Vatican II
Vatican Council II (1962—1964) gathered up many of the fruits of recent Catholic scholarship and set the tone for normative Catholic theology for the rest of the century Taking for granted the universal distribution of grace, the Council showed little interest in what reason might be able to do in the area of religion without the help of grace. It passed over in silence the traditional arguments from prophecy and miracle. It treated the four marks of the Church, so prominent in Counter-Reformation apologetics, more as precepts than as descriptions of the Catholic Church in its historical actuality. The preferred method of Vatican II seems to have been a confident, appealing, and irenic presentation of Catholic doctrine rather than an attempt to prove its truth. Yet the Council did affirm: “The disciple is bound by a grave obligation toward Christ his Master ever more adequately to understand the truth received from Him, faithfully to proclaim it, and vigorously to defend it” (Dignitatis Humanae 14).
On the vexed question of the historical value of Scripture the Council encouraged biblical scholarship by endorsing the critical principles that had already been accepted by Divino afflante Spiritu. It stated that the Gospels, “whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts”, were composed for the sake of imparting saving truth concerning the teaching and redemptive work of Jesus Christ. The oral tradition and the Evangelists as its final editors reworked the testimony of eyewitnesses with a view to effective proclamation to their respective audiences (Dei Verbum 19).
The irenic tone of Vatican II tended to undermine the polemic spirit that had animated the apologetics of the past. The Council promoted dialogue rather than debate. It encouraged Catholics to seek points of agreement with other Christians and with adherents of other religions. Some apologetical motifs, however, are present in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), which holds up Jesus Christ as the key to the meaning of the world and its history (GS 10) and as casting light on the riddles of sorrow and death (GS 22). Affirming the obligation for believers to work with the rest of the human community for secular goals such as peace and prosperity, the Pastoral Constitution endorsed the Teilhardian principle that Christian faith motivates believers to work more vigorously for such goals than they would without faith (GS 43). Christ, through His Spirit, offers humanity the light and the strength to measure up to its supreme destiny (GS 10).
The Debate about Method
In the Catholic seminaries and universities a great debate occurred in the decade after Vatican II about the status of apologetics. Even after the Council some authors continued to ply the type of apologetics that had been characteristic of the earlier manuals, based on the neo-Scholastic analysis fidei. Adolf Kolping’s Fundamentaltheologie is essentially a work of apologetics, in tone or content it resembles the work by the same title authored by Albert Lang more than a decade earlier.1 Introducing a volume on The Development of Fundamental Theology, Claude Geffre, O.P., wrote:
[T] he term “fundamental theology” is now preferred to describe Christian apologetics. It is not simply that in an age of dialogue the word “apologetics” is discredited. It is rather, and more profoundly, that we have become conscious of the weakness of apologetics when it pretends to be able to prove the fact of revelation on historical grounds. We can only be sure of divine revelation within the experience of faith.2
Within this shift, leading Catholic experts such as Rene Latourelle and Henri Bouillard sought to maintain a rightful place for apologetics as a function of fundamental theology.3 According to Latourelle fundamental theology, in its dogmatic aspect, studies the Word of God as the foundational reality of Christianity. Under this aspect, it elaborates the basic categories of theological science, including revelation, tradition, biblical inspiration, and the Magisterium of the Church. In this first phase, fundamental theology considers the response of faith as a grace-given, free, and decisive acceptance of the Word of God. In its second, or apologetic, aspect fundamental theology seeks to demonstrate that the Word of God, as it comes through history, is worthy of acceptance by persons who have not yet received it. It confronts the signs of revelation with the demands and resistances of reason.4
Bouillard, a disciple of Blondel, substantially concurred, while giving greater emphasis to the subjective dispositions necessary for faith. Apologetics, in his view, indicates in a general way how the faith can satisfy one of its permanent conditions—namely, its agreement with the demands of rationality. This done, apologetics can attempt to present the signs in such a way that their supernatural meaning becomes perceptible. But the actual perception of that meaning in a manner that results in faith requires, in addition, an interior illumination that can only come from God. Most importantly, apologetics studies the mental process that is implied in the act of faith and reflects on the historical events that lie at the basis of Christianity. These tasks are of interest not only for the credibility of the faith but also for supplying the foundations to which dogmatic and moral theology always has to return. For this reason apologetics and fundamental theology cannot be separated.5
German authors, while giving more attention to the rational preambles to faith, likewise favor the absorption of apologetics into fundamental theology. The Munich theologian Heinrich Fries maintains that apologetics “remains an ever-valid dimension of theology which, for its own sake, must attend to its encountering and creatively coming to terms with the spirit of the historical epoch in which it finds itself. The term ‘fundamental theology’ is intended to express that the apologetic task can and should be integrated into a comprehensive theological reflection: in the believing reason’s self-examination of its foundations and presuppositions.”6
The influential Handbuch der Fundamentaltheologie is divided into four volumes, dealing respectively with religion, revelation, Church, and theological method. In the fourth volume one of the editors, Max Seckler, treats the status of apologetics. Like Geffre, Latourelle, and Bouillard, he regards apologetical theology as one function of fundamental theology. It is an attempt to show why persons who do not believe, or are tempted not to believe, may and should responsibly embrace the faith. Apologetics, consciously involved in dialogue, prevents faith from turning in upon itself, as though it were of concern to believers alone. Besides dealing polemically with objections against Christianity from outside, it seeks to show to believers themselves why their faith is reasonable and responsible.7
In some of its recent manifestations fundamental theology tends to deny that faith rests upon demonstrable signs of credibility, as was done in traditional apologetics. The American Francis Schussler Fiorenza proposes a “reconstructive hermeneutics” that renounces the task of validating faith on the basis of prior foundations and seeks rather to illuminate the transformative impact of faith upon human life.8
Evidentialist Apologetics
On the eve of Vatican II the French lay apologist Jean Guitton (1901—1999) in his popular work The Problem of Jesus meditated on the New Testament from within a broad and open horizon.9 Instead of beginning from Christianity as a position to be defended, he seeks to trace the reflections of a sincere “freethinker” looking for the most plausible explanation for the assertions of the New Testament. Anxious to avoid minimizing any objection, Guitton shows a keen awareness of the complexities of historical testimony and the special difficulties inherent in the history of Jesus. What testimony, he asks, would be sufficient to establish the reality of such elusive facts as Jesus’s divine Sonship and His appearances from beyond the grave? In the final analysis, Guitton shows, the difficulties in accepting the Christian explanation of the documents are less than the difficulties in opposed interpretations. The total candor of Guitton’s approach does much to offset the overbearing complacency of so many apologetical tracts. He leaves the reader with a new respect for the honest objections of nonbelievers and with a healthy realization that a sympathetic examination of the objections can purify and strengthen the faith of those who do believe.
Some twenty years later Hans Küng (1928—) still sought to practice a kind of evidentialist apologetics. His On Being a Christian aims to answer the question Why should I be a Christian?10 Rejecting Rahner’s idea that anyone who accepts the grace of Christ operating secretly in the depths of his being is an “anonymous Christian”, Küng requires an explicit confession of Jesus Christ (97-98). But not much depends upon this confession, it would seem, since, in Küng’s view, other religions are legitimate and are now recognized as ways of salvation (91). Although Küng writes as a Roman Catholic, he does not give reasons why other Christians should enter the Catholic Church. His book may be seen as an apologetics for Christianity in some generic form.
Accepting the Gospels (or at least the Synoptics) as the fundamental testimonies of Christian faith, Küng presents a striking portrait of Jesus as an enlightened preacher of reform who championed the cause of the oppressed and provoked opposition from the religious and civil authorities of his day. But Küng distances himself from traditional Catholic teaching and perhaps from Christian orthodoxy. He casts doubt on the doctrine of the Trinity, on the foundation of the Church by Jesus, on the institution of the Eucharist, on the sacrifice of the Mass, on the expiatory death of Jesus, on His bodily Resurrection, and many other basic Christian teachings. Küng the revisionist almost blots out Küng the apologist. He promotes an individualistic faith in which neither Scripture nor the Church have any decisive authority.
In a companion volume on the existence of God published four years later Küng takes a critical stand toward the excessively rationalistic apologetics of Scholasticism and neo-Scholasticism, but also rejects the idea of faith as a blind leap into the dark. “A person should not be mentally abused, but convinced by arguments, so that he can make a responsible decision of faith.”11 While asserting that the logical force of the proofs of God is finished today (534), he holds that on the basis of a fundamental trust in reality, we may reasonably affirm the reality of God and thereby gain additional reasons for trusting reality (572). Biblical faith in God, he declares, is coherent and has proved itself rationally justifiable over thousands of years (626). God does not operate on the world from above or from outside as an unmoved mover, but from within as the dynamic and supremely real agent in the process of the evolution of the world, which He makes possible, directs, and completes (649). The biblical God, unlike the God of natural theology, is a sympathetic, compassionate God, who shows Himself in history and enters into covenant-relations with His people (664—65). In the face of all the critical objections raised by Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and others, it remains reasonable to answer the question “Does God exist?” with a clear, convinced affirmative (702).
Dynamism of the Subject
Many speculative Catholic apologists, especially within the Society of Jesus, adhered to the principles of Rousselot and Marechal. Among those whose natural theology owes much to Marechal one must reckon Henri de Lubac. In his The Discovery of God he relies heavily on the Marechallian thesis that a certain awareness of God is implicitly pre-contained in every judgment. In his writings before Vatican II, de Lubac contends that this thesis is well grounded in the Fathers of the Church and in Thomas Aquinas. Proofs, for de Lubac, simply remove obstacles that might impede people from confidently affirming the God who is the total source of all reality and intelligibility.12
A few years after Vatican II, Louis Monden in his Faith: Can Man Still Believe? shows his agreement with Pierre Rousselot, who had contended that God’s grace, giving the “eyes of faith”, was a prerequisite for seeing the force of the evidence. Setting forth a phenomenological meditation on the act of faith, Monden maintains that faith is not a conclusion resting on a prior demonstration but a response to an invitation from above, which validates itself when generously lived out.13 In the latter half of the twentieth century the dominant voice in Catholic academic circles was probably that of the systematic theologian Karl Rahner (1904—1984). Working on the basis of an original blend of the transcendental Thomism of Joseph Marechal and the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Rahner delved deeply into the philosophy of religion and the credibility of the Christian proclamation. His early work Hearers of the Word14 takes up the Blondelian question of the obligation to concern oneself with the question of supernatural revelation. On the basis of a sound philosophical anthropology and natural theology, Rahner maintains, it is antecedently clear that God could freely reveal Himself and that if He were to do so His revelation would have to come in a social and historical way (that is, a way proportioned to the socio-historical character of human nature). Our highest task, therefore, is to interrogate the history of the human race for signs as to whether God has disclosed Himself. In certain polemical passages Rahner argues that the Protestant philosophy of religion falls either into a modernistic rationalism ala Schleiermacher or into a fideistic agnosticism ala Barth.15 Everything leads up to the conclusion: “Whoever reckons with the possibility that a specific portion of human history, to the exclusion of others, may be God’s history, is bound to believe a revelation in the Catholic sense.”16
This early excursion into the philosophy of religion does not, even in the revised edition, correspond exactly with Rahner’s mature thought.17 His later writings on the approaches to faith are profoundly affected by his conviction that the reason of all men and women is supernaturally elevated by grace and therefore oriented toward Christian faith.18 To awaken explicit faith, the apologist must present the contents of Christian revelation not as an extraneous element foreign to the hearers’ personal experience but rather as an interpretation of what they have already encountered through the inner workings of grace in the depths of their consciousness. The primary task of the apologist, then, is to exhibit how the whole system of Christian teaching is the one complete answer to the primordial question that man is to himself. To the ineluctable question, how the transcendent ground of being is related to human existence, Christianity responds: as merciful intimacy in the radical self-communication of God in Jesus Christ.
To furnish a scientific historical demonstration of the Christian fact today, according to Rahner, is an immensely complex task, beyond the normal possibilities of the individual believer or even those of the individual theologian. But belief is nevertheless a reasonable attitude. To those whom have opened themselves to the Christian interpretation of human nature as divinized through Christ, every other view of life seems less meaningful and less inspiring. The objections from the various sciences are too peripheral and trivial to outweigh the total vision of human nature and destiny offered by the gospel as understood in the Catholic Church.19
In his later writings Rahner was more concerned with the implications of the gospel for life in the world. He accepts the Teilhardian vision of mankind as the shaper of its own innerworldly destiny, with all the terrible responsibility that this implies. Without renouncing his original transcendental Thomism, Rahner accepts an evolutionary and future-oriented doctrine of humanity and religion. He sees the religions of the world as flowing together into a single stream in the present age of planetization. The other religions, he contends, are intrinsically ordered toward Christ as their unacknowledged fulfillment.
In his last major book, Foundations of Christian Faith,20 Rahner seeks to reformulate the whole of Catholic doctrine in light of an unthematized experience of God as incomprehensible mystery—an experience that he regards as self-evident in every human life. In this framework Rahner constructs an a priori Christology. All human beings, he maintains, are in search of salvation, the definitive success of our existence as a whole. Experience teaches them that such salvation is unavailable within the relativities of history, but at the same time that salvation must be sought within history in association with our fellow human beings. Spontaneously, therefore, we look for a human person in whom God’s saving power would be wholly and manifestly successful. By considerations of this kind, Rahner believes, we can project the idea of “the absolute bringer of salvation” to whom God definitively communicates Himself in absolute fullness, and whose definitive success is manifested by a death for others and a victory over death. Whoever is on the lookout for such a figure in history is practicing what Rahner calls a “searching Christology”.
According to Rahner a transcendental or searching Christology is necessary to prevent the traditional Christology based on the New Testament accounts from being dismissed as mythology. On the other hand, a priori arguments do not take the place of reasoning from facts. Actual history alone can tell us that the absolute Savior has appeared and has done so in Jesus of Nazareth.21
Johannes B. Metz (1928—), a pupil of Rahner, promoted a personalist transcendental theology in his Christliche Anthropozentrik.22 But gradually he moved to the view that Rahner’s theology was too individualistic and insuffiently involved in secular concerns. He contended that to Christianize the world is fundamentally to secularize it—“to bring it into its own, bestowing on it the scarcely conceived heights or depths of its own worldly being, made possible by grace, but destroyed or buried in sin”.23 In the 1970s he launched a kind of “political theology”, which sought to bring out the critical and liberating power of Christianity with regard to history and society. He dwelt particularly on the “dangerous memory” of the Cross and on Christian hope in the eschatological future, which could function as negative norms for criticizing all actual situations.24 Metz’s disciple Helmut Peukert, under the influence of the “Frankfurt School”, carried social criticism into the very heart of apologetics in his Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action.25 The criterion for the acceptability of any claim to revelation, in this system, must be the promise of universal solidarity that was given in the conduct of Jesus. At least outside of Germany, this work appeared too closely tied to a specific social theory to capture the general interest of apologists.
The Canadian Gregory Baum (1923—) attempted to develop an apologetics based on Blondel’s philosophy of action. In a collection of essays published in 1972 he rejected the transcendental Thomism of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan on the ground that it still affirmed “the God of metaphysics, the supreme being”. But he enthusiastically accepted Rahner’s doctrine of “anonymous Christianity”. Recent Catholic literature, he believed, registered a consensus “that the divine mystery present in the making of the human world is accessible in faith to any man who opens himself to the message inscribed in his life—and is revealed in Jesus Christ”.26 In his Man Becoming Baum tries “to translate every sentence about God, contained in the traditional creeds, into a sentence dealing with human possibilities promised to man and changes of consciousness offered to him”.27 Drawing on contemporary psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Baum sought to validate the Christian message apologetically by its capacity to explain and intensify depth-experiences.28
The “emerging consensus” noted by Baum in the early 1970s did not long survive. In some Protestant circles the ebullient secularism of the 1960s soon gave way to the negativity of the “God-is-dead” theology, which preserved some Christian elements while professing atheism. The attention of Catholic theologians shifted for a while to Latin American liberation theology, which was, in part, an attempt to rebut the Marxian thesis that the Church, by holding forth heavenly promises, distracted its members from their tasks on earth. Although liberation theology enjoyed several years of immense popularity and spawned a number of imitations in the United States, mainstream Catholic theologians objected that liberation theology, like secularization theology, neglected the element of transcendence that is crucially important for Christianity.29
Luminosity of the Object
The principal alternative to Rahner’s aprioristic approach is offered by his erstwhile friend and colleague, the Swiss priest Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905—1988), who emphasized the receptiveness needed to acknowledge the presence of the divine Other. In a relatively early work, The God Question and Modern Man, Balthasar reflected on the problems created by the collapse of natural religion and its replacement by a “brazen irreligion that pretends to be just as natural”.30 He spoke of the difficulty of finding words in which to speak about the mystery of the transcendent God. The word “love” itself, he said, had gradually become unbearable.31 A word of revelation would not be worth listening to unless it were steeped in mystery.32
In a later work, Love Alone Is Credible, Balthasar, looking over the vast span of the centuries, found two dominant approaches, the cosmological and the anthropological.33 The cosmological, dominant until the nineteenth century, discerned elements of truth and holiness in the various religions and philosophies of the world and proposed Christianity as a higher synthesis in which the secret aspirations of these fragmentary systems were fulfilled. The bridge from the natural to the supernatural, however, was destroyed by the Scholastic division between nature and grace, so that only miracles and prophecies remained to give external pointers to the truth of Christianity.
The anthropological style of apologetics is typified by Schleierma-cher, who proposed the consciousness of the pious believer as the criterion of truth. Christology in this system became reduced to the condition of possibility of the experience of being saved. In effect, Catholic Modernism followed the same path. Sören Kierkegaard, better than others, pointed out the weakness. The human spirit cannot be the measure of God, who comes to us, if at all, in radical transcendence. The apostle, for Kierkegaard, is completely different from the religious genius. He is the bearer of the Word of God, which can only interpret itself.
Balthasar therefore moves to a third style of apologetics, which is at once personalist and aesthetic. The love of God, he maintains, appears as “total otherness”, so majestic that it evokes adoration. The glory of God can be seen only in a light borrowed from itself—a light that Rousselot correctly perceived, though he understood it too subjectivistically. The Church, as the herald of the Word of God, is credible only in the saints, who make God’s love the basis for everything.
Balthasar is severe in his criticism of the apologetics of the previous century, which attempted to answer the question: How can we verify the claims of a man who identifies himself with God?34 In trying to answer that question apologetics proves either too much or too little. Either it persuades people to believe on the basis of natural certainty, which is not Christian faith, or it asks them to believe on the basis of mere probability, which makes faith irrational.
The central question for fundamental theology, Balthasar contends, is the aesthetic problem of perceiving form. Jesus appears in history not as a mere sign but as a form; the act and the content of revelation are the same. In the self-emptying of Christ on the Cross we behold the supreme image of divine love itself appearing on earth.35 In the act of faith the human spirit understands itself as “a being drawn by God, an overcoming of its own impotence by the power of Christ, an overcoming also of all subjective, self-projective anticipations of human thought and imagination by the wholly different clarity and evidence that stems from the thing itself”.36
Catholic Apologetics toward the Close of the Century
Something like Balthasar’s aesthetic approach is combined with a Rahner-like transcendental analysis in the fundamental theology of Hansjürgen Verweyen, which has attracted considerable attention in the past few years.37 Like many others, he accepts the tripartite division of fundamental theology into demonstratio religiosa, christiana, and catholica. The demonstratio religiosa has to show the structural openness of the human spirit to the self-manifestation of the Absolute in the crucified flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, which is the central content of Christian faith. The demonstratio christiana and the demonstratio catholica are linked because the ecclesial tradition that transmits the Christ-event is pure transparency to that event.
Verweyen’s book is built on the claim that Jesus Christ is, as the title of his book puts it, “God’s last word”. While accepting this claim as his point of departure, he proceeds, with the help of a transcendental analysis, to find the conditions of possibility of affirming a full and final revelation. The human subject is, in his view, oriented toward the Absolute. The total self-gift of God in Jesus Christ alone fulfills the human quest for what Rahner had called “the absolute bringer of salvation”. Seeking to avoid the “extrinsicism” of the neo-Scholastics, Verweyen makes his apologetics relatively independent of the facticity of biblical prophecies and miracles and even of the Resurrection considered as historical proofs. He sees such events not as manifestations of divine power but as signs of the meaning of Christ’s incarnate life. Like Balthasar, he centers his attention on the Cross, which he regards as the heart of the Christian message, already given and received before the Resurrection. In his final and third part of his work (the demonstratio catholica) he briefly presents the Church as the ongoing witness that makes God’s last word present and perceptible.
Verweyen has important disciples in Germany, including Klaus Miller and Thomas Propper. But he has his critics as well. Hans Kessler, in a study of the Resurrection, faults him for his almost exclusive emphasis on the Cross and his failure to attend to the Resurrection as the climactic result to which the sacrifice of the Cross is oriented.38 Hermann J. Pottmeyer, in as yet unpublished lecture, considers that Verweyen neglects the centrality of the kingdom of God in the Christian understanding.
Jürgen Werbick in his work Den Glauben verantworten proposes a more modest apologetic, which aims to show that with the help of grace it is possible to make a firm act of faith on the basis of convergent signs in history. In place of the threefold “demonstration” he uses four disputed cases (Streitfdlle) as structuring principles: religion, revelation, redemption, and Church. In contrast to Verweyen, he is content to say that, while the absolute character of revelation cannot be demonstrated philosophically, philosophy can show that the appearance of God’s absolute self-revelation within history is a meaningful option.39 Apologetical arguments, he concedes, cannot by themselves produce a justification for the absolute character of the assent of faith.
Other German fundamental theologians, making use of contemporary linguistic philosophy, emphasize the evocative and performative characteristics of primary religious discourse. Eugen Biser, in a series of books, develops a “hermeneutical fundamental theology” in which the biblical concept of the “efficacious word” plays an important role. The credibility of Christian faith, he contends, cannot be established from a neutral philosophical position, but only from within the dialogue established by the coming of God’s Word into history.40 Josef Meyer zu Schlochtern, a professor at Paderborn, makes use of various English-speaking linguistic philosophers. In the footsteps of Michael Polanyi and Basil Mitchell, he proposes a cumulative theory in which credibility results from the convergence of separate lines of investigation.41
In France a number of contemporary theologians seek to relate theology to sociology, particularly in the light of cultural pluralism. Claude Geffre, O.P., a leader in this group, disavows classical metaphysics, apologetics, and proselytism. He accepts a form of hermeneutical theology that begins with the Word of God in Scripture and seeks to interpret the great biblical symbols in a creative manner that discloses new possibilities of existence for particular groups today. In our time, he believes, we live in a situation of “unsurmountable theological pluralism”.42 The Jesuit Christoph Theobald, who lives and works in Paris, reflects on fundamental theology in the light of his study of Blondel. While admiring Blondel, he takes quite different positions, since he renounces the effort to find a theoretical foundation of faith and pursues a strictly hermeneutical approach, relating faith to particular cultures with the help of human sciences.43
In Spain the most eminent proponent of apologetics, Salvador Pie i Ninot, exhibits astonishing erudition on gathering up the fruits of publications in many different languages. In his own personal synthesis he emphasizes the category of testimony as the ground of credibility. Using the traditional threefold schema, he begins by considering man in search of the Word of God. Then he discusses the credibility of Christian revelation as God’s definitive word. In a final section he reflects on the testimony of the Church, the authorized witness to revelation.44
Testimony, for him, has a dual aspect. Interiorly, it enters into the construction of fundamental theology; exteriorly, it supports the Church’s apologetic and missionary task.45
In Italy one of the major theological centers is Milan, where Giuseppe Colombo has focused attention on theological method. He and others look upon faith as a distinctive mode of knowledge, corresponding to the truth of God. One of the prominent new voices is Pierangelo Sequeri, a diocesan priest who teaches on the theological faculty of Milan. A musician and a composer, he emphasizes the role of the affections and aesthetic considerations in the judgment of credibility, somewhat as does Balthasar. The God proclaimed by Jesus is trustworthy, and to Him the Church bears witness. Like Verweyen, Sequeri holds that testimony is the only adequate form of mediation of the foundational event whereby Jesus on the Cross entrusts Himself to God’s trustworthy fidelity. “Christian faith”, he writes, “lives from the gospel tidings that the desire for eternal happiness is good, proper, blessed and sustained by Him whom Jesus calls, and teaches us to call, Abba.”46
Rino Fisichella, who taught for some years at the Gregorian University as a close associate of Latourelle, has particularly interested himself in the problem of credibility. Like Balthasar, on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation, he emphasizes the objective credibility of the Christ-event. In particular, he maintains that the death of Jesus on the Cross, taken up into the mystery of the Resurrection, “endures as the authentic and definitive sign of the trinitarian love of God, capable of being perceived as genuine love by those who seek to lead their lives in a prudent fashion”.47 Like Pie i Ninot, Fisichella considers that Christian testimony and Christian faith must take on an ecclesial form.48
For a highly pastoral work reflecting the classical three-stage approach one may consult Luigi Giussani’s trilogy: The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church?49 Departing from the scientific methods of metaphysics and history, Giussani uses an experiential and phenomenological approach reminiscent of Augustine and Pascal. In his first volume he takes his departure from the questions that arise, as he says, “at the core of our being”. He finds that the hypotheses of God and of revelation correspond to our antecedent needs and expectations. In his second volume, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Giussani shows that to know for certain whether the ultimate mystery has become a “fact” in history, one must experience it from within an encounter, and thus within a living relationship with Jesus. In his third volume, Why the Church? the author explains how life within the Church opens up possibilities for a lived experience of communion with God. This experience provides a verification of the claims that are made for the Church.
Some attention should be given at this point to the work of Karol Wojtyla (1920—2005), who, as Pope John Paul II, continued to interest himself in philosophical and theological questions. In his very personal reflection Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he devoted two chapters to the existence of God.50 In the first of these chapters he adverted to the treatment of the question in the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, a masterpiece that he judged to be somewhat neglected in our time. But in the following chapter he took a very different tack from that of St. Thomas in the question just cited. He argued, not from movement and causality, or from contingency or degrees of perfection, or from design and finality in nature, but from the human person’s search for the meaning and purpose of his own existence. Man recognizes himself, wrote John Paul, as an ethical and religious being. For philosophers of dialogue such as Buber and Levinas, he noted, the path to God lay through the experience of coexistence in community. He did not develop the proof, but he said enough to show that his personalist and communitarian approach diverges from the “five ways” of traditional Thomism. He no doubt regarded his proposed approach as complementary, not as an alternative.
In his encyclical Fides et ratio John Paul II devoted his third chapter to the theme “Intelligo ut credam” (“I understand in order to believe”). On the basis of Acts 17:22-23, he affirmed that Paul recognizes the nostalgia of the human heart for God, the infinite, and the eternal (24). The search for truth and meaning is so deeply imprinted in human nature that it cannot be vain and useless (28). Ultimate answers to these questions are offered in religious traditions handed down in communities of faith. “Belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person’s capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring” (32). In an act of personal self-giving the human person can find a fullness of certainty and security that could not be obtained by cold and calculating reason. Christian faith comes to meet men and women on their journey of discovery. “Moving beyond the stage of simple believing, Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God” (33).
In general we may say that while Fides et ratio supports the thesis of Vatican I that faith and reason support each other, it employs a personalist idiom that differs markedly from the Scholastic language of that council. Faith, as John Paul described it, is a full personal commitment that arises in response to testimony in an atmosphere of personal trust. “The martyrs”, he wrote, “stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the courage to express” (32). The Pope’s personalism led him to a welcome emphasis on the special persuasive power of personal testimony.
In the past quarter of a century there has been a strong revival of Catholic apologetics in the United States. Some of these new apologists, such as Karl Keating and Patrick Madrid, are “cradle Catholics”, but many, such as Peter Kreeft, Sheldon Vanauken, Thomas Howard, Dale Vree, and Scott and Kimberly Hahn, are converts. Kreeft, together with the Jesuit Ronald K. Tacelli, has composed a standard textbook defending orthodox Christianity without going into arguments for the Catholic Church. Within its limits, this book is remarkably complete and orderly. It takes into account the importance of a realistic epistemology.51
Much of the output of this group of apologists takes the form of works intended to persuade Protestants to become Catholics. Although this genre includes many works of merit, it falls beyond the scope of this survey, as does the Protestant literature urging Catholics to convert to make the opposite decision.52 The present work is concerned with apologetics for Christianity rather than with inner-Christian controversial literature.
Mark Brumley, himself a convert to Catholicism, gives some salutary warnings to apologists in his How Not to Share Your Faith. Committed as he is to a theologically responsible and honest apologetics, he warns his cohorts against overweening rationalism, “sacred dishonesty”, and reductionist accommodationism.53
The American lay theologian Michael Novak, in Tell Me Why, carries on a dialogue with his daughter Jana about reasons for believing in God and accepting various doctrines of the Catholic Church. The daughter’s questions, honest and probing, typify the doubts of many young Americans. The wise and lucid answers of the father manifest a serene faith that is hospitable to reason and argument.54 George Weigel, a lay theologian who stands close to Novak in many of his positions, writes as an apologist in his The Truth of Catholicism. This book ably defends the positions of Pope John Paul II on belief in God, the unique Lordship of Christ, the meaning of sexuality, and other points.55
In a recent book dedicated to, and influenced by, Giussani, the American Lorenzo Albacete maintains that “religious claims are born out of the desires of the human heart.”56 The great obstacle to faith, according to Albacete, is the general unwillingness to trust one’s desires or to pursue them to their ultimate implications. Following Giussani, he contends that reasonable persons should be open to all aspects of reality and should not stop with those that can be rationalized. Science itself, in his view, opens us up to the realm of mystery. Revelation is the self-presentation of absolute Transcendence in radical intimacy.57
Ambivalence about Apologetics
Like their Catholic counterparts, many Protestant theologians in the 1960s have been suspicious of apologetics. Some, influenced by Karl Barth, expressly disavow the discipline. The American Congregational theologian Donald Bloesch repudiates the efforts of Paul Tillich, Harvey Cox, and John A. T. Robinson to devise a new “secular” apologetics that would render the gospel credible to contemporary men and women. As a “post-apologetical” thinker Bloesch opts for a kerygmatic and confessional theology that takes Holy Scripture as its basic authority. But he insists that such a theology is obliged “to take seriously the phenomenon of unbelief and to grapple with attacks upon the faith from the outside world”. Thus kerygmatic theology includes, in his view, “a certain kind of apologetics”.58 But unlike many Evangelicals he makes no effort to ground the truth of Christian claims in rational apologetics.59
Langdon Gilkey (1919—2004), in a survey of new trends in Protestant apologetics, notes a variety of currents, including the neo-orthodox apologetics of Emil Brunner, the Niebuhr brothers, Tillich, and Bultmann; the process theology of John H. Cobb, Jr., and Schubert M. Ogden; and the defenses of religious language by Iam Ramsey and Donald Evans. All three of these strategies, in his estimation, failed to mount a viable apologetics. He concludes that apologetics cannot survive as an independent discipline but as only an element in confessional or dogmatic theology.60 In his own major work on religious language, published several years later, Gilkey argues for an abandonment of the traditional cleavage between kerygmatic language addressed to the Church and apologetic theology addressed to the unbelieving world. Kerygmatic theology, he holds, must be secular, and hence in some sense apologetical, in order to speak meaningfully about God in a secularized world.61
The debate continues. William C. Placher, after studying at Yale under Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, opted in 1989 for “unapologetic theology” on the ground that apologists are overinclined to adopt the language and assumptions of the prevailing culture and therefore fail to speak with a distinctively Christian voice.62 But in 1991 Paul Griffiths, then an Anglican professor of Eastern religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago (he has since become a Catholic), published a defense of interreligious apologetics.63 He lays down both an epistemic and an ethical imperative. The epistemic imperative arises from the fact that since religions are maps of reality, the serious religious person will want to know which map is best. Unless the adversary is to be eliminated by sheer force, one must give reasons for thinking that a given religion teaches the truth. The ethical imperative derives from the claim of religions to offer salvation. A Christian will find salvation in Christ, while a Buddhist, for example, will hold that to achieve Nirvana one must assent to the propositions that everything is impermanent, that everything is unsatisfactory, and that everything is without Self. Love for others will impel believers to share their faith. Unless faith is to be relegated to the realm of purely private opinion, the challenge cannot be ignored. Representative intellectuals must respond to it not by seeking to destroy the challenger but by defending the truth of their own tradition. Such defense takes the form of apologetics.
Joining vigorously in the debate, William A. Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards have edited a volume of essays with the title Unapologetic Apologetics. The authors, all graduates of Princeton Theological Seminary, lament the demise of apologetics as a seminary course at their alma mater and other mainline Protestant seminaries. In his contribution to this volume Dembski summarizes his theory of “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to Darwin’s biological evolutionism.64
Much of the debate in Protestant circles hinges on the form of apologetics. In the mainline churches of the Reformed tradition a low-key apologetics is currently in favor. Douglas John Hall, a theologian of the United Church of Canada, rejecting biblicism and triumphalism, holds that the apologist need not claim to possess religious certitude. Faith, he declares in Tillichian style, is not certitude but a dialogue with doubt. Confessing that he himself much of the time lives in a kind of doubting faith, Hall claims no superiority over nonbelievers. Apologetics, in his view, should “make contact with ordinary life” and “establish points of common concern between the Christian message and the human situation”.65 Instead of trying to correct other religions, Christians should help their adherents to discover truth and beauty within their own traditions.66
Another Canadian Protestant, John G. Stackhouse, Jr., forcefully denounces the overconfident apologetics manifest in Evangelical works with titles such as Be Sure! A Study in Christian Evidences.67 But he concedes that apologetics, in the sense of a constructive engagement with the ideas and minds of the day, is not without value. He wants a “humble apologetics” in which the apologist has the honesty to admit that he may be wrong. He prefers not to engage in apologetics as a branch of theology or philosophy—disciplines that most people do not study. More effective, he thinks, is an apologetics that simply presents the Christian fact in an engaging manner. Inspired by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Austin Farrer, he calls attention to the beauty and goodness of the Christian message and to the good works of believers, which are their own apology.
Secular Theology
The theology of secularization launched by Bonhoeffer and Gogarten made a powerful impact outside Germany. Best sellers such as Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and Bishop J. A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God embodied an apologetics of Christian secularity. The Dutch missiologist Arend van Leeuwen presented a total panorama of world history as a process of progressive secularization taking place under the aegis of biblical faith. Christianity, in contrast to pagan religions, “demystified” the world and placed it under man’s dominion.68 Western technology, according to van Leeuwen, is a form of pre-evangelization of the non-Christian world—a necessary preconditioning for its conversion to the Christian faith. As illustrated by these authors, the secular turn in Protestant apologetics mirrors many of the concerns already noted in Catholic authors such as Teilhard de Chardin and Metz.
It is doubtful whether a convincing apologetics can be erected on the sole ground that Christianity contributes to secularization. The sacred has always occupied too prominent a place in Christianity for anyone to be drawn to Christianity in order to escape from the sacred. Besides, it could easily be objected that secularization was imposed upon Christianity from outside by the forces of the Enlightenment and that the success of secularity in no way depends upon its acceptance by Christians. At best the apologist might be able to show that, for those who live by faith, secularity does not constitute the threat to moral and spiritual values that it might otherwise seem to entail.
Historical Criticism and Evidence
The question of the historical Jesus, much debated since the days of Lessing, continues to be controverted. The efforts of the liberal theologians of the nineteenth century to reconstruct the Jesus of history according to their own predilections was effectively demolished by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer in their quest for the “historical Jesus” at the turn of the century. The field was thus left open for Bultmann to deny the religious importance of the history of Jesus and to base faith entirely on the preaching of the post-Easter community. For this position Bultmann claimed the apologetical advantage that it made faith invulnerable to the assaults of historical criticism and left the historian free to follow the demands of his discipline without extrinsic pressure from the Church to reach some results rather than others. Many theologians, however, rebelled against Bultmann’s separation of Christological faith from scientific history.
Paul Althaus (1888—1966), an outstanding Lutheran confessional theologian of the mid-twentieth century, holds that historical criticism cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to faith on the ground that its supposed results are always subject to further questioning. To neglect the history of Jesus would be, in effect, to surrender His true humanity. Theology, according to Althaus, must accept the tension between the essentially inconclusive results of scientific historical knowledge and the assurance of the faith encounter that it mediates. “The revelatory character of the history of Jesus is not known by means of historical reflection or historical reasoning. But on the other hand it is not known without these. For the gospel deals with facts which, it is claimed, happened in this history of ours; it has ‘historical facts’ as content, and its foundation in history is a part of its credibility.”69 Implicitly, then, Althaus seems to affirm that a historical apologetic can bring the unbeliever toward a position of being able to make the assent of faith and can prevent the conscientious believer from feeling obliged to renounce faith in the flesh-and-blood Jesus for the sake of intellectual integrity.
A number of Bultmann’s disciples, including Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Kasemann, Gunther Bornkamm, and Ernst Fuchs—all of whom held important chairs in German universities—rejected their master’s dissolution of the bonds between faith and scientific history on the ground that it made Christian faith indistinguishable from commitment to a mythical Lord. While eschewing the liberal effort to reconstruct the outward aspect of Jesus’s career—His works, His deeds, and the chronology of His life—they believed that existential history, utilizing the earliest traditions of the New Testament, could reconstruct Jesus’s self-understanding and thus unveil the true intention and meaning of His life. In this way, according to James M. Robinson, an American admirer of the post-Bultmannian school, the “new quest” could establish “not that the kerygma is true but that the existential decision with regard to the kerygma is an existential decision with regard to Jesus”.70 This identity is of concern to apologetics because it would be hard to accept the Christian kerygma if it rested on a misinterpretation of Jesus’s true intention.
The “new quest” for the historical Jesus represents a real advance over the positivistic historiography of the old quest, with its ironclad presuppositions and rules of evidence. But Robinson’s effort to point out the novelty of the post-Bultmannian quest betrays him into some exaggerations. He makes it appear almost as though Jesus’s self-understanding could be known without careful scrutinizing of the evidences regarding His words and deeds. As Van A. Harvey remarks, the new quest “puts the heaviest weight on just those kinds of historical judgments which, from a logical point of view, are the least capable of bearing it. By regarding historical inquiry as culminating in claims about a person’s existential selfhood, it defines historical knowledge in terms of the weakest of its epistemological links.”71
The quest for the historical Jesus never ceases. It was renewed later in the twentieth century, with what some call a “third quest”. Using the social sciences as well as critical historiography, these authors seek to obtain some assured data about Jesus as seen within his own cultural milieu. The questers are sharply divided among themselves, some defending the substantial historicity of the Gospels, and others dismissing events such as the burial of Jesus and His bodily Resurrection as fiction or myth.72
A major voice in the discussion concerning faith and history has been that of the German Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928—). Sharply opposed to the Bultmannians, he and his circle have been seeking to ground the case for Christianity not on the credibility of an authoritative word but on the “language of facts”.73
As an evidentialist, Pannenberg rejects natural theology and insists that God can be known only through historical revelation. The Christian revelation, as he understands it, coincides with a rational interpretation of the total course of world history. In the Resurrection of Jesus, he maintains, the total meaning of history is disclosed insofar as the end of history is proleptically made present. The Easter event, according to Pannenberg, is as reliably attested as any event in the ancient world. The event clearly carries with it its own meaning and is not in need of clarification by authoritative interpretation.74
Christianity, according to Pannenberg, is the only revealed religion, for it alone holds the key to the meaning of universal history. In comparison with Jesus Christ, all earlier self-manifestations of the divine are purely provisional.75 Even the revelation in the Old Testament, since it is not definitive, cannot be called in the strict sense God’s self-revelation.76
Although Pannenberg insists that the credibility of the New Testament assertions can be carried out “solely and exclusively by the methods of historical research”,77 he also admits that the question whether a person can believe in the Resurrection has to be answered “by theology as a whole, and not only by theology, but also by the way in which the faith of Christians, which is grounded upon the truth known in the past, stands the test today in the decisions of life”.78 In order to defend the adequacy of history, Pannenberg finds himself obliged to expand the concept of historical research beyond its normal limits.
In Pannenberg’s later work one senses a growing sensitivity to the complexity of the problem. He insists increasingly that historical fact includes the “transmission of traditions”, and by this strategy reintroduces much of the authoritative word-theology that he previously seemed to repudiate. The primitive Christian testimonies to the empty tomb and the Easter appearances, he grants, inevitably enter into the judgment about the facticity of the Resurrection.79 In addition, he gives continually greater attention to the element of hope that is embedded in the judgment that Jesus has been raised from the dead. This judgment is, in the concrete, an expression of hope about the future salvation to which the believer is called in Christ. It therefore depends in part upon “an anticipatory gift of divine truth” that encounters us, calling us to wholeness and salvation.80 The credibility of the Resurrection in the contemporary climate of philosophical skepticism, Pannenberg concedes, rests in part upon what he calls “the anthropological argument for a hope after death”.81 In the end, therefore, he seems to admit the presence of a “fiducial” ingredient of trust or confidence that seemed to be absent in his initial claims to rely only on objective historical method.
Pannenberg’s position is as yet too new for final evaluation. He has been accused of owing more to Hegel than to the Bible, and some of his statements are indeed reminiscent of nineteenth-century semi-rationalism. But as he continues to write, he has been introducing distinctions that seemed to be lacking in his original programmatical declarations. In its final elaboration his position is no longer diametrically opposed to that of Barth and the more moderate members of the Bultmann school, although the fideism of the kerygmatic school was what he originally set out to attack.82
Renewal in Anglo-American Evangelicalism
Notwithstanding the difficulties pointed out by Bloesch, Gilkey, and others, the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a striking revival of traditional apologetics, especially among Evangelicals. Stimulated by contact with philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition, Evangelical apologetics since the 1980s has grown in rigor and complexity. The discussion of method has been particularly energetic.
In a helpful recent publication, the tendencies in recent Evangelical literature are grouped in the following five “views” or approaches.83 The categories are not mutually exclusive, especially because authors in each school have been picking up ideas from one another.
The Classical Method
This method, which became standard after the outbreak of deism in the seventeenth century, proceeds by stages, first demonstrating the existence of God as an omniscient and omnipotent Creator and then the validity of Christianity as the highest version of theism. The existence of God is established by natural theology, which often repeats, in modified forms, the standard ontological and cosmological arguments that have come down from the Middle Ages. Some authors add teleological arguments (from finality) and axiological arguments (from moral values). Once theism has been validated, it follows that revelation and miracles are at least possible. The second part of classical apologetics, the demonstratio christiana, demonstrates that the Gospels and other biblical accounts are reliable in their testimony to Jesus as divine teacher and risen Savior.
Richard Swinburne (1934—), an emeritus professor at Oxford, is often mentioned as a distinguished representative of the classical method. He has produced a fairly complete and systematic apologetics in a series of books published since 1970. Among his principal works is a trilogy consisting of The Coherence of Theism (1977, rev. 1993), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981). He then published a shorter version of the argument of his The Existence of God under the title Is There a God? (1996).
In other works Swinburne seeks to establish the probability of the principal Christian doctrines, provided that theism is presupposed. This he does in five principal works (thus far): Responsibility and Atonement (1989), Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (1992), The Christian God (1994), Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998), and The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003).
In general, Swinburne’s method is inductive. Borrowing the practice of many scientists, he works from observed phenomena to frame an explanatory hypothesis, which he then tests by its internal coherence and its capacity to account for the phenomena in question. Looking at reality in its most general features, he seeks to account for the existence of the world, its orderliness, the emergence of human life, reports of miraculous occurrences, and the fact of religious experiences. An as explanation he proposes the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, everlasting, and morally upright God—the God of Christian theism. This hypothesis, he argues, is credible because it is internally coherent and does in fact account for the phenomena. He then shows that objections such as the problem of evil do not hold. He concludes that the existence of the God of theism is highly probable.
Swinburne is a rigorous thinker whose work is calculated to appeal to academicians familiar with scientific method. He works more as a philosopher than as a theologian, avoiding appeals to authority and treating Scripture and tradition as ordinary historical sources. He pays little attention to what Pascal called the reasons of the heart. A possible weakness of the method may be that in building probabilities on prior probabilities it ends up with a rather low degree for the truth of theism and of the various Christian doctrines connected with it. But if the probabilities could be presented as independent and mutually corroborative, he may have materials for a powerful case.
Norman Geisler (1932—), founder and president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the most prolific North American apologists of this school. A graduate of Wheaton College and a holder of a doctorate in philosophy from Loyola University in Chicago, he is unusually well versed in the history of apologetics. Single-handedly he has written a large one-volume encyclopedia of apologetics.84 As “classical” apologist he stands consciously in the tradition of Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as that of Locke, Paley, and Warfield. His book on miracles shows an indebtedness to C. S. Lewis. Against the presuppositionalists he holds that the existence of God and the fact of Christian revelation are demonstrable. Against the evidentialists he holds that the existence of God is necessary as a prerequisite for showing the possibility and the fact of revelation and of miracles.
The jointly authored work Classical Apologetics by R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley is in some respects untypical. While devoting much attention to the reconstruction of natural theology, it deals rather cursorily with the evidential arguments from prophecy and miracle. The second half of the book is an extended refutation of presuppositionalism.85
The Evidential Method
This method, as practiced by Protestants, takes different forms, but most frequently places primary reliance on external evidences, especially the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles as described in the New Testament. The Resurrection, taken as the central miracle, occupies a dominant place in this form of apologetics. The evidential method substantially coincides with the second phase of classical apologetics, but the two schools disagree about the necessity of natural theology. The classical method maintains that the existence of God and the possibility of miracles must be established in advance in order for miracles to be understood as signs of revelation. The evidential method holds on the contrary that the study of Christian evidences does not presuppose natural theology. The remarkable miracles of Jesus, including His Resurrection, are seen as proofs that the God He proclaimed is real.
The evidential method has a long lineage, with ancestors in the early Middle Ages. Authors such as Benjamin Warfield and Wolfhart Pannenberg are often classified as members of the school. Among the North American Evangelicals who currently pursue the method John W. Montgomery, Clark Pinnock, and Gary R. Habermas should be mentioned.
Many scholars have investigated the biblical miracles from an evidential point of view—a theme already broached in our first chapter.86 Swinburne, using a classical approach, gave a full response to Hume in his The Concept of Miracles (1970). From an evidential perspective the Evangelicals R. Douglas Geivett and Gary Habermas have edited an important symposium entitled In Defense of Miracles.87
The “Cumulative Case” Method
This approach abstains from reliance on formal arguments, such as the syllogism. Nor does it proceed by discrete stages, like the methods previously mentioned. Instead it seeks to project a hypothesis that accounts for all the data, and to show that rival hypotheses fail to pass this test. The convergence of many signs all pointing to the same conclusion is taken as a fact that needs to be explained. Paul D. Feinberg, a proponent of this approach, summarizes the case as follows: “It is a broad-based argument with many subjective and objective elements. They require some explanation and in some cases can be seen as reinforcing one another to strengthen the case for Christian theism. The case is like a lawyer’s brief. The claim is that Christian theism gives the most plausible explanation of all the evidence.”88
Working in the apologetical tradition of C. S. Lewis, the Anglican Basil Mitchell and the Methodist William J. Abraham both follow this method, while not agreeing with each other on all points.89
“Presuppositional” Apologetics
As practiced by Protestants, this position normally rests on the premise that human reason has been so damaged by sin that evidential apologetics is fruitless. Presuppositionalists therefore begin by assuming that the teaching of the Bible is true. Setting out from this axiom, the apologist argues that biblical revelation yields a coherent explanation of our experience in the world, and that other worldviews are, in comparison, incoherent. Some add that it is impossible to live or think without logically presupposing the reality of God, the source and measure of all truth.
This presuppositionalist method is generally traced to Cornelius Van Til, on whose work we have already commented. Evangelical representatives of this school would include Gordon H. Clark, Francis Schaeffer, Gregory L. Bahnsen, and John M. Frame.
The Northern Baptist theologian Carl F. H. Henry (1913—2003) was a notable champion of this theory. He composed a number of apologias, such as Remaking the Modern Mind (1946) and Giving a Reason for Our Hope (1949), in which he castigates the relativistic and naturalistic tendencies of modern philosophy and argues that Christian faith in revelation is the highest rationality.90 In his six-volume God, Revelation and Authority (1976—1983) he takes the position that “the basic axiom of every system is undemonstrable”. For revealed religion, revelation constitutes the basic axiom and this means, for Protestants, the Word of God as contained in Holy Scripture. Henry goes on to say that the Christian must engage in apologetics in order to show the internal consistency of the Christian axioms and the contradictions inherent in opposed systems.91
As contrasted with classical and evidential apologetics, this school denies the power of the unredeemed intellect to reason correctly about religious questions; but it asserts with Luther and especially with Calvin that redeemed reason, relying on faith, can perceive the force of the Christian evidences. These authors generally make only minimal concessions to modern historical and scientific criticism and keep close to the “obvious sense” of the Bible.
“Reformed” Epistemology
In recent years a number of Reformed theologians and philosophers, originally centered at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have maintained that it is possible and proper to believe without evidence.92 In asserting this they seem to be taking the term “evidence” in a very strict sense, as if it meant immediate experience or deduction from premises previously held as true and certain. They go back to the patristic idea of the “testimony of the naturally Christian soul” (Tertullian), which they take to be virtually equivalent to Calvin’s concept of the testimonium Sancti Spiritus internum. They argue that by using our cognitive faculties as they are intended to be used, we spontaneously embrace the truths of theism and Christianity, without having to justify our assent before the bar of reason. In this respect, they say, our knowledge of God is not unlike our knowledge of the reality of the external world or the reality of other minds, neither of which can be deduced from anything previously known.93 They dwell particularly on the existence of God as something spontaneously and universally accepted, but seek to extend the method to the doctrines specific to Christianity.
Major voices in the “Reformed” epistemology camp would include Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Mavrodes, and William Alston. According Alvin Plantinga, the acknowledged leader of this group, Thomas Aquinas and Calvin agree that when the human mind functions properly in a normal environment it accepts Christian belief without evidences (taken in the strict sense explained above). Apologetics, according to this school, is valuable for showing that Christian belief does in fact have warrants and that the objections do not succeed in refuting it.94
Growing Protestant-Catholic Convergences
The five methods here attributed to contemporary Evangelical theology are not peculiarly Evangelical. All of them have parallels in other Protestant traditions and in Catholicism.
1. The classical method has its roots deep in the patristic and medieval tradition. It was consciously pursued by apologists since the early seventeenth century. We have already noted the development of this method in authors such as Grotius, Hooke, Liebermann, and Perrone. Their tripartite schema survives in contemporary Catholic authors such as Seckler, Verweyen, Pie i Ninot, and Giussani. It may also be found in the works of popular apologists such as Peter Kreeft in the United States.
More confident of the indispensability of human mediation, Catholics miss in much of the Protestant literature anything like the theology of testimony which is so important in the thinking of Balthasar and his followers. God himself speaks to us in the words of his qualified witnesses, so that Christian faith involves an acceptance not only of the written word but of God’s human messengers. On the ground that the Church is par excellence the appointed witness to Christ, Catholic apologetics rarely stops with a demonstratio christiana. It goes on to develop a demonstratio catholica. In many cases these two demonstrations are interwoven.95
2. The evidential method is also familiar to Catholics. It goes back at least to Houtteville in the eighteenth century. It seems to be the best description of the apologetics of Guitton and Küng, as described above. The ongoing debates about the historical-critical method and the historical Jesus transcend all denominational divisions. Biblical scholars, depending on their presuppositions and methodological postulates, sometimes undermine traditional beliefs about Jesus and sometimes support them. Some apologists reject historical criticism of the Bible as methodologically skewed in favor of atheism, but others believe that, prudently employed, the historical-critical method has positive value for apologetics.
The Resurrection of Jesus has become a major area of specialization for scholars of many denominations. The Evangelical William Lane Craig published a study entitled The Son Rises,96 later being reissued under the title Knowing the Truth about the Resurrection.97 Those who, like Craig and Gary Habermas, make use of the Shroud of Turin in building their case for the Resurrection will have at their disposal a vast body of literature, largely Catholic, on that subject.98 The Catholic Gerald O’Collins has written a series of scholarly volumes supporting the substantial historicity of the New Testament accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance of the risen Lord.99
Objections to the Resurrection continue to be raised. Gerd Lidemann, a disciple of Bultmann, regards the story as a fantasy brought on by the grief and guilt of the Apostles.100 Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., explains it as a materialization of an overwhelming experience of forgiveness on the part of the disciples.101 Some members of the American “Jesus Seminar”, such as John Dominic Crossan, reject it as a legend invented by power-hungry scribes of the post-apostolic generation.102 These and other hypotheses are carefully analyzed and refuted in works such as the monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God by the Anglican N. T. Wright. After a meticulous sifting of the canonical and noncanonical sources, Wright concludes that “the historian has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ with Jesus as ‘historical events’.”103 The bodily Resurrection of Jesus provides not only a sufficient condition, but a necessary condition for these two facts. “All the efforts to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so.”104
Evidentialism need not restrict itself to the biblical data. In the past many Catholics, following Chrysostom, Bossuet, and Newman, have argued from events such as the conversion of the Roman Empire, discerning the guidance of God’s providential hand in history. In the mid-twentieth century Danielou and others contended that Christian revelation makes it possible to find meaning in history. Still others point out the wisdom and culture-forming capacities of Christian faith. With the Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World, they find in Jesus Christ “the key, the focal point, and the goal of all human history” (GS 10).
3. The cumulative case method is thoroughly familar to Catholics. Classically expounded by John Henry Newman, it was operative in the works of Paul de Broglie. Other Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton took the method into popular apologetics. Since the 1950s it has been adopted by Catholics such as Werbick, Meyer zu Schloctern, and David Burrell.
4. Presuppositionalism, in its typical Evangelical form, tends to be tenaciously bound to the sola scriptura doctrine and to a rather narrow understanding of biblical inerrancy as prerequisites for apologetics. In that form the method is scarcely open to Catholics. But something analogous to this method may be found among Catholics who, following Augustine and Anselm, speak of “faith seeking understanding”. Many recent and contemporary Catholic apologists take over from Rousselot the idea that the credibility of the Christian religion, which apologetics seeks to demonstrate, can be seen only from within the posture of faith. The work of Monden, noted above, may serve as an example.
Vatican II seems to endorse this style of argument. The Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, after speaking of the mystery of the human person in the light of revelation, concludes: “Through Christ and in Christ the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful” (GS 22). Those who adhere to revelation in faith find that life becomes more meaningful and livable. They do not escape suffering, but find ways of coping with it.
5. “Reformed” epistemology, in spite of its name, is congenial to Catholics. It has deep patristic roots; for example, in Tertullian’s famous appeal to the soul “which is by natural instinct Christian”. Plantinga himself, as we have observed, attributes the method to Thomas Aquinas.105 It is manifestly present in authors such as Bautain and Gratry and, of course, in the followers of Marechal, such as de Lubac. But these authors, unlike the Calvinists, would probably say that the existence of God is immediately evident, not that it is to be believed without evidence.
Christian Faith, Philosophy, and Science
Catholics, who have long upheld the importance of philosophy and natural theology, may applaud the resurgence of philosophical theology in Evangelical circles, as evidenced by the foundation of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and the Society of Christian Philosophers, which publishes the important journal Faith and Philosophy. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, in their monumental Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, cover a wide range of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and philosophy of reason, in the light of biblical faith.106 Their attempts to prove from logic and science that the universe had a beginning in time through an act of divine creation will be critically discussed among Catholics, but not necessarily rejected.107 Their speculations on the Trinity and the Incarnation, while generally orthodox, depart in some particulars from the ancient Councils and from Catholic tradition. But to resolve these issues would take us beyond the scope of the present book.
From the Catholic side it would be possible to list a multitude of recent philosophical works that have an apologetical aspect. Traditional Thomism continues to be upheld by authors such as Ralph McInerny and Aidan Nichols, O.P. A new school of analytical Thomism stemming from Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter T. Geach is represented in the United Kingdom by John Haldane. The British philosopher Hugo A. Meynell, an authority on the work of Bernard Lonergan, has written several useful books defending the truth of traditional Christianity.108 An outstanding group of Catholic philosophers contributed to the volume Rational Faith, assessing the so-called “Reformed Epistemology” of Plantinga and his associates.109
The philosophical dimension of apologetics has great importance for our time, since so many of the obstacles to faith today come from an unreflective absorption of the relativism, subjectivism, and agnosticism that pervades the atmosphere, at least in Western Europe and North America. These attitudes undercut the very possibility of seriously considering anything like a firm act of faith in revelation.
A vibrant dialogue is currently being conducted between scientists and theologians of many ecclesial traditions. In this field theologians seek to keep abreast of new scientific theories and to demonstrate that the true findings of science are compatible with faith. In learned volumes Catholics such as Stanley Jaki and John Haught, Anglicans such as John C. Polkinghorne, and Presbyterians such as Thomas Torrance have shown that there need be no conflict between theology and physics. The Anglican Evangelical Alister McGrath, after publishing some brief and attractive apologetical pieces,110 has completed a multi-volume work, A Scientific Theology.111 American Evangelicals such as J. P. Moreland participate knowledgeably in this debate.
The Darwinian theory of evolution, which aroused so much controversy in the nineteenth century, continues to be a subject of intense scrutiny.112 Six-Day Creationism is not the only alternative to materialistic evolutionism. Many theologians of different religious families contend that God, while truly designing the universe, leaves room for certain mechanisms such as natural selection to operate. He designs the mechanisms themselves.
Pope John Paul II took some Catholics by surprise when, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he declared that “new knowledge leads to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” This statement does not seem to engage the authority of the Magisterium in the sense that Catholics would be obliged to assent to it. In any case, the Pope added that there were several theories of evolution. He certainly did not espouse a materialist or reductionist view that would exclude all intelligent design or divine intervention. He insisted, in fact, that believers must hold that the human soul is immediately created by God.113 If these cautions are respected, Catholics are free to affirm that man “evolved” from earlier forms of animal life.
By the middle of the twentieth century the negative critique of apologetics by Barth and others had made its full impact on Protestants and Catholics alike. Apologetics was struggling for legitimacy. The Second Vatican Council, with its irenic spirit, discouraged Catholics from undertaking the kind of rational confrontation involved in apologetics. Contemporary pluralism, moreover, has made it difficult to identify the adversary with whom the apologist should be in conversation.
For some years apologetics fell into a general disrepute from which it has not entirely recovered, at least in Europe. Serious scholars in European universities, wary of apologetics, diverted their energies to the newly developing discipline of fundamental theology, practiced primarily for the guild of professors and graduate students. Going somewhat beyond merely academic audiences, major theologians such as Rahner and Balthasar conducted apologetics of a sort in their efforts to describe the process by which people can come responsibly to Christian faith. A few Catholic authors such as Hans King and Luigi Giussani wrote major popular works for nonbelievers and marginal Christians.
In recent years traditional apologetics has witnessed a strong revival, particularly among Evangelicals in North America. They continue to debate among themselves about the methods and goals of apologetics.
In Protestant circles Evangelicals who look for probative evidences find themselves opposed by mainstream Protestants who practice a “humble apologetics” that is content to achieve a probable assent to the gospel. Even among Evangelicals different methods are pursued. Some call for an acceptance of religious truth as a precondition of apologetics; others work their way toward faith by establishing philosophical preambles and treating the Scriptures as historical sources. Catholics often cast the net of evidence more widely, taking in practically the whole of world history and the entire range of human experience. Some, finally, single out certain particular events and religious experiences as decisive and sufficient to warrant belief. A growing number adhere to the traditional arguments for the existence of God. These various approaches, prudently pursued, may be understood as mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
As compared with their Protestant counterparts, Catholics characteristically put greater emphasis on the inner dynamism of the human spirit toward union with the God who, as Augustine said in his Confessions, has made us for Himself. If our hearts cannot be at rest except in Him, the search for God must be part of the human condition. But searching is not the same as finding. The journey through the dark shadows of unbelief may be long and arduous. It may involve combing large areas of nature, history, and spiritual experience for clues. The New Testament retains its value as the basic Christian source, but it comes to life in the persons of committed believers down through the centuries. Since Christ promised to remain with His Church to the end of time, the religious inquirer will inevitably be brought into dialogue with the Church, the community of faith. The religious testimony of the believing community, found initially in the New Testament and subsequently in the life of the Church, enters into the calculus of credibility in such a way that adherence to the gospel must have an ecclesial dimension.
Together with Hans Urs von Balthasar, a good number of contemporary Catholics lift up the radiant beauty of Jesus Christ as grounds for adhering to Him in a loving submission of faith. For them, the figure of Christ as given in Scripture and in the liturgy is its own evidence. No complicated arguments from history or source criticism, they believe, are needed.
Those who have found God’s supreme revelation in Jesus Christ and have joined the community of faith acknowledge joyfully that they have received a priceless gift. Some of them, desiring to share this gift as fully as possible with all the world, engage in evangelization and apologetics.
In pressing the case for their discipline, apologists should keep in mind that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salutary acts of faith. It is not necessary, for we all know people who have strong faith without having ever read a word of apologetics. It is not sufficient, because faith is a grace-given submission to the Word of God, not a conclusion from human arguments. Apologetics has a more modest task. It seeks to show why it is reasonable, with the help of grace, to accept God’s word as it comes to us through Scripture and the Church. Reflective believers can be troubled by serious temptations against faith unless they find reasons for believing. Converts, in particular, will normally deliberate for some time about the reasons for embracing the faith. The Catholic Church has taught, and continues to teach, that there are sufficient signs to make the assent of faith objectively justifiable. The task of apologetics is to discover these signs and organize them in such a way as to be persuasive to particular audiences. The arguments can never prove the truth of Christianity beyond all possibility of doubt, but they can show that it is reasonable to believe and that the arguments against Christianity are not decisive. God’s grace will do the rest.
If they wish to avoid false trails, apologists will seek wisdom from the past and will profit from the giants who have gone before them. While recognizing that apologetics is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the saving act of faith, they will cultivate the discipline for its ability to challenge unbelief and remove obstacles to faith itself. As long as people ask questions and pose challenges to one another, believers will be called upon to give a reason for the faith that is in them (cf. 1 Pet 3:15). Apologetics justifies itself, time and again, as a distinct discipline and as a normal ingredient in authentic evangelization, catechesis, theology, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue.