This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Two Months with the Atheists and Christ Mythers

Near mid-August, a message board (tied as a promotional device to a forthcoming movie) debuted on the internet. That forthcoming movie, riding the coattails of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, intends to show that the biblical Christ never existed. The day after the message board hit the internet, I came across it via a link from one of the blogs I read, and I, myself, signed up. It has been an enlightening and interesting two months, not the least of which is that I came away with the distinct understanding and experience that Christians have very little to fear when it comes to defending the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

That being said, I am not going to provide a link to the message board, for a number of reasons. First, not every Christian is intellectually nor emotionally equipped to handle the radical challenges to the faith presented on the board, and by providing a link, I will, in effect, be providing the potential means to cause a brother or sister to stumble. And in any case, any Christian determined to find the message board can do so very shortly via a web search. Secondly, these sorts of things can be consuming: of time, of mental and spiritual energy, and of the need to be right. There are stewardship issues here. On the day I started posting on the boards, another blogger whom I read asked me: “Is this for the salvation of your soul?” I can now say, “Yes, it was,” but I'm not sure, early on, that I could have given such an answer. Finally, the sort of engagement necessary for a Christian in such a context demands a particular gift, the gift, if you will, of apology. There are Christians, such as St. Justin the Philosopher, or St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose works clearly reveal their ability to communicate the truth in the face of pagan opposition.

All that being said, I learned some important things among the atheists and Christ mythers. First, that nearly all of those who submit that they accept claims only on the basis of reason, don't. That rationalist skeptics are as loony as the groups they lambaste and lampoon. And finally that apologetics is never only about human reasoning: it is first, last, and always about the will.

When first confronted by the demand of atheists and others to present the Christian faith in rationally defensible terms, one is rightly taken aback. None of us became Christians on the basis of reason alone. It was first and finally a step of faith. Not an irrational step, mind you. We are called to and can give a reasonable defense. But many of us came to faith before we could rightly reason. I myself am one. I was seven when I was baptized in the name of the Trinity. Our faith has since been assisted by, though it's perhaps not correct to say confirmed by, reasonable arguments. We have had our moments of doubt, our rational struggles with an irrational fallen world and a suprarational God. But this is not the same as being led to the Faith first by way of reason. I do not myself know if that is even possible.

Be that as it may, there are two responses a Christian will make to such demands. Which response one leads with will depend upon the gifts and temperament of the individual Christian and the person or group he is addressing. The first and obvious one is to respond with the reasonable arguments that have already been well-formulated by those who've gone before us. (May I recommend the “mere Christian” C. S. Lewis' works?) But this response will be met by ever more retrenched rebuttals. These rebuttals, too, have their own responses, and so on. A Christian so confronted can be confident that her responses to such critiques and demands will be both rational, logical and potentially persuasive (though more on that below).

Sometimes, however, the atheist interlocutor will be skillful enough to turn the conversation to the ultimate and real end: becoming a Christian is a matter of faith. For the rationalist atheist (or agnostic, but in practical terms it doesn't matter), this is game, set and match. If there is any aspect of Christianity that must be finally accepted on faith, it is not rational and therefore not something worthy of reasonable human consideration. This is where the second response is called for, and here the Christian must wield such a weapon carefully. At this point all that can be done is to show that the rationalist claims to base everything on reason alone itself cannot be based on reason alone. I'll not here go into detail, since the arguments can be subtle, but I'll send you first to Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism, especially Book II, which develops three important points (there are more, but these will do): The claim to base all knowledge and action on reason alone (or even primarily) fails three important tests of reason: it begs the question (by assuming the conclusion in the premise), it is circular (by assuming something else, say, objective reality to prove reason, which is then used to prove objective reality), and it falls prey to infinite regress (on what foundation is reason based, and on what foundation is that based, and so on).

Now I should note that the sort of rationalism you will run into here is that of the scientistic variety. Not scientific, but scientistic. That is to say, the claim that is being made is that science is the final arbiter of truth, a very close minded and subjective opinion that is ultimately unverifiable on science's own terms. Here the second response is actually rather more simple: ask what the atomic weight of justice is, or how to measure the redshift of evil; heck, even ask them to verify on scientific terms that science is the final arbiter of truth (and what is the molecular makeup of truth?).

If your interlocutor disavows any claim to such extrascientific realities, that is to say, denies any sort of metaphysic at all, you have on your hands a materialist and likely a determinist, who fails to realize that their own claims are metaphysical ones. One can first of all note that we accept as true all sorts of things that science cannot test; namely, various historical claims, that our beloved loves us, indeed, that we love our beloved, and so forth. This is why I like to use such nonsensical items like the “atomic weight of justice” since most scientistic folks do believe in nonscientific metaphysical realities like justice.

In other words, the second response to rationalism or scientism is to simply take the argument apart on its own terms. This will not ultimately resolve the debate (see below on the will), but it will do two things at once: demonstrate that your interlocutor ultimately takes the positions they do on faith, not reason, and thereby also demonstrate that your doing so with regard to Christian claims is no different in substance (though very different in effect).

Now that we have Dan Brown's novel as material evidence, is it really so surprising that rationalists, atheists and agnostics swallow so gullibly and uncritically any argument that seems to disprove Christianity? The message board I've frequented these last several weeks in particular is very well overrun with those who rely on arguments dating back to the eighteenth century: the Gospels were not written till late in the second century, the Jesus story is all myth, and so on. For all their claims to rationality, the message board adherents are awfully lazy in their research. I came thinking I would have to debunk the arguments of Bart Ehrman on the “Orthodox corruption of Scripture” and “lost Christianities.” I need not even have wasted my time checking the volumes out from the library: the message board adherents didn't even know they existed. (This is not to say the Ehrman and Walter Bauer before him have not presented challenges that orthodox—and Orthodox—Christians need to address. But that's another post.)

Worse, all these rationalists and purported hard-core “scientists” subscribed to such debunked ideas that the Jesus story is nothing more than a creative borrowing from all the other mythologies that preceded it. Never mind that no manuscripts that seem to provide such one-to-one correspondence with various Christian doctrines can be found that predate Christianity. Never mind that scholars have shown that the original versions of these pre-Christian myths did not contain the supposedly borrowed elements (and in fact, may well have borrowed them from Christianity), and never mind that these supposed borrowings were from such a vast array of cultures and climes that the early Christians must have been not only the most well-traveled of ancient groups, but the most polymathic. The thinking seems to be that if it sounds like a duck . . . Never mind that we never really established that what we heard was actually a duck.

This of course does not excuse Christians for their hypersensitive conspiracy theories and end times ruminations. But for those Christians concerned that Christianity might not carry the same intellectual weight of certain Joseph Campbell wannabes, have no fear. There's looniness out there. Don't take it for scholarship or serious thought. Demand references and original sources. And be ready to show the early dates and original sources for Christianity.

But there is a certain corrosive impact to rationalist demands. With a dogged and gifted interlocutor, a Christian offering her apologetic will very likely find herself boxed in: the rationalist will eventually be able to bring the conversation to a draw. He will claim that there is no overwhelming reason to put one's faith in the Gospel. One may get him to admit that such a faith is a reasonable one, but he will likely still insist that the respective arguments carry equal weight, and he is doing just fine with his convictions, thank you very much.

This, ultimately, is the point of my eight weeks with the atheists and Christ mythers. What it boils down to is the will. Apologetics is not about merely presenting overwhelming rational arguments for the faith. Apologetics is not about convincing the unconvinced or persuading the unpersuaded—not primarily. Apologetics is about, first, middle and last, addressing the will. One does not enter the Kingdom by syllogism, but by faith. Pascal's wager is, in the end, little more than a wager. What is needed is an address to the will.

And the only persuasive way to address the will is to live in such a way that an apologetic is simply another name for matyrdom. Time and time again, various threads and arguments were brought to the point of diversion or termination because it finally came down to: this or that Christian acted like an animal. Salem witch trials, the Inquisition, the Christian “father” who mercilessly beats his children. Offenses imagined or offenses real, we Christians do not persuade by argument but by love. Love for one another, love for our enemies.

The Athenians were not persuaded despite St. Paul's rhetoric: their wills balked at the Resurrection and an incarnate Faith. I submit that it wasn't St. Stephen's speech but his death the unleashed not only a great persecution, but a great number of conversions.

Ultimately it is the embodiment of the cross of the Lord in our daily lives that persuades. If they do not see this in us, this love of God and one another, they will not believe, no matter the arguments we form.

Posted by Clifton at October 5, 2004 12:07 PM | TrackBack