I have a distinct memory of the first time I ever knowingly encountered outspoken scepticism about Christianity, in the playground of my primary school. The occasion is hard to fix exactly in time – it was sometime between Year 3 and Year 5 – but I know the place where it happened to within a couple of feet. The face and the tone, though not the name, of my interlocutor is similarly lodged in my mind.
“You worship the clouds,” he jibed, which I now realise was good preparation for about 95 per cent of popular atheist polemic. I cannot remember what, if anything, I said in response. I do remember feeling slightly unsettled. Christian belief was the sea in which I swam as a child. My Evangelical family prayed together and attended church at least once every week. Most of my close friends were from church. I wouldn’t say we lived in a Christian bubble, but active hostility to faith struck an extremely discordant note in my general experience of life – and this was 30 years ago, when the ambient culture was not as relentlessly antagonistic towards Christians as it has since become.
Naturally, in the course of growing up, I came to understand that believing Christians were a minority in Britain. At secondary school and then university, I met more and more people who approached the faith with the same spirit as my primary school adversary.
However, I also discovered apologetics, ie the intellectual defence of the faith. I had barely been aware of this endeavour before adulthood. The church in which I spent most of my childhood was heavily and admirably focused on evangelisation, but much less so on providing a solid intellectual and historical underpinning for the Christian claims.
This is not a criticism. Defending the faith can be hard. There are a large number of possible objections to Christianity, drawn from a wide range of academic and intellectual domains: philosophy, the natural sciences, history, archaeology, ancient languages, textual criticism and biblical scholarship. Some are nonsensical or easily dismissed. Others are more challenging, but can be refuted with the aid of study and careful thought.
A small number are highly sophisticated and can only be countered by believers possessing a high level of knowledge and argumentative skill. One thinks of the argument put forward by sceptical ancient historians that the biblical narrative of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan is not only unsupported, but contradicted, by the archaeological evidence. Hearing this thesis for the first time might be quite a shock to an orthodox Christian believer. But it is not the whole story, and that can be made clear by a well-formed apologist. Archaeological discoveries have often confirmed biblical details that had been doubted by sceptics. This is what happened with the Tel Dan stele, an inscription discovered in Israel in 1993 which mentions the House of David. Until then many non-religious scholars had questioned whether King David was even a real person. It is now widely accepted that he was.
Nevertheless, apologetics is necessary, especially in our time when Christianity has been widely rejected by the intellectual elites of society, often on the grounds of its alleged incompatibility with science, history, archaeology or “the modern world”.
Apologetics has its critics. I have seen arguments that apologists make the faith a series of rationalistic syllogisms instead of a sacramental relationship with the very Creator of the universe. Some say that apologetics is triumphalist, designed to give the impression that we have all the answers and can easily defeat opposing worldviews. Still others accuse it of draining mystery and wonder from the faith, or of making it appear that faith is not really needed at all, if every part of Christianity can be rationally demonstrated.
None of these criticisms is entirely baseless. Obviously, it is possible to fall into the traps of rationalism, of triumphalism, and of over-intellectualising the faith. It is true that ultimately it is God Himself who must convert hearts and minds, through the gift of faith. But it does not follow from this that we needn’t bother trying to persuade people that Christian belief is rationally credible. As I once heard someone say, “God is in control, but he doesn’t expect you to lean on your shovel and pray for a hole.” The exact interplay of God’s will and our own wills and intentions is fundamentally mysterious – but that should not be used as an excuse for inaction.
Sure enough, relatively few people are persuaded by pure argument. Humans so often believe what they wish to be true, or adopt the beliefs that suit them. Nevertheless, apologetics can help to clear away misconceptions about what Catholics actually believe. It can overcome the intellectual barriers of sceptics, or weaken the rationalisations which clever non-believers often construct to justify their desire not to believe. It also helps us to know our own faith more fully and intimately, and to become – with the help of God’s grace – better Christians; more fitted for, and more desirous of seeing, the Beatific Vision.
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