sets for himself, mysteries such as the Resurrection and the divinity of Jesus. Thanks to his personal faith and piety, his work is more impressive than the limitations of his method would seem to promise.
In the person of H. Pinard de la Boullaye (1874—1958), whose early work on apologetical method has been mentioned above, the cathedral of Notre Dame found a distinguished successor to Lacordaire and Ravignan. In his Lenten conferences from 1928 to 1937, Pinard transported into the pulpit the fruits of his fundamental theology courses given at the Jesuit scholasticate of Enghien in the previous fifteen years. Of particular apologetical worth were his sermons of 1929 on the historicity of the Gospels and of Paul; those of 1930 on Jesus’s Messiahship and Resurrection; and those of 1931 on Jesus’s miracles and prophecies. The published volumes containing these sermons are fully equipped with learned footnotes, but the style is unmistakably oratorical. The argumentation takes the positivist, historical form already examined in Felder and Grandmaison.
French Catholicism in the first half of the century produced some remarkable efforts of collaboration, the most outstanding being the Apologetical Dictionary of the Catholic Faith. It takes up the main subjects pertaining to fundamental theology (God, Christ, Church, Scripture, etc.), the other religions and the dissident Christian groups, and subsidiary questions in the fields of doctrine, history, science, etc., that have made for religious controversy. The editor, Adhemar d’Ales, gathered an exceptional team of scholars including not only Grandmaison and Le Bachelet, whose contributions we have already mentioned, but also Lebreton (Trinity), Y. de la Briere (Church), Teilhard de Chardin (Man), Rousselot (Intellectualism), Bainvel (Faith), Mangenot (Canon), Duchesne (Gnosis), Harent (Modernism, Pope), Prat (Paul), Pinard de la Boullaye (Religious Experience), the Valensin brothers (Immanence, Doctrine and Method of),48 and M. de la Taille (Insurrection).
On a somewhat less ambitious scale, but also very comprehensive, was the bulky tome Apologetics published in 1937 under the joint editorship of Maurice Brilliant and Maurice Nedoncelle.49 It contained articles by prominent scholars on the main questions taken up in the standard seminary apologetics course, e.g., the philosophy of religion, natural theology, the possibility of revelation, the historical value of the Old and New Testaments, the status of the dissident churches and of the non-Christian religions, and the common objections to Catholic Christianity. The volume was reissued in 1948 with some revisions, especially as regards the relationship between science and religion. In the revised edition it was thought proper to reduce the article on the history of apologetics from eighty pages to ten!
On the occasion of the first edition of the publication just noted, one of the contributors, the Louvain Scripture scholar Joseph Coppens, in a frequently noticed essay, ventured to summarize the current state of Catholic evidences.50 His summary comes down to an inductive apologetic reminiscent of Newman (whom he frequently quotes) and the Abbe de Broglie. “The figure of Jesus”, he concludes at one point, “is so transcendent and unique in religious beauty, both for Jews and for pagans, that souls in search of the truth will not hesitate, after having come to know him, to give themselves to him in an act of faith and trust as the best guide that history offers them on the road to religious truth and salvation.”51
The triumphs of atheistic Communism in Russia, in the judgment of some Catholics, called for a new Summa contra gentiles. In 1937 Yvan Kologrivov edited such a work. In 1950 it was thoroughly revised under the editorship of Jacques de Bivort de la Saudee and reissued in 1953 with several new chapters.52 The work in its final form was intended not simply as a reply to Marxists but as a general refutation of scientific materialism on those points where this philosophy collided with Catholic orthodoxy. The work explored at some length questions such as the origins of man and the world, the spirituality of the soul, and the relations between the Church and capitalism. The contributions by Henri de Lubac on the origins of religion and by Yves M.-J. Congar on the problem of evil—to mention only two—placed this work far above the normal level of apologetical symposia.
Meanwhile the flow of Latin seminary manuals on the Roman pattern continued unabated.53 Commonly these works consist of two main parts: first a general Christian demonstration following the basic lines of Grandmaison’s article, and then a Catholic demonstration that seeks to prove that the Church founded by Christ has the same essential characteristics as, and is historically continuous with, the Roman Catholic Church of today. Monotonously similar to one another, these manuals uniformly reject the “method of immanence” and the theses of Rousselot regarding the discernment of supernatural signs. They hold that miracles and prophecies are certainly knowable by unaided human reason and are the primary signs vindicating the divine authority of Jesus Christ. They conclude that the only reasonable position is to accept the credibility of Catholic Christianity.
As already noted in the work of Perrone, the simplicity of the argument in these Scholastic manuals had obvious pedagogical advantages over the bulky Teutonic treatises of the late nineteenth century. But the apparent clarity of the demonstration is dissatisfying to the critical reader. The manner in which the argument is structured—in a series of theses, each of which presupposes its predecessors and is independent of those that are to follow—makes it necessary to claim certitude for every major affirmation and to overlook the inductive logic of converging probabilities as developed by Butler, Newman, and others.
The more perceptive Catholic theologians—especially those influenced by Rousselot—were not unaware of these limitations of seminary apologetics. In a notable article published as early as 193054 Henri de Lubac castigated “the apologetics of yesterday” as being too mean, too opportunistic, too superficial, and too untheological. It remained too much in the area of extrinsic criteria and failed to enter boldly into the sanctuary of revealed truth. There is no valid apologetics, according to de Lubac, that does not begin and end in theology, understood as a quest for a deeper understanding of faith. The principal sign of credibility, he argued, is the doctrine of Jesus Christ, which by its brilliance bears witness to itself in the deepest recesses of the human heart.55
The most incisive Catholic critique of textbook apologetics was perhaps that of Jean Levie, professor at the Jesuit scholasticate in Louvain. In his Under the Eyes of the Unbeliever56 he applies to apologetics the ideas of Pierre Rousselot and of Joseph Marechal regarding the dynamism of the human intellect and will in their restless search for communion with the infinite. Apologetics, he maintains, must present Christ and the Church as living signs of God’s infinite charity toward mankind. Only when viewed in relation to this center of intelligibility can the claims and miracles of Jesus, as narrated in the New Testament, appear credible.
In the course of his argument Levie calls attention to five erroneous postulates that underlie the scientific-historical apologetics of the seminary manuals:
1. that the examination of the evidences of credibility can suitably be made without any consideration of the specific content of revelation;
2. that the evidences of credibility are equally accessible to all persons of good will, whether believers or unbelievers;
3. that by rigorous application of profane historical method one can arrive at stringent conclusions regarding the religious significance of Christ;
4. that the moral and religious dispositions of the subject play no positive role in the apologetical process;
5. that each of the arguments of credibility is an independent whole, which can reach its conclusion without the concurrence of the others.
By relentlessly criticizing each of these postulates, Levie intellectually demolished many of the specific positions of the Roman school and the popular apologetics deriving from that school.
Under Pope Pius XII (1939—1958) official Roman directives showed a gradual but hesitant relaxation of the anti-Modernist strictures in the area of fundamental theology. In his encyclical in biblical studies (Divino afflante Spiritu, 1943) Pius XII accepted the literary principles of form criticism with regard to the Old Testament and New Testament—an acceptance later to be confirmed by Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, 1965). The encyclical Humani generis (1950), warning against an imprudent irenicism that would stray from the approved tradition of the Church, reiterated the possibility of a purely natural knowledge of God and of the moral law, and insisted that God had provided sufficient external signs of credibility so that the divine origin of the Christian faith could be certainly proved “by the merely natural light of reason”.57
The Apologetics of Restoration
A very influential stream of Catholic apologetics in the first half of the century took the form of a critique of modern culture. It maintained that the modern West in rejecting the divine authority of the Church was ineluctably plunging toward the abyss of nihilism and despair. This approach is especially evident in works by converts seeking to win others to the Catholic faith.
Some of the Catholic apologists of this period were converts from high Anglicanism (e.g., R. H. Benson, R. A. Knox, S. P. Delaney) much concerned with technical points disputed between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, such as the problem of Anglican Orders. But the majority of the converts, both in England and the United States, came from broad and liberal types of Protestantism. They had become convinced that civilization would fall apart without a strong religious authority such as Catholicism alone could offer. Zealous laymen such as David Goldstein and Frank Sheed, as well as highly apostolic priests such as Fulton Sheen, Martin Scott, and John A. O’Brien, swelled the volume of Catholic apologetical writing.
The themes of the convert literature show little variety. Outside the Catholic Church, religion was rapidly declining; dogma was evanescing, church membership was shrinking (Knox). “Protestantism was splintered into a myriad of groups” (Murray Ballantyne). The Protestant churches were in utter bewilderment on moral questions such as birth control, divorce, and spiritualism; only the Catholic Church consistently dared to speak up against the spirit of the times and with accents of authority (Chesterton). Western civilization was still living off the accumulated capital of the ages of faith; but it was illusory to suppose that “it is possible to conserve all of positive and constructive value in the Christian order while removing from it belief in God” (Rosalind Murray). Protestantism had an inner affinity with subjectivism and with the ultimate denial of reason; it had sired empiricism, pragmatism, and was leading to revolt against the very idea of God (Ross Hoffman). To become a Catholic was to assume a part in “an Armageddon-fight between the old culture in which Europe was cradled, and the sharply defined materialistic forces of today” (Knox). “The craving for unity, for consistency, for certainty. . . can be satisfied only where the principle of authority, established by Christ, stands like the rock of Gibraltar against the shifting winds of private fancy” (John A. O’Brien). “The cold clear light of reason is all the guidance a man needs to find his way to the Church” (Lunn).
The spirit of the convert literature is reflected in some of the titles Rebuilding a Lost Faith (John L. Stoddard), Restoration (Ross Hoffman), The Good Pagan’s Failure (Rosalind Murray), The Flight from Reason and Now I See (Arnold Lunn), I Had to Know (Gladys Baker), All or Nothing (Murray Ballantyne)—and even by Thomas Merton’s Dantesque title, The Seven Storey Mountain. The mood was at once rationalist and authoritarian, and on both counts restorationist. The world could save itself only by going back to The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries (James J. Walsh).
The preeminent Catholic apologist of this period was surely Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874—1936).58 His Orthodoxy, published in 1908, some fourteen years before he became a Catholic, set a new tone by its freshness of style, wit, and literary elegance. The book describes the journey by which the author himself came to be convinced of the truth of Christianity, as expressed, for example, in the Apostles’ Creed. He had been a pagan, he says, at the age of twelve and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen. He never read a line of Christian apologetics, a genre of writing that he still dislikes. It was the rationalists who brought him to believe. When he finished reading Herbert Spencer on evolution he found himself doubting whether evolution had occurred at all. When he laid down the book of Colonel Ingersoll’s lectures on atheism, he began to suspect that he must become a Christian. The attacks of unbelievers on Christianity made him conclude that Christianity must be an extraordinary thing, combining vices that seemed incompatible with one another—too pessimistic, too optimistic, too timid, too aggressive, too particularistic and too similar to other religions, too peaceful and too belligerent, too Puritanical and too corrupt! Was it possible that the trouble lay with the critics themselves?
Orthodoxy is essentially a critique of contemporary culture. It brilliantly exposes the shortcomings of liberalism, scientific determinism, materialism, positivism, mechanistic evolutionism, and the like. Chesterton refrains from presenting positive arguments for Christianity because, he says, no number of arguments could do justice to the evidence. Everything points to its truth. Christianity is like a key—irregular, unique—that opens the door to understanding. As he was to say in a later book, The Everlasting Man (1925):
A key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it. . . or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler key. . . . The key. . . is also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, or dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with platitudes about peace and simplicity. . . , it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum. . . . There was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door.59
Chesterton does not see the journey as moving from the simplicity of the world to the deep mystery of faith. Rather, he sees the world as strange and mysterious, and the faith as the source of intelligibility. We are born in a state of confusion, and when we arrive at faith we realize that Christianity is more natural to us than we to ourselves.
In The Everlasting Man Chesterton undertook to offset the simplistic account of world history that H. G. Wells had given in his Outline of History. Chesterton challenges Wells on two essentials. He insists that human beings differ in kind, and not simply in degree, from other animals, and that Christ is unique in kind among all human beings. No other religious leader—including Moses, Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad—made claims to divinity. He did not primarily teach doctrines, but claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life. The religion that Jesus founded “has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside”.60
Chesterton was a great debater whose writing exposed the sham and pretense of secular ideologies. He moved his readers by his humor and his obvious joy in faith. He made them laugh with him at discovering the goodness hidden at the heart of things. Converts from English-speaking Protestantism were in general negative toward the church they had left. They often took the position that Protestantism as a faith was collapsing. Their intended audience would seem to have been persons who loved civilization and reason rather than firm Protestant believers.
Rather different in this respect is the Catholic convert literature published on the European continent toward the middle of the century. Writers such as Cornelia de Vogel, Willem van de Pol, Heinrich Schlier, and Louis Bouyer continued to revere the Protestant principles upon which they had been reared; but they argued that these principles were supplemented and better protected within Catholicism. Not untypical is the chapter in Bouyer’s The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism61 entitled “The Catholic Church Necessary to the Full Flowering of the Principles of the Reformation”. The principles of the Reformation—grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone, and glory to God alone—were still a live issue on the Continent in the 1950sas they had not been in the English-speaking world for a generation.
A similar restorationist spirit undergirded the revival of Scholastic philosophy under the leadership of two brilliant French laymen, Étienne Gilson (1884—1978) and Jacques Maritain (1882—1973). Both of them were convinced that modern philosophy could not revive unless it returned to the metaphysics of philosophia perennis and that metaphysics itself could not survive outside of the Christian atmosphere in which it had achieved its highest development.
Gilson, who was primarily a historian of medieval philosophy, began to set forth his personal convictions in the 1930s and 1940s. In his Gifford Lectures of 1931—1932 he formulated with masterly clarity his notion of Christian philosophy: “I call Christian every philosophy which, although keeping the two orders formally distinct, nevertheless considers the Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary of reason.”62 The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy by Gilson is an apologia for such a philosophy, and hence indirectly for Christianity itself. It traces the healthful impact of the Judeo-Christian revelation on medieval philosophy and shows how the Scholastics were able to rise to a greater rationality, thanks to their divinely given knowledge of the origin and goal of humanity and the world.
Several years later in The Unity of Philosophical Experience63 Gilson contended that the various efforts to revive philosophy after the Middle Ages had inevitably come to nothing because they had neglected to return to the metaphysics of being, the keystone of medieval philosophy.
Speaking at the Harvard tercentenary in 1936, at a time when Hitler was rising to the peak of his power, Gilson pleaded for a restoration of medieval universalism. “The aim and purpose of this communication”, he began, “is to describe a certain aspect of medieval thought and medieval culture that can rightly be considered as typical of that period, and whose lasting value is so high that everything should be done to revive it under some form suitable to our own times.”64 The principle was that truth is universal in its own right and that it belongs to mankind as a whole. The rampant nationalism of the day, according to Gilson, was the natural result of a process that began with the rejection of the authority of God. “The sad fact is that after losing our common faith, our common philosophy, and our common art, we are in great danger of losing even our common science and exchanging it for state-controlled dogmas.”65 The clear implication was that we should return to a common faith, authoritatively determined, in order to safeguard the values of science and philosophy.
Jacques Maritain, a convert to the faith in 1906, devoted his life to the dissemination of Thomism, which he viewed as a philosophy that had been born in and could not survive outside of a Christian atmosphere. “I am convinced”, he wrote, “that what the world and civilization have lacked in the intellectual order for three centuries has been a philosophy which would develop its autonomous exigencies in a Christian climate, a wisdom of reason not closed but open to the wisdom of grace.”66
Believing in the de facto dependence of nature on grace and of reason upon revelation, Maritain advocated as the basis for society a theistic and Christian humanism.67 There were basically only two forms of humanism, he believed: an anthropocentric humanism that so deformed the image of man that it invited the demons of Communism and Fascism; and a theocentric humanism—or humanism of the Incarnation—that acknowledged both man’s dignity in relation to God and man’s sinfulness in relation to the Fall and the Crucifixion. “The only way of regeneration for the human community is a rediscovery of the true image of man and a definite attempt toward a new Christian civilization, a new Christendom.”68 This new Christendom would differ from that of the Middle Ages in that it would be secular rather than sacral, but it would be authentically Christian insofar as the leaven and inspiration of the Gospel would be permitted to penetrate all the structures of life and thus sanctify the temporal order. In many of his finest books Maritain explored the relationship between the democratic ideal and the Christian outlook on the world. Maritain even more than Gilson was concerned to recommend Thomism—and hence indirectly Catholic Christianity—on the basis of its relevance to contemporary secular life.
Teilhard de Chardin
The philosophy of Gilson and Maritain, while it cannot fairly be called reactionary, took for granted the stability and essential permanence of the world order and of the systems of thought corresponding to the real. The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881—1955), on the other hand, espoused a radically evolutionary world-view. Early in life he became convinced of his vocation to be an apologist to the world of science. As he wrote in 1926, referring to a recent lecture by a Harvard professor on the dawn of thought in the animal series:
However farfetched the notion might appear at first, I realized in the end that, hic et nunc, Christ was not irrelevant to the problems that interest Professor Parker; it only needed a few intermediate steps to allow a transition from his positivist psychology to a certain spiritual outlook. This realization cheered me up. Ah, there lie the Indies that draw me more strongly than those of St. Francis Xavier!69
In other early letters one finds him saying: “To tear away the mask of atheism from these new currents of thought and to express them as Christian—that is my great hope, and I need not tell you that it urges me on as a vocation.” “To point out this strong, genuine and total coherence [between science and Christian revelation], this will be my whole ‘apologetic’.”70
The great objection brought against Christianity in his time, Teilhard de Chardin believed, was the suspicion that it isolates its adherents from the rest of the human family and lessens their interest in common tasks. Even convinced Christians, feeling cut off from their nonbelieving colleagues, were sometimes prompted to ask themselves whether they had not lost touch with the mainstream of human development. “One of the first apologetic duties of the Christian is to show, by the logic of his religious views and still more by the logic of his action, that the Incarnate God did not come to diminish the magnificent responsibility and splendid ambition that is ours: of becoming our own self.”71 In his many books, which began to be published after his death, Teilhard tried to establish that Christianity represents the highest fulfillment of personal life and lies on the main axis of the progress of the universe.
The formal structure of Teilhard’s apologetic is succinctly stated in the memorandum How I Believe, in which he analyzes the sources of his own conviction that Christianity is valid. Proceeding on the premise that any articulate faith arises out of a more basic and primitive faith, which must keep developing in order to maintain itself, Teilhard probes the depths of his own fundamental faith and seeks to show how it finds in Christianity its most coherent development. At the bedrock level of his own faith he finds, first of all, a belief in the world as a coherent system, somehow capable of being grasped as a unity. Contemplating the world, he concludes that its unity is dynamic and evolutionary; he sees it in movement toward life and consciousness. As a second article of his creed, Teilhard therefore states that he believes in spirit (thought, freedom, reflective awareness) as the term toward which the world is moving. Third, he sees spirit at work in the human species striving forward by the implicit logic of action toward an indestructible result. (Here Teilhard refers to Blondel’s searching analysis of action.) If there were not an unlimited horizon ahead, the sources of human effort would dry up. Fourth, Teilhard affirms that immortality must be personal. If life is meaningful, the best that is in each individual must survive—but if one’s personality became extinct, the best would perish. “My personality, that is, the particular center of perception and love that my life consists in developing—it is that which is my real wealth.”72 As the universe tends toward its consummation, persons converge in unity. For the unity to be one that preserves and develops the individuality of each, it must be a union in love. For love, instead of absorbing and annihilating what it unites, preserves the distinctness of lover and beloved. “Union differentiates.”
In a second portion of How I Believe Teilhard discussed the choice of a religion. Some religion is necessary, for religion is an essential dimension of the developing collective consciousness of mankind as it seeks to relate itself to the universe as such. For himself, Teilhard confessed, no extrinsic norms, such as miracles, could be decisive; he looked rather to harmony with the personal credo expressed in the preceding pages. There seemed to be three main types of religion to be considered: the ancient Eastern religions, the new secular humanism of the West, and the biblical faiths, among which Christianity alone appeared to Teilhard as a living option. In the Eastern religions Teilhard admired the mystical sense of cosmic unity and the yearning for transcendence, but he found that these religions gave too little place to human personality and earthly progress. He was greatly attracted to the humanitarian pantheism of the modern West, which accentuated the very elements overlooked in Asiatic religion; but Western humanitarianism stopped with the second article of Teilhard’s personal creed. Since it failed to open up the prospect of personal immortality, its ceiling was too low.
Christianity appealed to Teilhard because it was preeminently the religion of the imperishable and the personal, but in its existing forms it seemed to give insufficient weight to corporate progress on this earth. Teilhard felt that some Christians were asking him to cut his ties with the earth and to scale the clouds. This defect, however, appeared remediable if Christianity could absorb what was valid in the creeds of secular science. Teilhard’s was the religion of the universal Christ upon whom, as he saw it, all the religions of the world were converging.
In his masterpiece, The Phenomenon of Man,73 Teilhard sketches the forward movement of the universe from the dawn of life to the present day. This progress he attributes to the influence of a real goal, a “prime mover ahead”, called “Omega”. Turning then to the current situation he describes, somewhat in the style of Pascal, the “giddiness and disorientation” that seizes upon us as we wake up to the terrifying realization that we now stand at the spearhead of the universe, holding in our own hands the future of evolution.74 Humanity cannot rise to the next level, Teilhard concludes, except through the actual influence of Omega as an operative force in the universe.
The New Testament idea of the cosmic Christ, Teilhard believed, superabundantly verifies the specifications of the scientific hypothesis of Omega. This idea assures us that Omega is not just an abstract idea but a present center of attraction, a personalized star capable of eliciting and focusing the highest energies of love. The love of Christ can overcome individual and corporate egotism and assist in the planetization of mankind in a way that no human philosophy such as Marxism is capable of doing:
Failing such a center of universal coherence, not metaphorical or theoretical but real, there can be no true union among totalized Mankind, and therefore no true substance. A world culminating in the Impersonal can bring us neither the warmth of attraction nor the hope of irreversibility (immortality) without which individual egotism will always have the last word. A veritable Ego at the summit of the world is needed for the consummation, without confounding them, of all the elemental egos of Earth. . . .
I have talked of the “Christian view,” but this idea is gaining ground in other circles. Was it not Camus who wrote in Sisyphe, “If Man found that the Universe could love he would be reconciled”? And did not Wells, through his exponent the humanitarian biologist Steele in The Anatomy of Frustration, express his need to find, above and beyond humanity, a “universal lover”?75
Teilhard was one of the most daring and original apologists the Church has ever known. With prophetic single-mindedness he concentrated upon what was to become, a decade after his death, the most serious problem of apologetics: the Christian significance of the secular. Not content with a superficial concordism between the current theories of science and of theology, he sought to pioneer new interdisciplinary methods. If neither science nor theology has fully accepted his results, could this not be because each remains too isolated in its own sphere?
Inasmuch as he had only a limited formation as a philosopher and a theologian, it is not surprising that Teilhard left many problems unanswered. The most serious is the question he expressly put to himself: Once we have “panchristized” the universe, integrated Christianity into cosmogenesis, and generalized Christ the Redeemer into Christ the Evolutor, “is this still really the Christ of the Gospel?”76
Teilhard, of course, was convinced of the affirmative, but many other capable thinkers judge otherwise. Gilson, for instance, wrote: “The Teilhardian theology is one more Christian gnosis, and, like gnoses from Marcion to the present, it is a theology-fiction. . . . I am not sure whether an Omega point of science exists, but I feel perfectly sure that in the Gospel, Jesus of Nazareth is quite another thing than the ‘concrete germ’ of the Christ Omega.”77 Maritain agreed with this criticism and also with Cardinal Journet, who regarded Teilhardianism as a misguided apologetics—able for a time to attract some devotees of science but tending in the long run to seduce them away from orthodox Christianity. The “Peasant of the Garonne” asks leave of his readers to speak bluntly: “Is it the function of apologetics to lead minds to the truth by using the seductions and approaches of any error whatever. . . or do apologetics have to lead us to Truth via truth?”78
Henri de Lubac, in several works published in the early 1960s, gave a more positive evaluation. He points out that Teilhard in his apologetics uses a method calculated to find common ground with the unbeliever, in order to bring his readers by gradual stages to affirm Christ and the Church. He sometimes used ambiguous terms such as “super-humanity” and the “ultra-human”. But his thought had nothing in common with the Nietzschean myth of superman. He was trying to express in fresh language the idea that the union of human beings with one another in God would personalize them to the full. For him it was axiomatic that human progress was a part of God’s design and that the whole human adventure must be related to the final realities of which the gospel tells us.79
German Apologists
Many of the Catholic apologists in Germany, while keeping an eye on developments in France and Belgium, followed a somewhat independent course, influenced by the German philosophical tradition, both the idealism of the nineteenth century and the phenomenology of the twentieth (Brentano, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and others). From the beginning of the twentieth century, German apologetics showed a healthy concern with the inner unity of the Christian message and with its adequacy as an answer to total human quest for meaning and value.
The “new apologetics” that aroused such commotion in France at the turn of the century made only a slight impression across the Rhine. The Tübingen apologist Paul von Schanz, then in the last years of his life, conceded that the scholarly tradition had failed to take sufficient account of the psychological and moral aspects of the approach to faith, which were now being fortunately reemphasized by Blondel and his associates.80
The most prominent fundamental theologian in the first decade of the century, Herman Schell (1850—1906), professor of apologetics at Wurzburg from 1884 to 1906, tried to renew apologetics with the help of a dynamic and actualistic philosophy partly influenced by the personalism of Franz Brentano.81 Desiring to renew Catholicism and bring it into close contact with the modern world, he wrote a book entitled Catholicism As a Principle of Progress,82 but this, like some of his other works, was placed on the Index through the influence of more conservative Catholics.
In his works on God and Spirit83 and Religion and Revelation84 Schell showed himself generally in agreement with Blondel’s view of the weaknesses of the prevalent forms of apologetics, but he felt that Blondel was in danger of falling into a naturalistic immanentism. In his two-volume Christian Apology85 Schell tried to strike a balance between intellectualism and voluntarism, between immanentism and extrinsi-cism. The most important signs of credibility, he argued, were the two internal marks of wisdom and holiness, which answer respectively to the spiritual drives for meaning and for value and the dual aspiration for union with God in mind and will. These internal criteria of the Christian religion are, however, supplemented by two external marks, miracle and prophecy, which exhibit the coherence of revelation with the whole of reality. Miracle shows revealed religion as a victorious inbreaking of God’s kingdom into the world, turning back the forces of evil. Prophecy identifies the revelation as a unified and progressive realization of God’s salvific plan in human history.
In the spiritual crisis in Germany following World War I, when all values seemed to be threatened by skepticism and nihilism, the value-oriented phenomenology of Husserl and Scheler had a revivifying effect on apologetics. Max Scheler (1874—1928), who had been converted to Catholicism in his days as a student, became active as a university professor in the intellectual apostolate, especially at Cologne, where he began to teach philosophy in 1919.86 Several years later, at the time of his divorce and remarriage, he broke with the Church and fell into a religious depression from which he seems never to have recovered.
During his Catholic period, influenced by the religious phenomenology of Rudolf Otto, Scheler argued that the experience of the holy was an irreducibly distinct act. For apologetics this implied, negatively, the futility of seeking to prove the transcendent by inference from ordinary experience. On the positive side this meant that to intuit the transcendent we must open ourselves in humble attentiveness to the loving self-disclosure of God, to which we must be prepared to submit in loving adoration. “Pascal was right when he said, ‘Do thou but kneel, and faith will come.’ And so we should thus advise our man: ‘Try to perform the moral acts and ritual which this religion lays down, then see whether or how far you have gained in religious understanding.’ ”87
The Tübingen theologian Karl Adam (1876—1966), following up on the religious phenomenology of Otto and Scheler, evolved an original value-oriented theology of faith. In his first apologetical work The Spirit of Catholicism88 he assailed the critical theology of the past century for being mistakenly committed to the kind of scientific method suited only to the profane sciences and for behaving “as though the living Christian faith can be resolved into a series of ideas and notions which might be examined, considered, and classified according to their provenance”.89 The Catholic, Adam asserts, does not know Christ by piecing together the fragmentary evidences of the New Testament considered as an academic historical document but through the living faith of the Church as the mystical body of Christ.
In The Son of God and other Christological works Adam applies this approach to the problem of Jesus. Faithful to the principles of phenomenological method, he insists that the subject matter of any investigation necessarily conditions the attitude to be taken by the inquirer and the act by which it is to be apprehended. Religious knowledge, he maintains, is specifically distinct from every kind of secular knowledge; it involves not merely the intellect but the whole person, including the will and the emotions. As a consequence, anyone seeking to solve the question of Jesus by the techniques of secular history finds that “the critical boring tool breaks off when the real question first emerges, that of the supernatural being and activity of Christ.”90
In accordance with his declared method, Adam does not hesitate to present a deeply religious and even theological apologetic. On every page of his study he confronts the reader with profoundly existential questions of faith. He concentrates on the inner life and divine consciousness of Jesus rather than on the exact chronology of His words and deeds. When he comes to discuss the Resurrection he views it as a supernatural manifestation of Jesus as Lord and Savior. Like Karl Barth, Adam was able to face with equanimity and even with some satisfaction the collapse of the nineteenth-century “quest of the historical Jesus”, whose funeral oration had been pronounced, he believed, by Albert Schweitzer. The immense popularity of Adam’s books among seminarians and laity alike were clear signs that he met a religious need not adequately filled by the Scholastic textbooks of the day.
PROTESTANT APOLOGETICS (1900—1950)
Dialectical Theology
In the nineteenth century the struggle within Protestantism was principally between conservatives and liberals. Toward the end of World WarIanew player entered the field. Karl Barth (1886—1968) and his circle initiated the movement known as “dialectical theology”. Barth himself was generally hostile to apologetics. In the early chapters of his Church Dogmatics91 he raises the question whether prolegomena should be admitted as a pretheological discipline. The usual answer, he says, is that of Emil Brunner, who holds that in this day, when the very existence of God and of revelation is widely called into question, it is necessary to show initially that there is in the human situation a point of contact for the divine message and that the Word of God is a gratuitous fulfillment of what reason by itself cannot achieve. Barth rejects this position on three grounds. First, he argues that these times are not singular, for there has always been opposition to the Christian faith. The contention that revelation is a fulfillment of religious aspirations rests on the false supposition that Christianity is merely a special case within the genus of revelation as a whole.
Second, Barth objects that no amount of anthropological study can establish the capacity of the mind to discern divine revelation. Revelation creates within the mind the capacity to perceive it; hence there is no justification for an extra-theological basis for theology. If it be true that the revelation, when it comes, must be presented with a view to the concrete situation of its recipients, this is not a prolegomenon for dogmatics but rather a consequence flowing from the knowledge of revelation.
Third, according to Barth a really up-to-date dogmatic theology will establish its own relevance to the modern mind by appearing “on the spot, as the witness of faith against unbelief. . . . There has never been any other effective apologetic and polemic of faith against unbelief than the unintended one. . . which took place when God Himself sided with the witness of faith.”92 When apologetics as a special discipline assumes the task of going out to meet the unbeliever, it runs the risk of losing its own theological character, and by separating itself from theology it leaves theology out of contact with the modern world.93 In the chapter on Schleiermacher to which allusion has already been made,94 Barth gives a portrayal of the dangers involved in the type of apologetics that seeks to commend the Christian message to the world of the day. The apologist, says Barth, must go out to the enemy “carrying a white flag” and must seek to mediate between belief and unbelief from a superior position, from which he can be just to both parties.95 This cannot but be damaging to Christianity.
In a later volume of his Church Dogmatics, however, Barth makes room for a “supplementary, incidental and implicit apologetics” that proceeds from revelation and from the constraint that the Word of God imposes on the religious inquirer and seeks to differentiate between the true knowledge of God and the false knowledge of idolatry.96 In his study of Anselm, Barth gives an illustration of how the believer can go out to meet the unbeliever without compromise or betrayal of the faith. Anselm, he suggests, in his desire to convince the unbeliever, crossed the gulf “on this occasion not in search of a truce. . . but. . . as a conqueror whose weapon was the fact that he met the unbelievers as one of them and accepted them as his equal”.97 This tactic could be successful, Barth intimates, because the grace of God went ahead of the defender of the faith. In the end, therefore, Barth seems to make room for an apologetic that proceeds from faith and that addresses itself at least in appearance to unbelievers.
Of Barth’s companion in arms in the early days of dialectical theology, Emil Brunner (1889—1966), it has been correctly said that his “entire theology has an apologetic character”.98 By apologetical, or as he prefers to call it, “eristic”, theology Brunner means the intellectual discussion of the Christian faith in the light of the ideologies of the present day that are opposed to it.99 The principal task of apologetics, according to Brunner, is not to set Christian faith on the platform of some previous rational understanding of reality, still less to prove it by reference to this, but rather to reflect on faith with a view to exposing the falsity of reason’s understanding of itself. Apologetics thus aims to defend Christian faith against the misunderstandings that originate from the sinful abuse of reason. Since these objections are identical with the believer’s own temptations against the faith, apologetics is not, according to Brunner, self-righteous.
In Brunner as in many other recent Protestant theologians (even Barth might perhaps be included) apologetics is not a distinct discipline but rather a dimension of all theology. A few years before his death Brunner wrote: “As a matter of fact these two tasks, apologetics and dogmatics, cannot be separated from each other. Every dogmatic statement is at the same time an apologetic-polemic statement and vice versa.”100
Rudolf Bultmann (1884—1976) takes an attitude toward apologetics that might be described as intermediate between the predominantly negative view of Barth and the highly positive stance of Brunner. With regard to the celebrated dispute about whether there is in human nature a “point of insertion” for the gospel, he sides rather with Brunner than with Barth. Man, he says, has a necessary and permanent relationship to God, in advance of God’s revelation in Christ. “Man’s life is moved by the search for God because it is always moved, consciously or unconsciously, by the question about his own personal existence. The question of God and the question of myself are identical.”101 But our personal relationship to God, which is decisive for faith, can be made real only by God and cannot be discovered by ourselves. “God’s revelation is not at the beck and call of human criteria: it is not a phenomenon within the world, but his act alone. And he alone must know whether and how he wishes to speak to us.”102 Not even the so-called facts of revelation—the great and wonderful deeds of God—can constitute grounds of faith except “as perceived by faith itself”.103 The effort to secure faith by rational proofs, according to Bultmann, undermines faith by making it depend on something else—and this something else proves in the long run to be insecure. “He who thinks that it is possible to speak of wonders [miracles] as of demonstrable events capable of proof offends against the thought of God as acting in hidden ways. He subjects God’s action to the control of objective observation. He delivers up the faith in wonders to the criticism of science and in so doing validates such criticism.”104
As a New Testament critic Bultmann feels that he is in no way undermining faith when he casts doubt upon the historical accuracy of various reports concerning the miracles and Resurrection of Jesus. For with him it is a principle that God’s action in Jesus Christ is “not a fact of past history open to historical verification”.105 “We cannot buttress our own faith in the resurrection by that of the first disciples and so eliminate the element of risk which faith in the resurrection always involves.”106
In spite of Bultmann’s apparent indifference to any positive program of apologetics, his famous demythologizing program is partly motivated by an apologetic intent. Holding that the stumbling block of faith cannot and should not be removed, he adds that it is important to remove the false stumbling block that is presented when contemporary audiences are asked to accept the gospel in mythological form. “To demythologize is to deny that the message of Scripture and of the Church is bound to an ancient world-view which is obsolete.”107
Barth is therefore on good ground when he suggests that although “Bultmann and his disciples are annoyed if we call him an apologist”, Bultmann is concerned, as Schleiermacher was, “to make Biblical exegesis, theology in general, and preaching in particular, relevant and interesting for its cultured despisers”. And, Barth adds, “Surely theologians have always been apologists in some sense; they could hardly help it.”108
A fourth major figure, sometimes reckoned as a dialectical theologian, is Paul Tillich (1886—1965), who developed an original and penetrating doctrine regarding the nature and value of apologetics. He adverted to the present disrepute into which apologetics had fallen and ascribed this to two main reasons.109 In the first place apologists have often tried to take advantage of the gaps in scientific knowledge in order to find room for the divine. This has involved apologetics in a series of graceless and humiliating retreats. Each time science increased its capacity of explanation, theology had to find new lacunae as the loci of the divine mystery.
Second, as Barth and the kerygmatic theologians point out, theology endangers its proper autonomy when it seeks to ground itself in knowledge that does not depend on revelation. Once theology has to appeal to criteria that can be verified outside of faith, it is in danger of sacrificing its distinctive character and of falling away from the kerygma that should be the criterion of all theological statements.
Tillich, however, does not draw the Barthian conclusion that the Christian message must be thrown “like a stone” at those who stand outside the believing community. He holds that theology, without loss of its proper principles, can show that the Christian message is relevant to man in the existential situation in which he finds himself. In Tillich’s “method of correlation” apologetics has the task of showing that the symbols used in the Christian message respond to man’s existential questions—the profoundly personal questions that are “we ourselves”.
For Tillich, therefore, apologetics is not a nontheological preamble to theology; it is not a sheerly philosophical or historical discipline having a merely extrinsic relationship to faith. For him as for Brunner apologetics is “an omnipresent element and not a special section of systematic theology”.110 “The method of correlation explains the content of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence.”111 It is not as though man operating independently of God asked the questions, and God subsequently by a supernatural intervention supplied the answers. Rather, according to Tillich, “symbolically speaking, God answers man’s questions, and under the impact of God’s answers man asks them.”112 Theology, insofar as it is apologetic, has to organize the materials provided in the human situation, in a given cultural context, in relation to the answers provided by the Christian message.
A fifth theologian who is in some ways related to the dialectical movement is Reinhold Niebuhr (1892—1971). As Alan Richardson says, Niebuhr is too critical of the presuppositions of this age to be a conventional apologist. Writing more as a prophet, he prefers to criticize and even repudiate the prevailing ideas and values in terms of which nonbelievers might be inclined to judge the worth of the Gospel.113 But, as Richardson goes on to show, Niebuhr in his capacity as prophet seeks to arouse thoughtful people to the realization that the insights of the Bible have existential relevance for the problems of man and society today. In his Gifford Lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man,114 Niebuhr engages in a profound critique of modern culture from the point of view of the Christian vision of man and society. In this and other works he succeeds in showing how traditional Christian doctrines, notably the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith, are capable of illuminating the issues of the twentieth century. The central thrust of Niebuhr’s apologetic is indicated by the following remarks on the validation of the Gospel:
The Christian Gospel is negatively validated by the evidence that both forms of worldly wisdom, leading to optimism and to pessimism, give an inadequate view of the total human situation. This evidence is partly derived from the testimony which the optimists and the pessimists bear against each other. . . . There is nevertheless a positive apologetic task. It consists in correlating the truth, apprehended by faith and repentance, to truths about life and history, gained generally in experience. Such a correlation validates the truth of faith insofar as it proves it to be a source and center of an interpretation of life, more adequate than alternative interpretations, because it comprehends all of life’s antinomies and contradictions into a system of meaning and is conducive to a renewal of life.115
A distinctive element in Reinhold Niebuhr’s apologetics is its emphasis on social action. The social impotence of the churches, he believed, was the most powerful objection against Christian faith. Marxists all over the world were successfully exploiting this weakness. In fact, however, Christianity supplies the divine remedy against tyranny and oppression as well against personal sin. In Jesus Christ God exposes the nature of human sin and provides the supreme antidote, motivating believers to sustained action against the prejudice and injustice pervading modern industrial society. In the words of a close student of Niebuhr:
Love, as the ethical ideal, is never fully realized in this world. No amount of human achievement can ever realize what God must fulfill from “beyond history.” But neither is it possible for true love to allow tyranny and social injustice to go unopposed. In an unloving and unregenerate world love must be transposed into a perpetual quest for approximate social justice. Love continually raises systems of justice to new, more demanding heights.116
Reinhold’s brother, H. Richard Niebuhr (1894—1962), in his book The Meaning of Revelation, was strongly critical of Schleiermacher and Ritschl on the ground that they wanted to justify Christianity before the bar of reason as the best religion. In the place of apologetical self-defensiveness, Niebuhr called for a “resolutely confessional theology” that would renounce any claim to superior knowledge or virtue.117 But Richard Niebuhr does not seem to have totally avoided apologetics. As several critics have pointed out, much of his own theology may be characterized as a rational defense of “radical monotheism”,118 a stance that in his view liberates man from subservience to any creature and makes him objectively critical of himself.
The six theologians here treated under the heading of dialectical theology do not constitute a single school. They have sharply disagreed with one another; but within their disagreements they have reciprocally influenced one another, and by their joint labors they were largely responsible for the revitalization of the Protestant churches in the 1940s and 1950s.
From the present standpoint, the most striking common trait of these authors is their refusal to erect any system of criteria that would permit the Christian message to be adequately evaluated from a position outside of faith. They tend to soft-pedal miracles—whether physical or intellectual or moral—if these are taken to be extrinsic signs validating Christianity in the eyes of unaided reason. They stress the demand for an inner conversion or repentance—in the biblical sense of metanoia—as the prerequisite for judging the credibility of the gospel. This conversion takes place through a prophetic proclamation of the Christian message; and the proclamation finds a point of impact thanks to the restlessness toward the divine that God Himself arouses in fallen human nature. Apologetics in this view is not adequately distinct from preaching. It is the adaptation of Christian preaching to the existential needs of the hearers in a particular sociocultural situation. Thanks to its meaningfulness and illuminative power, the gospel properly proclaimed is its own apologetic.
Germany
Notwithstanding the emergence of the dialectical school, some Protestant theologians in Germany continued to ply a rather traditional type of apologetics in the tradition of Sack and Tholuck. The most prolific was Karl Heim (1874—1958),119 who taught at Tübingen from 1920 until his retirement and who wrote in answer to his Catholic colleague Karl Adam a work on The Nature of Protestantism.120 His principal lifework was to mediate to the modern secular mind the fruits of the Swabian pietistic faith in which he had been reared, and to this end he composed a six-volume summa, The Evangelical Faith and the Thought of the Present, which has been translated into English.121
Unlike Barth, Heim was convinced that God-talk had to be made meaningful to the modern secular mind; unlike Bultmann he believed that this could be done without radically changing the traditional content of Christian doctrine. Faithful to the Lutheran tradition, he avoids founding his apologetics on any kind of natural theology or seeking to reason from some common premises acceptable both to believers and nonbelievers. Instead he seeks to establish the incapacity of autonomous reason to achieve ultimate answers and in this way to make the secular thinker receptive to the Word of God.
Heim is at his best in unmasking the idols of secular society. He makes deft use of Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s indeterminism in order to show that modern physics has eliminated the very conception of an absolute object. If there is anything on which we can rely unconditionally and to which we can cleave with our whole hearts, Heim reasons, this must be sought in the realm of the nonobjective. Then he proceeds to explain the notion of the transcendent in a manner that could make sense to modern secular persons. In our moral decisions, Heim believes, we encounter a dimension of depth that lies hidden to objective thinking. In this hidden dimension Heim finds the divine transcendence.
Finally Heim commends the Christian idea of Jesus as Lord and Savior to a generation all too inclined to worship human leaders. In the notion of Jesus as sole redeemer Heim sees the divine remedy not only for the guilt of sin but also for the despair of skepticism. Thus, as Althaus points out, Heim concocts a kind of natural theology out of modern skepticism and relativism.122 His reliance of these systems stands in some tension with his theological conservatism, since he is unwilling to recast the traditional Christian doctrines in the light of a modern understanding of the universe. “The latest insights of natural science are used by Heim to justify traditional views of creation, miracle, and eschatology—views which many exegetes and theologians are no longer able to purvey as either mandatory or meaningful.”123
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906—1945), who studied briefly under Heim at Tübingen, may have been partly indebted to his old teacher for his preoccupation with making Christianity meaningful to modern secular readers. Like Heim, Bonhoeffer criticized Barth for his demand that people should be expected to submit to the gospel without first seeing it as a meaningful and credible message. But Bonhoeffer took a far more favorable view of the mature, serene secularist than Heim and other theologians of that day. Secularism, he believed, was correct in holding that human beings were responsible for the future of the world and in refusing to appeal to any deus ex machina. The whole effort of modern apologetics to keep people in dependence on religious forces was in Bonhoeffer’s opinion illegitimate:
The attack by Christian apologetic on the adulthood of the world I consider to be in the first place pointless, in the second place ignoble, and in the third place unchristian. Pointless, because it seems to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems to him. Ignoble, because it amounts to an attempt to exploit man’s weakness for purposes that are alien to him and to which he has not freely assented. Unchristian, because it confuses Christ with one particular stage in man’s religiousness, i.e. with a human law.124
This triple indictment is directed particularly at the apologetics of Heim and Tillich. “Heim sought, along pietist and methodist lines, to convince the individual man that he was faced with the alternative, ‘either despair or Jesus.’ He gained ‘hearts.’ ” Tillich, in Bonhoeffer’s opinion, set out to drive modern man into a kind of existential despair, so that he would be impelled to look for God in the threatening “border situations” of life. “That was very brave of him, but the world unseated him and went on by itself.”125
While Bonhoeffer rejected any apologetics based on the religious premise, his theology left room for a type of secular apologetics based on the capacity of Christianity to lead people to responsible maturity. Elements of such an apologetics may be most clearly found in the work of Friedrich Gogarten (1887—1967), who argued that Christian faith sustains the process of secularization.126 It liberates believers from the world, considered as an enclosed and enclosing entity; in Pauline language, it delivers them from subjection to the elemental powers (cf. Gal 4:9-10). Once the world is desacralized by monotheistic faith, man becomes lord of the visible universe, responsible for it and for his own history. For Gogarten secularization is the working out in history of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. Faith is necessary not only to de-divinize the world but also to interpret the secularized world and to prevent it from falling prey to its own ideologies.
England
Prior to the impact of dialectical theology, an apologetics of accommodation had great influence in England. A moderate representative of this school may be found in the English “liberal Catholic” prelate Charles Gore (1853—1932). In the preface to a programmatic work that he edited under the title Lux mundi Gore expressed the aim of his lifetime apostolate. “Our purpose”, he wrote, “was to ‘succour a distressed faith’ by endeavouring to bring the Christian Creed to its right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historical, critical; and to the modern problems of politics and ethics.”127 In The Reconstruction of Belief128 Gore analyzed the major shocks to religious belief that had come from the Darwinian theory, biblical criticism, comparative religion, and the revolt of the modern conscience against the Calvinistic ideas regarding hell and atonement. He sought to show how faith could be renewed on the basis of a critical reappraisal of the biblical and traditional heritage, taking advantage of all the tools of modern scholarship. In a volume replying to his critics, Can We Then Believe?129 Gore restated his conviction that it is possible to find a via media between blind conservatism and rootless Modernism.
Anglican apologetics in the past generation has followed a middle way, sometimes inclining more toward Barthian kerygmatic theology, sometimes more toward Thomistic natural theology, but always avoiding the extremes of fideism and rationalism.
One of the Anglicans who came closest to dialectical theology was Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns (1884—1937), who, after adhering for some time to the “liberal Catholicism” of Gore, was deeply affected by reading (about 1924 or 1925) Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, which he later translated into admirable English. Although he came to look upon the kingdom of God as a sudden and unexpected inbreaking of divine righteousness that brings man’s highest idealism under judgment, Hoskyns did not believe that this position precluded a rational approach to the decision of faith making full use of the techniques of exact historical research. The Riddle of the New Testament, a work written by Hoskyns in collaboration with Noel Davey, is a fascinating piece of historico-literary detective work. It argues on the basis of the independent and converging testimony of all the New Testament traditions that the Christological interpretation of Jesus’s career could not possibly have been superimposed at a later date on an originally unchristological history and hence that Jesus Himself must have regarded His ministry as that of the Messiah inaugurating the kingdom of God.130 Historical analysis thus confronts the reader with the challenge of Jesus Himself, whose claims were no less foreign to His own age than to ours. “The gospel was as much a scandal to the first century as it is to the twentieth.”131 With an eloquence approaching Barth’s Hoskyns brought out in the Bible those sharp, scandalous, and challenging notes that had been muted by the liberal theologians of the preceding generation.132
During the next decade some of the finest apologetics among Protestants and Anglicans in Britain was conducted by New Testament scholars. The Congregationalist New Testament professor Charles H. Dodd (1884—1973) defended the authenticity of the apostolic preaching as summarized in the sermons attributed to Peter and Paul in the early chapters of Acts. This primitive kerygma, according to Dodd, was historically accurate and constitutes the very heart of the New Testament message.133 British biblical scholarship in the hands of experts such as Dodd gave impressive support to Barth’s kerygmatic theology and was generally unfavorable to Bultmann’s dehistoricized reinterpretation of the kerygma.
In the 1930s and 1940s the Church of England was blessed by a number of lay persons such as T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers, distinguished authors who ventured into the realm of apologetics. The most influential apologist of this group was C. S. Lewis (1898—1963). Raised in the Puritanical atmosphere of Protestant Belfast, he rebelled against the rigidities of the system and became for a time an atheist. While recovering from an illness in France during the First World War, he began to see the light. “Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man”, he wrote, “and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seems to me to make sense.”134 His atheism was shaken at its foundations. After returning to Oxford he became an Anglican in 1931, but he preferred to characterize himself simply as a Christian. In his apologetical works he defended what in the title of one of his most popular books he called Mere Christianity.135 His faith, confidently traditional and orthodox, could also be described as “classical Christianity”.
Lewis’s apologetics is contained in allegories such as Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933), satires such as The Screwtape Letters (1942), in the dream-vision of The Great Divorce (1945) and, perhaps most brilliantly, in mythological space-novels such as Perelandra (1944) and That Hideous Strength (1945), and in his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955). In his three main didactic works—The Problem of Pain (1940), The Case for Christianity (1943), and Miracles (1947)—Lewis proved himself a master of popularizing the Christian idea of a transcendent, personal, and provident God and of exposing the fallacies behind many of the common objections.
As a brilliant stylist Lewis reached a vast number of readers who would not have found time for technical theological works. Deeply rooted in the tradition of Western Europe, he lamented the way in which the rapidly changing technology was cutting people off from the accumulated wisdom of the past. Christianity and paganism, he believed, had more in common than either had with godless post-modernity. Like Chesterton, whom in many ways he resembles, he considered that Christianity was the great safeguard of the human.136
Several of the Anglican apologists of this period shared the enthusiasm of their Roman Catholic brethren for Thomas Aquinas. Austin Farrer (1904—1968) in his Finite and Infinite (1943) composed a careful defense of natural theology, as did Eric L. Mascall (1905—1993) in his He Who Is, published the same year. Mascall’s Bampton Lectures, Christian Theology and Natural Science (1943), explored many disputed border areas where there might be question of interdisciplinary conflict between theology and the physical sciences. Later, in The Secularization of Christianity (1965), Mascall criticized some of the philosophical weaknesses and inconsistencies in the new secular theology as propounded by J. A. T. Robinson and Paul van Buren.
A serene and knowledgeable form of apologetics was offered by another distingished Anglican, Alan Richardson (1905—1975). Rejecting what he takes to be the Thomistic view—that autonomous reason can even in theory bring people to a natural knowledge of God and of grounds of credibility—he held, with the Augustinian theologians, that reason must be assisted by the light of grace in order to rise from its fallen state. In his apologetics Richardson sought to show that the Christian affirmations measure up to the exigencies of reason enlightened by faith.
The central argument in Richardson’s principal apologetical works was, in effect, that Christianity offers an interpretation of history more coherent and adequate to the totality of the evidence than do the various rival views, including scientific rationalism. For one thing, Christian faith can make sense of biblical testimonies that others have to explain away with considerable embarrassment. Furthermore, “the events of our own contemporary history are best understood in the light of Christian faith in God’s judgment and mercy in history.”137 “There is a universality and finality about the Christian faith which makes it relevant to the whole human race in every age and place, and which. . . has no parallel in the history of the world.” Christ is confessed by men of every nation as “the Light of the world and the desire of all nations”.138
In order to ground these sweeping generalizations Richardson gave considerable attention to the nature of historical thinking. Following Dilthey, Collingwood, and Becker he held that history should not aim at strictly scientific objectivity but should make liberal allowance for personal interpretation and evaluation. Understood in this way the category of history is wide enough to include miracles and even the Resurrection of Jesus. Richardson therefore rejected Gunther Bornkamm’s statement that the Easter faith of the disciples is the “last fact” accessible to the historian.139
Richardson showed, moreover, that the Resurrection of Jesus is not a totally anomalous event.140 It has intelligibility insofar as it brings to a climax a whole series of revelatory events beginning with the Exodus cycle. While the reality of these revelatory events cannot be strictly demonstrated from a position outside faith, they can be discerned as credible by those to whom it is given to participate in analogous “disclosure situations”.
Persuasive though he was, Richardson did not fully satisfy all his critics.141 They ask if he admits a valid distinction between fact and interpretation. Are there some “facts” that impose themselves on all persons of judgment and good will by virtue of undeniable evidences? Is there a nonconfessional historical method that can be used by believers and unbelievers to establish an agreed corpus of facts of this character? If there are further facts that are admitted only by believers, is there some way of showing nonbelievers that believers have the better position? If so, why should Richardson have to appeal to the subjective point of view established by the grace of faith? If not, must the apologist renounce any effort to shield the believer from the charge of arbitrariness?
Although questions such as these will continue to be discussed, Richardson provides material for answering them as far as the subject matter permits. He makes an excellent case for Christianity as a coherent interpretation of the total course of human history.
North America
At the beginning of the twentieth century conservative Protestant apologetics was ably represented in both England and the United States. One such able conservative was Benjamin B. Warfield (1851—1921), of Princeton Theological Seminary. In an encyclopedia article on apologetics published in 1908 he maintained that the business of apologetics is to establish the truth of Christianity as the absolute religion, directly and as a whole. Apologetics consequently takes its place “at the head of the departments of theological science, and finds its task in the establishment of that knowledge of God which forms the subject-matter of these departments”.142 He set himself in opposition to the Ritschlian bifurcation between theoretical and religious knowledge, which in his view would undermine apologetics by asserting that religion is not the object of rational proof.
In the face of mounting attacks on the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, followers of Warfield’s type of rational apologetics found themselves ranged on the conservative side of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy that rocked American Protestantism in the first third of the century. Beginning with the publication, in 1909, of the first volume of The Fundamentals, fundamentalist apologists were heavily engaged in polemics against liberal Protestants regarding specific points such as biblical criticism, the Virgin Birth, Christ’s atoning death, the physical Resurrection of Christ, evolution, and the social gospel.
Among Warfield’s students at Princeton was the Dutch-born Cornelius Van Til (1895—1987), who considered himself rather a disciple of the Dutch Reformed theologians Abraham Kuyper (1837—1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854—1921). Van Til taught apologetics at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1928, but resigned in 1929 because the Seminary seemed to be veering toward liberalism. He was one of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he taught apologetics until his retirement in 1975. His distinctive approach, known as “presuppositionalism”, maintains that the issue between believers and nonbelievers in Christian theism cannot be settled except by reference to a conceptual framework in terms of which facts and laws become intelligible. The Christian must begin by presupposing that the revelation contained in Scripture is true and then find that reality and life make sense in terms of this presupposition.143
Both conservative and liberal apologetics were taken to task by Harvard’s Willard L. Sperry in his “Yes, But—” The Bankruptcy of Apologetics. In either form, says Sperry, apologetics is but an unsatisfactory compromise between the old faith and new knowledge: “The religious mind does not like to qualify its beliefs and the scientific mind does not care to qualify its truths.”144 The apologist is drafted for the “sorry service” of trying to defend religion against the honest efforts of the human mind to discover what is so. After first taking the position that new scientific theories are false, apologetics is forced in the end reluctantly to concede the validity of new theories.145 Religion deserves no credit for conceding at a late date truths it should have gladly welcomed from the beginning. In place of apologetics the religious mind should content itself with seeking the truth and be prepared to follow wherever the evidence may lead. Yet toward the end of his book Sperry, the convinced Christian, falls into something like apologetics himself. He says that “the closer one seems to come to the man [Jesus] himself the more impertinent and irrelevant conventional apologetics become. We should have the courage and generosity to go as far as is historically possible in letting him stand in his own right and speak his own words, whether we hear or whether we forbear. That is the only useful Christian apologetic.”146
From the point of view of apologetical productivity, the first half of the twentieth century registered both progress and decline. There were few major apologetical syntheses of the sort associated with the names of Luthardt and Hettinger, Kaftan and Schanz. Although this decline of productivity may be interpreted as a failure of courage, it may be interpreted from another point of view as a sober reaction against the hypertropy of apologetics in the nineteenth century. An overanxious defensiveness tended to penetrate all the theological tracts and almost to the exclusion of doctrinal speculation.
In the first half of the twentieth century liberal Protestants such as Gore pursued an accommodationist type of apologetics that was more suited to keeping doubt-ridden Christians within the fold than to inducing outsiders to come in. Catholic apologetics rose to a new pitch of intensity in France. The era of Gardeil, Garrigou-Lagrange, Grandmaison, and the Apologetical Dictionary of the Catholic Faith marks a high point in the history of Scholastic apologetics, but the authors, most of whom were seminary professors, became overinvolved in subtle theological distinctions of small concern to the laity. A fresh note was sounded by literary apologists such as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis and their colleagues in England.
Toward the middle of the century, theologians such as Barth warned against apologetics on the ground that it neglected the quality of faith as a grace and that it led to doctrinal compromises. On the Protestant side theologians such as Bultmann attacked rationalistic and historicist apologetics in the name of the Protestant principle of “faith alone”. Tillich pointed out a temptation to which the apologist is particularly subject, namely, that of “sacred dishonesty”; and H. Richard Niebuhr showed that apologetical defensiveness often results from vanity, insecurity, and lack of confidence in God. Sperry rejected the “accommodating” type of apologetics as unsatisfactory to the scientific mind.
Among Catholics, disciples of Blondel and Rousselot such as Henri de Lubac and Jean Levie severely criticized neo-Scholastic apologetics, which Garrigou-Lagrange and Gardeil were attempting to perpetuate with only minor adjustments. They accused their adversaries of seeking to prove the truth of Christianity without regard to the specific nature of religious knowledge and the indispensable role of grace in the decision of faith.
These challenges to apologetics on both the Protestant and Catholic sides did not, however, result in a qualitative decline. The second quarter of the century registered important gains in relating the Christian faith to advances in philosophy and in the other human sciences. In Maritain and Gilson Thomistic philosophy became almost a form of apologetics. Adam capitalized on the phenomenology of Scheler; Brunner built on the personalism of Ebner and Buber; Bultmann was influenced by the existentialism of the early Heidegger; Karl Heim drew on the results of modern physics; Alan Richardson profited from recent developments in historiography; and Teilhard de Chardin carried on a vigorous dialogue with evolutionary science. Thanks to their familiarity with nontheological disciplines, these apologists were able to speak with real credibility to some sectors of the “secular” audience.
Some apologists, in their efforts to bridge the gap between the Church and the modern world, put forward daring new hypotheses. The Catholic Modernists found themselves rejected by the Church of their day; Blondel and, in the next generation, Teilhard de Chardin narrowly escaped succumbing to the same fate. Protestants such as Tillich and Bultmann were a scandal to many of their co-religionists.
While the massive tomes of previous centuries gather dust on library shelves, mid-twentieth century apologists continues to attract an eager reading public. Authors such as Gilson and Maritain, de Lubac and Teilhard de Chardin, and Chesterton and C. S. Lewis continue to attract an eager reading public. For its literary quality, the apologetics of the period is memorable.